Favorite Poet?

[Kidsmum]

Omar Khayam

[AbielleRose]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning Her work is all so beautiful and heartfelt.

[vinay87]

Omar Khayam

 

I've always wanted to read the Rubaiyat!! Any thoughts on it?

[SueK]

Matthew Arnold. I did Sohrab and Rustum for my GCSE thousands of years ago and still have a copy of the poem. It goes on for pages but I really love it.

 

Also love John Masefield - esp Sea Fever.

[Kidsmum]

I've always wanted to read the Rubaiyat!! Any thoughts on it?

 

It's very beautiful a lot of it touches on mortality & the brevity of life. It's the sort of poetry that you have to read slowly & savour to really appreciate, like a good wine

[Pixie]

I am not sure who my favorite is, but here are a few I love.

 

Robert Frost

Alfred Lord Tennyson

William Shakespeare

Walt Whitman

[Chrissy]

Good choices there Pixie, I adore Robert Frost and Walt Whitman's 'Dalliance Of Eagles' is wonderful!

[Jonathon]

philip larkin

Leonard Cohen

simon armitage

[poppy]

Leonard Cohen

 

I love the lyrics to Leonard Cohen songs which read like poetry but haven't read any of his actual poems.

Edited July 9, 2010 by poppy

[Kidsmum]

philip larkin

 

I love Toads by Larkin we learnt it at school but i didn't really appreciate it till i left & entered the world of work.

[Brida]

This is a tricky subject since poetry is very specific translation-wise, so some of these poets I know only through translations However I do try to read originals as much as possible.

 

I quite like Baudelaire, romanticism and romantic poetry (The Fly by Wiliam Blake has been one of my favourites since the 1st time I read it, I don't know why I loved it as much), some I.G. Kovačič, A. G. Matoš, T. Ujević, Shakespeare, some E. Dickinson (Because I Could not Stop for Death is also a fav)...

[ethan]

I was once a great admirer of Edwin Arlington Robinson -

 

Richard Cory

 

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

 

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

 

And he was rich, richer than a king,

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

 

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

 

Paul Simon wrote a song based on this poem, and I think Robinson was a major influence on such Beatles songs as Eleanor Rigby and A Day in the Life, and some early Kinks songs.

[poppy]

A very poignant poem. What Paul Simon song do you think was influenced by this?

[Kylie]

There's a Simon & Garfunkel song called Richard Cory; it's one of my favourites. I had no idea it was based on a poem though! Thanks for that.

[BookJumper]

I think Robinson was a major influence on such Beatles songs as Eleanor Rigby and A Day in the Life, and some early Kinks songs.

As far as I know, the inspiration for Eleanor Rigby was simply a gravestone in Liverpool bearing that name do you remember where you heard about the connection Ethan?, I'm intrigued now!

[ethan]

Influence can be a difficult thing to pin down. Structurally and thematically, Eleanor Rigby struck me as a Robinson-like poem when I first heard it way back in the sixties. Robinson specialized in vignettes of people living lives of quiet desperation, often with emotional payoffs in the final verse. He was very popular in his lifetime, won the Pulitzer three times, and if you grew up in the US school systems in the fifties and sixties you would have come across oodles of his poems. I believe he was admired universally, so its reasonable to assume artsy types like Lennon and Davies knew him well, though I have not read such. One of the Kinks songs I'm thinking of is A Well Respected Man.

[metasearcher]

Definitely Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Boudelaire

[ABC_Em]

William Blake and Sylvia Plath (yes, even though so many people declare her to simply be "depressing!") are great, in my opinion. I tend to enjoy a lot of different poetic styles, so I hesitate to refer to a favourite.

 

I love writing poetry too, although I don't claim to be brilliant at it.

[Stephen Melling]

My favourites change with the, well, with the tides. John Betjeman's A Subaltern's Love Song is a particular favourite. I like The Raven, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, William Blake(I like the use of it in Bladerunner, though the poem was deliberately misquoted)Mmmmm. Could go on for quite a bit here...

[KindleWorm]

One of my favourite poets has to be TS Eliot... The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is incredible...

 

But also, Robert Burns... A Red, Red Rose (second stanza)

 

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will love thee still, my Dear,

Till a' the seas gang dry.

 

How can you argue with a sentiment like that!

[rykketid]

My favourite poet is Giuseppe Ungaretti. This is one of my favourite poems by him:

 

Soldiers

 

There we are

like leaves on

trees, in Autumn

 

He wrote that in the trenches during WW1. I think that in those three verses he managed to explain so thoroughly how soldiers feel when in war.

[bonzoi]

My favorite Poet is "

Spring Pools - Robert Frost."

[sharpscribbler77]

I'd say my favourite poets are Edgar Allan Poe and Siegfried Sassoon.

[Maedeh]

Hasht-Ketab by my favorite poet: Sohrab Sepehri. I think it will be eight books in English, In our language eight means hasht(هشت)and book means ketab(کتاب).It includes eight books and every book have some beautiful poet. It never gets boring!I love it!

[Nicola Booth]

Robert Frost and Philip Larkin and only because I did them at A-Level!

 

I would not read poetry for fun as I do not really get it unless explained! Think I try too hard!