Who's your favorite poet? [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

Alexander III

03-15-2011, 07:46 AM

Though one, I think I can only answer by breaking it down into countries, under the name of the poet I'l post a poem of his I admire.

English: Percy Bysshe Shelley

1
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The city's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.

2
I see the deep's untrampled floor
With green and purple seaweeds strown;
I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown:
I sit upon the sands alone--
The lightning of the noontide ocean
Is flashing round me, and a tone
Arises from its measured motion,
How sweet! did any heart now share in my emotion.

3
Alas! I have nor hope nor health,
Nor peace within nor calm around,
Nor that content surpassing wealth
The sage in meditation found,
And walked with inward glory crowned--
Nor fame nor power, nor love, nor leisure,
Others I see whom these surround--
Smiling they live, and call life pleasure;
To me that cup has been dealt in another measure.

4
Yet now despair itself is mild,
Even as the winds and waters are;
I could lie down like a tired child,
And weep away the life of care
Which I have born and yet must bear,
Till death like sleep might steal on me,
And I might feel in the warm air
My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea
Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.

5
Some might lament that I were cold,
As I, when this sweet day is gone,
Which my lost heart, too soon grown old,
Insults with this untimely moan;
They might lament - for I am one
Whom men love not - and yet regret,
Unlike this day, which, when the sun
Shall on its stainless glory set,
Will linger, though enjoyed, like joy in memory yet.

French: Arthur Rimbaud

On the blue summer evenings, I shall go down the paths,
Getting pricked by the corn, crushing the short grass:
In a dream I shall feel its coolness on my feet.
I shall let the wind bathe my bare head.

I shall not speak, I shall think about nothing:
But endless love will mount in my soul;
And I shall travel far, very far, like a gipsy,
Through the countryside - as happy as if I were with a woman.

German: Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Italian: Leopardi

It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.

Russian: Pushkin

If I walk the noisy streets,
Or enter a many thronged church,
Or sit among the wild young generation,
I give way to my thoughts.

I say to myself: the years are fleeting,
And however many there seem to be,
We must all go under the eternal vault,
And someone's hour is already at hand.

When I look at a solitary oak
I think: the patriarch of the woods.
It will outlive my forgotten age
As it outlived that of my grandfathers'.

If I caress a young child,
Immediately I think: farewell!
I will yield my place to you,
For I must fade while your flower blooms.

Each day, every hour
I habitually follow in my thoughts,
Trying to guess from their number
The year which brings my death.

And where will fate send death to me?
In battle, in my travels, or on the seas?
Or will the neighbouring valley
Receive my chilled ashes?

And although to the senseless body
It is indifferent wherever it rots,
Yet close to my beloved countryside
I still would prefer to rest.

And let it be, beside the grave's vault
That young life forever will be playing,
And impartial, indifferent nature
Eternally be shining in beauty.

I know these are all European poets, but my knowledge of foreign poets is limited, for instance from Japan and China combined I have read but 4 poets so, choosing a favorite would be ineffectual. The same more or less goes for the orient and the Americas.

dfloyd

03-16-2011, 06:21 PM

The Edgar Allan Poe of the 20th century: Dr. Suess.

YesNo

03-16-2011, 10:10 PM

While I was in the bathroom at Powell's Book Store near the University of Chicago, I noticed a poem by Tanith Lee written neatly on the wall facing me near the floor. There was a lot of other stuff written on those walls, but that poem still is in my mind.

Here's a link to it: http://wonderingminstrels.blogspot.com/2003/10/untitled-tanith-lee.html

From the information in the blog it is from one of her novels, The Silver Metal Lover, which I haven't read.

Since she's on my mind, at the moment she's my favorite poet.

shortstoryfan

03-17-2011, 02:34 PM

I could never choose just one. Ever.

Sleazy_Weasley

03-24-2011, 01:50 AM

I would have to say definitely Yeats; in particular, Leda and the Swan or else When You Are Old, even though I studied them in English. They're quite emotive and beautifully written. :)

Mutatis-Mutandis

03-24-2011, 11:05 AM

I'd have to go with Yeats, also. My favorite of his is "The Second Coming":

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

missmeadowsweet

03-30-2011, 02:35 PM

I agree with shortstoryfan, there are so many amazing poets, how does one choose only one? But at least one of those amazing poets is Robbie Burns. I love the Scottish accents in his poems. Here is one I used in a book I recently finished writing:

O, my luve is like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my luve is like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sand o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only luve,
And fair thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!

I am a bit of a romantic, but I absolutely love this. There's something simply beautiful about it.

MorpheusSandman

03-30-2011, 10:10 PM

I don’t know about picking a single, definitive favorite, but right now my current poet obsession is:

John Donne (1572-1631)
From: England
Forms: Songs & Sonnets, Satires, Elegies, Epigrams, Verse Epistles
Topics: Love, Sex, Death, Religion

Why I like him: TS Eliot said of Donne that “[a] thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility,” and what I love about reading Donne is the intensity of experience and feeling behind the profundity of thought. Perhaps the classic idea of a poet is that of someone that’s sensitive to the aesthetic aspects of the world, and that sensitivity translates into poetry about beauty and emotion. But in Donne, sensitivity and emotion was just a means to intellectually explore the thoughts it provoked, and what it creates is a greater synthesis of these three states of sense, emotion, and thought. It’s really this depth that’s spoiled me to many other poets, and I, like Eliot, now have trouble enjoying/appreciating the romantics, which seem so shallow by comparison. As for his work, The Ecstasy maybe my favorite lyrical poem in all of the English language (It’s very close with Milton’s Lycidas).

There’s no poet that’s more challenging than Donne but no poet that’s more rewarding. His best pieces are like stubborn flowers that refuse to bloom until you take the time and effort to understand them and then they burst open into rich, unknown worlds of experience. I’ve read through Songs & Sonnets in its entirety at least 4 times, reading many of my favorites up to 10 times, and I still repeatedly return them afresh, always discovering something new in them, as if discovering them for the first time. Ben Johnson said of him “he was the first poet in the world in some things”, and one of those things was his revolutionary, unconventional use of rhythm and form, which closely foreshadows the moderns and free verse in its more prose-like appearance. But Donne’s poetic powers of those of great subtlety that unleash themselves in unexpected changes in rhythm, or powerful, carefully placed words, the condensed syntax that gains its power through concentrated compression, or his inventive structures. He also had an immense gift for metaphor and simile.

To read Donne is to always be on your intellectual toes, aware of the density of thought and depth of emotion. Donne is a formidable challenge, yes, but he’s also one of those writers who will reward as much time and effort as you care to devote to him. Some of my favorite pieces:

AIR AND ANGELS
by John Donne

TWICE or thrice had I loved thee,
Before I knew thy face or name ;
So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame
Angels affect us oft, and worshipp'd be.
Still when, to where thou wert, I came,
Some lovely glorious nothing did I see.
But since my soul, whose child love is,
Takes limbs of flesh, and else could nothing do,
More subtle than the parent is
Love must not be, but take a body too ;
And therefore what thou wert, and who,
I bid Love ask, and now
That it assume thy body, I allow,
And fix itself in thy lip, eye, and brow.

Whilst thus to ballast love I thought,
And so more steadily to have gone,
With wares which would sink admiration,
I saw I had love's pinnace overfraught ;
Thy every hair for love to work upon
Is much too much ; some fitter must be sought ;
For, nor in nothing, nor in things
Extreme, and scattering bright, can love inhere ;
Then as an angel face and wings
Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,
So thy love may be my love's sphere ;
Just such disparity
As is 'twixt air's and angels' purity,
'Twixt women's love, and men's, will ever be.

A NOCTURNAL UPON ST. LUCY'S DAY,
BEING THE SHORTEST DAY.
by John Donne

'TIS the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks ;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays ;
The world's whole sap is sunk ;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd ; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring ;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness ;
He ruin'd me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death—things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that's good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have ;
I, by Love's limbec, am the grave
Of all, that's nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown'd the whole world, us two ; oft did we grow,
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else ; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death—which word wrongs her—
Of the first nothing the elixir grown ;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know ; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means ; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love ; all, all some properties invest.
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light, and body must be here.

But I am none ; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all,
Since she enjoys her long night's festival.
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year's and the day's deep midnight is.

A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING
by John Donne

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.

THE ECSTACY
by John Donne

WHERE, like a pillow on a bed,
A pregnant bank swell'd up, to rest
The violet's reclining head,
Sat we two, one another's best.

Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm, which thence did spring ;
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string.

So to engraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one ;
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.

As, 'twixt two equal armies, Fate
Suspends uncertain victory,
Our souls—which to advance their state,
Were gone out—hung 'twixt her and me.

