Who is your favourite poet!!!???

[NikolaiI]

Who is your favourite poet? Mine's Herman Hesse.

[stephofthenight]

Edgar Allen Poe...i love him

[andave_ya]

W.B. Yeats and Dorothy L. Sayers!!!!

[Demian]

King David and Rumi. In them is contained all that true poetry can ever aspire to be.

[Mesalithasamut]

I prefer Percy Shelley. (Sorry for the double post)

[Mesalithasamut]

King David and Rumi. In them is contained all that true poetry can ever aspire to be. All that true poetry can ever aspire to be? What is "true" poetry? And what does true poetry aspire to be?

[Granny5]

I love most poetry and lots of poets. Right now my favorites are here on LitNet. Cdnreader, ampoula, PrinceMyshkin, Pendragon, Virgil, etc. Logging on is like getting a new book of poetry everyday. I'm glad motherhubbard talked me into registering here.

[Demian]

All that true poetry can ever aspire to be? What is "true" poetry? And what does true poetry aspire to be?

True poetry is inspired. It's highest aspiration is seeking and/or providing illumination.

[blazeofglory]

Who is your favourite poet? Mine's Herman Hesse.

I have read Herman Hesse and his Siddhartha is very appealing to me. Yet my favorite is Khalil Gibran and Lao tze. I never got tired of reading them. The Prophet of Gibran is so much engaging and everytime I read him I find something different, indeed a very wellspring of inspiration.

[JBI]

My English poet dream team is
Chaucer
Shakespeare
Milton
Blake
Wordsworth
Whitman
Yeats
H.D.
Heaney

[Tillottama]

Anna Akhmatova, Sergey Esenin, Milton and Homer

[superunknown]

T. S. Eliot
E.E. Cummings

[Virgil]

Impossible to say, because their are so many I admire. But let me just throw a few out in no particular order:

Dante, Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Keats, T.S. Elliot, Yeats.

[Anza]

Ovid, Shakespeare, Virgil, Edgar Allan Poe

[thom]

Blake, Shakespeare, Rupert Brooke(for Granchester), Browning(for the pied piper of hamlyn) Yeats, Thomas Gray, Dylan Thomas(for under milk wood)

[quasimodo1]

EURYDICE--TO VICTOR HUGO
Orpheus, the night is full of tears and cries,
And hardly for the storm and ruin shed
Can even thine eyes be certain of her head
Who never passed out of thy spirit's eyes,
But stood and shone before them in such wise
As when with love her lips and hands were fed,
And with mute mouth out of the dusty dead
Strove to make answer when thou bad'st her rise.

Yet viper-stricken must her lifeblood feel
The fang that stung her sleeping, the foul germ
Even when she wakes of hell's most poisonous worm,
Though now it writhe beneath her wounded heel.
Turn yet, she will not fade nor fly from thee;
Wait, and see hell yield up Eurydice.

[mohakom]

William Bulter Yeats is my favorit poet ........

[AwayAloneAlast]

Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Keats, Whitman, Yeats... that's my top list (in no particular order, though I might place Milton on top right now)

I also like Chaucer, Spenser, and Wordsworth very much.

[mortalterror]

I have to go with Dante. I'm no hippy, and I don't do drugs, but when I read The Inferno, I felt a blue door open in my mind, and suddenly I was open to new ideas, new ways of looking at literature and the world. His book changed me, touched me deeper than Shakespeare, or anybody else had ever touched me before or since. The words are so deceptively simple, but they do something most words don't: they build upon each other, and every canto was like a new ingredient being added to a feast and changing the flavor. Then you could see the over arching structures and the underlying structures, and how every image meant seven different things and could be analyzed on all sorts of different levels. I've never seen such attention to form, except possibly in Plato's Republic. Every piece was harmonious, instead of conflicting and working against each other as so often happens. Then there's the content and the sheer scope of what Dante did. What vision!

After him, I'd say T.S. Eliot, Leopardi, and Ovid. From there on, I'm fonder of individual poems than of the artist's work as a whole.

[Kafka's Crow]

I love Ezra Pound's Cantos specially Canto I and Canto XLV. So true of our times and the present global economic situation.
http://reactor-core.org/usura.html

[JBI]

I love Ezra Pound's Cantos specially Canto I and Canto XLV. So true of our times and the present global economic situation.
http://reactor-core.org/usura.html

Yes, they are also loaded with countless anti-semitic and other derogatory comments. Though there are beautiful moments, tons of passages in the cantos are disgusting to say the least.

[asilef73]

really depends on my mood but i guess i'll go with Bukowski.

[Trekker114]

I will have to go with the great John Keats.

[bazarov]

Sergey Alexandrovich Yesenin.

[Kafka's Crow]

Yes, they are also loaded with countless anti-semitic and other derogatory comments. Though there are beautiful moments, tons of passages in the cantos are disgusting to say the least.

So do Shakespeare's works. Should it hurt Shakespeare's reputation as well like it did Pound's? Should all Muslims hate Dante? What a criterion! I am amazed. Nevertheless, Pound remains a major, major figure in American Modernism in spite of his detractors. So much so, I can safely say the he is the greatest figure of that age. Hugh Kenner called American Modernism, The Pound Era:
http://www.amazon.com/Pound-Era-Hugh-Kenner/dp/0520024273
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aba1dVLVSFg&feature=related

[Kafka's Crow]

BE in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee. Ezra Loomis Pound

[aeroport]

Hmm, I rather dig Yeats. (Just picked up Helen Vendler's recent book Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Poetic Form; eager to digest)
My American Lit class has provoked an interest for me in Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.
I'm currently getting really into Milton as well (also for class).
As far as a favorite, it's impossible to say.

