Top 20 Poets

[Drkshadow03]

Name your top 20 poets of all time.

[mortalterror]

How about my top 100?
1.Dante- The Divine Comedy
2.Shakespeare- Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet
3.Homer- The Iliad, The Odyssey
4.Ferdowsi- The Shahnameh
5.Vyasa- The Mahabharata
6.Virgil- The Aeneid
7.Ovid- The Metamorphoses, The Amores, The Heroides,
8.Vyasa- The Ramayana
9.Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered
10.Milton- Paradise Lost
11.Rumi- Masnavi
12.Nizami Ganjavi- The Khamsa
13.Horace- Odes, Epodes, Satires
14.Hafez- Divan
15.Jayadeva- Gita Govinda
16.Anonymous- Book of Job
17.Anonymous- Beowulf
18.Du Fu- Song of the Wagons
19.Bai Juyi- Song of Unending Sorrow, Song of the Lute Player
20.Li Bai- T'ien-mu Mountain Ascended in a Dream
21.Omar Khayyam- The Rubaiyyat
22.Ariosto- Orlando Furioso
23.Kalidasa- The Cloud Messenger
24.Camoes- The Lusiads
25.T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland
26.Jean Racine- Phaedra
27.Calderone- Life is a Dream
28.Coleridge- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
29.Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil
30.Wordsworth- The Prelude
31.Shelley- Lyrics and Odes
32.Goethe- Faust
33.Apollonius Rhodius- The Argonautika
34.Statius- The Thebaid
35.The Arch Poet- His Confession
36.Jami- Haft Awrang
37.Saadi- The Bostan (Orchard), The Gulistan (Rose Garden)
38.Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass
39.Petrarch- Canzoniere
40.Ronsard- When You Are Truly Old
41.Wyatt- They Flee From Me
42.Alexander Pope- Essay on Man
43.Lucan- Pharsalia
44.Aneirin- Y Gododdin
45.Judah Halevi- Ode to Zion
46.Chaucer- Canterbury Tales
47.William IX Duke of Aquitaine- Under the Sun I Ride Along
48.Walther von der Vogelweide- Under the Linden Tree
49.Gottfried von Strassburg- Tristan and Isolt
50.Arnaut Daniel- On this gay and slender tune
51.Bernart de Ventadorn- When I See the Lark
52.Ezra Pound- Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
53.Yeats- The Second Coming
54.Bertran de Born- The Joyful Springtime Pleases Me
55.Wolfram von Eschenbach- Parzival
56.Francois Villon- Ballad of the Dead Ladies
57.William Dunbar- Lament for the Makaris
58.Kabir- Songs
59.Joachim du Bellay- The Regrets
60.Edmund Spenser- The Faerie Queene
61.Francois de Malherbe- Consolation for Mr. du Perier
62.Vitsentzos Kornaros- Erotokritos
63.John Donne- Works
64.George Herbert- The Temple
65.Andrew Marvell- To His Coy Mistress
66.John Wilmot- The Farce of Sodom
67.Matsuo Basho- The Narrow Road to the Deep North
68.Thomas Gray- Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
69.William Blake- Songs of Innocence and of Experience
70.Robert Burns- A Red, Red Rose
71.Nguyen Du- The Tale of Kieu
72.John Keats- Endymion
73.Leopardi- Idylls
74.Byron- So We'll Go No More A'roving
75.Heinrich Heine- Book of Songs
76.Pushkin- Eugene Onegin
77.Lermontov- The Demon
78.Poe- The Raven
79.Robert Browning- My Last Duchess and other dramatic Lyrics
80.Janos Arany- Toldi
81.Dionysios Solomos- The Shark
82.Tennyson- Ulysses
83.Elizabeth Barrett Browning- Sonnets from the Portuguese
84.Gustavo Adolfo Becquer- Rhymes and Legends
85.Gerard Manley Hopkins- The Wreck of the Deutschland
86.Arthur Rimbaud- A Season in Hell
87.Jose Hernandez- Martin Fierro
88.Nguyen Gia Thieu- Sorrows of an Abandoned Queen
89.Ruben Dario- Azul
90.Emily Dickinson- Poems
91.Jose Marti- Simple Verses
92.Edwin Arlington Robinson- Richard Cory
93.Carl Sandburg- Chicago
94.Rudyard Kipling- If
95.Gabriele D'Annunzio- The Rain in the Pinewood
96.Constantine P. Cavafy- Ithaca, The Horses of Achilles
97.Rilke- Sonnets to Orpheus
98.Neruda- 20 love poems and a song of despair
99.Guillaume Apollinaire- Alcohol
100.Robert Frost- Mending Wall

[MorpheusSandman]

1. John Milton
2. William Blake
3. John Donne
4. WB Yeats
5. WH Auden
6. William Shakespeare
7. George Herbert
8. William Wordsworth
9. John Keats
10. James Merrill
11. Wallace Stevens
12. Virgil
13. Geoffrey Chaucer
14. Percy Blysshe Shelley
15. Robert Burns
16. Alexander Pope
17. Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
18. Du Fu
19. Geoffrey Hill
20. Robert Browning

Off the top of my head. I'll probably go "d'oh! I forgot so-and-so and why did I include so-and-so ahead of him!?" later.

[stlukesguild]

1. Dante
2. Shakespeare
3. William Blake
4. Baudelaire
5. Homer
6. Firdowsi
7. Keats
8. Edmund Spenser
9. Milton
10. Rilke
11. Robert Herrick
12. Yeats
13. Petrarch
14. T.S. Eliot
15. Rimbaud
16. Verlaine
17. Walt Whitman
18. Emily Dickinson
19. Eugenio Montale
20. Pablo Neruda
21. Federico Garcia-Lorca
22. P.B. Shelley
23. Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin
24. Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)
25. Boris Pasternak
26. Octavio Paz
27. Li Bo
28. Tu Fu
29. Wang Wei
30. J.L. Borges

The order is roughly in accordance to importance... to me... The choices have little to do with my opinions as to who is the best... but rather which poets I have found myself returning to most often... which poets have the most meaning to me.

[namenlose]

Mortal's list is a pretty good one, although it may say more about him in some parts than about the cultures he tried to represent, which may be inevitable to anyone trying to make this kind of list. All in all, though, he made in my opinion a wonderful, varied and — as much as it is possible — impartial selection. I would also include to it the great greek dramatists, Pindar, Sappho, Wang Wei, Lucretius and some others I think should not be lacking. There are also a few poets in there I have not explored, so I might look for their works.

I had an extremely hard time trying to choose only twenty poets myself to compound a representative list of the whole of world literature, so I will present a list of favorites following my current inclinations, just as St. Luke's Guild:

1. Dante Alighieri
2. William Shakespeare
3. Giacomo Leopardi
4. Charles Baudelaire
5. Emily Dickinson
6. Homer
7. Firdawsi
8. Walt Whitman
9. Percy Shelley
10. Virgil
11. Ovid
12. T. S. Eliot
13. Li Po
14. Wang Wei
15. Petrarch
16. John Milton
17. Geoffrey Chaucer
18. Arnaut Daniel
19. Omar Khayyam
20. Calderon de La Barca

Some of them I would always maintain, but others could be replaced following my inclinations. I might try to make my own selection of the proper top poets some other day as the discussion proceeds, but today I'm rather tired to make such difficult decisions.

