Greatest/Favourite Poets of the 20th Century (in all languages)

[Pierre Menard]

The 'Greatest Poets of the 20th Century in English' produced some interesting discussion and quite a lot of posts (4 pages seems quite a lot these days on litnet), so I thought i'd set up a similar topic, but for all languages, not just English language poets (solely so we can discuss a broader range of poets).

I know quite a few of these topics have been done before, but it can't hurt to have an updated one.
I'm also fully aware that there is a big difference between 'greatest' and 'favourite' but I noticed people on the other topic talked about both, so the option is there to post both (obviously many will overlap).

Feel free to post poems and talk about translations which you particularly enjoyed (translation being a major part of any discussion of foreign language poets).

Hopefully we can conjure up a few posts. Or not, and then I will never make a topic again. :D


Just to start, my own list (of a few favourites):

- Rilke (trans. Edward Snow, Stephen Mitchell)
- Milosz (His collected poetry is largely translated by himself and Robert Hass, with a few other translators throughout. I hugely recommend the collected poems as Milosz had a large hand in the whole translation process)
- Fernando Pessoa (trans. Zenith)
- Tomas Transtromer (trans. Fulton, Hass)
- Anna Akhmatova (trans. Herschenmeyer, D.M Thomas)
- Eugenio Montale (Trans. Arrowsmith, Young, Galassi)

There's obviously a lot more, but just a few names to start. (I'll expand on such poets and post some poems at a later date)

And the English language faves: Stevens, Eliot, Yeats, Crane, Geoffrey Hill, Merwin, Heaney, and a number of others. Just starting to get into Merrill as well, which should make Morpheus happy.

[Iain Sparrow]

I'm going with my all time favorite... English poet, and songwriter... Freddie Mercury.
This is a beautifully rendered and melodic piece about a high class prostitute...


Killer Queen

She keeps her Moet et Chandon
In her pretty cabinet
'Let them eat cake' she says
Just like Marie Antoinette
A built-in remedy
For Kruschev and Kennedy
At anytime an invitation
You can't decline

Caviar and cigarettes
Well versed in etiquette
Extraordinarily nice

She's a Killer Queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laserbeam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime
Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
Wanna try

To avoid complications
She never kept the same address
In conversation
She spoke just like a baroness
Met a man from China
Went down to Geisha Minah
Then again incidentally
If you're that way inclined

Perfume came naturally from Paris
For cars she couldn't care less
Fastidious and precise

She's a Killer Queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime

Drop of a hat she's as willing as
Playful as a pussy cat
Then momentarily out of action
Temporarily out of gas
To absolutely drive you wild, wild..
She's all out to get you

She's a Killer Queen
Gunpowder, gelatine
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytime

Recommended at the price
Insatiable an appetite
You wanna try...

[MorpheusSandman]

I don't read a lot poetry in translation except for the canonical classics (Homer, Virgil, Dante, etc.) where it's unavoidable. I just know how much is lost in translation at the best of times, but especially in poetry where things like rhythm, sound, rhyme, etc. often play as large an aesthetic role as what's actually being said. That said, from the 20th century I do love what I've read from Neruda and Transtromer. There was an article on the latter in American Poetry Review several months back and it was probably the best thing I've read in that journal to date. Despite the translation problem, he seems like a genuine great. I also very much like what I've read from Riilke. Thanks for the Milosz rec; it's always nice to know the original author was involved in the translation.


Just starting to get into Merrill as well, which should make Morpheus happy.Indeed. I need more people to chat with about Merrill. :)

[Whosis]

Maybe someone can help me with this one. There's this haiku (I believe it's famous) that depicts a tree leaf falling from a branch to be a butterfly. It's nice, inventive imagery.

[desiresjab]

I have only read three of your foreign authors more than a smattering. I haven't read all of Montale or Neruda either. Twenty Love Poems and A Song of Despair is the part of Neruda that got famous. Political poetry usually does not interest me unless it is satire. Foreign speaking satire usually does not interest me because I am not intimate enough with details. I prefer the lyricism of Rilke.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/archaic-torso-of-apollo/

These few lines by Montale, 32 English syllables, show the slayer he was.

Do not cut, scissors, that face
alone in fading memory,
do not lose her listening wonder
in my everlasting haze.

