Still Another Showdown: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Whitman, Rilke, or Tennyson?

[stlukesguild]

Simple enough. Your favorite of these great late 19th century poets...


If anyone here still reads poetry.

[JCamilo]

Rilke in XIX century? This is sabotage towards Verlaine.

[stlukesguild]

OK... OK... I suppose by having included Rilke I should have added Yeats and Pessoa as well.

Just play the damn game.

[JCamilo]

I am. Everyone knows I only nitpicked and complained in the other threads. That is what I am doing.

[Kyriakos]

I voted for Baudelaire, who is one of my favourite poets

[laymonite]

Not sure if this was intentional, stlukes, but I was able to multi-select my ballot, so I went with Baudelaire and Rimbaud! The rest are, of course, incredible poets, but my recent immersion in French Symbolist poetry has rekindled my passion for liiterature all around., and I feel slightly guilty eschewing them from my ballot. Oh well!

[arrytus]

I choose Rilke but between it's betwixt him and Baudelaire....

'wie voll Vorwand das alles ist'

'nous alimentons nos aimables remords'


***OH I just realized this is supposed to be 19TH CENTURY! Rilke is 20th, even if he lived about half his life in both obviously his poetry wasn't developed until the latter half, after working with Rodin.

so if i could change it I would vote for Baudelaire because Rilke doesn't count

[JCamilo]

I jinxed it

[arrytus]

lol-- 5 voters and a 11 votes! i only voted once btw

[laymonite]

Perhaps some people voted but did not post? I voted twice; I had to!

[sixsmith]

Due to a lack of familiarity with some of the authors involved, I've refrained from participating in the preceding 'Showdown' threads. Here again, I've read very little Whitman, but in the spirit of competition, I'm going to vote anyway.

I'm happy to disqualify Rilke on the grounds that he is in truth a 20th century poet. I'd otherwise have a difficult time choosing between he and Baudelaire who, in turn, is moderately ahead of Rimbaud. Tennyson penned one of my single favourite poems in Ulysses, but I am not particularly fond of his other work.

[stlukesguild]

In all honesty, I'd be torn between any and all of these poets. I think that I'd be able to eliminate Rimbaud the quickest because he is clearly behind Baudelaire... then again... I quite love Illuminations which pushes poetry into something approaching an abstraction that is only rivaled at this time by Mallarme.

Whitman is undeniably brilliant... the realization of Emerson's imagined new American poet. He gets bonus points as the first American writer to be really leading the Europeans (well... yeah, there's also Poe... but more as a short story writer than a poet) and he continues to be relevant into the 20th century, impacting Pessoa, Neruda, Eliot, Montale, on forth to Ginsberg, Paz, etc...

Tennyson is grossly underrated. Ulysses is a brilliant poem... but there are numerous others most obvious being In Memoriam... surely one of the great poetic elegies of all time.

Rilke was poet I came upon early... and admittedly struggled with... and yet could not let go. There was something right from the start that spoke to me in his verse while I endeavored to wrest the "meaning" from it. I currently have some 12 or 13 volumes of his poetry.

In the end, I'd probably go with Baudelaire for the simple reason that he was the poet who truly turned me into a poetry reader... and eventually a poetry fanatic. As a young student I embraced him as someone I had "discovered" on my own and I was seduced by his eroticism and his dark "atmosphere". With time I became enamored of the formal beauty of his language and poetic form... the manner in which this formal "beauty" often contrasted with the themes and images he employed... and the "atmosphere". I came to recognize that poetry... that all literature... that all art... need not be limited or defined by the linear narrative. Poetry could be about conveying mood... atmosphere... feelings... sensations... Baudelaire led me to Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, and Gautier... back to Poe and forward to Valery, Eliot, Neruda, and others.

[arrytus]

Tennyson is grossly underrated. Ulysses is a brilliant poem...

fabulous line: "unequal laws unto a savage race"

[JCamilo]

I like Tennyson and also Elizabeth Barrett, both great poets. But they are underated (bad word) only because the romantic generation is big Shadow. The are just not as spetacular as the big 6 were, as much they seem as perfect as their romantic precussors. And also, inside her own Kitchen, there is one who was more unique, Robert (which you forgot, Borges would tell you that you like teenagers poets)...

Anyways, Baudelaire, mostly because about poetry those guys are matched, but Baudelaire work with prose and essays, plus saving Poe, is pretty much an extra.

[Mr.lucifer]

If this was a reallife physical showdown, can they all wield knives?