But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.”
If I recall correctly, this is Gladwell talking about the thoughts and research for his latest book, Outliers. The paragraph sort of popped out and hit me in the face, and I realized that some of these pieces I am not familiar with. Hence I've begun a journey through the eleven poems. My mind right now is scattered, so I only attempted the first two. As Robert Lowell would say, "My mind’s not right."
We'll save the rest for a later day...
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