Top 10 American poets

[desiresjab]

I am new here, and you folks have probably discussed this one before.There is a lot of disagreemnt still, I am sure.

For instance, what criterion does one use to answer the question? We could go by talent, historical influence, personal impact, critical consensus...or an intuitive combination.

People will vote primarily by how much they like a certain poet, by how much emotional impact that poet has had on them personally. But there are other considerations that can be weighed.

I think Whitman was the greatest American poet, but not the best. He was often boring and long winded, he was not a great craftsman but a man of passion, a mighty spirit with a pen. He is our poetic spokesman for America's period of legendary fame, and cannot be toppled. Frost and Stevens were better craftsmen, as well as many others.

My own list is based on the core strength of a small number of the best poems of each author IMO, but also on things like longevity and body of work, influence, craftsmanship, etc.

But it is also based upon the ignorance of certain areas and certain poets. If a poet is not on this list it may mean they never managed to hook me with Frost's immortal wound. Maybe I just do not like them. I have tried most. Hart Crane, for instance, could never make it onto my list. He has no rhythm that I could ever find.

Is this a safe list, or pretty ragged, and why?

1 Whitman
2 Roethke
3 Stevens
4 Frost
5 Dickinson
6 Poe
7 R. Lowell
8 Snodgrass
9 Pound
10 Sandburg

[MorpheusSandman]

I'll make two lists: one based on "objective" qualities like influence, originality, and longevity, and another expressing my own personal favorites:

"Objective:"

1. Dickinson
2. Whitman
3. Stevens
4. Poe
5. Frost
6. Ashbery
7. Pound
8. Bishop
9. Merrill
10. Lowell

"Personal:"

1. Merrill
2. Stevens
3. Ashbery
4. Crane
5. Frost
6. Whitman
7. Lowell
8. Merwin
9. Wilbur
10. Berryman

As for yours, I think any "objective" American list has to have Whitman and Dickinson 1 and 2, with their reputations and influence being so close I don't think the order matters. Whitman's influence was more immediate, but Dickinson's persists strongly today. In fact, I might venture as far as to say that no poet has had a greater impact on the form/methods of modern poetry than Dickinson. In contrast, Whitman's emotionalism seems quite a product of its time. Dickinson initiated what Stephen Burt called the "elliptical style" of poetry. Ashbery should certainly be on your list as well as no poet has influenced poetry of the last 50 years more than he has, for better or worse. I think Roethke being in the top 10 is defensible, but putting him 2 is not. Roethke's influence/reputation has really fluctuated, and while he his beloved by some he's ignored by just as many. Snodgrass would be tough for a top 20, much less 10. Sandburg is also defensible, but not, IMO, over poets like Bishop or Merrill. Bishop is probably the 20th Century's Dickinson, while Merrill (and Auden) set the standard for all formalist poetry in this century, and he wrote what I think most would agree to be the century's greatest "epic" in The Changing Light at Sandover (not that he has a lot of competition). It also doesn't feel right excluding WC Williams and Plath given their influence; they'd probably be my 11 and 12.

An interesting question is how we should consider Auden and Eliot: Eliot was born in the US and moved to England; Auden was the reverse. If you consider either American then they'd be quite high on the list. Eliot would have to be #1, and Auden definitely in the top 5.

[desiresjab]

I forgot Berryman. That was an oversight. Merwin, Merrill and Ashbury are overrated IMO, and vastly so.

Dickinson had some greatness, but it is all one dish served over and over. Poe also had great power, which did not come out very often as a poet, but when it did was spectaular.

If you can show me instances of great power in the works of Merrill, Merwin and Ashbury, rather than just the exercises of some stable professors in cerebrealism, I would be pleased to change my mind. Show me one short poem from any of them as pure and rhythmic as William Simpson's Early in the Morning, and maybe I will start to see things your way. Show me anything half as good as Stevens' Table Talk.

On Snodgrass and Sandburg I am not that firm, but Roethke in the top five is a must, as I see it. His poetry takes on a new dimension when read aloud, while most poets lose a dimension with the exposure.

Elliot is one of the greatest poets of all time, but he is an internationalist, as is Auden. Pound I included on the list, though he has no home either, and was a far greater critic than poet.

[MorpheusSandman]

You said it yourself: they're "overrated, IN YOUR OPINION." If we're talking personal opinion than we're free to pick a top 10 list purely based on that, as my second one is. However, if we're basing it on more objective factors that you listed in your OP, such as "longevity, influence, and craftsmanship" then our opinions shouldn't enter into the discussion. Like I said, Ashbery has had a profound influence on the last 50 years of poetry; Dickinson's influence is all over 20th century poetry and permeates to this day. It's hard to read any short, aphoristic, elliptical poem without thinking of Dickinson. I don't know how anyone couldn't recognize this regardless of personal tastes. Meanwhile, Asbhery seems to personify postmodernism in poetry, for better or worse.

I'm not terribly interested in showing you instances of "great power" in these poets, especially if you're limiting it to a "short" poem. One thing all three have in common is that they're best in their longer works, whether it's the "medium long" pieces like Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror or Merrill's Lost in Translation, or the book-length works like Merrill's Sandover, Merwin's Folding Cliffs, or Ashbery's Girls on the Run. Really, I feel much the same is true of Stevens, whose real greatness and lasting reputation rests more on his long poems than it does on his much more popular short poems. Anyway, you did list "craftsmanship" as one criteria, and two greatest craftsmen of the century were Auden and Merrill; no poets had a greater grasp on or facility with meter and verse forms. Stable professors in cerebralism? If anything, there's been precious little critical/academic attention given to any of these poets; most of the appreciation for them comes from OTHER poets.

Plus, of all of Stevens' poems to use as an example, why in the world Table Talk? I find nothing remarkable about that poem; I'd be much more likely to use Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour. Anyway, I find Merrill's Lost in Translation (http://jeremygregg.com/quotes/lost-in-translation-by-james-merrill-poem/) superior to either. You're free to disagree, of course. We're also free to disagree about Roethke. I like him alright, but I don't see a great deal of influence, longevity, craftsmanship, etc. He seems to me to be a solid poet with some influence more than a truly great one.

[Lykren]

Can influence really be measured objectively though? I for one would put Plath above Lowell, but that may be due not only to my personal preference, but to my lack of extensive knowledge of American poetry (or poetry in general). That is, if you are going by influence alone I may be missing some factors that place Lowell above Plath - although exactly what factors those could be I have no idea.

Perhaps this also explains my wonderment at your high placement of Poe. He doesn't seem like a very impressive or engaging poet to me, but then, you may be judging by different, more objective criteria.

It's interesting, Morpheus, that you slipped in the word craftsmanship while remarking on Roethke's stature. Craftsmanship seems to me to be an entirely subjective matter. We can't measure it the way we would measure the craftsmanship of a chair, by subjecting it to x amount of use and then seeing how long it takes before it falls apart. Or rather, we do do something similar with poems, but for the best poems it takes many centuries, and even then you can't be sure a poem won't surface and re-gain popularity after being 'dormant' for a while. Essentially I'm saying that I am having a difficult time understanding the concept of objectivity as it applies to poetry.

Finally, that's a great poem you've linked to. Thanks for sharing.

Here's my (purely personal) list of American poets:

1. Dickinson
2. Stevens
3. Ashbery
4. Eliot
5. Whitman
6. W.C. Williams
7. Plath
8. Gluck
9. Pound
10. Crane

[desiresjab]

My quick reply did not post. I don't feel like rewriting it right now. Thanks for the replies. We have much to debate.

[desiresjab]

What would have been interesting is a thread on American poets since 1900, using as the criterion suspected longevity.

