Who is your favourite poet(s)?

manonthemoon

My favourites at the moment are (in no particular order)

• Simon Armitage
• Philip Larkin
• Paul Durkan

NoDayBut2Day

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe

sonic juice

Dylan Thomas
John Keats

NoDayBut2Day

Oh... Emily Dickinson and T.S. Elliot... can't forget them!

Lou.m

One of mine is Coleridge, esecially Kubla Kahn and the Rhyme of the Ancient Marriner, but i also like Yeats and..... gosh so many others.

luckat

Too many to mention. More poems than poets, like Wallace Stephens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

<snip>

John

Plath, Larkin, Eliot, Dickonson, Blake, Shakespeare, Heaney, Hughes, etc. etc.

Earthhorse

Pretty hard to pick a favourite. ee cummings and Emily Dickinson spring to mind. Of modern poets perhaps Bukowski and Levine, thought I haven't read enough of the latter to be sure.

Yeats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Hopkins, Edna St. Vincent Mallay have all thrilled and delighted me at some stage.

The_Minister

Yeats hands down. I love his simpler ones, like Scholars:


The Scholars

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

toomevara

E.E.cummings, Pablo Neruda, Robert Lowell, Gary Snyder.......and many more....

abelard

It's got to be Yeats for me too, I'mnot even really sure why, I guess the themes just appeal to me or something.

Coming in not far behind are TS Eliot and William Blake

John

Forgot to mention Robert Frost before. Some stunning poetry in his repetoire.

BossArky

I'm not the biggest reader of poetry these days, but "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare stands out from my school days.

"Is there anybody there said the traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door
As his horse in the silence chomped the grass
Of the forests ferny floor"

...agh beautiful.

MagnumForce

Earthhorse wrote:

Of modern poets perhaps Bukowski and Levine, thought I haven't read enough of the latter to be sure.

Bukowski definitly is one of my favorites at the moment, the man was a legend! Also quite fond of Richard Brautigan. In the past I have looked kindly on Hughes, Dickinson, Kavanagh, T.S. Elliot and others.

Tar.Aldarion

BossArky wrote:

I'm not the biggest reader of poetry these days, but "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare stands out from my school days.

"Is there anybody there said the traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door
As his horse in the silence chomped the grass
Of the forests ferny floor"

...agh beautiful.

That is my favourite poem!

Him, frost, dickinson, some mahon poems and one plath poem. One or two Shakespeare ones are superb.

lacuna

I've always been very fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

NoDayBut2Day

Shel Silverstein... the children's poet. I think that's his name. Oh and Dr. Seuss... would you consider him a poet?

Tar.Aldarion

lacuna wrote:

I've always been very fond of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Anybody hate him and his aptly named terrible sonnets as much as me?

starn

John Milton, Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson.

I never tought a whole lot of Yeats personally

MagnumForce

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

Anybody hate him and his aptly named terrible sonnets as much as me?

yes, i hate him, he's a twat, none of his poems ever appealed to me, they were just religious drivel, religious drivel can still sound beautiful if you ignore the religious nature, but his are just unbearable

r3nu4l

Hmmm, I have to say I love rhyming poetry with good meter. There's something about the making something sound beautiful despite the constraint of structural rigidity!

Anyway, I love poetry by Oscar Wilde and WB Yeats.

sophiej

Neruda without a doubt

stevejazzx

starn wrote:

I never tought a whole lot of Yeats personally

Waaaa?

He won The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for
"his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation"
William Butler Yeats
Ireland




Hows about these apples:


Child dancing in the wind:

Dance there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water’s roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet
Being young you have not known
The fool’s triumph, nor yetLove lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?


Byzantium:
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees -
Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

Peace

that Time could touch a form That could show what Homer's age Bred to be a hero's wage. 'Were not all her life but storm, Would not painters paint a form Of such noble lines,' I said, 'Such a delicate high head, All that sternness amid charm, All that sweetness amid strength?' Ah, but peace that comes at length, Came when Time had touched her form

---

T. S. Eliot


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question...
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.


Alexander Pope

The Tortoise here and Elephant unite,
Transform'd to Combs, the speckled and the white.
Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows,
Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux.
Now awful Beauty puts on all its Arms;
The Fair each moment rises in her Charms,
Repairs her Smiles, awakens ev'ry Grace,
And calls forth all the Wonders of her Face;
Sees by Degrees a purer Blush arise,
And keener Lightnings quicken in her Eyes.
The busy Sylphs surround their darling Care;
These set the Head, and those divide the Hair,
Some fold the Sleeve, while others plait the Gown;
And Betty's prais'd for Labours not her own.[/CENTER][/LEFT][/LEFT]

MagnumForce

stevejazzx wrote:

Waaaa?