[aabbcc]

Dante, Ovid, Hugo, Milton.

[Kafka's Crow]

Hmm, I rather dig Yeats. (Just picked up Helen Vendler's recent book Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Poetic Form; eager to digest)
My American Lit class has provoked an interest for me in Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost.
I'm currently getting really into Milton as well (also for class).
As far as a favorite, it's impossible to say.

Wallace Stevens' The Emperor of Ice Cream is a wonderful poem. Frost is in a class of his own. At the age of 11 I knew Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by heart without having any idea of the great wealth of meaning this short poem contains. I saw the books you are reading on Milton, if you could find it, read Milton's Grand Style by Christopher Ricks, a little gem of a book. Written over 40 years ago still it Ricks's work still provides one of the best explanations of Milton's poetic style. Well, you can read it here (isn't the internet wonderful?):

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23170610

[Lady Raven]

William Blake, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dorothy Parker, Anna Akhmatova, Langston Hughes, Edgar Alan Poe.

[Bakiryu]

Silvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, Gustavo Adolfo Becker.

However, some of my favorite poems ever come from some litnetters (whose names I won't type here.) ♥♥♥

[antiprefix]

Raymond Carver.

[stlukesguild]

A single favorite poet? Rather impossible, don't you think? The ones I keep returning to however include: Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Baudelaire, Rilke, Yeats, Holderlin, Montale, Herrick, Spencer, Whitman, the anonymous Hebrew Biblical poets, Dickinson, Verlaine, Borges, Eliot... among others.

[believin]

It's hard to make a short list, but I usually place as the top three for me:

John Donne
W. H. Auden
Edwin Morgan


A new poet that I first came across in Poetry magazine a couple of years ago is quickly becoming a favourite too. His name is Todd Boss. I've since seen his work in Poetry several times, and often visit his website (http://www.toddbosspoet.com/toddbosspoet/Poems/Poems.html), where there is some really good work.

[aeroport]

Wallace Stevens' The Emperor of Ice Cream is a wonderful poem. Frost is in a class of his own. At the age of 11 I knew Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by heart without having any idea of the great wealth of meaning this short poem contains. I saw the books you are reading on Milton, if you could find it, read Milton's Grand Style by Christopher Ricks, a little gem of a book. Written over 40 years ago still it Ricks's work still provides one of the best explanations of Milton's poetic style. Well, you can read it here (isn't the internet wonderful?):

http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=23170610

Excellent. Thanks! :)

[Dark Muse]

I would have to rank among my faveorites:

Edgar Allan Poe, (first and foremost) than Syliva Plath, Wordsworth, and William Blake

[ballb]

Milton
Keats
Donne

[Drummergal42]

I love "The Road Not Taken" By Richard Frost. It has such a great meaning.

[symphony]

Right now--
Shelley, Rainer Rilke, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, Tagore, Kazi Nazrul, Sukanto Bhottacharya, Omar Khayyam... and so it goes.


And these people here on LitNet, i think, have earned their position in that list--
Virgil, Riesa, jon1jt, Pendragon, firefangled, PrinceMyshkin, thefifthelement.

They all write different kinds of poetries, all have different views on life and art. But they all have that wonderful common thing about them- they write poetries I can go back to. :)

[tinustijger]

I love "The Road Not Taken" By Richard Frost. It has such a great meaning.

I love the poem, but the poet is called Robert Frost, right?

Right, well, my favourite poem at the moment would be Leap Before You Look, by Auden. Someone posted it before I did and I loved it :)

The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short and steep,
However gradual it may look from here;
Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

Tough minded men get mushy in their sleep
And break the by-laws any fool can keep;
It is not the convention but the fear
That has a tendency to disappear.

The worried efforts of the busy heap,
The dirt, the imprecision, and the beer
Produce a few smart wisecracks every year;
Laugh if you can, but you will have to leap.

The clothes that are considered right to wear
Will not be either sensible or cheap,
So long as we consent to live like sheep
And never mention those who disappear.

Much can be said for social savoir-fairs,
But to rejoice when no one else is there
Is even harder than it is to weap;
No one is watching, but you have to leap.

A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep
Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:
Although I love you, you will have to leap;
Our dream of safety has to disappear.

- W. H. Auden


The first poem I ever loved was also written by Auden! (Funeral Blues)

[Silvia]

I'm presently studying symbolism in German literature, and I have read poems that really touched my hearth and moved me..it is strange, because I usually feel this way about Italian and English literature (and, to be honest, most of times I find it hard to fully appreciate poetry, no matter what language it is written in). Anyway, this is " der Panther" by Rainer Maria Rilke. It just keeps coming to my mind!

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille -
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

Oh, and today we have read " Ballade des äußeren Lebens" by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Wonderful.

[Guinivere]

That would be W.H.Auden and Herman Hesse. I think Hesse's Im Nebel is one of my favourite poems.

[JoanS]

whitman, rimbaud, baudelaire, verlaine, heaney, morrison, parra, poe and many others.. the problem is that the mayority of poets iam only able to read in translations which lowers the quality of reading.. does anybody think the same?

[Psychosis]

Fernando Pessoa and his heteronyms.

[stark6]

well, I would have to say that it's really difficult to choose just one because I actually HAVE read these poets in their original language
Spanish and American poets: Fray Luis de León, St. John of the Cross, Vicente Huidobro, Cesar Vallejo
Italian poets: Dante, Petrarca, Leopardi, Montale
English poets: Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Keats
French poets: Mallarmé, Baudelaire.
Latin poets: Virgil, Martial

[johann cruyff]

I,too,can't really decide on just one,so here are a few of my favourites: Leopardi,Yesenin,Eugenio Montale,Baudelaire,Rilke,Rimbaud,Blake,Frost.