And whilst our souls negotiate there,
We like sepulchral statues lay ;
All day, the same our postures were,
And we said nothing, all the day.

If any, so by love refined,
That he soul's language understood,
And by good love were grown all mind,
Within convenient distance stood,

He—though he knew not which soul spake,
Because both meant, both spake the same—
Might thence a new concoction take,
And part far purer than he came.

This ecstasy doth unperplex
(We said) and tell us what we love ;
We see by this, it was not sex ;
We see, we saw not, what did move :

But as all several souls contain
Mixture of things they know not what,
Love these mix'd souls doth mix again,
And makes both one, each this, and that.

A single violet transplant,
The strength, the colour, and the size—
All which before was poor and scant—
Redoubles still, and multiplies.

When love with one another so
Interanimates two souls,
That abler soul, which thence doth flow,
Defects of loneliness controls.

We then, who are this new soul, know,
Of what we are composed, and made,
For th' atomies of which we grow
Are souls, whom no change can invade.

But, O alas ! so long, so far,
Our bodies why do we forbear?
They are ours, though not we ; we are
Th' intelligences, they the spheres.

We owe them thanks, because they thus
Did us, to us, at first convey,
Yielded their senses' force to us,
Nor are dross to us, but allay.

On man heaven's influence works not so,
But that it first imprints the air ;
For soul into the soul may flow,
Though it to body first repair.

As our blood labours to beget
Spirits, as like souls as it can ;
Because such fingers need to knit
That subtle knot, which makes us man ;

So must pure lovers' souls descend
To affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great prince in prison lies.

To our bodies turn we then, that so
Weak men on love reveal'd may look ;
Love's mysteries in souls do grow,
But yet the body is his book.

And if some lover, such as we,
Have heard this dialogue of one,
Let him still mark us, he shall see
Small change when we're to bodies gone.

A LECTURE UPON THE SHADOW
by John Donne

STAND still, and I will read to thee
A lecture, Love, in Love's philosophy.
These three hours that we have spent,
Walking here, two shadows went
Along with us, which we ourselves produced.
But, now the sun is just above our head,
We do those shadows tread,
And to brave clearness all things are reduced.
So whilst our infant loves did grow,
Disguises did, and shadows, flow
From us and our cares ; but now 'tis not so.

That love hath not attain'd the highest degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.

Except our loves at this noon stay,
We shall new shadows make the other way.
As the first were made to blind
Others, these which come behind
Will work upon ourselves, and blind our eyes.
If our loves faint, and westerwardly decline,
To me thou, falsely, thine
And I to thee mine actions shall disguise.
The morning shadows wear away,
But these grow longer all the day ;
But O ! love's day is short, if love decay.

Love is a growing, or full constant light,
And his short minute, after noon, is night.

Judas130

03-30-2011, 10:31 PM

to borrow from Eliot's conception of a 'classic' writer in relation to Virgil, there are - according to Eliot - two things that a writer can boil down to:

i) the work realises the genius of the poet
ii) the work realises the genius of the language

Unfortunately, most of my favourite poets fall into the first. Donne and his metaphysical look-what-I-can-do mentality is just too attractive. Donne is fearless. Shakespeare - due to the work of evaluation, national canon-making, scholarship - has fallen into the first also. Byron - fantastic - definately hard for many to read without reading the 'author' behind the text: Byron is playing with you when you do this. Byron takes his celebrity and he savages it. Brilliantly satirical, ironic, etc.

Pope. so boring to so many. but i'll always cherish him for Eloise to Abelard.

My favourite poet is Marlowe.

MorpheusSandman

03-30-2011, 10:36 PM

L.M. The Third

03-31-2011, 12:54 PM

Themistocles18

03-31-2011, 07:04 PM

T.S. Eliot. I have Prufrock and The Wasteland by heart and I don't even think those are his best poems. Eliot's early work is overvalued relative to his later work because religious writer's post conversion works are systemically devalued (Waugh and Auden are other good examples). It's a shame because Ash Wednesday is an achingly lovely poem; maybe the most rhythmic poem by the language's most rhythmic poet.

After Eliot, Shakespeare. Shakespeare is my desert island pick, of course, because he has quite a bit more material, but I'd take Eliot over other more prolific poets I love (Tennyson, Auden, Chaucer, Donne, etc). Only Dante has a chance of beating Eliot to the Island, and only then if I get a bilingual edition (If I'm stuck on an island I'd at least like to learn Italian).

Themistocles18

03-31-2011, 07:26 PM

Someone simply has to mention the genius of Emily Dickinson before we go any further! I never have one favorite poet for long, but my most recent obsessions have been Donne and Milton. Older favorites that I haven't read much of lately are Wordsworth and Tennyson. And I have a strong feeling I'm going to become especially fond of Browning and Yeats.

I've never studied poetry academically (high school doesn't count) so I've always been curious about the reaction to Dickinson. While I've made no attempt to systematically go through her poetry, I have spent a few hours with her- on the whole I don't quite get it. Not the poetry. I think I "get" the poetry, or at least there's little that is immediately befuddling. And I don't mean that I don't like her, though I suppose, with the exception of "Success", I don't (yet). I mean that if you'd given me the 5 consensus best poems by the 20 consensus best (English language) poets, and you asked me to rank them (let's assume I've never seen any of poems before but nonetheless know a fair bit about verse) I'm not sure I'd put any of Dickinson's poems in the top half. Or at least I don't know on what grounds those who regard Dickinson as dueling with Whitman for Best American poet honors would have me do so. Can anyone give me a hint? I don't usually miss genius- sometimes I don't like it (Joyce, astonishing as he is, leaves me fairly cold)- but I rarely miss it. If Dickinson is really one of the 5 or 6 best poets in the language then I must be fairly insensitive to some large aspect of poetry. Just a hint, since I don't like to have poetry explained to me. Why do you regard Dickinson as nearly unparalleled?

Judas130

03-31-2011, 07:28 PM

^ I don't recall reading that from Eliot (genius of the poet VS genius of the language), though I'm curious as to his reasons behind the separation and his categorizations. I can't imagine a poet realizing his own genius could do so without realizing the genius of the language, because poetry boils down to the art of language, and how you could express personal genius through an art-form that's about language without it capitalizing on the language escapes me. Shakespeare, especially, had an unparalleled mastery of language in all its forms.

One of Eliot's essays 'What is a Classic?' given to the Virgil Society in the 1940s. The essay essentially anticipates The Waste Land. The essay is an attempt to determine, for Eliot, the character of a classic. He notes

i) maturity of mind: "An individual author can do much to develop his language but he cannot bring that language to maturity unless the work of his predecessors has prepared it for his final touch. A mature literature, therefore, has a history behind it: an ordered though unconscious progress of a language to realise its own potentialities within its own limitations."

ii) maturity of manners: "...A Congreve is more mature than a Shakespeare in that it reflects a more mature society, a greater maturity of manners." Essentially making the Enlightenment assumption in historical progress.

iii) maturity of language, a: "the development towards a common style. This does not mean that the best writers are indistinguishable from each other. The essential and characteristic differences remain, but they are more subtle and refined. What we find, in a period of [maturing language], is not a mere common convention of writing but a community of taste."

iv) maturity of language, b: "the writer is aware of his predecessors, and that the scholar/critic is aware of the predecessors behind his work. The accomplishment of predecessors must be such as to suggest still undeveloped resources of the language, and not as such as to oppress the younger writers with the fear that everything that can be done has been done in their language" [makes the assumption that one can be original in a language shared by others - 'original', to me, is an open word]. the writer is "the continuer of their traditions, that he preserves essential family characteristics, and that his difference of behaviour is a difference in the the circumstances of another age". - essentially, creativeness consists of an unconscious balance between tradition and the originality of the living generation.

What makes a classic Universal, for Eliot, is an addition to the above:

"We have no classic age, and no classic writer, in English. Nevertheless, we must maintain the classic ideal before our eyes" etc. "Maturity of mind needs history and the consciousness of history." - but here's the important bit: "This consciousness cannot fully awake, except where there is other history than the history of the poet's own people: we need this in order to see our own place in history. There must be knowledge of the history of at least one other highly civilised people, and of a people whose civilisation is sufficiently cognate to have influenced and entered into our own."

Maturity of mind is associated with maturity of manners and an absence of provinciality.

"The writer's style would not be possible without a literature behind him, and without his having a very intimate knowledge of this literature: so that he is, in a sense, re-writing it - [...] The learned author has, for his use, just enough literature behind him and not too much. As for maturity of style, the writer has a great command of the complex structure, both of sense and sound, without losing the resource of direct, brief and startling simplicitly when occasion requires it. A common style is one which makes us exclaim, not 'this is a man of genius using the language' but 'this realises the genius of the language'."

