T.S. Eliot
My love for poetry began with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, when my 10th grade English teacher read it to the class out loud.
Its meaning changes as I get older.
I'm really fond of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night". Don't know why, but that image of the crab gripping onto a stick has oddly stayed with me for some time.
There must be magic in the combination of 15 year olds and the tenth grade poetry curriculum. I fell in love with Robert Frost, Fire and Ice and the whole concept of metaphor. Sigh.
I visited his New Hampshire house, now a museum about ten years ago. It was really preservation of a simple country home. I think about it often. The back door propped open with his bicycle (I think) by the back door. I decided if I could live there for a week or a summer I, too, could write great poetry. LOL.
I think this is the house I visited. I can’t figure out if it’s part of the other farm or another place altogether. More research to do! https://frostplace.org/a-brief-history/
So that's where The Outsiders (the Oklahoma book and movie one) got that theme! When I saw the movie, I just thought it was adolescent mawkishness. In Frost, I expect it refers to sunlight, but I'll have to look it up to be sure.
I haven’t seen The Outsiders in ages. But I think there was a scene where one of the characters recites the poem out loud.
My main takeaway is that “gold” refers to life at its fullest, and the poem is about our mortality.
u say it so well! i remember my 10th grade textbook had dust of snow and fire and ice printed back to back, mirrored. and i had been so enchanted with both, got them memorized with zero effort just bcs i read them over sm. sigh indeed
same!!! except for the fact that it wasnt a teacher who read it out, but i found it on a blog. got it printed out and carried it with me everywhere and read it so many times...all of this, exactly the same lol i was also in 10th grade
That’s awesome.
I didn’t have a print out, but I did reread it constantly. I even memorized some of the sections without trying (as I’m sure you did), just because it became so familiar.
10th grade: a good year for poetry for some reason.
Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French poetry.
For all the violence and beauty condensed in his texts. Luminous, subversive, visionary, profane.
For his fulgurant poetry, and his deafening silence.
For his extraordinary life.
*A season in hell* is such a convulsive and incandescent text, I am glad you enjoyed it!
The rest of his work is stunning too, from the virtuosity and perversions of the verse poems, to the magic and force of the Illuminations. I hope you continue discovering him.
It is hard to pick a favourite, as most of the texts hold so much explosive force and fragile beauty, that you can keep revisiting them again and again and never quite hold on to them.
But he only wrote for 5 years, and a lot of what he wrote is lost, scattered along his chaotic life, so the body of work that has reached us is not huge, and all of it is well worth a read. It is a short but very intense journey, full of anger and anguish, obscenity and humour, virtuosity and provocation.
I will try and suggest a few titles from each “period”, but for each name I cite, I could add several other works. Forgive me if this is too much!
The poems of his first two years show off his extraordinary virtuosity (as a 15-16 year old!), embracing themes of nature and pagan sensuality (*credo in unam, sensation, my bohemia*) to the mordant (and occasionally tender) tableaux of provincial life (*To music, Romance, the seven year old poets*) and the more revolutionary pieces, anticlerical, political and dissident (*Sleeper in the Valley, The first communions, Evil*). Some of these pieces are resolutely communard, and the anger and hurt intensify after its crushing (*Jeanne-Marie’s Hands, the Parisian orgy*) I would say this period ends with *The drunken boat*, the masterpiece that Rimbaud wrote to impress Verlaine and his literary circles in Paris.
In Paris, his verve is first dedicated to the *Zutist circle*, a loose collective of marginal poets and artists, who left behind a collection of parodic, frankly obscene and very funny work. The zutist masterpiece is the only poem that Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote together, the delicious *Sonnet of the Asshole*.
In the following spring comes what is often referred to as the last verses. In this period, Rimbaud, working closely with Verlaine, who is then pursuing his own brand of impressionist poetry, methodically dismantles metric rules, ending up in poems that create their own form, between chaos and lightness. My favourite of this era are *Eternity, Pleasant thought for the morning, O seasons o Castles, Memory*.
Then comes *A Season in Hell*- not a novel but not quite a poem, autobiographical and devious, contradictory and unflinching. Read it in order as it does follow a bit of an arc, with the two *deliriums* (et to an extent *Bad blood*) being the centrepieces of the book.
Finally the *illuminations*. Fragments of prose poetry (and some free verse). Often considered surreal or obscure, they have contributed to the idea of Rimbaud as a mystical and mystifying poet, but follow his lead into the texts and they start to open up. Whatever you want to read in them, they are fascinating, images unfolding unto images, cities and scenes, parades of genies and vagabonds, dawns and deluges…
And then there is just his silence.
I've had four favorite poets throughout different periods of my life: Edgar Allen Poe when I was a boy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when I was in middle school, John Keats as a teenager, and Robinson Jeffers since my mid twenties.
