Ogden Nash
Ogden Nash
Ogden Nash
1: T. S. Eliot
2: Wm. Shakspr.
3: Robert Frost
4: Shel Silverstein
5: Edgar Allen Poe
Though I’m tempted to say Douglas Hofstadter.
As long as I don’t have to explain why other poets deserve to be excluded, I’d have to say that the poet I look back at most often is A.E. Housman. He was criticized in his day for writing puerile verse, and later for being possibly a homosexual. These days, people are sure he was a homosexual but now he’s taken more seriously, not less so because of it.
He was also dismissed as a pagan, though I never quite understood that charge. These days it would be his searing misogyny that he’d be nailed for, but I don’t think that necessarily plays a big part in his verse. But I’d say he wrote chiefly for young men. Mostly it’s around themes of youthful angst, and his book A Shropshire Lad explicitly communicates to future angsty young men that at least someone has felt like they did before.
Otherwise, Shakespeare and Donne continue to impress. Whoever doesn’t like Frost or Thomas is probably just being contrary for its own sake.
[ol]
[li]Sappho[/li][li]Jalal al-Din Rumi[/li][li]Mirabai[/li][li]Kathleen Raine[/li][li]Patti Smith[/li][/ol]
A homosexual poet? Don’t be ridiculous!
I loved Buk’s novels and short stories when I was an undergrad in the late '70s (one of my roommates was German and told me to read him well before he caught on big in 'Murica). Don’t go back and re-read him now that I’m an old guy, kinda like I wouldn’t bother re-reading Vonnegut.
Never thought too much of his poems. Like Brautigan, another writer best enjoyed while young and callow, Bukowski’s prose is entertaining but his poetry is terribly self-indulgent.
It changes, but right now (in no particular order):
Naomi Shihab Nye
Maya Angelou
Mary Oliver
Wendell Berry
Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin and Pablo Neruda, in no particular order. I’d have to think about a fifth. Probably T.S. Eliot.
Now I want to go dig out all my poetry books…
It’s easier to think of favorite poems than poets. Many of mine have been mentioned so far. The haiku poets rank highest for me (Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki) then the Romantics (Shelley, Byron, Keats) and some random ones whose specific poems matter to me (De La Mare, Bryant, cummings).
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry - Wikipedia would probably have most of the ones I haven’t named specifically.
Ok–there’s a vast difference between top poets of all time and favorite poets. You can recognize somebody’s greatness even if that person is not one of your personal favorites.
OP, which did you want?
What…no John Milton? Chaucer?
Really, it’s hard to pick just 5.
I think it’s clear the OP wanted the top 3-5 of our personal favourites, not our favourite of the top 3-5 poets (I certainly wouldn’t put Leipoldt in the top of a list of poets).
That a nice call. It improves the back to the basket scoring options for the starting 5.
Seamus Heaney
W.B. Yeats
Robert Frost
Walt Whitman
Robert Burns
Emily Dickinson
Stephen Crane
e.e. Cummings
William Carlos Williams
Ogden Nash
i never read Elitot…but i know “The Waste Land” is considered like the most influential poem of the 20th century
Definitely Emily Dickinson, who is deep, wry, funny, and has an outstanding sense of what you can do wth words. Too many favorites to count, but probably it would be I Dwell in Possibility. Or Because I could not stop for death (the “kindly” just gets to me somehow).
William Shakespeare. Enough said, really. The Sonnets are astounding when they’re great.
Wallace Stevens. Sunday Morning is my favorite, but he’s such an oustanding stylist.
Poe, in fact, though I am not sure if he’ s good. The Raven is both abysmal in its repetitiveness and simply great, especially read aloud.
And then perhaps Joachim Ringelnatz, who is for German what Ogden Nash is for English…
Robert Frost, William Shakespeare and Bob Dylan.
Trust America to give the world one of its best poets ever and not realize it for fifty years.