[desiresjab]

It is interesting, Morph, that you will not deign to show ten lines of great power from any of your trio of genius professors. Surely you can find something that most would agree is a hell of a stanza worthy of such touting.

Ashbery, Gluck, Crane and Williams make it onto a top ten list, and Frost and Roethke do not? Wow. All I can say is some poets touch you and some do not.

[stlukesguild]

I'm going to have to agree with Morpheus in placing Whitman and Dickinson at the top of the heap... although I would probably add Eliot and Stevens to make up the four Tetrarchs of American poetry. Close upon their heels must be Crane and Frost... and perhaps Pound. I agree that Ashbery's influence has been immense... yet I've never really taken to him much... let alone Lowell. Poe? I think he's overrated and underrated. I agree with Baudelaire and Borges who found much more of poetic interest in his prose tales. Of more contemporary poets I quite admire Wilbur... and Anthony Hecht... but I'm not sure as to their lasting influence. What of some earlier writers? I might suggest Frederick Tuckerman and Herman Melville as well as Emerson... and perhaps Longfellow.

[desiresjab]

I spent the day reading Richard Wilbur. I do not deny he is a good poet, in fact better than the vast majority He has some real moments, such as the eyes open to a cry of pulleys. Being a professor poet, he unfortunatley wants to stock almost every poem with tired classical allusions.

He has fine image making skills. Most of his brilliant images are followed by the facile observations of a man trying not (not very successfully) to sound like Auden making an observation, is the feeling I kept getting. He tries to reach the grand climax, the great conclusion, and usually fails, but not always. We have to give him credit for isolated perfection here and there, usually when he drops the classical allusions and gets real and forgets he is a professor looking for something to write about, as in the charming miniature Barred Owl, wherein Mr. Wilbur even makes a beautiful observation on the power of the word.

I often like poems that are a veiled discussion of poetics and/or the power of language, and it stands to reason that Mr. Wilbur, being a professor needing something to write about, would have this trait.

I liken Mr. Wilbur to an expert boxer with a light to medium punch, who once in a while nevertheless can connect with a haymaker that puts his opponent in the third row. But most of his fights go to a boring decision after an early promise of much action. I like good boxers, but the man with one punch knockout power is what we all want to see.

[desiresjab]

Whitman has such immense stature that sometimes I think he should be set aside while the others fight it out. I feel the big fight is between Frost and Stevens. But remember, I am not counting Elliot or Auden as American poets, and I have decided to take Pound off my list as an American poet, as well. Like the injun halfbreeds in American westerns, they have no nation, except the nation of poets.

If we exclude those three, and leave Whitman out of it, a great many people would feel the big fight was between Stevens and Dickinson. I feel Stevens and Frost both trump Emily, though not by too much. She fixed one of the best isolation stews in the business, but never learned to cook anything else. In her withdrawn way, she still managed to pull a huge amount of universality from her bonnet. An unquestionably great poet. I think it is unquestionable.

Maybe I should not seem so immovable. However, the sheer number of times she managed to hit homeruns qualifies her, I believe, in spite of her shortcomings, and the length of time now that she has stood up. One thing about all true greats, they each have a unique voice, and she sounds like no other.

I believe Frost and Stevens will do well over the long haul, too, their critical reputations waxing and waning down the ages, as they should. Both are unquestionable greats, Stevens a flamboyant inventor, the Tesla of American poetry, Frost the unwilling inheritor of the American bucolic crown, with one of the best ears ever, stubbornly melding the traditional and the modern, the beautiful and the macabre.

I think Stevens is our greatest poetic virtuoso. Sometimes virtuosity is all that is keeping him going, but he is so good at it. Forget his philosophy of poetic paradise, which was a hoax, but never stop enjoying the language...our reddest lord, peer of the populace of the heart.

Stevens' atheistic, aesthetic paradise where poetry was supreme fiction was a mere elaborate posturing from the maestro, the attempt of an insurance executive to find something immortal to write about which he believed in. So Stevens wrote a lot about poetry itself. Eventually he tried to construct his own world view and paradise based on poetry, as Yeats had done. But it was a hoax after all, part of the grand play. In his last days Stevens converted to catholicism with characteristic flippancy...I had better hurry up and get in the fold.

In two hundred years no one will care. The best of Stevens will have been sorted out, all the chaff fallen by the wayside. After the erosion of time, many buttes will still remain.

[Lykren]

It is interesting, Morph, that you will not deign to show ten lines of great power from any of your trio of genius professors. Surely you can find something that most would agree is a hell of a stanza worthy of such touting.

Ashbery, Gluck, Crane and Williams make it onto a top ten list, and Frost and Roethke do not? Wow. All I can say is some poets touch you and some do not.

Frost and Roethke seem like tired poets to me. Their poems never amaze, no matter how carefully crafted they appear to me. With Frost it feels substanceless, idea-less, and with Roethke I am reminded of a person who is convinced he feels deeply, but does not. For example, this line from his famous "In a Dark Time":

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

reminds me of your comment on Wilbur, that he "He tries to reach the grand climax, the great conclusion, and usually fails, but not always." Roethke's conclusion to "In a Dark Time" seems to me limp and cliched, and not even particularly well-formed.

I prefer Wilbur, who is technically more perfect, if not especially more interesting in an emotional sense.

You've mentioned rhythm a few times as though it were of primary importance in judging a poem.

Show me one short poem from any of them as pure and rhythmic as...

and on Crane:

He has no rhythm that I could ever find.

Why do you think that rhythm is a deciding factor in a poem's worth? It is of course a factor, but not the only one. And what precisely do you mean by "pure"? It's an ambiguous term, not really suited to close analysis.

I also feel your judgement of Steven's later work is rather facile;

his philosophy of poetic paradise, which was a hoax.

Why should not a belief in the primacy of aesthetics be a worldview as conducive to genuine emotion and spiritual resonance as any other you could care to describe?

Regarding Dickinson your assessment of her as a poet who could only write about isolation is absurd. Obviously it was a major focus for her, but if we set it in the context of such texts as the master letters:

A love so big it scares
her, rushing among her small
heart- pushing aside the
blood- and leaving her
(all) faint and white in the
gust' arm-
Daisy- who never flinched
thro' that awful parting-
but held her life so tight
he should not see the
wound-

it becomes clear that her poetry blends isolation with fragrances of the passion that begat isolation - and of course it is this awful tension and paradox that forms the main interest of her poetry.

[MorpheusSandman]

Can influence really be measured objectively though? I for one would put Plath above Lowell, but that may be due not only to my personal preference...I'd say influence is relatively objective; even if we can't put a precise number on it, we can certainly see evidence of influence in statements made by poets about who influenced them as well as in the writing itself and how it borrows techniques/styles from past poets. I mean, I don't think many would doubt that TS Eliot was more influential than Edward Lear, even if we can't measure precisely how much. At least it's more objective than just picking what poets appeal to us.

As for Lowell VS Plath, I think there are two major factors: one is that Lowell came first, two is that he was far more prolific. Both worked in the "confessional" mode, but that was a mode Lowell very much pioneered on Life Studies and For the Union Dead; both of which came out before Plath's Ariel, by far her most important/influential work.


It's interesting, Morpheus, that you slipped in the word craftsmanship while remarking on Roethke's stature. Craftsmanship seems to me to be an entirely subjective matter.Again, I think craftsmanship is relatively objective, but much less so than influence. We tend to infer craftsmanship by knowing something about the craft ourselves and how much time/effort it takes to achieve certain things. I mostly associate it with a facility with form, because without form there are as many standards as there are authors and each may have their own peculiar kind of craft that we aren't aware of. But when I see how Merrill and Auden work in every form or level of diction, I know the kind of effort that requires. With so much modern poetry one is compelled to ask what's the difference between it and lineated prose.


