Favorite Poet

Poe has always been my favorite since high school days. I think its because of his romantic, melancholy dream like quality to his poems and short stories. He also had a plan when he wrote. He had an aesthetic ideal he stroved for and more often then not achieved. The Raven is the best! I almost have it memorized, but my sentimental favorite is Annabel Lee, which I have memorized. When Poe gets rolling his poetry takes off and transcends it into another realm. Example: The last stanza of Annabel Lee along with The Bells, A Dream Within a Dream etc.....

I quite like Tennyson. I like how he uses medieval myths and legends to present his themes. I think a lot of people get hung up on the stories. Of course they're important, but I think he has a more important role than that.

I love Poe, I bought his collection a while ago and I keep it in my bed every night! there is only one other book I keep in my bed and that is the Shakespeare collection I've had that since I was 15.

Poe writes so great poems, I love Annabell Lee it is my all time favourite poem!

Wordsworth is another faveourite, his Lucy poems are so good

How about Pablo Neruda, Luís Cernuda or Konstantinos Kavafis? I love their poems about love and desire...

Body, remember not only how much you were loved
not only the beds you lay on
but also those desires glowing openly
in eyes that looked at you...

Anyway, I like some of the english romantics... Keats, Shelley or Byron... "She walks in beauty" is just so perfect!

:)

wait, i figured it out (you think i would have mentioned him in my favorite poems post, but i had so many others in mind). i've gotta go with w.h. auden. this guy was a master of forms and blended modern with classical so well. some favorites include "but i can't," "ode to terminus," and "in memory of sigmund freud."

My favourite poet is Edgar Allan Poe. "The Raven", "A Dream within a Dream", "The Bells", "Evening Star", "Spirits of the Dead" and many many others are great, full of melancholy and fantasy. I also like Bolesław Leśmian, a Polish poet, who actually drew inspiration from Poe and translated his works into Polish.

Hello. I'm new to this forum and I think it's great!
My favorite poets are: Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Poe, Hart Crane, Auden, Sylvia Plath and many more!! Somebody has already mentionned Cavafy ; I adore him !!

I can't believe this thread has kept surfacing and I never noticed it! Well, I might as well put mine down. :D I'm sure I'm leaving a ton out, but these are the people I can think of at 1:45pm on Jul-8-04:

Elizabeth Hollister Frost
Lord Byron
Robert Frost
Emily Dickinson
James Tate
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lewis Carroll

Well, thats a hard question, I like the poems by Lord Tennyson specially The Lady of Shalott, I like too the poems by Ana de Rosenzweig I like too te Lady of the lake and I can be all the day saying my favorite poems and authors

I adore Sylvia Plath! She was so amazing at her poetry! ~Sophia

I think my fave has to be Joyce Kilmer...he is famous for this (among other things)...

Peoms are made by fools like me...

But only God can make a tree.

There is much more to the poem but the end is what has stuck in my head for years...and I mean years :D like 45 ...

....writer ducks the tomatoes and runs for the door.

No tomatoes, promise Hepzibah. That part of the poem sounds beautiful. I think I´ll look the whole poem.

My favorite right now, apart from TS Eliot, is Tomas Tranströmer. Which is strange since they are said to belong to quite opposite schools of poetry. Robert Bly did some good translation of Tranströmers poems. This is my favorite:

Allegro

After a black day I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green and full of silence.

The sounds says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like man who is calm about it all.

I raise my Haydnflag. The signal is
"We do not surrender. But want peace"

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope,
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

A. Rimbaud.

I love him

...have to be two authors of radically different style: Walt Whitman and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

just saw that someone else did mention Kipling's If, but the link's not quite hyper.


If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!