The World's Greatest Poets

These are the world's greatest poets—the greatest poets of all time, from around the globe—according to the literary expert consensus, the reader consensus, and one poetry lover's opinion.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST POETS
by Michael R. Burch

This is both a consensus ranking and my personal ranking of the world's greatest poets, beginning with the first poet we know by name, the ancient Sumerian poetess/priestess Enheduanna, to the greats of the last three millennia, to the very best contemporary poets.

Who are the best living poets? The question became much more difficult after the recent deaths of Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wilbur and Derek Walcott. I have a section on that question.

But let’s start with the greatest poets of all time.

For readers in a hurry, I will do a quick overview, after which I will provide poet capsules with examples of their best poems.

This page should be a great resource for students, educators, scholars and poetry lovers of all ilks. Please bookmark the page if you find it useful. Comments, shares and “likes” are always appreciated. I try to respond to all civil inquiries.

Where to begin?

The recurring “consensus core” or “big four” greatest poets, according to literary experts, are Shakespeare, Homer, Dante and Virgil. However, readers disagree. Can we find a golden mean? I will begin with what I call my

EXPERT/READER CONSENSUS

If we were to weigh reader and expert opinions equally, the top ten poets might look like this, although it would be biased toward English language poets: (1) Emily Dickinson (2) John Keats (3) William Blake (4) Pablo Neruda (5) Robert Frost (6) William Butler Yeats (7) Walt Whitman (8) William Shakespeare* (9) Rabindranath Tagore and (10) T. S. Eliot*.

*Shakespeare is not as popular with readers as with experts. Why? Perhaps because readers don’t consider his verse plays to be poetry, or perhaps because they haven’t read the plays. Why T. S. Eliot? Perhaps because readers are put off by his multilingual highbrow poems, such as the student-dreaded, written-in-seven-languages, footnotes-longer-than-the-poem, obscure-to-the-point-of-incomprehensibility tome “The Waste Land,” which I believe Eliot admitted not being able to understand himself. However, I like and admire Eliot’s more accessible poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Preludes,” “Four Quartets” and his lovely weeping girl poem “La Figlia Che Piange.” Thus, I have no problem with Eliot being in the top ten, although I rank him lower myself.

The top ten poets are all ultra-worthy and impossible to argue against, except perhaps Eliot being ranked a bit too high, above poets like Homer, Sappho, Virgil and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

When we consider reader preferences, three of the “big four” fall out of the top ten and Shakespeare is just 23rd according to Ranker’s public poll. Dante is 25th, but is that mostly by reputation? How many readers have read, much less finished the Divine Comedy, one wonders.

THE REMAINDER OF THE TOP 20 POETS

Expanding to the top twenty poets we have: (11) Percy Bysshe Shelley (12) John Milton (13) Virgil and Dante (14) Homer (15) Charles Baudelaire (16) Petrarch (17) Dylan Thomas (18) Rumi and Hafez (19) John Donne and (20) William Wordsworth.

Some experts would quibble with Dylan Thomas, or have hissy fits, but I think he was a great poet in his best poems, all utter masterpieces, including “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” “Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and the famous villanelle he wrote for his dying father, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

The last few times I googled “best poems of all time” the number one poem was “Do Not Go Gentle.”

At this point it has become obvious that many readers and some alleged experts are unfamiliar with the works of the great Chinese and Japanese poets. I will not ignore these maestros in my ranking, and I will provide translations that prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they belong high in the canon.

Seeing, after all, being believing, or in this case reading.

THE REMAINDER OF THE TOP 25 POETS

Rounding out the top twenty-five poets we have: (21) Langston Hughes (22) Alfred Tennyson (23) Pindar and Catullus (24) Geoffrey Chaucer* and (25) W. H. Auden, Christina Rossetti and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a three-way tie.

*Not as popular with readers as experts.

I suspect Coleridge ranks high with readers for two poems: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished “Kubla Khan.” (We can blame the infamous “person from Porlock” for Coleridge’s dream poem being incomplete.) I rank Coleridge lower because other poets had more great poems.

All the poets in this “expert/reader consensus” are very worthy, although my top 25 includes names not found so far, pushing other poets down a bit. I explain why in my poet capsule bios.

HIGH HONORABLE MENTION: THE TOP 50 POETS OF ALL TIME

Poets who appear in some top 25 rankings, but not enough to make my consensus top 25 ranking, include Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Charles Bukowski, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, e. e. cummings, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ben Jonson, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Audre Lorde, Robert Lowell, Sarojini Naidu, Mary Oliver, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Alexander Pushkin, Adrienne Rich, Shel Silverstein, Wallace Stevens and Oscar Wilde.

Why are important names missing from my “expert/reader consensus”? Because the average reader will be less familiar with the best poems, much less the oeuvres, of great poets like Li Bai, Matsuo Basho, Elizabeth Bishop, Luis de Camoes, Catullus, Du Fu, Mirza Ghalib, Goethe, Lorca, Pessoa, Pindar, Pushkin, Rendra, Rilke and Sappho.

So I hope you will keep reading and give these marvelous poets the consideration they deserve…

If you don’t care for such lists, below my ranking you will find snippets of the best poems—some of the greatest lines in the English language, several via translation—followed by some of the best complete poems.

For those willing to do a “deep dive,” I also have a timeline of poetry eras and landmarks, followed by “one-hit wonders” and sections with the best poets by country, genre and poetic “school” such as the Romantics, Decadents, Imagists, Beats, Confessionals, et al.

For readers in a hurry, before I give my complete ranking of 250 poets with “supporting detail,” I will quickly summarize my top 25 poets and explain how I got there…

THE “BIG FOUR” GREATEST POETS, EXPANDED

The greatest poets of all time, according to the consensus of experts, include the “big four” of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, to which I have added Li Bai, Basho, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sappho, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats.

This gives me a “big fifteen” poets, as I have demoted Dante in my ranking. Feel free to correct me in the comments if you disagree about Dante or any other poet or poets.

My top fifteen poets of all time are: (1) Shakespeare (2) Homer (3) Sappho (4) Neruda (5) Basho (6) Whitman (7) Dickinson (8) Goethe (9) Yeats (10) Tagore (11) Frost (12) Rilke (13) Blake (14) Li Bai and (15) Virgil.

Rounding out my top 25 poets are: (16) Wallace Stevens (17) Alexander Pushkin (18) Geoffrey Chaucer (19) Langston Hughes (20) Mirza Ghalib (21) William Wordsworth (22) e. e. cummings (23) Rumi (24) Robert Burns and (25) John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in a tie between friends.

If anyone doubts my qualifications to judge foreign language poets, I have translated Homer, Sappho, Neruda, Basho, Goethe, Tagore, Rilke, Li Bai, Virgil, Pushkin, Ghalib and Rumi. My translations appear herein, so you can be the judge of my expertise, or lack thereof. But even if you don’t think particularly well of my translations, I have obviously read these poets and devoted considerable time to their work.

THE “GREAT DIVIDE”

How do we account for the “Great Divide” between the rankings of experts and readers?

Poets popular with readers who are not as highly regarded by many experts include Maya Angelou, Charles Bukowski, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Khalil Gibran, Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Audre Lorde, Mary Oliver, Edgar Allan Poe, Shel Silverstein, Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde.

Poets popular with experts who are not as popular with readers include Catullus, Chaucer, Hart Crane, Goethe, Issa, Ovid, Petrarch, Pindar, Virgil, Elizabeth Bishop, Du Fu, Mirza Ghalib, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, D. H. Lawrence, Andrew Marvell, Alexander Pope, Alexander Pushkin, Arthur Rimbaud, Edmund Spenser, Wallace Stevens and Wang Wei.

I attribute this to experts reading poetry more widely than most other readers, not to any sort of deficiency in reader taste or acumen.

However, in many cases, I believe experts are inhibited by too many “thou shalt nots” while ordinary readers are free to simply like what they like. Experts have been trained to fear and abhor a long list of things, including but not limited to: abstractions, adjectives, adverbs, meter, rhyme, praise, even honest human sentiment. For example, I doubt that any major journal would publish William Blake’s “Cradle Song,” which appears herein and is one of the loveliest, most tender, touching poems in the English language. Ah, but it expresses honest human sentiment, and that is strictly verboten according to the experts. But are they wiser than Blake, or flunking Poetry 101?

Sometimes the alleged experts remind me of Colonel Klink and Sgt. “I know nuthink” Schultz on Hogan’s Heroes: i.e., comically incompetent gatekeepers. Dare I point out that Schultz’s “I know nuthink” parses as “I know nut-think”?

To understand how nutty “art theory” has become, I recommend the rib-splitting little book, a quick but hilarious read, The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe.

But I digress…

If we consider influence on human societies and the evolution of human thinking, I would rank William Blake and Walt Whitman first, as co-equals, followed by Giovanni Boccaccio, Robert Burns (still revered and taught in Russia as the poet of equality), Langston Hughes, Petrarch (the “Father of Humanism”), Sappho, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Voltaire and Lao Tzu. With a nod to activist singer-songwriters who are also poets, like Joan Baez, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger. Also to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for his poetic “I Have a Dream” speech/sermon.

Poets who might have challenged for numero uno if they had lived longer include Thomas Chatterton, Hart Crane, John Keats, Federico Garcia Lorca, Christopher Marlowe, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Arthur Rimbaud, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Dylan Thomas.

There are popular poets that I haven’t ranked because I haven’t read enough of their work to form a judgement. Such poets include Maya Angelou, Jose Luis Borges, Charles Bukowski, Khalil Gibran, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Rupi Kaur, Audre Lorde, Sarojini Naidu, Mary Oliver and Shel Silverstein. So much to read and so little time!

There are some poets I don’t rank as high as most experts, including Dante, John Dryden, T. S. Eliot, John Milton and Alexander Pope. I explain why in my ranking’s capsule bios. Again, please feel free to disagree in the comments. I have been known to change my mind when the facts warrant.

There are poets I rank higher than pretty much everyone, including Conrad Aiken, Louise Bogan, Charles d’Orleans, Fukuda Chiyo-ni, Mahmoud Darwish, Ernest Dowson, Enheduanna, Ono no Komachi, Miklós Radnóti and Tzu Yeh.

In addition to my own ranking, for the top 50 poets I have given what I believe to be the consensus expert ranking in the form (C#x). I explain in an Appendix the methodology I used to arrive at my consensus rankings, such as counting the number of poems and pages a poet has in major anthologies.

I have also consulted Ranker’s public poll of the world’s greatest poets and have given the Ranker position in the form (R#x).

Finally, I have included Google’s ranking for the search term “world’s greatest poets” in the form (G#x). Google’s rankings vary over time but seem pretty stable, overall, with around 60 poets competing for the top 50 positions, including, rather amazingly, moi. If you doubt Google’s sanity, you can read my poems and judge for yourself by googling “Michael R. Burch” (comments are always welcome here, whether positive, negative or indifferent).

THE 250 GREATEST POETS OF ALL TIME
by Michael R. Burch

1. William Shakespeare (C#1, G#1, R#23) is the consensus number one pick of critics for the world’s greatest poet of all time. I rank Shakespeare first primarily for his great verse plays such as Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure, As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, Henry IV, Henry V, and several others.
   
   If he wrote the songs found in the plays, Shakespeare was also a marvelous songwriter.
   
   However, I think Shakespeare’s sonnets tend to be overrated and if this ranking were strictly about lyric poetry, I would rank several other poets higher, including Sappho, Basho, Rilke, Neruda and Yeats.
   
   Shakespeare’s most popular sonnet, according to Google, is Sonnet 18:
   
   Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
   Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
   —William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18
   
   A very nice sonnet, but not one of the very best lyric poems, for me. And there are several sonnets I consider better, using the original definition of sonnet as a “little song,” including “Bread and Music” by Conrad Aiken, “Cradle Song” by William Blake, “Sweet Rose of Virtue” by William Dunbar, “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost, “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, “Piano” by D. H. Lawrence, “Novenas” by Tom Merrill, “The Unreturning” by Wilfred Owen, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens,” “Requiescat” by Oscar Wilde and “Whoso List to Hunt” by Sir Thomas Wyatt. Also, several love sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay and curtal sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
   
   I am also not a fan of Shakespeare’s longer poems: Venus and Adonis, The Phoenix and the Turtle, A Lover’s Complaint and The Rape of Lucrece.
   
   If we don’t include the plays, Shakespeare’s ranking boils down to the sonnets, and I don’t think readers ranking him 23rd based on the sonnets is beyond reason. For instance, I don’t have any of Shakespeare’s sonnets in my top 50 lyric poems of all time.
   
   In my opinion, Shakespeare’s top ten greatest pieces of writing, expanded to a baker’s dozen, are:
   
   • “All the world’s a stage” aka “The seven stages of man” from As You Like It
   • “To be or not to be / that is the question…” and “What a piece of work is a man!” from Hamlet
   • The St. Crispin’s Day speech (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers…”) from Henry V
   • “Now is the winter of our discontent” from Richard III
   • “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / creeps in this petty pace from day to day…” from Macbeth
   • “Full Fathom Five” from The Tempest
   • “Dirge” (“Fear no more the heat o’ the sun…”) from Cymbeline
   • “Under the Greenwood Tree” from As You Like It
   • Sonnet 63: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…”
   • Sonnet 116: ““Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments…”
   • “O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?” and “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon…” from Romeo and Juliet
   • “If music be the food of love, play on…” from Twelfth Night
   • “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears…” from Julius Caesar
   
   Full Fathom Five
   by William Shakespeare
   
   Full fathom five thy father lies;
   Of his bones are coral made;
   Those are pearls that were his eyes:
   Nothing of him that doth fade
   But doth suffer a sea-change
   Into something rich and strange.
   Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
   Ding-dong.
   Hark! now I hear them: ding-dong, bell.
   
   Shakespeare was influenced by Ovid, Plautus, Plutarch, Seneca, Terence, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Castiglioni, Tasso, Chaucer, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Michel de Montaigne and the Geneva Bible (and thus by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale).
   
   Poets, playwrights and other writers influenced by Shakespeare include John Milton, John Keats, Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, Herman Melville and William Faulkner, among many others.

2. Homer (C#2, G#20, R#38) is the first great narrative poet we know by name, for his epic poems the Odyssey and the Iliad, and he remains one of the great storytellers along with Virgil, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Austen, the Bronte sisters, Chekov, Dickens, Tolkien, Tolstoy and Twain.
   
   Passage home? Impossible! Surely you have something else in mind, Goddess, urging me to cross the ocean’s endless expanse in a raft. So vast, so full of danger! Hell, sometimes not even the sea-worthiest ships can prevail, aided as they are by Zeus’s mighty breath! I’ll never set foot on a raft, Goddess, until you swear by all that’s holy you’re not plotting some new intrigue! — Homer, excerpt from the Odyssey, translation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Homer’s epic poems are among the first great works of literature, along with the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Sanskrit Bhagavad-Gita, Mahabharata and Ramayana, and the most ancient books of the Bible and Apocrypha.
   
   Homer has influenced innumerable poets, playwrights and novelists, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Tolstoy, James Joyce, J. R. R. Tolkien and Derek Walcott (esp. Omeros).

3. Sappho of Lesbos (C#8, G#15, R#33) is the first great lyric poet we know by name. She would rank first if I considered only lyric poetry. Sappho was so revered by her ancient peers that they called her the Tenth Muse. The other nine Muses were goddesses, so that is high praise indeed.
   
   I and others have proposed that Sappho was the first modern poet because she wrote introspectively in the first person about her innermost thoughts, fears and desires.
   
   Sappho was also the first great confessional poet, anticipating poets to come like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and my friend Richard Thomas Moore, who in his epic poem The Mouse Whole compared himself to a rodent trying to escape a labyrinthic sewer.
   
   It also bears noting that Sappho wrote the first “make love, not war” poem a mere 2,500 years ahead of her time. The poem has been titled “Some Say,” “Some People Say” and “Helen’s Eidolon.”
   
   Mnemosyne was stunned into astonishment when she heard honey-tongued Sappho, wondering how mortal men merited a tenth Muse. — Antipater of Sidon, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Eros harrows my heart:
   wild winds whipping desolate mountains
   uprooting oaks.
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   A short transparent frock?
   It's just my luck
   your lips were made to mock!
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   That enticing girl's clinging dresses
   leave me trembling, overcome by happiness,
   as once, when I saw the Goddess in my prayers
   eclipsing Cyprus.
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Gongyla, wear, I beg,
   that revealing white dress …
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   She keeps her scents
   in a dressing-case.
   And her sense?
   In some undiscoverable place.
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   May the gods prolong the night
   —yes, let it last forever!—
   as long as you sleep in my sight.
   —Sappho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Sappho has been translated by more poets than any of her peers. Poets who have translated, interpreted and/or otherwise paid tribute to Sappho include Anacreon, Antipater of Sidon, Apollonius, Catullus, Longinus, Menander, Plato, Ovid, Plutarch, Sophocles, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Ambrose Philips, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A. E. Housman, Thomas Hardy, Walter Savage Landor, Thomas Moore, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Sara Teasdale and William Carlos Williams.
   
   Poets influenced by Sappho include Catullus, Horace, Erinna, Sulpicia, Algernon Charles Swinburne, H.D., Amy Lowell and Adrienne Rich.

4. Pablo Neruda (C#7, G#5, R#5), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971, was arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century, or is certainly in the running along with Robert Frost, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Rabindranath Tagore, William Butler Yeats, and a few other luminaries.
   
   Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet who wrote poems in Spanish. He is especially known for his love sonnets. This is my favorite Neruda love sonnet:
   
   Love Sonnet XI
   by Pablo Neruda
   translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
   I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
   Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
   from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.
   
   I long for your liquid laughter,
   for your sunburned hands like savage harvests.
   I lust for your fingernails' pale marbles.
   I want to devour your breasts like almonds, whole.
   
   I want to ingest the sunbeams singed by your beauty,
   to eat the aquiline nose from your aloof face,
   to lick your eyelashes' flickering shade.
   
   I pursue you, snuffing the shadows,
   seeking your heart's scorching heat
   like a puma prowling the heights of Quitratue.
   
   Neruda’s influences include Federico García Lorca, Gabriela Mistral, Alexander Pushkin, Rabindranath Tagore and Walt Whitman.
   
   Poets influenced by Neruda include Martín Espada, W. S. Merwin (who translated Neruda), Charles Simic, Luis Omar Salinas, Mark Strand and Javier Zamora.

5. Matsuo Bashō (C#13, G#39, R#74) was the greatest of the great Japanese haikuists, the best of the “big four” in my opinion, as much as I love Kobayashi Issa and Fukuda Chiyo-ni.
   
   Winter in the air:
   my neighbor,
   how does he fare? ...
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   The first soft snow:
   leaves of the awed jonquil
   bow low.
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Come, investigate loneliness!
   a solitary leaf
   clings to the Kiri tree.
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Lightning
   shatters the darkness―
   the night heron’s shriek
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   The cheerful-chirping cricket
   contends gray autumn’s gay,
   contemptuous of frost
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   This snowy morning:
   cries of the crow I despise
   (ah, but so beautiful!)
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   An ancient pond,
   the frog leaps:
   the silver plop and gurgle of water
   ―Matsuo Basho, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

   
   Poets influenced by Basho include Yosa Buson, Fukuda Chiyo-ni, Kobayashi Issa and Masaoka Shiki, as well as Western poets like Ezra Pound, H.D. and Amy Lowell.