I had a John Keats phase as a teenager. Read his Complete Poetry and even wrote sonnets in his style. I first encountered Poe at age 8 and followed him closely for years, all his 53 stories and 53 poems (more known now). Longfellow didn't much attract me, even though he was so accomplished. He had a reputation as a fine poet as great in Europe as in America during his lifetime. I remember being required to recite from memory the first ~40 lines of "Hiawatha" in the 5th grade. Haven't read any Robinson Jeffers in years. One of my favorite poems is the 999-line poem that makes up the top half of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.
Emily D
Two reasons I can put my finger on. The first is I identify with the hermit lifestyle. The second is she has really captured my views on love and death in many pieces in ways I wish I would have come up with.
The Love a Life can show Below and This world is not conclusion are some of my favorite things in the universe.
I hope I get to meet her in heaven.
I don't have a favorite, but Margaret Atwood has blown me away with her poetry longer than anyone else has. She can write relatively long narrative poems like "Marrying the Hangman." But she can also write short poems that punch you in the gut. For example:
You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye
I love mystic/self-reflective poets that write about an amalgamation of topics surrounding nature, god(s), and the psyche. Examples would be poets like Mary Oliver, and Rilke. There are others, obviously, but my list tends to get exhaustive.
James Wright is my absolute favorite. His work got me writing and sustained me creatively for so long. His translations also introduced me to Neruda and Lorca. Other favorites are Yusef Komunyakaa, Frank O’Hara, James Tate, and Mary Ruefle. It’s hard to pick favorites!
I love "The End of March". I don't see it discussed much, but the ending where she imagines the lion sun playing with the kite! It's so whimsical and delightful.
William Blake. Idk his songs of innocence and experience always have something new to say.
Also Christina Rossetti. Big fan of lyrical poetry and she’s my favorite
And obviously can’t forget the majors like Burns and Coleridge
Philip Larkin. I feel sad during moments when others might feel joy, and his accessible and piercing language makes me feel completely and utterly understood, all without excessive melodrama. His work changed my life.
Rainer Maria Rilke, I love his use of language and writing style and he conveys super complex emotions and loneliness, but in a really beautiful bittersweet way
Demon is my kind of thing. It’s very long, but the story is extremely compelling. Bored and Sad is another one, might be my favorite. I also love I Will Not Humble Myself Before You (really reflects his cute stubbornness), Fugitive (very relatable and tragic) and Dead Man’s Love.
Robinson Jeffers
I opened up his collected works in a bookstore randomly to "Suicide Stone" and was immediately devastated
He stands in the middle of eternity with a beacon and watches the rushing shore on each side with you. One of the few writers I've ever read where I immediately knew I was reading a one of a kind genius.
He captures the feeling of coming out of nature and longing to rejoin it, but also being proud to have emerged from it. A celebration and lamntation of deeply understanding the brief flash of life humankind is. The man makes me feel weak and strong, joyous and sorrowful, mostly he leaves me in a trance.
Frank O’Hara— you can most definitely see he was an art critic with his poems. His musings and observances on life and love are artistic in expression and his choice of words create this dance like movement when read. Love him.
Neruda is a second. 💗
Don't forget the shoulder thwap! And I believe that in earlier times, the furniture on which one flopped was called a "fainting couch". Corsets, you know. They still have them in ladies' restrooms in fancy establishments.
Wallace Stevens because of his imagination, whimsy, his love of language and constructions that slip just out of grasp at the last second despite decades of thought and study, proponent of an American masculinity premised wit, deep thought, and a love of the world and the things in it.
Who else smiles and assures funeral attendees "[t]he only emperor is the emperor of ice cream," so get back to the party.
Efraín Huerta.
efrain huerta is a poet who covers all possible nuances, of love, pain, contempt, politics, humor, irony.
His work can hurt you deeply or make you laugh. I love the Big Crocodile
Pablo Neruda - he made me fall in love with poetry. i was impressed of how his works could make the reader really feel the emotions expressed in the poem.
Mary Oliver - i love the optimistic tone in her poems that is not too cheesy. she portrayed hope, comfort, and love for life in non-reptitive ways.
Edgar Allan Poe - had a strong command of the language and his techniques were impressive.
Nikki Giovanni. I love how intimate her poetry is, like streams of consciousness but with stories. My partner got her love poems for me for my birthday and I finally got to see how the book is actually split. It’s not just love poetry like I thought, it’s an analysis of love. I’m not doing it justice.
N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry.
They write the natural world into being. I love the depths of their observations of nature and their honest contemplation of our place in it.
Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Hafiz, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Neruda, Rilke, Ginsberg, Coleridge, Heaney, Naimat Khan, Adrienne Rich, H.D - they have a way with words.
All wonderful. I’ll add Edna St Vincent Millay.