A lot of that is adapted/paraphrased - the original essay is worth a read. I'm a few wines in to my evening/morning and a bit busy, but each time I've said 'author' or 'writer' Eliot is saying 'poet'. Sorry for all this off-topic theory!

L.M. The Third

04-02-2011, 12:33 AM

I've never studied poetry academically (high school doesn't count) so I've always been curious about the reaction to Dickinson. While I've made no attempt to systematically go through her poetry, I have spent a few hours with her- on the whole I don't quite get it. Not the poetry. I think I "get" the poetry, or at least there's little that is immediately befuddling. And I don't mean that I don't like her, though I suppose, with the exception of "Success", I don't (yet). I mean that if you'd given me the 5 consensus best poems by the 20 consensus best (English language) poets, and you asked me to rank them (let's assume I've never seen any of poems before but nonetheless know a fair bit about verse) I'm not sure I'd put any of Dickinson's poems in the top half. Or at least I don't know on what grounds those who regard Dickinson as dueling with Whitman for Best American poet honors would have me do so. Can anyone give me a hint? I don't usually miss genius- sometimes I don't like it (Joyce, astonishing as he is, leaves me fairly cold)- but I rarely miss it. If Dickinson is really one of the 5 or 6 best poets in the language then I must be fairly insensitive to some large aspect of poetry. Just a hint, since I don't like to have poetry explained to me. Why do you regard Dickinson as nearly unparalleled?

I beg to call your attention to the fact that the title of this thread is not “Who were the greatest poets?” but “Who are your favorite poets?” I mentioned Emily Dickinson immediately, because she's relatively popular and her poetry has always resonated with me personally. Her own definition of poetry (“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”) perfectly articulates my feelings about her poetry. Even when I don't entirely understand it intellectually, her use of language and the feelings she conveys cause me to be ever newly delighted and intrigued by her poems. For example, “There's a certain slant of light” evokes feelings that I can relate to, even if precisely what experience(s) she drew this from is open to speculation.

Having said that, yes, I did call her a genius and would rank her among the greatest poets. I'm not sufficiently well-read or versed in criticism to start compiling lists and ranking poems and poets, but Emily Dickinson is notable for study because of her enigmatic, yet concise language and her creativity. Most of her contemporary's works are predominantly in iambic pentameter, or are ballads, sonnets, etc. Emily Dickinson's meter isn't so innovative – it's mostly hymn-compatible meter- but her use of it is. Her erratic punctuation, her enigmatic and shocking statements – these elements in her poems have always epitomized “creative economy” for me.

I'm really not sufficiently versed in Whitman to compare them for you, but feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar contrast Whitman confidently declaring, “I celebrate myself and sing myself” to Dickinson whispering “I'm Nobody! Who are you?” This is quite unrelated to the idea of “Best American Poet” you brought up, but it's an interesting commentary on the differences between contemporaneous male and female poets. Of course they go on to say that Whitman's loud “yawping” may be as much a mask as Dickinson's reclusive “woman in white” spinsterhood.

But, again, this thread is about favorite poets. I'm sure you can find much abler defenders of Dickinson's worth, but don't feel bad if you don't particularly like her. I don't read Emily Dickinson because she's great, I read her because I love her. However, I hope that liking her wouldn't prevent me from moving on to something better if I did consider her mediocre.

stlukesguild

04-02-2011, 12:56 AM

As wasted as I am... and considering that right now Moick Jagger sounds like a genius... I must concur with the assertion that Dickenson is one of the major voices in American poetry... if not poetry in English. As a high-school student I was presented with the false image of Emily, the virginal, Puritanical, New England writer of delicate poems tied up in pink ribbons. In college she became Saint Emily, the patron saint of lesbian feminists... a poet of sexuality and gender issues. Finally reading her for myself I recognized a brilliant and strong voice... rooted in the knotty muscularity of Milton and Puritan hymns. Compressed into a poetic architecture as taut and rigid as Puritan and Shaker architecture, she was able to impose layers of meaning through a choice of words that is so "perfect" that she challenges the intellect to an extent only rivaled by Milton and Blake.

MorpheusSandman

04-02-2011, 03:35 AM

she challenges the intellect to an extent only rivaled by Milton and Blake.Milton, Blake, and Dickinson are intellectual lightweights compared to Donne. I think it was Coleridge (I could be wrong) that said that we should read, reread, and study Donne just so we would be able to enjoy Milton. I remember the gist of the theory was that once we'd mastered Donne, no poetry would ever pose such an intellectual challenge again and we could enjoy it on a purely emotional level.

Now I've got myself curious about where I read this...

L.M. The Third

04-05-2011, 07:48 PM

MorpheusSandman

04-05-2011, 10:17 PM

I think I read it either here (http://www.amazon.com/John-Donne-Poems-Analysing-Texts/dp/0312225237/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1302055805&sr=8-1) or here (http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Poetry-Reading-Enjoying-British/dp/0275991377/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1), but I can't quite remember. Stuff like that drives me crazy!

What film are you referring to, btw?

If I had to rate Milton, Blake, and Dickinson it would pretty much be in that same order, and I think the same would go for if we're talking about intellectual difficulty. Both Milton and Blake were visionaries who conjured up these grand mythologies to compete with what came before them, but I also think their work is more understandable on that level, as stories and mythologies. Dickinson is one of the great poets at suggesting much more than what she directly says. I think she leaves a lot of room for the reader to interpret and feel the meaning behind it, even if I don't think her intentions and thought are all that obscure. Donne is quite different as so easily slips between abstruse abstraction and the everyday and ordinary, all wrapped up in syntax that twists your brain in knots. Unlike Milton and Blake, I don't think you can really enjoy Donne without being able to follow his thought process, because his poetry practically IS his thought process. It's almost never just surface prettiness, or powerful images, or anything that stands alone.

conartist

04-09-2011, 08:03 AM

I would take Shakespeare like many others over all else. Recently though I've been reading a lot of Verlaine, who I think is hugely underrated. He perhaps suffers by being so closely associated with Rimbaud. He's not an original on that level, or a seer in any way; he's simply a great pure writer. Take the Autumn Song (in English and French):

The long sighs
Of the violins
Of autumn
Hurt my heart
With a languor
Of sameness.

All stifling
And pale, when
The hour sounds,
I remember
Days of once
And I weep.

And I let myself go
With the evil wind
Which carries me
Here, beyond,
Like the leaf
Which has died.

Les saglots longs
Des violons
De l'automne
Blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l'heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m'en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m'emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

Incredibly simple but incredibly beautiful and a decent translation seeing as it loses the rhyme (Joyce performed a fantastic translation which retains it and may be out there). Verlaine is I think perhaps the greatest example of the unambitious poet. He was a bit of strange guy, pretty depressive, and seems to have turned to poetry as an expressive rather than inventive act.

stlukesguild

04-10-2011, 01:33 PM

Milton, Blake, and Dickinson are intellectual lightweights compared to Donne. I think it was Coleridge (I could be wrong) that said that we should read, reread, and study Donne just so we would be able to enjoy Milton. I remember the gist of the theory was that once we'd mastered Donne, no poetry would ever pose such an intellectual challenge again and we could enjoy it on a purely emotional level.

I could be wrong, but it sounds less like Coleridge and more like T.S. Eliot who virtually manufactured the cult of John Donne single-handedly. One suspects various reasons for this: Donne's late Renaissance/Mannerist love of knotty word-play, neologisms, and shocking metaphor that is not unknown to Modernists; Donne's religiosity as opposed to Shakespeare's amorality; Donne as an alternative to Blake, Milton, and Shakespeare... and Whitman... the English-language father-figures that he did his best to deny. Eliot's obsession with Dante in many ways seems but an ingenuous effort to downplay Shakespeare.

Seriously, I doubt that Donne makes Milton, Blake, or Dickinson seem but intellectual lightweights. Donne, as an intellectual, surely dwarfed even Shakespeare... although this says nothing about the merits of the two writer's work. Blake is a visionary who builds his poetry upon sources that no one at that time dared to build upon: not merely the Bible... Milton, Shakespeare, Dante and Chaucer... but also Jakob Böhme, Emanuel Swedenborg, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, and various leading thinkers of the French and American Revolutions as well as any number of non-Western sources including the Qur'an, the Mahabharata, etc... From these Blake, as he argues in his famous line, "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's..." attempts to construct his own cosmology... both visually and in poetry. Only Dante, before Blake, and the prophetic writers of the Bible, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism attempted something so grandiose... and while Blake's efforts were ultimately doomed to failure... the result was a brilliant failure.