6. Walt Whitman (C#5, G#6, R#55) wins a near-tie with Emily Dickinson due to his worldwide influence as the first major free verse poet and author of the revolutionary Leaves of Grass.
   
   Also, Whitman was the first openly gay modern poet, in his poems, and the first to write openly about homosexuality, masturbation, etc.
   
   Ironically, Whitman’s only notable rhyming poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” may be his most-read poem today. However, his major poems include Song of Myself, Drum-Taps, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”
   
   “O Captain! My Captain!” was written as an elegy for Abraham Lincoln but “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is a far greater elegy for the fallen president Whitman so loved and admired. If you haven’t read it, please do.
   
   Algernon Charles Swinburne called “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” the “most sweet and sonorous nocturne ever chanted in the church of the world.”
   
   But this is my favorite Whitman poem:
   
   A Noiseless Patient Spider
   by Walt Whitman
   
   A noiseless patient spider,
   I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
   Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
   It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
   Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
   
   And you O my soul where you stand,
   Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
   Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
   Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
   Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
   
   The then-scandalous Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, widely rejected by public libraries, and burned by John Greenleaf Whittier when he received his copy!
   
   Whitman’s influences include McDonald Clarke (the “mad poet” of Broadway), Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Macpherson, Thomas Paine, the border ballads of Sir Walter Scott, and the cadences of the King James Bible, which means William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale.

   
   Whitman influenced Oscar Wilde, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg and the Beat poets, D. H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Fernando Pessoa, Carl Sandburg and Bob Dylan, among many others, including millions of readers around the world.
   
   Wilde visited Whitman and later wrote: “The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips.”
   
   Pound wrote: “What I feel about Walt Whitman: He is America.”
   
   Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Charles Ives and Ralph Vaughan Williams set Whitman’s poems to music.
   
   Whitman was admired by artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, E. M. Forster, Henry James, Franz Kafka, John Lennon (who cited Leaves of Grass as an inspiration for his famous song “Imagine”), Lorca, Lorde, Vincent Van Gogh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Thomas Mann and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
   
   Thomas Mann called Song of Myself a “holy gift.”
   
   Harold Bloom opined that Shakespeare invented the modern human. I might opine that Walt Whitman invented the modern, more tolerant and freethinking American, except that I fear Uncle Walt is still way ahead of us because we keep backsliding.

7. Emily Dickinson (C#6, G#4, R#1) has a reputation as a recluse and spinster, but she wrote marvelous erotic love poems like “Wild Nights” and her suggestive bee poems…
   
   Come slowly—Eden!
   Lips unused to thee—
   Bashful—sip thy jasmines—
   As the fainting bee—
   
   Reaching late his flower,
   Round her chamber hums—
   Counts his nectars—alights—
   And is lost in balms!
   
   Emily Dickinson may be the best gnomic poet who ever picked up a pen. Her best-known poems, full of remarkable, sometimes breathtaking insights, include “Because I could not stop for Death,” “A narrow fellow in the grass,” “Hope is the thing with feathers,” “A certain slant of light,” “Success is counted sweetest” and “I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
   
   Dickinson was influenced by William Blake, the Bronte sisters, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. From what I understand she was a nerd who loved to read her Webster’s Dictionary, another influence.
   
   Dickinson especially admired Emily Bronte’s poem “No coward soul is mine” and Thomas Wentworth Higginson read it at her funeral.
   
   Dickinson established what I call “poetic authority” with readers, by speaking directly without artifice or ornamentation, and writing so well in that mode, like Sappho, A. E. Housman and Robert Frost.
   
   Poets influenced by Emily Dickinson include Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Paul Celan, Lucille Clifton, Stephen Crane, e. e. cummings, H.D., Louise Glück, Jorie Graham, Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, William Carlos Williams and Charles Wright.

8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (C#14, G#39, R#68) was a polymath, Renaissance man, and the German Shakespeare. His best-known poetic work is his verse play Faust.
   
   Goethe was a formidable intellectual and yet had a very tender, whimsical touch in his love poems…
   
   Excerpt from "To the Moon"
   by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
   translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
   
   Scattered, pole to starry pole,
   glide Cynthia's mild beams,
   whispering to the receptive soul
   whatever moonbeams mean.
   
   Bathing valley, hill and dale
   with her softening light,
   loosening from earth's frigid chains
   my restless heart tonight!
   
   Over the landscape, near and far,
   broods darkly glowering night;
   yet welcoming as Friendship's eye,
   she, soft!, bequeaths her light.
   
   Touched in turn by joy and pain,
   my startled heart responds,
   then floats, as Whimsy paints each scene,
   to soar with her, beyond…
   
   Goethe inspired musical compositions by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Mahler, Berlioz and Strauss, among others.
   
   Goethe’s influences were as diverse as Hafez, Homer, Johann Gottfried Herder, Kant, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Shakespeare (he credited Shakespeare with his “first literary awakening”) and Spinoza. Also the poems of Ossian (i.e., the Scottish poet James Macpherson) and Goethe’s good friend and collaborator Friedrich Schiller.
   
   After Schiller’s death in 1805, Goethe kept what he believed to be Schiller’s skull on his desk, and wrote a poem to/about the skull!
   
   Writers influenced by the protean Goethe include Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who called Goethe the “surpassing intellect of modern times”), Margaret Fuller, Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse (who called Goethe his greatest influence), Henrik Ibsen (Peer Gynt has been compared to Goethe’s Faust), Randall Jarrell (who called Goethe his “own favorite daemon, dear good great Goethe”), James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Christopher Marlowe, Gerard de Nerval, Novalis, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley) and Mark Twain.

9. William Butler Yeats (C#9, G#9, R#3) was a towering figure of Modernism who wrote many notable poems including my favorite, “The Wild Swans at Coole,” as well as “Sailing to Byzantium,” “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” “When You Are Old,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Second Coming,” “Among School Children,” “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “Easter, 1916,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” “Down By The Salley Gardens” and many more.
   
   Yeats was arguably the last of the great Romantics and the greatest of the Modernists. I believe both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot considered Yeats the best poet of their era.
   
   When you are old and gray and full of sleep
   and nodding by the fire, take down this book…
   —William Butler Yeats
   
   Yeats’s best love poems, including the one above, were inspired by Maud Gonne, to whom he proposed several times, but who never accepted and eventually married another man.
   
   Yeats co-founded the Rhymer’s Club, which included John Davidson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, T. W. Rolleston, Ernest Rhys and Arthur Symons. The latter directed Yeats’s attention to St. John of the Cross, Stéphane Mallarmé and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (called the “Spanish Shakespeare”).
   
   Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
   
   Richard Ellman opined that Yeats’s “mastery seems almost excessive” at times and might be called “overmastery.”
   
   Was Yeats too good at what he did?
   
   Edward Thomas observed the “heavy voluptuous splendor” of much of Yeats’s work. But in his best poems it was an earned and very effective splendor.
   
   Yeats’s influences include Edmund Spenser, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites, Algernon Charles Swinburne (perhaps through Symons), Oscar Wilde, Balzac, Walter Pater, Ezra Pound (who became his secretary), and Rabindranath Tagore.
   
   Was “Lines Written in Dejection” influenced by similar poems by Alexander Pope and Samuel Taylor Coleridge?
   
   Writers influenced by Yeats include Oscar Wilde and the Decadents, Ezra Pound and the Modernists, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, among many others.
   
   Yeats was
   a poet of rare ability

   and verbal agility.
   —Michael R. Burch

10. Rabindranath Tagore (C#15, G#19, R#7) is revered in India, and rightly so. Tagore wrote poems in Bengali, translated them into English, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first non-European to win the prestigious award.
    
    Come As You Are
    by Rabindranath Tagore
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Come as you are, forget appearances!
    Is your hair untamable, your part uneven, your bodice unfastened? Never mind.
    Come as you are, forget appearances!
    
    Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.
    If your feet glisten with dew, if your anklets slip, if your beaded necklace slides off? Never mind.
    Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.
    
    Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?
    Flocks of cranes erupt from the riverbank, fitful gusts ruffle the fields, anxious cattle tremble in their stalls.
    Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?
    
    You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.
    Who will care that your eyelids have not been painted with lamp-black, when your pupils are darker than thunderstorms?
    You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.
    
    Come as you are, forget appearances!
    If the wreath lies unwoven, who cares? If the bracelet is unfastened, let it fall. The sky grows dark; it is late.
    Come as you are, forget appearances!
    
    Only Let Me Love You
    by Michael R. Burch
    
    after Rabindranath Tagore
    
    Only let me love you, and the pain
    of living will be easier to bear.
    Only let me love you. Nay, refrain
    from pinning up your hair!
    
    Only let me love you. Stay, remain.
    A face so lovely never needs repair!
    Only let me love you to the strains
    of Rabindranath on a soft sitar.
    
    Only let me love you, while the rain
    makes music: gentle, eloquent, sincere.
    Only let me love you. Don’t complain
    you need more time to make yourself more fair!
    
    Only let me love you. Stay, remain.
    No need for rouge or lipstick! Only share
    your tender body swiftly ...
    
    Rabindranath Tagore was influenced by Kabir, Kālidāsa, Lalon Shah Fakir and Hafiz as well as Western poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats and William Shakespeare.
    
    Writers influenced by Tagore include Amitav Ghosh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Salman Rushdie and William Butler Yeats.
    
    Tagore’s poems were translated by Anna Akhmatova and Andre Gide, among others, including me.

11. Robert Frost (C#11, G#3, R#4) wrote masterpieces in “To Earthward,” “Directive,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Birches,” “The Most of It,” “Design,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Gift Outright” and several others. Other personal favorites include “Fire and Ice” and “Forgive O Lord.” Few poets have as many great poems as Robert Frost.
    
    Robert Frost was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 31 times, but never won. A travesty in my opinion.
    
    Nothing Gold Can Stay
    by Robert Frost
    
    Nature's first green is gold,
    Her hardest hue to hold.
    Her early leaf's a flower;
    But only so an hour.
    
    Then leaf subsides to leaf.
    So Eden sank to grief,
    So dawn goes down to day.
    Nothing gold can stay.
    
    When Robert Frost moved from New England to England, he met and was influenced by the British poets Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves and Edward Thomas (who wrote the marvelous “Adlestrop” about traveling by train to meet Frost).
    
    Frost was also influenced by John Milton, William Wordsworth, Ralph Waldo Emerson (whom he greatly admired) and Thomas Hardy.
    
    The classicist scholar Helen H. Bacon has theorized that Frost was also influenced by Euripides and Virgil.
    
    Frost in turned influenced many poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Edward Thomas (with whom he became friends after the Adlestop train trip), and Richard Wilbur.
    
    Frost’s famous poem “Fire and Ice” inspired the title of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy novel series A Song of Ice and Fire, which became the popular TV series Game of Thrones.
    
    On an amusing note, it sounds as if John Ashbery was talked out of his early love for Frost’s poetry by his free verse mentors!
    
    No one ever talked me out of loving the poems I love.

12. Rainer Maria Rilke (C#10, G#38, R#78) wrote poems in German and French and should be in my top ten, but the competition is fierce!
    
    Archaischer Torso Apollos ("Archaic Torso of Apollo")
    by Rainer Maria Rilke
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    We cannot know the beheaded god
    nor his eyes' forfeited visions. But still
    the figure's trunk glows with the strange vitality
    of a lamp lit from within, while his composed will
    emanates dynamism. Otherwise
    the firmly muscled abdomen could not beguile us,
    nor the centering loins make us smile
    at the thought of their generative animus.
    Otherwise the stone might seem deficient,
    unworthy of the broad shoulders, of the groin
    projecting procreation's triangular spearhead upwards,
    unworthy of the living impulse blazing wildly within
    like an inchoate star—demanding our belief.
    You must change your life.
    
    Herbsttag ("Autumn Day")
    by Rainer Maria Rilke
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
    Lay your long shadows over the sundials
    and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
    Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
    O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
    Urge them to completion, and with power
    convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
    Who has no house now, never will build one.
    Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
    he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
    and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
    restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.
    
    Rilke’s influences include the artist Paul Cézanne, Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Leo Tolstoy and, later in his career, Paul Valery.
    
    Rilke in turn influenced John Ashbery, W. H. Auden, John Berryman, Robert Bly, Randall Jarrell, Sidney Keyes, Galway Kinnell, W. S. Merwin, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Ann Sexton, Delmore Schwartz, Stephen Spender and the novelist Thomas Pynchon.

13. William Blake (C#12, G#12, R#6) was one of my boyhood guiding lights and mentors. His poem “The Tyger” was once the world’s most-anthologized poem and quite possibly remains the most-read poem of all time. Other famous Blake poems include “London,” “Jerusalem,” “The Sick Rose,” “A Poison Tree,” “The Garden of Love,” “Ah! Sun-flower,” “The Lamb,” “The Little Black Boy,” “The Divine Image,” “Holy Thursday” and “The Chimney Sweeper.” But this is my favorite Blake poem:
    
    Cradle Song
    by William Blake
    
    Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
    Dreaming in the joys of night;
    Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
    Little sorrows sit and weep.
    
    Sweet babe, in thy face
    Soft desires I can trace,
    Secret joys and secret smiles,
    Little pretty infant wiles.
    
    As thy softest limbs I feel
    Smiles as of the morning steal
    O’er thy cheek, and o’er thy breast
    Where thy little heart doth rest.
    
    O the cunning wiles that creep
    In thy little heart asleep!
    When thy little heart doth wake,
    Then the dreadful night shall break.
    
    Blake was the first major antiestablishment poet. Elsewhere I have claimed that Blake is the most influential poet/artist of all time, due to his influence on Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, John Lennon and the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison (the Doors were named after Blake’s “Doors of Perception”), Patti Smith (“My Blakean Year”) and many other singer-songwriters, poets, writers and artists.
    
    In terms of influence Blake was arguably England’s greatest poet, its greatest prophet, and its greatest visual artist. Or second only to Shakespeare and perhaps Milton.
    
    But Blake is first in my book as I engage in his “mental fight” against the forces of darkness, ignorance and unreason.
    
    • Blake was ranked 38th in a BBC poll of the hundred greatest Britons. The only British poet ranked higher was Shakespeare. No British artist was ranked higher.
    • Many eminent men and women of letters recognized Blake’s genius and achievements, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, A. E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Walter Savage Landor, Edward FitzGerald, Virginia Woolf, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler and Michael Schmidt, to name a few.
    • Housman identified Blake as the first major English poet after John Milton.
    • Harold Bloom agreed with Housman, saying: “Blake’s poems, especially his epics, seem to me the best poetry in English since Milton.”
    • Algernon Charles Swinburne claimed Blake’s work was the height of 18th century poetry, using sweeping superlatives.
    • Edward Larrissy asserted that “Blake is the Romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century.”
    • Northrop Frye called Blake the “finest gnomic artist in English literature” and hailed his “genius for crystallization.” For those interested in learning more about Blake, I recommend Frye’s study of Blake, Fearful Symmetry, which I have read three times, leaving my copy full of dogears and underlines.
    • Frye called Blake “particularly modern and relevant” to our times, either anticipating Whitman, Ginsberg, Bob Dylan and John Lennon, or helping to create them.
    • James Joyce’s “gods were Blake and Dante.”
    • William Rossetti called Blake a “glorious luminary.”
    • Michael Schmidt called Blake the “archpoet of embodiment.”
    • Jonathan Jones, an art critic, proclaimed Blake “far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced.”
    
    Blake’s influences include the Prose Edda, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Emanuel Swedenborg and the Bible (however, Blake was not a fan of the biblical god, whom he dubbed Nobodaddy because no one would want him for a father).

14. Li Bai (C#17, G#51, R#60) also known as Li Po, was one of the very best ancient poets and he influenced Modernism through his influence on Ezra Pound. Li Bai has been called the Chinese Byron and he was friends with Du Fu, who also appears in this ranking.
    
    The spring breeze knows partings are bitter;
    The willow twig knows it will never be green again.
    —Li Bai, “Lines from Laolao Ting Pavilion,” translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Water reforms, though we slice it with our swords;
    Sorrow returns, though we drown it with our wine.
    —Li Bai, “A Toast to Uncle Yun,” translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Moonlight illuminates my bed
    as frost brightens the ground.
    Lifting my eyes, the moon allures.
    Lowering my eyes, I long for home.
    —Li Bai, “Quiet Night Thoughts,” translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Li Bai influenced Du Fu and Su Shi, as well as Western poets like Ezra Pound (perhaps through Arthur Waley), Amy Lowell, Gary Snyder and James Wright.

15. Virgil (C#4, G#48, R#8) was the Roman Homer, a superior storyteller justly famous for the Aeneid and his Eclogues and Georgics.
    
    "The Descent into the Underworld"
    by Virgil
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    The Sibyl began to speak:
    
    “God-blooded Trojan, son of Anchises,
    descending into the Underworld’s easy
    since Death’s dark door stands eternally unbarred.
    But to retrace one’s steps and return to the surface:
    that’s the conundrum, that’s the catch!
    Godsons have done it, the chosen few
    whom welcoming Jupiter favored
    and whose virtue merited heaven.
    However, even the Blessed find headway’s hard:
    immense woods barricade briared bottomland
    where the Cocytus glides with its dark coils.
    But if you insist on ferrying the Styx twice
    and twice traversing Tartarus,
    if Love demands you indulge in such madness,
    listen closely to how you must proceed...”
    
    Virgil was influenced by the Greek poets Homer, Hesiod and Theocritus, and by the Roman poets Catullus, Ennius and Lucretius.
    
    Virgil influenced Ovid, Dante, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson and Matthew Arnold, among many others.

16. Wallace Stevens (C#18, R#53) created masterpieces in “The Snow Man,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” and several others. He was a word musician and an amazing talent. One can argue that his only peers for use of the language among English language poets are Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats and Hart Crane.
    
    Wallace Stevens was influenced by Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Eliot, cummings and Marianne Moore, as well as by the poet/philosopher George Santayana.
    
    In turn Stevens influenced a host of poets, including John Ashbery, Robert Bly, Edward Byrne, Kenneth Koch, Tom Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and others too numerous to name.

17. Alexander Pushkin (C#23, R#26) was a major Russian poet, playwright and novelist. Pushkin has been called the “founder” and “father” of modern Russian literature.
    
    I Loved You
    by Alexander Pushkin
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I loved you ... perhaps I love you still ...
    perhaps for a while such emotions may remain.
    But please don't let my feelings trouble you;
    I do not wish to cause you further pain.
    
    I loved you ... thus the hopelessness I knew ...
    The jealousy, the diffidence, the pain
    resulted in two hearts so wholly true
    the gods might grant us leave to love again.
    
    Pushkin was influenced by Shakespeare, Goethe, Voltaire, Lord Byron and the folk tales of Sir Walter Scott.
    
    In turn Pushkin influenced Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev and Vladimir Nabokov, among many others. The famous composer Tchaikovsky created three operas based on Pushkin’s works, including Eugene Onegin. Rachmaninoff also created two operas based on works of Pushkin.

