/lit/ - Literature

Personally I'd say my top 5 are:

John Berryman
Dylan Thomas
W.B. Yeats
John Ashbery
T.S. Eliot

I think I look for something that I can only understand partly, so that there is always something I can keep thinking about and coming back to.

I've only really read 20th century poetry though, so if anyone can recommend something older that they think would appeal to me, I'd be very interested.

bump

>>2862337
that guy is crap thats all i know

>>2862337
Percy Bysshe Shelley
T.S. Eliot
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hart Crane
H.D.

>Who are your top 5 favourite poets?
Percy Shelley
Robert Browning
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
W.B. Yeats
Lewis Carroll

>What qualities do you like in a poem?
An interesting rhyming pattern and words that evoke imagination.

>Who would you recommend to other posters based on their tastes?
Well, it's obvious I have a fondness for romantic poetry, so mostly that. Yeats is up there solely because he shared a lot of the same tastes I have.

>>2862428
Suit yourself I guess. How come?

>>2862430
Hart Crane seems like an interesting one. Berryman mentions him and his life a few times in The Dream Songs. I wonder if he was influence on him somehow?

>>2862462
hugely, iirc

>>2862464
Awesome, I'll have to check him out in that case.

byron
lil wayne
a.a milne
eliot
shelley

>>2862550
>a.a. milne
Mah nigga.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUIPOKOGIOA&feature=relmfu

>Rimbaud
>Walt Whitman
>Hart Crane
>Milton
>Nerval

in no order

get on my level, plebs

lord byron
percy shelley
walt whitman
charles bukowski
wb yeats

imagery, narrative, flow

o i get it, is this a 'you-post-bukowski,-you-lose' thread?

the game

>>2862430
>>2862430

or, conversely, a 'you-post-hart-crane,-you-win' thread

> mah niggah

Harold Bloom

>>2862598
>nerval
oh lord

My girlfriend lent me some Rilke based on my interest in the German language (German on one side, translation on the other). How is he? Will he be worth my time later?

Of course I'll read anyway to form my own opinion, but I have to ask. I'm a pleb.

John Milton
Rabindranath Tagore
Li Bai
Vladimir Mayakovsky
R. Parthasarathy

>>2862667
OP here. I'm also interested in Rilke (I'm a German student). I read this one really good one called Schwarze Katze. The closing image is just amazing:

http://rainer-maria-rilke.de/090046schwarzekatze.html
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/black-cat/

in descending order

>Wallace Stevens
>Milton
>Yeats
>Eliot
>Frost

i like pope, blake, wordsworth, browning and stevens

Donne
Rilke
Baudelaire
Pound
Zukofsky

no particular order

sage for lolmasturbation

rebump

Paz
Rilke
Popa
(Elizabeth) Bishop
Whitman

surprised at the lack of Paz in this thread. anyways I really love very evocative, emotional, surrealistic poetry. I might even put Rilke above Paz for the deeper emotional depth of his evocations. In any case hit me with recs, I don't care.

>ctrl+f
>no woodsworth
come on /lit/

>>2864447
>woodsworth
>¿¿¿

>>2864447
your dum

Ginsberg
Whitman
Yeats
Cummings
Hughes

>>2862343

For older stuff, I'd recommend Christopher Smartt or John Donne, for slightly less older stuff, Hart Crane and WH Auden.

My favourites:

Berryman
Auden
Millay
Neruda
Heaney

Honourable mentions: Derek Walcott, WH Auden, Simon Armitage, Andrew Marvell

Homer
Virgil
Anonymous (Beowulf)
Pope
Keats

you are all beneath me

>Who would you recommend to other posters based on their tastes?
>nobody reads
>nobody recommends
>another day on shitty /lit/

worst board on 4chan

>>2864869
>worst board on 4chan

it's sad because it's true

>>2862905

DAT TASTE! Zukovsky had me scratching my head a little, but woah.

John Donne
Byron
T.S. Eliot
Dionne Brand
William Carlos Williams

>>2864863
>Anonymous (Beowulf)
>tells anyone to get on his level

>>2864880
It's magnificent.
I pity you.

guys, stop liking T.S. Eliot, he isn't that great. He's honestly just mediocre.

>>2864884
Nah, he's certainly one of the most talented poets of the 20th century, even if he isn't one of my favorites.

>>2864884

Edgy hipster warning.

