# Name the ten or twenty greatest poets.



## Ritwik Ghosh (May 14, 2014)

I welcome answers that are supported by rational arguments and I warmly welcome any connections with music.


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

To name twenty great poets each supported by rational arguments would be like writing an essay! As a retired English teacher, I find that too much like hard work.  Please couldn't we just tell you the ones we like?


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## Ritwik Ghosh (May 14, 2014)

Surely, Certainly, you are welcome


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## Ingélou (Feb 10, 2013)

Okay then - can't resist. These are in chronological order & I like each for the same reason - that they were superb craftsmen, and even though they wrote in the style of the times, they had their own voice & individuality, and I can lose myself in these poems. After each name, I'll put the quality that most appeals to me in blue.

14th century - the Gawain poet *(ambiguity)*; Chaucer *(vitality)*
16th century - Shakespeare *(empathy)*; Ben Jonson *(elegance)*; Michael Drayton *(assurance)*
17th century - the Metaphysicals John Donne *(wit)* & George Herbert *(playfulness)*; also Andrew Marvell *(intelligence)*; then John Milton *(splendour)*; John Dryden *(good sense)*
18th century - Alexander Pope *(precision)*; Robert Burns *(heart)*; 
18th/19th century (Romantic era) - Wordsworth *(reflectiveness)*, Keats *(sensuousness)*
19th century - Alfred Lord Tennyson *(vision)*; Gerard Manley Hopkins *(haecceitas)*; Matthew Arnold *(self-awareness)*
20th century - Philip Larkin *(doubt)*; Ted Hughes *(power)*; Seamus Heaney *(richness)* Elizabeth Jennings *(vividness)* Andrew Young *(a brilliant nature poet)*

But I've probably missed someone out in a senior moment - there's hardly a major poet that I dislike; I also love *Anonymous*, particularly his medieval lyrics and his *English and Scottish Ballads* (ed F. Child)

Okay then - I just like everyone!


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

For a man who likes language and words, I have never really developed a love of poetry, although I have read some poetry. Here are some I like (in no particular order):

Bertolt Brecht
Rainer Maria Rilke
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I know I have read many more German ones, some French ones, and a few in the English language, too. This is sad. My mind draws a blank right now. I might add some later  I have read a fair bit, as I said, but it has been a while.

I read some of Shakespeare's sonnets, but I wouldn't call them favourites.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I got into Japanese Haiku for a while. A favourite was Matsuo Bashō.

Still, my primary interest in reading was always prose. Bashō's travel journal, _The Narrow Road to the Deep North_, is a favourite.

I also had a period when I was heavily into the Dadaists. Again, I can't think of names, but one that comes to mind is Comte de Lautréamont's _Les Chants de Maldoror_: I found it boring and very tedious.


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## Cheyenne (Aug 6, 2012)

Ingélou's list is ample. A few added favorites of my own would be Gray, Gay, Goethe, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Heine, Wilbur etc.

As for rational arguments -- let us start with Wordsworth! Hazlitt always commented on Wordsworth with great insight, such as here in the _Observations on Mr. Wordsworth's Poem the Excursion_: --

[T]he evident scope and tendency of Mr. Wordsworth's mind is the reverse of dramatic. It resists all change of character, all variety of scenery, all the bustle, machinery, and pantomime of the stage, or of real life, -- whatever might relieve, or relax, or change the direction of its own activity, jealous of all competition. The power of his mind preys upon itself. It is as if there were nothing, but himself and the universe. He lives in the busy solitude of his own heart; in the deep silence of thought. His imagination lends life and feeling only to "the bare trees and mountains bare;" peoples the viewless tracts of air, and converses with the silent clouds!​
And again, in Mr. Wordsworth from _The Spirit of the Age_: --

He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them, the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them, the great despise, the fashionable may ridicule them: but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die. Persons of this class will still continue to feel what he has felt: he has expressed what they might in vain wish to express, except with glistening eye and faultering tongue! There is a lofty philosophic tone, a thoughtful humanity, infused into his pastoral vein. Remote from the passions and events of the great world, he has communicated interest and dignity to the primal movements of the heart of man, and ingrafted his own conscious reflections on the casual thoughts of hinds and shepherds. Nursed amidst the grandeur of mountain scenery, he has stooped to have a nearer view of the daisy under his feet, or plucked a branch of white-thorn from the spray: but in describing it, his mind seems imbued with the majesty and solemnity of the objects around him-the tall rock lifts its head in the erectness of his spirit; the cataract roars in the sound of his verse; and in its dim and mysterious meaning, the mists seem to gather in the hollows of Helvellyn, and the forked Skiddaw hovers in the distance.​
And _again_, in a review of Wordsworth's collected poems for the _London Weekly Review_: --