18. Geoffrey Chaucer (C#25, R#32) is almost universally considered to be the first major English poet, primarily for the Canterbury Tales and other long narrative poems like Troilus and Criseyde, The Book of the Duchess, The Parliament of Fowls and The House of Fame, but he was also an accomplished lyric poet who wrote ballads and rondels. Chaucer’s better-known lyric poems include “To Rosamond” and “Complaint to his Purse.”
    
    Chaucer also translated the Consolation of Boethius and 7,700 lines of The Romance of the Rose.
    
    Mine is the ruin of the high halls,
    The falling of the towers and of the walls…
    —Geoffrey Chaucer, excerpt from The Knight’s Tale
    
    Merciles Beaute (”Merciless Beauty”)
    by Geoffrey Chaucer
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Your eyes slay me suddenly;
    their beauty I cannot sustain,
    they wound me so, through my heart keen.
    
    Unless your words heal me hastily,
    my heart’s wound will remain green;
    for your eyes slay me suddenly;
    their beauty I cannot sustain.
    
    By all truth, I tell you faithfully
    that you are of life and death my queen;
    for at my death this truth shall be seen:
    your eyes slay me suddenly;
    their beauty I cannot sustain,
    they wound me so, through my heart keen.
    
    Long before Shakespeare, Chaucer created unforgettable characters like the Wife of Bath, the Miller and the Pardoner. These are the first “developed” literary characters in English literature.
    
    John Dryden called Chaucer the “father” of English poetry and “a man of most wonderful comprehensive nature.” William Dunbar sang his praise: “O reverend Chaucer, rose of rhetoricians.” Edmund Spenser called Chaucer “the well of English undefiled” and furthermore claimed to be Chaucer’s reincarnation!
    
    And it’s fitting that the father of English poetry, Geoffrey Chaucer, was the first bard to be buried in what came to be called Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey.
    
    Geoffrey Chaucer was influenced by John Wycliffe and the Italian writers Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio.
    
    In turn, Chaucer influenced nearly every English language poet who followed him, including, among many others, William Dunbar, Shakespeare and his reincarnation, Edmund Spenser.

19. Langston Hughes (C#21, G#13, R#98) is particularly notable for his “fusion” of the blues and jazz with traditional poetry and his ability to communicate emotion splendidly in poems like “Island,” “Harlem (A Dream Deferred),” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Minstrel Man.”
    
    I believe Langston Hughes has been underestimated by many critics, but the public knows better.
    
    Island
    by Langston Hughes,
    
    Wave of sorrow,
    Do not drown me now:
    
    I see the island
    Still ahead somehow.
    
    I see the island
    And its sands are fair:
    
    Wave of sorrow,
    Take me there.
    
    Writers influenced by Langston Hughes include James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker and Richard Wright.

20. Mirza Ghalib (C#26, R#131) is arguably the greatest of the Urdu poets, and certainly one of the greatest. Ghalib was an Indian poet who wrote in the later days of the Mughal Empire.
    
    Ghazal
    by Mirza Ghalib
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    It's time for the world to hear Ghalib again!
    May these words and their shadows like doors remain open.
    
    Tonight the watery mirror of stars appears
    while night-blooming flowers gather where beauty rests.
    
    She who knows my desire is speaking,
    or at least her lips have recently moved me.
    
    Why is grief the fundamental element of night
    when everything falls as the distant stars rise?
    
    Tell me, how can I be happy vast oceans from home
    when mail from my beloved lies here, so recently opened?
    
    Poets influenced by Mirza Ghalib include Allama Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Ahmed Faraz, all major figures in modern Urdu poetry. Also, Western poets who wrote ghazals such as Adrienne Rich and John Hollander.

21. William Wordsworth (C#22, G#22, R#27) was an incredibly influential poet and his “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” is an utter masterpiece and one of the better long poems in any language. Other famous Wordsworth poems include “The Solitary Reaper,” “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” aka “Daffodils,” “Upon Westminster Bridge,” “It Is a Beauteous Evening,” “Michael,” “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey,” “The Prelude” and the famous Lucy poems.
    
    My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
    by William Wordsworth
    
    My heart leaps up when I behold
    A rainbow in the sky:
    So was it when my life began;
    So is it now I am a man;
    So be it when I shall grow old,
    Or let me die!
    The Child is father of the Man;
    I could wish my days to be
    Bound each to each by natural piety.
    
    Wordsworth kickstarted the English Romantic Movement, with a little help from his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, via the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798.
    
    Wordsworth was influenced by Shakespeare, Milton, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, his friend Coleridge and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth.
    
    Wordsworth in turn influenced Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Southey, and later nature poets like Robinson Jeffers and Mary Oliver, among many others.
    
    Matthew Arnold mentioned Wordsworth’s “healing power” in a poem and, indeed, John Locke was cured of a terrible depression by reading Wordsworth. /bookmark/

22. E. E. Cummings (C#24, G#16, R#35) has been a favorite of mine since my boyhood and I have written a number of poems “after” Cummings, such as “i (dedicated to u).”
    
    … you are whatever a moon has always meant
    and whatever a sun will always sing is you …
    ―e. e. cummings

23. Rumi (C#29, G#28, R#16) has international appeal; he was the best-selling poet in the United States not so very long ago. Among Middle Eastern poets, Rumi and Hafez have had the most influence on Western thought, with their calls for individual freedom, tolerance, love and compassion. They were great spirits as well as great poets, similar to Walt Whitman in that regard.
    
    Forget security!
    Live by the perilous sea.
    Destroy your reputation, however glorious.
    Become notorious.
    —Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Your heart’s candle is ready to be kindled.
    Your soul’s void is ready to be filled.
    You can feel it, can’t you?
    —Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Raise your words, not their volume.
    Rain grows flowers, not thunder.
    —Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    This is love: to fly toward a mysterious sky,
    to cause ten thousand veils to fall.
    First, to stop clinging to life,
    then to step out without feet ...
    —Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Let yourself be guided by the strange magnetism of what you really love:
    It will not lead you astray.
    The lion is most majestic when stalking prey.
    —Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Rumi was influenced by the Persian poets Attar, Sanai and Shams al-Din Tabrizi aka Shams Tabrizi.
    
    In turn Rumi influenced Muhammad Iqbal aka Allama Iqbal, Waris Shah and Kazi Nazrul Islam, among many others. Also, the Western poets W.S. Merwin, Gary Snyder and Kenneth Rexroth.

24. Robert Burns (C#27, G#41, R#81) was one of the mentors of my boyhood. I discovered his poetry around age 12-13 and was immediately hooked. Still am.
    
    Burns was not just the greatest Scottish poet, he was voted the #1 Scotsman of all time in a radio poll!
    
    My favorite Burns poems include “A Red, Red Rose,” “Afton Water,” “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye,” “Green Grow the Rushes,” “Banks o’ Doon,” “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse.” Burns was also songwriter, best known for “Auld Lang Syne.”
    
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Burns an “always-natural poet” and “Nature’s own beloved bard.”
    
    Coleridge also observed that William Wordsworth said the only “born” poets he knew were Burns and John Clare.
    
    Other poets who expressed admiration for Burns’s poetry include Matthew Arnold, Lord Byron, John Keats, Abraham Lincoln and Edward Thomas. And yes, Lincoln did write poetry.
    
    The title of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye is an allusion to “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”

25. John Keats (C#7, G#7, R#2) died young, at age 25, or he might be first on this list. He had that kind of talent. Keats’s best-known poems include “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” “This Living Hand,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” “Lamia,” “Isabella,” the sonnets “Bright Star” and “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” and his famous odes such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “To Autumn” and “Ode to a Nightingale.” His longer works include Endymion and Hyperion.
    
    A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
    Its loveliness increases; it will never
    pass into nothingness …
    ―John Keats
    
    Keats was influenced by Chaucer, Dryden, Horace, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelly, Spenser and Wordsworth.
    
    In turn Keats was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite poets Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Morris, as well as poets as diverse as Countee Cullen, Kevin N. Roberts, Wallace Stevens, Oscar Wilde and many others.
    
    This is a tie between friends who died young or they would both rank much higher.
    
    Percy Bysshe Shelley (C#16, G#22, R#11) joins his friend Keats in my top 25. Shelley’s most famous poems include “Love’s Philosophy,” “To a Skylark,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “The Indian Serenade,” “Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples,” “The Cloud,” the sonnets “Ozymandias” and “England in 1819,” and his elegy for Keats, “Adonais.”
    
    In addition to such stunning original poems, Shelley translated and/or interpreted passages of Aeschylus, Guido Cavalcanti, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Goethe, Euripides, Homer, Plato, Sappho and Virgil.
    
    Shelley also wrote longer poems such as the Miltonic Alastor: or The Spirit of Solitude, Prometheus Unbound, Mont Blanc, The Mask of Anarchy, Epipsychidion, Queen Mab, The Witch of Atlas, The Cenci, Hellas, Triumph of Life and The Revolt of Islam.
    
    Shelley called Prometheus Unbound his “favorite poem” but didn’t expect it to sell more than 20 copies, so he instructed his publisher to send copies to Lord Byron, William Godwin, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, Thomas Moore, Thomas Love Peacock and Horace Smith.
    
    But this is my favorite Shelley poem, an utter masterpiece almost without peer for musicality and communication of emotion:
    
    Music When Soft Voices Die (To —)
    by Percy Bysshe Shelley
    
    Music, when soft voices die,
    Vibrates in the memory—
    Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
    Live within the sense they quicken.
    
    Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
    Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
    And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
    Love itself shall slumber on.
    
    ”Mad Shelley” was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing a tract titled The Necessity of Atheism.
    
    In 1821 Shelley wrote his now-famous Defence of Poetry in response to Thomas Love Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry.
    
    Robert Graves called Shelley “a volatile creature of air and fire.”
    
    Matthew Arnold called Shelley “a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating his wings in a luminous void in vain.”
    
    Writers critical of Shelley include W. H. Auden, Walter Bagehot, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Hazlitt, F. R. Leavis, Charles Kingsley and Mark Twain (the latter over personal morals).
    
    But they are in a minority.
    
    Poets and writers who admired Shelley include Robert Browning, Robert Frost (he called Shelley an influence), Thomas Hardy, John Keats, Kevin N. Roberts, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Santayana, George Bernard Shaw, Wallace Stevens (“a major predecessor”), Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Wade, Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats (he called Shelley a “foundational inspiration” and master symbolist).
    
    Harold Bloom called Shelley “a lyric poet without rival.”
    
    Michael Schmidt said Shelley “does things no other English poet has achieved.”
    
    William Wordsworth called Shelley “the best of all.”
    
    Matthew Arnold said Shelley and Byron would remembered over their peers, including Wordsworth and Keats. And Shelley is undoubtedly a greater poet than Byron.
    
    When William Carlos Williams was on his deathbed, he asked Robert Lowell, “Am I as good a poet as Shelley?”
    
    No, but few are.
    
    Only a splendid few.
    
    And if Shelley had lived to a ripe old age, perhaps no one.

26. Du Fu (C#28, R#121) is also known as Tu Fu. He is widely considered to be one of China’s greatest poets of the Tang dynasty, along with his friend Li Bai aka Li Po.
    
    According to one of his translators, David Hinton, the widely-traveled Du Fu “explored the full range of experience, and from this abundance shaped the monumental proportions of being merely human.”
    
    The first Du Fu poem, “Moonlit Night,” is addressed to the poet’s wife, who had fled war with their children. Ch’ang-an is ironic because it means “Long-peace.”
    
    Moonlit Night (I)
    by Du Fu
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Alone in your bedchamber
    you gaze out at the Fu-Chou moon.
    
    Here, so distant, I think of our children,
    too young to understand what keeps me away
    or to remember Ch’ang-an ...
    
    A perfumed mist, your hair’s damp ringlets!
    In the moonlight, your arms’ exquisite jade!
    
    Oh, when can we meet again within your bed’s drawn curtains,
    and let the heat dry our tears?
    
    Moonlit Night (II)
    by Du Fu
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Tonight the Fu-Chou moon
    watches your lonely bedroom.
    
    Here, so distant, I think of our children,
    too young to understand what keeps me away
    or to remember Ch’ang-an ...
    
    By now your hair will be damp from your bath
    and fall in perfumed ringlets;
    your jade-white arms so exquisite in the moonlight!
    
    Oh, when can we meet again within those drawn curtains,
    and let the heat dry our tears?
    
    Lone Wild Goose
    by Du Fu
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    The abandoned goose refuses food and drink;
    he cries querulously for his companions.
    
    Who feels kinship for that strange wraith
    as he vanishes eerily into the heavens?
    
    You watch the goose as it disappears;
    its plaintive calls cut through you.
    
    The indignant crows ignores us both:
    the bickering, bantering multitudes.
    
    Poets influenced by Du Fu include Bai Juyi, Su Shi, Matsuo Basho, Kenneth Rexroth and Li-Young Lee.

27. Dylan Thomas (C#38, G#46, R#13) was a marvelous Welsh poet who wrote poems in English. My favorite Dylan Thomas poems, all utter masterpieces, include “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October,” “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” “Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and the famous villanelle he wrote for his dying father, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
    
    The last several times I did a Google search for “best poems of all time” the #1 poem was “Do Not Go Gentle.”
    
    Dame Edith Sitwell, in her review of Thomas’s second poetry collection for the Sunday Times, wrote: “The work of this very young man (he is twenty-two years of age) is on a huge scale, both in theme and structurally. … I could not name one poet of this, the youngest generation, who shows so great a promise, and even so great an achievement.”
    
    I agree with Sitwell.
    
    Dylan Thomas was a marvelous talent. In fact the poetic school called the English Movement was largely a reaction against the “excesses” and “emotionalism” of a poet who was far greater than any of them, if we can remember their names, much less their poems, other than Philip Larkin and perhaps Thom Gunn?
    
    If he had lived longer, Dylan Thomas might top this ranking. That’s how good he was in his best poems.
    
    It can be argued that no English language poet born after Dylan Thomas (b. 1914) surpassed him in talent for the language. His closest competitors in my opinion are Robert Lowell (b. 1917), Richard Wilbur (b. 1921), Derek Walcott (b. 1930), Sylvia Plath (b. 1932) and Seamus Heaney (b. 1939).
    
    It has been long disputed whether Robert Zimmerman derived his stage name Bob Dylan from that of Dylan Thomas. While Zimmerman has denied the connection, one of his early girlfriends confirmed it in an interview.

28. Enheduanna (circa 2285 BC) is the first poet we know by name, and she wrote the first anti-war poem over 4,000 years ago!
    
    Enheduanna was also the first anthologist, the first creator of a hymnal, and probably the first librarian as well.
    
    Lament to the Spirit of War
    by Enheduanna
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You hack down everything you see, War God!
    
    Rising on fearsome wings
    you rush to destroy our land:
    raging like thunderstorms,
    howling like hurricanes,
    screaming like tempests,
    thundering, raging, ranting, drumming,
    whiplashing whirlwinds!
    
    Men falter at your approaching footsteps.
    
    Tortured dirges scream on your lyre of despair.
    
    Like a fiery Salamander you poison the land:
    growling over the earth like thunder,
    vegetation collapsing before you,
    blood gushing down mountainsides.
    
    Spirit of hatred, greed and vengeance!
    
    Dominatrix of heaven and earth!
    
    Your ferocious fire consumes our land.
    
    Whipping your stallion
    with furious commands,
    you impose our fates.
    
    You triumph over all human rites and prayers.
    
    Who can explain your tirade,
    why you carry on so?

29. Petrarch (C#32, R#12) was a highly esteemed Italian poet. In fact, he was crowned Poet Laureate in Rome in 1341. He has also been called the father of humanism.
    
    Petrarch was his pen name; his given name was Francesco Petrarca.
    
    Sonnet XIV
    by Petrarch
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Lust, gluttony and idleness conspire
    to banish every virtue from mankind,
    replaced by evil in his treacherous mind,
    thus robbing man of his Promethean fire,
    till his nature, overcome by dark desire,
    extinguishes the light pure heaven refined.
    Thus the very light of heaven has lost its power
    while man gropes through strange darkness, unable to find
    relief for his troubled mind, always inclined
    to lesser dreams than Helicon’s bright shower!
    Who seeks the laurel? Who the myrtle? Bind
    poor Philosophy in chains, to learn contrition
    then join the servile crowd, so base conditioned?
    Not so, true gentle soul! Keep your ambition!
    
    Poets influenced by Petrarch include Boccaccio, Chaucer, Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, Shakespeare, and pretty much all the Elizabethan poets.
    
    It can be argued that the English Renaissance began with Petrarch, due to his enormous influence on Surrey and Wyatt.

30. John Donne (C#36, G#46, R#19) was the leading poet of the English school of metaphysical poets. My favorite Donne poem is his enchanting “Song” (“Go and catch a falling star”). Other personal favorites include “The Sun Rising” and “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.”
    
    Study me then, you who shall lovers be

    At the next world, that is, at the next spring;

    For I am every dead thing,

    In whom Love wrought new alchemy.

    For his art did express

    A quintessence even from nothingness,

    From dull privations, and lean emptiness;

    He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot

    Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
    —John Donne, excerpt from “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day”
    
    Donne remains highly regarded, paradoxically, for his “holy sonnets” and his erotic love poems.
    
    Donne is also known for his eloquent sermons, some preached as Dean of St. Paul’s, particularly “No Man Is an Island.” Donne’s most famous sermon inspired the bitter refutation of a young monkish troubadour, Paul Simon, who penned the lines: “I am a rock, I am an island.”
    
    Poets influenced by Donne include the other metaphysical poets and, especially, T. S. Eliot.
    
    Donne seems more modern than his peers; Allen Tate called him a “contemporary.”
    
    Harold Bloom identified a tradition of Wit that began with John Donne and flowed through Ben Jonson, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot.
    
    However, it bears noting that Dryden was not a fan and considered Donne a great wit, not a great poet. (Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets)

    
    Coleridge, however, compared Dryden to Donne, observing that in both “The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion.” Both poets were “self-impassioned.” While I am not a Dryden fan, I must disagree about Donne’s best poems, such as the ones I mentioned above.

31. Catullus (C#34, R#20) was a Roman poet who wrote poems in Latin. He is best-known today for his love poems to a woman he called Lesbia. Catullus was influenced by Sappho and Pindar, and in turn influenced Ovid and Virgil, among others. Harold Bloom included “Attis” in his texts of the Western Canon, but this is my favorite Catullus poem, by far:
    
    Catullus CI: “His Brother’s Burial”
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Through many lands and over many seas
    I have journeyed, brother, to these wretched rites,
    to this final acclamation of the dead ...
    and to speak — however ineffectually — to your voiceless ashes
    now that Fate has wrested you away from me.
    Alas, my dear brother, wrenched from my arms so cruelly,
    accept these last offerings, these small tributes
    blessed by our fathers’ traditions, these small gifts for the dead.
    Please accept, by custom, these tokens drenched with a brother’s tears,
    and, for all eternity, brother, “Hail and Farewell.”

32. Federico Garcia Lorca (C#33, G#35, R#39) was a Spanish poet who died young, the victim of foul play, or who knows what he would have accomplished?
    
