The greatest living poet

[Catamite]

This is probrably a topic that has been stripped to the bone, but still, why not once more. Obvious contenders are Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott (my personal choice) and Wislawa Szymborska. But who else, and why?

[JBI]

Wilbur is still alive, who I like very much, but greatest, well isn't that a guessing game.

[Catamite]

I'd never even heard of him until now. Well yes, a guessing game, but a fun one if there is enough friction between opinion on poets, and what makes a poet 'great' etc.

[WICKES]

This is probrably a topic that has been stripped to the bone, but still, why not once more. Obvious contenders are Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott (my personal choice) and Wislawa Szymborska. But who else, and why?

I've always thought Heaney a bit overrated. For me, the last great poet the British Isles produced was Philip Larkin.

[mortalterror]

The real test is their accomplishments. What have they done that elevates them above all the others? Construct a history of contemporary poetry and you will know the score. Personally, I like Heaney but think the best thing he's done was his translation of Beowulf, not his own poetry. Walcott is good and he has a few short poems that work well, but I couldn't really get into his epic Omeros. As for Szymborska, I haven't really read her, but 250 poems in 60 years? Where did she find the time? Those poems had better be some serious Wasteland or Four Quartets type stuff. Adunis is pretty good, but I've only read one of his books, so I don't know how he stacks up overall. He might have written some really powerful stuff I just don't know about. Wilbur is overrated like John Ashbery and Anne Carson.

I suspect there is someone out there I haven't even heard of who is really throwing it down like a Neruda, an Eliot, a Baudelaire, or even a Milton, or a Dante, but only time will tell. JBI follows the contemporary scene more than I do. Things just don't get sexy for me until they are about a thousand years old.

[stlukesguild]

Ultimately the question becomes: "Who is the greatest living poet from among the poets you have read and are familiar enough with?" Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Anne Carson, Yves Bonnefoy, John Ashbery, and a couple others immediately come to mind. I understand where Mortal is coming from. There are no clear-cut examples of the poet able to pull off a brilliant epic poems or even the longer poem like The Wasteland or a body of related poems that add up to something we might agree is a masterpiece.


Like Mortal I'm not sold on Omeros. Perhaps the closest are Anne Carson with her poem/novel, The Autobiography of Red, Geoffrey Hill with his knotty elegiac poems (which I'm surprised Mortal doesn't like considering their link with Eliot) confronting the larger issues of history, and perhaps Homeros Aridjis, the leading poet of Mexico, who also produced the larger text that blurs the novel and the poem... as well as a good body of rich lyrical poetry.

[Charles Darnay]

I'd have to go with Ashbery

[Charles Darnay]

Ultimately the question becomes: "Who is the greatest living poet from among the poets you have read and are familiar enough with?"


This is also true of "who is the greatest dead poet" or "who is the greatest...." - you can only speak of those you are familiar with.

[mortalterror]

Perhaps the closest are Anne Carson with her poem/novel, The Autobiography of Red, Geoffrey Hill with his knotty elegiac poems (which I'm surprised Mortal doesn't like considering their link with Eliot) confronting the larger issues of history, and perhaps Homeros Aridjis, the leading poet of Mexico, who also produced the larger text that blurs the novel and the poem... as well as a good body of rich lyrical poetry.

Autobiography of Red sucked, The Triumph of Love sucked, The Shadow of Sirius sucked. I've been burned by you too many times! And Geoffrey Hill doesn't sound anything like Eliot to me. You know who sounds like Eliot? Apollinaire. I read Alcools last year and thought, "Hmm, this guy is a lot like Eliot." Ezra Pound sounds a little like him too. Hill reminds me of other mannerists who came after them and couldn't tell the weaknesses from the strengths of the master's style. Eliot would have been a great poet even if he hadn't been complicated.

[Gregory Samsa]

Tomas Tranströmer and Wislawa Szymborska.

[JBI]

The real test is their accomplishments. What have they done that elevates them above all the others? Construct a history of contemporary poetry and you will know the score. Personally, I like Heaney but think the best thing he's done was his translation of Beowulf, not his own poetry. Walcott is good and he has a few short poems that work well, but I couldn't really get into his epic Omeros. As for Szymborska, I haven't really read her, but 250 poems in 60 years? Where did she find the time? Those poems had better be some serious Wasteland or Four Quartets type stuff. Adunis is pretty good, but I've only read one of his books, so I don't know how he stacks up overall. He might have written some really powerful stuff I just don't know about. Wilbur is overrated like John Ashbery and Anne Carson.

I suspect there is someone out there I haven't even heard of who is really throwing it down like a Neruda, an Eliot, a Baudelaire, or even a Milton, or a Dante, but only time will tell. JBI follows the contemporary scene more than I do. Things just don't get sexy for me until they are about a thousand years old.

I've been out of contemporary poetry for two, almost three years now - I read virtually no English last year, so I am totally rusty.

As for greatest living though, probably just picking favorite poems out from individual poets, or perhaps looking into single collections, as the Anthology seems to be are dominant form of poetry.

I have a strong suspicion though that the best poetics will be lost for another 50 years until it is sifted for us, which is the process which happens before we judge. That's why classics are so popular; the work has already been done well.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I haven't heard of any of these people. If I wanted a little survey of the "bs" contemporary poetry, are there any anthologies or collections of certain authors I should look into?

[JBI]

Just look for any periodical that publishes poetry - that is the main avenue, then look for different presses. I cannot help you since my knowledge of current American poetry is limited.

