"who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out"

Not to sound too Harold Bloom here, but I recently re-read The Egoist and was wondering if I was the only person left who still reads George Meredith. I have since learned that I am not, but I think he's not a name that springs to many minds these days – I was recently speaking to a retired librarian who loves nineteenth-century English novels, and she had never heard of him. He flutes and pirouettes a bit too much for twenty-first-century taste (probably I do too), though I think some of his contemporaries also disparaged those tendencies in him, but he's very witty, and intelligent on the subject of wittiness (among other subjects), and astute and lyrical. If you think you'd like something that reads like Jane Austen as written by late-period Henry James, let me suggest The Egoist. Here's some sample hilarity. Clara Middleton is speaking to her fiancé, Sir Willoughby Patterne, as she is starting to realize her engagement was a mistake, and if you find this exchange as hilarious as I do, let me recommend the novel:

". . . but if you read poetry you would not think human speech incapable of —"

"My love, I detest artifice. Poetry is a profession."

"Our poets would prove to you —"

"As I have often observed, Clara, I am no poet."

"I have not accused you, Willoughby."

So speaking of accusing people of poetry, my actual subject here is to list the most popular poems from 2013's "Poem of the Week" series, insofar as I can determine them from Google's analytics, not that those are as extensive as I would like.

#3 is Love, Too Frequently Betrayed (Tom Rakewell's aria), by WH Auden and Chester Kallman, from their libretto for The Rake's Progress.

#2 is the Sonnet On Being Cautioned against Walking on an Headland Overlooking the Sea, because it was Frequented by a Lunatic, by Charlotte Smith.

#1 is the first one in the series, The Reactionary Poet by Ishmael Reed.

That's an eclectic assortment, and I have no idea why those are the most popular; they don't seem like things students would steal for homework, and as far as I could see on Google analytics no one was linking to them, and no comments were left on the top two. Actually one of my personal favorites among my entries also became popular for mysterious reasons. It started as a few goofy jokes about Christmas music but got longer and darker as I wrote ("Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, Won't you guide my sleigh tonight?"). The weird thing is that only about two years after I wrote it did it start climbing the charts, so to speak. At the time I had Statcounter as well as Google Analytics, and I could never tell from either one why that entry was suddenly popular: no one ever left a comment, and I never discovered who, if anyone, was linking to it or forwarding it. Such are the mysteries of the Internet. (If anyone reading this knows the answer, I'm curious to hear it.)

Anyway, the 2014 series has started, so off we go, and as always thank you for reading.