Finally, that's a great poem you've linked to. Thanks for sharing.You're welcome; it's a favorite. The remarkable thing there are four (IIRC) others of similar length and just as good in the same volume, Divine Comedies. Of those I was able to find Yannina (http://www.cstone.net/~poems/essamerr.htm) and McKane's Falls (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse/122/6#!/20596171) online.


Frost and Roethke seem like tired poets to me. Their poems never amaze, no matter how carefully crafted they appear to me. With Frost it feels substanceless, idea-less, and with Roethke I am reminded of a person who is convinced he feels deeply, but does not. I mostly agree with this, though I might state it slightly less emphatically, especially for Frost. My problem with Frost is that his range of diction, subject, form and tone was incredibly limited that it becomes monotonous after the while. I can't agree with them being entirely substanceless, but his focus on the "ulteriority" of poetry can often seem to be little more than a game of subtle wits, with common symbols standing in for obviously ambiguous signifeds (like the famous Stopping by the Woods... or The Road Less Traveled). Yet I do think Frost had some genuine thematic concerns, especially his frustrated relationship with Darwin and the nature of design/purpose VS evolution/meaningless. I like Frost best when that sense of anxiety and frustration cracks through the surface, like in his poem Design (http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/design/). I also think he could occasionally craft some poems that were quite provocative, such as The Witch of Coos and Maple, (http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/robert_frost/poems/731) the latter of which may be the best riff ever on Shakespeare's "a rose by any other name" theme. He also had a talent for writing quite memorable lines: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," "good fences make good neighbors," "the best way out is always through," "the woods are lovely, dark and deep," "nature's first green is gold," "We would not see the secret if we could now: we are not looking for it any more," and the list goes on. Only Yeats and Auden had a roughly equal ability for lodging lines in one's head.

I'm less inclined to defend Roethke, though, and more or less agree with your assessment.

[MorpheusSandman]

I'm going to have to agree with Morpheus in placing Whitman and Dickinson at the top of the heap... although I would probably add Eliot and Stevens to make up the four Tetrarchs of American poetry.I think we decided Eliot should be considered international rather than American. If we consider him American then I'd agree with your Tetrarch.


Of more contemporary poets I quite admire Wilbur... and Anthony Hecht... but I'm not sure as to their lasting influence. What of some earlier writers? I might suggest Frederick Tuckerman and Herman Melville as well as Emerson... and perhaps Longfellow.I quite like Wilbur, but I haven't read Hecht. I enjoy most Emerson and Longfellow I've read, but they do seem rather dated now in a way Whitman and Dickinson don't to the same degree. Any opinion on Merrill or Merwin?

[MorpheusSandman]

If we exclude those three, and leave Whitman out of it, a great many people would feel the big fight was between Stevens and Dickinson. I feel Stevens and Frost both trump Emily, though not by too much.Well, like I asked in my last post: what are the standards? Stevens, Frost, and Dickinson were all quite limited in their own ways. All were more of what you'd call "poetic hedgehogs" as opposed to "foxes." Dickinson had her aphoristic, parable-like ellipticism; Frost had his naturalistic dialogue and idiomatic blank verse; Stevens had his dense imagery, symbols, and theories. If we're talking influence, I see more of Dickinson's "aphoristic ellipticism" in modern poetry than I see of the others. Frost's influence was mostly on formalists concerned with writing in form without appearing archaic, but just as many 20th century formalists look either farther or nearer backwards for influence than to Frost (Auden with Hardy, eg). Not many have really imitated Stevens's voice or his thematic concerns, though some have been influenced by his sensuous imagery and obliqueness.

Personally I'd take Stevens, then Frost, then Dickinson; but, objectively, I don't think I can find an argument to put either Frost or Stevens ahead of Dickinson, as much as I agree with your assessment of her limitations.


I think Stevens is our greatest poetic virtuoso. Sometimes virtuosity is all that is keeping him going, but he is so good at it. Forget his philosophy of poetic paradise, which was a hoax, but never stop enjoying the language...The only thing virtuosic about Stevens was his imagistic and linguistic density, that he actually pared down greatly as his career went on. His densest works, The Comedian of the Letter C and Owl's Clover, were both amongst his early collections. My one skepticism with Stevens was his usage of form; does it really matter whether he used couplets or tercets or quatrains or anything else? I never could tell he gave much though to form behind the need for having some consistency.

I really don't know what you mean by his "poetic paradise" as a "hoax." Stevens' life-long poetic theme was the relationship of reality and the imagination, and how they shaped/altered each other. He never, AFAICT, wrote about a "paradise," so much as he wrote about men's attempts to create imaginary paradises and how these always, ultimately failed. The Man With the Blue Guitar is very much about how one embodies the ideal within an art that must falsify. Towards the end of his career, Stevens became much more concerned with the "bareness" of reality, of what was left after one removed all traces of imaginative figuration. It's the bareness he's describing in The Plain Sense of Things and, in his last long work, An Ordinary Evening at New Haven. Meanwhile, Credences of Summer is about the inability to sustain imaginary paradises, and The Auroras of Autumn is about their dissolution.

I think you completely misunderstood the purpose of Stevens' "supreme fiction." In fact, Stevens never laid out what the "supreme fiction" was, but rather provided "notes towards" creating it, stating that it must be abstract, must change, and it must give pleasure. However, he never stated that supreme fiction must be poetry at all (in fact, he took much of his ideas from art critics and philosophers; not other poets). Stevens did, however, think of religion as a "supreme fiction" of the past that embodied all the ideals of its cultures, something he saw lacking in the modern world of science, materialism, naturalism, etc. Given that science had debunked so many of our imaginative ideals, Stevens obsessed over what role the imagination had to play in a reality that was being laid bare and shown to be even antagonistic towards our imagination. Like I said, though, towards the end he seemed as much interested in reality sans imagination, similar to what Yeats described in Meru:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:

That "desolation of reality" very well describes the late Stevens.


It is interesting, Morph, that you will not deign to show ten lines of great power from any of your trio of genius professors. Surely you can find something that most would agree is a hell of a stanza worthy of such touting.Why do you insist on calling them "genius professors?" Anyway, one problem is that the majority of their poetry is not easily available online, and most of the poems I would choose I'd have to copy out by hand after looking them up in my LOA/Collected volumes, and there's no easy way to do that without fetching some weights to hold down the pages while I type, so it's a bit of a hassle. Like I said, I consider the primary strength of those poets to reside in their long works anyway, not in their ability to create a "hell of a stanza" that embodies their greatness. Ashbery annoys and intrigues me in equal degree, but in his long works I find myself absorbed in a way that I rarely am in his short poems; much the same is true of Merwin. The greatness of Merrill's Lost in Translation is in its structural effects, how the puzzle as central subject slowly becomes a metaphor for everything touched on in the poem, from the poet's craft, to his personal history, to national history, to the mind itself. Such things can't be contained within a few lines. I do think Merrill is better in his short poems than Ashbery or Merwin, but most of his best I can't find online. Here's one I really like from his last collection:

B O D Y

Look closely at the letters. Can you see,
entering (stage right), then floating full,
then heading off—so soon—
how like a little kohl-rimmed moon
o plots her course from b to d

—as y, unanswered, knocks at the stage door?
Looked at too long, words fail,
phase out. Ask, now that body shines
no longer, by what light you learn these lines
and what the b and d stood for.

[Pierre Menard]

I might just do a top 5 for now:

It's hard to argue with any of: Whitman, Stevens, Dickinson, Bishop, Merrill, Frost, Crane, Ashbery, Merwin, Pound and so on. All very fine poets. If we could include Eliot, than he'd be at the top with Whitman for me.

