who's your favorite poet? why?

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Originally Posted by Cailin

Depends on my mood - as others have said here.

Amongst my favourites are Yeats, Longley, Plath, Keats, O'Driscoll, Montague.... Clearly a bias towards Irish poets!

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I'm a bit biased towards the Irish too. :D
Synge, Yeats, Heaney, Kavanagh being my forerunners...
I also love shakepseare, Thomas... Dahl is quite a funny poet. oh and cant forget Burns.

Living : David Harsent

Dead: WH Auden

Very Dead: Donne

Classical: Catullus

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Originally Posted by Niamh

I'm a bit biased towards the Irish too. :D
Synge, Yeats, Heaney, Kavanagh being my forerunners...
I also love shakepseare, Thomas... Dahl is quite a funny poet.

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Hey Niamh, Cailin,

My Favourite Irish poet is Yeats - born to write poetry.
Also I love Heaney. Poets I want to read more of are Mangan, O'Rathaille and the poems of early Irish Christian monks, who preserved Irish mythology - there is so much imagination in them.
But if I had to pick one poet it would be Yeats.

Can't believe I forgot Heaney!!!!!! :eek: Been to hear him read so many times - the latest a celebration for his 70th birthday. Currently devouring "Stepping Stones".....

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Originally Posted by Cailin

Currently devouring "Stepping Stones".....

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Are they hard to digest? :lol:

John Keats is definately one of my favourites. I love especially the poems that are steeped in the Greek and Roman Classics - Ode on a Grecian Urn, Hyperion, Ode to Psyche, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer etc. He has such a powerful imagination whilst staying true to the mythology and legends he is using. I also love his elevation of the life of the mind over the life of the senses - see On First Looking into Chapman's Homer. And his passion for music.

:wave:

I have not read much poetry. Whitman, Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Rudyard Kipling is really all I have read. I have a good anthology of poetry though.

Coleridge is my favorite poet. I havent read much of his poetry though. Just the poems im my anthology.

William Topaz Macgonagall, The Tay, the Tay, the silvery Tay, it runs all night and it runs all day. The Coo, loosely translated as the Cow. The Coo, the Coo looks so forloner, standing there, with a leg in each corner. Aye, Burns had serious competition to be Scotland's bard!

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Originally Posted by Neely

Yes Shelley is an interesting one I think, great poet. I get the impression that he would have been a very interesting person to meet too, highly passionate and wild in everything he did.

His poetry to me is so very musical and flowing, so much so that I often get carried away with it and I don't even take in what I am reading half the time! He's one of the only writers that I can read half-drunk and lose nothing for it for that reason.

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Did Shelly die young?

so, i think he might be more famous than Shakespeare if he could live longer.

Did Shelly die young?

so, i think he might be more famous than Shakespeare if he could live longer.

Yes... he drowned. In spite of this I doubt he could have surpassed Shakespeare in fame or certainly in artistic achievements had he lived longer. Keats and Rimbaud and perhaps Nerval, Garcia-Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez are all equal of greater losses. Keats more than any...:(

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Yes... he drowned. In spite of this I doubt he could have surpassed Shakespeare in fame or certainly in artistic achievements had he lived longer. Keats and Rimbaud and perhaps Nerval, Garcia-Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez are all equal of greater losses. Keats more than any...:(

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Holderlin, Tasso, Rimbaud, the history of literature is full of authors with impressive beginnings who sputtered out and produced nothing of note in their maturity. As good as Lucan is, I have no evidence to suggest that had he lived he would have surpassed Virgil. Some authors just peak early. Would Leopardi have surpassed Dante if he'd lived another thirty years, probably not.

Such a question is all hypothetical and what an artist "might have achieved had he or she only lived another 20 or 40 years" is impossible to tell. Dante, himself, was not the oldest... but it is hard to imagine that anything he might have done after the Comedia could have surpassed it. And what of Shakespeare? Again he was not the oldest of men... and his last years were not the most fruitful in terms of artistic output. What if he had just kept at it? Keats is one I suspect might have achieved much more... though just how good, who can tell. I suspect Mozart, Schubert, Raphael, and Van Gogh might have produced many more masterful works... perhaps they may have even led major shifts within their artistic genre... but again... its all by hypothetical. Perhaps a good question might be which artist in any genre or artistic language would you give an extra 10 0r 20 years if you could? Who do you imagine might have achieved the most?

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

I suspect Mozart, Schubert, Raphael, and Van Gogh might have produced many more masterful works... perhaps they may have even led major shifts within their artistic genre... but again... its all by hypothetical. Perhaps a good question might be which artist in any genre or artistic language would you give an extra 10 0r 20 years if you could? Who do you imagine might have achieved the most?

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Or Cobain, or Hendrix, or Hemingway for that matter? Your mentioning of Van Gogh reminds me of what Hokusai, one of my favorite artists, once said.

"From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie."

On his death bed he is said to have exclaimed, "If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter." He was 88.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Yes... he drowned. In spite of this I doubt he could have surpassed Shakespeare in fame or certainly in artistic achievements had he lived longer. Keats and Rimbaud and perhaps Nerval, Garcia-Lorca, and Miguel Hernandez are all equal of greater losses. Keats more than any...:(

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Rimbaud was done. Even if he had lived for fifty more years he wouldn't have produced anything more (I'm almost certain), so losing him wasn't a great loss.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Such a question is all hypothetical and what an artist "might have achieved had he or she only lived another 20 or 40 years" is impossible to tell. Dante, himself, was not the oldest... but it is hard to imagine that anything he might have done after the Comedia could have surpassed it. And what of Shakespeare? Again he was not the oldest of men... and his last years were not the most fruitful in terms of artistic output. What if he had just kept at it? Keats is one I suspect might have achieved much more... though just how good, who can tell. I suspect Mozart, Schubert, Raphael, and Van Gogh might have produced many more masterful works... perhaps they may have even led major shifts within their artistic genre... but again... its all by hypothetical. Perhaps a good question might be which artist in any genre or artistic language would you give an extra 10 0r 20 years if you could? Who do you imagine might have achieved the most?

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Hey!! do you know Keats, right?
So, could you tell me about his work, To Solitude?