    Canción del jinete (“Song of the Rider” or “The Horseman’s Song”)
    by Federico Garcia Lorca
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Cordoba. Distant and lone.
    Black pony, big moon,
    olives in my saddlebag.
    Although my pony knows the way,
    I never will reach Cordoba.
    
    High plains, high winds.
    Black pony, blood moon.
    Death awaits me, watching
    from the towers of Cordoba.
    
    Such a long, long way!
    Oh my brave pony!
    Death awaits me
    before I arrive in Cordoba!
    
    Cordoba. Distant and lone.

33. Sylvia Plath (C#19, G#8, R#61) has her detractors among the critics, but she was a marvelous poet in her best poems. In particular, I think “Tulips” and “Daddy” are masterpieces. Definitely one of the best modern poets. “Lady Lazarus,” “The Colossus” and “Ariel” are other well-known Sylvia Plath poems.
    
    She has a claim to be the best contemporary American poet due to having four of the top 20 most anthologized such poems according to Granger’s.
    
    O my God, what am I
    That these late mouths should cry open
    In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
    —Sylvia Plath, excerpt from “Poppies in October”
    
    I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
    Whatever I see I swallow immediately
    Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
    I am not cruel, only truthful‚
    The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
    Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
    —Sylvia Plath, excerpt from “The Mirror”

34. Charles Baudelaire (C#40, G#42, R#10) was a highly influential French poet, essayist and art critic who translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French. Baudelaire is best-known for his 1857 collection of lyric poems Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”).
    
    On an amusing note, my translations of erotic poems by Baudelaire have been used by porn stars, escort services and dating sites to advertise their services!
    
    The pros appreciate Monsieur Baudelaire.
    
    Invitation to the Voyage
    by Charles Baudelaire
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    My child, my sister,
    Consider the rapture
    Of living together!
    To love at our leisure
    Till the end of all pleasure,
    Then in climes so alike you, to die!
    
    The misty sunlight
    Of these hazy skies
    Charms my spirit:
    So mysterious
    Your treacherous eyes,
    Shining through tears.
    
    There, order and restraint redress
    Opulence, voluptuousness.
    
    Baudelaire has been said to have invented modern poetry. He influenced Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valery, Algernon Charles Swinburne and the English Decadents, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke, among many other poets and writers.

35. Ono no Komachi (circa 850 AD) was a legendary beauty who wrote tanka (also known as waka), the most traditional form of Japanese lyric poetry. Although little is known about her life with any surety, Ono no Komachi continues to speak eloquently through her poetry. Komachi is best known today for her recurring themes of autumn rains, wilting flowers and passionate dreams, and for her pensive, melancholic and erotic poems…
    
    If fields of autumn flowers
    can shed their blossoms, shameless,
    why can’t I also frolic here —
    as fearless, wild and blameless?
    —Ono no Komachi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I had thought to pluck
    the flower of forgetfulness
    only to find it
    already blossoming in his heart.
    —Ono no Komachi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

36. Mahmoud Darwish was a marvelous Palestinian poet who wrote poems in Arabic.
    
    Palestine
    by Mahmoud Darwish
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    This land gives us
    all that makes life worthwhile:
    April's blushing advances;
    the aroma of bread baking at dawn;
    a woman haranguing men;
    the poetry of Aeschylus;
    love's trembling beginnings,
    a kiss on a moss-covered boulder;
    mothers who dance to the flute's sighs;
    and the invaders' fear of memories.
    
    This land gives us
    all that makes life worthwhile:
    September's rustling end;
    a woman leaving forty behind, still full of grace, still blossoming;
    sunlight illuminating prison cells;
    clouds taking on the shapes of unusual creatures;
    the people's applause for those who smile at their erasure,
    mocking their assassins;
    and the tyrant's fear of songs.
    
    This land gives us
    all that makes life worthwhile:
    Lady Earth, mother of all beginnings and endings!
    In the past she was called Palestine
    and tomorrow she will still be called Palestine.
    My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life!

37. Hafez aka Hafiz (C#30, G#36, R#14) was a wonderful Persian poet and Sufi mystic.
    
    Infectious!
    Hafez
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I became infected with happiness tonight
    as I wandered idly, singing in the starlight.
    Now I'm wonderfully contagious—
    so kiss me!
    
    Dispensing Keys
    by Hafiz aka Hafez
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    The imbecile
    constructs cages
    for everyone he knows,
    while the sage
    (who has to duck his head
    whenever the moon glows)
    keeps dispensing keys
    all night long
    to the beautiful, rowdy,
    prison gang.

38. A. E. Housman (R#126) was a great English poet, a master of direct statement, and one of my earliest influences around age 13-14. My favorite Housman poems include his Syrian Garden poem, “Epitaph of an Army of Mercenaries,” “Crossing alone the nighted ferry” and “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now.”
    
    Here dead lie we because we did not choose
    To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
    Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
    But young men think it is, and we were young.
    —A. E. Housman
    
    Housman became a best-selling poet with the poems of A Shropshire Lad.
    
    Why?
    
    Because his poems had impact, emotional resonance, and were memorable.
    
    And still are.
    
    Housman was a classical scholar and professor of Latin at Cambridge for a quarter century. His themes were those of the ancient Greeks and Romans: love, war, sacrifice, mortality and the briefness and hardships of life. Michael Schmidt called Housman’s editions of Juvenal, Lucan and Manilius “magisterial.” Housman also translated Horace and Sappho.
    
    Schmidt also observed that Housman’s poems can take on “magnificent authority.”
    
    Harold Bloom said Housman wrote poems “with a devastating apparent simplicity” and a “genius for memorability.”
    
    I agree.
    
    I think this “magnificent authority” is especially true when Housman opposes war and other people imposing their dubious “morality” on him.
    
    Housman’s influences include Horace, Virgil, Theocritus, the songs of Shakespeare, the Scottish border ballads, and Heinrich Heine.
    
    Writers influenced by Housman include W. H. Auden, Willa Cather, e. e. cummings, Elizabeth Daryush, Geoffrey Hill, T. E. Hulme, Philip Larkin, Tom Merrill, George Orwell, Theodore Roethke and Edward Thomas. Also, the war poets Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon
    
    Larkin joked that he was “A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship.”

39. T. S. Eliot (C#12, G#11, R#15) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, but remains a bit of an enigma for me. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a masterpiece and I love his “Weeping Girl” poem, “La Figlia Che Piange,” and admire “Preludes” and “Four Quartets,” but I think Eliot has been overrated otherwise. “The Waste Land” is a poem that can’t be read aloud, having been written in so many languages, and I believe Eliot admitted that he didn’t understand it himself.
    
    I am moved by fancies that are curled

    Around these images, and cling:

    The notion of some infinitely gentle

    Infinitely suffering thing.
    —T. S. Eliot, excerpt from “Preludes”
    
    For me Eliot is like the little girl who had a little curl.
    
    What do the experts say in the major anthologies? If you agree with me that “The Waste Land” is overrated, Eliot has five poems in Harmon, four in Norton, and three in Bloom.
    
    The four quartets are four substantial poems titled “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.” Published between 1936 and 1942, they represent the mature Eliot at the height of his powers. And yet I prefer the much younger 22-year-old Eliot of “Prufrock.”
    
    Eliot identified his influences as Myles Coverdale, Dante, Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue and his friend and mentor, Ezra Pound. However, Harold Bloom opined that Walt Whitman was Eliot’s “authentic father” and that paterfamilias was perhaps confirmed by Pound in “The Pact.” Bloom also detected a “strong strain” of Tennyson. Michael Schmidt identified John Davidson and Arthur Symons as influences, and Robert Browning in Eliot’s dramatic monologues. Henry James and Walter Pater were influences on the younger Eliot. He later studied under the poet-philosopher George Santayana at Harvard.
    
    Eliot identified John Donne as a significant influence, particularly admiring Donne’s “metaphysical wit” and “fusion of intellect and passion.”

    
    Eliot influenced pretty much all the Modernists, to some degree, whether in concordance or opposition, as with Hart Crane in The Bridge. Eliot’s criticism also influenced critics like Donald Davie and C. H. Sisson.

40. Christina Rossetti (C#41, G#26, R#65) is a major poet for her best poems, which are marvelous and as good as anyone’s in their genres. She was arguably the best female poet of the English language, after Emily Dickinson. However, she didn’t have as many great poems as Dickinson. But then who does?
    
    C. H. Sisson said Dickinson “has” to be read with and judged against Dickinson.
    
    If so, the consensus is that Dickinson was the greater poet, but Christina Rossetti was a wonderful poet in her best poems, which include “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest”), “Remember” (“Remember me when I am gone away”), “Up-Hill,” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” “Memory” and “Goblin Market.”
    
    Writers influenced by Christina Rossetti include Ford Madox Ford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Virginia Woolf.
    
    Ford opined that only Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti were worth rereading in their day.
    
    Sisson praised “the intimate falls of her rhythms.”

41. Wilfred Owen was the author of multiple masterpieces. He was the greatest of all the war poets and anti-war poets, in my opinion.
    
    Wilfred Owen’s best-known war poem is “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
    
    Other war poems of note include “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” “Greater Love,” “Futility,” “Insensibility” and “Strange Meeting.”
    
    Owen’s first volume of poems was published after his death, by Edith Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon,
    
    Wilfred Owen was influenced primarily by John Keats, then by Matthew Arnold, Thomas Gray, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Paul Verlaine and William Butler Yeats. Also by his fellow war poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met at Craiglockhart Military Hospital where the three poets were suffering from shell shock.
    
    My tribute poem for Wilfred Owen mentions Craiglockhart:
    
    At Wilfred Owen’s Grave
    by Michael R. Burch
    
    A week before the Armistice, you died.
    They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,
    then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie
    between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
    to politics, your poetry unknown
    except for one brief flurry: thirteen months
    with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
    dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
    of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
    your broken heart together and the fist
    began to pulse with life, so close to death.
    
    Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
    of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life
    is only in the work, and made despair
    a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
    a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less
    than wrested from you, and which we confess
    we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
    that even Sassoon failed to share, because
    a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
    and breath’s transparent, unless we believe
    the words are true despite their lack of weight
    and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
    and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
    of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.

42. Thomas Hardy (C#42, G#34, R#76) was a great poet and an esteemed novelist, although I like his poetry better. I especially admire “The Darkling Thrush” and “The Convergence of the Twain.” Other Hardy poems of note include The Dynasts, “The Voice,” “The Oxen,” “The Ruined Maid,” “Channel Firing,” “Drummer Hodge,” “The Man He Killed” and “Neutral Tones.”
    
    Thomas Hardy influenced W. H. Auden, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Donald Hall, Geoffrey Hill, Robinson Jeffers, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence and Edward Thomas, among others.
    
    Ford Madox Ford said Hardy “showed the way for the Imagists.” And, indeed, Ezra Pound said of Hardy’s poems, “Now there is clarity.”
    
    Lionel Johnson complimented the “earthly charm” and “primitive savor” of Hardy’s poems and one can see that appealing to poets like Frost, Thomas, Lawrence and Jeffers.

43. Hart Crane (C#31) died three months short of his 33rd birthday, or he might head this ranking. Crane wrote magnificent poems in “Voyages,” “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge” and “The Broken Tower.” Other notable poems include “At Melville’s Tomb,” “Chaplinesque,” “Exile,” “Interior,” “Forgetfulness,” “Repose of Rivers,” “The Tunnel” and “Atlantis.”
    
    I consider the long version of “Voyages” (parts I-VI) to be the best love poem in the English language.
    
    Hart Crane’s father, Clarence Arthur Crane, was a candy maker who created Life Savers.

44. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) was the first modern English poet, in my opinion, and the greatest and most innovative talent between Chaucer and Shakespeare. (In fact, I prefer Wyatt’s best lyric poems to most of Shakespeare’s.)
    
    Wyatt used a wide variety of poetic forms, many of which he invented. Others he imported from Italy, such as terza rima and the sonnet. One of his inventions was poulter’s measure, which was adopted by Henry Howard, Fulke Greville, George Gascoigne and Robert Southwell, among others.
    
    My favorite Wyatt poems are “They Flee from Me,” “My Lute, Awake!” and “Whoso List to Hunt.” The latter may have been written about Anne Boleyn.
    
    Wyatt’s poems were originally published in Tottel’s Miscellany in 1557. Unfortunately, Tottel tried to “improve” Wyatt’s meter by making it more regular. That was like a flat-earther trying to “improve” Einstein’s theories.

45. Issa (C#43) is one of the “big four” Japanese haikuists, and one of my favorite poets to translate. I love Issa’s compassion for all life and his quirky sense of humor.
    
    Right at my feet!
    When did you arrive here,
    snail?
    ―Kobayashi Issa, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Composed like the Thinker, he sits
    contemplating the mountains:
    the sagacious frog!
    —Kobayashi Issa, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Unaware of these degenerate times,
    cherry blossoms abound!
    —Kobayashi Issa, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

46. Charles d’Orleans was one the world’s greatest love poets, esp. “Oft in my Thought.” The Duke of Orleans was a medieval French poet who also wrote poems in Middle English. He was a master of the ballade, the chanson (song), the rondeaux/rondel, the complaint and the carol. He has been called the "father of French lyric poetry" and has also been credited with writing the first Valentine's Day poem.
    
    Oft in My Thought
    by Charles d'Orleans
    translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch
    
    So often in my busy mind I sought,
    Around the advent of the fledgling year,
    For something pretty that I really ought
    To give my lady dear;
    But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
    Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
    And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.
    
    For me to keep my manner and my thought
    Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
    While proving that I never once forgot
    Her worth? It tests my power!
    I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
    For it would be a shame for me to stray
    Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.
    
    Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
    And the cost of everything became so dear;
    Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
    Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
    And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
    As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
    Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.
    
    When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
    I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
    Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
    And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
    God keep her soul, I can no better say.

47. Gerard Manley Hopkins (C#44, R#67) had one of the more unique voices among English poets. Hopkins, who was tutored by Walter Pater and influenced by the Anglo-Saxon scops, Duns Scotus, George Herbert and John Keats, is famous for his curtal sonnets. Hopkins wrote poems in a unique “sprung rhythm” that influenced Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill and Nick Marco, among others. Hopkins’ most famous poems include “God’s Grandeur,” “Heaven-Haven,” “The Windhover,” “Pied Beauty,” “Carrion Comfort” and the lovely, touching “Spring and Fall.” Hopkins fell in love with the student poet Digby Mackworth Dolben, who died tragically young. Both Hopkins and Dolben were unpublished in their lifetimes but were published posthumously by Robert Bridges.
    
    I don’t rank myself, but I will note that according to Google the name Michael R. Burch has been showing up consistently in the top 50 poets for the search term “world’s greatest poets” with an average ranking between 43-47 from April to October 2025.
    
    I began writing poetry seriously around age 13-14 and my earliest influences were William Blake, Robert Burns, e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Ernest Dowson, T. S. Eliot (esp. “Prufrock”), A. E. Housman, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dylan Thomas, Sir Thomas Wyatt and W. B. Yeats. Also, songwriters like Sam Cooke, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye (esp. “Mercy Mercy Me” and “What’s Going On”), Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell (esp. “Both Sides Now” and “Big Yellow Taxi”) and Paul Simon. More than a hundred of my teenage poems have been published by journals and several have been set to music by composers and/or translated into other languages. Later, I was influenced by Basho, Li Bai, Chiyo-ni, Issa, Martial, Neruda, Rilke, Sappho and Tagore, among many others, thanks to my wide reading of poetry from around the globe and of all ages.

48. Alfred Tennyson aka Alfred, Lord Tennyson (C#39, G#25, R#18) is not a particular favorite of mine, but he continues to have popular appeal. I do admire Tennyson’s poems “Ulysses,” “Mariana,” “The Eagle,” “Crossing the Bar,” “The Splendor Falls” and “Tears, Idle Tears.” Other famous Tennyson poems include “Tithonus,” “The Lady of Shallot,” “Morte d’Arthur,” “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
    
    Tennyson began writing poetry at age five under the influence of James Thomson, and later, that of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott and John Keats.
    
    In his early twenties Tennyson was discovered by Leigh Hunt, who said he had written the best poetry since the last volume of John Keats.
    
    High praise indeed.
    
    Tennyson wrote his famous meditation on mortality, In Memoriam A. H. H., after the death of his close friend and fellow poet Arthur Henry Hallam.
    
    In 1850, Tennyson became Poet Laureate, succeeding William Wordsworth.
    
    In 1884 he accepted a barony and became Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

49. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (C#50, G#31, R#47) is underrated in many circles and compares favorably with Tennyson.
    
    Longfellow’s best-known poems include “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls,” “My Lost Youth,” “The Cross of Snow,” “Chaucer,” “A Psalm of Life” and “Paul Revere’s Ride” aka “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.”
    
    Poems that once made Longfellow a best-selling poet have fallen out of favor, such as Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha and The Courtship of Miles Standish.
    
    Charles Dickens helped inspire or at least encouraged Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery.
    
    Longfellow, a remarkable scholar, also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy.
    
    He “divided the age” with Tennyson. Indeed, Longfellow was the first American poet to have a bust in Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
    
    Poets influenced by Longfellow include Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling.

50. Wang Wei (C#48, R#150) was a Chinese poet, musician, painter, and politician during the Tang dynasty. He had 29 poems included in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. "Lu Zhai" ("Deer Park") is one of his best-known poems.
    
    "Lu Zhai" ("Deer Park")
    by Wang Wei
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Uninhabited hills ...
    except that now and again the silence is broken
    by something like the sound of distant voices
    as the sun's sinking rays illuminate lichens ...
    
    "Lovesickness"
    by Wang Wei
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Those bright red berries you have in the South,
    the luscious ones that emerge each spring:
    go gather them, bring them home by the bucketful,
    they’re as tempting as my desire for you!
    
    The Ormosia (a red bean called the “love pea”) is a symbol of lovesickness.
    
    Farewell (I)
    by Wang Wei
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Where the mountain began its ascent,
    we stopped to bid each other farewell...
    Now here dusk descends as I shut my wooden gate.
    Come spring, the grass will once again turn green,
    but will you also return, my friend?

51. Anna Akhmatova (C#50, R#100) and Marina Tsvetaeva (a tie between friends and fellow Russian poets).
    
    The Guest
    by Anna Akhmatova
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Everything’s the same: a driving snow
    Hammers the dining room windows.
    Meanwhile, I remain my usual self.
    But a man came to me.
    
    I asked him, “What do you want?”
    “To be with you in hell.”
    I laughed: “It’s plain you intend
    To see us both damned!”
    
    But he lifted his elegant hand
    to lightly caress the flowers.
    “Tell me how they kiss you,
    Tell me how you kiss.”
    
    His eyes, observing me blankly,
    Never moved from my ring,
    Nor did a muscle move
    In his implacable face.
    
    We both know his delight
    is my unnerving knowledge
    that he is indifferent to me,
    that I can refuse him nothing.
    
    THE MUSE
    by Anna Akhmatova
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    My being hangs by a thread tonight
    as I await a Muse no human pen can command.
    The desires of my heart—youth, liberty, glory—
    now depend on the Maid with the flute in her hand.
    