Only on those poets I know:

1 Yeats
2 Neruda
3 Rilke
4 Auden
5 Montale

[Sir Guyon]

At present I would say Hart Crane, here is a selection from his foreboding Broken Tower:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thighs embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope – cleft to despair?

The steep encroachments of my blood left me
No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower
As flings the question true?) -or is it she
Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes
My veins recall and add, revived and sure
The angelus of wars my chest evokes:
What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone
(Not stone can jacket heaven) – but slip
Of pebbles, – visible wings of silence sown
In azure circles, widening as they dip

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

[mortalterror]

1.T.S. Eliot- The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
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.Yeats- The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

3.Ezra Pound- Make strong old dreams
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.

4.Robert Frost- The Road Less Traveled
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.'

5.Carl Sandburg- Chicago
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,

6.Gabriele D'Annunzio- The Rain in the Pinewood
Rain falls on the pine trees
Scaly and bristling,
Rain falls on the myrtles-
Divine,
On the broom-shrubs gleaming
With clustered flowers,
On the junipers thick
With fragrant berries,
Rain falls on our faces-
Sylvan,
Rain falls on our hands-
Naked,
On our clothes-
Light,
On the fresh thoughts
That our soul discloses-
Renewed,
On the lovely fable
That yesterday
Beguiled you, that beguiles me today,

7.Rilke- Sonnets to Orpheus
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

8.Neruda- 20 love poems and a song of despair
Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the gray light unwind in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want
to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

9.Guillaume Apollinaire- Alcohol
Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine,
Why must I be reminded again
Of our love?
Doesn't happiness issue from pain?

Bring on the night, ring out the hour.
The days wear on but I endure.

Face to face, hand in hand, so
That beneath
The bridge our arms make, the slow
Wave of our looking can flow.

Then call the night, bell the day.
Time runs off, I must stay.

And love runs down like this
Water, love runs down.
How slow life is,
How violent hope is.

Come night, strike hour.
Days go, I endure.

Nor days nor any time detain.
Time past or love
Can not come again.
Under Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.

Bring on the night, ring out the hour.
Days wear away, I endure.

10.Paul Valery- The Young Fate
Who is that weeping, if not simply the wind,
At this sole hour, with ultimate diamonds?...But who
Weeps, so close to myself on the brink of tears?

This hand of mine, dreaming it strokes my features,
Absently submissive to some deep-hidden end,
Waits for a tear to melt out of my weakness
And, gradually dividing from my other destinies,
For the purest to enlighten a broken heart in silence.

11.Federico Garcia Lorca- Death of the Matador
But now he sleeps without end.
Now the moss and the grass
open with sure fingers
the flower of his skull.
And now his blood comes out singing;
singing along marshes and meadows,
sliding on frozen horns,
faltering soulless in the mist
stumbling over a thousand hoofs
like a long, dark, sad tongue,
to form a pool of agony
close to the starry Guadalquiver.

12.Thomas Dylan- Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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

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

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

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

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

13.W.H. Auden- The Shield of Achilles
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who’d never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

14.A.E. Houseman- The Oracles
'Tis mute, the word they went to hear on high Dodona mountain
When winds were in the oakenshaws and all the cauldrons tolled,
And mute's the midland navel-stone beside the singing fountain,
And echoes list to silence now where gods told lies of old.

I took my question to the shrine that has not ceased from speaking,
The heart within, that tells the truth and tells it twice as plain;
And from the cave of oracles I heard the priestess shrieking
That she and I should surely die and never live again.

Oh priestess, what you cry is clear, and sound good sense I think it;
But let the screaming echoes rest, and froth your mouth no more.
'Tis true there's better boose than brine, but he that drowns must drink it;
And oh, my lass, the news is news that men have heard before.

The King with half the East at heel is marched from lands of morning;
Their fighters drink the rivers up, their shafts benight the air.
And he that stands will die for nought, and home there's no returning.
The Spartans on the sea-wet rock sat down and combed their hair.

15. Zbigniew Herbert - The Envoy of Mr. Cogito
16. Czeslaw Milosz - Rescue
17. Rudayard Kipling - If
18. Derek Walcott - A City's Death By Fire
19. Muhammad Iqbal - Wings of Gabriel
20. Fernando Pessoa - The Message
21. Eugenio Montale- Cuttlefish Bones
22. Paul Eluard - The Capital of Pain
23. Khalil Gibran - The Prophet
24. Constantine P. Cavafy - Ithaca
25. Rabindranath Tagore - Gitanjali
26. Ruben Dario - Songs of Life and Hope
27. Octavio Paz - The Sunstone

[Marbles]

Let's remember Faiz Ahmed Faiz among others, who is with full justification called the Neruda of the Indian Subcontinent.