He murmurs about the domestic earth - about cottage doors - about flower-beds - about infancy - about the calm joys of far retirement, repose, security, contemplation. He shuns the mighty struggles and untameable passions of daring men - the voice of war, whether raised by Freedom or by Oppression, scares him; he has no hymn for Liberty; no denunciations of wrath, revenge, or retribution, to pour out of the poetic vial upon the disturbers of the earth; no tale, instinct with energy, to tell, illustrative of any truth of vital importance to mankind, or engendering hatred or contempt of their oppressors.​
On the other end of the critical spectrum, there's John Ruskin, who found him "simply a Westmorland peasant." The two lines he chose as examples of bad Wordsworth were: --

Parching summer hath no warrant
To consume this crystal well.​
Matthew Arnold, a great enthusiast of Wordsworth (and excellent poet himself) supplemented with his own example of bad Wordsworth: --

Sol hath dropt into his harbour --​
But Arnold was firmly convinced of Wordsworth's greatness, despite the many bad verses he wrote (scattered throughout volumes which are only read by those who peruse all of his poetic works -- the high quality works outnumber it); and the source of the greatness of his verse was most evident to him: --

The cause of its greatness is simple, and may be told quite simply. Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.​
With this I concur. I was a scoffer at natural scenery throughout most of my youth; I found poetical descriptions of it mere sentimentalism -- _until_ I read Wordsworth! Matthew Arnold's selection of Wordsworth's poems is an excellent starting point, I have found; and he is an accessible poet in general. Even girls from my class who would never dream of touching a book where charmed by his description of a girl who was a

Phantom of delight 
When first she gleam'd upon my sight; 
A lovely Apparition, sent 
To be a moment's ornament: 
Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; 
Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; 
But all things else about her drawn 
From May-time and the cheerful dawn; 
A dancing shape, an image gay, 
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.​
Everywhere in his works are to be found great lines. I think I have quoted him oftenest of all poets in essays I have written for school. He truly communicates a tranquility; he speaks to the "depth, and not the tumult, of the soul"! The Everyman's Library Pocket Poets selection of his poems is a great, small, charming gift. I used to own three, but already gave two away! I had always considered it a possible Valentine's Day gift, but haven't had the privilege of using it for that so far. (I also own a facsimile edition of Yeats' poetry collection _The Tower_, as it was released on Valentine's Day of 1928, for the same purpose.)


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Thanks, Cheyenne. These are some more I have read: Baudelaire and Rimbaud.

Also, I was pretty heavily into the Icelandic sagas for a while. I read Beowulf (I just learned that it is Old English  ). The Epic of Gilgamesh, too.

And lots of the Persian Sufi mystic, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī!

Shouldn't forget the Book of Psalms, from the Bible 

Japanese Zen poets galore, Chinese Taoist (and others): Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei...

Stefan George, Mallarmé, Tagore, Service, Kipling...

It's starting to come back to me


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## Winterreisender (Jul 13, 2013)

1. Titus *Lucretius* Carus (for envisaging a world where science and reason prevails, where man can live free of fear)
2. Publius *Ovid*ius Naso (for his witty and sometimes subversive take on all the traditional genres)
3. Publius *Vergil*ius Maro (for being at times high and lofty, and times humble and restrained, but always dignified)
4. Gaius Valerius *Catullus* (for championing the view that short and refined beats long and verbose)

They're my top four, anyway, but I'm afraid my knowledge of poetry ends in about 100AD, lol...

Honourable mentions: several Greek poets such as Callimachus of Cyrene and Theocritus of Syracuse


