A single poetry collection is also the most practical gift in this whole section: it can be read in fragments, over months, without losing the thread — which suits a life that has no room for a novel, and a December that has no room for anything.
Start with the short lyricists here — Dickinson, Housman, Keats — and leave Whitman and Tennyson for a reader who has already been converted. The full texts on this site are the same editions the books reprint, so you can read a dozen poems before choosing.
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Poems
Short poems, odd punctuation, enormous interior life. Dickinson never published in her lifetime; the modern selections are the place to start, and the poems are the right length for a busy reader.
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Sixty-three poems about young men, loss and the English countryside, written in a voice so plain it is often mistaken for simple. The most giftable collection of nineteenth-century verse.
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The 1820 collection, with the odes that everybody half-knows. For the reader who wants beauty rather than argument — give the selection with "To Autumn" in it.
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Blake's paired songs, innocent and experienced, printed together. Short lines, huge ambition, and the rare case where reading the poems alongside the engravings is the whole point — so buy a print edition.
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A single poem about grief that turns into a machine. Give it as a small volume; it is the best possible first hit for someone who has never finished a poetry book.
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Yeats in middle age, writing the clearest poems of his life. "The Second Coming" and "Easter 1916" are not in this collection, which is a reason to start here rather than with a greatest-hits.
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Not only for children, though it is the best gift here for one. Stevenson wrote it while ill in bed, and the poems about playing in the dark are the ones adults remember.
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Tagore's own English translations, which won the Nobel Prize in 1913 and introduced a whole devotional tradition to European readers. Quiet, repetitive by design, and best read a few pages at a time.
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The early poems: "Mariana", "The Lotos-Eaters", "Ulysses". Tennyson is unfashionable and will come back; give him to someone who likes sound more than sense.
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The big one, and the best gift for a reader who wants poetry to be an event. Whitman revised it his whole life, so choose an edition that says which version it prints — the 1891 "deathbed" text is the usual choice.
If the recipient is under twenty, start with the gothic list instead; if they read a novel a week, gifts for book lovers is the safer shelf.
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