I also enjoy Emerson's and Melville's poetry.

I'll throw out some other names (not so much for the objective top ten, but might factor in as a personal favourite for some or generate some discussion): Robert Penn Warren, Richard Howard, Mark Strand, Marianne Moore, Anne Carson (Canadian, but I still think that can count), A.R. Ammons, John Hollander, Stephen Crane, Edwin Arlington Robinson...

[Lykren]

I would have mentioned Anne Carson too, but I thought that was breaking the rules.

[desiresjab]

I understand your appreciation for Wilbur's technique. That is one thing I appreciate about him. A few days before even reading your post I had the same thought from the same Roethke lines you quoted. He has done much better than those lines.

Thanks for the reply, Lykren. Many good things to think about. Rather than replying where we know each other's stance and it may not be likely to change, I will address your question on rhythm.

Yes, rhythm is of outstanding importance in judgung any poem's quality, otherwise what you have is a nice piece of prose such as Galway Kinnell's Oatmeal, which would not suffer an iota if written out as prose, except that now people would call it that. A consideration for rhythm is the one quality I find living in abject poverty within the great abundance of contemporary American poetry. I know the reason. The reason is one some people are going to vilolently disagree with. A main river on the continent of poetry is one which stresses "organic" rhythm and form, a completely destructive term as far as I am concerned, as overworked and useless as the word energy at a spiritualists' roundtable, and which has served to issue wholesale licenses to call anything poetry as long as the line is broken before the end of the page.

Unfortunately, there are not as many Whitmans, Stevens and Ginsbergs as the hopeful would like to think. It takes (as Auden noted) a very good ear to know simply when to break the lines in free verse, and we haven't even gotten to rhythm yet. Organic rhythm has come to mean in the vast majority of practitioners write a good prose line and break it creatively. Break it into stanzas, symmetrical or otherwise, to make it look even more poetic, if you must.

Regular metrical feet (varied adroitly as called for in Pope's Sound and Sense) are no more passe or boring than 4/4 or 3/4 time in music are. The masters seldom use long periods of perfect meter because it soon cloys the appetite for more, yet they often return to regular perfect meter for a spell before another hiatus of "organic" reasoning. Regular line breaks are something that help bring rhythm about,'deed they do, though they are not a sufficient condition in themselves, nor a necessary one.

I am not naiive enough to say everything should be written in metrical verse. Many of my favorite poems are in free verse, and I write in it as well, though not exclusively. Free verse always runs the risk of being nothing more than good prose, and in fact often is.

The same thing Auden said about line breaks applies even more fully to metrical considerations. The world set out blithely to write poetry organically. Almost all that it has so far produced of this variety will fall away, I am personally confident. One of the deepest responses of poetry is as an aural art, a primitive response in which rhyme and regularity functionally contributed to the ease of memorizing a long piece, and which made it memorable. (One of the reasons Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner is much easier to memorize than Blades of Grass).

One willingly gives up a lot when one gives up normal access to this primitive response, so one had better have an awful good reason for doing it. Whitman and Ginsberg had visions not expressible in traditional poetry, being more visionaries than poets especially technique-wise, the way Ramanujan was more visionary than mathmatician, but made lasting contributions to mathmatics.

I don't think Stevens started out with an inexpressible vision. He was not a visionary. He was a virtuoso who could pose as any number of things, a visionary among them, who needed complete freedom in his serious hobby away from the daily grind which confined his exuberant creativity.

Stevens sometimes uses the furniture of formal logic in his poems (reasonable, especially for a lawyer) such as Algebraic capitals and frequent formal phrasing. It is one of his beautiful affectations. Philosopher and logician were other roles that he played, all to add poetic depth, not seriously. I think Stevens started out without a vision, without an overwhelming passion, and constructed his own artificial vision. Artificial, but one whose poetry we would hate to live without. He presented his paradise as a vison for the future, but really it was just a vision for him.

<<Why should not a belief in the primacy of aesthetics be a worldview as conducive to genuine emotion and spiritual resonance as any other you could care to describe?>>

Spiritual resonance with what? A moment ago you said pure was an ambiguous term not appropriate to close analysis. Close analysis shows that time and again Stevens presented his paradise as an alternative to God and religion, not an adjunct. Then he got scared and converted to catholicism in his last days. He cannot be taken serioulsy as atheist or theologian either, I am afraid, no more than his other roles. I am an agnostic myself, before someone calls me a marauding christian.

I cited Emily's greatness quite freely. Pointing out limitations and weaknesses in her work is not off limits. Instead of behaving like a bad lawyer trying to insist that I am saying a poet I already admitted was among the all time greats is one who can only write about isolation, try admitting as a given how limited her scope was because of that isolation. This limitation of scope is likely one reason for her depth. What she really knew were lonliness and isolation, desperate longing, the rest was imagination. Her cottage was a hermit's cave, man. She knew love from books and unrequited inner cravings. Her poetry is as bereft of varied people as her world was. No keen observer of makind, her. These are limitations. Sometimes magical things are wrought by limitations (a veiled argument for form, perhaps). Django Reinhardt and Emily Dickinson both had extreme liabilities in their chosen arts, but managed.

[desiresjab]

The only thing virtuosic about Stevens was his imagistic and linguistic density, that he actually pared down greatly as his career went on.

There might be a little more to it than that. His use of the furniture of formal logic such as syllogisms and algebraic capitals are no less part of his virtuosity than Pagannini's grace notes. He was a man apt to raise any affectation to high art.

The first two lines of Ideas of Order, one of his greatest poems, could have been scanned by Oliver Goldsmith. When he needed formal rhythm, Stevens knew where to find it. The rhymes of the poem are not accidental, either, but like most things in his changeable world, he quickly leaves a notion of regular rhyme behind. But note how he keeps returning to perfect iambic pentameter. The heaving speech of air, a summer sound. And in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, are a few examples. As we beheld her striding there alone. The poem is in iambic pentameter, quite plainly. Oh! blessed rage for order pale Ramon. Some lines are only almost perfect, others stray completely, which is a necessary ingredient for interesting poetry, not just in Stevens ever changeable verse.

Iambic pentameter equals form. Though the verses are broken irregularly, the lines are regular, sometimes five and a half feet.


Why do you insist on calling them "genius professors?"

Because almost every bigtime poet since 1950 is a professor poet, and it tends to show in many cases. Those in high academic positions provide most of the gruel the rest of us are told is good for us.


I really don't know what you mean by his "poetic paradise" as a "hoax." Stevens' life-long poetic theme was the relationship of reality and the imagination, and how they shaped/altered each other.

Another constant reminder was the replacement of religion with his philosophy of aesthetics, the superiority of the former. He was not merely talking about the deficiency of religion in aesthetic terms, but as an object of belief. This is the only part I am disagreeing with, not because I am a religious believer, which I am not, but because Stevens himself jumped to catholicism in his last days. He jumped his own ship, essentially taking out insurance on traditional religion.

I do not think you saw Yeats do this, though I am not certain. If Yeats did, it certainly diminishes the notion of his seriousness in his own system, in the same way that Stevens doing it diminishes the seriousness of some of his suggestions. Hell no, the vice president of Hartford Accident & Indemnity Insurance Company, could not come right out and proclaim atheism, but he did a pretty good job of suggesting it all the way through.

Like yourself, I am handicapped by the internet selection, and the fact that my volume of Stevens is packed in a box in another county.

Stevens' little hypocrisy, which will not affect the evaluation of his poetry in the long run, is what I am pointing out and objecting to.

