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It has long been curious to me, since Paul was so interested in complexity and ambiguity, that his taste in poetry ran to completely clear -- I'd say actually, absolutely kitch-y -- pieces, w/ rhythm and rhyme schemes that were insistently regular and predictable; when I tried to get him hooked on something more (he thought: needlessly) complex, he'd read it over, shake his head, and ask, ""why can't they just say what they mean?"  This puzzled me.

But, for the record: favorites of Paul's that I know about/heard often recited include Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." He also really liked Kipling's "If"  (the occasion for one of our many arguments, and the provocation for my writing an alternative version). He was fond, too, of Alfred Noyes' "The Highwayman" (especially as sung by Phil Ochs), -- and four years ago, when he retired from directing the Center for Science in Society (which had been a very important venue--created and maintained by him for seven years), I wrote a mock-heroic riff, "The Ballad of Grobsteinman," to celebrate what he had accomplished (which was, really, pretty heroic).

He also really loved to recite "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and was known (I was there for this, too) to recite for his students  a riff on the poem which he had written himself in high school:
Now the bias let's take
That clear we may make
Just who yours truly might be
And why he should want
Others to haunt
With pictures so open and free.

He's one to whom living
His creed I'm giving
Encompasses all man knows and does.
To sit and see life
Its varieties rife
Serves as its own Because.

And yet to see
With a capital Be
Requires as well that one is
And so he will sit
In the random sieve
And view lives, others and his.

And errors he'll make
For he too has a stake
In how he wants things to be
And can't ever quite know
From his vantage point low
What eternity can see.

There are strange things done
Under moon and sun
By those who search to Live
The tales of the race
Through time and space
Appear as from a Random Sieve
To the Lasting Same
Who view the game
It must look the dance of the blind
But to those down below
Who play the show ...

Finally, there was a (much better!) poem called "En Paz" (At Peace), by Amado Nervo, which Paul loved to quote (head back, eyes closed, reciting from memory in Spanish). He told me years ago --and then again this January-- that it would serve well as his epitaph.