It’s difficult to choose one poem above all the others which I have loved for years, but being forced to choose I’ve gone for three of my favourite poets and chosen for each, one of their longer works. In my opinion one of the greatest poems ever written is Gerard Manley Hopkins’s  ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’ which is an amazing tour de force. To add to this goes Philip Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and probably the poem which has most emotional impact for me, Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’. Each time I read this poem it seems to speak directly to me about Time, growing old and the loss of childhood.

I have two favourite poems, ‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 18’. The Owen poem I have used in History lessons with Year 9 pupils after previously having looked at why young men joined up in 1914. This poem shows the harsh reality of war and its effects. It makes clear that had they been born in the late 19th century or early  20th century, this could have been their fate. ‘Sonnet 18’ captures for me the power of love of one person for another better than any other I’ve read.

My favourite poem is ‘One Day I Wrote her Name upon the Strand’, a sonnet by Spenser. It prefigures Shakespeare’s attempts to explore how the poet through his poetry can bequeath immortality to his loved one. On a lighter note we used to holiday in St Ives, and on Portminster beach I too used to write on the sand, but used the words ’Leeds United’, hoping to annoy any Manchester United fans.

For a variety of reasons a poem can become one’s favourite. Walt Whitman’s ‘I sing the body electric’ is an amazing, eccentric poem as is Christopher Smart’s ‘I will consider my cat Geoffrey’, both of which I love. Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is another poem I am repeatedly drawn back to for its dense succession of striking ideas and images. Yet another I like for its acute observation captured in a minimum of words is Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’. Finally, I’ve always enjoyed narrative verse, ranging from Browning’s ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ and Goethe’s ‘Erl King’ to Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ and Stanley Holloway’s ‘Albert and the Lion’.

I first read T.S.Eliot’s ‘Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ when I was about fifteen and it has remained a favourite ever since.; I can still remember huge chunks.Another favourite is Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’,which I thought sounded so modern despite having been written in 1867. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’ I love for its ability to capture the joy, uncertainty and apprehension of being the mother of a new-born baby. For anyone with Northern Ireland connections Part 3 of Seamus Heaney’s ‘ Whatever you Say,Say Nothing’ really resonates. It’s brilliant.

I have chosen ‘London’ by my favourite poet William Blake. I have always loved the work of this poet, artist, visionary and revolutionary and ‘London’ is my especial favourite. As a ‘Song of Experience’ it reveals his compassion and anger at the state of the city which still, sadly, has relevance today. Other of his well-known poems worth re-reading are ‘The Lamb’, ‘The Tyger’ and ‘The Sick Rose.’

The Ode on A Grecian Urn by Keats will always occupy a special place in my thoughts. Those lines, immortal as the urn: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” constitute a most profound poetical utterance. Truth is felt by the heart – not conceptualised or analysed by the intellect. An aesthetic, mysterious conveyance. Art can transport us to ‘a minute freed from time’, in the words of Proust. Poetry, at its best, compresses so much within such a narrow compass. Despite its ostensibly literary nature, it manages to escape the straightjacket of discursive language. Having been enthralled by Henri Bergson’s theory of ‘Duration’ (la durée) for many years, I sense vibrations at all levels of being, resonating and coalescing in this singular poetical intuitive reflection from one individual artist. Bergson held that matter and consciousness differ only by degree. Both urn and poem are events though dilated; with different rhythms of duration. Expressing the interconnection of scales of being is the special domain of music. Melody is integral to art. Which brings me to my other favourite couplet, from the same poem: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter;’ Spinoza spoke of naturing nature (natura naturans) which is the ‘unheard’ until it is actualised in natured nature (natura naturata) the ‘heard’ melody. Proust’s words are often quoted in relation to the virtual: ‘real without being present, ideal without being abstract’ – an intuition which is not a transcendent grasp of essence, of any separate, eternal reality, but rather a transcendental apprehension of the integration and unity of the virtual and the actual, their interplay in a continuous process of unfolding and enfoldment. Every time a musician plays a phrase from a composed melody an entirely new expression unfolds from the virtual universe (duration is indeterminate therefore creative). The virtual is the entire universal field of potentialities. I love the poetry of Wallace Stevens with its resplendent hallucinogenic, psychedelic, shimmering quality. Proust’s favoured term ‘miroiter’ – meaning flashing back and forth or mirroring – conveys with exactitude the sensation of the virtual becoming manifest that, under the right conditions, can be experienced in life. He unearths the sublime from the repository of the mundane, the every day is elevated to a mystical, visionary plane without escaping itself. He expresses, in equal measure, at once the terrifying awe and order of beauty. Loving the sea, as I do, in conclusion I have to mention a choice poem by George Mackay Brown – the bard of Orkney – the primordial ‘Haddock Fisherman’ which includes the image ’Sunset drives a butcher blade/In the day’s throat.’; and another favourite, W B Yeats who, in the wonderful ‘Byzantium’ speaks evocatively of ‘The fury and the mire of human veins.’