• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Who's Your Favorite Poet?

Mephisto

Philosopher
Mephisto
Joined
Apr 10, 2005
Messages
6,064
I thought this was a good companion thread to "Who's Your Favorite Painter."

I've got a degree in English and I concentrated primarily on the Romantic Period poets. I love poetry in general though and my list of favorite poets can be long and tedious, so I'll try to shorten it for the purpose of this thread.

More or less chronologically, I like:

Homer

For the Romantic Period poets, William Blake for "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience."

Robert Burns - especially for "To a Mouse (which reminds me of Jethro Tull's song - "One Brown Mouse") and "Ae Fond Kiss"

William Wordsworth - for "The World Is Too Much with Us"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - for everything, but especially for "The Eolian Harp," "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," "Kubla Khan," and "Christabel."

I especially like Percy B. Shelley for "Ozymandias" (I'm doing a painting based on "Ozymandias" with the bust of George W. lying in the Iraqi sand), "Mont Blanc," "Prometheus Unbound," and "To Night."

and wrapping up the Romantic Period, I absolutely loved John Keats, especially for "Endymion: A Poetic Romance," "When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be," "Sonnet to Sleep," "Lamia," and "Ode on Melancholy." I also loved the biography of Keats (how prophetically sad).

Among the Victorians l like:

Alfred Lord Tennyson for "The Kraken," "The Lotos-Eaters," and "To Virgil,"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning for "To George Sand: A Desire," and "Sonnets from the Portuguese"

I never much cared for the poets in early American literature (too didactic), but I've always been fond of the transendentalists. My favorite poet around the American civil war was Edgar Allan Poe (in spite of the fact that he was a racist).

In the 20th century - I liked (among British poets) William Butler Yeats (and his "spiral" philosophy) for "The Stolen Child," "When You Are Old," "The Wild Swans at Coole," and "Byzantium."

Virginia Woolf for "The Mark on the Wall"

James Joyce for "Ulysseus," and "The Dead"

T.S. Eliot (I'm sure he'd appreciate being counted as a British poet although he was actually American) - everything, but especially "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and "The Waste Land"

for the post-modernists

Ted Hughes for "How to Paint a Water Lily," "The Minotaur," and "A Woman Unconscious"

Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes wife) for everything she ever wrote, but especially "Witch Burning," "Daddy," "Cut" and "Ariel" her suicide was also tragic

Anne Sexton (friend of Plath - and fellow suicide) for "When Man Enters Woman," "The Kiss," and "Words."

I've probably bored you enough so I'll stop here and allow everyone (and I hope a lot of people respond) throw in their two cents. :)
 
My favourite poets

Ogden Nash used to write for cash,
Edward Lear used to write for beer,
Milligan told me he was ill, again,
and John Hegley's writing more poems about spectacles.

----------

It's not as easy as it looks.
 
I can't pick favorites in this subject, but would add a few that are at the top of my current list of contemporary poets:

If you like current poetry, you could do worse than Billy Collins, Wislawa Szymborska, Stephen Dobyns, Mark Strand, Mary Oliver and Charles Simic.
 
Of living poets my two favourites are Leonard Cohen and Seamus Heaney.
 
Keats, Burns, Shakespeare and Byron. There was another, forgotten name of, who wrote poetry about the WW1 or WW2.
 
Ooh, off the top of my head I'd have to say my favourite poets are Christina Rossetti, Wendy Cope, Wilfred Owen, Siefried Sassoon, Anne Brontë, Maya Angelou and Edna St. Vincent Millay.
 
I collect Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Throw out the long stuff (does anyone really read book length poems?) and forget about the fact that you had to read "Richard Corey" a half dozen times in high school. His best shorter works, such as "Stafford's Cabin" or "Lisette and Eileen"; make Edgar Lee Masters look like a piker.
 
zigaretten said:
I collect Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Throw out the long stuff (does anyone really read book length poems?) and forget about the fact that you had to read "Richard Corey" a half dozen times in high school. His best shorter works, such as "Stafford's Cabin" or "Lisette and Eileen"; make Edgar Lee Masters look like a piker.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Robinson is underestimated. The ballad form is out of fashion, but a poem like "Eros Turannos" is hard to beat.
 