>What are your top 5 favorite poets?
Charles Baudelaire
Arthur RImbaud
Yeats
Sappho
Tennyson
>What qualities do you like in a poem?
If it communicates the ideal, I like it.
>Who would you recommend to other posters based on their tastes?
Um ok.
>>2862337
Probably a poetry anthology. Like "The Giant Book of Poetry". Something breezy and entry level.
>>2862343
Older poets... I really enjoy Sappho, but if you don't know Ancient Greek then maybe Chaucer? I I don't know what languages you're familiar with enough to read poetry in.
>>2862430
I would recommend some Byron.
>>2862436
I would recommend Tennyson.
>>2862550
I would recommend Thomas Gray.
>>2862598
I would recommend Baudelaire.
>>2862600
I would recommend Billy Collins.
>>2862667
He's worth it unless you suck at German.
Also I would recommend Goethe.
>>2862673
I would recommend Anna Akhmatova.
>>2862680
I would recommend John Donne.
>>2862894
I would recommend Longfellow.
>>2862905
I would recommend Rumi. Unless you don't know the language.
>>2864444
I would recommend Pablo Neruda.
>>2864852
I would recommend Ezra Pound.
>>2864856
I would recommend Thomas Gray.
>>2864863
I would recommend Pindar and some humility.

>>2864884
Joyce>>Eliot>Woolf (except to the Lighthouse)

>>2864889
bahahahahah

what are you talking about

>>2864887
>I'm going to quote everyone so I can pretend to myself I know about literature

>>2864889
But Joyce's poetry wasn't that great, and I don't know if Woolf wrote any poetry at all

>>2864863
>no Chaucer
At least you have the Beowulf poet(s).

>>2864886
liking Eliot is one of the most hipster things you can do. Even Pound had more talent, lol. Sylvia Plath is a better poet than Eliot. Hughes, Rilke and Pessoa are far better.
>>2864888
What talent does he have?
>>2864889
yeah, there'll all kinda low

>>2864887

Thanks for the recommendation - I lije Gray, but I haven't read him in a while - off to Gutenberg for me.

My recommendation in return would be Craig Raine, and if you haven't read him already, Seamus Heaney, Yeats only real successor.

>>2862436

To you I'd recommend Wendy Cope.

While I'm on here, are there any dutchfags available who can recommend any contemporary Dutch poetry? I've read some Gerrit Achterberg, which was OK, but I've no idea who your best poet working at the moment is.

>>2864884
>>2864898
I do not like the best poetry. I have read poetry that is very poetic, and I have hated it. Someone like Joyce or Faulkner might epitomize the modern novel, but that doesn't mean that they are my favorite, or that liking them has any correlation with their talent. This is especially true for poetry. Please, before attacking popular beliefs, reconsider the assumptions you picked up in your undergraduate literature courses

>>2864898
Ezra POund is a bit overrated, and Sylvia Plath? Now you're obvliously fucking with me.

>yeah, there'll all kinda low

You're just mad because you didn't completely understand The Waste Land and Ulysses the first time you tried to read them

>>2864863
It is a very interesting piece of history, but nobody cares about it outside of Britain for a reason, and that's because it doesn't have anywhere near the merit or importance that has made Dante, Homer, Virgil, etc, immortal. Shit, in terms of form or content it's pretty pedestrian - it's made by primitive mudslingers for primitive mudslingers and it shows. Many, many poets have written greater work than Beowulf and it's in your top 5. Come on now.

Very overrated if you ask me. But you are entitled to your opinion

>>2864898

>Pound had more talent

lel

>>2864863
If you didn't read this in Old English, you should get off this board.

>>2864917
> Shit, in terms of form or content it's pretty pedestrian - it's made by primitive mudslingers for primitive mudslingers and it shows.

How is this different to how Homer wrote (or spoke) his poems? He wasn't making it for a refined audience, he was making it to excite the common man.
You're wrong about the form/content. It's rich.

>>2864898
>Eliot
>hipster

He's one of the most recognized poets of the 20th century. Hipster he is not.

>>2864917
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliterative_verse

John Cooper Clarke, Lynton Quesi Johnston, Gil Scott Heron, James Clarence Mangan and Adrian Mitchell.

Well, as you can see from the list, I like all sorts of poetry. I do like something that has a lyricism to it, something delicate like Mangan or James Joyce's chamber music but i do also like energetic ballsy performance poetry, and its great watching it being done live. Evidently Chickentown by John Cooper Clarke is possibly my all time favourite poem because of the simple but effective use of form and the way the structure works with the content to evoke a particular place and time, which is also relevant to all shitty urban landscapes and probably always will be.

I'd recommend James Clarence Mangans poetry to anyone who likes Yeats, Joyce or anyone else following in their tradition, he was one of the unknown greats of 19th Century literature yet remains obscure probably only really remembered because of the oblique references to him in Dubliners or in some of Brendan Behans work. His greatest work is possibly The Nameless One.