[MorpheusSandman]

FWIW, I'm always a bit leery of including poets I've only read in translation, since you can never be sure how much of what you're reading is the original poet and how much is translation. No medium is hurt worse in translation than lyric poetry, because the nuances of meaning and rhythm vary, sometimes greatly, across languages. The few non-English poets I included are those that moved me enough to get me past my hesitations.

[namenlose]

FWIW, I'm always a bit leery of including poets I've only read in translation, since you can never be sure how much of what you're reading is the original poet and how much is translation. No medium is hurt worse in translation than lyric poetry, because the nuances of meaning and rhythm vary, sometimes greatly, across languages. The few non-English poets I included are those that moved me enough to get me past my hesitations.

I agree the difference between the translation and the originial text of a poem tends to be great. From the poets I chose, I can't read in the original either Charles Baudelaire, Arnaut Daniel, Virgil, Ovid, Li Po, Wang Wei, Firdawsi or Omar Khayyam. Being myself a native speaker of a romance language, my understanding of French, although my domine of the language is rudimentary, is suffciently natural to allow me a certain degree of appreciation of Baudelaire's works in the original, what I also could claim to some extent about the Occitan poems by Arnaut Daniel, even though I would hardly approach either, specially Arnaut, without translations or heavy textual assistence. My Latin, as I never really studied it enough, is even worse, what limits my readings of Virgil and Ovid to their translations — which are usually pretty good, though.

I know nothing of Persian or Chinese, however. Firdawsi and Khayyam have been considerably well served by translations in the west, even though The Shahnameh rarely is translated in its entirety, the only complete English edition I know of being the one by the brothers Edmond and Arthur Warner, which I had the opportunity of reading. If I'm right, there is no consensus about the complete number of quatrains of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, but there were numerous notorious translations, the one by FitzGerald being the most famous, despite the fact he took some liberties while composing it.

The translations from the Chinese seem to me to be the most problematic among these. In spite of the fact I read many different selections from both Wang Wei and Li Po, I still feel I'm only able to perceive their true genius in a fragmentary and restrained form. However, they are still among the poets who best resonated with me, appealing to my poetic sensibility in a deeper way than Du Fu, Wei Yingwu, Li He, Bai Juyi, Li Houzhu, Meng Haoran, Li Shangyin or any other notable Chinese poet I read. Just as you, I would not include any of these poets if I was not deeply moved by them.

[namenlose]

Oh, I forgot Homer. I'm far yet from being able to read Ancient Greek :biggrin5:

[MorpheusSandman]

How about my top 100?As I was reading over that list, I was rather shocked to find Auden and Stevens completely absent. Next to Eliot, Yeats, and Pound, probably no two poets had a larger impact on 20th century English poetry. To not include them in a top 100, especially one that includes the likes of Kipling and Sandburg, is almost blasphemous!

[mortalterror]

Mea culpa. Should have included Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles since I included Racine, and Calderon; although I tend to think of them in terms of plays. However, Shakespeare might make it in just for his sonnets and long poems, without recourse to theater. Sappho was omitted partly for the same reason that Callimachus, Archilochus, and Anacreon were. There isn't much of them left and what there is is fragmentary. Pindar and Lucretius didn't make the cut because I don't like them. Besides, if I were going to add more Latin poets I'd have added Tibullus and Sextus Propertius. But how could I add those two when I was already omitting Catullus for Latin and Theocritus for Greek? Why didn't I include Auden whom I like and Stevens whom I dislike? Because there are already enough English names and I omitted some French ones just as good (Valery, Eluard, Hugo, Mallarme, Vigny, Nerval). Maybe I should have included more Chinese like Wang Wei, Tao Qian, Qu Yuan, or Su Shi, but I don't really like most Chinese poetry to be honest. I also feel like I could have added more Indian writers, but there are too many I haven't seen in good enough translations to judge. Bhartrhari, Bharavi, Bhavabhuti, and Amaru all would have made nice additions but I'm not as familiar with their work as I am with Wyatt's. If I were Persian, I'd probably have included Rudaki and Attar, but I'm not and I didn't. Is Tulsidas or Kakuichi as good as their native cultures say they are? Heck if I know? With those reservations I'm pretty proud of my list, though I should have found a place for Iqbal.

Carl Sandburg is a much better writer than people give him credit for. In spite of winning three Pulitzer Prizes, people are still sleeping on him, just like Robert Penn Warren. Edna St. Vincent Millay could use some love too. At another period of history they might have been big names, but they stood in the shadow of giants. They are to poetry what Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, or W. Somerset Maugham are to novels: not Eliot, Pound, Yeats, or Frost, not Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, or Lawrence.

[Drkshadow03]

For everyone who included non-English poets, would you be willing to share which translations you've read of those authors (by adding a link to your lists, possibly?).

[namenlose]

No list is perfect and hardly one would not contain important omissions, for one motive or another. That being said, I think yours did a good job and would be as good as one could get. Had other person made a similar list with the same amount of care and effort, the same critics could also be made against it in favor of other authors. A list should not contain everything, after all. It represents your point of view, and others, like me, may take some benefit from it by exploring new authors and understanding your views about them and their place in the tradition. Thanks for sharing.

[stlukesguild]

Translations:

Dante- John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Musa, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Robert and Jean Hollander

Baudelaire- Louise Varese (Paris Spleen), Marthiel Mathews and Jackson Mathews editors (selected translators), Norman R. Shapiro, and Richard Howard (Les Fleurs du mal)

Homer- Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Fagles, and Alexander Pope

Firdowsi- Dick Davis, James Atkinson

Rilke- Stephen Mitchell, Edward Snow, Anita Barrows and Joanna Marie Macy, Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann, Babette Deutsch, and A. Poulin

Petrarch- Robert M. Durling, Mark Musa, Thomas Campbell editor, David Young

Rimbaud- Wyatt Mason, Paul Schmidt, Louise Varese, Enid Starkie... and I'm looking to pick up John Ashberry's translation of the Illuminations

Verlaine- Martin Sorrell, Norman R. Shapiro, C. F. MacIntyre, and several others for selected poems

Eugenio Montale- William Arrowsmith, Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright

Pablo Neruda- Alastair Reid, Stephen Mitchell, Robert Hass, Stephen Kessler, Jack Hirschman, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Tapscott, William O' Daily, Donald D. Walsh, Anthony Kerrigan, Robert Bly, etc...

Federico Garcia-Lorca- Christopher Maurer editor (selected translations by various hands), W. S. Merwin, Donald M. Allen editor, Michael Dewell and Carmen Zapata

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin- Michael Hamburger, Richard Sieburth, Christopher Middleton

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)- Dick Higgins, George MacDonald, Arthur Versluis

Boris Pasternak- Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Mark Rudman and Bohdan Boychuk, Babette Deutsch

Octavio Paz- Eliot Weinberger, Elizabeth Bishop

Li Po- David Hinton, David Young, Red Pine

Tu Fu- David Hinton, David Young, Kenneth Rexroth

Wang Wei- David Hinton, Tony & Willis Barnstone & Xu Haixin, David Young

I tend to make the attempt to read those non-English language poets who are most important to me in several translations... recognizing that often one translator will capture one aspect of the poet's voice while another may succeed in giving voice to another aspect of the same poet.