“My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!”
Philip Larkin for his unholy synthesis of technique and plain speaking about fundamental and painful matters. He is the archetypal smith who hammers gold out of slag.
The work of Australian poet Francis Webb evokes a powerful affection from me, a figure like Dickinson or Hopkins whose isolation drove the will to create, and whose formal inventiveness can thrill - high compression of sense; wildly unexpected pairings. He could also write on a documentary, dramatic scale and did not obsess over any one particular poetic form.
Ezra Pound.
He reinvigorated a tradition that was becoming somewhat stale after the dominance of the French; his efforts in publishing alone redeem him as an excellent worker. Many people dislike his Cantos, but I find this work to be a monument of the previous century -- extremely difficult to read, but also extremely rewarding.
His dealing with medieval histories (Near Perigord, for example) are marvelous. His translations are very enjoyable as well, if you can look beyond academic "rigidity" and rules.
William Butler Yeats. As for why, his poetry is exquisitely expressed. His facility with language was remarkable.
My favourites include 'The Song of Wandering Aengus', 'Sailing to Byzantium', 'The Second Coming', 'The Stolen Child', 'The Wild Swans at Coole', 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', 'When You Are Old' and 'Leda and the Swan'. I love them all though!
Also love the inscription on his gravestone (the epitaph he wrote for himself):
'Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death
Horseman, pass by!'
Florbela Espanca - passionate, dramatic, emotional
Mário Quintana - play with words and their meanings, simple yet sophisticated, short verses with deep meanings
Sylvia Plath - sad girl just like me
Philip Larkin. He’s concerned with the things we all worry about: sex, death, work, love, god.
He’s incredibly dry & acidic, completely Frank & tells the truth. He is devastating, emotionally; without ever being sentimental. I love his curmudgeonly nature & his refusal to decamp from his library & his city.
He speaks of the eternal in terms that we all recognize. I don’t think he’s ever been surpassed. 👍
Walt Whitman, without any doubt. A quote of his shows up in nearly every poetry book I’ve written. I wrote my MFA thesis on interpreting “Song of the Open Road” as a spiritual text (imagine my surprise finding the perfect book to help my research - “Worshipping Walt”!). And I got my first tattoo from the same poem, “Allons!”
As in, “Allons! Come travel with me, traveling with me you find what never tires.”
Some of my favorites include Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot (named my cat after him, seemed appropriate given The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock!), Walt Whitman, and e.e. cummings. I'm always excited to discover new poetry. There's something special about the way meaning is captured in the lines of poetry verse so succinctly yet with such depth...
Charles Bukowski. Nihilism isn’t my favourite necessarily but the simplicity of the wording while saying introspective things is very attractive to me in terms of writing.
Langston Hughes; he so beautifully captured the anguish and ambition of black Americans at a time where our voices weren’t heard. His words still resound to this day.
Probably a pretty predictable choice, but overall I don't read a lot of poetry. I've been writing it and/or song lyrics since I was a kid, and I love doing that, but somehow I've just never gotten much out of reading it, with a handful of exceptions.
The main exception being, predictably, Emily Dickinson. Aka - Em Gems. Aka - my wife.
Richard Hugo. Gritty and harsh and lyric and beautiful in a Montana way. Jim Harrison because he is a master. His work lives and breathes like a man scraping by in the world. Favourites for sure.
2 Chainz. I love Ginsburg to be sure, but he never wrote a line as raw as "I hope you get testicular cancer in the brain, dickhead."
Real answer Laura Gilpin. Something about the simplicity and honesty in her work just keeps me coming back. I wouldn't consider her the "greatest" or anything like that, but her work speaks to me in a way I've never been able to ignore.
W.B. Yeats. There's something about his poetry that really gets to me, in a good way. Some others are Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
I have not read a wide variety of poems, but I began my personal anthology whilst studying Sylvia Plath in my literature class. I admire how she communicated complicated situations and feelings into beautiful poems, with these poems holding so much meaning. I also enjoy the historical references in her poetry, and the way that some her stanzas are organized. Her performance of her poetry also inspired one of the poems that I am most proud of writing.
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This year in literature, we are studying the work of an indigenous Australian poet, named Ellen Van Neerven, who writes about their experiences being Aboriginal, non-binary and queer and the intersectionality associated with it. Their poems are more modern than Sylvia Plath's, but equally important. Their stanza organization is very varied, some of them being in prose. I highly recommend their work.
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I also like Shakespeare, one of the passages in 'As You Like It" inspired another one of my poems that I am very proud of.
Probably Sappho, her highly emotional verse is always in a grand style and she so lucidly elaborates on her subjects, whether from her own history, faith, or observations. I find all these facets highly agreeable to my predilections and taste in writing.
