Which is weirder to do with a massive poetry collection like

Read one poem a day. Read it several times and think and feel about it.
Doesn't matter if you go start to end or skip around, unless you want to see how they develop over time. Probably easier to go front to back though.
I think Keats' odes are in a specific order.

>>8580164
That really depends how the editors have ordered them. But yes reading them with pauses between them is important o they don't just flow in to one long work.

I have that exact same copy (inherited from grandfather) and I'd say that you need to avoid doing a cover-to-cover reading.

I'd pick one to start with and focus on (personally I'd say Shelley because Keats' oeuvre is bunk).

A helpful essay is Harold Bloom's "The Unpastured Sea: An Introduction to Shelley". It provides a fairly vague explanation of Shelley's major works and their chronology.

First poem to start with: Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind". Sets the standard for the late English Romantics.

>>8580213
Not OP but I really enjoyed that poem, thanks for the suggestion.

How do you guys retain what you read in poetry? I can return to parts of collections I thought I hadn't read but then two or three pages in I'll notice my notes on the side. This doesn't happen anywhere near as often when I'm reading or rereading prose.

>>8580213
Echoing Bloom suggestions - as meme as he is, his work on the Romantics (as well as most American poets) is excellent and a great way to cultivate appreciation of the poems.

If I'm about to read a big collection of a poet's works I'll listen to a podcast or two about them, read a couple of articles and then dive in and read the whole thing quickly. Then I know roughly what collections or eras I'm more drawn to. Then I go back and reread those parts slowly. Occasionally I'll go back and read other parts I didn't like so much to make sure I wasn't missing something by reading them so fast but there are times when you know it's not for you. Never again am I reading Yeats' early poems or Blake's juvenilia.

>>8580530
It's horrible, I feel the same way. Especially with poetry as tightly wound and dense as Shelley's.

I try to get a long/fairly long poem and re-read it for a few days or a week. Then I read some scholarship, and if possible talk to a professor about it. After that I return to the poem and read it every day a few times for another week or so.

I've only done this seriously with 2 or 3 long poems, but it's really beneficial. I did it with "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and sometimes find lines or stanzas just popping into my head; it feels pretty damn good.

>>8580164
Both are less weird than asking which is less weird.