Best poet my country has ever produced

[Rudro]

:brow: I wonder this will be effective to have a taste of good poetry from the whole world! I suggest the format below.

Poet: Rabindranath Tagore

Masterpiece: Gitanjali

Language: Bangla

Country: India

Best Living Poet: :banana: Shamsur Rehman, Al Mahmud, Mohammad Rafiq.
(Bangladesh)

[Daniel A. C.]

This will probably be a controversial choice for my country, and I'm not all that well read in Canadain poetry (but I've read some). Anyway, I say:

Poet: Leonard Cohen

Masterpiece: Ten New Songs, or The Future (Recorded Albums)

Language: English

Country: Canada

Best Living Poet: Cohen's still alive, and actually is releasing a new work of poetry this week.

My guesses for the other countries:

Greece: Homer
Italy: Dante
England: Shakespeare
U.S.A.: Whitman
Russia: Pushkin
Germany: Goethe
Ireland: Yeats
Japan: Basho
Ukraine: Shevchenko
Scotland: Burns
Tibet: Milarepa

Am I right?

[Pensive]

Poet: Allama Iqbal

Masterpiece: Lots of good poems, I can't decide which.

Language: Urdu

Country: Pakistan

[Rudro]

Thanks Daniel A. C. and Pensive

But where are others?

We still need to know poets of other languages.

Hey friends will you hide your poet from us? Does he/she deserve it?

So pls contribute here.

[MikeK]

Poet: Robert Frost

Masterpiece: He doesn't have a definitive masterpiece, but my favorite poem of his is "Come In"

Language: English

Country: USA

[kilted exile]

Scotland: Burns
Am I right?

Probably overall yeah, However my personal favourite Scottish poet was/is Iain Crichton Smith

link (http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/ScotLit/ASLS/ICSmith.html)

[IrishCanadian]

I like Stevenson's poems too for Scotland.
Its interesting that Leanord Cohan is for Canada. Everyone here will sing the praises of Margret Attwood to death. But the most overrated authors thread, I think, does her more justice. Its too bad that Canada's culture is so shallow. I guess its because we're such a young nation.

[Woland]

Poet: William Carlos Williams

Masterpiece: Spring and All

Language: English

Country: United States


From "Spring and All"

"By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken"

[rabid reader]

For English Poets I have often heard Pardise Lost by Milton is considered the best poem written in the English langauge, which by reason would make Milton the greatest english poet. Although my favourite is Bryon.


Don't know any Canadian poets but for the US I think it is easily Poe... and I really hope none suggest Whitman instead- gah!

[emveedub]

The greatest poet of America: Ezra Pound.

His masterpiece was not written, but comes from the gift he made to the 20th Cent. of Robert Frost, TS Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell.

Also a plus, he disliked Longfellow, and only gradually made peace with Walt Whitman -- a kind of working through which must be a prerequisite for those who want to come out the other side of their education knowing anything about verse.

[P0IS0N]

I think any romanian would say this:

Poet: Mihai Eminescu

Masterpiece: Luceafarul

Language: Romanian

Country: Romania

[James Wallace]

Poet: Ahmad Shawky.

Language: Arabic.

Country: Egypt.

Best living poets: Farouq Guwaida, Abdel Rahman El Abnudi, Ahmad Fouad Negm.

[rintrah]

Country: Wales

Best poet from my country: Dylan Thomas

Language: English

Best living poet: Menna Elfyn

Language: Welsh

[chasestalling]

i'm working on it on both accounts that is to say THE POEM and its country of origin. Stay tuned.

[ennison]

Iain Crichton *!@?** Smith. A balloon pal a deflated sad old balloon

[kilted exile]

Iain Crichton *!@?** Smith. A balloon pal a deflated sad old balloon

Yeah, anyone who is christian will dislike him. I always found it interesting he referred to himself as irreligious, when clearly he is obsessed with it.

The other reason I like him is because he was about the only poet we covered in my high school class (it should surprise no one by now to learn that I was in the idiot english class), we had a student teacher for a few weeks that tried to teach us about blake, and something called iambic pentameter - but when the majority of the class is more interested in throwing things across the classroom or running across the desks you can guess pretty well how that went......

So I like Smith, I understand the man.

[Whifflingpin]

"something called iambic pentameter - but when the majority of the class is more interested in throwing things across the classroom or running across the desks you can guess pretty well how that went......"

Did he no' teach you to bang the desk lids in iambic pentameters?

Or tell you the real things about Blake?

[kilted exile]

Ahem, no she had "wonderful" ideas about how she was going to teach us all about poetry and form and all that stuff - It was always going to be a train wreck, (not as bad however as the geography teacher who used mini chocolate bars to bribe us into behaving - I have too many of these type stories).

[ennison]

I met him. He was a snob, like MacCaig that other member of the late 20th century Scottish triumverate of Macdiarmid, MacCaig and ICS. Macdiarmid/Grieve started off brilliantly but degenerated into political, artyfarty mumbo-jumbo. He and MacCaig used to do an amazing stand up double act with MacCaig acting as a kind of intellectual minder for HM while he spewed vitriol over the audience - responding to criticism with rejoinders like 'May the skin of your bum never cover a banjo'. I would recommend his early poetry to anyone but his conscious determination to be 'aye where extremes meet' wasted his artistic energies. I'd also have no hesitation in recommending Robin Jenkins (Atheist ann neo as) as Scotland's second greatest modern novelist after Massie.

There are many Scottish poets and I have read them only long after leaving school. I never heard any of the great Gaelic poets even mentioned in the passing in school and it was through family, friends and post-education experience that I came across them.

[Lioness_Heart]

Country: England
Best Poet: John Clare
Best Poem: I Am
Why?... Because he used to live near where I live now, and I believe that he really captured our region so perfectly in the spirit of his poems. I Am is a beautiful poem too... it has an indescribable depth to it, and is so poignant... More that any other poem that I can think of right now, this gives a wonderful insight into such a troubled mind (he spent the last 27 years of his life in a lunatic asylum).

[ennison]

Christopher Smart is another great English poet who spent time in an asylum; inscribing at least one of his poems into a window frame with a key.