I LOVE e.e.cummings.

I actually made 'the boys I mean are not refined' into a song.

I used to have his complete volumes. I miss it. :(
 
I Love Ogden Nash. Yeah, I'm deep like that. ;)

I ran across his poem, "Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man" in a poetry book and just loved the humor of it, and being a horrid procrastinator, I identified a bit with it.
 
Overman said:
I LOVE e.e.cummings.

I actually made 'the boys I mean are not refined' into a song.

I used to have his complete volumes. I miss it. :(
Click to expand...
LOL. You'll never get any airplay.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of the uncapitalized one myself. I'd have to say he's my favorite.

Other favorites are:
Ogden Nash
T.S. Eliot
Percy Shelly
Robert Frost
Emily Dickenson
Edward Arlington Robinson
Robert Burns
George Gordon Lord Byron
John Ciardi
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Gerard Manly Hopkins


For songwriter poets:
Joni Mitchell
Jackson Browne
Bob Dylan
Leonard Cohen (provided somebody else sings them)
Jill Sobule

Best poem ever: It's a tie between The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T. S. Eliot) and The Rubayaat of Omar Khayam (Translated, and really written by Edward J. Fitzgerald). The latter should be called "The Atheist's Answer to the Bible".

Arghh! There are too many. I can't pick them
 
I've always been a fan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and largely because of Kubla Kahn.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

...
Click to expand...
 
Thank you everyone for posting a whole slew of new poets I'll have to read, and thank you for liking some of the same poets I do, you've made me feel better knowing I'm not as strange (for my poetic tastes) as I thought I was. :)
 
Tennyson greatly impressed me with his:"Mariana in the moated grange."

"Mariana in the moated grange."
Measure for Measure.

With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, 'The night is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen's low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem'd to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, 'The day is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken'd waters slept,
And o'er it many, round and small,
The cluster'd marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low,
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, 'The night is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak'd;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek'd,
Or from the crevice peer'd about.
Old faces glimmer'd thro' the doors,
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, 'My life is dreary,
He cometh not,' she said;
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!'

The sparrow's chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then, said she, 'I am very dreary,
He will not come,' she said;
She wept, 'I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!'

Poem by Alfred Tennyson
 
Corpse Cruncher said:
Keats, Burns, Shakespeare and Byron. There was another, forgotten name of, who wrote poetry about the WW1 or WW2.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing maybe Robert Service, he who wrote "The Cremation of Sam McGee", "The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill", "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man" (a book of verse centered around WWI), "Ballad of a Cheechako" (about the Yukon gold rush) and many others...

"There are strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold..."
 
I only have a minute for now, though I'd like to answer more fully, but I'll offer up one...

Recent poets: Richard Wilbur
 
Favorites:
Emily Dickinson
e e cummings
Dr. Adequate

Deserves to die:
Robert Frost- Goddamn you for writing the "two paths diverge in a yellow wood" poem that is quoted at every graduation!
 
Too many to mention, but for my money, the cream of the crop....

Theodor Geisel
W.H. Auden
e. e. cummings
Pablo Neruda
Mary Oliver
Li-Young Lee
Yusef Komunyakaa
Rumi
Walt Whitman
W. S. Merwyn
Seamus Heaney
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Yeats
Stephen Crane
Carl Sandburg
Wallace Stevens
Richard Shelton
Wilfred Owen
Federico Garcia Lorca
Judson Mitcham
Randall Jarrell
Dylan Thomas
Henry Reed
Gwendolyn Brooks
Allen Ginsberg
Mark Strand
Shel Silverstein
Gary Snyder
Nikki Giovanni
David Bottoms
Billy Collins
T. R. Hummer
Diane Ackerman
A. R. Ammons
Philip Levine
Paul Muldoon
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom