English poetry

[Anonymous No.1503188]

Hey /lit/!

Do you guys have any recommendations on english poetry? I need to start reading all kinds of shit and "learn the basics" so I'll be able to write my own (mostly song lyrics), and make sure it isn't your usual amateur teen-bullshit.
I thought of Shakespeare as the first step. Where do I go from there?

[Anonymous No.1503196]

You're already on the right track - the Floyd's a pretty good place to start.

[Anonymous No.1503308]

Browning is great

Here's a good starting poem, about a guy really pissed at someone at his monastary.

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/rb/cloister.html

[Anonymous No.1503326]

Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Larkin.

[Anonymous No.1503336]

Seamus Heaney might well be the best poet alive at the moment.

Yeats is fantastic - accessible and a genius craftsman as well.

T.S. Eliot is pretty much compulsory imho

Wendy Cope has written a few good poems - she's kind of snappy and amusing as well, she's a whining cow in real life though.

I've been reading Raymond Carver's A New Path to the Waterfall recently, and that's got some really poignant moments in it - although I don't think Carver was ever a great poet.

[Anonymous No.1503339]

>>1503336
>>1503326

Leda and the Swan
by W. B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?


Booyakasha etc.

[Anonymous No.1503346]

Blake. He'll make you sad that your sanity will never let you see the world the way he did.

Also, Ezra Pound (not English, but English language). His ideas about structure and intertextuality were revolutionary, but he may have broken poetry.

[Anonymous No.1503355]

Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn.

[Anonymous No.1503386]

>>1503346

Ezra Pound is nice & all, but he's part of that whole high modernism scene. He thought that if people could understand his poetry, he wasn't trying hard enough. I like a couple of his poems, but his hipster contrivance makes it hard for me to like him as a poet.

[Tio Lan !VYDyKaEzIA No.1503394]

>>1503339
>Yeats
>English

[Anonymous No.1503398]

>>1503394
I'm >>1503326 and the reason I put Yeats is that I think it's stupid to not introduce someone to a great poet because of his nationality.

[Anonymous No.1504928]

>>1503394

I thought we were talking about the English Language, not the English people, you cunt

[Anonymous No.1504948]

>>1503336

This. But I'd hold off on Eliot indefinitely.

Some good additions to the list:

Robert Frost (although he's a bit entry-level)
E.E. Cummings
Wallace Stevens
Philip Larkin