Your favorite non-Literotica poet?

[unapologetic]

There was a similar thread a couple of months back (before I started paying attention to the Poetry Discussion Boards), but it died almost as quickly as it started.

My all time faves: Jack Prelutsky and Elizabeth Bishop (evidence: my newest poem, Elizabeth).

My recent discovery: Sara Teasdale.

How about you?

 

[Maria2394]

Mine is T.S. Eliot

 

[Tzara]

Kenneth Koch

 

[FifthFlower]

Adela Florence Nicolson/Laurence Hope

A year ago I picked up the Complete Love Lyrics of Laurence Hope in a used book store. These I keep re-reading, so I guess they are my favorite at the moment.

Laurence Hope was the pseudonym for Adela Florence Nicolson Cory.

 

[bluerains]

as I have

often said Stevens is one of my fav's..
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

In honor of winter...

 

[Twelve]

T.S. Eliot

Enormously overrated. Do you know Ezra Pound actually wrote his poems- including The Wasteland? The original documents Eliot wrote, before Pound's revisions were recently discovered. Suffice it to say, the American lacked style.



Not that I like Pound either.

Regarding favorite poets--- three words. Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Praying all I can,
If prayers will not hush thee,
Airy Lilian,
Like a rose-leaf I will crush thee,
Fairy Lilian.

 

[Sissy Adele Howells]

Sylvia Plath

Of all the poets I have read, I love the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Her descriptions make me feel that I am at the location she is talking about. A tragic women but also a genius.

 

[MyNecroticSnail]

Enormously overrated. Do you know Ezra Pound actually wrote his poems- including The Wasteland? The original documents Eliot wrote, before Pound's revisions were recently discovered. Suffice it to say, the American lacked style.



Not that I like Pound either.

Regarding favorite poets--- three words. Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Read again, Eliot wrote The Wasteland, Pound suggested removing sections.
Tennyson was good, did anyone ever read The Charge of the Heavy Brigade?
Elizabeth Bishop was alot like Eliot, great, very little dross.

rimbaud
and
Stéphane Mallarmé

 

[unapologetic]

Thanks

In A Poetry Handbook, Mary Oliver says that part of writing poetry is reading what others are doing. I've got a place to start now.

 

[bogusbrig]

W.H. Auden has to be up there amongst my favourites because he is earthbound in the best possible way. An antidote to Yeats and all the inflated rhetoric and false emotion that goes along with that sort of poetry.


September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

 

[vampiredust]

I don't have a fav at the mo. I love a few: Charles Simic, Robert Pinsky and Ruth Stone are some of the ones I'm into now.

 

[GuiltyPleasure]

Alphabetically

Bradbury, Collins, Cohen, Crozier, Larkin, Layton, Ondaatje, Thomas.

 

[clutching_calliope]

W.H. Auden has to be up there amongst my favourites because he is earthbound in the best possible way. An antidote to Yeats and all the inflated rhetoric and false emotion that goes along with that sort of poetry.

I'd have to agree with you. "The Unknown Citizen" by him literally saved me from a career of scraping petri dishes and into an English degree (not that I'm in any important - or well-paying - career right now, but besides the point).

I would like that particular poem on my tombstone but methinks it may not fit.