Greatest/Favourite Poets of the 20th Century (in all languages)

[ladderandbucket]

Robinson Jeffers seems criminally neglected.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity
Heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the Molten Mass, pops
And sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
Fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
Ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
Is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
Mountains: shine perishing republic

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
From the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lies at the
Monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man.
A clever servant, insufferable master.
There is a trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
they say God, when he walked on Earth.

[Dreamwoven]

That's nice, I may look his work up sometime.

[SongsOfOrpheus]

Conrad Aiken is a pleasant discovery for me.

Ballad

Into the wood the old king went
And greeted an ash and touched an oak
Out of his sore soul’s discontent
He sighed and spoke:

“Children I had and they are dead
A wife I had, and she is lost.
What do you do, good trees,” he said,
“At the hour of frost?”

The oak-trees soughed and the ash-tree sighed,
But never a word they gave the king.
The crow in the ash-tree cawed and cried,
But did not sing.

The old king shut his two eyes fast,
And leant his forehead against the tree
And though of all the dead leaves past-
A marvelous company.

They came, they came, like waves of the sea,
These ghosts of leaves came round that king.
They hushed they whispered, ceaselessly;
And he heard them sing:

Children and bright eyed wives we were
But Time forgot us, and no one grieves.
Who remembers us? Who will stir
The ghosts of leaves? . . .

The world is a world of forgotten things
It is better so, far better so.
Wives and children, even a king’s,
Are brief as snow.

And who can be happier than the dead,
By all forgotten, forgetting all?
Come with us King! - the dead leaves said-
The year’s at the fall.

[Nikonani]

1. Hart Crane
2. WH Auden
3. John Ashbery
4. Ezra Pound (perhaps not for his poetry, which I'm rarely fond of, but as the singular driving force behind one of the most cohesive movements in literary history)
5. WB Yeats
6. Wallace Stevens
7. Eliot (not for his poetry at all, which I actually largely dislike, but just as a scholar)
8. Basil Bunting

I don't really care about non-English or non-French poetry

[Eupalinos]

César Vallejo -- who, despite Mortal Terror's claim of being overrated, is probably the greatest poet of the century for me with Osip Mandelstam a close second, then Akhmatova, Celan, Char, Pessoa, etc. -- from the excellent bilingual and complete collection of his poetry translated by Clayton Eschleman:


Considering coldly, impartially,
that man is sad, coughs and, nevertheless,
takes pleasure in his reddened chest;
that the only thing he does is to be made up
of days;
that he is a gloomy mammal and combs his hair. . .

Considering
that man proceeds softly from work
and reverberates boss, sounds employee;
that the diagram of time
is a constant diorama on his medals
and, half-open, his eyes have studied,
since distant times,
his famished mass formula. . .

Understanding without effort
that man pauses, occasionally, thinking,
as if wanting to cry,
and, subject to lying down like an object,
becomes a good carpenter, sweats, kills
and then sings, eats lunch, buttons himself up. . .

Considering too
that man is truly an animal
and, nevertheless, upon turning, hits my head with his sadness. . .

Examining, finally,
his discordant parts, his toilet,
his desperation, upon finishing his atrocious day, erasing it. . .

Understanding
that he knows I love him,
that I hate him with affection and, in short, am indifferent to him. . .

Considering his general documents
and scrutinizing with a magnifying glass that certificate
that proves he was born very tiny. . .

I make a gesture to him,
he approaches,
I hug him, and it moves me.
What's the difference! It moves me. . . moves me. . .


I find in this poet a lack of bluff and a genuine weight of authority very rare among the Modernists. Perhaps part of the cause is he's not a Modernist at all but a late Romantic (and one of the best).

[UlyssesE]

Robinson Jeffers seems criminally neglected.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity
Heavily thickening to empire (etc)

Great selection. Like Dreamwoven, I'm going to have to look up some other work.

[Marcus1]

Certainly one of the ten best poems I have ever read, I present a Montale which makes the heart shiver with such disarming beauty:


The Lemons by Eugenio Montale


Listen to me, the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.