[SilvanDitties]

How will we ever choose just one? D:

[stlukesguild]

Expanding my own initial list to 100:

1. Dante
2. Shakespeare
3. William Blake
4. Baudelaire
5. Homer
6. Firdowsi
7. Keats
8. Edmund Spenser
9. Milton
10. Rilke
11. Robert Herrick
12. Yeats
13. Petrarch
14. T.S. Eliot
15. Rimbaud
16. Verlaine
17. Walt Whitman
18. Emily Dickinson
19. Eugenio Montale
20. Pablo Neruda
21. Federico Garcia-Lorca
22. P.B. Shelley
23. Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin
24. Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg)
25. Boris Pasternak
26. Octavio Paz
27. Li Bo
28. Tu Fu
29. Wang Wei
30. J.L. Borges

31. Virgil
32. Chaucer
33. Ovid
34. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
35. Ludovico Ariosto
36. Giuseppe Leopardi
37. Théophile Gautier
38. Tennyson
39. Fernando Pessoa
40. Hafez
41. anon. The Song of Solomon
42. anon. Beowulf
43. Horace
44. Theocritus
45. Sappho
46. Victor Hugo
47. Stephane Mallarme
48. Gerard Nerval
49. Thomas Traherne
50. Henry Vaughan
51. Robert Browning
52. Lord Byron
53. Samuel Coleridge
54. Jaroslav Seifert
55. Robert Burns
56. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
57. Paul Celan
58. John Clare
59. Wallace Stevens
60. Solomon Ibn Gabirol
61. Shmuel HaNagid
62. Yehuda Halevi
63. Pierre de Ronsard
64. San Juan de la Cruz
65. Robert Frost
66. Ralph Waldo Emerson
67. Thomas Hardy
68. Paul Valery
69. Alexander Pope
70. Dylan Thomas
71. Torquato Tasso
72. Marina Tsvetaeva
73. Alexander Pushkin
74. Czeslow Milosz
75. Heinrich Heine
76. Paul Eluard
77. Andre Breton
78. Luís de Camões
79. Philip Sidney
80. Walter Raleigh
81. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman
82. Herman Melville
83. Gerald Manley Hopkins
84. Hart Crane
85. César Vallejo
86. Geoffrey Hill
87. Matsuo Bashō
88. Yosa Buson
89. Yosano Akiko
90. Ono no Komachi
91. Antonio Machado
92. Rafael Alberti
93. Miguel Hernández
94. Luis de Góngora
95. Vicente Aleixandre
96. Homero Aridjis
97. Eugénio de Andrade
98.Pierre Louÿs
99. Ugo Foscolo
100. José María de Heredia

I must agree with Mortal that in consideration of the access to translations it is really unrealistic to expect anyone to be able to compile a truly multicultural list of the "best of" drawn from every language. As a painter I am far more intrigued with Persian, Arabic, and Indian culture than I am with Chinese... but the availability of quality translations of poetry there is quite lacking. I may have more German poets than others might include for the simple reason that I can struggle my way through the originals and I also have a good deal of exposure to German poetry as a result of my admiration for German lieder. The period of French poetry from Symbolism through Surrealism is also or particular interest... as well as Modern Spanish poetry. But how many brilliant poets have I ignored? Far more than in this list, no doubt. Surely there is much more to be found in Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Russian and Latin-American poetry. Undoubtedly there are poets of real merit from Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Holland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia (Jaroslaw Seifert! I just recall him. A wonderful poet), and Poland (Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Symborska)... as well as that universe of India.

[stlukesguild]

How will we ever choose just one? D:

Why would we need to?

[mortalterror]

Good top 100 StLuke. I can't believe I forgot to put Lorca in mine, and your choice of Hardy and Gongora were also nice. You picked Pessoa twice, so pick one more. You could double down on Eastern Europe, specifically Poland. Your Milosz is practically asking for a complementary Zbigniew Herbert. Sandor Petofi would put Hungary up on the board. Or you could go to India with Rabindranth Tagore which would compliment your poets who were also novelists group (Hugo, Hardy, Goethe, Pasternak, Melville). Mirza Ghalib should be mentioned, I think, though I'm not one for ghazals.

[SilvanDitties]

I should clarify, I meant when choosing translations. I never know whose translation to go with when coming to a writer I'm unfamiliar with.

[Paulclem]

How about adding to the list how the poems struck you, or when you came across them and the effect they had? You could add what technical details, metaphors etc impressed you, or what it is about a poem that resonates. It could be quite illuminating, especially concerning poets others haven't come across before, and give them a starting point for their reading.

[Drkshadow03]

I should clarify, I meant when choosing translations. I never know whose translation to go with when coming to a writer I'm unfamiliar with.

Yeah, which is why I was hoping everyone would include what translation they've read/used for non-English speaking poets.

[mortalterror]

Preferred translation and information about each? At the risk of TLDR, I'll give it a shot. #1-25

1.Dante- The Divine Comedy (Dorothy Sayers Translation from Penguin)- Especially the Inferno. It has all of the structure of Plato's Republic, all the mythology of Ovid, all the religious devotion of the Bible, a never ending stream of characters and invention. The greatest book ever.

2.Shakespeare- Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet - He's the writer I look to and think "There's no better way to word this. These are the best words in the best possible combination."

3.Homer- The Iliad, The Odyssey (Fitzgerlad and Fagles)- I'm always amazed at this guy. His work is so powerful after all these years. It's so light, and free, lyrical but powerful and aggressive, poetic and adventurous, all great poetic accomplishments unite in these works. He has these great battle scenes like where Ajax defends himself against the whole Trojan army with a giant spear from the wreck of a burning battleship, and then he'll make these lyrical metaphors about the army being like a flock of birds, or men being overwhelming as the ocean, or compare a dying soldier to a wilting flower. There's all the variety of character you would see in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and even outburst of humor, like when Patroclus speared a guy in the chest and he fell out of his chariot. Patroclus makes a quip about him being some sort of diver into the dirt. Or when Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and then makes a joke about his name. These spots of levity make the tales more well rounded, the way similar incidents improve Dante's Divine Comedy; such as when the demons fall off the bridge.

4.Ferdowsi- The Shahnameh (Arthur and Edmond Warner)- an Iranian poet the equal of Shakespeare or Homer wrote a three thousand page poem about the mythical history of Iran from it's earliest days to his own. His hero Rostam is one of the baddest mother****ers in all of literature. Think Gilgamesh, Achilles, Erra, Marduk, Samson, Hercules, or Roland. The feats in this book would put Beowulf to shame.

5.Vyasa- The Mahabharata - Best part is the Bhagavadgita (Edwin Arnold)- Good as The Book of Job and similar in that they both probe the nature of God and man's relation to the divine. But for the longer complete narrative, try the (Kisari Mohan Ganguli) translation in four prose volumes. I haven't read the whole thing, but what I did read was excellent even in prose. Hard to get a hold of a hard copy but you can download an ebook from archive.org or read it at sacred-texts.com. The overall narrative is about an Indian war, kind of like the Iliad with gods and heroes, but there is all sorts of back story. And after one side is victorious they all die and get a view of the afterlife like Dante's Divine Comedy. It's pretty rad.

