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.