In some ways Dickinson resonates like Blake... or like the Blake of The Songs of Innocence and Experience. Her poems, initially, seem simple enough... but there is a deceptiveness here. Formally, the are tautly structured as the little white houses of Puritan New England... or Shaker furniture and architecture. But Dickinson also makes a masterful use of the unexpected... the word which suddenly breaks the flow or the rhyme with a dissonance worthy of Gesualdo leading us to reexamine the meaning. In many ways Dickinson strikes me as a proof of what is untranslatable in poetry. She often employs just that exact word that leads us to multiple interpretations... or that word that draws the minds attention to specific analogies in a Puritan hymn, a nursery rhyme, etc...

As I noted in earlier comments, my opinions of Dickinson's work were clouded by expectations wrought by various camps of teaching. When I finally sat down and really read her work I discovered so much more. I'm not up for culling examples and analyzing them right now. This is not the time or place. Suffice to say, she is always worth further exploration.

MorpheusSandman

04-10-2011, 07:27 PM

I could be wrong, but it sounds less like Coleridge and more like T.S. Eliot who virtually manufactured the cult of John Donne single-handedly. One suspects various reasons for this: Perhaps it was Eliot, but I couldn't find it with a quick scan of those books' indexes. I'm starting to think perhaps I read it online or just imagined it.

Another thing I think Eliot saw in Donne was an inventive formalism that simultaneously mimicked natural speech more closely than most poetry and yet was frequently wrapped up in very artificial syntax and conceits. I've often astounded when reading Donne how unabashedly he ignores and violates meter, forcing you to read it almost as prose, yet at the next moment is challenging your ability to comprehend his developing thought even if it is prose-like. I think Eliot, above all, liked that Donne put the thought, the theme, above any petty prettiness or poetic propriety while still finding a way to wield words and form as powerful weapons that were slaves to his thought, rather than having his thought be a slave to form, words, and meter.

Seriously, I doubt that Donne makes Milton, Blake, or Dickinson seem but intellectual lightweights.I'm not quite sure what you're saying here (are you saying you DON'T doubt that Donne makes Milton, Blake, Dickinson seem like lightweights?).

I'm also not sure we're on the same page with what we mean by intellectual. When I use the word I think of it as what I said above, that thought, theme, the meaning/intent is first and foremost above all else in the work, and to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the work you have to be able to comprehend that thought and how it develops. As I said with Milton and Blake, I think it can often be easy to slip into the grandness of their vision and allow that to work purely on that level. Milton's description of the creation in PL, for instance, is beautiful on a purely aesthetic level without any rigor of thought. I think Blake frequently achieved that same level of aesthetically rich vision. Perhaps call it a more cinematic form of poetry, where you can simply see what the words describe without thinking about what it means. Dickinson is certainly different, yet I even think that what she evokes and suggests is more intuitive--as you say, deceptively simple--than purely intellectual.

Compared to this, Donne doesn't offer the same aesthetic pleasures. His meter and words don't work as music on a phonetic or rhythmic level (well, at least they don't in the same way as his contemporaries and predecessors; if Donne's meter/phonetics "work" it's on a rough, jazzy level), and his images are usually banal without understanding the meaning behind it. Even if you take the famous compass from Forbidden Mourning or the sun/shadow from Lecture Upon a Shadow they really don't work on a sheer evocation, visual level. You have to be able to follow the ingenious thought to appreciate it. So I guess I'm saying that my feeling of Donne being the most intellectual stems simply from the idea that you can't enjoy/appreciate Donne without being engaged in his thoughts and themes.

Shakespeare, I think, is an interesting foil. I never got the sense that Shakespeare was particularly wrapped up in his themes, with perhaps the exception of Hamlet. For Shakespeare, themes simply flew naturally from the drama and characterizations. Themes were simply what happened as he so deftly imagined himself as other people living their life. Plus, I think what makes Shakespeare's thought so important is because his drama works so well and often doesn't resolve itself fully without leaving us with a lingering sense of "there's more there". That's that same intuitive intellectualism that is present is Dickinson (but in a different form). I remember the last time I saw a production of King Lear I thought "you know, the ending of this play is kinda crap from a dramaturgical perspective, yet sheer genius as thematic provocation". Hamlet's very similar in that respect, and what I mean by it is that they both offer a kind of superficial resolution to the drama that seems to shortchange the deeper underpinnings of both. In fact, when I got to thinking about, a lot of my favorite dramatic fiction (in all mediums) does this precise thing; flippantly resolve the drama leaving the audience to realize that there's something deeper left unresolved.

So I think a lot of Shakespeare's intellectual stems from that dramatic resolution combined with thematic irresolution. To paraphrase Donne: "When Shakekspeare's done, he's not yet done, there's still much more".

xeon123

04-15-2011, 05:58 PM

Fernando Pessoa is one of the best portuguese poets off all times.

S.Amritananda

04-16-2011, 11:28 AM

Kabir

Hey brother, why do you want me to talk?
Talk and talk and the real things get lost.

Talk and talk and things get out of hand.
Why not stop talking and think?

If you meet someone good, listen a little, speak;
If you meet someone bad, clench up like a fist.

Talking with a wise man is a great reward.
Talking with a fool? A waste.

Kabir says: A pot makes noise if it's half full,
But fill it to the brim -- no sound.

Pierre Menard

04-21-2011, 12:56 PM

At the moment, Walt Whitman.

But I have so much poetry to read yet, heck I haven't even read Dante yet.

I also like:

Keats and a number of the other romantics.
Tennyson
Homer
Shakespeare

Just starting to get into William Blake as well.

AJ Culpepper

05-23-2011, 10:33 AM

I have many favorite poets, but my most favorite also happen to be among my favorite authors - Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.

First, hailing from Boston, Massachusettes, the one and only "Master of the Macabre". Poe's works are filled with a dark, gothy feel. Coming from the early 1800s, I suppose one could describe his works as somewhere between goth (as in "The Raven") and steampunk (as in "The Balloon Hoax"). He focuses on emotions and sensations making the gloom (or the fear) as real to the reader as it is to the speaker of the poem (or story). He brilliant in his use of imagery to manipulate the feelings of his reader making every poem (and story) a work of art. This is what I love best about his works. I'm sure you've heard of "The Raven" so instead of posting his most famous poem, I'll share one of his lesser knowns (and my personal favorite).

The Conqueror Worm

LO! 't is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.

Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly;
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their condor wings
Invisible Woe.

That motley drama—oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot;
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.

But see amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude:
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And over each quivering form
In human gore imbued.

Out—out are the lights—out all!
And over each quivering form
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
[E.A. Poe 1809-1849]

My other favorite poet, this one from Cheshire, England, is Lewis Carroll, a.k.a Charles Ludwig Dawson (also hailing from the 1800s, though in his case mid- to latter). Most famous for taking a little girl named Alice on some wild adventures in a place called "Wonderland", few people are aware that the brilliant mathematician also applied his imaginative genius to poetry. They all carry a kind of logic in their anti-logic that makes them very logical works...if that made any sense. It's Carroll's word play, logic and fantasy that draws me to his works like an addict. Seriously. I read "Jabberwocky" just for kicks.

I also recite it from memory "just for kicks" because no one has a clue what I'm talking about.

Anyway. My favorite poem IS "Jabberwocky", but I also love "The Hunting of the Snark". However, this is a VERY long poem so I'll just post a link to it >> http://www.literature.org/authors/carroll-lewis/the-hunting-of-the-snark/

And post "Jabberwocky" instead ;)

JABBERWOCKY
Lewis Carroll
(from "Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There", 1872)

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
He chortled in his joy.

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

hallaig

05-23-2011, 11:02 AM

My favourite and maybe a poet unfamiliar to some of you? Iain Crichton Smith wrote in Scots Gaelic and English.

TWO GIRLS SINGING

It neither was the words nor yet the tune
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn't the words or the tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

JBI

05-23-2011, 11:12 AM

Well this is in part ridiculous. Donne is a very intellectual poet no doubt, but Milton is just as intellectual, perhaps more so.

I'm also not sure we're on the same page with what we mean by intellectual. When I use the word I think of it as what I said above, that thought, theme, the meaning/intent is first and foremost above all else in the work, and to understand, appreciate, and enjoy the work you have to be able to comprehend that thought and how it develops. As I said with Milton and Blake, I think it can often be easy to slip into the grandness of their vision and allow that to work purely on that level. Milton's description of the creation in PL, for instance, is beautiful on a purely aesthetic level without any rigor of thought. I think Blake frequently achieved that same level of aesthetically rich vision. Perhaps call it a more cinematic form of poetry, where you can simply see what the words describe without thinking about what it means. Dickinson is certainly different, yet I even think that what she evokes and suggests is more intuitive--as you say, deceptively simple--than purely intellectual.