[JCamilo]

There is Ferreira Gullar, brazilian poet that since 60's build a solid reputation also in Portugal, but to be honest, I do not fancy much his style. And sorry to not mention, but he is so old that we kill him by costume, but Manoel de Barros is quite very good.

[stlukesguild]

Autobiography of Red sucked, The Triumph of Love sucked, The Shadow of Sirius sucked.

But Mortal your opinions are rather useless are they not considering that you have made it clear on more than one occasion that you think pretty much the whole of modernism (Metallica excepted) sucked.

[Catamite]

Ultimately the question becomes: "Who is the greatest living poet from among the poets you have read and are familiar enough with?"

To be fair, this is true of anything. I'm reading a Larkin anthology of 20th century poetry at the moment and just got carried away with Walcott after reading Tales of the Islands, which is a sonnet sequence. Here's a little bit:

The marl road, the Doree rushing cool
Through gorges of green cedar, like the sound
Of infant voices from the Mission School,
Like leaves like dom seas in the mind; ici, Choiseul.
The stone cathedral echoes like a well,
Or as a sunken sea-cave, carved in sand.
Touring its Via Dorosa I tried to keep
That chill flesh from my memory when I found
A Sancta Teres in her nest of light;
The skirts of fluttered bronze, the uplifted hand,
The cherub, shaft upraised, parting her breast.
Teach our philosophy the strenght to reach
Above the navel; black bodies, wet with light
Rolled in the spray as I strolled up thr beach.

These lines just make me swoon. I think they're euphonic without being over-classical, articulate without losing an easy tone.

[mortalterror]

But Mortal your opinions are rather useless are they not considering that you have made it clear on more than one occasion that you think pretty much the whole of modernism (Metallica excepted) sucked.

That's not an accurate portrayal of my position. When it comes to fine art I like the late impressionists, Alma-Tadema, Repin, Hunt, Rodin, Boldini, Dali, some Picasso, Magritte, Lempicka, Stuck, Ernst, Escher, Marc, Bacon, Chagall, Hasui, Hopper, Klimt, Mucha, Malczewski, Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros, Renau, Camarena, Helnwein, Melamid, Tubke, Triegel, Cappiello, Levy-Dhurmer, Varo, Banksy, Fairey, The Mac, Blume, Jess, certain Nerdrum, and Biggers.

As for classical music of the twentieth century I enjoy Prokofiev, Ravel, some Stravinsky, Shostakovich, some Gershwin, Vaughn Williams, Gustav Holst, Rachmaninoff, Puccini, Orff, Barber, Khachaturian, Kabalevsky, Copland, a little Gorecki, a little Steve Reich, Ennio Morricone. I have tunes in my Pandora playlist by Virgil Thomson, Osvaldo Golijov, Granville Bantock, Philip Glass, Bela Bartok, Joaquin Rodrigo, Zoltan Kodaly, Ottorino Respighi, Michael Torke, Leonard Bernstein, Rautavaara, Michael Tippett, Leroy Anderson, and Malcolm Arnold.

Furthermore, when it comes to literature I am a fan of Cavafy, Apollinaire, Frost, Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Auden, Paul Valery, Rilke, Montale, Paul Eluard, e.e. cummings, Pessoa, Neruda, Lorca, Kazantzakis, Czeslaw Milosz, Dylan Thomas, Adunis, Zbigniew Herbert, and Derek Walcott just in poetry. There are far more writers of prose I respect and admire. So your claim hardly holds up.

P.S. When it comes to architecture I like Norman Foster. :prrr:

[Heteronym]

I don't know, but he's probably Portuguese: António Osório, Herberto Hélder, Manuel Alegre, Maria Teresa Horta, or Gastão Cruz :arf:

Nah, it's actually Adam Zagajewski.

Still, lots of new names for me here: I'll have fun looking them up.

[conartist]

Obvious contenders are Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott (my personal choice) and Wislawa Szymborska.

Spooky

[Heteronym]

You see what happens when you start these threads? It's the whole butterfly/tornado thing...

[Catamite]

Yes, I suppose it will be Walcott gone over the weekend and Heaney by the end of next week

[stlukesguild]

Nah, it's actually Adam Zagajewski

Yes... another great poet.

[fb0252]

Walter W. Arndt, and then, ooops, the end of this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_W._Arndt

and he just died. See his translation of Faust Part II Act V as proof.

[ennison]

Drifting through these older threads I came on this . How could it be answered accurately? Poetry loses too much in translation to be able to make valid comparisons between poets from different cultures. I like Pessoa but I read His native tongue too badly to be able to compare him to say Crane or Wright or Walcott though I could compare them together.

[MorpheusSandman]

Old thread, but I'd throw in my vote for Ashbery, though he's a bit like Wordsworth in that one really hast to wade through a lot of mediocre crap to get to the stuff that makes him great, and he hasn't been great in many years. On reconsideration, I might have to go with Geoffrey Hill for that reason, who is consistently great, though I don't know if he has anything quite on the level of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I always enjoy Wilbur, but I always find myself thinking that he's a notch below the great formalist poets of the past like Frost and Yeats. Pleasant, but not original in the least. Anne Carson is good, but I want to see a bit more from her before I make up my mind. I've yet to really get into Walcott, though I haven't read Omeros. One name I haven't seen mentioned is Luise Gluck. I disliked what I read of her in anthologies, but after picking up the recent Collected Poems, I've become a big fan. Her control over tone and atmosphere is second to none. Again, perhaps not as profound as Ashbery or Hill at their best, but consistently good.