Who is your favourite poet(s)?

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?

mariaalice

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

Denerick

Loved Yeats. Though I don't read enough poetry.

Michael longly and Patrick Kavanagh are also my favourites. But I've happened to mention half of all the poets I've ever read in this post, so its not saying much.

lemon_sherbert

this thread is really making me want to get back into poetry, but my favourites, off the top of my head

Brendan Keneally
TS Eliot
Dylan Thomas
Yeats

and when I was younger Fleur Adcock

sadhbhc15

Plath - The Times are Tidy

lordgoat

Bukowski
William Carlos Williamson
Neruda
ee cummings

Like a jar you housed infinite tenderness...


Others i read include - Hardy, Plath, Shakespeare, i also like the hedge school by austin clarke alot.

galactus

Milton, Eliot, cummings, Plath and Armitage would be up there for me. Am also one of those who believe that Yeats mostly wrote completely over-rated trite rubbish. Nowadays he's be lucky to get a job with Hallmark.

This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

pauline fayne

Michael Hartnett
Patrick Kavanagh
Paula Meehan
Sylvia Plath

Denerick

What is life if full of care... There is to time to stop and stare! (W.H. Davies, I think)

Paddy Samurai

That Dead guy?.....you know the one!.

TheDrog

kipling

This_Years_Love

Emily Dickinson... loved her poems since studying them in secondary school.