[MorpheusSandman]

There might be a little more to it than that. His use of the furniture of formal logic such as syllogisms and algebraic capitals are no less part of his virtuosity than Pagannini's grace notes. He was a man apt to raise any affectation to high art.As far as rhetorical forms go, Stevens was far less diverse than, say, Auden. Yes, he had his faux-logical constructions, the modus ponens "if/when X then Y," and the constant "maybes" and "perhapses" that seemed to be attempting to get nearer to the truth, or his sometimes seemingly interminable lists of restatements of either descriptions or apt metaphors, but they became more of a personal stylistic tic than what I'd call an example of virtuosic. By comparison, Auden seemed to be able to draw on just about every style/affectation possible when the fancy took him, and half the time one gets the sense that Auden was just writing to experiment with a new style and letting it dictate content. I never get that sense with Stevens, where form is either facilitory (why isn't there an adjective form of "facilitate?") or merely an expression of how Stevens's mind works.

While it's true that Stevens often worked in classic forms, especially iambic pentameter early on, I never got the sense he was really concerned in making the most of the form in the way that Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth were, and while his lines could "scan" they weren't afraid of sacrificing regularity or even traditionally accepted substitutions if the thought dictated it (eg, hyper-metrics or mid-line spondees, pyrrhics, or trochees). When one looks at most of his rhymed poems, they seemed to rhyme only when he was in a musical mode, and then it had all the regularity of a jazz solo (Man With the Blue guitar being a perfect example). I never got the sense that form was all that important to Stevens, and he eventually settled into those tercets that were simultaneously loose in what they allowed, but consistent in that they were always tercets. But I can't tell that he adapted his thoughts to form, or his form to his thoughts, in remotely the same way that Auden or Yeats did.


Because almost every bigtime poet since 1950 is a professor poet, and it tends to show in many cases. Those in high academic positions provide most of the gruel the rest of us are told is good for us.I don't really see it like this. At least, I think there's at least a dichotomy of academics, your "professors," and other poets, and often they are one and the same (let's not forget that Auden and Eliot were prominent in academia). When it comes to those three, I think only Ashbery is really beloved amongst academics because of how much he's defined postmodernism in poetry. Yet Merwin and Merrill have been relatively neglected, and the critical studies that are available on them are primarily by those poets that just happen to be academics. Particularly with Merrill, I see absolutely nothing about him that's either especially appealing to professors or off-putting for poets and what few "ordinary readers" there are left. While he could be difficult, of all the 20th century's great poets, he must be one of the most accessible. At least, he's no more difficult than Eliot or Early Auden, and quite often as accessible as late Auden and Yeats, perhaps his two biggest influences. Merwin has seemed to garner more popular acclaim than academic acclaim.


Another constant reminder was the replacement of religion with his philosophy of aesthetics, the superiority of the former. He was not merely talking about the deficiency of religion in aesthetic terms, but as an object of belief. This is the only part I am disagreeing with, not because I am a religious believer, which I am not, but because Stevens himself jumped to catholicism in his last days. He jumped his own ship, essentially taking out insurance on traditional religion.I've read a few critical studies on Stevens and none of them mentioned him "jumping to Catholocism." Checking Wikipedia, it seems the report of his baptism has been disputed by none other than his own daughter. Are you sure he actually came back to religious belief? Even if he did, I don't know why you think that would make his work a hoax. There have been authors that have struggled with religious belief/doubt and fluctuated between them, expressing that struggle in their work, only to eventually settle on religion. Auden was one of them, though his Christian conversion showed up almost immediately in his poetry. Does that validate his poetry before the conversion? Not in my mind; poetry, if it tells the truth at all, it should only be the truth of a mind at the moment it's written. As Auden said, the clear expression of mixed feelings. I think too many think that poetry, especially a body of poetry, is a mixed expression of clear feelings and often don't want to accept that poets are humans whose thoughts/opinions/beliefs change over time. Whatever belief Stevens settled on doesn't, IMO, invalidate the aesthetic philosophy as expressed in his poetry.


I do not think you saw Yeats do this, though I am not certain. If Yeats did, it certainly diminishes the notion of his seriousness in his own system...Yeats's "system" seemed to be little more than a method for generating new poetry and even prose. While Stevens constantly wondered to what extent imagination/mind shaped reality, Yeats was always intent on insisting that the mind DID shape reality, which is one reason he embraced Kant and his notions that the mind wasn't just a passive receptor of reality as it is, but rather played a major role in shaping reality. Yeats also rejected the hermetic abstractions of Plato and insisted that we must live in the fullness of reality of our own making. In his poetry, this is perhaps no clearer than in the passes in Amongst School Children when he talks about the philosophers and the need to be amongst the fullness of life and not the spareness of abstractions, or in Dialogue of Self and Soul in which the two presents both poles, where Soul says:

"Such fullness in that quarter overflows
And falls into the basin of the mind
That man is stricken deaf and dumb and blind,
For intellect no longer knows
I, Is from the I, Ought, or I knower from the I Known..."

but Self gets the last word, which was Yeats' consistent conclusion:

"A living man is blind and drinks his drop.
What matter if the ditches are impure?
What matter if I live it all once more?
...
I am content to live it all again
And yet again, if it be life to pitch
Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch,
A blind man battering blind men;
Or into that most fecund ditch of all,
The folly that man does
Or must suffer, if he woos
A proud woman not kindred of his soul.
I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Yeats was willing to live in the fullness, blindness, fecundity of what imagination made of life, while Stevens was not. Stevens ended his career speaking on the desolation of reality while most of his early poetry was flush in the midst of the imagination, even when it was the fluctuations of imagination like the perspectives on the statue in Owl's Clover.

[desiresjab]

<Even if he did, I don't know why you think that would make his work a hoax.>

My normal procedure is to dump a discussion where I keep getting misquoted after numerable explanations. I can't help it if WikiPedia is your for forking source, pal. Sayanora.

[MorpheusSandman]

My normal procedure is to dump a discussion where I keep getting misquoted after numerable explanations. I can't help it if WikiPedia is your for forking source, pal. Sayanora.:smilielol5: This post is so laughably, ironically wrong in so many ways I half suspect you were drunk when you wrote it:

1. I never misquoted you. You said specifically: "Forget his philosophy of poetic paradise, which was a hoax," which I addressed in my first post by stating Stevens didn't have a "philosophical poetic paradise," then you clarified by "hoax" you meant "Stevens himself jumped to catholicism in his last days... Stevens' little hypocrisy... is what I am pointing out and objecting to." which I responded to in my last post in two ways, first by stating I'd never heard of this conversion, second by stating that I don't see how that invalidated Stevens' philosophy or made it a hoax. A hoax implies a knowing trick, which wouldn't describe Stevens' conversion; nor would it be hypocritical even IF Stevens converted, because a change of mind does not amount to hypocrisy.

2. For all your apparent dislike for being misquoted, you seemed to miss where I said I'd read "a few critical studies on Stevens and none of them mentioned him 'jumping to Catholocism,'" and only in light of this lack of mentioning did I check Wikipedia. So for you to state that Wikipedia is "my source" is close to a misquote since I alluded to other sources that didn't mention them.

3. This naive bashing of Wikipedia needs to stop. In two studies done, experts rated Wikipedia higher than non-experts (http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/11/8296/) and in a random sampling of 42 studies Wikipedia was found to be as reliable as Encyclopedia Britannica (http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/12/5768-2/). Anyway, anyone knows a reference source is only as good as its own references, and Wikipedia usually cites its references. If it doesn't, THEN there's cause to question what's stated.