    Look! Now she arrives; she flings back her veil;
    I meet her grave eyes—calm, implacable, pitiless.
    “Temptress, confess!
    Are you the one who gave Dante hell?”
    
    She answers, “Yes.”
    
    The evening light is broad and yellow
    by Anna Akhmatova
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    The evening light is broad and yellow;
    it glides in on an April rain.
    You arrived years late,
    yet I’m glad you came.
    
    Please sit down here, beside me,
    receive me with welcoming eyes.
    Here is my blue notebook
    with my childhood poems inside.
    
    Forgive me if I lived in sorrow,
    spent too little time rejoicing in the sun.
    Forgive, forgive, me, if I mistook
    others for you, when you were the One.
    
    I have also translated this tribute poem written by Marina Tsvetaeva for Anna Akhmatova:
    
    Excerpt from “Poems for Akhmatova”
    by Marina Tsvetaeva
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You outshine everything, even the sun
    at its zenith. The stars are yours!
    If only I could sweep like the wind
    through some unbarred door,
    gratefully, to where you are ...
    to hesitantly stammer, suddenly shy,
    lowering my eyes before you, my lovely mistress,
    petulant, chastened, overcome by tears,
    as a child sobs to receive forgiveness ...
    
    I Know The Truth
    by Marina Tsvetaeva
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I know the truth—abandon lesser truths!
    There’s no need for anyone living to struggle!
    See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
    So why the useless disputes, generals, poets, lovers?
    
    The wind is calming now; the earth is bathed in dew;
    the stars’ infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
    And soon we’ll sleep together, under the earth,
    we who never gave each other a moment’s rest above it.
    
    I Know The Truth (Alternate Ending)
    by Marina Tsvetaeva
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I know the truth—abandon lesser truths!
    There’s no need for anyone living to struggle!
    See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
    So why the useless disputes, generals, poets, lovers?
    
    The wind caresses the grasses; the earth gleams, damp with dew;
    the stars’ infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
    And soon we’ll lie together under the earth,
    we who were never united above it.
    
    Poems about Moscow
    by Marina Tsvetaeva
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    5
    Above the city Saint Peter once remanded to hell
    now rolls the delirious thunder of the bells.
    
    As the thundering high tide eventually reverses,
    so, too, the woman who once bore your curses.
    
    To you, O Great Peter, and you, O Great Tsar, I kneel!
    And yet the bells above me continually peal.
    
    And while they keep ringing out of the pure blue sky,
    Moscow’s eminence is something I can’t deny ...
    
    though sixteen hundred churches, nearby and afar,
    all gaily laugh at the hubris of the Tsars.

52. Edmund Spenser (C#49, R#49) is best known for his epic poem The Faire Queene and The Shepheardes Calendar. The latter has been called called “the first work of the English literary Renaissance.” But Spenser was also a marvelous lyric poet who created a version of the English sonnet now called the Spenserian sonnet, the best-known being “One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand.” He also wrote other lovely lyrics such as “Epithalamion” and “Prothalamion.” Spenser was called the “Prince of Poets” in his day and has been called the “poets’ poet” in ours. He has also been called the “first and most perfect representative of humanism in English poetry.” Spenser is also notable for being the first English poet to write verse that was “fluid, limpid, translucent and graceful.” He was arguably the first great English Romantic poet and the creator of a Spenserian tradition that includes Milton, Blake, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson, Longfellow, Hardy, et al.
    
    Harold Bloom identified a Romantic tradition or sequence that began with Spenser and flowed through Milton, to the High Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats), then to Tennyson, Robert Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane. Bloom called Eliot a “secret Romantic” but I would counter “not so secret” in Prufrock. To the best of the Romantic tradition I would add Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, Robert Burns, Dylan Thomas and Kevin N. Roberts.
    
    Spenser’s influence on Burns is undeniable in “Afton Water.”
    
    Writers who influenced Spenser include Virgil, Ovid, Ludovico Ariosto, Torquato Tasso, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Tyndale and Sir Philip Sidney.
    
    When he died, Edmund Spenser was buried next to Chaucer at Westminster Abbey. Before his death Spenser was “widely recognized as the most important living English poet.”

53. John Milton (C#20, G#18, R#9) remains most famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost but wrote other notable long poems in Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes and the pastoral elegy Lycidas. His great masque Comus was produced by Henry Lawes, the leading English composer and songwriter of his day. Milton’s better-known shorter poems include the sonnets “Methought I saw my late espoused saint,” “Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints,” “On Shakespeare” and “On His Blindness” (“When I consider how my light is spent”) as well as “The Passion,” “At a Solemn Music,” “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”
    
    Milton wrote the prose Areopagitica, which has been cited as one of the most compelling arguments for freedom of the press, but Milton has also been accused of censorship and supporting the anti-freedom Cromwell government by being its chief propagandist. Politics and poets do make strange bedfellows.
    
    England was a fen

    before Milton

    and vaster

    thereafter.
    —Michael R. Burch
    
    Milton was influenced by Homer, Virgil, Dante, William Tyndale, Edmund Spenser and John Wycliffe; in turn he influenced Alexander Pope, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, among others.
    
    In his preface to Paradise Lost the aging, blind Milton claimed that he would “justify the ways of God to man,” but William Blake said he was of the Devil’s party and didn’t know it. Paradise Lost “positively bristles with learning” (Schmidt) but Milton ended up making Satan and Eve romantic heroes for the ages, while making Jehovah seem like a tyrannical despot. Which, according to the Bible, he was.
    
    Although long revered and often said to be second only to Shakespeare among English poets, Milton has had his detractors, including notably Dr. Johnson (albeit with grudging respect), T. S. Eliot (not a fan of Milton’s moral content or lack thereof), F.R. Leavis (“monotony”) and William Empson.

54. Dante Alighieri (C#3, G#17, R#24) is not a personal favorite of mine. By reputation, Dante is elite, among the top four poets of all time, but I don’t see it myself. Perhaps in the original Italian. An enigma for me among the great poets.
    
    Dante is famous for his Divine Comedy, which consists of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, and for the lyric poems of La Vita Nuova (“The New Life.”)
    
    Midway through my life’s journey
    I awoke to find myself lost in a trackless wood,
    for I had strayed far from the straight path.
    —Dante, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    INSCRIPTION ON THE GATE OF HELL
    Before me nothing created existed, to fear.
    Eternal I am, and eternal I endure.
    Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
    —Dante, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Dante was influenced by Virgil, whom he selected to be his guide through hell, and also by Horace, Ovid and Lucan, as well as by philosophers like Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
    
    In turn Dante influenced Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Milton and Tennyson, among many others.

55. Seamus Heaney (C#45, R#57) was the greatest Irish poet after William Butler Yeats, in my opinion. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. My favorite poems by Seamus Heaney are “Punishment” and “The Forge.” Heaney is also highly regarded for his translation of Beowulf.
    
    Helen Vendler considered Seamus Heaney to be a major poet. I agree.

56. Pindar (C#47, R#21) was an ancient Greek poet famous for his Pindaric Odes.
    
    Athens, celestial city, crowned with violets, beloved of poets, bulwark of Greece!
    —Pindar, fragment 64, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Do not, O my soul, aspire to immortality, but exhaust life.
    —Pindar, Pythian Ode III, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Fairest of all preludes is mine to incomparable Athens
    as I lay the foundation of songs for the mighty race of Alcmaeonidae and their majestic steeds.
    Among all the nations, which heroic house compares with glorious Hellas?
    —Pindar, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Toil and expense confront excellence in endeavors fraught with danger,
    but those who succeed are considered wise by their companions.
    —Pindar, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I rejoice at this accomplishment and yet I also grieve,
    seeing how Envy slanders noble endeavors.
    —Pindar, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

57. Lord Byron (C#35, G#24, R#41) shone most brightly in Don Juan but is best known today for his love poem “She Walks in Beauty (like the night).” Other notable Lord Byron poems include “When We Two Parted,” “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving,” “The Dream,” “Lara” and the long poem Beppo.
    
    Byron is also notable for his creation of the “Byronic hero” — an antihero modeled on himself.
    
    Byron became famous overnight, to his own amazement, when he published Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage in 1812. He quickly outsold everyone, including Jane Austen and the then-popular George Crabbe. The Giaour, published the following year, went into eight editions within a year.
    
    Byron was accused of “depravity” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Graves, among others. According to Graves, Byron shrouded his “colossal vulgarity” in a “cloak of aloof grandeur.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, called Byron “a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices” and was furthermore “mad as a hatter.” Ford Madox Ford was also repelled by Byron’s “vulgarity.”
    
    Unlike the other Romantics, Byron esteemed John Dryden, John Milton and Alexander Pope (his “chief idol”) over Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. While one can argue about Milton, I suspect few modern poets or poetry lovers hold Dryden and Pope in such high regard. I certainly don’t.
    
    Byron launched attacks on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Southey. Did he refrain from attacking Shelley because they were friends?
    
    Byron was influenced primarily by Pope, but also by Milton, Dante, Petrarch, Torquato Tasso, Goethe, and probably, one suspects, by John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester.

58. Edna St. Vincent Millay (R#118) was a marvelous poet in her best poems. I like some of her love sonnets better than Shakespeare’s.

59. Louise Bogan is a criminally underrated poet. My favorite Louise Bogan poems are “After the Persian” and “Song for the Last Act.”

60. Fukuda Chiyo-ni was a great haikuist and a personal favorite of mine.
    
    Because morning glories
    hold my well-bucket hostage
    I go begging for water
    ―Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Ah butterfly,
    what dreams do you ply
    with your beautiful wings?
    ―Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

61. Tzŭ-Yeh was a courtesan of the Jin dynasty era (c. 400 BC) also known as Lady Night or Lady Midnight. Her poems were pinyin ("midnight songs"). Tzŭ-Yeh was apparently a "sing-song" girl, perhaps similar to a geisha trained to entertain men with music and poetry. She has also been called a "wine shop girl" and even a professional concubine! Whoever she was, it seems likely that Rihaku (Li-Po) was influenced by the lovely, touching (and often very sexy) poems of the "sing-song" girl. Centuries later, Arthur Waley was one of her translators and admirers. Waley and Ezra Pound knew each other, and it seems likely that they got together to compare notes at Pound's soirees, since Pound was also an admirer and translator of Chinese poetry. Pound's most famous translation is his take on Li-Po's "The River Merchant's Wife: A Letter." If the ancient "sing-song" girl influenced Li-Po and Pound, she was thus an influence―perhaps an important influence―on English Modernism. The first Tzŭ-Yeh poem makes me think that she was, indeed, a direct influence on Li-Po and Ezra Pound.
    
    I heard my love was going to Yang-chou
    So I accompanied him as far as Ch'u-shan.
    For just a moment as he held me in his arms
    I thought the swirling river ceased flowing and time stood still.
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Will I ever hike up my dress for you again?
    Will my pillow ever caress your arresting face?
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Night descends ...
    I let my silken hair spill down my shoulders as I part my thighs over my lover.
    Tell me, is there any part of me not worthy of being loved?
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I will wear my robe loose, not bothering with a belt;
    I will stand with my unpainted face at the reckless window;
    If my petticoat insists on fluttering about, shamelessly,
    I'll blame it on the unruly wind!
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    When he returns to my embrace,
    I’ll make him feel what no one has ever felt before:
    Me absorbing him like water
    Poured into a wet clay jar.
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I could not sleep with the full moon haunting my bed!
    I thought I heard―here, there, everywhere―
    disembodied voices calling my name!
    Helplessly I cried "Yes!" to the phantom air!
    ―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

62. Ernest Dowson is one of my favorite unknown or under-known poets, and I consider him a major poet for his best poems. I particularly admire his Cynara poem “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” in which Dowson coined the phrases “gone with the wind” and “the night is thine.” I also admire “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchohare longam” in which Dowson coined the phrase “the days of wine and roses.” An other Dowson favorite of mine is “A Last Word.”

63. John Clare was one of the great nature poets. He tells us that the world is beautiful and sad. My favorite John Clare poems include “The Badger,” “The Skylark,” “I found a ball of grass among the hay,” “The Fallen Elm,” “A Vision” and “I Am.”
    
    Clare was influenced by Robert Burns, Lord Byron and James Thomson. Influenced so much that Clare, who spent considerable time in insane asylums, at times imagined himself to be Burns and Byron, and even revised some of the latter’s poems!
    
    John Clare’s poetry was admired by Harold Bloom, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney, Thomas De Quincy and Edward Thomas, among others.
    
    Bloom called Clare “frequently a major poet, an eminence obscured by the proximity of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.” I would add Burns, another major poet considered a “peasant poet.”
    
    Heaney opined that “Clare is a sponsor and a forerunner of modern poetry in post-colonial nation languages.”
    
    Edward Thomas praised Clare’s “lowly fidelity” and his love “not only of the wild, but of the waste places.”

64. Fadwa Tuqan (1917-2003), the Grande Dame of Palestinian letters, is also known as "the Poet of Palestine." She is generally considered to be one of the very best contemporary Arab poets. The sister of the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, she was born in Nablus in 1917. She began writing in traditional forms, but became one of the leaders of the use of the free verse in Arabic poetry. Her work often deals with feminine explorations of love and social protest, particularly of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
    
    Enough for Me
    by Fadwa Tuqan
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Enough for me to lie in the earth,
    to be buried in her,
    to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish ...
    only to spring forth like a flower
    brightening the play of my countrymen's children.
    
    Enough for me to remain
    in my native soil's embrace,
    to be as close as a handful of dirt,
    a sprig of grass,
    a wildflower.
    
    Existence
    by Fadwa Tuqan
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    In my solitary life, I was a lost question;
    in the encompassing darkness,
    my answer lay concealed.
    

    You were a bright new star
    revealed by fate,
    radiating light from the fathomless darkness.
    

    The other stars rotated around you
    —once, twice —
    until I perceived
    your unique radiance.
    

    Then the bleak blackness broke
    and in the twin tremors
    of our entwined hands
    I had found my missing answer.
    

    Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
    
    Don't you remember the coalescence
    Of our spirits in the flames?
    
    Of my universe with yours?
    
    Of the two poets?
    
    Despite our great distance,
    Existence unites us.
    
    Nothing Remains
    by Fadwa Tuqan
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Tonight, we’re together,
    but tomorrow you'll be hidden from me again,
    thanks to life’s cruelty.
    

    The seas will separate us ...
    Oh!—Oh!—If I could only see you!
    But I'll never know ...
    where your steps led you,
    which routes you took,
    or to what unknown destinations
    your feet were compelled.
    

    You will depart and the thief of hearts,
    the denier of beauty,
    will rob us of all that's dear to us,
    will steal our happiness,
    leaving our hands empty.
    

    Tomorrow at dawn you'll vanish like a phantom,
    dissipating into a delicate mist
    dissolving quickly in the summer sun.
    

    Your scent—your scent!—contains the essence of life,
    filling my heart
    as the earth absorbs the lifegiving rain.
    

    I will miss you like the fragrance of trees
    when you leave tomorrow,
    and nothing remains.
    

    Just as everything beautiful and all that's dear to us
    is lost—lost!—when nothing remains.
    
    Labor Pains
    by Fadwa Tuqan
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Tonight the wind wafts pollen through ruined fields and homes.
    The earth shivers with love, with the agony of giving birth,
    while the Invader spreads stories of submission and surrender.

    
    O, Arab Aurora!

    
    Tell the Usurper: childbirth’s a force beyond his ken
    because a mother’s wracked body reveals a rent that inaugurates life,
    a crack through which light dawns in an instant
    as the blood’s rose blooms in the wound.

65. Miklós Radnóti was the greatest of the Holocaust poets, in my opinion. These postcard poems were written on what became his death march as Nazi soldiers herded Jewish concentration camp prisoners away from the advancing Russian armies.
    
    Postcard 1
    by Miklós Radnóti
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
    resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
    while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
    the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
    and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
    glowing within my conscience—incandescent, intense.
    Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever:
    still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
    or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree.
    
    Postcard 2
    by Miklós Radnóti
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    A few miles away they’re incinerating
    the haystacks and the houses,
    while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
    the shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
    Now, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
    sets the silver water a-ripple
    while, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
    seem to swim like drifting clouds.
    
    Postcard 3
    by Miklós Radnóti
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    The oxen dribble bloody spittle;
    the men pass blood in their piss.
    Our stinking regiment halts, a horde of perspiring savages,
    adding our aroma to death’s repulsive stench.
    
    Postcard 4
    by Miklós Radnóti
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    I toppled beside him — his body already taut,
    tight as a string just before it snaps,
    shot in the back of the head.
    “This is how you’ll end too; just lie quietly here,”
    I whispered to myself, patience blossoming from dread.
    “Der springt noch auf,” the voice above me jeered;
    I could only dimly hear
    through the congealing blood slowly sealing my ear.
    
    This was his final poem, written October 31, 1944 near Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary. “Der springt noch auf” means something like “That one is still twitching.”

66. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning in a tie between husband and wife. He is more popular with critics while she is better known to the public and has the most-read poem: thus, a tie.
    
    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (C#50, G#23, R#94) is known almost exclusively for her most famous poem from Sonnets from the Portuguese (“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”) and for her verse novel Aurora Leigh, although the former is read much more than the latter these days.
    
    Robert Browning (C#37, G#40, R#28) is best-known for “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” his dramatic monologues such as “My Last Duchess” and “Fra Lippo Lippi,” and the short lyric poems “Meeting at Night” and “Parting at Morning.”
    
    Browning’s poems often function like verse novels.
    
    The Ring and the Bell has been called Browning’s masterpiece, including by Harold Bloom, but who has heard of it, much less read it? Not everyone agrees about the mastery. The poem has been called “enormous and enormously tedious.” Michael Schmidt didn’t disagree and observed that the poem is “certainly long,” occupying 12 books.
    
    Bloom called Browning “the most considerable poet in English since the major Romantics,” having surpassed his rival Tennyson, not to mention Yeats, Hardy and Wallace Stevens.
    
    Ah, but people still read those poets.
    
    Browning’s masterpieces, not so much.
    
    Robert Browning influenced Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. Also, many writers of dialog.
    
    He was influenced by Byron, Donne and especially Shelley.

67. Molière was a poet. Many of his plays, such as Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The School for Wives and The Learned Ladies, were written in rhyming alexandrines.

68. Jean Racine was a poet who wrote plays in verse, including his masterpieces Andromache, Phaedra, Britannicus and Athaliah. Robert Lowell praised Racine’s writing for having a “diamond-edge” and for the “glory of its hard, electric rage.”

69. Robert Lowell (R#134) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best known for his poetry collections Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies. My favorite Robert Lowell poems include “For the Union Dead,” “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “Skunk Hour.” The latter was written in response to “The Armadillo” by the next poet in this ranking.

70. Elizabeth Bishop was an outstanding poet, and one might argue, as I have, a major poet, for marvelous poems like “One Art,” “The Armadillo” and “The Fish.” However, she didn’t write as many great poems as some of the poets I have ranked above her.

71. Marcus Valerius Martial, known better as simply Martial, was an ancient Roman poet famous for his acidic wit and scathing epigrams. But Martial was also capable of tenderness, especially in his touching elegy for the little slave girl Erotion.
    
    Epitaph for the Child Erotion
    by Marcus Valerius Martial
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Lie lightly on her, grass and dew ...
    So little weight she placed on you.
    
    PARTIAL TO MARTIAL
    
    I must admit that I’m partial
    to Martial.
    —Michael R. Burch
    
    You ask me why I’ve sent you no new verses?
    There might be reverses.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You ask me to recite my poems to you?
    I know how you’ll “recite” them, if I do.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You ask me why I choose to live elsewhere?
    You’re not there.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You ask me why I love fresh country air?
    You’re not befouling it, mon frère.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You never wrote a poem,
    yet criticize mine?
    Stop abusing me or write something fine
    of your own!
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    He starts everything but finishes nothing;
    thus I suspect there’s no end to his fucking and sucking.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You’ll find good poems, but mostly poor and worse,
    my peers being quite “diverse” in their verse.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    You alone own prime land, dandy!
    Gold, money, the finest porcelain—you alone!
    The best wines of the most famous vintages—you alone!
    Discrimination, taste and wit—you alone!
    You have it all—who can deny that you alone are set for life?
    But everyone has had your wife—
    she is never alone!
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    There’s no need to brag
    when outstripping some inglorious nag.
    —Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

    
    Martial influenced Juvenal, Lord Byron, Ben Jonson, A. E. Housman, Thomas More, Alexander Pope and Oscar Wilde, among others.

72. Ovid (C#50, R#36) was a Roman poet who wrote verse in Latin. His Metamorphoses and Amores (“Love Poems”) influenced Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Milton, Michel de Montaigne and Goethe, among others. Ovid is widely considered to be one of the three “most major” Latin poets, along with Virgil and Horace.
    
    “The Amores” Book I, Elegy II: Darted!
    by Ovid
    translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Why can I say except that my mattress feels hard to me
    and that my sheets and clothes keep tumbling to the floor
    through these long, sleepless, endlessly tossing nights?
    Why do my weary bones ache?
    Why is my restless body wracked with pain?
    But if I was being assailed by desire, surely I’d know it!
    Certainly, Cupid’s crept in and wounded me with some secret art.
    That’s it: a sliverous dart has found and lodged fast in my heart,
    where cruel Love now commands my conquered breast.

73. Giovanni Boccaccio (R#85) was an Italian writer and important Renaissance humanist. He is considered one of the “Three Crowns” or “Three Jewels” of Italian literature along with Petrarch and Dante.
    
    Boccaccio is best known for the Decameron, which combines prose novellas with lyric poems. Notable poems by Boccaccio include Amorosa visione (“The Amorous Vision”), Il Filostrato (the inspiration for Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde), Teseida (the inspiration for Chaucer’s The Knightes Tale), Theodore and Honoria and The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta.
    
    Writers influenced by Boccaccio include Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes and Lope de Vega. /bookmark/

74. Paul Valery

75. Philip Larkin (R#64) esp. for “Aubade,” “Church Going,” “The Whitsun Weddings” and “This Be The Verse.”

76. Sara Teasdale was admired by Robert Frost, a hard man to please where poetry is concerned. My favorite Sara Teasdale poems include “Wild Asters,” “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “Advice to a Girl.”
    
    “There Will Come Soft Rains” is a top 50 poem for the search term “world’s greatest poems” according to Google.

77. Arthur Rimbaud (C#50, R#48) was a French prodigy and one of the first great free verse poets. As a teenager he had an affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine that ended when a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Rimbaud was 18 at the time. He would give up poetry around age 20 to become a soldier, deserter, stone quarry foreman and gunrunner. Some say a slave trader but that is disputed.
    
    Stéphane Mallarmé called Rimbaud a “meteor” for what he accomplished at such a young age, only to vanish.
    
    Paul Valery opined that “All known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud’s.”
    
    Rimbaud influenced John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Octavio Paz and Patti Smith, among others.

78. Paul Verlaine (R#73)

79. Yosa Buson was one of the “big four” Japanese haiku poets.
    
    A kite floats
    at the same place in the sky
    where yesterday it floated ...
    ―Yosa Buson translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
    
    Your coolness:
    the sound of the bell
    departing the bell.
    —Yosa Buson, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

80. Sir Philip Sidney (C#48) was the brother of Mary Sidney, another poet who appears in this ranking. The dashing Sidney has been proposed as Shakespeare’s “rival poet.” His best-known poems are sonnets such as “Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show” and “Come sleep, Oh sleep, the certain knot of peace.”
    
    Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, published six years after his death, was the first major sonnet sequence in the English language. His other major literary work was the Old Arcadia, later revised to the New Arcadia. The Arcadia was a prose romance with poems at the end of each book.
    
    Sidney was also England’s first notable poet-critic, primarily for his prose Defence of Poesy.
    
    Fulke Greville, his classmate, friend, editor and first biographer, called Sidney the “wonder of our age.” John Aubrey called Sidney “the most accomplished Cavalier of his time.” Sir Walter Ralegh called Sidney the “Scipio, Cicero and Petrarch of our time.” Edmund Spenser dedicated The Shepheardes Calendar to him. Lady Mary Wroth, Sidney’s niece, wrote a romance inspired by her uncle’s Arcadia. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was also influenced by Arcadia. Thomas Campion and Spenser were poets influenced by Sidney.
    
    If he hadn’t died at age 32, Sidney would no doubt rank higher in this list.

81. Ezra Pound (G#44, R#29) is another enigma for me. I love his Kensington Garden poem, a masterpiece. But his life’s work, the Cantos, will be a tough slog for most readers, probably all. Pound’s more accessible and/or better poems include my favorite, “The Garden,” his haiku-like “In a Station of the Metro,” his loose Li Bai translation “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” the tactless “A Pact” (in which Pound grudgingly admits that Walt Whitman is his poetic father), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Homage to Sextus Propertius and “Planh for the Young English King.” His translation of “The Seafarer” is worth reading, although I like to think mine is better.
    
    Pound was accused of antisemitism, fascism and treason for supporting Benito Mussolini and becoming a radio propagandist for the Axis during WWII. After the war Pound spent 12 years in a mental institution, having been found unfit to stand trial. He was released after Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and others lobbied for his freedom.
    
    Pound was talented,
    but balanced that by being unbalanced.
    He said, “Make it new.”
    Ad-vice he eschewed.
    Why not just better?

    —Michael R. Burch
    
    I agree with Harold Bloom that Modernism, despite its mantra of “Make it new!” was a continuation of Romanticism.
    
    The great Romantics made it new, and they made it better than their Augustan predecessors. The Modernists, with a few pleasant exceptions here and there, made it new (as in trendy novelties) and more confusing.
    
    I am not opposed to Modernism. I love “Prufrock,” “The Garden” and other rare masterpieces of Modernism. But its excesses resulted in the train derailing and scattering its passengers to the four winds. Many never to be regained.
    
    Pound became friends with William Carlos Williams and H.D. (Hilda Dolittle) at the University of Pennsylvania. The three poetic musketeers would help create and propel the Imagist school of English/American poetry.
    
    Pound was influenced by Li Bai, Charles Baudelaire and the French Symbolists, Robert Browning, Guido Cavalcanti, Abraham Cowley, Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Walter Savage Landor, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Theocritus, Francois Villon, Edmund Waller, Walt Whitman and William Butler Yeats (for whom he once worked as a secretary).
    
    Pound’s influence was enormous: on T. S. Eliot, H.D., James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Amy Lowell, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and others too numerous to mention.
    
    When Amy Lowell took the Imagists in directions Pound didn’t approve, he renamed them the Amygists and said, in effect, “Don’t blame me for the looniness.” But it was too late, and then he, too, went mad, if he wasn’t already.
    
    None of that has prevented other poets from participating in the “no ideas but in things” trainwreck.
    
    One mad hatter to rule them all.
    
    If we don’t trust his economic theories or his racist theories, why does anyone trust his theories about poetry?
    
    Pound flitted from Imagism to Vorticism to Fascism, like a nectar-drunk butterfly.

82. Callimachus

83. W. H. Auden (G#50, R#25) is not a personal favorite, but I consider his lovely “Lullaby” an utter masterpiece. I also admire his elegies “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” and “Funeral Blues.”

84. Edgar Allan Poe (G#10, R#61) was a major writer when we include his short stories, essays and innovations, but he was not a greater poet than those above him on this list, in my opinion. Poe’s most famous poems include “The Raven,” “To Helen” (written when Poe was 15 or 16), “Bells,” “Eldorado,” “The City in the Sea,” “Sonnet to Science,” “Israfel,” “Ulalume,” “Alone” and “A Dream Within a Dream,” but my favorite Poe poem is the haunting “Annabel Lee.”
    
    Helen, thy beauty is to me
    Like those Nicean barks of yore,
    That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
    The weary, wayworn wanderer bore
    To his own native shore.
    —Edgar Allan Poe, excerpt from “To Helen”
    
    Poe was influenced by Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Thomas De Quincy and Shelley.
    
    Poe influenced Charles Baudelaire, who translated Poe’s writings into French, and other French Symbolists, including Verlaine, Rimbaud and Valery. Stéphane Mallarmé wrote an elegy for Poe. Andre Gide admired Poe’s work.
    
    Through the French Symbolists, Poe influenced the English Decadents, including Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde, and the Modernists, including Yeats, Rilke, Pound and Eliot.
    
    Poe also influenced fantasy/horror/science fiction writers like Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, Robert Louis Stevenson (esp. his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, as well as writers of psychological thrillers, like Fyodor Dostoevsky and Shirley Jackson, creators of psychological “cliff hanger” movies like Alfred Hitchcock, and the writers of detective fiction like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and pretty much every other author of crime drama.
    
    It is believed that Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes was based on and/or inspired by Poe’s inspector C. Auguste Dupin.
    
    William Carlos Williams said of Poe that “In him American literature is anchored, in him alone, on solid ground.”

85. Stéphane Mallarmé

86. Oscar Wilde (G#30, R#43) wrote a masterpiece, “Requiscat,” but didn’t have the output of the greatest poets, probably because he spent most of his time writing plays and prose. The Divine Oscar Wilde ranks much higher as a major writer and many consider him the world’s greatest epigrammatist, along with Martial and Mark Twain. Wilde’s best-known poem is his “Ballad of Reading Gaol.”
    
    Nod to the Master

    by Michael R. Burch
    
    for the Divine Oscar Wilde
    
    If every witty thing that’s said were true,

    Oscar Wilde, the world would worship You!

87. Robert Herrick (R#146) was the last of the Cavaliers and one of the most musical poets of the English language. Algernon Charles Swinburne called Herrick “the greatest song writer ever born of English race.” Herrick’s best-known poems include the much-anthologized (and rightly so) “Upon Julia’s Clothes,” “Delight in Disorder” and “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”
    
    Herrick had a bewitching way with words and something of a lingerie fetish for a vicar: “erring lace,” “tempestuous petticoat,” “the liquefaction of her clothes,” etc.
    
    Upon Julia’s Clothes
    by Robert Herrick
    
    Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
    Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
    The liquefaction of her clothes.
    
    Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
    That brave vibration each way free,
    Oh, how that glittering taketh me!
    
    Delight in Disorder
    by Robert Herrick
    
    A sweet disorder in the dress
    Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
    A lawn about the shoulders thrown
    Into a fine distraction—
    An erring lace, which here and there
    Enthrals the crimson stomacher—
    A cuff neglectful, and thereby
    Ribbands to flow confusedly—
    A winning wave, deserving note,
    In the tempestuous petticoat—
    A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
    I see a wild civility—
    Do more bewitch me than when art
    Is too precise in every part.
    
    Upon Julia’s Breasts
    by Robert Herrick
    
    Display thy breasts, my Julia, there let me
    Behold that circummortal purity;
    Between whose glories, there my lips I’ll lay,
    Ravished in that fair Via Lactea.
    
    Another: Upon a Child
    by Robert Herrick
    
    Here a pretty baby lies
    Sung asleep with lullabies:
    Pray be silent, and not stir
    Th’ easy earth that covers her.

88. Thomas Gray is most famous for his immortal meditation on mortality, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” arguably the English language’s greatest poem, and for “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.” Other notable Gray poems include “The Bard,” “Ode on the Spring” and “Ode to Adversity.” He also wrote the much-anthologized “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” after his friend Horace Walpole’s cat drowned in a goldfish bowl.
    
    Gray also translated Dante, Propertius, Statius and Tasso.
    
    Gray was influenced by Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, and probably by James Thomson and James Macpherson.
    
    In turn Gray influenced Oliver Goldsmith, particularly in The Deserted Village. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were influenced by Gray’s nature imagery and melancholy tone. Wordsworth cited Gray as a major inspiration.

89. Robinson Jeffers esp. “Shine Perishing Republic” and “Hurt Hawks.”

90. Paul Celan esp. “Todesfuge”

91. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (C#50, G#43, R#17) is remembered as a poet primarily for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished dream poem “Kubla Khan” whose composition was interrupted by the infamous “person from Porlock.”
    
    “Christabel” is another notable but unfinished poem. William Hazlitt opined that “There is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.”
    
    Other notable poems by Coleridge include “Dejection: An Ode,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” and “The Aeolian Harp.”
    
    Coleridge is considered to be one of the “Big Six” poets of English Romanticism, along with William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his close friend William Wordsworth.
    
    Coleridge was also an important literary critic as well as an essayist, philosopher and theologian. He shared volumes and/or collaborated with Charles Lamb, Charles Lloyd, Robert Southey and Wordsworth.
    
    Coleridge’s most important prose works were Biographia Literaria and his collected criticism of Shakespeare. Coleridge has been credited with rehabilitating the reputation of Hamlet after the play had been denigrated by Dr. Johnson, Voltaire and other critics.
    
    Coleridge was influenced by William Cowper, Thomas Gray, John Milton and Wordsworth.
    
    Coleridge in turn influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Rudyard Kipling, Mary Shelley, Robert Southey and Wordsworth, among many others. Indeed, his Wikipedia page claims that Coleridge’s poems “directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age.”

92. Eihei Dogen Kigen

93. Heinrich Heine

94. Hermann Hesse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.

95. Omar Khayyam (R#37) is best known in the West for Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

96. Horace was an ancient Roman poet, satirist and critic who is known and influential for his Epodes, Odes, Epistles and Satires. Horace was influenced by Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon of Teos and Callimachus, and in turn influenced Ovid, John Keats, William Wordsworth, A. E. Housman, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice.

97. Pierre de Ronsard was a French poet called the "prince of poets."

98. Boethius influenced Dante, Alfred the Great, Chaucer, John Gower and many other poets and translators with his masterwork The Consolation of Philosophy. Edward Gibbon call the Consolation a “golden volume.”

99. Friedrich Schiller

100. Robert Hayden esp. “Those Winter Sundays.”

101. Adam Mickiewicz has been called the Polish Byron.
     
     Donald Davie translated part of Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz into English.

102. Louis MacNeice esp. the marvelous “Bagpipe Music”

103. Kajal Ahmad is a wonderful contemporary Kurdish poet.

104. Friedrich Holderlin (R#34)

105. Taras Shevchenko is widely held to be the foremost Ukrainian poet.

106. Aeschylus was an ancient Greek poet and playwright famous for his plays Oresteia, The Persians, Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes and Suppliant Women aka The Suppliants. Aeschylus has been called the father of tragedy.

107. Sophocles was another ancient Greek poet/playwright famous for Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Rex aka Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Philoctetes and The Women of Trachis.

108. Euripides was an ancient Greek poet/playwright famous for Alcestis, Andromache, Bacchae, Cyclops, Hecuba, Helen, Heracles, Medea, Orestes, Hippolytus, Ion and

     Iphigenia at Aulis.

109. Aristophanes was an ancient Greek poet/playwright famous for The Birds, The Clouds, The Frogs, The Knights, Lysistrata and The Wasps.

110. Su Shi

111. Michelangelo Buonarroti is much better known as a sculptor and painter, but he was also an accomplished poet who wrote sonnets and madrigals.
     
     Ravished, by all our eyes find fine and fair,
     yet starved for virtues pure hearts might confess,
     my soul can find no Jacobean stair
     that leads to heaven, save earth’s loveliness.
     ―Michelangelo, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

112. Leonardo da Vinci is also better known for other things, but was an accomplished poet.
     

     Blinding ignorance misleads us.
     Myopic mortals, open your eyes!
     —Leonardo da Vinci, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

113. Giacomo Leopardi (R#40)

114. Mikhail Lermontov (R#43)

115. Bertolt Brecht

116. Ben Jonson (C#48) esp. for the lovely “Song: To Celia” (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”) and the touching elegies “On My First Son” and “On My First Daughter.” Michael Schmidt called Jonson the “most versatile writer in the history of English poetry. After all, he wrote plays, epistles, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, songs, poems, masques, country house poems, translations (including Horace’s Ars Poetica), etc. Jonson was an obvious influence on “the sons of Ben” who included the Cavalier poets Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling. But also on later poets like John Dryden and Alexander Pope. And Jonson made a strong positive impression on the modern poets Thom Gunn and Yvor Winters.

117. Lao Tzu

118. E. A. Robinson is notable for marvelous poems like “Luke Havergal,” ‘Eros Turannos,” “The Mill” and “Mr. Flood’s Party.” However, he’s best-known today for his less marvelous poems “Miniver Cheevy” and “Richard Cory.” The latter was set to music by Paul Simon and became a minor hit for Simon and Garfunkel.
     
     Robinson also wrote a “sprawling trilogy” of long Arthurian poems: Merlin, Launcelot and Tristram.
     
     E. A. Robinson was widely admired in his day, ranking second only to Robert Frost among American poets, and won three Pulitzer Prizes.
     
     E. A. Robinson was influenced by George Crabbe and wrote a sonnet to him.

119. William Dunbar (1460-1525) is widely regarded as the greatest Scottish poet before Robert Burns, and some consider him the greatest Scottish poet, period. For instance, Sir Walter Scott called Dunbar “unrivalled by any which Scotland ever produced.” Hugh MacDiarmid agreed. My favorite William Dunbar poems are “Sweet Rose of Virtue” and “Lament for the Makaris (Makers).”
     
     “Sweit rois of vertew” (“Sweet Rose of Virtue”)
     by William Dunbar
     translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
     
     Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
     delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
     richest in bounty and in beauty clear
     and in every virtue that is held most dear―
     except only that you are merciless.
     
     Into your garden, today, I followed you;
     there I saw flowers of freshest hue,
     both white and red, delightful to see,
     and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
     yet nowhere one leaf nor petal of rue.
     
     I fear that March with his last arctic blast
     has slain my fair rose and left her downcast,
     whose piteous death does my heart such pain
     that I long to plant love’s root again―
     so comforting her bowering leaves have been.
     
     If the tenth line seems confusing, it helps to know that rue symbolizes pity and also has medicinal uses; thus I believe the unrequiting lover is being accused of a lack of compassion and perhaps of withholding her healing attentions. The penultimate line can be taken as a rather naughty double entendre, but I will leave that interpretation up to the reader!

120. Boris Pasternak was an accomplished Russian poet, novelist, composer and translator. Pasternak is best known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which became a blockbuster movie. When Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was forced to decline it by Soviet authorities, who had banned Doctor Zhivago.

