who are your top 5 poets of all time?

[RiteStuff]

and why?

edit: the title should be "who" instead of "what" my apologies

[tojeem]

My first post in the forum, so I thought I’d kick this one off. In no particular order:

1. Edgar Allan Poe - I love his distinctly gothic style, and his rhythm is near-perfect. Favourite poem is "Annabel Lee".

2. A. A. Milne - Though better known for children's novels, Milne's poetry is wonderfully British and quaint. Favourite poem is "The Ballad of Private Chad".

3. Banjo Patterson – Patterson always has a place in my heart. He wrote quintessentially Australian poems about the wonders of outback living. Favourite poem is undoubtedly “Clancy of the Overflow”.

4. Dorothy Parker – A particularly dry cynicism shows through Parker’s poetry. Great for stormy nights. Favourite poem is “Résumé”

5. Spike Milligan - Great comedy genius, but also has a keen sense of how serious poetry should be. Favourite poem is from the collection "Hidden Words" (I believe the poem is untitled, so I've copied it down below).

Poem by Spike Milligan:

What are you saying
Supermarket shopping lady
In the scarlet telephone box.
Full of labelled pollution with secret codes
What are you saying?
Is this your dream booth?
Are you telling some plastic operator
You are Princess Grace
And can he put you through
to Buckingham Palace?
Two decimal pence
Is very little to pay for a dream in Catford.
If only the label on the door didn't say
'Out of order'.
Shouldn't it be on you?

[Alfonso Espada]

1. Robert Frost

2. Emily Dickinson

3. Alfred Lord Tennyson

4. Edgar Allen Poe

5. Shakespear

[desiresjab]

Homer
Dante
Shaksepeare
Goethe
Li Po

[FrankMarcopolos]

Poe
Eliot
Shelley
Shakespeare
Frost

[stlukesguild]

1. William Shakespeare- This should be obvious. He was almost certainly the greatest writer in English and one of the greatest of all time. His use of language and invention of character is nearly unsurpassed.

2. Dante Alighieri- Dante's Comedia strikes me (and many others) as the most perfect and brilliant work of literature ever penned. Perhaps the closest alternatives would be Milton, Homer, or the Persian, Firdausi.

3. William Blake- My favorite of the great English Romantics, Blake wrote poems that seem almost as simply and child-like as nursery rhymes which conceal great depths, as well as the Epics that virtually invent a personal universe to rival Dante or the Bible.

4. Charles Baudelaire- I toyed with Walt Whitman, who was the poet of America and in many ways, one of the first "Modern" poets... but Baudelaire's darker vision is even more Modern, embracing the modern city, decadence, and eroticism in gem-like lyric poems. Other alternatives might include Tennyson, Hugo, Rilke, and Rimbaud.

5. T.S. Eliot- Eliot, like all of the above poets, is someone I have read repeatedly. In selecting five favorite poets (I'll not get into arguments as to "best") I need one poet of the last century. Possibilities include Yeats, Rilke, Montale, Pessoa, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, Neruda, and even Borges. Eliot, however, best speaks to me of period known as Modernism.

[Eugae]

Here we go with it.. I know they are all from Italy (apart from Homer) but it actually follows a logic, which, after the Odyssey inspired the Eneid, is a resumed way of how this country transformed his language and itself,
from the latin of Virgilius to the great innovation of the tuscan of Dante and to the great innovators of the verse and rhytm Leopardi and for instance D'annunzio who for sure introduced the free verse and a new way of poetry to the italian literature, .
1. Homer
2. Virgilius
3. Dante
4. Leopardi
5. D'Annunzio

[Poetaster]

1. Homer
2. Aeschylus
3. Dante
4. Frost
5. Burns

Just personal choices, I had trouble deciding who I would pick, so honourable mentions include: Petrarch, Ovid, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Catullus, Yeats, and Milton.

[glympsy]

My Top best Poets. (https://www.bikramsinghmajithia.org/).

1.Robert Frost
2.John donne
3.dylan thoman
4.charles dickens
5.william shakespeare

[Jackson Richardson]

I don't know any poems by Dickens. He's a wonderful novelist, one of any five favourite novelists of mine, but he's surely not a poet.

[Carmilla]

I have 6. ;)
Robert Browning
John Keats
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
William Shakespeare

[Danik 2016]

My top poets are:
Homer
William Shakespeare
Goethe
Fernando Pessoa
Manuel Bandeira