know what's good and bad poetryBut I need examples of authors and famous poems of good and bad poetryIs O Captain, My captain by Walt Whitman good poetry?Is The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred Lord Tennyson good poetry? Is A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe good poetry?Have to do this for AP Literature but I can't tell the difference between good poems and bad poemsWhen I mean good or bad I mean on a scale of 1-10 1-5 is bad poetry and 6-10 is good poetry.
This is pretty subjective and relies on personal taste, so take my opinions for just that: opinionI'd say that O Captain! My Captain! is a bad poem, but When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, also by Whitman and on the same topic, is a good oneThe Charge of the Light Brigade is unmitigatedly badVirtually any poem by Poe is bad, except in Baudelaire's French translations, although some of his short stories are excellentWhen I think of bad poetry I think of verse which is obvious, dull, trite, or simplistic, which makes poor use of the possibilities of language, or which is merely fashionableGood poetry is inventive, rich, and rewards repeated readingSome good poems, at random: Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Donne's Holy Sonnets, early Wordsworth, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, Hart Crane's The Bridge, most Czeslaw Milosz, Ashbery's Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, virtually all Lorca but especially the Mirror SuiteSome bad poems, at random: Essentially all Longfellow (but especially Hiawatha), Poe's The Raven, most Swinburne, all of Robert Frost's most popular work (although he wrote some less well-known poems that are excellent), most Emerson (although some of it has didactic merit apart from it's value as poetry), most later Bukowski, and virtually the entire oeuvre of Billy Collins.