4. In the case of Stevens, there are references given. Stevens's daughter, Holly, disputes the conversion here: Peter Brazeau, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, New York, Random House, 1983, p. 295 (according to Wiki's citation). Apparently, the only "evidence" for the conversion is a statement made by the priest at Stevens's hospital 20 years after Stevens's death. Helen Vendler, one of the leading scholars on Stevens's work, wrote a letter to the man who reported it. Their letters can be read, surprise surprise, in the citations on Wikipedia:
Archives of the Holy Cross Fathers (Eastern Province) (AHCFE), North Easton, Massachusetts, 02356. Helen Vendler's letter (dated 8/28/09): "Dear Father Chichetto: I am sorry to have annoyed you by my putting of quotes around the word 'baptism.' I simply wanted to indicate by the quotation marks my skepticism about the fact. Of course, I did find something 'arwy' in Father Hanley's account, but I have never accused Father Hanley of prevarication, only of forgetfulness. I believe he believed that things happened as he said, but he was interviewed twenty years after Stevens' death. Of course I credit the first part of Father Hanley's story concerning conversations with Stevens during Stevens' first day in the hospital between 26 April and 11 May. He returned to the hospital with disseminated cancer in July, and Father Hanley says that the baptism took place 'a few days before his death.' Stevens had not apparently requested baptism in April during his first stay in the hospital. Of course, I can imagine Stevens discussing religion with a priest who was attempting to convert him, but nothing in his poetry or prose suggests any wish to be a member of any church. It's therefore hard to believe Father Hanley's recollection. And it is harder to believe because there is no written record and no contemporaneous evidence. I can understand reasons why people might request that a baptism be kept private. Father Hanley does not describe any such request by Stevens, so the absence of a written record becomes more inexplicable. Father Hanley, in his long service, no doubt conseled, consoled, and baptized many dying people. It seems to me quite possible that he confused Stevens with someone else. Faulty memories are common in all of us, and it does not seem to me at all probable that Stevens would have requested baptism, have requested secrecy, or have responded with the cliche, 'Now I am in the fold.' Such language is inconsistent with Stevens' abhorrence of chiche. I do not impugn Father Hanley's veracity, only his memory. In the absence of any contemporary testimony and any recorded notice, I think that any biographer would agree that an unsupported recollection, voiced twenty years after the fact, cannot be taken as conclusive. There is nothing in Stevens' life and writing that makes a request on his part for baptism plausible or believable. It makes no difference to the writing, of course, which was in any case complete before Stevens' hospitalization. Yours truly, Helen Vendler"
AHCFE, Fr. Chichetto's letter (dated 9/2/09): "Dear Helen Vendler, I didn't expect you to agree with everything I put down in my letter to you. It is disturbing, however, when you ignore the testimony of Dr. Edward Sennett (in charge of the Radiology Dept. at St. Francis Hospital when Stevens was admitted both times [1955]) and the Sisters with whom I talked in 1977 (and later) who believed Fr. Hanley's account. They never spoke of any kind of forgetfulness or memory loss on Fr. Hanley's part, whether noble (when one intentionally does not remember injuries, mischief, etc.) or unmeant (when one unintentionally cannot remember things owing to trauma, confusion or some other mental impairment). What provoked me NOT to visit Fr. Hanley in 1977 was their testimony that his account in 1955 was credible and that they believed Stevens was baptized. The Sisters had no reason to doubt Hanley's word, one of whom worked with him and knew him quite well. You seem to want to ignore that. Do you really believe they were ALL taken in by Fr. Hanley's 'forgetfulness,' by his 'mental impairment,' in 1977, when he was alive, retired, and in touch with them? (He lived only a half hour away from them!) Dr. Sennett was too sharp a person and knew the Sisters too well to believe they were being deluded and misled owing to Fr. Hanley's 'memory loss.' Also, in your response, you ignore the fact that a number of priests in the past refrained from recording (in nearby parishes and hospitals) the baptisms of certain dying people. I myself, for example, remember baptizing two people and leaving their baptisms unrecorded on two different occasions. That is, I baptized two people (unconditionally and absolutely), gave them Communion, and didn't record their baptisms in a nearby parish or at the hospital – for many reasons, not the least being that the dying person wanted no Catholic funeral and preferred that his/her 'reception' remain private (i.e., between himself/herself and God). I mentioned this in my first letter. Such private baptisms did occur in New England and elsewhere! (Today, of course, federal law and new legislation requires that some sort of record of a person's baptism be kept in the hospital as part of the deceased person's medical history. But that was not always the case in the past. And it is anyone's guess as to whether priests abide by those rules today; they pick and chose so freely.) Finally, to assume that because 'nothing in his [Stevens'] poetry or prose suggests any wish to be a member of any church' he therefore could never have requested a private baptism flies in the face of so many 'hour of death' accounts of the dying, many of whose private testimonies, disclosures, groundless terrors contradict the reckonings and calculations erected or founded on their earlier lives (and, in this case, the person's writings). The dying often believe for themselves; not for another person or for the sake of some book they wrote. Any person who has witnessed the dying also knows that they 'say' and disclose their sentiments (in words and gestures) better than the witnesses or those around them can, foolish cliches and all. In conclusion, I don't think this response to your letter will dissuade you from holding your own belief that Fr. Hanley was forgetful, etc. Indeed, reasoning further against your opinion in this matter would be like fighting against a shadow – all-consuming, exhausting without affecting the shadow. I also sincerely believe you can't change. As a critic, you have too much invested in your opinion. (One of my colleagues lent me her THE MUSIC OF WHAT HAPPENS to read. In that book you are quite adamant about Hanley on page 80.) However, based on Dr. Sennett's and the Sisters' propriety of feeling for Fr. Hanley and their belief that he was telling the truth in 1977 as he was in 1955, I do believe Stevens was baptized privately (though in academic journals his baptism will always be lightly condemned, censured, or laid aside as 'inconsistent' with his writings). I also believe that the baptism should never have been made public. Stevens was a great 'unnamer,' to quote Harold Bloom, and Fr. Hanley should have left his baptism unnamed, as it were, anonymous, like a 'blindness cleaned.' Sincerely, (Fr.) James Chichetto, C.S.C."Having read both, I'm inclined to side more with Vendler. We basically have a 20-year-old recollection VS the entire body of Stevens's writing, none of which in poetry or prose suggests an interest in religion beyond the aesthetic, and his daughter's own disputation of the matter.

Anyway, you're more than welcomed to "dump this discussion," but methinks your reasons for doing so are quite dishonest, as I have not misquoted you, and have responded directly to your points, and you've failed to back up your statements. I suspect you suddenly realized you COULDN'T support them and are just trying to save face as opposed to admitting a mistake. It's OK to be wrong, you know. :)

[desiresjab]

When a priest baptizes Frank Sinatra he will remember that he did it, recorded or unrecorded. No evidence I know of has surfaced supporting the senility of the good father.

If Stevens did convert, there is no reason to believe he will not be impugned in future critical studies. Such attacks will provide no lasting blemish on his body of work. Being a renouned scribe, he was a man with the obvious personal fault of selfishness when it came to his own time. Perhaps he felt the black eye Hemingway gave him had been not quite enough to pardon the faults of a bilious old capitalist for years of impatience with others.

His body of work seems narrow. He was usually exploring the same ideas. His poetic landscape is also void of real people, the people being props, rhetorical conveniences, when they come into a poem at all. The latter is perhaps not a major fault. To me it is not. The narrowness seems a significant defect, though. I never have the sense of a real man moving through a populated world, as I do in Auden.

Auden slaps Stevens and Frost around like tow-headed stepchildren, if he were only available as an American. He has the best batting average of any poet I can think of. Time and again he hits homeruns from every type of park. A homerun can be hit from minature parks, too, and are just as difficult. In a ten liner you are batting against Eddie Feigner at forty feet instead of Sandy Koufax at sixty.

