Who Is Your Favorite Poet and What Is Your Favorite Poem By Them?

[verson]

I really like Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee. Robert Frost's A Road Not Taken is amazing, too. Who do you like and what poem by them do you like?

[hoope]

My fav. Is as well Edgar Allan Poe but the fav poem is Alone

And I like reading for Emily Dickinson poems Life ; some things that fly there by .

[F2ionA76]

Shakespeare

[F2ionA76]

Shakespeare is he OK?

[Darcy88]

Shakespeare is he OK?

Yeah he's okay.

[Helga]

I guess I change my mind regularly about favorite poets and poems. Blake and the Sick Rose is always high on my list as well as W.H.Auden and his poems to Britten but at the moment I Have to say Baudelaire, A celle qui est trop gaie and Une charogne.

[Lokasenna]

I too change my mind regularly, but there are certain firm favourites that keep cropping up, one of the most recurring being Tennyson's sublime Tithonus.

[PoeticPassions]

Yeah he's okay.

hahahaha your comment actually made me laugh out loud.

[PoeticPassions]

I have so many 'favorites' that it is really difficult to choose... among them are Neruda, Lorca, Dylan Thomas, Blake, Coleridge and John Milton (Paradise Lost is spectacular)...

Some of my favorite poems are: 'Clown in the Moon' by Thomas; 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' by Coleridge, 'Marriage of Heaven and Hell' by Blake, and 'A Song of Despair' by Pablo Neruda.

[Pierre Menard]

Borges, Yeats, Whitman, Akhmatova, Shakespeare, Rilke would be the top echelon for me, so far.

Couldn't possibly choose a favourite poem. Maybe when I re-read their stuff multiple more times in the future the standouts will be extra apparent.

[Darcy88]

Its a three-way tie between Shakespeare, Whitman and Auden. My favourite poems of each are these:

Song of Myself
1
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.

(The poem is super-long, I only copied here the first few stanzas.)

The Shield of Achilles
by W. H. Auden


She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

(Shield of Achilles is my favourite poem period.)

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

[Themistocles18]

Eliot is my favorite poet and my favorite poem by him is probably Little Gidding. But my favorite poem, in general, changes a lot. Lately, I've been loving:

Spring and Fall: To a Young Child, by Gerard Manley Hopkins


Márgarét, are you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves, líke the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow's spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

[Kingbob]

Allan Poe's To Helen is also great！And my favourite poet is Ralph Waldo Emerson，his Nature attracts me most.

[stlukesguild]

Including epic poetry, the choice for me is easy: Dante's Comedia. If we are speaking of shorter (lyrical) poetry, then my favorites are too numerous to even begin to name and my answers would change from day to day. At the moment, I could live with saying that I can't think of any poem I like more than Spenser's Epithalamion.

Wake now, my love, awake! for it is time;
The Rosy Morne long since left Tithones bed, 75
All ready to her silver coche to clyme;
And Phoebus gins to shew his glorious hed.
Hark! how the cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies
And carroll of Loves praise.
The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft; 80
The Thrush replyes; the Mavis descant playes;
The Ouzell shrills; the Ruddock warbles soft;
So goodly all agree, with sweet consent,
To this dayes merriment.
Ah! my deere love, why doe ye sleepe thus long? 85
When meeter were that ye should now awake,
T' awayt the comming of your joyous make,
And hearken to the birds love-learnèd song,
The deawy leaves among!
Nor they of joy and pleasance to you sing, 90
That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring.

My love is now awake out of her dreames,
And her fayre eyes, like stars that dimmèd were
With darksome cloud, now shew theyr goodly beams
More bright then Hesperus his head doth rere. 95
Come now, ye damzels, daughters of delight,
Helpe quickly her to dight:
But first come ye fayre houres, which were begot
In Joves sweet paradice of Day and Night;
Which doe the seasons of the yeare allot, 100
And al, that ever in this world is fayre,
Doe make and still repayre:
And ye three handmayds of the Cyprian Queene,
The which doe still adorne her beauties pride,
Helpe to addorne my beautifullest bride: 105
And, as ye her array, still throw betweene
Some graces to be seene;
And, as ye use to Venus, to her sing,
The whiles the woods shal answer, and your eccho ring.

http://www.bartleby.com/101/82.html

[Dorian Doyle]

Well, it depends. I love Homer's poems (Iliad and Oddisey), The Satyricon by Petronius, Au lecteur by Baudelaire, Une Charogne by the same poet, The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, Les chants de maldoror by Lautréamont and famous Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. I also like Horatio's Odes.