Better if the hubbub of the birds
dies out, swallowed by the blue:
we can hear more of the whispering
of friendly branches in not-quite-quiet air,
and the sensations of this smell
that can't divorce itself from earth
and rains a restless sweetness on the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of troubled passions calls a truce;
here we poor, too, receive our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemons.

See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret.
sometimes we feel we're about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won't hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.
The eye scans its surroundings,
the mind inquires aligns divides
in the perfume that gets diffused
at the day's most languid.
It's in these silences you see
in every fleeting human
shadow some disturbed Divinity.

But the illusion fails, and time returns us
to noisy cities where the blue
is seen in patches, up between the roofs.
The rain exhausts the earth then;
winter's tedium weighs the houses down,
the light turns miserly--the soul bitter.
Till one day through a half-shut gate
in a courtyard, there among the trees,
we can see the yellow of the lemons;
and the chill in the heart
melts, and deep in us
the golden horns of sunlight
pelt their songs.

[Eupalinos]

That poem is truly incredible, Marcus1. Gives me every reason to deplore my negligence of Montale thus far.

[Marcus1]

Thanks! Here are my favourite poets if you are interested:


Osip Mandelstam
Paul Celan
Friedrich Hölderlin
Charles Baudelaire
Gabriela Mistral
Mario Benedetti
Alejandra Pizarnik
Federico Garcia Lorca
Pablo Neruda
Eugenio Montale
Vicente Aleixandre
Forugh Farrokhzad
Octavio Paz
Fernando Pessoa
Akiko Yosano
Sakutarō Hagiwara
Anna Akhmatova
Marina Tsvetaeva
William Butler Yeats

[booksncoffee]

Is everyone forgetting Slivia Plath? She has one twisted soul (I mean you kind of have to be to sick your head in the oven you know), but I absolutely love all of her work. Some of her work makes you not surprised she stuck her head in an oven.
Also Edgar Allan Poe because he has some creepy work that sends a chill down your spine

[Eupalinos]

Very nice list... The first four are big with me as well, and there are a handful there I need to look up.

Speaking of Mistral have you come across Frédéric Mistral? 'Mirèio' sounds interesting.

[Marcus1]

I have not heard of Frédéric Mistral, but I will check him out when I have the time. There's still a lot of poets I have yet to explore, especially the Eastern/African poetry, which I intend to do so soon.

Anyway here are my ten favourite poems at the moment:


Akiko Yosano - River of Stars
Charles Baudelaire - Voyage to Cythera
Eugenio Montale - The Lemons
Paul Celan - Death Fugue
Octavio Paz - Between Going and Coming
Rabindranath Tagore - The Further Bank
Forough Farrokhzad - The Wind Will Carry Us
Anna Akhmatova - Requiem
Vicente Aleixandre - Who I Write For
William Butler Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

Hope you find some of these worthy of appreciation as I do!

[Eupalinos]

Thanks hugely for the reading list. I have about a dozen favorite Celans; one is below.


Es ist nicht mehr
diese
zuweilen mit dir
in die Stunde gesenkte
Schwere. Es ist
eine andre.

Es ist das Gewicht, das die Leere zurückhält
die mit-
ginge mit dir.
Es hat, wie du, keinen Namen. Vielleicht
seid ihr dasselbe. Vielleicht
nennst auch du mich einst
so.


It is no longer
this
heaviness
lowered at times together with you
into the hour. It is
an other.

It is the weight holding back the void
that would
accompany you.
Like you, it has no name. Perhaps
you two are one and the same. Perhaps
one day you also will name me
so.

[stlukesguild]

Is everyone forgetting Slivia Plath?

No. My decision to exclude her from my list of my Favorite (Greatest) poets of the 20th century was quite conscious.

[Marcus1]

I don't see any particular reason to dislike people who enjoy reading Plath, Bukowski, Salinger, etc. instead of the traditional classics. What I do find disconcerting and have issue with is the willfully naive art "critic", a fair representation of the typical Anglophone community, who simply refuses or even denies the credibility of non-English literature, poetry, film or art.