121. Marie de France was a popular 12th century French poet, a writer of lais, or in English, lays, of which the best-known is Lanval. She wrote in Anglo-Norman, the language of Breton and postconquest England. It is likely that she was born in France and lived in England. She was the first female French poet, as far as we know.

122. Archibald MacLeish esp. “You, Andrew Marvell,” “The Silent Slain” and “Memorial Rain.”

123. Sir Walter Ralegh aka Sir Walter Raleigh is best-known today for the poems of The Ocean to Cynthia, “Even Such Is Time,” and his nymph’s reply to Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd. But my favorite Ralegh poem, by far, is “The Lie.”
     
     Go, soul, the body’s guest,

     Upon a thankless errand;

     Fear not to touch the best;

     The truth shall be thy warrant.

     Go, since I needs must die,

     And give the world the lie.
     

     Say to the court, it glows

     And shines like rotten wood;

     Say to the church, it shows

     What’s good, and doth no good.

     If church and court reply,

     Then give them both the lie…
     —Sir Walter Ralegh
     
     The sun may set and rise;
     But we, contrariwise,
     Sleep after our short light
     One everlasting night.
     —Sir Walter Ralegh
     
     Ralegh was held in high regard as a poet. Edmund Spenser called him “the summer’s Nightingale” with a capital “N.”
     
     Ralegh was more a man of action than most poets and has been credited with introducing both the potato and tobacco to the Old World, from the New.
     
     Ralegh was, at one time, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, to whom he dedicated, The Ocean to Cynthia, comparing her to the moon and himself to tides compelled to rise in her wake. Rather naughty, no?
     
     Ralegh was knighted in 1584, made the captain of the royal guard in 1587, sent to the Tower of London for two months in 1592 after impregnating the queen’s maid of honor and marrying her secretly without the queen’s knowledge, sought the fabled gold of El Dorado in 1595, was sent to the Tower a second time in 1603 (this time by James I, for 13 years during which Ralegh wrote his History of the World), was released unpardoned in 1617 to seek El Dorado a second time, then was beheaded in 1618 on charges of treason.

124. Edward Thomas wrote his best poem (in my opinion), “Adlestrop,” while traveling by train to meet Robert Frost for the first time. The two became friends and Frost wrote his famous poem “The Road Not Taken” for Thomas.
     
     Frost also recommended that Thomas take up writing poetry, which he did, starting at the late age of 36. Because he committed suicide in 1917, at age 39, that makes his accomplishments as a poet all the more impressive.
     
     He was also a literary critic, and a good one.
     
     Edward Thomas’s notable poems include “Adlestrop,” “Rain,” “October,” “Liberty,” “Interval,” “Old Man,” “The Watcher,” “The Glory,” “The Thrush,” “The Owl” and “The Gallows.”
     
     Writers who influenced Thomas include Walter Pater, Algernon Charles Swinburne and his friend Robert Frost. However, Thomas chose to abandon the writing style of Pater and Swinburne for something one might call “closer to earth” and more akin to Frost’s.

125. Elinor Wylie esp. “Cold-Blooded Creatures,” “The Eagle and the Mole,” “Let No Charitable Hope” and “Ophelia”

126. Conrad Aiken is one of my favorite unknown/underknown poets, esp. for “Bread and Music” and his Senlin poems.

127. Carl Sandburg esp. “Grass” and “Chicago”

128. Matthew Arnold esp. “Dover Beach” which I consider to be the first great poem of English Modernism, a real masterpiece. Michael Schmidt called it “the single greatest poem of the Victorian period.” I agree.
     
     Other Matthew Arnold poems of note include the lovely “To Marguerite,” “Sohrab and Rustum,” “Memorial Verses to Wordsworth,” “Philomela,” “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis,” a pastoral lament for the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, a close friend of Arnold’s.
     
     Arnold stopped writing poetry when he could no longer “convey joy” and for the last 30 years of his life was a man of letters and an important critic, but seldom a poet.

129. Allen Ginsberg esp. “Howl”

130. D. H. Lawrence wrote the marvelous “Piano” but is better-known for “Snake” and “Bavarian Gentians,” and even better for his racy-for-the-time novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love, The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers.
     
     F. R. Leavis, a hard critic to please, considered Lawrence a major poet.
     
     D. H. Lawrence influenced numerous writers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Ralph Ellison (esp. Invisible Man), H.D., Langston Hughes, Denise Levertov, Claude McKay (who called Lawrence his favorite author), Adrienne Rich, Jean Toomer (esp. in Cane), Tennessee Williams and Richard Wright (esp. in Native Son).

131. Francois Villon

132. Stephen Crane was a minimalist poet, novelist and short story writer who was influenced by the “compactness” of Emily Dickinson, Ambrose Bierce and William Dean Howells. In turn Crane influenced Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor and John Dos Passos. Crane’s prose was admired by Joseph Conrad, Henry James and H. G. Wells. His poems, by John Berryman.
     
     Stephen Crane, no relation to Hart and at the opposite end of the style spectrum, is best-known for his novel The Red Badge of Courage, for the short stories “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and for short, economical, highly compressed poems like “War is Kind” and “God is Cold.”

133. George Gascoigne is an underrated poet. In fact, I have probably underrated him here. Gascoigne is notable as one of the better “plain style” or minimalist poets. He was a poet of “abrupt clarity” and bittersweet humor.
     
     Gascoigne was considered the leading poet of the early Elizabethan era and is notable for a number of firsts: he was the first poet to deify Elizabeth as a virgin goddess; the first English poet to create a linked sonnet sequence; the first creator of an English prose comedy, Supposes; possibly the writer of the first English novel, The Adventures of Master F.J., and the first penner of a treatise on the writing of English verse in The Posies.
     
     Gascoigne’s best poems include “Gascoigne’s Lullaby” aka “The Lullaby of a Lover,” “And If I Did, What Then?” and “The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy” with the refrain “Fancy (quoth he) farewell.”
     
     Poets influenced by Gascoigne include Sir Walter Ralegh, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, George Turberville and George Whetstone.

134. Robert Bridges was an English Poet Laureate and the publisher of poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins and Digby Mackworth Dolben, who might otherwise be unknown. My favorite Robert Bridges poems include “Low Barometer,” “Nightingales,” “The Evening Darkens Over” and “London Snow.”

135. Christopher Marlowe aka Kit Marlowe ranks highest as a playwright, for plays like Tamburlaine (the first English play written in blank verse); Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Jew of Malta and Doctor Faustus.
     
     Was this the fact that launched a thousand ships
     and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
     —Christopher Marlowe, excerpt from The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus
     
     Marlowe was admired by his peers. George Peele called him “Marley, the Muses’ darling.” Ben Jonson praised “Marlowe’s mighty line.” Shakespeare paid tribute to Marlowe in As You Like It. Michael Drayton said his “raptures were / all air and fire.”
     
     Marlowe’s best-known poems are Hero and Leander and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
     
     Marlowe influence Shakespeare and Goethe, among many others.
     
     If Marlowe had not died young, he would undoubtedly rank much higher here.

136. Erinna left only a few poems, or she would rank higher.

137. Anne Reeve Aldrich died young or she would undoubtedly rank higher. My favorite poem of hers is “Servitude”:
     
     Servitude
     by Anne Reeve Aldrich
     

     The church was dim at vespers.
     My eyes were on the Rood.
     But yet I felt thee near me,
     In every drop of blood.
     

     In helpless, trembling bondage
     My soul’s weight lies on thee,
     O call me not at dead of night,
     Lest I should come to thee!

138. Thomas Chatterton died at age 18, or he might top this list.
     
     William Wordsworth called Chatterton the “marvellous boy” in “Resolution and Independence.” John Keats dedicated Endymion to Chatterton’s memory and called him “the purest writer in the English language.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first important poem was “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” and he revised it over the course of 30 years, making it one of his last finished poems. Coleridge said Wordsworth could name only two “born” poets: Chatterton and Burns. Thomas Warton called Chatterton a “prodigy of genius” and said he “would have proved the first of English poets” if he had lived to maturity.
     
     Song from Ælla: Under the Willow Tree, or, Minstrel’s Song
     by Thomas Chatterton, age 17 or younger
     modernization/translation by Michael R. Burch
     
     MYNSTRELLES SONGE // MINSTREL’S SONG
     
     O! synge untoe mie roundelaie[1], // O! sing unto my roundelay,
     O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, // O! drop the briny tear with me,
     Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie[2], // Dance no more at holy-day,
     Lycke a reynynge ryver bee; // Like a running river be:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys death-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe[3] tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     [1] roundelay = a poem/song with a refrain
     [2] holidays were originally “holy days”
     [3] a “weeping” willow suggests sorrow
     
     Blacke hys cryne[1] as the wyntere nyghte, // Black his crown as the winter night,
     Whyte hys rode[2] as the sommer snowe, // White his skin as the summer snow,
     Rodde hys face as the mornynge lyghte, // Red his face as the morning light,
     Cale he lyes ynne the grave belowe; // Cold he lies in the grave below:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     [1] cryne = crown
     [2] rode = complexion, cross (as in “rood”)
     
     Swote hys tyngue as the throstles note, // Sweet his tongue as the throstle’s note,
     Quycke ynn daunce as thoughte canne bee, // Quick in dance as thought can be,
     Defte hys taboure[1], codgelle stote, // Deft his tabor, cudgel stout,
     O! hee lyes bie the wyllowe tree: // O! he lies by the willow tree:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     [1] tabor = portable drum
     
     Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge, // Hark! the raven flaps his wing
     In the briered delle belowe; // In the briar’d dell below;
     Harke! the dethe-owle loude dothe synge, // Hark! the death-owl loudly sings
     To the nyghte-mares as heie goe; // To the nightmares, as they go:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie; // See! the white moon shines on high;
     Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude; // Whiter is my true love’s shroud:
     Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie, // Whiter than the morning sky,
     Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude: // Whiter than the evening cloud:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow-tree.
     
     Heere, uponne mie true loves grave, // Here upon my true love’s grave
     Schalle the baren fleurs be layde. // Shall the barren flowers be laid.
     Nee one hallie Seyncte to save // Not one holy saint to save
     Al the celness[1] of a mayde. // All the coolness of a maid:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     [1] celness = coolness?, coldness?
     
     Wythe mie hondes I’lle dente[1] the brieres // With my hands I’ll frame the briars
     Rounde his hallie corse to gre[2], // Round his holy corpse to grow;
     Ouphante fairie[2], lyghte youre fyres, // Elf and fairy, light your fires,
     Heere mie boddie stylle schalle bee. // Here my body, stilled, shall go:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     [1] dente = fasten, gird, frame
     [2] gre = grow
     [3] ouph = elf
     
     Comme, wythe acorne-coppe & thorne, // Come, with acorn-cup and thorn,
     Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie; // Drain my heart’s red blood away;
     Lyfe & all yttes goode I scorne, // Life and all its good I scorn,
     Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie. // Dance by night, or feast by day:
     Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
     Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
     Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
     
     Waterre wytches, crownede wythe reytes[1] // Water witches, crowned with plaits,
     Bere mee to yer leathalle tyde. // Bear me to your lethal tide.
     I die; I comme; mie true love waytes. // I die; I come; my true love waits.
     Thos the damselle spake, and dyed. // Thus the damsel spoke, and died.
     
     [1] reytes = reeds, water-flags
     
     The song above is, in my opinion, competitive with Shakespeare’s songs in his plays, and may be the best of Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems. It seems rather obvious that this song was written in modern English, then “backdated.” One wonders whether Chatterton wrote it in response to Shakespeare’s “Under the Greenwood Tree.” The greenwood tree or evergreen is a symbol of immortality. The “weeping willow” is a symbol of sorrow, and the greatest human sorrow is that of mortality and the separations caused by death. If Chatterton wrote his song as a refutation of Shakespeare’s, I think he did a damn good job. But it’s a splendid song in its own right.
     
     Thomas Chatterton influenced the Romantics — particularly Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth — and through them the Modernists.

139. Digby Mackworth Dolben died young, or he would rank much higher.

140. Walter Savage Landor is an underrated poet these days. But he was famous in his day, praised by Robert Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Southey and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others, and caricatured genially by Charles Dickens as Boythorn in Bleak House. Later poets who admired Landor’s work include Donald Davie, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Pinsky and Ezra Pound.
     
     Landor’s notable poems include the much anthologized “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday” aka “Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher” as well as the poems to Ianthe and Rose Aylmer, “To Robert Browning” (“There is delight in singing”) and “Dirce.”
     
     He had classical leanings. Landor’s stated influences include Anacreon, Catullus, Milton, Ovid, Pindar and Sappho. But he also admired and was influenced by Romantics like Byron, Keats and Shelley.
     
     Amusingly, Landor corrected the “extravagances” of Abraham Cowley while translating his poems into Latin.
     
     Poets influenced by Walter Savage Landor include Robert Browning, Thom Gunn, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Alfred Tennyson.

141. Dante Gabriel Rossetti ranks higher as a painter, one of my very favorites. His sister, Christina Rossetti, is generally regarded as the better poet, as she is in this ranking. Harold Bloom disagrees, saying Dante was only surpassed by Tennyson and Robert Browning in their period. A judgment Bloom admits is “unfashionable these days.”
     
     Dante’s best poems, and very good ones, include “Sudden Light,” a sonnet from The House of Life (“A sonnet is a moment’s monument”), “The Woodspurge,” “The Stream’s Secret,” “The Orchard-Pit,” “Willowwood,” “Sestina (After Dante)” and “The Blessed Damozel.”
     
     A talented painter, Dante had affairs with three early supermodels: Elizabeth Siddal, his wife for two years until her tragic and premature death, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Burden, the wife of the poet/painter William Morris.
     
     Dante Gabriel Rossetti was influenced by John Keats and his namesake, whom he translated, probably better than anyone else.

142. Algernon Charles Swinburne is known for the musicality of his poems. And sometimes for making music at the expense of sense. However, T. S. Eliot affirmed that Swinburne “did something that had not been done before.” What did he do? Swinburne used words more to create moods than meanings. Eliot again: “Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne.”
     
     One must read Swinburne’s poems and decide for oneself.
     
     Sometimes we have to judge poets by how well they do what they attempt, not by what we think they should do. After all, we don’t judge AC/DC for not sounding like Mozart.
     
     Swinburne’s notable poems include “August,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” “At Month’s End,” Atalanta in Calydon, “Anactoria,” and his translations of Francois Villon.
     
     Swinburne was influenced primarily by Shelley. But he also admired Baudelaire, Blake, Landor, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Sappho, Whitman, even the Marquis de Sade!
     
     In turn Swinburne influenced W. H. Auden, Ernest Dowson, Charlotte Mew, Edgell Rickwood, Kevin N. Roberts, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Oscar Wilde.

143. Adah Isaacs Menken was an American ballet dancer, tightrope walker, vaudevillian, painter, lecturer and poet, and the highest-earning actress of her day, the mid-1800s. Her sometimes-scandalous performances earned her international fame, particularly her role in Mazeppa, a drama based on Lord Byron’s poem, in which she wore nude-colored stockings and appeared to be naked.
     
     Menken’s private life was equally scandalous. She wore her hair short, smoked cigarettes and was photographed in her undies. She even wrote free verse! What were shocked Victorians supposed to think?
     
     We all know the first major free verse poet, but does anyone know the second?
     
     While in New York, Menken met Walt Whitman. In 1860 she wrote a review, “Swimming Against the Current,” in which she praised Leaves of Grass, calling Whitman “centuries ahead of his contemporaries.” Menken then updated her own style and became the “first poet and the only woman poet before the twentieth century” to follow Whitman’s free verse lead.
     
     According to Samuel Dickinson she was very popular with the “gay blades” and the two topics on everyone’s minds were the progress of the Civil War and whatever Menken was up to. She had affairs with Bret Harte, Alexandre Dumas père and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others.
     
     Menken was also an early advocate of women’s rights, including the right not to marry. A right she failed to exercise five times, adding to her notoriety with each divorce and remarriage. She remarried before one divorce was official and was accused of bigamy. Her husbands included two musicians, a bare-knuckle boxing champion, a humorist and a gambler.
     
     Her only book, Infelicia, a collection of 31 poems, was published just days after her death in 1868. The book went through several editions and remained in print until 1902.
     
     Menken is a vastly underknown, underread and underappreciated poet. I particularly admire her fiery, early feminist poem “Judith.”

144. Walter de la Mare

145. Christopher Smart is most famous for his early free verse poem “Jubilate Agno,” which Benjamin Britten set to music, for his translations of the Psalms, and for the madcap “A Song to David” which he allegedly wrote in an insane asylum. Northrop Frye called the latter a “musical tour de force.”
     
     Smart was a prodigy who began writing poetry at age four.
     
     Perhaps too smart for his own good? (Please pardon the terrible, too obvious pun.)
     
     He translated Horace into prose, then later into verse.
     
     Donald Davie has suggested that Smart was the “greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.” I would go further back, to Milton, and added Thomas Gray.

146. Thomas Campion was one of the more musical English poets, along with Robert Herrick, and is best-known today for his Book of Ayres (airs, or songs) and for lyrical poems like “There is a Garden in Her Face,” “My Sweetest Lesbia” and “When to Her Lute Corinna Sings.” Campion was probably second only to Thomas More as a Latin epigrammatist among English writers.
     
     NOVELTIES
     by Thomas Campion
     translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
     
     Booksellers laud authors for novel editions
     as pimps praise their whores for exotic positions.
     
     Impressionum plurium librum laudat
     Librarius; scortum nec non minus leno.
     
     THE PLAGIARIST or THE PLAGIARTIST
     by Thomas Campion
     translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
     
     Dogs raise a ruckus at the stench of a thief,
     so what would they say about you, given speech?
     
     Suspecto quid fure canes cum,
     Pontice, latrent Dixissent melius, si potuere loqui?
     

147. James Weldon Johnson inaugurated the “Harlem Renaissance” or “Black Renaissance” with his 1917 publication of Fifty Years and Other Poems. The executive secretary and de facto head of the NAACP for a decade, Johnson is best-known today for writing the lyrics of the Civil Rights anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which his brother Rosamond set to music.

148. George Meredith should be better known for poems like Modern Love, “Lucifer in Starlight,” “Love in the Valley” and “The Lark Ascending.” Harold Bloom called Meredith “one of the best neglected poets in the language” along with John Clare. And Meredith has been much more neglected than Clare.
     
     Meredith married the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock and after his divorce moved into “a perfectly mad household” with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, until being “rescued by his happy second marriage.”

149. Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor, poet and writer. Levi is best-known for his books If This Is a Man, If Not Now, When? and The Periodic Table.

150. Anne Sexton esp. “The Truth the Dead Know”

151. Juvenal was an ancient Roman poet famous for his satires. Juvenal wrote satirical poems in Latin and influenced Henry Vaughan, Ben Jonson, Alexander Pope and John Gay, among others.

152. Thomas Carew was a courtier poet in the service of the ill-fated and eventually headless Charles I. Carew was called “The Oracle of Love” and is best-known today for “To My Inconstant Mistress,” his erotic poem “A Rapture” and his “Song” (“Ask me no more where Jove bestows / When June is past, the fading rose.”).