[MorpheusSandman]

Frank Sinatra and Wallace Stevens are hardly people with the same level of notoriety or recognizabilty, and human memory is faulty when it comes to what happened 20 minutes ago, much less 20 years. One doesn't have to blame it on "senility" at all: a 40 year recalling what happened at 20 would be almost as unreliable as a 90 year old recalling what he did at 70. Human memory is extremely fallible, and the combination of a lack of any documentary evidence, Stevens's entire body of writing, and the disputation of his own daughter would lead one, I think, to question such a memory. Anyway, there is far too little evidence to state anything with certainty, and any impugnment would have to come with an "if he did" attached.

I agree about his body of work being narrow. Stevens is one of those who developed a very singular theme and accompanying symbolic system. He himself said that (paraphrased) the problem with him was that life was an affair of people not places, but for him it was an affair of places. Yet, as Helen Vendler has argued in her Words Chosen Out of Desire, much of Stevens's philosophical aesthetic investigations sprung out of the emotions and desires of real life, which explains much of the emotions behind his poetry even with its lack of people.

I certainly don't disagree with your positive assessments of Auden, but I'm not sure how much he "slaps Stevens... around." Auden himself distinguished between "major" and "minor" artists by saying that the former are those that tried to touch on all of humanity, while the latter created their own universes out of narrow concerns; he went on to say that very often our favorite artists will be the minor ones because they speak more strongly to our particular personality, while the major ones are often too universal to be so personal. For those Stevens speaks to, he can be amongst the most intimate and personal of poets. Auden's diverse universality generates in me more intellectual admiration than the kind of aesthetic, even emotional profundity I get out of Stevens. Auden was not without his faults either; have you read Randall Jarrell's lectures on Auden? They are incredibly insightful but are also quite frequently negative. Yet even when I disagree with Jarrell's qualitative assessments (I'd be more inclined to reverse his judgment of Paid on Both Sides being a masterpiece and The Age of Anxiety being the embodiment of all that's wrong in Auden), I don't think one can easily dismiss them either.

All that said, both Auden and Stevens are amongst my favorite poets, and would be very close on my personal list. Whom I prefer would probably depend on my mood at the time I was asked.

[desiresjab]

Time to leave the professor poets now. I am going to start a thread on 20th century poets in English.

[Nick Capozzoli]

I prefer not to think about the "best American poets" but rather the "best American poems" or just the "best poems"... Great poems are rare, and I appreciate them whoever wrote them. WC Williams wrote many good poems, but some are better than others, IMHO. "To a dead journalist" and the poem beginning with "By the road to the contagious hospital" are great poems. ED's "'Twas warm at first like us" is great and stands out from her other poems. There are many other less known American poets, such as McMichael ("Itinerary"), Hugo ("Driving Montana"), Momaday ("Angle of Geese"), etc. that wrote truly excellent poems.

Some years ago Yvor Winters and Kenneth Fields edited a collection of poems called "Quest for Reality." I happen to agree with their goal to identify the "best" poetry, and for the most part I agree with their selections.

[desiresjab]

When does the weeding out begin, or has it already? Who is fading, and may not return for a while or ever? Who was big, but is not so big anymore?

Stienbeck, Hemingway, Faulkner and Bellow are safe for now it seems, in fiction, but I can't think of an American poet from the 20th century that I think is comparably secure, outside of Frost, and not counting Eliot as an American but an internationalist.

Like it or not, Frost is as secure as secure can be. People will keep on loving him and reading him and interpreting him new ways. Stevens may be the greater poet, which is still debated, but Frost will always be loved by many and Stevens will continue to be read by poets and critics. Stevens may, too, be secure, but just do not look for anything more from him. His reputation will not suddenly soar into popularity and seize public imagination. He will speak only as he has spoken.

When you have one in your midst, I think you know it. Plenty of people realize it with you... The man on the street. That is the way it was with Shakespeare and Whitman and Frost too. People knew during their lifetimes they were pretty special. They talked to you. It was understood that Yeats was an all time great before he was dead.

We have not had a poet who both speaks to the masses and satisfies the critics since Frost

There will be those that come back, literally from the dead, to entertain us anew. However, we do not know who those are. We can get a better read on who is fading from us.

I cannot think of any 20th century American poets whose reputations I whose reputations I believe to have already been moved to the all time great ledger,

[The Comedian]

Top Ten?

I'm not going to contribute a list, but I will speak some kind words for Longfellow. I honestly can't think of a single poet who can draw in a skeptical audience (of poetry) like him. He's anti-modernest, inclusive, simple, aural. . . . I've read much of his work and I can totally see why he was so popular in his day and why the modernists and postmodernists relegated him to the Wal-mart literature section. But when I go to poetry, not as a professor or scholar, but as someone who looks for a verse to put an idea in such a pleasing way, I go to Longfellow. He's the Epicurus of poetry.

[MorpheusSandman]

We have not had a poet who both speaks to the masses and satisfies the critics since FrostA large part of that, I think, can be blamed on the invention of so many new forms of popular entertainment in the 20th century, from photography to film to recorded music to television to video games to the internet. Frost may have been the last popular/critically acclaimed poet because he was around largely before the explosion of new media (at least, his popularity started before then). If we were still in the 19th century where the middle class only had literature, painting, and music concerts to choose from, I think there's little doubt that many late-20th century poets would've achieved that same level of popular and critical praise.

If there is a legitimate problem with contemporary poetry it's that it has no real casual readership in the way there are "casual" moviegoers, "casual" music listeners, "casual" gamers, etc. Most everyone who reads poetry either writes it, teaches it, and/or REALLY loves reading it. Of course, I could say the same thing about photography and painting, so poetry is hardly alone. I always think, though, that are is healthier when there's that tension and debate between the "popular" and the "connoisseur" tastes.

[mortalterror]

1.T.S. Eliot-
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet–and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

2.Ezra Pound-
Make-strong old dreams lest this our wold lose heart.

For man is a skinfull of wine
But his soul is a hole full of God
And the song of all time blows thru him
As wind thru a knot-holed board.

Tho man be a skin full of wine
Yet his heart is a little child
That croucheth low beneath the wind
When the God-storm battereth wild.

3.Robert Frost-
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

4.Walt Whitman-
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wander'd alone, bareheaded, barefoot,
Down from the shower'd halo,
Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they
were alive,
Out from the patches of briers and blackberries,
From the memories of the bird that chanted to me,
From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard,
From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears,
From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist,
From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease,
From the myriad thence-arous'd words,
From the word stronger and more delicious than any,
From such as now they start the scene revisiting,
As a flock, twittering, rising, or overhead passing,
Borne hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly,
A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,
Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves,
I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,
Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,
A reminiscence sing.

5.Poe-
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore -
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Nameless here for evermore.

6.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 grew 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 but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

7.Edwin Arlington Robinson-
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
'Good-morning,' and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich - yes, richer than a king -
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

8.Carl Sandburg-
HOG Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

9.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis,
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.

There the wrinkled old Nokomis
Nursed the little Hiawatha,
Rocked him in his linden cradle,
Bedded soft in moss and rushes,
Safely bound with reindeer sinews;
Stilled his fretful wail by saying,
‘Hush! the Naked Bear will hear thee!’
Lulled him into slumber, singing,
‘Ewa-yea! my little owlet!
Who is this, that lights the wigwam?
With his great eyes lights the wigwam?
Ewa-yea! my little owlet!’