6.Virgil- The Aeneid (Fitzgerald or Fagles)- A roman combination of the the Iliad and the Odyssey in terms of style and plot. Aeneas a Trojan hero founds Rome after the fall of Troy. The beginning is a lesson on how to begin a book, and Book 2 with the Fall of Troy is the greatest description of warfare, battle, and the fall of a city in literature. Tolstoy couldn't touch it.

7.Ovid- The Metamorphoses (Humphries), The Amores (Guy Lee), The Heroides (Harold Isbell)- The Metamorphoses is just the tip of the iceberg that is his work. He is the poet of variety, a scholar the likes of Petrarch or T.S. Eliot, a lover of mythology, a lover of women and sensuality, richly allusive to literature he loved. He is cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated, aristocratic, and moral. His major work is like the Bible: out of many stories a unity. The Amores are his series of love poems. The Heroides are letters by mythical women to their heroic lovers, often complaining of loneliness, fearing for their safety, or angry about some injustice done to them. Very human.

8.Vyasa- The Ramayana - I haven't found a good translation of this book or even read it. But considering it forms a substantial core of all Indian literature like The Odyssey does to Greek literature I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. It's the story of Rama a heroic prince endowed with all good pious characteristics like Aeneas. He has a wonderful wife who's kidnapped by a demon even the gods can't oppose. He makes friends with a monkey god Haruman and leads his army of monkeys against the army of demons to rescue his wife etc.

9.Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered (Anthony Esolen)- The best poem about Knights, the middle-ages, chivalry, and the Crusades. Epic writing better than Milton's, because it's not so stuffy. All of the energy of the earlier romances but with more polish and style. The French knight Roland is nominally the hero of this tale but he sits on the sidelines like Achilles for much of the book sulking and the Italian hero Tancred gets most of the glory. There is witchcraft and warfare, lovely maidens, and even a female moorish knight who falls in love with Tancred. If I remember correctly she and Tancred even do battle at one point like Achilles and the amazon Penthesilea.

10.Milton- Paradise Lost - Maybe the greatest poem in the English language. An epic about Adam and Eve, the rebel angels, and the fall of man. Satan is the hero and a sympathetic protagonist. Milton tries to adhere to all the old Greek and Roman models of epic. Even the fight in heaven is based upon the Gigantomachia when the Olympian gods overthrew the Titans. Some very cool parts, and a very strange latin style of verse. A little dry, dense, and moral overall though. Not for everybody. I think I liked his Samson Agonistes better.

11.Rumi- Masnavi (Coleman Barks)- If Ferdowsi is the Homer of the Middle East, Rumi is it's Dante. You will find no greater celebration of the mystery and wonder of God than here.

12.Nizami Ganjavi- The Khamsa (check archive.org for persian lit)- If Ferdowsi occupies the place of Homer in the middle east and Rumi is it's Dante, Nizami is sort of like Wordsworth. His Khamsa is a group of five epic poems he wrote. He's very good, even better than the Persian poet Jami who reminds me of him.

13.Horace- Odes, Epodes, Satires (no preferred translation)- When I think of Horace, I think of precision. It feels like he's an architect who leaves nothing to chance. His works show symmetry from the foundation to the roof beams, sort of like Du Fu. They are often short and calculated. Efficient, with no wasted words or lines, every phrase or metaphor flowing seamlessly into the next.

14.Hafez- Divan (Gertrude Bell) Hafez is as good as Horace but more romantic in tone, and less precise. He's wistful where Horace is more legal or clinical, rhetorical, or factual. Hafez' poems are about wine and lovers but this is supposedly a Sufi conceit and a way of talking about God. The Beloved is God and his drunkenness is the symbol of his devotion or religious ecstasy.

15.Jayadeva- Gita Govinda (Edwin Arnold) A poem about two lovers better than the Song of Solomon. A story about yearning for mystical union and the ideal mate. Almost as good as the Bhagavadgita. The god Shiva dallies with many maidens who are just reflections or shadows of his true mate Parvati, with whom he eventually forms a deep mystical union.

16.Anonymous- Book of Job (King James Version)- sorrow at it's most beautiful

17.Anonymous- Beowulf (Seamus Heaney)- Initially, I didn't think much of of this Old English poem, but under Heaney's skillful translation I see now all the praise which is heaped upon it is merited. It makes you wish more of the Finnesburg Fragment and other Anglo-Saxon poetry were preserved.

18.Du Fu - Song of the Wagons (get the Rexroth translations)
19.Bai Juyi - Song of Unending Sorrow, Song of the Lute Player (Witter Bynner)
20.Li Bai - T'ien-mu Mountain Ascended in a Dream (Witter Bynner)

These three Tang Chinese poets should be taken together. Du Fu is cool and precise. He sings about warfare and his troubled times. His friend Li Bai is hot and romantic. He sings about wine and the moon or other fantastical things. Bai Juyi is neither hot blooded or calm and tragic. He is down to earth, laconic, and simple for the most part. However, the two poems I think are his best are tragic break your heart kind of things. The Song of Unending Sorrow is about an Emperor who lost the only woman he ever loved. The Song of the Lute Player is the story of a female lute player's fall from grace which reminds the poet of his own exile from the capital. They are probably the three greatest Chinese poets.

21.Omar Khayyam- The Rubaiyyat (Fitzgerald)- one of the greatest sequences of short poems ever. Wine, song, and the transience of human life.

22.Ariosto- Orlando Furioso (Guido Waldman)- This was the most popular modern epic of the Renaissance. It's supposed to be about the Matter of France, with the knight Roland running about having adventures, but really it's a super hero comic book. People fly around in flaming chariots, ride magical beast, horses are as strong as tanks, men rip chains apart and swim oceans, rings turn people invisible, mirrors dazzle foes, and sorcery abounds.

23.Kalidasa- The Cloud Messenger (Arthur W. Ryder)- Kalidasa is basically Indian Shakespeare. He's better known for his dramas like Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, but I didn't finish that. The Cloud Messenger is a poem about twenty pages long about the same length as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It's a lyrical poem where a banished demi god tells a cloud to carry a message to his lover back where he came from. As the cloud travels the poem describes all the lands it passes through, until it arrives at it's destination. Very good poetry. Made me want to read his epic about the birth of the war god Kali.

24.Camoes- The Lusiads (no preferred translation)- I couldn't get through this one. But Camoes is supposed to be the greatest poet of the Portuguese language. The poem is about Vasco da Gama and his voyage from Europe to India.

25.T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot is a scholar poet, ultra modern. A master of bringing disparate fragments together and making a new whole. A mind with more sides than a circle, a great connector with a smooth flow. Where Ovid would make a mythological reference, Eliot feasts upon literary references.

[Era Vulgaris]

1. Homer (translated by P. Østbye)
2. Shakespeare
3. Dante (translated by Ole Meyer or Magnus Ulleland)
4. Anonymous. Beowulf (translated by Seamus Heaney)
5. Virgil (translated by Otto Steen Due)
6. Percy Bysshe Shelley
7. T. S. Eliot
8. Dylan Thomas
9. Ted Hughes
10. Lord Byron
11. Sylvia Plath
12. Charles Baudelaire (translated by Haakon Dahlen)
13. W. B. Yeats
14. André Bjerke
15. Edith Södergran
16. Emily Dickinson
17. W. H. Auden
18. Edgar Allan Poe
19. Sigbjørn Obstfelder
20. E. E. Cummings

[JBI]

Since so many have posted on Du Fu, why not start a discussion of his works? I could hook up a free translation if you guys want. It's technically not illegal for me to upload the books from China, so I could give a copy of the Watson translation to anyone who needs it (or the more difficult a Little Primer of Tu Fu, which is a raw form of reading).