Before You Came

Before you came things were just what they were:
the road precisely a road, the horizon fixed,
the limit of what could be seen,
a glass of wine was no more than a glass of wine.

With you the world took on the spectrum
radiating from my heart: your eyes gold
as they open to me, slate the color
that falls each time I lost all hope.

With your advent roses burst into flame:
you were the artist of dried-up leaves, sorceress
who flicked her wrist to change dust into soot.
You lacquered the night black.

As for the sky, the road, the cup of wine:
one was my tear-drenched shirt,
the other an aching nerve,
the third a mirror that never reflected the same thing.

Now you are here again—stay with me.
This time things will fall into place;
the road can be the road,
the sky nothing but sky;
the glass of wine, as it should be, the glass of wine.

Translated from Urdu by Naomi Lazard in collaboration with the poet.

----

Nizar Qabbani, the Arab Syrian poet famous for his poems on love, romance, eroticism and feminism. Here's a short poem that truly goes beyond languages and vernaculars.


Language

When a man is in love
How can he use old words?
Should a woman
desiring her lover
lie down with
grammarians and linguists?

I said nothing
To the woman I loved
But gathered
Love’s adjectives into the suitcase
And fled from all languages.

Translator not known to me.

[readspider]

I believe Leonard Cohen is one of our most important living poets. His early works, set to simple music, is powerful and emotive. I submit one of my all time favourites for your consideration.

"Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye"


I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes, many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but now it's come to distances and both of us must try,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.
I'm not looking for another as I wander in my time,
walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme
you know my love goes with you as your love stays with me,
it's just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm,
your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm,
yes many loved before us, I know that we are not new,
in city and in forest they smiled like me and you,
but let's not talk of love or chains and things we can't untie,
your eyes are soft with sorrow,
Hey, that's no way to say goodbye.

[stlukesguild]

German- Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Celan
Italian- Eugenio Montale and Umberto Saba
French- Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Yves Bonnefoy
Spanish- Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Miguel Hernández, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Homero Aridjis, J.L. Borges
Portuguese- Fernando Pessoa, Eugénio de Andrade
Russian- Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova
Greek- Constantine Cavafy, Nikos Kazantzakis, Odysseus Elytis, Giorgos Seferis
Polish- Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski
Czech- Jaroslav Seifert
Hebrew/Israeli- Yehuda Amichai
Japanese- Akiko Yosano
Arabic/Palestinia- Mahmoud Darwish
English- W.B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Walter de la Mare, T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish , Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, e.e. cummings, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, W.S. Merwin, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Charles Wright... and I'm starting to warm to James Merrill.

[mortalterror]

German- Ranier Maria Rilke and Paul Celan
Italian- Eugenio Montale and Umberto Saba
French- Paul Valéry, Guillaume Apollinaire, Pierre Reverdy, and Yves Bonnefoy
Spanish- Antonio Machado, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Pablo Neruda, Vicente Aleixandre, Miguel Hernández, César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Homero Aridjis, J.L. Borges
Portuguese- Fernando Pessoa, Eugénio de Andrade
Russian- Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova
Greek- Constantine Cavafy, Nikos Kazantzakis, Odysseus Elytis, Giorgos Seferis
Polish- Zbigniew Herbert, Czesław Miłosz, Wisława Szymborska, Adam Zagajewski
Czech- Jaroslav Seifert
Hebrew/Israeli- Yehuda Amichai
Japanese- Akiko Yosano
Arabic/Palestinia- Mahmoud Darwish

Celan, Vallejo,Paz, Akhmatova, and Seferis are overrated. Kazantzakis poetry reads like a novel. Other than that, a decent selection.

[Cleanthes]

Celan, Vallejo,Paz, Akhmatova, and Seferis are overrated. Kazantzakis poetry reads like a novel. Other than that, a decent selection.

I don't know about how overrated the others are, but a lot of Vallejo's poetry when read in Spanish, resonates like nothing else I've ever read, so YMMMV. I haven't read Seferis in the original, so I cannot vouch for him as strongly as for Vallejo, but his poetry seems excellent, even in translation.