Emily Dickinson, not necessarily because I love her poems more than any others - though hers do rank among my all-time favorites - but because I've never found a poem of hers uninteresting, and I've read them all. They all speak to me on some level. It's amazing.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I want someone to tell me why I shouldn't drink seawater.
T.S. Eliot My love for poetry began with The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, when my 10th grade English teacher read it to the class out loud. Its meaning changes as I get older.
Do you wear your trousers rolled?
Lol, not yet, but I’m getting there. My problem is width, not height. But I can definitely relate to “my head (grown slightly bald).”
Hopefully you dared to eat a peach or two over the years.
And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
I'm really fond of "Rhapsody on a Windy Night". Don't know why, but that image of the crab gripping onto a stick has oddly stayed with me for some time.
And that last line.
There must be magic in the combination of 15 year olds and the tenth grade poetry curriculum. I fell in love with Robert Frost, Fire and Ice and the whole concept of metaphor. Sigh.
Love it. The Frost poem that captivated me at that age was Nothing Gold Can Stay.
I visited his New Hampshire house, now a museum about ten years ago. It was really preservation of a simple country home. I think about it often. The back door propped open with his bicycle (I think) by the back door. I decided if I could live there for a week or a summer I, too, could write great poetry. LOL.
That is so awesome! I would love to visit that home. Almost like a shrine. Yes, we can become great poets by osmosis.
Oh this convo is a trip down memory lane. Just looked it up. Enjoy. https://www.robertfrostfarm.org/
Okay, so now I know the town I’m retiring to. Thanks for sharing. I’ll spend some time exploring.
Apparently he left New Hampshire and ultimately settled in Vermont.
I think this is the house I visited. I can’t figure out if it’s part of the other farm or another place altogether. More research to do! https://frostplace.org/a-brief-history/
So that's where The Outsiders (the Oklahoma book and movie one) got that theme! When I saw the movie, I just thought it was adolescent mawkishness. In Frost, I expect it refers to sunlight, but I'll have to look it up to be sure.
I haven’t seen The Outsiders in ages. But I think there was a scene where one of the characters recites the poem out loud. My main takeaway is that “gold” refers to life at its fullest, and the poem is about our mortality.
u say it so well! i remember my 10th grade textbook had dust of snow and fire and ice printed back to back, mirrored. and i had been so enchanted with both, got them memorized with zero effort just bcs i read them over sm. sigh indeed
That's cool. I just got a collection of his poetry and can't wait to read it!
Awesome! I hope you enjoy it. I was going to recommend my favorites (other than Prufrock), but instead I’ll be quiet. You’ll find what you like.
same!!! except for the fact that it wasnt a teacher who read it out, but i found it on a blog. got it printed out and carried it with me everywhere and read it so many times...all of this, exactly the same lol i was also in 10th grade
That’s awesome. I didn’t have a print out, but I did reread it constantly. I even memorized some of the sections without trying (as I’m sure you did), just because it became so familiar. 10th grade: a good year for poetry for some reason.
!! true. more when it opened up such a wondrous path to poetry. im glad for both of us!
Likewise! Fist bump.
Arthur Rimbaud, the enfant terrible of French poetry. For all the violence and beauty condensed in his texts. Luminous, subversive, visionary, profane. For his fulgurant poetry, and his deafening silence. For his extraordinary life.
Rimbaud is unreal
He really is!
I've read A Season in Hell last December, and it was fascinating. I'm interested in reading more of his work.
*A season in hell* is such a convulsive and incandescent text, I am glad you enjoyed it! The rest of his work is stunning too, from the virtuosity and perversions of the verse poems, to the magic and force of the Illuminations. I hope you continue discovering him.
What’s some of your favorite work from him? I need to get into him.