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

Robert Service : The Song of the Camp-Fire

I 

Heed me, feed me, I am hungry, I am red-tongued with desire; 
Boughs of balsam, slabs of cedar, gummy ****** of the pine, 
Heap them on me, let me hug them to my eager heart of fire, 
Roaring, soaring up to heaven as a symbol and a sign. 
Bring me knots of sunny maple, silver birch and tamarack; 
Leaping, sweeping, I will lap them with my ardent wings of flame; 
I will kindle them to glory, I will beat the darkness back; 
Streaming, gleaming, I will goad them to my glory and my fame. 
Bring me gnarly limbs of live-oak, aid me in my frenzied fight; 
Strips of iron-wood, scaly blue-gum, writhing redly in my hold; 
With my lunge of lurid lances, with my whips that flail the night, 
They will burgeon into beauty, they will foliate in gold. 
Let me star the dim sierras, stab with light the inland seas; 
Roaming wind and roaring darkness! seek no mercy at my hands; 
I will mock the marly heavens, lamp the purple prairies, 
I will flaunt my deathless banners down the far, unhouseled lands. 
In the vast and vaulted pine-gloom where the pillared forests frown, 
By the sullen, bestial rivers running where God only knows, 
On the starlit coral beaches when the combers thunder down, 
In the death-spell of the barrens, in the shudder of the snows; 
In a blazing belt of triumph from the palm-leaf to the pine, 
As a symbol of defiance lo! the wilderness I span; 
And my beacons burn exultant as an everlasting sign 
Of unending domination, of the mastery of Man; 
I, the Life, the fierce Uplifter, I that weaned him from the mire; 
I, the angel and the devil, I, the tyrant and the slave; 
I, the Spirit of the Struggle; I, the mighty God of Fire; 
I, the Maker and Destroyer; I, the Giver and the Grave. 


II 

Gather round me, boy and grey-beard, frontiersman of every kind. 
Few are you, and far and lonely, yet an army forms behind: 
By your camp-fires shall they know you, ashes scattered to the wind. 

Peer into my heart of solace, break your bannock at my blaze; 
Smoking, stretched in lazy shelter, build your castles as you gaze; 
Or, it may be, deep in dreaming, think of dim, unhappy days. 

Let my warmth and glow caress you, for your trails are grim and hard; 
Let my arms of comfort press you, hunger-hewn and battle-scarred: 
O my lovers! how I bless you with your lives so madly marred! 

For you seek the silent spaces, and their secret lore you glean: 
For you win the savage races, and the brutish Wild you wean; 
And I gladden desert places, where camp-fire has never been. 

From the Pole unto the Tropics is there trail ye have not dared? 
And because you hold death lightly, so by death shall you be spared, 
(As the sages of the ages in their pages have declared). 

On the roaring Arkilinik in a leaky bark canoe; 
Up the cloud of Mount McKinley, where the avalanche leaps through; 
In the furnace of Death Valley, when the mirage glimmers blue. 

Now a smudge of wiry willows on the weary Kuskoquim; 
Now a flare of gummy pine-knots where Vancouver's scaur is grim; 
Now a gleam of sunny ceiba, when the Cuban beaches dim. 

Always, always God's Great Open: lo! I burn with keener light 
In the corridors of silence, in the vestibules of night; 
'Mid the ferns and grasses gleaming, was there ever gem so bright? 

Not for weaklings, not for women, like my brother of the hearth; 
Ring your songs of wrath around me, I was made for manful mirth, 
In the lusty, gusty greatness, on the bald spots of the earth. 

Men, my masters! men, my lovers! ye have fought and ye have bled; 
Gather round my ruddy embers, softly glowing is my bed; 
By my heart of solace dreaming, rest ye and be comforted! 


III 

I am dying, O my masters! by my fitful flame ye sleep; 
My purple plumes of glory droop forlorn. 
Grey ashes choke and cloak me, and above the pines there creep 
The stealthy silver moccasins of morn. 
There comes a countless army, it's the Legion of the Light; 
It tramps in gleaming triumph round the world; 
And before its jewelled lances all the shadows of the night 
Back in to abysmal darknesses are hurled. 

Leap to life again, my lovers! ye must toil and never tire; 
The day of daring, doing, brightens clear, 
When the bed of spicy cedar and the jovial camp-fire 
Must only be a memory of cheer. 
There is hope and golden promise in the vast portentous dawn; 
There is glamour in the glad, effluent sky: 
Go and leave me; I will dream of you and love you when you're gone; 
I have served you, O my masters! let me die. 

A little heap of ashes, grey and sodden by the rain, 
Wind-scattered, blurred and blotted by the snow: 
Let that be all to tell of me, and glorious again, 
Ye things of greening gladness, leap and glow! 
A black scar in the sunshine by the palm-leaf or the pine, 
Blind to the night and dead to all desire; 
Yet oh, of life and uplift what a symbol and a sign! 
Yet oh, of power and conquest what a destiny is mine! 
A little heap of ashes — Yea! a miracle divine, 
The foot-print of a god, all-radiant Fire.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Wilfred Owen, British pacifist and WWI poet, depicted the horrors of gas and trench warfare brilliantly and memorably in his poems.