He won The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923 for
"his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation"
William Butler Yeats
Ireland

that doesnt mean he has to like him.

BossArky

Just remembered that Raghlan Road is another fav. of mine.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet,
I see her walking now,
Away from me as hurriedly as reason will allow,
That I had woed not as I should a creature made of clay,
And the man who woes the clay will loose his wings at the end of the day.

Those words are not exactly correct there at the end... just quoting from the top of my head... but it is such a beautiful ending to that poem.

Tar.Aldarion

My favourite Yeats poem.


A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

The_Minister

BossArky wrote:

Just remembered that Raghlan Road is another fav. of mine.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet,
I see her walking now,
Away from me as hurriedly as reason will allow,
That I had woed not as I should a creature made of clay,
And the man who woes the clay will loose his wings at the end of the day.

Those words are not exactly correct there at the end... just quoting from the top of my head... but it is such a beautiful ending to that poem.

On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had loved not as I should a creature made of clay -
When the angel woos the clay he'd lose his wings at the dawn of day.


I could not let that pass uncorrected.

BossArky

Thanks. I did say that my lines above were a guesstimation.

Earthhorse

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Although this poem is only six lines long my friend and I managed to come up with completely different interpretations of it.

That sigh in the last line, is it one of contentment or one of longing?

sambora

Emily Dickinson
Patrick Kavanagh
Seamus Heaney

The_Minister

Earthhorse wrote:

Although this poem is only six lines long my friend and I managed to come up with completely different interpretations of it.

That sigh in the last line, is it one of contentment or one of longing?

I got longing, a distant, unreturned love. I think its open to interpretation.

biko

Dylan Thomas

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Tar.Aldarion

Earthhorse wrote:

Although this poem is only six lines long my friend and I managed to come up with completely different interpretations of it.

That sigh in the last line, is it one of contentment or one of longing?

It's longing, he felt unrequited love all his life, and it really speaks to me I suppose.
If that wine is buckfast or if I changed wine to devil's bit.
I suppose it could be contentment in a sad sort of way.

MagnumForce

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

It's longing, he felt unrequited love all his life, and it really speaks to me I suppose.
If that wine is buckfast or if I changed wine to devil's bit.
I suppose it could be contentment in a sad sort of way.

Hurray for buckfast!

Tar.Aldarion

Got me through some tough times.

BossArky

Tar.Aldarion wrote:

My favourite Yeats poem.


A Drinking Song

Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye;
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.

Imagine writing that poem yourself nowadays and trying to get it published. People would laugh at you.

doonothing

bukowski, ginsberg and angelou.

Tar.Aldarion

BossArky wrote:

Imagine writing that poem yourself nowadays and trying to get it published. People would laugh at you.

No they wouldn't!

I would hide it amongst hundreds of other poems.

godspal

Dylan Thomas, T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Edgar Allen Poe, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, John Keats, Allen Ginsberg.

Lynn Hejinian's My Life is worth a read. Very Hypnotic.
Use to like William Wordsworth until I read Keats, far superior.
Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales is amazing.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for anybody else who likes middle-English poetry. (and to be honest I really enjoyed this.)
Very impressed by anything I have read by Alexander Pope, but since I haven't really read that much by him...
Milton and Baudelaire are two I have been meaning to read. And I have read bits and bobs of Yeats early stuff (which reek of Romantic structure and tone, which I don't really like in Modernist poets.) but I have been meaning to read The Tower for quiet some time, but can't get just an edition of this book (I am a bit reluctant to hand out e30 for a poet I haven't been impressed by so far.)
Joyce's poems are amazing too, so deliberate and precise.
Finally I will finish with the Big Daddy, the most influential poet of the 20th Century, Ezra Pound. I really haven't made my mind up on him yet... He has some amazingly evocative poems, but conversely has these underwhelming anti-semitic poems in his Cantos. Anyone able to point me to some of his works that might lean me either direction?

ee cummings, WB Yeats and Dylan Thomas




ee cummings... I like my body Yeats... When your are old

Sempronia

W.B.Yeats and his favorite poet, Wiliam Blake; Homer; Virgil; Catullus; Chaucer; who ever wrote "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and "The Pearl; Pablo Neruda; Octavio Paz; Baudelaire; Rilke; Shakespeare; Villion; Mallarme; Dante; Petrarch; e.e. cummings; Wallace Stevens; Sappho; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripedes; Vyasa; Keats; Coleridge; early Wordsworth; Browning; Maya Angelou; Toni Morrison; Kit Marlowe and his mighty line; Eliot Yevtushenko; Frost; Goethe . . . so many poets, too little time.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance:
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

MonicaBing

For me its anything by Robert Frost, i espec love, ''I stopped by the woods of a snowy evening'', and Yeat's always has a special place in my heart with ''The Cloths of Heav'n'' and The Second Coming''. I love Kipling's If as well...

