My Top 5 Books on Poetry for the Soul

When it comes to God, Dickinson wrote near the end of her life, “we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.” These dazzling, gnomic poems both comfort and confound the soul.

Yeats was a nominal Protestant who dabbled in esoteric religious practices, but his poetry nevertheless bore the imprint of biblical language and logic. Like a mystic meditating on the meaning of Christ’s wounds, he sensed “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.”

Shaped by the sufferings of Poland in World War II, this Nobel Prize—winning Catholic poet was driven by doubt yet also fueled by the hope that one day we “will rise, in undiminished light, / And be real, strong, free.” A remarkable thinker, an astonishing poet.

For almost 70 years, Wilbur has been writing poems marked by exceptional wisdom, elegance, and grace. “In the strict sense,” he observes, “We invent nothing, merely bearing witness / To what each morning brings again to light.”

Recently published, this collection is packed with deeply personal poems of unusual depth, clarity, and candor. They speak of suffering and seeking in a world in which “God goes belonging to every riven thing He’s made.”