Did you even read Paradise Lost? It's one of the most dense poems in English, certainly as dense if not more dense than anything by Donne.

Seriously, I am amazed by the ridiculousness of such a statement, given the criticism perhaps of Milton's dense leveling. Something which is also present in the dense Spenser, who is also an intellectual poet, who perhaps in some ways masks it better than Donne and in some ways worse.

Seriously though, Milton is the supreme intellectual poet, Donne is so much the gimmick poet, intellectual, true, but still, jokey, whereas Milton is more dense than Brahms.

deguonis

05-24-2011, 08:17 AM

George William Russell aka A. E., Herbert Bashford, William Watson.

Patrick_Bateman

05-30-2011, 11:00 AM

Baudelaire, Keats and TS Eliot

Pierre Menard

05-31-2011, 10:30 AM

I've just started reading some Rilke poems. Edward Snow and Stephen Mitchell translations.
Really, really impressed. Such beautiful imagery and feeling behind the words. I find myself having to re-read certain poems a number of times in a row just to grasp the beauty of it.

Could definitely end up being a favourite.

ennison

06-01-2011, 02:11 PM

Rather difficult to choose a favourite poet. Reading a lot of Norman Nicholson at present. I tend to prefer formal verse but I get quite a lot from Anne Stevenson. Scannel was almost always successful in what he wrote. But where would one put the playful James Reeves on a scale. His poetry is enjoyable and carries its learning lightly. Crichton Smith was a scholar and a manic depressive. A lot of good stuff and also some nonsense there.

hallaig

06-01-2011, 03:43 PM

Even if you were correct about Iain Crichton Smith's mental health, what's that got to do with it? Might as well say: Norman Nicholson, weird sideburns.

What's the nonsense you're referring to?

lieasleep

06-05-2011, 04:50 PM

Richard Brautigan. Anyone know him?

TheChilly

06-12-2011, 10:31 PM

As much as I'm not too into poetry, I really enjoyed "The Whipping" by Robert Hayden. It was really interesting to see a triangle of victims at work in the piece, the victims being the abused, the abuser, and the spectator who watches everything going on and doesn't do a thing about it... and even the abuser is also tormented.

You can find the poem online or in an anthology called "An Introduction to Poetry" (13th Edition) by X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.

Le Lazy Lazarus

06-13-2011, 02:11 PM

Richard Brautigan. Anyone know him?

Oh yes. It was actually Brautigan, through "The Galilee Hitchhiker" who introduced me to Baudelaire, and by eventual extension, the major French Symbolists (Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, etc). While there are some of his poems that I detest because I consider them a bit lazy, his great poems are plenty worth it and truly magnificent. If I could post one of my favorites of his, called "Your Catfish Friend":

If I were to live my life
in catfish forms
in scaffolds of skin and whiskers
at the bottom of a pond
and you were to come by
one evening
when the moon was shining
down into my dark home
and stand there at the edge
of my affection
and think, "It's beautiful
here by this pond. I wish
somebody loved me,"
I'd love you and be your catfish
friend and drive such lonely
thoughts from your mind
and suddenly you would be
at peace,
and ask yourself, "I wonder
if there are any catfish
in this pond? It seems like
a perfect place for them."

As for myself, I don't think it would be possible to select one poet as my favorite. Instead I'll share a few poems by poets/poetesses that some of you may not have heard of that I adore.

Firstly, Kenneth Fearing. I think his poem "Dirge" is without a doubt a work of poetic genius.

1-2-3 was the number he played but today the number came 3-2-1;
bought his Carbide at 30 and it went to 29; had the favorite at Bowie but the track was slow—

O, executive type, would you like to drive a floating power, knee-action, silk-upholstered six? Wed a Hollywood star? Shoot the course in 58? Draw to the ace, king, jack?
O, fellow with a will who won't take no, watch out for three cigarettes on the same, single match; O democratic voter born in August under Mars, beware of liquidated rails—

Denouement to denouement, he took a personal pride in the certain, certain way he lived his own, private life,
but nevertheless, they shut off his gas; nevertheless, the bank foreclosed; nevertheless, the landlord called; nevertheless, the radio broke,

And twelve o'clock arrived just once too often,
just the same he wore one gray tweed suit, bought one straw hat, drank one straight Scotch, walked one short step, took one long look, drew one deep breath,
just one too many,

And wow he died as wow he lived,
going whop to the office and blooie home to sleep and biff got married and bam had children and oof got fired,
zowie did he live and zowie did he die,

With who the hell are you at the corner of his casket, and where the hell we going on the right-hand silver knob, and who
the hell cares walking second from the end with an American Beauty wreath from why the hell not,

Very much missed by the circulation staff of the New York Evening Post; deeply, deeply mourned by the B.M.T.,

Wham, Mr. Roosevelt; pow, Sears Roebuck; awk, big dipper; bop, summer rain;
Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong.

Next, a certain Dane, Inger Christensen.

Inside the first society there is a second, inside the second there is a third, inside the third a fourth society etc.

Inside society no. 3517 a man contemplates a society

In society no. 1423 a man contemplates a society

Man no. 8611 has been spinning fables all this time about happiness

At the end of all the united societies sits Mr. _______ smiling, “I’m very pleased to meet you. You are my first patient”

And lastly, Kay Ryan. This is called "Blandeur", a word invented by herself.

If it please God,
let less happen.
Even out Earth’s
rondure, flatten
Eiger, blanden
the Grand Canyon.
Make valleys
slightly higher,
widen fissures
to arable land,
remand your
terrible glaciers
and silence
their calving,
halving or doubling
all geographical features
toward the mean.
Unlean against our hearts.
Withdraw your grandeur
from these parts.

endgame

06-13-2011, 02:32 PM

i don't know him. how is his poetry?

lobanw

06-13-2011, 02:45 PM

Slightly off topic, but if painters can at all count as poets, I would recommend Googling for Odd Nerdrum ...

Aurora

06-13-2011, 03:57 PM

Keats

lieasleep

06-13-2011, 10:58 PM

Oh yes. It was actually Brautigan, through "The Galilee Hitchhiker" who introduced me to Baudelaire, and by eventual extension, the major French Symbolists (Verlaine, Mallarme, Rimbaud, etc). While there are some of his poems that I detest because I consider them a bit lazy, his great poems are plenty worth it and truly magnificent.

Love Baudelaire. And that was a great choice. I don't know if I would call him lazy. Terse? Yes. Lazy? No. Semantics? Maybe. For example, "The Beautiful Poem."

I go to bed in Los Angeles thinking
about you.

Pissing a few moments ago
I looked down at my penis
affectionately.

Knowing it has been inside
you twice today makes me
feel beautiful.

3 A.M.
January 15, 1967

@endgame. sweet name.

endgame

06-14-2011, 03:12 AM

thank you :) i chose this name because i love S.Beckett.. and above all because Endgame is one of my favourite plays :)

Gregory Samsa

06-14-2011, 10:33 AM

Tomas Tranströmer and Czeslaw Milosz.

After a Death

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

So Little

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know
What in all that was real.

Arrowni

06-15-2011, 04:29 PM

I'm currently discovering Cesar Vallejo, but my all time favorite is Henri Michaux.

stlukesguild

06-17-2011, 12:29 AM

What do you know...? I'm famous. I'm being quoted in spam.:smilewinkgrin::smash:

ShadowsCool

06-17-2011, 10:51 PM

Though maybe not my favorite, certainly one of them. It's a hard choice but these two I particularly like from him.

And death shall have no dominion

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

LadyGodiva

06-18-2011, 07:23 AM

Sylvia Plath, Henry David and Walt Whitman

brontedoll

06-19-2011, 10:52 AM

Emily Bronte is my favorite poetess.

Dr.reid_16

06-20-2011, 09:47 PM

Wow, what a question! I believe I would have to go with Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan. Both are from U.S.A and the 1960s. Both turned their poetry into songs and ballads, which I respect greatly.

Morrison wrote about many topics, such as saying goodbye to a loved one (The End) and even things he saw daily, like women walking down the beach (Hello, I Love You).

Bob Dylan also expressed ALL of his feelings into his songs/poems such as The Times They Are A-Changin', and Knockin' on Heaven's Door. He felt so strong about numerous amount of subjects and topics, and he had the incredible ability to translate his thoughts and emotions to paper and then transferred them to a microphone, which he sang into so proudly.

With that being said, I highly recommend those two poets/songwriters, to everyone reading this, they changed my lives and many other people.

zhannochka

07-27-2011, 10:53 PM

I have many favourites... but I can't go past Coleridge. Specifically "What is life?"