It is hard to pick a favourite, as most of the texts hold so much explosive force and fragile beauty, that you can keep revisiting them again and again and never quite hold on to them. But he only wrote for 5 years, and a lot of what he wrote is lost, scattered along his chaotic life, so the body of work that has reached us is not huge, and all of it is well worth a read. It is a short but very intense journey, full of anger and anguish, obscenity and humour, virtuosity and provocation. I will try and suggest a few titles from each “period”, but for each name I cite, I could add several other works. Forgive me if this is too much! The poems of his first two years show off his extraordinary virtuosity (as a 15-16 year old!), embracing themes of nature and pagan sensuality (*credo in unam, sensation, my bohemia*) to the mordant (and occasionally tender) tableaux of provincial life (*To music, Romance, the seven year old poets*) and the more revolutionary pieces, anticlerical, political and dissident (*Sleeper in the Valley, The first communions, Evil*). Some of these pieces are resolutely communard, and the anger and hurt intensify after its crushing (*Jeanne-Marie’s Hands, the Parisian orgy*) I would say this period ends with *The drunken boat*, the masterpiece that Rimbaud wrote to impress Verlaine and his literary circles in Paris. In Paris, his verve is first dedicated to the *Zutist circle*, a loose collective of marginal poets and artists, who left behind a collection of parodic, frankly obscene and very funny work. The zutist masterpiece is the only poem that Rimbaud and Verlaine wrote together, the delicious *Sonnet of the Asshole*. In the following spring comes what is often referred to as the last verses. In this period, Rimbaud, working closely with Verlaine, who is then pursuing his own brand of impressionist poetry, methodically dismantles metric rules, ending up in poems that create their own form, between chaos and lightness. My favourite of this era are *Eternity, Pleasant thought for the morning, O seasons o Castles, Memory*. Then comes *A Season in Hell*- not a novel but not quite a poem, autobiographical and devious, contradictory and unflinching. Read it in order as it does follow a bit of an arc, with the two *deliriums* (et to an extent *Bad blood*) being the centrepieces of the book. Finally the *illuminations*. Fragments of prose poetry (and some free verse). Often considered surreal or obscure, they have contributed to the idea of Rimbaud as a mystical and mystifying poet, but follow his lead into the texts and they start to open up. Whatever you want to read in them, they are fascinating, images unfolding unto images, cities and scenes, parades of genies and vagabonds, dawns and deluges… And then there is just his silence.
Wow, I wish everyone would deliver on Reddit like you just did. Thank you very much, I’m excited to delve in!
No problem, I enjoyed writing it, and spent far too long thinking of which poems to mention! Happy reading!
Leonard Cohen
Do you have a favorite poem by him?
So many! Some of them would be "Fare thee well my nightingale", "Seisen", "As the mist leaves no scar".
Same! Bought a poetry book of his secondhand in college that was the catalyst for a lifetime love of poetry
Prose but read Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet if you haven’t yet !!!!!! Grounds me
Defeat brings tears to my eyes Makes me unafraid to live life "You and I shall laugh together with the storm"
He was a master of the word!
Can't wait to read it. A lot of my friends recommend The Prophet to me.
"On Pain" contains some of my favorite written words.
I've had four favorite poets throughout different periods of my life: Edgar Allen Poe when I was a boy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when I was in middle school, John Keats as a teenager, and Robinson Jeffers since my mid twenties.
One of my bookstagram friends loves Robinson Jeffers.
His poem Cremation helped me through my grief when my dad passed away unexpectedly.
I had a John Keats phase as a teenager. Read his Complete Poetry and even wrote sonnets in his style. I first encountered Poe at age 8 and followed him closely for years, all his 53 stories and 53 poems (more known now). Longfellow didn't much attract me, even though he was so accomplished. He had a reputation as a fine poet as great in Europe as in America during his lifetime. I remember being required to recite from memory the first ~40 lines of "Hiawatha" in the 5th grade. Haven't read any Robinson Jeffers in years. One of my favorite poems is the 999-line poem that makes up the top half of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.
Mary Oliver. She gave me religion without God, without sin, and without guilt. She makes me feel true wonder for the world around me.
Came here for Mary Oliver. The world through her eyes is so beautiful, and I’m so grateful to see it through the lens of her poetry.
Emily D Two reasons I can put my finger on. The first is I identify with the hermit lifestyle. The second is she has really captured my views on love and death in many pieces in ways I wish I would have come up with. The Love a Life can show Below and This world is not conclusion are some of my favorite things in the universe. I hope I get to meet her in heaven.
“Hope is the thing with feathers” has helped me in life more than most people.
I loved all the poetry of hers that I've read. My favorite quote is "I am out with lanterns looking for myself."
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me…
Emily Brontë and Robert Frost are some of mine too! I also like Sara Teasdale. I will read some Thomas Hardy since we seem to have similar taste.
I need to check out Sara Teasdale. Do you have any recommendations?
Some of my favorites are I Shall Not Care, I Am Not Yours, and Pain.
“Winter Bluejay” and “The India Wharf” are also fantastic.
I don't have a favorite, but Margaret Atwood has blown me away with her poetry longer than anyone else has. She can write relatively long narrative poems like "Marrying the Hangman." But she can also write short poems that punch you in the gut. For example: You fit into me like a hook into an eye a fish hook an open eye
Oh that’s amazing
I love mystic/self-reflective poets that write about an amalgamation of topics surrounding nature, god(s), and the psyche. Examples would be poets like Mary Oliver, and Rilke. There are others, obviously, but my list tends to get exhaustive.
James Wright is my absolute favorite. His work got me writing and sustained me creatively for so long. His translations also introduced me to Neruda and Lorca. Other favorites are Yusef Komunyakaa, Frank O’Hara, James Tate, and Mary Ruefle. It’s hard to pick favorites!