[Dreamwoven]

Tomas Tranströmer died on 26 March. His poetry was translated into over 60 languages. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011. You can read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomas_Tranströmer

[Winklehurt]

I am surprised nobody has mentioned Philip Larkin or Wilfred Owen. Their poems never fail to send shivers down my spine or put tears in my eyes.

[axolotl]

vallejo, paz, neruda!

[ladderandbucket]

Robinson Jeffers seems criminally neglected.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity
Heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the Molten Mass, pops
And sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
Fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances,
Ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste, haste on decay: not blameworthy; life
Is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than
Mountains: shine perishing republic

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance
From the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lies at the
Monster’s feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man.
A clever servant, insufferable master.
There is a trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught
they say God, when he walked on Earth.

[Dreamwoven]

That's nice, I may look his work up sometime.

[SongsOfOrpheus]

Conrad Aiken is a pleasant discovery for me.

Ballad

Into the wood the old king went
And greeted an ash and touched an oak
Out of his sore soul’s discontent
He sighed and spoke:

“Children I had and they are dead
A wife I had, and she is lost.
What do you do, good trees,” he said,
“At the hour of frost?”

The oak-trees soughed and the ash-tree sighed,
But never a word they gave the king.
The crow in the ash-tree cawed and cried,
But did not sing.

The old king shut his two eyes fast,
And leant his forehead against the tree
And though of all the dead leaves past-
A marvelous company.

They came, they came, like waves of the sea,
These ghosts of leaves came round that king.
They hushed they whispered, ceaselessly;
And he heard them sing:

Children and bright eyed wives we were
But Time forgot us, and no one grieves.
Who remembers us? Who will stir
The ghosts of leaves? . . .

The world is a world of forgotten things
It is better so, far better so.
Wives and children, even a king’s,
Are brief as snow.

And who can be happier than the dead,
By all forgotten, forgetting all?
Come with us King! - the dead leaves said-
The year’s at the fall.

[Nikonani]

1. Hart Crane
2. WH Auden
3. John Ashbery
4. Ezra Pound (perhaps not for his poetry, which I'm rarely fond of, but as the singular driving force behind one of the most cohesive movements in literary history)
5. WB Yeats
6. Wallace Stevens
7. Eliot (not for his poetry at all, which I actually largely dislike, but just as a scholar)
8. Basil Bunting

I don't really care about non-English or non-French poetry

[Eupalinos]

César Vallejo -- who, despite Mortal Terror's claim of being overrated, is probably the greatest poet of the century for me with Osip Mandelstam a close second, then Akhmatova, Celan, Char, Pessoa, etc. -- from the excellent bilingual and complete collection of his poetry translated by Clayton Eschleman:


Considering coldly, impartially,
that man is sad, coughs and, nevertheless,
takes pleasure in his reddened chest;
that the only thing he does is to be made up
of days;
that he is a gloomy mammal and combs his hair. . .

Considering
that man proceeds softly from work
and reverberates boss, sounds employee;
that the diagram of time
is a constant diorama on his medals
and, half-open, his eyes have studied,
since distant times,
his famished mass formula. . .

Understanding without effort
that man pauses, occasionally, thinking,
as if wanting to cry,
and, subject to lying down like an object,
becomes a good carpenter, sweats, kills
and then sings, eats lunch, buttons himself up. . .

Considering too
that man is truly an animal
and, nevertheless, upon turning, hits my head with his sadness. . .

Examining, finally,
his discordant parts, his toilet,
his desperation, upon finishing his atrocious day, erasing it. . .

Understanding
that he knows I love him,
that I hate him with affection and, in short, am indifferent to him. . .

Considering his general documents
and scrutinizing with a magnifying glass that certificate
that proves he was born very tiny. . .

I make a gesture to him,
he approaches,
I hug him, and it moves me.
What's the difference! It moves me. . . moves me. . .


I find in this poet a lack of bluff and a genuine weight of authority very rare among the Modernists. Perhaps part of the cause is he's not a Modernist at all but a late Romantic (and one of the best).

[UlyssesE]

Robinson Jeffers seems criminally neglected.

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity
Heavily thickening to empire (etc)

Great selection. Like Dreamwoven, I'm going to have to look up some other work.

[Marcus1]

Certainly one of the ten best poems I have ever read, I present a Montale which makes the heart shiver with such disarming beauty:


The Lemons by Eugenio Montale


Listen to me, the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.

