Reddit mentions of The Penguin Book of English Verse

Not really what you are looking for, but it is somewhat related and may be of interest to someone: The Penguin Book of English Verse is an anthology of poetry sorted chronologically, rather than by author.

The concept is that you can get a feeling of what kind of verse the public would hear/read and how the language and the themes would evolve as the years went on. But one could read it backwards by starting with contemporary poets and ending with the Middle English verse of 1300s (there are notes for the most difficult words).

Philip Larkin, for one.

>They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

>They may not mean to, but they do.

>They fill you with the faults they had

> And add some extra, just for you.
>
>But they were fucked up in their turn

> By fools in old-style hats and coats,

>Who half the time were soppy-stern

> And half at one another's throats.
>
>Man hands on misery to man.

> It deepens like a coastal shelf.

>Get out as early as you can,

> And don't have any kids yourself.

Just by way of example. I also highly recommend T.S. Eliot (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a good introduction; The Waste Land is somewhat harder, but well worth it) and Ezra Pound.

Also not a waste of your time: Wilfred Owen (specifically, "Three rompers run together hand in hand"; helps if you know he wrote his poetry while fighting in World War I, and eventually died in that war), Thomas Wyatt ("Whoso list to hunt," and pretty much all his sonnets; a little biographical research also makes his poetry more rewarding, but it also stands well on its own), the Fitzgerald "translation" of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the poetry of Li Po (also spelled Li Bai) if you want to broaden your horizons outside English stuff. If you're not sure the poetry of someone who's been dead for 1200 years has much to offer you, consider this:

>Alone on Jian-Ting
>
>The birds take wing and fade away;

>The last cloud slowly disappears;

>We watch each other, the mountain and I,

>Until only the mountain remains.

And this is stuff you'll probably hate but that I will mention anyway because I like them and they are awesome: the Andrew George translation of the Epic of Gilgamesh (because it's excellent, and not one of those interminably dull prose translations; seriously, why the fuck do people find prose translations of verse acceptable?), and Gawain and the Green Knight (I recommend an edition that has the original Middle English side by side with the Modern English, or even better, a Middle English copy with a gloss of the difficult vocabulary in the margin).

EDIT: While I'm on the subject of translations and editions for poetry (but also literature in general): there are a lot of bad translations out there. The less well-known the language is, generally, the worse the average standard. The key, I have often found, are editions that come with a lot of additional scholarly errata, which are usually useful in providing context and additional insight. Penguin Classics editions are usually fantastic (this is how I found both the Andrew George translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh, which is still one of my favorite books of all time, and a fantastic copy of Njal's Saga, which, although somewhat outside the scope of your original request being longish prose rather than poetry, is highly entertaining and you should check it out), and when I go to the bookstore these days I tend to be awed by the broad range of texts they cover. Norton anthologies are also excellent.

If you want a range of poetry to survey and find what you like, my brother swears by the Penguin Book of English Verse.

> I also want actual english poem collections too


this is the only part where I can help. I suggest The Penguin Book of English Verse (don't be put off by the average rating, many reviews are just against the lack of an index in the kindle version).

It's a very wisely chosen and various collection of poems ranging from 1300 to 1994 and sorted by date rather than by author - so you can dive in a certain period if you feel like it, or just read in a sequence and see how the language and the themes evolved. I've been perusing it for months and I keep on finding gems inside.

It's pretty cheap too.