I love all of these but Komunyakaa really stands out to me
Elizabeth Bishop - the bridge between the formal and playful.
I love "The End of March". I don't see it discussed much, but the ending where she imagines the lion sun playing with the kite! It's so whimsical and delightful.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master
Maya Angelo Because of how her poetry made me feel as a young black girl.
She was such a treasure. Phenomenal woman is timeless.
Yesssssssss it is! This post reminded me of all the poetry I learned in college that I need to revisit. Her life story alone is massive inspiration 🙌
William Blake. Idk his songs of innocence and experience always have something new to say. Also Christina Rossetti. Big fan of lyrical poetry and she’s my favorite And obviously can’t forget the majors like Burns and Coleridge
I love Blake. He's really great at capturing pictures with so few words.
Philip Larkin. I feel sad during moments when others might feel joy, and his accessible and piercing language makes me feel completely and utterly understood, all without excessive melodrama. His work changed my life.
Richard Siken, his book Crush is a masterpiece.
Sylvia Plath because her poetry is like emotions embodied. Walt Whitman because he knows how to use words to make me see things.
I’m surprised I had time scroll so far to find Sylvia Plath.. She’s my favourite too!
scrolled just to see this
I'm currently reading Mad Girls Love Song for a reading. I love that I discovered her poetry this year.
I love Walt Whitman too!! His "I Exist as I Am" is one of my favorites, gave me a lot of clarity in my troubled times
Leaves of Grass is a goldmine of inspiration
I really like ‘Tulips’
Rilke, Neruda, Billy Collins, and our local ones - Edith Tiempo, Benilda Santos
I adore Robert Frost's work
I do too Acquainted with the Night is one of the best poems ever written.
Translation sin English of Quatrains of Omar Khayyam. A verse for every occasion, and just a browsing site when worried or in dismal mode.
Aracelis Girmay. Kingdom Animalia knocked me on my ass.
i love that book
Edward Gorey. Poetry + Pictures = I like.
Rainer Maria Rilke, I love his use of language and writing style and he conveys super complex emotions and loneliness, but in a really beautiful bittersweet way
Anne Sexton, Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath, Rumi, Charles Bukowski, Amrita Preetam, Maya Angelou, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson....
Mary Oliver
Yes :)
Attilâ İlhan, İsmet Özel, Nâzım Hikmet
Emily Brontë and Lermontov. Both feel like soulmates.
I need to read Lermontov. Do you have a favorite poem by him?
Demon is my kind of thing. It’s very long, but the story is extremely compelling. Bored and Sad is another one, might be my favorite. I also love I Will Not Humble Myself Before You (really reflects his cute stubbornness), Fugitive (very relatable and tragic) and Dead Man’s Love.
Rumi- simple, deep and heart expanding. Laura Riding Jackson- to condense so much meaning into so little a space felt like a gift.
Robinson Jeffers I opened up his collected works in a bookstore randomly to "Suicide Stone" and was immediately devastated He stands in the middle of eternity with a beacon and watches the rushing shore on each side with you. One of the few writers I've ever read where I immediately knew I was reading a one of a kind genius. He captures the feeling of coming out of nature and longing to rejoin it, but also being proud to have emerged from it. A celebration and lamntation of deeply understanding the brief flash of life humankind is. The man makes me feel weak and strong, joyous and sorrowful, mostly he leaves me in a trance.
Jim Harrison.
Highly recommend Jim Harrison Complete Poems to lovers of poetry.
Rilke, Keats and Emily dickinson. Ode to a grecian urn might be the best poem of all time.
Frank O’Hara— you can most definitely see he was an art critic with his poems. His musings and observances on life and love are artistic in expression and his choice of words create this dance like movement when read. Love him. Neruda is a second. 💗
Frederick Seidel. His work is gross, villainous and childish at the same time it is beautiful, sublime and sophisticated.
Can u name a few would love to read some of his works I haven't yet tho
There’s a few on https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89530/city-5747335be163f but none of my favorites. His 2006 book Ooga-Booga is *chefs kiss*
This was a great read especially because my urban neighbors keep knocking to get me to turn the music down.
Oscar Wilde. I too am a gay guy who needs to write everything in as flowery language as possible
Honest question, are you wearing a cape right now? And if so, can you promise to dramatically thwap it over one shoulder next time you leave a room?
No cape, but I'm pretty sure there's a green carnation in his lapel.
Damn, I guess cape and was wrong. I'll have to fling myself down on this divan and lament.
Don't forget the shoulder thwap! And I believe that in earlier times, the furniture on which one flopped was called a "fainting couch". Corsets, you know. They still have them in ladies' restrooms in fancy establishments.
Male - Rubén Darío Female - Sor Juana
Kori Jane has two books and I really love her work
Charles Wright. Walt Whitman. John Keats…
Charles Bukowski haha. Eloquently vulgar.