Better if the hubbub of the birds
dies out, swallowed by the blue:
we can hear more of the whispering
of friendly branches in not-quite-quiet air,
and the sensations of this smell
that can't divorce itself from earth
and rains a restless sweetness on the heart.
Here, by some miracle, the war
of troubled passions calls a truce;
here we poor, too, receive our share of riches,
which is the fragrance of the lemons.

See, in these silences where things
give over and seem on the verge of betraying
their final secret.
sometimes we feel we're about
to uncover an error in Nature,
the still point of the world, the link that won't hold,
the thread to untangle that will finally lead
to the heart of a truth.
The eye scans its surroundings,
the mind inquires aligns divides
in the perfume that gets diffused
at the day's most languid.
It's in these silences you see
in every fleeting human
shadow some disturbed Divinity.

But the illusion fails, and time returns us
to noisy cities where the blue
is seen in patches, up between the roofs.
The rain exhausts the earth then;
winter's tedium weighs the houses down,
the light turns miserly--the soul bitter.
Till one day through a half-shut gate
in a courtyard, there among the trees,
we can see the yellow of the lemons;
and the chill in the heart
melts, and deep in us
the golden horns of sunlight
pelt their songs.

[Eupalinos]

That poem is truly incredible, Marcus1. Gives me every reason to deplore my negligence of Montale thus far.

[Marcus1]

Thanks! Here are my favourite poets if you are interested:


Osip Mandelstam
Paul Celan
Friedrich Hölderlin
Charles Baudelaire
Gabriela Mistral
Mario Benedetti
Alejandra Pizarnik
Federico Garcia Lorca
Pablo Neruda
Eugenio Montale
Vicente Aleixandre
Forugh Farrokhzad
Octavio Paz
Fernando Pessoa
Akiko Yosano
Sakutarō Hagiwara
Anna Akhmatova
Marina Tsvetaeva
William Butler Yeats

[booksncoffee]

Is everyone forgetting Slivia Plath? She has one twisted soul (I mean you kind of have to be to sick your head in the oven you know), but I absolutely love all of her work. Some of her work makes you not surprised she stuck her head in an oven.
Also Edgar Allan Poe because he has some creepy work that sends a chill down your spine

[Eupalinos]

Very nice list... The first four are big with me as well, and there are a handful there I need to look up.

Speaking of Mistral have you come across Frédéric Mistral? 'Mirèio' sounds interesting.

[Marcus1]

I have not heard of Frédéric Mistral, but I will check him out when I have the time. There's still a lot of poets I have yet to explore, especially the Eastern/African poetry, which I intend to do so soon.

Anyway here are my ten favourite poems at the moment:


Akiko Yosano - River of Stars
Charles Baudelaire - Voyage to Cythera
Eugenio Montale - The Lemons
Paul Celan - Death Fugue
Octavio Paz - Between Going and Coming
Rabindranath Tagore - The Further Bank
Forough Farrokhzad - The Wind Will Carry Us
Anna Akhmatova - Requiem
Vicente Aleixandre - Who I Write For
William Butler Yeats - Sailing to Byzantium

Hope you find some of these worthy of appreciation as I do!

[Eupalinos]

Thanks hugely for the reading list. I have about a dozen favorite Celans; one is below.


Es ist nicht mehr
diese
zuweilen mit dir
in die Stunde gesenkte
Schwere. Es ist
eine andre.

Es ist das Gewicht, das die Leere zurückhält
die mit-
ginge mit dir.
Es hat, wie du, keinen Namen. Vielleicht
seid ihr dasselbe. Vielleicht
nennst auch du mich einst
so.


It is no longer
this
heaviness
lowered at times together with you
into the hour. It is
an other.

It is the weight holding back the void
that would
accompany you.
Like you, it has no name. Perhaps
you two are one and the same. Perhaps
one day you also will name me
so.

[stlukesguild]

Is everyone forgetting Slivia Plath?

No. My decision to exclude her from my list of my Favorite (Greatest) poets of the 20th century was quite conscious.

[Marcus1]

I don't see any particular reason to dislike people who enjoy reading Plath, Bukowski, Salinger, etc. instead of the traditional classics. What I do find disconcerting and have issue with is the willfully naive art "critic", a fair representation of the typical Anglophone community, who simply refuses or even denies the credibility of non-English literature, poetry, film or art.