As of now, my list has probably pushed to half Chinese half other, since I have been reading Chinese almost exclusively lately. I will put together a list, however, of works that can be found in English, so as to not discourage others from reading. Expect it soon.

Though seriously, think about discussions we could have.

[TenderButtons]

Thanks would be very interesting, JBI. I have never had the opportunity to discuss poems with others and have almost no exposure to Chinese poetry, so I would really enjoy that a lot.

[Paulclem]

Preferred translation and information about each? At the risk of TLDR, I'll give it a shot. #1-25

1.Dante- The Divine Comedy (Dorothy Sayers Translation from Penguin)- Especially the Inferno. It has all of the structure of Plato's Republic, all the mythology of Ovid, all the religious devotion of the Bible, a never ending stream of characters and invention. The greatest book ever.

2.Shakespeare- Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet - He's the writer I look to and think "There's no better way to word this. These are the best words in the best possible combination."

3.Homer- The Iliad, The Odyssey (Fitzgerlad and Fagles)- I'm always amazed at this guy. His work is so powerful after all these years. It's so light, and free, lyrical but powerful and aggressive, poetic and adventurous, all great poetic accomplishments unite in these works. He has these great battle scenes like where Ajax defends himself against the whole Trojan army with a giant spear from the wreck of a burning battleship, and then he'll make these lyrical metaphors about the army being like a flock of birds, or men being overwhelming as the ocean, or compare a dying soldier to a wilting flower. There's all the variety of character you would see in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and even outburst of humor, like when Patroclus speared a guy in the chest and he fell out of his chariot. Patroclus makes a quip about him being some sort of diver into the dirt. Or when Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and then makes a joke about his name. These spots of levity make the tales more well rounded, the way similar incidents improve Dante's Divine Comedy; such as when the demons fall off the bridge.

4.Ferdowsi- The Shahnameh (Arthur and Edmond Warner)- an Iranian poet the equal of Shakespeare or Homer wrote a three thousand page poem about the mythical history of Iran from it's earliest days to his own. His hero Rostam is one of the baddest mother****ers in all of literature. Think Gilgamesh, Achilles, Erra, Marduk, Samson, Hercules, or Roland. The feats in this book would put Beowulf to shame.

5.Vyasa- The Mahabharata - Best part is the Bhagavadgita (Edwin Arnold)- Good as The Book of Job and similar in that they both probe the nature of God and man's relation to the divine. But for the longer complete narrative, try the (Kisari Mohan Ganguli) translation in four prose volumes. I haven't read the whole thing, but what I did read was excellent even in prose. Hard to get a hold of a hard copy but you can download an ebook from archive.org or read it at sacred-texts.com. The overall narrative is about an Indian war, kind of like the Iliad with gods and heroes, but there is all sorts of back story. And after one side is victorious they all die and get a view of the afterlife like Dante's Divine Comedy. It's pretty rad.

6.Virgil- The Aeneid (Fitzgerald or Fagles)- A roman combination of the the Iliad and the Odyssey in terms of style and plot. Aeneas a Trojan hero founds Rome after the fall of Troy. The beginning is a lesson on how to begin a book, and Book 2 with the Fall of Troy is the greatest description of warfare, battle, and the fall of a city in literature. Tolstoy couldn't touch it.

7.Ovid- The Metamorphoses (Humphries), The Amores (Guy Lee), The Heroides (Harold Isbell)- The Metamorphoses is just the tip of the iceberg that is his work. He is the poet of variety, a scholar the likes of Petrarch or T.S. Eliot, a lover of mythology, a lover of women and sensuality, richly allusive to literature he loved. He is cosmopolitan, worldly, sophisticated, aristocratic, and moral. His major work is like the Bible: out of many stories a unity. The Amores are his series of love poems. The Heroides are letters by mythical women to their heroic lovers, often complaining of loneliness, fearing for their safety, or angry about some injustice done to them. Very human.

8.Vyasa- The Ramayana - I haven't found a good translation of this book or even read it. But considering it forms a substantial core of all Indian literature like The Odyssey does to Greek literature I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. It's the story of Rama a heroic prince endowed with all good pious characteristics like Aeneas. He has a wonderful wife who's kidnapped by a demon even the gods can't oppose. He makes friends with a monkey god Haruman and leads his army of monkeys against the army of demons to rescue his wife etc.

9.Tasso- Jerusalem Delivered (Anthony Esolen)- The best poem about Knights, the middle-ages, chivalry, and the Crusades. Epic writing better than Milton's, because it's not so stuffy. All of the energy of the earlier romances but with more polish and style. The French knight Roland is nominally the hero of this tale but he sits on the sidelines like Achilles for much of the book sulking and the Italian hero Tancred gets most of the glory. There is witchcraft and warfare, lovely maidens, and even a female moorish knight who falls in love with Tancred. If I remember correctly she and Tancred even do battle at one point like Achilles and the amazon Penthesilea.

10.Milton- Paradise Lost - Maybe the greatest poem in the English language. An epic about Adam and Eve, the rebel angels, and the fall of man. Satan is the hero and a sympathetic protagonist. Milton tries to adhere to all the old Greek and Roman models of epic. Even the fight in heaven is based upon the Gigantomachia when the Olympian gods overthrew the Titans. Some very cool parts, and a very strange latin style of verse. A little dry, dense, and moral overall though. Not for everybody. I think I liked his Samson Agonistes better.

11.Rumi- Masnavi (Coleman Barks)- If Ferdowsi is the Homer of the Middle East, Rumi is it's Dante. You will find no greater celebration of the mystery and wonder of God than here.

12.Nizami Ganjavi- The Khamsa (check archive.org for persian lit)- If Ferdowsi occupies the place of Homer in the middle east and Rumi is it's Dante, Nizami is sort of like Wordsworth. His Khamsa is a group of five epic poems he wrote. He's very good, even better than the Persian poet Jami who reminds me of him.

13.Horace- Odes, Epodes, Satires (no preferred translation)- When I think of Horace, I think of precision. It feels like he's an architect who leaves nothing to chance. His works show symmetry from the foundation to the roof beams, sort of like Du Fu. They are often short and calculated. Efficient, with no wasted words or lines, every phrase or metaphor flowing seamlessly into the next.

14.Hafez- Divan (Gertrude Bell) Hafez is as good as Horace but more romantic in tone, and less precise. He's wistful where Horace is more legal or clinical, rhetorical, or factual. Hafez' poems are about wine and lovers but this is supposedly a Sufi conceit and a way of talking about God. The Beloved is God and his drunkenness is the symbol of his devotion or religious ecstasy.

15.Jayadeva- Gita Govinda (Edwin Arnold) A poem about two lovers better than the Song of Solomon. A story about yearning for mystical union and the ideal mate. Almost as good as the Bhagavadgita. The god Shiva dallies with many maidens who are just reflections or shadows of his true mate Parvati, with whom he eventually forms a deep mystical union.