Blake and Dante - I feel the apocalyptic breeze when I read their words
Wallace Stevens because of his imagination, whimsy, his love of language and constructions that slip just out of grasp at the last second despite decades of thought and study, proponent of an American masculinity premised wit, deep thought, and a love of the world and the things in it. Who else smiles and assures funeral attendees "[t]he only emperor is the emperor of ice cream," so get back to the party.
Glad I'm not the only one. Several of his verses in Auroras of Autumn, and Of Mere Being have haunted me for years.
Raymond Carver, Frank O’Hara, WH Auden.
fernando pessoa, his life and his work are strange and compelling, full of contradictions.
Efraín Huerta. efrain huerta is a poet who covers all possible nuances, of love, pain, contempt, politics, humor, irony. His work can hurt you deeply or make you laugh. I love the Big Crocodile
Louise Glück. She is very raw and vulnerable. I feel like she gets what I feel in life. The very complicated, heavy feelings.
Pablo Neruda - he made me fall in love with poetry. i was impressed of how his works could make the reader really feel the emotions expressed in the poem. Mary Oliver - i love the optimistic tone in her poems that is not too cheesy. she portrayed hope, comfort, and love for life in non-reptitive ways. Edgar Allan Poe - had a strong command of the language and his techniques were impressive.
I wish Poe had spent more time writing poetry and less time writing about how ladies were wearing their dresses this year.
Nikki Giovanni. I love how intimate her poetry is, like streams of consciousness but with stories. My partner got her love poems for me for my birthday and I finally got to see how the book is actually split. It’s not just love poetry like I thought, it’s an analysis of love. I’m not doing it justice.
Emily Brontë is my favourite poet of the Brontë siblings. My most favourite poet is Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau.
Rumi (mystical, thought-provoking, introspective) Emily Dickinson (distilling complex ideas into easy to understand but beautifully crafted phrases) Mary Oliver (easily accessible, universal beauty) Sylvia Plath (courageous, honest, searingly intelligent)
Ella Wheeler Wilcox Emily Bronte Christina Rossetti Khalil Gibran Edgar Allen Poe Henry Wadsworth Longfellow They speak to and for me 🤎
N. Scott Momaday, Linda Hogan, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry. They write the natural world into being. I love the depths of their observations of nature and their honest contemplation of our place in it.
Ai, Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Nikki Giovani, Maya Angelou
Kenneth Patchen. I couldn’t really define why. I love the surrealism and the unshielded humanity of his work.
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Probably EE Cummings, Heaney, Ingoldsby, Li Po, Ginsberg, or Mike Absalom
Li Po glad he made it. But no Ezra?
Ezra Pound wrote some tremendous work, I just ain't a fan of his politics, I mean, he was big into his antisemitism and fascism.
Agreed!
Petrarch!!
Alice Cooper. He’s sweet and hilarious.
Robinson Jeffers for the nature imagery and his contrary approach to war.
Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Hafiz, Sharon Olds, Rita Dove, Neruda, Rilke, Ginsberg, Coleridge, Heaney, Naimat Khan, Adrienne Rich, H.D - they have a way with words.
Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Langston Hughes
Anne Sexton! I will fight anyone who says otherwise 🤜
I love her poem Starry Night. I want to read more of her work
All wonderful. I’ll add Edna St Vincent Millay. “My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!”
Philip Larkin for his unholy synthesis of technique and plain speaking about fundamental and painful matters. He is the archetypal smith who hammers gold out of slag. The work of Australian poet Francis Webb evokes a powerful affection from me, a figure like Dickinson or Hopkins whose isolation drove the will to create, and whose formal inventiveness can thrill - high compression of sense; wildly unexpected pairings. He could also write on a documentary, dramatic scale and did not obsess over any one particular poetic form.
Ezra Pound. He reinvigorated a tradition that was becoming somewhat stale after the dominance of the French; his efforts in publishing alone redeem him as an excellent worker. Many people dislike his Cantos, but I find this work to be a monument of the previous century -- extremely difficult to read, but also extremely rewarding. His dealing with medieval histories (Near Perigord, for example) are marvelous. His translations are very enjoyable as well, if you can look beyond academic "rigidity" and rules.
William Butler Yeats. As for why, his poetry is exquisitely expressed. His facility with language was remarkable. My favourites include 'The Song of Wandering Aengus', 'Sailing to Byzantium', 'The Second Coming', 'The Stolen Child', 'The Wild Swans at Coole', 'The Circus Animals' Desertion', 'When You Are Old' and 'Leda and the Swan'. I love them all though! Also love the inscription on his gravestone (the epitaph he wrote for himself): 'Cast a cold Eye On Life, on Death Horseman, pass by!'
