who are your top 3-5 favorite poets of all time (any language)
- Edgar Allan Poe
- William Shakespeare
I don’t have a third.
My favorite?
- Seamus Heaney
- Wislawa Szymborska
- Pablo Neruda
- Walt Whitman
- W.H. Auden
Robert Frost
Percy Bysshe Shelly
William Butler Yeats
AE Houseman
Lord Byron
Basho
Issa
Yeats
Poe
Frost
Homer
John Donne.
Thomas Gray.
“The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”
Who could do better than that? It scans, it rhymes, and evokes like mad.
And Shakespeare, of course.
Charles Baudelaire
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Paul Verlaine
Edward Estlin Cummings
Rainer Maria Rilke
By language
[SPOILER]English
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Edward Estlin Cummings
John Donne
Robert Lee Frost
William Shakespeare
French
Charles Baudelaire
Paul Verlaine
Victor Hugo
Guillaume Apollinaire
Henri Michaux
Apart from Rilke, I don’t know German poetry enough to come up with a list. Same for all the other languages.[/SPOILER]
However, some of my favourite poems were written by other poets. If the question had been “List your ten favourite poems”, the names would have been significantly different.
In no particular order:
C. Louis Leipoldt
Bashō
TS Eliot
Ginsberg
Wallace Stevens
No love for Billy Collins?
I can appreciate other poets but when I read Billy Collins I really get what he is saying.
Li Po
Baudelaire
Yeats.
Oooooo…I can have two more? Didn’t see that at first.
William Carlos Williams
Walter de la Mare
T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Poe, Dylan Thomas, and Billy. 
- Edgar Allen Poe.
- Seamus Heaney.
- W.B. Yeats.
- Percy Shelley.
- Vanilla Ice.
Blake
Yeats
Dickinson
Wordsworth
Robert Browning
e. e. cummings
T. S. Eliot
A. E. Housman
Edgar Allan Poe
…in alphabetical order. Order of preference would vary daily.
William Shakespeare
James Wright
William Yeats
Emily Dickinson
Wallace Stevens
Six more, perhaps not of “all time” but ones I love:
Stephen Dunn
Kenneth Patchen
Miller Williams
Philip Larkin
Jane Kenyon
Richard Hugo
Shakespeare
Yeats
Longfellow
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Langston Hughes
No love for Charles Bukowski? 