16.Anonymous- Book of Job (King James Version)- sorrow at it's most beautiful

17.Anonymous- Beowulf (Seamus Heaney)- Initially, I didn't think much of of this Old English poem, but under Heaney's skillful translation I see now all the praise which is heaped upon it is merited. It makes you wish more of the Finnesburg Fragment and other Anglo-Saxon poetry were preserved.

18.Du Fu - Song of the Wagons (get the Rexroth translations)
19.Bai Juyi - Song of Unending Sorrow, Song of the Lute Player (Witter Bynner)
20.Li Bai - T'ien-mu Mountain Ascended in a Dream (Witter Bynner)

These three Tang Chinese poets should be taken together. Du Fu is cool and precise. He sings about warfare and his troubled times. His friend Li Bai is hot and romantic. He sings about wine and the moon or other fantastical things. Bai Juyi is neither hot blooded or calm and tragic. He is down to earth, laconic, and simple for the most part. However, the two poems I think are his best are tragic break your heart kind of things. The Song of Unending Sorrow is about an Emperor who lost the only woman he ever loved. The Song of the Lute Player is the story of a female lute player's fall from grace which reminds the poet of his own exile from the capital. They are probably the three greatest Chinese poets.

21.Omar Khayyam- The Rubaiyyat (Fitzgerald)- one of the greatest sequences of short poems ever. Wine, song, and the transience of human life.

22.Ariosto- Orlando Furioso (Guido Waldman)- This was the most popular modern epic of the Renaissance. It's supposed to be about the Matter of France, with the knight Roland running about having adventures, but really it's a super hero comic book. People fly around in flaming chariots, ride magical beast, horses are as strong as tanks, men rip chains apart and swim oceans, rings turn people invisible, mirrors dazzle foes, and sorcery abounds.

23.Kalidasa- The Cloud Messenger (Arthur W. Ryder)- Kalidasa is basically Indian Shakespeare. He's better known for his dramas like Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, but I didn't finish that. The Cloud Messenger is a poem about twenty pages long about the same length as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It's a lyrical poem where a banished demi god tells a cloud to carry a message to his lover back where he came from. As the cloud travels the poem describes all the lands it passes through, until it arrives at it's destination. Very good poetry. Made me want to read his epic about the birth of the war god Kali.

24.Camoes- The Lusiads (no preferred translation)- I couldn't get through this one. But Camoes is supposed to be the greatest poet of the Portuguese language. The poem is about Vasco da Gama and his voyage from Europe to India.

25.T.S. Eliot- The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot is a scholar poet, ultra modern. A master of bringing disparate fragments together and making a new whole. A mind with more sides than a circle, a great connector with a smooth flow. Where Ovid would make a mythological reference, Eliot feasts upon literary references.

That's the kind of thing I was on about. It's much more interesting and informative than a simple list. Cheers Mortal. I'll post some of mine then.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

No mention of Dr. Seuss?

[Paulclem]

Since so many have posted on Du Fu, why not start a discussion of his works? I could hook up a free translation if you guys want. It's technically not illegal for me to upload the books from China, so I could give a copy of the Watson translation to anyone who needs it (or the more difficult a Little Primer of Tu Fu, which is a raw form of reading).

As of now, my list has probably pushed to half Chinese half other, since I have been reading Chinese almost exclusively lately. I will put together a list, however, of works that can be found in English, so as to not discourage others from reading. Expect it soon.

Though seriously, think about discussions we could have.

That sounds like a good idea. I like the Japanese poetry i've read, and it would be good to compare and widen my reading.

[Paulclem]

No mention of Dr. Seuss?

A fantastic body of work. The Cat in the Hat was the most coveted book in our book corner in my first class at school.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I was actually being serious (not that you thought I wasn't, Paul) by suggesting Dr. Seuss. I don't think be necessarily deserves to be in a top 20 list, but he's a pretty important figure.

[Paulclem]

I was actually being serious (not that you thought I wasn't, Paul) by suggesting Dr. Seuss. I don't think be necessarily deserves to be in a top 20 list, but he's a pretty important figure.

Absolutely - you've got to start somewhere and the younger the better.

[mortalterror]

#26-50
26.Jean Racine- Phaedra (Cairncross)- A dramatist near the level of Shakespeare, though more in tune with my personal aesthetics. Mostly a copier of Euripides, for which he's a match, but there's a structure, an order, no wasted motions or words to his writing that marks him for the premier writer of the Enlightenment. There's something surreal about the precision and control with which he writes about chaotic, irrational, wild, torturous love. Phaedra is his most popular play but I think Athalia or Iphigenia are better.

27.Calderone- Life is a Dream (FitzGerald)- Another nearly Shakespearean dramatist. His poetry sparkles especially in Life is a Dream. His handling of plot is phenomenal but his characters are a little flat.

28.Coleridge- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner- Romantic, brooding, and supernatural. My favorite poem.

29.Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil (James McGowan)- The single greatest poet of the nineteenth century. Forget Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Rimbaud, Whitman, and Tennyson. This is the high point of the age. Decadent, dark, sensual. There are a lot of femme fatales and snake imagery in these poems, a lot of decay and blasphemy. The Parisian Prowler (aka Paris Spleen tr. Edward K. Kaplan) is also definitely worth checking out.

30.Wordsworth- The Prelude - I'm not really a fan of the Prelude. I like his shorter stuff like Tintern Abbey, I wandered lonely as a cloud, and London 1812. He's a great Romantic poet. And it's wonderful to read him just to see the evolution of English blank verse from Wyatt, to Shakespeare, to Milton, and then to him. Big nature lover.

31.Shelley- Lyrics and Odes- If Coleridge is the mystic of the Romantics then Shelley is the intellectual. His poems aren't quite as slick as Keats' but there generally seems to be more substance. Ozymandias or Ode to the West Wind are great short ditties, but when you glance into his longer works such as Prometheus Unbound or Queen Mab you find a philosopher, an atheist, and a revolutionary.

32.Goethe- Faust (no preferred translation)- Center of the German literature. The artistic equal of Milton or Hugo. At turns classical with verse plays like Iphegenia in Tauris, poem collections like Roman Elegies, then oriental with The West-Eastern Divan, and contemporary with his Egmont and lyrics. He is many sided and goes through many different styles during his long career.

33.Apollonius Rhodius- The Argonautika (no preferred translation) Midway through this something clicked and it got a lot better. Jason's wooing of Medea was quite moving. But after she joins the Argonauts the story is mostly about her using her supernatural powers to save them over and over. This tends to diminish the resourcefulness and heroic qualities of the crew in general.

34.Statius- The Thebaid (A.D. Melville)- Twin princes, the sons of Oedipus struggle for power, and battle over Thebes. The outcast brother assembles foreign allies, armies, and champions to besiege the city. The description is so rich and Statius drops more mythological references than Ovid. The action is spectacular, the characters are passionate fire. Everything is so beautiful, larger than life, and full of metaphors. I like him way more than Virgil. He's got that raw power that the silver Latin poets possessed, that touch of transcendent darkness that made Lucan, Seneca, and Petronius so moving. If the golden age Latin poets valued serenity and balance more then these would be the Romantics who are overflowing with emotion.

35.The Arch Poet- His Confession (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/golias1.asp)- Nobody knows who this medieval poet actually was, but he left us some of the best Latin poems of the middle ages. His confession is hilarious. This guy is a master of double entendre, satire, and wit. Think of the anonymous Elizabethan poem Tom O' Bedlam and you'll get sort of a hint of what this guy is like.