10.Wallace Stevens-
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

[Poetaster]

9.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow-
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
"Forward, the Light Brigade!
"Charge for the guns!" he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"
Was there a man dismay'd?
Not tho' the soldier knew
Someone had blunder'd:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.

Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.

That's not a Longfellow poem, that's Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. Tennyson was also British.

[mortalterror]

That's not a Longfellow poem, that's Alfred Lord Tennyson's 'Charge of the Light Brigade'. Tennyson was also British.

Gee, you're right. All these years I thought that was a Longfellow poem. I guess, I should change the example to something from Evangeline or the Song of Hiawatha.

[Poetaster]

Gee, you're right. All these years I thought that was a Longfellow poem. I guess, I should change the example to something from Evangeline or the Song of Hiawatha.

Longfellow is funny for me, I both like him and dislike him at the same time, he still has many good poems to pick from. :)

[HCabret]

I am new here, and you folks have probably discussed this one before.There is a lot of disagreemnt still, I am sure.

For instance, what criterion does one use to answer the question? We could go by talent, historical influence, personal impact, critical consensus...or an intuitive combination.

People will vote primarily by how much they like a certain poet, by how much emotional impact that poet has had on them personally. But there are other considerations that can be weighed.

I think Whitman was the greatest American poet, but not the best. He was often boring and long winded, he was not a great craftsman but a man of passion, a mighty spirit with a pen. He is our poetic spokesman for America's period of legendary fame, and cannot be toppled. Frost and Stevens were better craftsmen, as well as many others.

My own list is based on the core strength of a small number of the best poems of each author IMO, but also on things like longevity and body of work, influence, craftsmanship, etc.

But it is also based upon the ignorance of certain areas and certain poets. If a poet is not on this list it may mean they never managed to hook me with Frost's immortal wound. Maybe I just do not like them. I have tried most. Hart Crane, for instance, could never make it onto my list. He has no rhythm that I could ever find.

Is this a safe list, or pretty ragged, and why?

1 Whitman
2 Roethke
3 Stevens
4 Frost
5 Dickinson
6 Poe
7 R. Lowell
8 Snodgrass
9 Pound
10 SandburgWhat about TS Eliot? How does he not make a list of Great American Poets?

[desiresjab]

What about TS Eliot? How does he not make a list of Great American Poets?

This was a while back. I am not sure why I did that. I may have considered him British because of his ex-patriotism. If that were the case I should have eliminated Pound, too, and included Auden. I don't think I was shock-jocking the folks, though I figured not too many would agree with my selections of Roethke and Snodgrass. In addition, I don't know why I have Pound on there at all. He was a literature critic for the ages but I do not find most of his poetry even readable. It always seemed pretentious and consciously trying too hard to be great literature amidst its trillion allusions. It has been a few years since I picked up any Pound. Maybe I would like him now. However, I have found my tastes to be somewhat stable regarding past preferences and dislikes. The short answer to your questions is I don't know.

[HCabret]

This was a while back. I am not sure why I did that. I may have considered him British because of his ex-patriotism. If that were the case I should have eliminated Pound, too, and included Auden. I don't think I was shock-jocking the folks, though I figured not too many would agree with my selections of Roethke and Snodgrass. In addition, I don't know why I have Pound on there at all. He was a literature critic for the ages but I do not find most of his poetry even readable. It always seemed pretentious and consciously trying too hard to be great literature amidst its trillion allusions. It has been a few years since I picked up any Pound. Maybe I would like him now. However, I have found my tastes to be somewhat stable regarding past preferences and dislikes. The short answer to your questions is I don't know.
Ezra Pound was a fascist bigot, but his poetry is extremely influential to both poetry and other fields of artistic expression. Also we would not have Ulysses or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock without Pound. Pound also edited The Wasteland into the beauty that it is. In 1917 Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned."

Arthur Miller called Pound "worse than Hitler" and for much of the mid 20th century, all modernists were associated with fascism, even Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Keynes. You may not like Pound as a person, but the greatness of his work is undeniable.

[desiresjab]

Ezra Pound was a fascist bigot, but his poetry is extremely influential to both poetry and other fields of artistic expression. Also we would not have Ulysses or The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock without Pound. Pound also edited The Wasteland into the beauty that it is. In 1917 Carl Sandburg wrote in Poetry: "All talk on modern poetry, by people who know, ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned."

Arthur Miller called Pound "worse than Hitler" and for much of the mid 20th century, all modernists were associated with fascism, even Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, and Keynes. You may not like Pound as a person, but the greatness of his work is undeniable.

Pound's influence is undeniable. The greatness of his poetry is questionable. His ideas, not his poetry, made a huge impact. His stupidity on political matters means he was a political idiot. The fool made radio broacasts supporting fascism, but this to you only means he was a modern. What makes you think we would not have had the works you mentioned without Ez? We would have had them in his unedited form. They may not have been as good as what we are familiar with, but they would exist. If left unpublished, they would nonetheless have been found in notebooks after the authors' deaths.

I find some of Pound's poetry to be readable, some to be good or near great. Unfortunately, the bulk of it is pedantic pap.

[HCabret]

Pound's influence is undeniable.Yes.


The greatness of his poetry is questionable. His ideas, not his poetry, made a huge impact.The Cantos were hugely influental of poetry. Allen Ginsgurg loved The Cantos.


His stupidity on political matters means he was a political idiot. The fool made radio broacasts supporting fascism, but this to you only means he was a modern.He was a Modernist. Modernism was a far reaching cultural and philosophical movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism


What makes you think we would not have had the works you mentioned without Ez? We would have had them in his unedited form. They may not have been as good as what we are familiar with, but they would exist. If left unpublished, they would nonetheless have been found in notebooks after the authors' deaths.The Waste Land was edited by Pound. That poem would be vastly different without Pound. Pound was directly responsible for getting Ulysses and Prufrock serialized.


I find some of Pound's poetry to be readable, some to be good or near great. Unfortunately, the bulk of it is pedantic pap.The beauty of opinion, is that everyone's got some.

[desiresjab]

Yes.

The Cantos were hugely influental of poetry. Allen Ginsgurg loved The Cantos.

He was a Modernist. Modernism was a far reaching cultural and philosophical movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism

The Waste Land was edited by Pound. That poem would be vastly different without Pound. Pound was directly responsible for getting Ulysses and Prufrock serialized.

The beauty of opinion, is that everyone's got some.

No doubt I overstepped my own qualifications. If Mr. Pound must be slammed, I think it should be by someone more qualified than myself. I recant that he is not a great poet, for the reason that I do not know. I have not read him intensely enough to be sure. To me he was not, though he was possibly the most important critic and reviser of others' work in 20th century literature, which I have recognized for many years. I have always loved him without loving his poetry or his politics. I liked some of his poetry but loved very little of it. All the things you mentioned about him I already knew. If I remember correctly he cut the Waste Land in half with his editing. I think he also revised and submitted some poetry of Yeats once without permission. The true test is that both these giants in the end accepted his revisions and forgave him his lack of tact. They must have recognized that he was an idiot savant of sorts and that his dedication to literature was on a level with their own. In literature I think he had complete integrity.

[tido123]

I love Dickinson

[CWolfieVan]

My personal favorites:
1. Eliot (line for line, none of the Whitman masterpieces move me as much as Eliot's best poems)
2. Frost (Provide, Provide is so impressive)
3. Whitman
4. Dickinson
5. Anne Carson
6. Wallace Stevens
7. Elizabeth Bishop
8. James Dickey
9. Robert Lowell
10. John Berryman

but it's a ragged list, the 5-10 on the list don't impress me remotely as much as Shelley, Wordsworth, Milton, Byron, Tennyson, Browning, etc.

[PeachSodaLover]

Carl,Sandburg