"Monster" Poems
 

I'll be teaching a literature course in the fall called "Monsters Without and Within." It's going to be a blend of fiction and poetry, and of course one of the main thematic questions will be what makes a monster a monster. Still, amid some of the more abstract ideas of "monsters," I'll likely have a few works with clear and obvious monsters. I'm curious about some good, quasi-canonical "monster" poems you can think of.

So far I think I'll teach Auden's "Victor," C. Rossetti's "Goblin Market," possibly a selection or two from Paradise Lost... Maybe some Poe, though I'll likely use one of his short stories instead. I should have room for two or three more, so...thoughts?

Jabberwocky, obviously
the Red Meat section in Autobiography of Red (on Geryon)
Edwin Morgan's "The Loch Ness Monster's Song" lol
and the Borges short story (it's very short), "The House of Asterion"

those are all fairly well-known.

Beowulf, of course. And Frankenstein.

Caliban,
and those black poets who write about him.

Tennyson's "The Kraken"

Poe’s “William Wilson” and Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"?

There has been a long and cruel association of deformity with moral monstrosity, so it might be useful to discuss George Green's "Lord Byron's Foot," which some students will only find funny and some students will find offensive.

Ogden Nash's "The Wendigo," of course.

Robert Graves's "Welsh Incident."

Jack Prelutzky's children's book "The Dragons Are Singing Tonight," illustrated by Peter Sís, has a whole range of takes on dragons.

Stanley Holloway's version of "Sweeney Todd" is another exploration/celebration of human criminality as something fascinatingly monstrous. Stanley Holloway also performed "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm," also covered by the Kingston Trio and others.

References to other monster poems, often in translation, are in this old thread. And this one (which also shows Chris Childers in all his purple antenna-ed glory).

Thanks for your responses so far. I should have known there was already a thread on this topic a decade or so ago. I got a bit of a chuckle out of all of the "of course" and "obviously" comments. I did indeed consider a lot of the options you provided as obvious...though there are reasons why I'm avoiding most of them. I may decide to add Beowulf, but we'll see. A few of the poems I don't know, so will check them out. I'm glad for the Borges comment, though. I haven't read Borges in a good long while and somewhat forgot about how many great stories he has that are "monstrous." I'll be using Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" and something by Borges would surely fit well alongside it.

If you go with the Borges, I suggest Irby's translation found in Labyrinths, which I find far more poetic than Hurley's.

Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues, “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess” exemplify the psychopathic monsters who, at a casual glance, seem perfectly normal. His “Caliban Upon Setebos” presents a meditation on the indifferent cruelty of nature in producing monsters.

Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman anthology
 

Maybe this will help? Tony Barnstone & Michelle Mitchell-Foust put together one of those little Knopf anthologies several years back (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series). I see you can get it for around $12 used at Amazon or other outlets & for about $20 new. Lots of choices to thumb through!