Resembles Life what once was held of Light,
Too ample in itself for human sight?
An absolute Self -- an element ungrounded --
All, that we see, all colours of all shade
By encroach of darkness made?--
Is very life by consciousness unbounded?
And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath,
A war-embrace of wrestling Life and Death?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772 - 1834)

shakeyourspeare

07-28-2011, 10:52 PM

Shakespeare was a great poet in my opinion

Hunny

08-02-2011, 01:27 AM

Hi guys!:smile5:

My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson,there is no information in Emily Dickinson's poems that separates her from us. She works the seams of language through her mastery of rhetoric and poetic form. She extracts from words "amazing sense." Instead of merely referring to the experience of the writer, the poem is made to be an experience for the reader, which is precisely how she says she knows poetry in her famous remark to Higginson
Is there any other way"
No, there isn't. Dickinson is the only poet about whom I consistently feel, "I wish I could write like that." My ambition to understand her inside out is to absorb all she can give me, but her rigorous attention to paradox and its manifold exfoliations are beyond me. So the so-called "enigma of Emily Dickinson" is not an enigma to me at all. Everything we need to know about her is in those 1789 poems.I am very grateful she did this work. It is one of the greatest enrichments of my life.

(HOPE)

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
:Angel_anim:
Its my favorite poetry.

Vivite Vibrance (http://www.viviteshop.com/Vivite-Vibrance-Therapy-p/vs-93563.htm)

Intuition

08-02-2011, 10:49 AM

Shakespeare may fairly claim the title of being the greatest writer to ever write poetry, although I do not think it would be properly fit to call him the greatest writer of poetry.

I believe the following poets deserve that title, equally:

Homer
Virgil
Ovid
Dante

Other great poets who may slightly fall short of this category could be:

Chaucer
Kālidāsa
Valmiki
Sa'di
Rumi
Vysa (if he actually did happen to write the Mahabharata)

I will not perform the conventional action of quoting any Western poet I mentioned, since they do not lack readers. Since many may not be too familiar with Eastern literature, here is an excerpt from Kalidasa.

Still sat Umā though scorched by various flame
Of solar fire and fires of kindled birth,
Until at summer's end the waters came.
Steam rose from her body as it rose from earth.

With momentary pause the first drops rest
Upon her lash then strike her nether lip,
Fracture upon the highland of her breast,
Across the ladder of her waist then trip
And slowly at her navel come to rest.

ftil

08-02-2011, 02:22 PM

I love Rumi and Kahlil Gibran.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase
each other doesn't make any sense.

Rumi

Beauty

And a poet said, "Speak to us of Beauty."
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say, "Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us."
And the passionate say, "Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us."
The tired and the weary say, "beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow."
But the restless say, "We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions."
At night the watchmen of the city say, "Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east."
And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, "we have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset."
In winter say the snow-bound, "She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills."
And in the summer heat the reapers say, "We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair."
All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.
People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Kahlil Gibran

Intuition

08-12-2011, 10:48 AM

It's impossible to go wrong with Rumi, he is truly a treasure to Eastern and International poetry alike.

I realize that most of the old masters of poetry have been mentioned. Here are some great modern poets.

Leopardi was a great 19th century poet, who has been often claimed "the greatest Italian poet since Dante." Here follows an excerpt of his poem:

The Infinite
It was always dear to me, this solitary hill,
and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,
from so much of the ultimate horizon.
But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,
I create interminable spaces,
greater than human silences, and deepest
quiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.
When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,
I go on to compare that infinite silence
with this voice, and I remember the eternal
and the dead seasons, and the living present,
and its sound, so that in this immensity
my thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweet
to me in this sea.

Another great poet was Federico Garcia Lorca-- who remains as perhaps the most famous Spanish poet of the 20th century.
The first stanza of his:

Ballad of the Sleepwalker.
Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.
With the shadow at the waist
she dreams on her balcony,
green flesh, green hair,
with eyes of cold silver.
Green, how I want you green.
Under the gypsy moon,
all things are watching her
and she cannot see them.

Lastly, there is also the great Holocaust poet, Paul Celan.

Over wine and lostness
Over wine and lostness, over
the running-out of both:

I rode through the snow, do you hear,
I rode God into farness-- nearness, he sang,
it was
our last ride over
the human hurdles.

They ducked when
they heard us above their heads, they
wrote, they
lied our whinnying
into one / of their be-imaged languages.

Although critically acclaimed, they are usually overlooked modern poets.

Darcy88

08-14-2011, 12:06 AM

I want to say Whitman or Shakespeare or Baudelaire ... but I'm going to go with W. H Auden, pretty much solely because of this poem -

The Shield of Achilles
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.

breathtest

08-14-2011, 08:43 AM

I profess to not being such a great reader of poetry. The poetry I do read is more contemporary stuff, what would not perhaps be classed as technically good. But I go by what sounds right to my ears when I read it. Something that makes me feel. I particularly like Jack Kerouac's Haiku's.

The low yellow
moon above the
quiet lamplit house

Birds singing
in the dark
rainy dawn

AjaxAscendant

08-14-2011, 09:19 AM

Ah ha, I think I'm gonna have fun with this thread!

I have lots of favorites, so I'm gonna pop in as soon as I can with an author as often as possible.

Starting off, W.B. Yeats.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Darcy88

08-15-2011, 02:02 AM

Another spectacular Auden poem -

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Alan kikani

09-02-2011, 03:31 AM

Farewell false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason.

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.

Sith* then thy trains my younger years betrayed,[since]
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed*,[revealed]
Whose course was ever contrary to kind*:[nature]
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu.
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.

Sir Walter Raleigh

JazzJazz

09-09-2011, 04:05 AM

I'm quite a big fan of Emily Bronte. I find her use of natural imagery amazing and I feel like I can relate to what she writes. If that makes sense? :) She wrote a lot about death, love and nature and drew inspiration from her surroundings (which were the Yorkshire Moors mostly). She lived in the first half of the 19th century. Here's a poem of hers that I particularly enjoy, entitled To Imagination .

When weary with the long day's care,
And earthly change from pain to pain,
And lost, and ready to despair,
Thy kind voice calls me back again:
Oh, my true friend! I am not lone,
While then canst speak with such a tone!

So hopeless is the world without;
The world within I doubly prize;
Thy world, where guile, and hate, and doubt,
And cold suspicion never rise;
Where thou, and I, and Liberty,
Have undisputed sovereignty.

What matters it, that all around
Danger, and guilt, and darkness lie,
If but within our bosom's bound
We hold a bright, untroubled sky,
Warm with ten thousand mingled rays
Of suns that know no winter days?

Reason, indeed, may oft complain
For Nature's sad reality,
And tell the suffering heart how vain
Its cherished dreams must always be;
And Truth may rudely trample down
The flowers of Fancy, newly-blown:

But thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o'er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death.
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.

I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening's quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!

Alan kikani

09-10-2011, 03:43 AM

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?

hajare

10-01-2011, 03:56 PM

Reckon I'll go with Yeats --

for he is one of the greats.

haha

http://www.online-literature.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=193

I kind of like his early poem, "The Stolen Child"
which is also a song covered by the Irish group The Waterboys.

oohhhh , he is a greaaat poet

The Ol' Man

10-02-2011, 07:24 AM

Crossing the Bar - Tennyson

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home!

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourn of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
-----

Tom O Roughly - W.B. Yeats

‘THOUGH logic choppers rule the town,
And every man and maid and boy
Has marked a distant object down,
An aimless joy is a pure joy,’
Or so did Tom O’Roughley say 5
That saw the surges running by,
‘And wisdom is a butterfly
And not a gloomy bird of prey.

‘If little planned is little sinned
But little need the grave distress. 10
What’s dying but a second wind?
How but in zigzag wantonness
Could trumpeter Michael be so brave?’
Or something of that sort he said,
‘And if my dearest friend were dead 15
I’d dance a measure on his grave.’

-------------------

Ode to the West Wind - Shelley

O WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being
Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
Are driven like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
Pestilence-stricken multitudes! O thou 5
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill 10
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and odours plain and hill;

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, O hear!

II

Thou on whose stream, 'mid the steep sky's commotion, 15
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of heaven and ocean,

Angels of rain and lightning! there are spread
On the blue surface of thine airy surge,
Like the bright hair uplifted from the head 20

Of some fierce Mænad, even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge

Of the dying year, to which this closing night
Will be the dome of a vast sepulchre, 25
Vaulted with all thy congregated might

Of vapours, from whose solid atmosphere
Black rain, and fire, and hail, will burst: O hear!