No greater tribute can be imagined than Benjamin Britten using nine of Owens' devastating poems in his War Requiem.

"If in some smothering dreams you too could pace behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear at every jolt, the blood come gurgling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as a cancer, bitter as the cud of vile,
Incurable sores on innocent tongues-
My friends, you would not tell with such high zest,
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie:
Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."

Amen, Wilfred Owen and may you forever rest in peace.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Whomever was the one or more people we now know as "Homer."

Sappho.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

At the moment Virgil is my favorite. I've been reminded how much I love this man's work as I've been reading _The Aeneid_.


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## clara s (Jan 6, 2014)

1-20 from my 100 favourite poets list
The only rational argument I put, is, samples from their poetry.

*William Shakespeare*

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages...

*Homer*

TELL ME, O MUSE, of that ingenious hero who travelled far and wide 
after he had sacked the famous town of Troy. 
Many cities did he visit, and many were the nations 
with whose manners and customs he was acquainted; 
moreover he suffered much by sea while trying to save his own life 
and bring his men safely home...

*Dante Alighieri*

When I had journeyed half of our life's way,
I found myself within a shadowed forest,
for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,
that savage forest, dense and difficult,
which even in recall renews my fear...

*Allen Ginsberg*

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, 
starving hysterical naked, 
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn,
looking for an angry fix...

*Anna Akhmatova*

De profundis… My generation Had been fed without honey. 
Aft that Just a wind sings in gloomy recession, 
And remembrance of them who is dead.
Our business have never been finished,
Our time had been marked by the end...

*Charles Beaudelaire*

Free as a bird and joyfully my heart
Soared up among the rigging, in and out;
Under a cloudless sky the ship rolled on
Like an angel drunk with brilliant sun.

"That dark, grim island there--which would that be?"
"Cythera," we're told, "the legendary isle...

*Bertolt Brecht*

The rope has been torn; a knot
Can tie it again, but
It's been torn.

Perhaps we'll meet again, but
You won't find me
In the place where we parted ways...

*F. Garcia Lorca*

Córdoba, Far away, and lonely. 
Full moon, black pony, olives against my saddle.
Though I know all the roadways, I'll never get to Córdoba...

*Emily Dickinson*

There is another sky, Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there...

*Arthur Rimbaud*

I have kissed the summer dawn. Before the palaces, nothing moved. 
The water lay dead. Battalions of shadows still kept the forest road...

*Ezra Pound*

And the days are not full enough, and the nights are not full enough,
And life slips by like a field mouse, not shaking the grass...

*Pablo Neruda*

Arise to birth with me, my brother.
Give me your hand out of the depths
sown by your sorrows.
You will not return from these stone fastnesses...

*Jack Kerouac*

April doesnt hurt here, Like it does in New England 
The ground, Vast and brown 
Surrounds dry towns 
Located in the dust, Of the coming locust
Live for survival, not for 'kicks'...

*Sylvia Plath*

Up from the jet-backed mirror of water
And while the air's clear, hourglass sifts a Drift of goldpieces...

*Constantine Cavafy*

The days of the future stand in front of us
Like a line of candles all alight----
Golden and warm and lively little candles.
The days that are past are left behind,
A mournful row of candles that are out;
The nearer ones are still smoking,
Candles cold, and melted, candles bent...

*Walt Whitman*

I see brains and lips closed, tympans and temples unstruck,
Until that comes which has the quality to strike and to unclose...

*Robert Frost *

I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference...

*Rudyard Kipling*

If you can dream, and not make dreams your master;
If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim...

*Langston Hughes*

Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird, That cannot fly...

*Jim Morrison*

Angels and sailors rich girls backyard fences tents
Dreams watching each other narrowly soft luxuriant cars Girls in garages, 
stripped out to get liquor and clothes half gallons of wine and six packs of beer Jumped, 
humped, born to suffer made to undress in the wilderness.
I will never treat you mean
Never start no kind of scene
I'll tell you every place and person that I've been...


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## clara s (Jan 6, 2014)

hpowders said:


> Wilfred Owen, British pacifist and WWI poet, depicted the horrors of gas and trench warfare brilliantly and memorably in his poems.
> 
> No greater tribute can be imagined than Benjamin Britten using nine of Owens' devastating poems in his War Requiem.
> 
> ...


amen, indeed........


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

clara s said:


> meaning?.........


War is hell.....


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## clara s (Jan 6, 2014)

hpowders said:


> War is hell........


you must confess to the confessional first

and then the holy fathers will decide how hell it is...


