As an initial qualifier, I’m no expert at the subject at all. I won’t pretend I know good poetry from bad, or what separates high art from what high school students make. What I do know is, I know what I like when I read it.
It goes without saying I have no idea where to start on other poets aside from ones I’ve read.
Specifically, I’ve liked:
T.S. Elliot
John Milton
I especially enjoy reading them then pausing to look up annotations and critical analysis (basically researching as I read). I like learning about all the hidden meanings and metaphors that basically make up every line (even if I don’t uncover them myself).
If you liked Eliot (one l), you should at least try Ezra Pound. But beware: Pound is to Eliot as Picasso is to van Gogh. Similar in a way, but way moreso.
Also, if you don’t mind a heapin’ helpin’ of century-old Irish politics with your poetry, you should try W. B. Yeats’ later works.
P.S.: What separates good poetry from bad is that good poetry makes the world around you new again. Bad poetry, by and large, merely rehashes tired images you’ve heard used sixteen times before.
Get yourself a fat anthology, and feast from it randomly. I particularly treasure my copy of The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World. It goes from the earliest known english poetry to the mid 20th-century. You can decide later what poets you want to pay particular attention to.
Kipling. Everyone should read Kipling. Not just because he was good - and he was often very good indeed - but because he’s basically 19th-century jingoism in a bottle. He’s an excellent reflection of the values of his times, and probably did more than a little to shape them. Read Kipling!
One of my favourites of Yeats’s is The Stolen Child - dripping with evocative, bucolic imagery mixed with faery imagery of the sidhe. And here’s an evocative interpretation of it by the Waterboys, with the poem read by Tomás Mac Eoin. Suggest you listen to the Waterboys’ version before reading it. Sends shivers up my spine.
And much less romantic, but no less challenging, is my favourite poem ever, Imperial by Don Paterson (it’s at the bottom of that page). Sort of experimental, yet challenging, and very atmospheric of a certain time in people’s lives.
Well, just as a warning for anyone who hasn’t encountered the piece before, it is famous among poets as an example of what not to do. It’s brilliantly executed, and therefore illustrates marvelously the cost of over-doing a technique even at the hands of a master. My own take is that the reader’s growing frustration with the perversely indulgent onomatopoeia parallels the slow revelation of the narrator’s madness.
I would alternatively suggest not ever listening to the Waterboys version. It makes me angry. They broke the poem’s spine to fit it into a mishapen box. But of course tastes vary.
Well, having been so negative just lately, I feel odd suddenly defending someone. But first of all, do you mean to say that they both single-handedly ruined trochaic octameter? Second, what are the good examples of trochaic octameter you’re holding them up against?
Oh no, of course not. “The Lady of Shalott” is in a different meter. And to be fair, the problem I have with that poem has as much to do with its rhyme scheme as its meter.
If you’re taking the contrary position, shouldn’t that be your task?
The point I was making was not that there were any other valid, worthwhile examples of trochaic octameter which have somehow been sullied. It’s that the meter is now essentially a closed wing of the building; any poem henceforth written in it will, regardless of its content, sound at best like a parody of “The Raven.”
Edit: to the OP, the first and last poem are full of tasty potential for analysis. I particularly like the Houseman poem, because it is so deceptively simple. But what does the author mean by it?
Since I would have cited The Raven as a good example, I would just be begging the question. But if all you’re not saying is that nobody can use the form anymore because the one exemplar looms so large, sure. I’ll buy that. Except that it mostly breaks into quadrameter by Poe’s own caesuras.
But, hell, versification is nothing if not a series of linguistic challenges. Maybe this is what we should do next time instead of another damn haiku thread. Write trochaic octameter without sounding like Poe. But, my Rime Royal challenge of (wow) a decade ago remains mostly unmet.
Well, Eliot and Milton would qualify as dense, multilayered work that might come off as a little dry to some.
For the sort of footnotey goodness plus dryness, perhaps try some Alexander Pope. For density, perhaps Edmund Spenser. For sheer complexity, perhaps Ezra Pound.
There are lots of ways you can head, and lots of poets who do certain things very well. I don’t tend to be a huge fan of Milton OR Eliot, since my tastes run more toward the sweaty than the cerebral.
For hugely enjoyable satire try Dryden, both the original stuff (Mac Fleckno, The Medal) and his wonderful translations from Juvenal (Satire VI especially)
Pope, The Dunciad, one of the funniest poems in the language, densely allusive and it helps to know your Classics, but repays any effort needed a thousandfold.
Browning’s huge poem The Ring and the Book - a murder recalled from a dozen different perspectives by a dozen different witnesses, incredible work, impossible to put down once started.
Marvell - The Horatian Ode, The Garden, etc
The translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding, one of the great Elizabethan translations, conveniently available in Penguin form.
Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (‘Whoever loved that loved not on first sight’), brilliant poem.
on this. But only about halfway.