36.Jami- Haft Awrang - He's something like the fifth most popular Persian poet, but he is still very good. He writes epics and lyrics and is generally considered the best Persian poet of the fifteenth century.

37.Saadi- The Bostan (Orchard)(tr. G.M. Wickens), The Gulistan (Rose Garden)(no preference) - This guy is another major Persian poet of the late middle ages and he is very pious. His writing is less secular and more what I would call wisdom literature. He tells stories with morals, and the point of his poetry is to instruct as it entertains.

38.Walt Whitman- Leaves of Grass - I'm not a big fan of Walt Whitman. I feel that a lot of his innovations were bad models and taken too far by later poets, but there is no denying how influential he was to modern literature. He may be the most influential American poet of all time. I will give him some credit for genius. Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, Oh Captain My Captain, Song of Myself, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed are all first rate. One of the other things that kind of annoys me about him is how he just kept expanding his one popular book until it was basically just his collected writings. Leaves of Grass should just refer to the original publication and then we should dice the rest into separate works.

39.Petrarch- Canzoniere (no preference) - I've seen good translations and bad translations of Petrarch. I read the Mark Musa version of the sonnets and I don't recommend them, but I've read other popular volumes which were worse. Unfortunately, he can come off a bit emo at times, endlessly complaining, and vomitting up his feelings. This is the side most people see from his Laura poems. But he had a very different side to him that comes out in his other work. His letters show a great adventurous mind at work. His letters to dead people are great reading. His epic poem Africa is worth skipping, from a note I made on the first three books: "Petrarch's epic poem Africa is boring the **** out of me. I read the first 52 pages and he has no knack for epic poetry. I love his lyrics and his sonnets but god damn is he dull when he tries to imitate Virgil. The first two Books are taken from Cicero's Dream of Scipio. Book one is all that future prophesying and book 2 is mostly a continuation of that but with a more of a vanity of human wishes, all things pass away tone. The tone of the second book is more successful because it's more in tune with Petrarch's native culture being a late medieval Catholic priest. But then once we get away from the forty page monologue things don't pick up. Book three begins with a ten page ecphrasis (description) of a mural in the palace of Syphax. None of these things are bad in themselves, but Petrarch has no sense of proportion and at what point to cut them off so that they remain pleasant, or what to follow them with afterwards. Dramatically, you can't follow a long speech with another long speech, or a monologue with a long description..." If you want to see a good example of his Latin writing try the translation by Edmon James Mills The Secret of Petrarch http://archive.org/stream/secretpetrarch00millgoog#page/n16/mode/2up and skip to the section In Vaucluse. That may be the best stuff he ever wrote period.

40.Ronsard- When You Are Truly Old (no preference) - This is one of the early Renaissance French poets. He wrote an epic like Petrarch called the Franciad which isn't very good and is now known for his love sonnets to a woman half his age.

41.Wyatt- They Flee From Me - Wyatt is responsible for bringing the Petrarchan sonnet into English and popularizing blank verse along with his buddy Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey. It was actually hard to pick between them and Sir Walter Raleigh since English poetry in general was at such a high level during the Elizabethan period. Wyatt mostly writes about love and the royal court.

42.Alexander Pope- Essay on Man - I once thought that his Virgilian imitation The Rape of the Lock was his greatest achievement. There is that beautiful opening, but the poem soon grows tedious after that, though not for lack of genius or want of glorious lines. From there I perused his translation of the Iliad, which was even more admirably done if not exact. You can see even here, at this stage of his career he is learning from the masters and incorporating their lessons into his own poems. Just as Virgil began with Theocritus, then moved on to Hesiod, and finally an imitation of Homer. Each imitation was a step up in difficulty and quality for either poet. Pope has brushes with other Latin poets like Lucretius and the introduction to his Iliad even bears the fingerprint of Cicero, though there is just as much Dryden. But when he finally lets himself go in An Essay on Man after a long and fruitful study of Horace, and Bacon to be sure, he is sublime. The Rape of the Lock is a poem by a young prodigy. An Essay on Man is the product of a tempered master. The first epistle was the best, and the fourth was a triumph, but the best section was the beginning of epistle number 2. I think it's worthy of comparison to Keats' famous A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever. Overall, I would say that his aesthetics are neo-classical, and that most of his works are flawed but with some of the greatest couplets and single lines in English literature.

43.Lucan- Pharsalia (Edward Ridley http://omacl.org/Pharsalia/) - An anti-epic poem of a world gone mad in an apocalyptic civil war. What The Book of Revelations would be like if Caesar were the anti-Christ.

44.Aneirin- Y Gododdin - Aneirin is a Welsh poet from around 600 who's Y Gododdin describes a battle between Saxons and Britons. He describes how 300 noble warriors feasted for a year and then attacked a much stronger fort knowing as they did so that their act of defiance was futile against overwhelming odds. This choice was my attempt to offer something of the middle ages, and how their art was every bit as good as other times, though I might just as easily have picked Caedmon's Dream of the Rood, Cynewulf's Elene, Angilbert's The Battle of Fontenoy, or anonymous pieces like The Phoenix, The Finnsburg Fragment, or The Battle of Brunanburh which Tennyson himself translated. Anyone with an interest in Anglo-Saxon poetry should try the translations by Kevin Crossley-Holland.

45.Judah Halevi- Ode to Zion (http://www.sacred-texts.com/jud/mhl/mhl13.htm) A medieval Spanish poet, possibly the greatest Jewish poet since the Bible. Besides the link I provided you can find other translations at Black Cat Poems.

46.Chaucer- Canterbury Tales - Chaucer is one of those rare poets who is also a great humorist. He's raunchy and made me laugh out loud a number of times. His strong suit is in creating memorable three dimensional characters who's stories and actions all make sense in light of their individual psychology. His other epics are pretty great too. I'd say he's the second greatest English poet right after Shakespeare and above Milton.

47.William IX Duke of Aquitaine- Under the Sun I Ride Along - One of the earliest and best of the French troubadours, vernacular poets who chose to write in their native language instead of Latin. They would sing their poems like modern rappers, and indeed would often engage in contests with other troubadours just like rap battles. Duke William's verses are witty, raunchy, and fun loving.

48.Walther von der Vogelweide- Under the Linden Tree - The best of the medieval German lyricists. He wrote mostly about love.

49.Gottfried von Strassburg- Tristan and Isolt - Strassburg along with Wolfram von Eschenbach and Hartmann von Aue, was one of the three great medieval German writers of chivalric epics. The story of Tristan is supposedly the basis of the later Arthurian story of Lancelot and Guinevere. A great knight betrays a king when he falls in love with the queen. But the story is so much more complex. Tristan and Isolt are just as likely to overcome their opponents through guile as well as brawn, and have several narrow escapes. Oh, and Tristan even does battle with a dragon.

50.Arnaut Daniel- On this gay and slender tune - A twelfth century troubadour praised by Dante and Ezra Pound. A writer of good love poems.

[Pierre Menard]

Since so many have posted on Du Fu, why not start a discussion of his works? I could hook up a free translation if you guys want. It's technically not illegal for me to upload the books from China, so I could give a copy of the Watson translation to anyone who needs it (or the more difficult a Little Primer of Tu Fu, which is a raw form of reading).