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

clara s said:


> you must confess to the confessional first
> 
> and then the holy fathers will decide


They told me I'm doing better now and I should stay away from the Amalfi Coast because it contributes to unsavory thoughts and decisions. I'm coming home!


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

clara s said:


> 1-20 from my 100 favourite poets list
> The only rational argument I put, is, samples from their poetry.
> 
> *William Shakespeare*
> ...


This is a very fine job, clara s. Brava! :tiphat:


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

Arthur Rimbaud
Charles Baudelaire
Rainer Maria Rilke
William Blake
Rabindranath Tagore
William Shakespeare
Sergei Yesenin
Stephane Mallarmé
Paul Verlaine
Lautréamont


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## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

*Rainer Maria Rilke*

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

[Translated by Stephen Mitchell]

*Wallace Stevens - closing stanzas of "The Idea of Order at Key West"*

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

*James Wright - "Lifting Illegal Nets by Flashlight"*

The carp are secrets 
Of the creation: I do not 
Know if they are lonely.
The poachers drift with an almost frightening
Care under the bridge.
Water is a luminous
Mirror of swallow's nests. The stars
Have gone down.
What does my anguish
Matter? Something
The color
Of a puma has plunged through this net, and is gone.
This is the firmest 
Net I ever saw, and yet something 
Is gone lonely
In the headwaters of the Minnesota.


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## Lord Lance (Nov 4, 2013)

I have experience only with Tennyson's unfinished play-poem callled "The Devil and The Lady" and another two or three early poems.

Stupendous writing for a fourteen year old.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

William Shakespeare
Dante Alighieri
William Blake
Charles Baudelaire
Hakim Abu ʾl-Qasim Ferdowsi Tusi (Firdawsi)
Homer
Virgil
John Milton
John Keats
Edmund Spenser
Johann Goethe
Ranier Maria Rilke
Giacomo Leopardi
T.S. Eliot
Pablo Neruda
Eugenio Montale
Walt Whitman
Fernando Pessoa
William Butler Yeats
Ferderico Garcia Lorca
Friedrich Hölderlin
Boris Pasternak
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Li Bo
Wang Wei
Wallace Stevens
Victor Hugo
Robert Herrick
Geoffrey Chaucer
Yehuda Halevi


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## TxllxT (Mar 2, 2011)

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin






(Even if you don't understand Russian, you may just listen to it as music)

Bulat Shalvovich Okudzhava






Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam






Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky
Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova
Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin
Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak
Ivan Andreyevich Krylov

Dante Alighieri
King David


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## omega (Mar 13, 2014)

I don't read much poetry, and almost exclusively in French (_traduttore, traditore_ ?)
My favourite is definitely Paul Valéry


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

*Premonition
*
I am like a flag surrounded by vast, open space.
I sense the coming winds and must live through them,
while all other things among themselves do not yet move:
The doors close quietly, and in the chimneys is silence;
The windows do not yet tremble, and the dust is still heavy and dark.

I already know the storms, and I'm as restless as the sea.
I roll out in waves and fall back upon myself,
and throw myself off into the air and am completely alone
in the immense storm.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke


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## Vronsky (Jan 5, 2015)

*Silentium*

Silentium

Be silent, hide away and let
your thoughts and longings rise and set
in the deep places of your heart.
Let dreams move silently as stars,
in wonder more than you can tell.
Let them fulfil you - and be still.

What heart can ever speak its mind?
How can some other understand
the hidden pole that turns your life?
A thought, once spoken, is a lie.
Don't cloud the water in your well;
drink from this wellspring - and be still.

Live in yourself. There is a whole
deep world of being in your soul,
burdened with mystery and thought.
The noise outside will snuff it out.
Day's clear light can break the spell.
Hear your own singing - and be still.

-- Fyodor Tyutchev


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Hmm... let's go. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Basho, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Basho, John Milton...

Okay I give up. 

I just can't do this (btw, I'm a former English major).


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## AnotherSpin (Apr 9, 2015)

he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.

putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.

who the hell is going to save 
me? he
thought.

as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you're going to have to
save yourself.

still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another 
spin.

_Charles Bukowski_


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## Potiphera (Mar 24, 2011)

Dante
Byron 
Shakespeare 
Milton 
Homer 
Shelley 
Wordsworth 
S. T. Coleridge 
T.S. Eliot 
W.H. Auden 
Spenser 
Chaucer.



And of course lots that have been mentioned already.


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