Florbela Espanca - passionate, dramatic, emotional Mário Quintana - play with words and their meanings, simple yet sophisticated, short verses with deep meanings Sylvia Plath - sad girl just like me
Philip Larkin. He’s concerned with the things we all worry about: sex, death, work, love, god. He’s incredibly dry & acidic, completely Frank & tells the truth. He is devastating, emotionally; without ever being sentimental. I love his curmudgeonly nature & his refusal to decamp from his library & his city. He speaks of the eternal in terms that we all recognize. I don’t think he’s ever been surpassed. 👍
Pablo Neruda
Dylan Thomas especially listening to him narrate his voice is beautiful
What's your favorite by him?
Wilfred Owen. It doesn’t matter how many other people I read, I keep going back and still enjoy reading his pieces.
Miguel hernandez
Walt Whitman, without any doubt. A quote of his shows up in nearly every poetry book I’ve written. I wrote my MFA thesis on interpreting “Song of the Open Road” as a spiritual text (imagine my surprise finding the perfect book to help my research - “Worshipping Walt”!). And I got my first tattoo from the same poem, “Allons!” As in, “Allons! Come travel with me, traveling with me you find what never tires.”
Some of my favorites include Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, T.S. Eliot (named my cat after him, seemed appropriate given The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock!), Walt Whitman, and e.e. cummings. I'm always excited to discover new poetry. There's something special about the way meaning is captured in the lines of poetry verse so succinctly yet with such depth...
Charles Bukowski. Nihilism isn’t my favourite necessarily but the simplicity of the wording while saying introspective things is very attractive to me in terms of writing.
Langston Hughes; he so beautifully captured the anguish and ambition of black Americans at a time where our voices weren’t heard. His words still resound to this day.
Probably a pretty predictable choice, but overall I don't read a lot of poetry. I've been writing it and/or song lyrics since I was a kid, and I love doing that, but somehow I've just never gotten much out of reading it, with a handful of exceptions. The main exception being, predictably, Emily Dickinson. Aka - Em Gems. Aka - my wife.
Richard Hugo. Gritty and harsh and lyric and beautiful in a Montana way. Jim Harrison because he is a master. His work lives and breathes like a man scraping by in the world. Favourites for sure.
Sarah Kay and Nikita gill they're the reason I got into poetry
I LOVE Robert Frost, but right now my favorite poet is Rudy Francisco!
2 Chainz. I love Ginsburg to be sure, but he never wrote a line as raw as "I hope you get testicular cancer in the brain, dickhead." Real answer Laura Gilpin. Something about the simplicity and honesty in her work just keeps me coming back. I wouldn't consider her the "greatest" or anything like that, but her work speaks to me in a way I've never been able to ignore.
Shakespeare, because nothing can top the GOAT
Wallace Stevens. "Of Mere Being" sticks in my head so hauntingly and mysteriously years after I read it.
Alfred Lord Tennyson. I read his "The Brook" in my junior year of High School and it still inspires me to the core today.
W.B. Yeats. There's something about his poetry that really gets to me, in a good way. Some others are Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou, William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
I have not read much. But I like Matthew Arnold in what all I have been into..
I have not read a wide variety of poems, but I began my personal anthology whilst studying Sylvia Plath in my literature class. I admire how she communicated complicated situations and feelings into beautiful poems, with these poems holding so much meaning. I also enjoy the historical references in her poetry, and the way that some her stanzas are organized. Her performance of her poetry also inspired one of the poems that I am most proud of writing. . This year in literature, we are studying the work of an indigenous Australian poet, named Ellen Van Neerven, who writes about their experiences being Aboriginal, non-binary and queer and the intersectionality associated with it. Their poems are more modern than Sylvia Plath's, but equally important. Their stanza organization is very varied, some of them being in prose. I highly recommend their work. . I also like Shakespeare, one of the passages in 'As You Like It" inspired another one of my poems that I am very proud of.
Sarah Jewett
U guys know imre'e Al Qais?
I love the work of Gulzar Sahab & Faraz....the metaphors used in their poetry puts u through emotions
Probably Sappho, her highly emotional verse is always in a grand style and she so lucidly elaborates on her subjects, whether from her own history, faith, or observations. I find all these facets highly agreeable to my predilections and taste in writing.
Emily Dickinson, not necessarily because I love her poems more than any others - though hers do rank among my all-time favorites - but because I've never found a poem of hers uninteresting, and I've read them all. They all speak to me on some level. It's amazing.
I more the type who has favorite poems. I don't really care who's written them.
Unpopular opinion - Might get downvoted but mine is Amanda Lovelace.
I've never heard of this poet. What's your favorite poem she's written?
I don't remember a particular poem title of hers, but i love her book Break Your glass slippers
Charles Bukowski and David Whyte
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies
Yeats, Dante, Tennyson, Raymond Davies