III

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, 30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,

Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay,
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss, and flowers 35
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers

Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea-blooms and the oozy woods which wear
The sapless foliage of the ocean, know 40

Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and despoil themselves: O hear!

IV

If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share 45

The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be

The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed 50
Scarce seem'd a vision—I would ne'er have striven

As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
O! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd 55
One too like thee—tameless, and swift, and proud.

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own?
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep autumnal tone, 60
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
Like wither'd leaves, to quicken a new birth;
And, by the incantation of this verse, 65

Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind? 70

-----------------

Ode to a Nightingale - Keats

MY heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, 5
But being too happy in thine happiness,
That thou, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease. 10

O for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delvèd earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South! 15
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stainèd mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim: 20

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs, 25
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow. 30

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night, 35
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. 40

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmèd darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; 45
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. 50

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, 55
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod. 60

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path 65
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that ofttimes hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. 70

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades 75
Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:—do I wake or sleep? 80

---------------------

Why East Wind Chills - Dylan Thomas

Why east wind chills and south wind cools
Shall not be known till windwell dries
And west's no longer drowned
In winds that bring the fruit and rind
Of many a hundred falls;
Why silk is soft and the stone wounds
The child shall question all his days,
Why night-time rain and the breast's blood
Both quench his thirst he'll have a black reply.

When cometh Jack Frost? the children ask.
Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?
Not till, from high and low, their dust
Sprinkles in children's eyes a long-last sleep
And dusk is crowded with the children's ghosts,
Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.

All things are known: the stars' advice
Calls some content to travel with the winds,
Though what the stars ask as they round
Time upon time the towers of the skies
Is heard but little till the stars go out.
I hear content, and 'Be Content'
Ring like a handbell through the corridors,
And 'Know no answer,' and I know
No answer to the children's cry
Of echo's answer and the man of frost
And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

----------------------------
Mad Song - Blake

The wild winds weep
And the night is a-cold;
Come hither, Sleep,
And my griefs infold:
But lo! the morning peeps
Over the eastern steeps,
And the rustling birds of dawn
The earth do scorn.

Lo! to the vault
Of paved heaven,
With sorrow fraught
My notes are driven:
They strike the ear of night,
Make weep the eyes of day;
They make mad the roaring winds,
And with tempests play.

Like a fiend in a cloud,
With howling woe,
After night I do crowd,
And with night will go;
I turn my back to the east,
From whence comforts have increas'd;
For light doth seize my brain
With frantic pain.
--------------------

TWICKENHAM GARDEN.
by John Donne

BLASTED with sighs, and surrounded with tears,
Hither I come to seek the spring,
And at mine eyes, and at mine ears,
Receive such balms as else cure every thing.
But O ! self-traitor, I do bring
The spider Love, which transubstantiates all,
And can convert manna to gall ;
And that this place may thoroughly be thought
True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

'Twere wholesomer for me that winter did
Benight the glory of this place,
And that a grave frost did forbid
These trees to laugh and mock me to my face ;
But that I may not this disgrace
Endure, nor yet leave loving, Love, let me
Some senseless piece of this place be ;
Make me a mandrake, so I may grow here,
Or a stone fountain weeping out my year.

Hither with crystal phials, lovers, come,
And take my tears, which are love's wine,
And try your mistress' tears at home,
For all are false, that taste not just like mine.
Alas ! hearts do not in eyes shine,
Nor can you more judge women's thoughts by tears,
Than by her shadow what she wears.
O perverse sex, where none is true but she,
Who's therefore true, because her truth kills me.
---------------

These are some poems I chose of the poets I read most often. Though I have more.

Meg Tapp

10-06-2011, 05:27 PM

I love so many poets... but my favourite is Wilfred Owen. The man had a beautiful gift for expression and he brings me into the horrors of war every time I read his work. However, my favourite POEM is by Lemn Sissay.. which I will share with you here:

Love Poem

You remind me,
Define me,
Incline me.
If you died,
I'd.

For that alone, he rivals Mr Owen. I also love Ted Hughes, ('Lovesong'), Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Percy Shelley, Emily Dickenson... too many. I love too many of them!

But Wilfred Owen... what a babe ;) x

maud's_mead

10-06-2011, 11:54 PM

I'm going to have to go along with several others in praising Yeats. One of my favorites is:

"A Coat"

I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eye
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it
For there's more enterprise
In walking naked.

This is one of his later poems, published 1916 I believe. It's great because I see this being written by an older Yeats who has become known within not only the artistic community but the Revolutionary community in Ireland. Others are trying to mimic him, yet he would rather cast his "song", rather restructure his entire style, than keep the same style being mimicked by others.

anishastrologer

10-07-2011, 01:51 AM

i like byron's poetry. in his childe harold pilgrimage poems he has very beautifully described the might of natural forces like that of ocean. also i love to read keats' poetry. there is nothing so beautiful as reading his poetry and feeling it. his description of autumn in his ode to autumn is marvellous. since i read the poem i always picture autumn as a woman reaper.

Stewed

10-08-2011, 12:00 AM

I really like that Walter Raleigh poem someone posted!

I don't have a favourite. But Yeats, Rilke, Keats and Philip Larkin would top my list.

amca01

10-23-2011, 03:17 AM

Darcy88

10-23-2011, 10:48 PM

So many great poets, so many great poems. Here's a couple of poets who nobody's mentioned so far, and who I think are terrific: Andrew Marvell (his "The Garden" is pure poetry and perfect), and more modern: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose The World Is a Beautiful Place (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-world-is-a-beautiful-place/) is a modern classic.

-A.

I love Ferlinghetti's poetry! Here is another great one from him -

Constantly risking absurdity

and death

whenever he performs

above the heads

of his audience

the poet like an acrobat

climbs on rime

to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

above a sea of faces

paces his way

to the other side of the day

performing entrechats

and sleight-of-foot tricks

and other high theatrics

and all without mistaking

any thing

for what it may not be

For he's the super realist

who must perforce perceive

taut truth

before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits

with gravity

to start her death-defying leap

And he

a little charleychaplin man

who may or may not catch

her fair eternal form

spreadeagled in the empty air

of existence

PoeticPassions

10-25-2011, 03:27 AM

Ah way too many favorites...
1. Pablo Neruda
2. William Blake
3. Khalil Gibran
4. Federico Garcia Lorca
5. Dylan Thomas
6. John Milton
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

One of my favorite poems:

CLOWN IN THE MOON

My tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream

~Dylan Thomas

or Gibran...

HOW I BECAME A MADMAN

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen -- the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, -- I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, "Thieves, thieves, the curséd thieves."

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, "He is a madman." I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, "Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks."

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a Thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

Will post more favorites when I get more time later! :)

AjaxAscendant

10-26-2011, 06:07 AM

Damn, Shelley's been posted :)

OK, how about these?

MURASAKI SHIKIBU (974-1031)

This life of ours would not cause you sorrow
if you thought of it as like
the mountain cherry blossoms
which bloom and fade in a day.

Bai Juyi/Po Chu-i, "Feelings on Watching the Moon"

The times are hard: a year of famine has emptied the fields,
My brothers live abroad- scattered west and east.
Now fields and gardens are scarcely seen after the fighting,
Family members wander, scattered on the road.
Attached to shadows, like geese ten thousand li apart,
Or roots uplifted into September's autumn air.
We look together at the bright moon, and then the tears should fall,
This night, our wish for home can make five places one.

harryadam798

11-03-2011, 01:48 AM

My favourite poet is William Shakespeare

here is his poem which i like most...

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire!
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green;
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours;
In those freckles live their savours;
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

Exterior Lighting (http://www.lightingforthehome.com)

louisgeorge

07-16-2012, 11:28 AM

my favorite poet is John Keats and favorite poem is Ode to a Nightingale....(31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821)

The Strander

07-17-2012, 11:47 PM

For Chinese is Li Bai.For English are Lord Byron,William Yeats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

peggynevers

07-18-2012, 07:12 AM

My favorite poet is "William Shakespeare".Anyways, Shakespeare's level of humanity never ceases to amaze me.

Adolescent09

07-21-2012, 05:54 PM

The Tiger

William Blake

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Ahhhh William Blake...:angel:

aliengirl

07-22-2012, 10:52 AM

For me it is difficult to name just one poet. The favorite's list keeps changing but there are some constant ones on it. Blake, Yeats, and Dickinson are some of my all time favorites and Auden is a recent one. Here is the last stanza of The Circus Animals' Desertion by Yeats -

III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

One of my favorite poems by Dickinson -

Because I could not Stop for Death
by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed us –
The Dews drew quivering and chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – 'tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity –

And on a more positive note-

Hope is the thing with feathers
by Emily Dickinson

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Check out this one by Auden-

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

The Truth

07-22-2012, 01:52 PM

Arthur Rimbaud, The Drunken Boat:

As I was floating down unconcerned Rivers
I no longer felt myself steered by the haulers:
Gaudy Redskins had taken them for targets
Nailing them naked to coloured stakes.

