Example of english language poets

[Majesty]

Who wrote with excellent technique but say nothing important?
and those who wrote great stuff in flawed techniques?

[MorpheusSandman]

Who wrote with excellent technique but say nothing important?Keats, Yeats, Frost, Tennyson, Pope


and those who wrote great stuff in flawed techniques?Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Stevens, Byron

Of course, it's not entirely so clean cut. I think most poets manage to occasionally say something important and occasionally slip up technically. Take someone like Auden who could be as flippant as he was philosophical, as technically virtuosic as he was slapdash. I think the above names are pretty good examples of your categories, though many could disagree with many of them. EG, Yeats did express his various philosophical ideas in poetic form, but his philosophical thinking was rather muddled and naive, a romantic rebelling against the science of the 20th century, which is why he latched on so much to Blake. Frost similarly reacted to, eg, Darwin, but never really settling on matters. I think, at their best, these poets provoke us to think about these ideas, rather than saying anything important about them themselves. Keats' meditation on art and history, beauty and knowledge, in Grecian Urn is one such example of a poem that provokes in us more thoughts than it directly contains.

[AuntShecky]

"On First Looking Looking into Chapman's Homer" contains a geographical error. "Locksley Hall" provides an inaccurate view about the railway. But neither "flaw" diminishes Keats and Tennyson in my view, since both poets are masters of technique and content. I'm surprised anyone would ever say that "In Memoriam" says "nothing important." Pope's "Essay on Criticism"and "Essay on Man" contain much "important" stuff as well.

[MorpheusSandman]

Like I said, someone can certainly disagree with the classifications. When I think of "saying something important" I guess I'm thinking of something closer to real philosophy as opposed to aphoristic philosophies (IE, philosophical ideas boiled down to their simplest, memorable form). I think Tennyson and Pope were masterful at rendering trite philosophy memorably because of their mastery of form (especially Pope's couplets), but their "making existing ideas memorable" isn't a Stevensian thinking through the intricacies of imagination's relationship with reality, or Blake's allegorizing of every aspect of human nature. Blake's thought seems like a direct forerunner to Jung. In comparison, Tennyson and Pope are just catchy parrots (not that I think that diminishes their achievement; as poetry isn't philosophy and shouldn't be judged as such).

[Nick Capozzoli]

Who wrote with excellent technique but say nothing important?
and those who wrote great stuff in flawed techniques?

It would help if you could explain what you mean by "technique."

[Majesty]

It would help if you could explain what you mean by "technique."

Mastery of form and other aspects that makes a good craftsman.

[Majesty]

Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, Stevens, Byron

What are the great stuff byron wrote though?

[Majesty]

Tennyson writes important stuff i would say,i first read tennyson through eliot and as i read more,tennyson is like the switch and eliot a portal.

[desiresjab]

First, you would have to decide exactly what important is. Does it mean poetry has the power to change world affairs, does it mean important to the history of poetry, or does it mean statements so important that everyone should read them? Or perhaps something else. By the first criterion none of them are important, by the second criterion Ginsberg is more important than Frost, and the third is even more subjective.

If I like them it is because they say things that are important to me. It is usually not the content but they way something is said that makes it of lasting importance to me.

I am not a believer in poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but rather that poetry makes nothing happen.

[MorpheusSandman]

...important to the history of poetry... Ginsberg is more important than FrostHow so?


I am not a believer in poets being the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but rather that poetry makes nothing happen.I think both statements are a bit hyperbolic, though I'm actually closer to agreeing with Shelley, not necessarily because I think the poets we hold up as aesthetic masters are such legislators, but rather that language, in general, does have the power to "legislate" how we see the world, and poetry is, if nothing else, the art of language. The shame is that the language that does seem to influence the world is too often not poetry or not even poetic.

Auden, of course, made his statement because he was disillusioned with the demands of the political poetry of the 30s, tired of the pressures thrust on him of being at the vanguard of Communist poetics and having to write about every important invent, tired of everyone wanting him to express the "spirit of the age". He saw both the silliness and greatness of Yeats and thought to himself "now there's a poet we love and will remember because of how he said what he said, not because what he said made anything happen; I want to be as frivolous, yet as great, as he was." Hence Auden's move from the politics of the 30s to the religion of the 40s to the personal of the 50s. His poetic world became increasingly hermetic. I think the statement would've been more accurately stated as "I'm tired of trying to make something happen through poetry."