The greatest living poet

[Catamite]

Ultimately the question becomes: "Who is the greatest living poet from among the poets you have read and are familiar enough with?"

To be fair, this is true of anything. I'm reading a Larkin anthology of 20th century poetry at the moment and just got carried away with Walcott after reading Tales of the Islands, which is a sonnet sequence. Here's a little bit:

The marl road, the Doree rushing cool
Through gorges of green cedar, like the sound
Of infant voices from the Mission School,
Like leaves like dom seas in the mind; ici, Choiseul.
The stone cathedral echoes like a well,
Or as a sunken sea-cave, carved in sand.
Touring its Via Dorosa I tried to keep
That chill flesh from my memory when I found
A Sancta Teres in her nest of light;
The skirts of fluttered bronze, the uplifted hand,
The cherub, shaft upraised, parting her breast.
Teach our philosophy the strenght to reach
Above the navel; black bodies, wet with light
Rolled in the spray as I strolled up thr beach.

These lines just make me swoon. I think they're euphonic without being over-classical, articulate without losing an easy tone.

[mortalterror]

But Mortal your opinions are rather useless are they not considering that you have made it clear on more than one occasion that you think pretty much the whole of modernism (Metallica excepted) sucked.

That's not an accurate portrayal of my position. When it comes to fine art I like the late impressionists, Alma-Tadema, Repin, Hunt, Rodin, Boldini, Dali, some Picasso, Magritte, Lempicka, Stuck, Ernst, Escher, Marc, Bacon, Chagall, Hasui, Hopper, Klimt, Mucha, Malczewski, Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, Renau, Camarena, Helnwein, Melamid, Tubke, Triegel, Cappiello, Levy-Dhurmer, Varo, Banksy, Fairey, The Mac, Blume, Jess, certain Nerdrum, and Biggers.

As for classical music of the twentieth century I enjoy Prokofiev, Ravel, some Stravinsky, Shostakovich, some Gershwin, Vaughn Williams, Gustav Holst, Rachmaninoff, Puccini, Orff, Barber, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Copland, a little Gorecki, a little Steve Reich, Ennio Morricone. I have tunes in my Pandora playlist by Virgil Thomson, Osvaldo Golijov, Granville Bantock, Philip Glass, Bela Bartok, Joaquin Rodrigo, Zoltan Kodaly, Ottorino Respighi, Michael Torke, Leonard Bernstein, Rautavaara, Michael Tippett, Leroy Anderson, and Malcolm Arnold.

Furthermore, when it comes to literature I am a fan of Cavafy, Apollinaire, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Auden, Paul Valery, Rilke, Montale, Paul Eluard, e.e. cummings, Pessoa, Neruda, Lorca, Kazantzakis, Czeslaw Milosz, Dylan Thomas, Adunis, Zbigniew Herbert, and Derek Walcott just in poetry. There are far more writers of prose I respect and admire. So your claim hardly holds up.

P.S. When it comes to architecture I like Norman Foster.

[Heteronym]

I don't know, but he's probably Portuguese: António Osório, Herberto Hélder, Manuel Alegre, Maria Teresa Horta, or Gastão Cruz

Nah, it's actually Adam Zagajewski.

Still, lots of new names for me here: I'll have fun looking them up.

[conartist]

Obvious contenders are Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott (my personal choice) and Wislawa Szymborska.

Spooky

[Heteronym]

You see what happens when you start these threads? It's the whole butterfly/tornado thing...

[Catamite]

Yes, I suppose it will be Walcott gone over the weekend and Heaney by the end of next week

[stlukesguild]

Nah, it's actually Adam Zagajewski

Yes... another great poet.

[fb0252]

Walter W. Arndt, and then, ooops, the end of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_W._Arndt

and he just died. See his translation of Faust Part II Act V as proof.

[ennison]

Drifting through these older threads I came on this . How could it be answered accurately? Poetry loses too much in translation to be able to make valid comparisons between poets from different cultures. I like Pessoa but I read His native tongue too badly to be able to compare him to say Crane or Wright or Walcott though I could compare them together.

[MorpheusSandman]

Old thread, but I'd throw in my vote for Ashbery, though he's a bit like Wordsworth in that one really hast to wade through a lot of mediocre crap to get to the stuff that makes him great, and he hasn't been great in many years. On reconsideration, I might have to go with Geoffrey Hill for that reason, who is consistently great, though I don't know if he has anything quite on the level of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I always enjoy Wilbur, but I always find myself thinking that he's a notch below the great formalist poets of the past like Frost and Yeats. Pleasant, but not original in the least. Anne Carson is good, but I want to see a bit more from her before I make up my mind. I've yet to really get into Walcott, though I haven't read Omeros. One name I haven't seen mentioned is Luise Gluck. I disliked what I read of her in anthologies, but after picking up the recent Collected Poems, I've become a big fan. Her control over tone and atmosphere is second to none. Again, perhaps not as profound as Ashbery or Hill at their best, but consistently good.