If you like performance poetry there is a huge vibrant scene out there to discover, most of it is shit but its worth following for the good stuff, some of which occasional makes the crossover into music through Hip Hop (Saul Williams, B Dolan). if you live in or near a moderate sized city anywhere there will be a live poetry night somewhere this very weekend, if you live in a major city of national capitol there is probably one on tonight.

Beowulf isn't actually in English.

However, the Seamus Heaney translation is wicked bad - a brilliant piece of work.

>>2864934
Chamber music is shit. Only worthwhile poem is An Army Charging Upon the Land

>>2864935
>Beowulf isn't actually in English.
We got an ill educated pedant, be careful guys.

>>2864939

>ill educated

Degree in English Lit., from an old-school university (yes, I did get a First, actually, thanks for asking), and we had to have special classes in Old English to understand Beowulf. Weird thing is that when I came to learn Dutch, it was a massive help, but that's by the by.

Quoting from Beowulf:

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,
þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

That is not English other than in name: separate alphabet, different verb structures, and it's a cunt to learn and quote for your finals.

It's called "english", but it's actually a kind of low german.

>>2864952
>we had to have special classes in Old English to understand Beowulf.
>it's in Old English, therefore it isn't in English
You're a fucking idiot.

>Top 5 Wackiest Wordsmiths
Robert Frost
Seamus Heaney
Dylan Thomas
Robert Lowell
Patrick Kavanagh

I like the use of nature in poetry. I like it when a poet can take a normally mundane occurrence and have it interpreted to convey emotions or an idea.

Alicia Ostriker. I've only started reading her recently but she's good.

>>2864959

An idiot? Are you implying that what he quoted is actually, comprehensible English, and not some rough early version of the language we speak today?

>>2864959
It ISN'T English, bro. The only thing it has in common with English is ancestry and the fact that the linguists who named the lanuage were morons.

>>2864973
Are you trying to claim that it's incomprehensible? Are you trying to claim that because it isn't modern SE it isn't English? You don't have to go far back in the history of English to find dialects which are generally incomprehensible to modern SE speakers, and then there's a whole other world of dialects if you look at creoles.

Also, low German doesn't mean what you think it means.

>>2864959
No sir, you are in fact, the idiot.

>>2864991
Touché, you wit.

>>2864959

You seem mad. Are you OK?

>>2864856
>Christopher Smartt or John Donne
>Hart Crane and WH Auden
Thanks for the recommendations. A lot of people are saying Crane so that seems to be a good choice.

>>2864887
>Sappho
>Chaucer
Wow, great post. I don't know Greek but I'm against translated poetry entirely. I'll prioritise Chaucer though. Thanks.

>>2865198
>but I'm against translated poetry
Shit I meant to write:
>but I'm NOT against translated poetry

I'm not really into lyrics poetry, so I tend to read older stuff.

Ovid
Goethe
Dante
Virgil
Homer

emily dickinson
john donne
wallace stevens
william blake
shakespeare

i most appreciate poems that marry thought with feeling. if they're also clever and have a sense of humor all the better. i love the meeting of all these seemingly incompatible emotions.

>>2865573
>i most appreciate poems that marry thought with feeling.
i should add that most poems aim to do this, but some do it better to my taste at least.

also, can someone tell me what they see in pound? all i've read by him have been terribly forgettable. could you post a poem of his you've found great please?

My favorite poets are Wallace Stevens and Walt Whitman.
I'm not knowledgeable about poetry at all, and I don't have any defined taste yet. I do love those two, though.

Any ideas or suggestions?

>>2865616
you might like ginsberg if you like whitman. similar spirit and style though ginsberg is a lot more vulgar. for a more contemporary take on whitman's expansiveness, though much more abstract and less exuberant, i would recommend john ashbury. hart crane is another one.

stevens was a modernist, so his style is in many ways like that of his peers (abstract, vague, imagist). my favorite modernists, though your patience and enthusiasm for them may vary, of course, are marianne moore and t.s. eliot. this page mentions a number of related poets:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagism

>still no mention of woodsworth

>>2865732
your stil dum

>>2864887

Thanks for the input. Also, I love me some Goethe, though having said that I definitely need read far more of him than the first few sections of Faust.

>>2865850
stay ignorant

>>2865897
sew wats ur fav pome buy woodsworth

>>2865900
anon made me chuckle

a short

Rumi
Hafiz
Hughes
O'Hara
Neruda

Truth, humor, and elements of transience

Read more contemporary poets. Tony Hoagland, Denise Duhamel, Gregory Orr...etc