I cared nothing for all my crews,
Carrying Flemish wheat or English cottons.
When, along with my haulers those uproars were done with
The Rivers let me sail downstream where I pleased.

Into the ferocious tide-rips
Last winter, more absorbed than the minds of children,
I ran! And the unmoored Peninsulas
Never endured more triumphant clamourings

The storm made bliss of my sea-borne awakenings.
Lighter than a cork, I danced on the waves
Which men call eternal rollers of victims,
For ten nights, without once missing the foolish eye of the harbor lights!

Sweeter than the flesh of sour apples to children,
The green water penetrated my pinewood hull
And washed me clean of the bluish wine-stains and the splashes of vomit,
Carrying away both rudder and anchor.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;

Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!

I have come to know the skies splitting with lightnings, and the waterspouts
And the breakers and currents; I know the evening,
And Dawn rising up like a flock of doves,
And sometimes I have seen what men have imagined they saw!

I have seen the low-hanging sun speckled with mystic horrors.
Lighting up long violet coagulations,
Like the performers in very-antique dramas
Waves rolling back into the distances their shiverings of venetian blinds!

I have dreamed of the green night of the dazzled snows
The kiss rising slowly to the eyes of the seas,
The circulation of undreamed-of saps,
And the yellow-blue awakenings of singing phosphorus!

I have followed, for whole months on end, the swells
Battering the reefs like hysterical herds of cows,
Never dreaming that the luminous feet of the Marys
Could force back the muzzles of snorting Oceans!

I have struck, do you realize, incredible Floridas
Where mingle with flowers the eyes of panthers
In human skins! Rainbows stretched like bridles
Under the seas' horizon, to glaucous herds!

I have seen the enormous swamps seething, traps
Where a whole leviathan rots in the reeds!
Downfalls of waters in the midst of the calm
And distances cataracting down into abysses!

Glaciers, suns of silver, waves of pearl, skies of red-hot coals!
Hideous wrecks at the bottom of brown gulfs
Where the giant snakes devoured by vermin
Fall from the twisted trees with black odours!

I should have liked to show to children those dolphins
Of the blue wave, those golden, those singing fishes.
- Foam of flowers rocked my driftings
And at times ineffable winds would lend me wings.

Sometimes, a martyr weary of poles and zones,
The sea whose sobs sweetened my rollings
Lifted its shadow-flowers with their yellow sucking disks toward me
And I hung there like a kneeling woman...

Almost an island, tossing on my beaches the brawls
And droppings of pale-eyed, clamouring birds,
And I was scudding along when across my frayed cordage
Drowned men sank backwards into sleep!

But now I, a boat lost under the hair of coves,
Hurled by the hurricane into the birdless ether,
I, whose wreck, dead-drunk and sodden with water,
neither Monitor nor Hanse ships would have fished up;

Free, smoking, risen from violet fogs,
I who bored through the wall of the reddening sky
Which bears a sweetmeat good poets find delicious,
Lichens of sunlight [mixed] with azure snot,

Who ran, speckled with lunula of electricity,
A crazy plank, with black sea-horses for escort,
When Julys were crushing with cudgel blows
Skies of ultramarine into burning funnels;

I who trembled, to feel at fifty leagues' distance
The groans of Behemoth's rutting, and of the dense Maelstroms
Eternal spinner of blue immobilities
I long for Europe with it's aged old parapets!

I have seen archipelagos of stars! and islands
Whose delirious skies are open to sailor:
- Do you sleep, are you exiled in those bottomless nights,
Million golden birds, O Life Force of the future? -

But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking.
Every moon is atrocious and every sun bitter:
Sharp love has swollen me up with heady langours.
O let my keel split! O let me sink to the bottom!

If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.

I can no more, bathed in your langours, O waves,
Sail in the wake of the carriers of cottons,
Nor undergo the pride of the flags and pennants,
Nor pull past the horrible eyes of the hulks.

Sara Izzie

08-03-2012, 09:06 AM

I'm absolutely in love with George Gordon Byron, especially with his poem "She walks in beauty":

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

I also love Emily Dickinson and the italian poet Umberto Saba :)

tonywalt

08-30-2012, 03:25 PM

Emil Miller

08-30-2012, 03:46 PM

Spike Milligan.

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
I'll draw a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use?
2B or not 2B?

cafolini

08-30-2012, 06:31 PM

The greatest poem. I never view it as religious but rather a judgement on the behaviour of mankind and how evil repeatedly rises to power.

He failed to realize that the beast was coming from Bethlehem to be born in Europe, not the other way around. Yeats was very naive.

cafolini

08-31-2012, 02:17 AM

As far as I go, this will be one of the funniest elections I've ever seen. So I'll give you a concert of what I'll do if that happens.
First, I stand upon my head till my ears are turning red. I would then petition so that the formula be changed to Ryan-Romney, instead of the way it is. Then, it would be okay to send Bidden to Central America, but it would be equally valid to send Rumney to Peru to deal with the issues he can deal with. This is already extreme fantasy. But there is a lot more. I would expect William James to send us a warning letter, saying that it is alright to be pragmatic, but you wouldn't need an atomic bomb to kill a fly.
Pritchard will come back galloping to anihilate the clanless societies discovered by Malinowsky. Someone would give Freudean Monkey a decoration for the name chosen for this forum.
Definitely Karl Popper will manage to make a genuine point about anarchy regardless of Feyerabend.
Could it happen? Could these freaks do it. And now we have to deal with Eastwood gone insane?
Till my ears are turning red.
:leaving:

Ser Nevarc

10-10-2012, 01:37 PM

I could never choose a single favorite author, but a few that I will always love are Milton, Blake, Byron, Keats, and Tennyson.

As for more contemporary poets I enjoy:

Galway Kinnel (sp.?), Irish poet
David Swerdlow, American poet

Dante

10-20-2012, 06:59 AM

wow...tough question!how can you name a great poet and forget others at the same time?!!this is so hard for me...Dante!Shakespeare!German Literature has got lots of too...Rilke...Goethe...i can't even name all of those!!!

Corona

10-20-2012, 09:00 AM

If we let the greatest names like Dante or Shakespeare out my current choice would likely be Paul Celan.
Indeed my username comes from one of his poems.
Also, there are a lot of them really worth, like Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Coleridge...
Since I study Italian Literature I got to know italian poets way better, so I would mention a lot of poets as some of my favourites: Leopardi, Pascoli, Ungaretti, Gozzano and above all Calogero are some of the best and I'm currently studying Dino Campana, that is a very interesting one.

Desolation

10-20-2012, 04:06 PM

I've never been exactly the biggest poetry fan...But, lately, I've been reading/enjoying it more than I used to.

I love T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Rimbaud is great, too.

pjjrfan1

10-20-2012, 05:44 PM

Emily Dickinson, Eliot and Wordsworth.

Virgil

10-20-2012, 10:40 PM

It's impossible to have a favorite. Appreciating writers - actually all artists - is not like having a favorite sports team. Dante and Shakespeare are the greatest. And then each era I might zero in on one that particularly seems to stand out or resonate with me. Lots of great poets mentioned but let me highlight who I think is the greatest American poet, Wallace Stevens. I know he's hard to read, but if you take the time to understand him you might really enjoy his work. A couple of samples.

[QUOTE]Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.
[End QUOTE]

[QUOTE]Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself
By wallace Stevens

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality. [End QUOTE]

And here just one stanza (the third) from what I think is his greatest poem.

[QUOTE]from The Auroras of Autumn
By Wallace Stevens

III

Farewell to an idea . . . The mother's face,
The purpose of the poem, fills the room.
They are together, here, and it is warm,

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.
It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.
Only the half they can never possess remains,

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old.
The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together. Boreal night
Will look like frost as it approaches them

And to the mother as she falls asleep
And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs
The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round
And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.
The wind will command them with invincible sound.[End QUOTE]

Ah heck, let me give you the final stanza (the tenth) because it's just a masterpiece.

[QUOTE]from The Auroras of Autumn
By Wallace Stevens

X

An unhappy people in a happy world--
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world--

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world--
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
A happy people in a happy world--
Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

Turn back to where we were when we began:
An unhappy people in a happy world--
Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

Read to the congregation, for today
And for tomorrow, this extremity,
This contrivance of the spectre of of the spheres,

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,
The vital, the never-failing genius,
Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,
The full of fortune and the full of fate,
As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,
To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights
Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.[End QUOTE]