Maya Angelou ain’t no poet. Not even close.
Alexander Pope–I just couldn’t get into the Dunciad. (Maybe if I’d been personally acquainted with the guy he was attacking…)
Anything by the cutesy and pretentious E. E. Cummings (sic).
Milton’s Lycidas (sp?). Alright, John, quit showing off your classical education and get to the frigging point.
Eliot’s The Waste Land–more pointless showing off.
But then, I like Wordsworth (pre-1805, at least).
Well, one of my sacred cows just went down in flames. 
For myself, I think a poem has to engage both the emotions and the intellect to be successful. And I understand what Milton is trying to do intellectually, and good for him, and yes, it’s a classic, but I don’t feel any emotional engagement with the characters–and it loses my interest.
It was the same way I felt about There Will Be Blood. I got what Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day Lewis were trying to do, and I applaud them for it (and DDL deserved the hell out of that Oscar), but I just couldn’t get into it. For me, the movie failed on that level. That doesn’t mean it was a failure–it just meant it wasn’t an unqualified success.
IMHO, YMMV, etc.
To quote the distinguished Robert Hass, at a lecture in D.C. when a fan said something similar…
“Yes. She is.”
But I’m not a fan.
Oh, good, other people hate Ezra Pound, too.
Yes, that. Or as I put it whenever I happen to think about him (which is more often that you’d think), what the hell is his damage?
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” has one of the most cringe-worthy lines ever written in verse, namely:
Oh, Percy. Were you hiding a 14-year-old girl under that cravat?
Yesterday, I had a memorable first encounter with (allegedly) W.H. Auden’s “The Platonic Blow,” which was (presumably) well-regarded by all those people who traded it amongst themselves back in the day, but is in actuality hilariously, gloriously bad. 14-year-old girls on Fanfiction.net write better erotica than that. Tower of power…oy.
Which reminds me, I don’t like Auden. (I can’t believe he wrote that poem, either. He’s not my cup of tea, but he’s not godawful like that poem.)
I kinda like the Romantic poets.
Robinson Jeffers makes me go “Huh??”
I subscribe to the Writer’s Almanac, so I am e-mailed a poem a day, and I love it because it introduces me to so many poets, some of whom I think are great, and others…not so much.
E. E. Cummings preferred his name capitalized.
Gertrude Stein, God. I feel like I should be on something when I read her poetry. It’d probably make more sense.
I couldn’t agree more. I think he might be dead now, in which case we should dig the muhfuh up and put him on trial. You know, like [url=“Cadaver Synod - Wikipedia”]the Corpse Synod[/url.]We’ll find him guilty, natch, and feed his fingers to those dogs you mentioned. And then the rest of his dead-ass ass.
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I also think that the majority of Allen Ginsberg’s work is crap too. He was possibly the worst of the beat poets.
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Aah, I dunno…personally I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call his stuff crap; AG has about a dozen really stellar pieces of work to his credit, and judging from the tapes I’ve heard he could do a pretty hot performance reading. But you gots a point: some of his contemporaries were finer poets, who just didn’t have the charisma and the drive for self-promotion that AG had by the semitruckloadful. Like Bob Kaufman. Talk about a brilliant fuckin genius poet…everyone knows about the Ginz, some folks even know who Gregory Corso was, but mention BK to a lot of lit droids and you get a blank stare. Maybe it’s because I live in San Fran and the B is sort of a local deity to some of us underground poetry types, but I get pissed off sometimes thinking how little recognition that crazy black man got, now or when he was alive. Now, there walked a poet, goddammit.
When I was in college I used to outrage other English majors when I honestly answered their questions about poetry preferences. “How can you major in English and hate both Romantic and Victorian poetry?!” I don’t know, I was and I could. With very few exceptions, my heart belongs to the Modernists and Post-Modernists.
When it comes to specifically hating a poet, though, that honor goes to Walt Whitman. Walt and I got off on the wrong foot with poems in Leaves of Grass. I found it galling that this educated man supposed he could “sing” for the unlettered masses. It’s condescending to believe as he obviously did that he could possibly know the intimate ins and outs of their struggles. It was downhill from there and all his other poems seemed tainted by smugness and contented pretentiousness. The only poem by him I can stand is “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer.”