BroomBurner

My favourite poem is The Eagle by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It was like a little shaft of golden light during a very grey year of childhood and will always be uplifting.

Philip Larkin and Edgar Allen Poe are also favourites.

Anyone write their own stuff? Maybe we could have a Poetry Corner

EDIT: Maybe a sticky in Creative Writing??

Ann22

I love Walter De La Mare's 'Silver' -

'Slowly, silently now the moon,
walks the night in her silver shoon.
This way and that she peers and sees
silver fruit upon silver trees'...
the last two lines are magical-
'and moveless fish in the water gleam, by silver reeds in a silver stream'

I also love Wordsworth's 'Daffodils' and Kavanagh's 'A Christmas Childhood'...'My father played the melodian outside at our gate, there were stars in the morning east and they danced to his music'....and 'in silver, the wonder of a Christmas townland, the winking glitter of a frosty dawn'...ah!
I also like Oliver Goldsmith's 'The village schoolmaster'..'a man severe he was and stern to view, I knew him well and every truant knew'.

Lizzykins

I love Patrick Kavanagh and Oscar Wilde. Also possibly as a throwback to school in the late 70s anything by Hopkins. I'm not much of a Yeats fan but maybe I just never liked the man as a character.

Slightly off topic I took a look at one of my kid's school poetry book and I hardly recognised a poet in it!

Sempronia

Thanks for reminding me of Robert Frost. He was indeed one of the great poets of all time. Many moons ago, I took at Graduate Seminar called "Frost and His Contemporaries, and I took it only because the professor was my mentor and he was friendly with Frost until Frost's death. My prof told so many anecdotes about Frost which kept everyone interested.

I gained so much insight into the poet everyone seems merelly to tolerate because they think of Frost's poet the same way they view Norman Rockwell's kitzchy paintings. But the two could not be more different!

You've also reminded me that I also love some of Pound, Muriel Rukeyser, and William Carlos Williams.

Slán.

Sempronia

zesman

Patrick Kavanagh, Michael Hartnett sometimes Yeats. Even though he's not really known as a poet Dermot Bolger. Also Raymond Carver has written some wonderful poems. Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinovic for the collection Sarajevo Blues. Lorca for his gypsy poetry.

BertrandMeyer

Definitely Edgar Allan Poe.


The Velvet on the Floor

Distinctly I whispered
Unmerciful disaster awoken
Eagerly I had sought to hear
Discourse so aptly spoken

The darkness gave no black plume
This mystery explore
Something at ease, reclining
Whose fiery eyes did bore...

eZe^

Oscar Wilde, definitely.


My limbs are wasted with a flame,
My feet are sore with travelling,
For, calling on my Lady's name,
My lips have now forgot to sing.

O Linnet in the wild-rose brake
Strain for my Love thy melody,
O Lark sing louder for love's sake,
My gentle Lady passeth by.

She is too fair for any man
To see or hold his heart's delight,
Fairer than Queen or courtesan
Or moonlit water in the night.

Her hair is bound with myrtle leaves,
(Green leaves upon her golden hair!)
Green grasses through the yellow sheaves
Of autumn corn are not more fair.

Her little lips, more made to kiss
Than to cry bitterly for pain,
Are tremulous as brook-water is,
Or roses after evening rain.

Her neck is like white melilote
Flushing for pleasure of the sun,
The throbbing of the linnet's throat
Is not so sweet to look upon.

As a pomegranate, cut in twain,
White-seeded, is her crimson mouth,
Her cheeks are as the fading stain
Where the peach reddens to the south.

O twining hands! O delicate
White body made for love and pain!
O House of love! O desolate
Pale flower beaten by the rain!

Manach

I'd perfer the simplier sorts: Kipling, Browning, Scott, & Cameron.

Recessional - Kipling
Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet.
Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Rascaduanok

All–time favourite poets of mine:

• William Shakespeare
• Muhammad Iqbal
• Hart Crane
• TS Eliot