As of now, my list has probably pushed to half Chinese half other, since I have been reading Chinese almost exclusively lately. I will put together a list, however, of works that can be found in English, so as to not discourage others from reading. Expect it soon.

Though seriously, think about discussions we could have.


That would be great!
I only have one translation of his work and as with most foreign works, the more translations to choose from the better!

[JBI]

Alright someone start a thread then, and I will PM people who express interest links to the books for download, as I do not think the mods would like me to post directly, even if it is legal where I am.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'll do my own intros for my list:

1. John Milton - The ultimate poet. He wrote the greatest elegy in the language (Lycidas), the greatest pastoral (Lycidas again), one of the great odes (Morning of Christ's Nativity), a handful of the best sonnets (On His Blindness, Methought I Saw...), one of the greatest closet dramas (Samson Agonistes), one of the greatest short narratives (Paradise Regained), and the greatest epic (Paradise Lost). In doing so, he practically invented his own language that nobody that came after was able to imitate without coming off as "Miltonic".

2. William Blake - The ultimate visionary that invented his own symbolic embodiments of the human psyche and embedded them in long, complex allegories. Blake was Jung and Freud before there was Jung and Freud. There's nothing else out there quite like Jerusalem and The Four Zoas... and for those intimidated by those works, Songs of Innocence and Experience is one of the pinnacles of Romantic lyric.

3. John Donne - The great metaphysical poet. Master of the nonce form, complex metaphorical conceits, outlandish statements, and paradox, innovator of speech-like rhythms... Donne is living thought embodied in poetry. One has to be on one's intellectual toes to read him, yet I find him endlessly readable for all his difficulties. Learn to understand him and every other poet will seem easy.

4. WB Yeats - The master of masks and disguises, few poets are as diverse and formally masterful as Yeats. Whether he was being apocalyptic and symbolic as Blake, or lyrical and realistic as WC Williams, he very rarely put a bad or unimaginative word to paper. He also made it look easy; few poets can throw out such seemingly simple statements and have them resonate with such profundity.

5. WH Auden - I consider him similar to Yeats to the extent that he was as diverse as he was masterful. Unlike Yeats, though, Auden also mastered free-verse. He could be bitingly satirical, gorgeously elegiac, whimsical, serious, light or heavy. I really don't think we've yet to fully appreciate the range of Auden.

6. William Shakespeare - The crux of Shakespeare is whether or not one considers his plays as poetry. Drama may be in verse, but there's still a big difference between verse drama and lyric. Personally, I don't consider Shakespeare's dramas when assessing him as a poet, though I don't object to those that do. So, in placing him 6th I do so on the strength of his sonnets and other poems. I stated in the other thread I think Shakespeare was the greatest of all sonneteers, and, in fact, I consider his sonnets to be perhaps the greatest sequence of poetry in existence along with Donne's Songs and Sonnets.

7. George Herbert - Typically overshadowed by Donne, Herbert mastered lyricism and the nonce form even to a degree that Donne didn't. As to where Donne was outlandish and melodramatic and expressive, Herbert is quieter, understated, more implicit. Herbert's isn't the type of poetry that grabs you by the throat and shakes you, but it's the kind of poetry that slowly seeps into your soul and infuses you with a vitality and life-force. No poet I know could make a statement like "something understood" so poignant.

8. William Wordsworth - The arch romantic, Wordsworth embodied both the best and worst of the period. Insanely prolific, he's been served well by anthologies that pare down his work to the essentials. When Wordsworth was on, as he was in most of Lyrical Ballads and Poems in Two Volumes with masterpieces like The Lucy Poems, Tintern Abbey, Intimations of Immortality, Simon Lee, or his best sonnets, then he was the greatest English writer since Shakespeare and Milton... unfortunately, he lived well past those two volumes and his poetic powers declined tremendously. The Prelude has its moments, but, ultimately, it's only a shadow of the magnum opus it was intended to be.


9. John Keats - Oh, what could've been... Keats developed the sophistication of lyric form probably more than anyone since Donne, and we're still trying to catch up with him. His Odes are stunning masterpieces of pure perfection, and will yield fruits no matter how often you return to them and how much you think about them. He also wrote a handful of tremendous sonnets and a few narrative masterpieces, especially the wonderful Eve of St. Agnus.

10. James Merrill - IMO, he wrote the only epic of the 20th Century worthy of its place amongst the all-time greats in The Changing Light at Sandover. Merrill had a clear mastery of form from an early age, and his work only gets better and more daring as one moves along. Like Auden, he mastered an incredible range of voices, tones, subjects, and forms.

11. Wallace Stevens - The poet as philsopher, Stevens can be difficult to digest, but he's undoubtedly worth the effort. Besides offering a great deal of philosophical material, he also wrote some of the most engrossing, sensual, palpable descriptions of nature of any poet of the 20th Century. His longer poems are grossly under-appreciated as well.

12. Virgil - Like Milton, he seemed to be born for a purpose, beginning with his revolutionary pastoral Eclogues, developing to the ravishingly beautiful Georgics, and culminating in The Aeneid, which is, IMO, after Paradise Lost, the greatest epic ever written. The Aeneid is like all of Homer compressed into 12 books with all of the fat surgically removed. His descriptions of the underworld best even those of Dante, IMO.

13. Geoffrey Chaucer - The Canterbury Tales is still one of the greatest depictions of humanity in all its multifarious forms, from the divinely high, to the crudely low, from the hilarious to the tragic. Yet, he also wrote Troilus and Criseyde, which has the perfection that Canterbury lacks. What does one call it? An epic in dramatic form? Whatever one calls it, it's one of the great works of psychologically erotic literature in English.

14. Percy Blysshe Shelley - Another visionary poet of the Blakean vein. Shelley is endlessly provocative, and he took metaphors to ecstatic heights. His Adonais may be the finest elegy in English next to Lycidas.

15. Robert Burns - Simplicity and elegance personified, Burns is little written about because he left it all on the page. The Scots dialect aside, he's never difficult to understand, yet he was an endlessly charming lyricists that still managed to hit on profundities as if by accident.

16. Alexander Pope - The ultimate satirist. Pope is out of fashion today because the endless Augustan couplets grates on the ears after a while and his copious allusions are lost on people that aren't aware of the historical context. Once one learns just enough about the period, there's no denying that The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are the finest works of poetry in the period. Nobody else took the mock-heroic to such masterful heights of absurdity.

17. Johann Wolfgang van Goethe - Another master of the diverse. Faust is up there with the greatest tragedies of Shakespeare as one of the pinnacles of the human mind, and his shorter poetry is full of beauties and provocative thoughts.

18. Du Fu - The great poet of suggestion. One always reads a Du Fu poem with the feeling of an infinite universe being suggested through the minimalism of what's actually on the page.

19. Geoffrey Hill - A tremendous modern titan enfolding myth and culture and society into a complex ball of something very meaningful. He's written the finest poetry on the subject of the holocaust, and one always gets the sense that he's very concerned with the morality of the poetic act itself.

20. Robert Browning - The great master of the dramatic monologue. The Ring and the Book is perhaps the best thing to come out of Victorian poetry; I have no idea why it's so little read. It's certainly better and more substantial than In Memorium. Besides the famous My Last Duchess, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is also a remarkable poetic narrative full of mysticism.