153. Emily Bronte ranks higher as a novelist, for Wuthering Heights. Her sisters Charlotte Bronte and Ann Bronte were also poets. As girls they published a book together, using male pseudonyms: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. If they thought that bit of subterfuge would improves sales, they were wrong, as the book sold two copies the first year, leading them to become novelists.
     
     Emily Bronte was the best poet of the three and her best-known poems include “Remembrance,” “Hope,” “Long neglect has worn away,” “Stanzas” (“Oft rebuked but always back returning”) and “Last Lines” (“No coward soul is mine”).
     
     All three sisters were influenced by Byron and the not-so-ideal idea of the Byronic hero.

154. Herman Melville ranks higher as a novelist, esp. for Moby-Dick but also for Billy Budd, Typee and Omoo.
     
     His poetry books include Battle-Pieces and the 18,000-line Clarel.
     
     Melville’s most famous and sometimes-anthologized poems are “The Portent” and “The Maldive Shark.”
     
     Randall Jarrell called Melville one of the best three American poets of the 19th century, along with Dickinson and Whitman.
     
     High praise indeed, from a strong poet and critic.
     
     But his poetic star
     has been in decline
     for a long time.
     —Michael R. Burch
     
     Melville was influenced by Homer, Virgil, Dante, John Gower, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley and his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.

155. The Pearl Poet

156. Rudyard Kipling (G#21, R#97) was not a better poet than Li Bai, Basho, Donne, Goethe, Shelley, et al! Google’s AI needs further programming here.
     
     I like Kipling’s dialect poems like “Danny Deever” and “Tommy” but don’t care for his “white man’s burden” nonsense, imperialism or jingoism. Nor do I care for Kipling’s most famous poem, “If,” which might have been written by Polonius. Kipling ranks higher as a major writer for Jungle Book, Kim and his best short stories.
     
     Kipling with his compulsion to tell readers what to think and do, reminds me of Dryden and Pope.
     
     Kipling doesn’t suggest or persuade; he tells.
     
     T. S. Eliot observed that Kipling’s popular poems elicit a single response, the way hymns and prayers do.
     
     Don’t think for yourself, just chant the mantra.
     
     Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, but probably more for his prose than his poetry.

157. Ralph Waldo Emerson (G#37, R#31) was a more important philosopher, essayist, lecturer and journalist than poet, although he had his moments. Harold Bloom called Emerson “the mind of America” for essays like “Self-Reliance” and “Experience.”
     
     It can be argued that Emerson was more important to Poetry for his essays and support of Walt Whitman, than for his poems.
     
     As an American poet in his own day Emerson was greatly eclipsed by Whitman and Dickinson, and to a somewhat lesser degree by Longfellow and Poe. Notable Emerson poems include “The Snow-Storm” (my favorite Emerson poem), “The Rhodora,” “Bacchus,” “Brahma,” “Uriel,” “Days” and “Concord Hymn.”
     
     Things are in the saddle
     and ride mankind.
     —Ralph Waldo Emerson
     
     Emerson influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, the senior Henry James and Jones Very, and championed Walt Whitman’s revolutionary Leaves of Grass. Among later Emersonian poets Robert Frost stands out. Frost called “Uriel” the “greatest Western poem yet,” an estimation I fail to grok.

158. William Carlos Williams (C#50, R#72) is not a personal favorite of mine. He is best known for “The Red Wheelbarrow” but my favorite William Carlos Williams poem is “This Is Just to Say.”

159. Sulpicia is one of the few female poets of ancient Rome whose work survives, and is arguably the most notable, but she only left a few poems.

160. Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, invented blank verse for his translations of Virgil’s Aeneid and was the father of the English sonnet along with his friend Sir Thomas Wyatt. Together they have been called the fathers of the English Renaissance and of English Petrarchanism.
     
     Surrey invented and/or developed what we now call the Shakespearean sonnet and was an obvious influence on Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney and various other penners of English sonnets and lyric poems.
     
     Thomas Warton the Younger called Surrey “the first English classical poet” and he was the only poet named on the title page of the first English poetry anthology, Richard Tottel’s Miscellany.
     
     Unfortunately, Surrey was beheaded at the Tower of London, ostensibly for treason, but possibly for being too popular a knight for his king’s taste.
     
     Henry Howard’s best-known poems include “Wyatt Resteth Here,” “The Soote Season” and “Love, That Doth Reign and Live within My Thought.”

161. John Skelton, the creator of a helter-skelter, irreverent, rude-and-crude style of English poetry called “Skeltonics,” was a courtier who tutored the young Henry VIII. Despite being a cleric, Skelton was something of an incorrigible rascal in both his personal life and verse. Alexander Pope called him “beastly Skelton” and John Milton deemed him the “vicar of hell,” borrowing the phrase from Henry VIII, who had said it in jest. But Skelton also had his admirers: he was made Poet Laureate of Oxford, Cambridge and Louvain! Erasmus called him Brittanicarum literatum decus et lumen (“The glory and light of British literature”). W. H. Auden and Robert Graves considered the “renegade humanist” a key transitional poet between the Middle Ages and Renaissance. John Skelton is best known today for his helter-skelter “Skeltonics” in poems like Collyn Clout, The Bowge of Court, Phyllyp Sparowe and Speke Parrot.

162. William Langland is remembered for one of the most popular early English poems, “Piers Plowman,” written in alliterative Middle English between 1362 and 1392, give or take. Long Will, as he was called due to his height, may have been the first English reformer poet, anticipating William Blake. Langland exposed corruption in church, state and English society.
     
     Langland was influenced by the Bible translations of John Wycliffe.

163. Robert Henryson, a Scottish poet, is best known for his Testament of Cresseid, which has been called “the great moral romance of the 15th century.” Henryson was also fabulist, a penner of moral fables.

164. Andrew Marvell (R#120) remains famous primarily for his carpe diem poem “To His Coy Mistress.” Less so for his Mower poems and “The Garden” today. According to John Aubrey, no English writer could compete with Marvell’s Latin verses, but who reads them today? Michael Schmidt called Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” the “most complex and the best directly political poem in the language.” But the poem vanished after the Restoration and wasn’t published again until 1776. Other critics who expressed admiration for Marvell’s poetry include Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Alfred Tennyson, T. S. Eliot (eyebrow-raisingly lavish) and Harold Bloom (who called Marvell a major poet).
     
     The eclectic Marvell has few direct heirs but John Ashbery “abounds in Marvellian allusions.” This makes Marvell “immensely influential upon modern poetry” in Bloom’s opinion, although not in mine. I like understanding what I read and Ashbery, like T. S. Eliot, has admitted not understanding what he writes. So how can we?

165. Isaac Rosenberg was the first major Jewish voice to emerge in the English language. And his was a unique voice. Siegfried Sassoon called Rosenberg “scriptural and sculptural.”
     
     Rosenberg died young fighting in WWI and is remembered as a war poet. A very forthright, sometimes graphic one in poems like “Dead Man’s Dump” and his best-known poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches.”

166. Michael Drayton is best-known today for Sonnet LVI from Idea (“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”).

167. Lucan was an ancient Roman poet whose masterwork is the epic poem Pharsalia, which recounts the civil war between Julius Caesar and Pompey.

168. Richard Lovelace was a Cavalier poet, a member of the “Tribe of Ben,” and the last of the knight-poets in the tradition of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney. Lovelace’s best-known and much-anthologized poems are “To Althea, from Prison,” “To Lacasta, Going to the Wars” and “To Amarantha, That She Would Dishevel Her Hair.” Lovelace was also the first literal translator of Catullus into English. Harold Bloom expressed admiration for “The Grasshopper.”

169. Sir John Suckling was a Cavalier poet and a member of the “Tribe of Ben.” William Hazlitt called “A Ballad upon a Wedding” Suckling’s masterpiece. But Suckling’s best-known poems are “Why so pale and wan, fond love?” and “Out upon it! I have loved / Three whole days together.”

170. Edmund Waller wrote the exquisite, picture-perfect “Go Lovely Rose.” And not much else that anyone remembers. Perhaps “On a Girdle.” But in poetry quality trumps quantity.

171. Mary Sidney, later Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, is best-known today as a translator of the Psalms, as a patron of other poets, and as the sister of Sir Philip Sidney. She was well-educated and knew English, Greek, Latin and Hebrew.

172. John Gower was one of the first “name” poets of the Middle English period, along with Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland. According to Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets, Gower wrote “more than 32,000 lines of French verse and 11,000 lines of Latin elegiacs” before writing his first English poem “well into his fifties.” Gower began to write verse in English upon the recommendation of the boy king Richard II that he write “some newe thing.” That “new thing” ended up being the 34,000 lines of Confessio Amantis, the first English poem to be translated into Continental languages. C. S. Lewis called Gower “our first formidable master of the plain style” and thus a precursor of Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway.

173. George Chapman is remembered primarily for his translations of Homer, praised famously if somewhat erroneously by John Keats, for his poem “Ovid’s Banquet of Sense,” and for the four sestiads he wrote to complete Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander.
     
     Chapman was admired by Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel, among others, and has been proposed as Shakespeare’s rival poet.
     
     Chapman is also notable for the strangeness of his verse, “as though Thomas Lovell Beddoes had an ancestor in the sixteenth century,” and for his ability to write enormously-long-but-still-readable sentences, anticipating Milton.

174. William Cullen Bryant was the first poet born in America to achieve a degree of international fame. Today he is remembered primarily for “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl,” which inspired my early poem “Flight” (“Eagle, raven, blackbird, crow ... / what you are I do not know.)

175. George Herbert is not a personal favorite of mine, but I do admire “Virtue.”
     
     Herbert is best-known for his metaphysical devotional poems like “The Collar,” “The Pulley” and “Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back.” Herbert also wrote concrete poems in the visual shape of an altar, wings, etc.
     
     Herbert was an English poet, orator, and Church of England priest notable for his compassion. Henry Vaughan called him “a most glorious saint and seer.”
     
     Herbert came from a wealthy, influential Anglo-Welsh family and was friends with Lancelot Andrewes, Francis Bacon and John Donne, among other luminaries. James I and the Earl of Pembroke were his patrons. Charles I read The Temple while awaiting execution in the Tower of London. John Wesley set several of his poems to music, turning them into hymns.
     
     Herbert influenced Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and T. S. Eliot, among others.
     
     Virtue
     by George Herbert
     
     Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright!
     The bridal of the earth and sky—
     The dew shall weep thy fall to-night;
     For thou must die.
     
     Sweet rose, whose hue angry and brave
     Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye,
     Thy root is ever in its grave,
     And thou must die.
     
     Sweet spring, full of sweet days and roses,
     A box where sweets compacted lie,
     My music shows ye have your closes,
     And all must die.
     
     Only a sweet and virtuous soul,
     Like season’d timber, never gives;
     But though the whole world turn to coal,
     Then chiefly lives.

176. Henry Vaughan was arguably second only to George Herbert as an English devotional poet, although I would rank John Donne and Gerard Manley Hopkins higher. And William Blake and Robert Burns, for anti-devotional poetry. Vaughan’s best-known poems include “They Are All Gone into the World of Light,” “The Retreat,” “The World” and “Regeneration.” In addition to his original poems Vaughan translated the tenth satire of Juvenal and verses by Boethius into English.

177. Richard Crashaw is an English devotional poet best-known (although not well) for “The Flaming Heart,” “To the Infant Martyrs” and “Upon the Infant Martyrs.”

178. Simonides was an ancient Greek poet known for his epitaphs. Poets who may have been influenced by Simonides include Bacchylides (his nephew), Horace, Pindar and A. E. Housman, a Greek scholar and professor.

179. Jules Laforgue (1860-1887) was a Franco-Uruguayan poet, usually considered a Symbolist but also called “part-symbolist, part-impressionist.” Michael Collie, author of a biography of Laforgue, has suggested a more or less conscious attempt on Laforgue’s part to produce a literary equivalent of Impressionism. L’Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune (The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon) is a collection of 22 poems that is considered Laforgue’s masterpiece. T. S. Eliot identified Laforgue as a key influence. Other poets influenced by Laforgue include Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jacques Prévert.

180. Voltaire is better-known for other things, but he was an accomplished poet.

181. John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, was wicked in real life—he spent time in the Tower—and wickedly funny in his best poems. Andrew Marvell called Rochester the best English satirist. Voltaire, a great satirist, admired Rochester’s. The notorious Earl may have written the notorious play Sodom. but he also wrote some excellent love poems. Rochester’s best poems include “A Satire Against Mankind,” “The Disabled Debauchee,” “The Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover” and “Upon Nothing.”

182. Hesiod was an ancient Greek poet famous for Works and Days and Theogony. It is from Hesiod that we get the myth of Pandora’s box. Hesiod influenced Aeschylus, Plato, Semonides, Virgil, William Blake and Seamus Heaney, among others.

183. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) fell under the influence of Ezra Pound, whom she met in college, then followed him to England, where she became Pound’s “crucial Imagist.” Or add an exotic “e” and change her name to H.D. Imagiste, as Pound actually did. According to Michael Schmidt, she “never quite worked herself free of that early marketing ploy.”
     
     She did write enough good poems, however, to make this list, including “Helen,” “Sea Rose,” “Sea Violet,” “Orchard,” “Garden,” “The Master,” The Walls Do Not Fall and Hermetic Definition.
     
     However, she doesn’t have a poem in Harmon’s anthology of the 500 most-anthologized English language poems, suggesting that she was very good, rather than great.
     
     Pound courted H.D. but she married the poet-novelist Richard Aldington instead. Later, she had an affair with D. H. Lawrence then a baby by the composer Cecil Gray.
     
     She had a nervous breakdown, was treated via extensive psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud himself, then later wrote and published her account of the sessions. Freud must have been a very good listener, as everything memorable was said by the patient!
     
     In addition to her original poems she translated the Ion of Euripides.
     
     Harold Bloom saw H.D.’s influences as a compounding of Christina Rossetti with Emily Dickinson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence.
     
     Not sure how he figured that out!

184. Mary Wroth has a very impressive fifteen poems in the Norton Anthology of Poetry.

185. Charlotte Smith is one of the better neglected English female poets. Indeed, she is “the first substantial” woman writer after Mary Sidney. (Michael Schmidt)
     
     Her major poem is Beachy Head.
     
     Her Elegiac Sonnets contributed to the revival of the then-neglected form in England.
     
     Charlotte Smith also wrote ten novels.
     
     “Jane Austen — though she ridiculed Smith’s novels — actually borrowed plot, character, and incident from them.” (Stanton)
     
     Robert Southey said, “She has done more and done better than other women writers.”
     
     Stuart Curran, an editor of Smith’s poems, called her “The first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic.” She helped shape the “patterns of thought and conventions of style” for the period and was responsible for rekindling the sonnet form in England.

186. Samuel Daniel is little-read and little-known today, but has an impressive nine poems in the Norton Anthology of Poetry, seven of them from Delia. His best-known poem is probably, “Care-Charmer Sleep, Son of the Sable Night.”

187. Thomas Nashe is best-known for his lament “Litany in Time of Plague” and “Adieu, farewell, earth’s bliss.”

188. Anne Finch pondered the situation of the female poet and found it lacking in poems like “The Introduction” and “The Answer’ (her witty feminist response to Alexander Pope’s Impromptu). William Wordsworth admired her poem “A Nocturnal Reverie,” as I do. Her poem “To Death” is well-argued and has a powerful ending. I deem her one of the best early English female poets. Definitely.

189. Jonathan Swift is better known for his prose than his poems, esp. the novel Gulliver’s Travels and the satirical short story “A Modest Proposal.”
     
     Swift was especially good at capturing life through vivid imagery in poems such as “A Description of the Morning” and “A Description of a City Shower.”
     
     Did he anticipate and/or influence the Imagists?
     
     In any case, Swift certainly influenced Edgell Rickwood and C. H. Sisson.
     
     Swift was a satirist and even satirized himself in “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”
     
     I and Coleridge agree with Swift’s definition of poetry: “proper words in proper places. I call this the “rightness of words” and “finding the right word at the right time.”

190. Alexander Pope (C#50, R#44) is not a personal favorite of mine. I admit that Pope, John Dryden, Dr. Samuel Johnson and John Gay were accomplished writers, but I join A. E. Housman in questioning whether they were writing poetry. Why? Wit is not always poetry. Rhyming verse is not always poetry. Sophisticated writing is not always poetry. And those over-confident, clicking couplets quickly begin to tire.
     
     John Keats mocked “the rocking horse” of the heroic couplet. Ezra Pound pounded and impounded the “metronome.”
     
     I agree and find Pope’s “Essay on Man” and “Essay on Criticism” discouraging and almost impossible to read, like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
     
     Keats criticized the poetry of the Augustan period with a broader brush as well, terming its conventions “musty laws lined out with wretched rules.”
     
     As Michael Schmidt observed, “…for many readers today the bulk of the eighteenth century remains terra incognita.”
     
     This is my quibble — nay, my outrage — with the alleged “experts.” Pope has three alleged “poems” in Harmon’s anthology of the 500 most-anthologized poems: the unreadable “Essay on Criticism,” the unreadable “Know Then Thyself,” and the nigh-unreadable-and-not-worth-the-effort “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.”
     
     When will the “experts” read real poets like Keats and Housman, and realize they’re right?
     
     Thomas De Quincy accused Pope of only suggesting what he meant, not saying it clearly.
     
     We cannot hope
     to follow Pope
     but only grope
     for hints
     of sense.
     —Michael R. Burch
     
     For this reason, lack of overall coherence, Pope is best taken in small doses, in a bric-a-brac couplet here and there, removed from his longer unreadable poems and converted into epigrams.
     
     William Blake agreed with Housman about Pope and Dryden. They were not really poets because “they did not understand verse.”
     
     Pope’s best serious poem may be “Ode on Solitude” which he wrote when he was twelve years old!
     
     Pope’s most celebrated longer poems are the satires The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.
     
     Pope is also known for his translations of Ovid, Horace, Statius and Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad.
     
     Pope was influenced by Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley, among others.

191. John Dryden was the leading English poet of his day, but that was during the mostly dry and wilted Augustan period. I agree with A. E. Housman, who identified a poetic drought after the last major poems of John Milton to the first major poems of William Blake.
     
     Michael Schmidt described Dryden as a “severe, mannerly, powdered, snuff-snorting, cosmopolitan poetic pontiff.” Robert Graves said Dryden found English poetry “native brick” and left it “imported marble.” Ford Madox Ford said the eighteenth century owed its “fadedness” to the way Dryden wrote in the seventeenth.
     
     But Dryden did have successes. Absalom and Achitophel was the first great English political satire, followed by Mac Flecknoe. Dryden translated Ovid, Virgil and Boccaccio. Anthologized Dryden elegies include “Lines on Milton,” “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” and “To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew” which Dr. Johnson called “the noblest ode that our language has ever produced.” Ah, but it lacks true feeling and has been called “a coldly deliberate tribute.”
     
     We cannot help deriding

     Dryden

     for his dauntless

     doubtless

     couplets.
     —Michael R. Burch

192. Dr. Samuel Johnson is best-known today for his prose works: his famous Dictionary of the English Language, his 200-plus articles for the Rambler and Idler, his edition of Shakespeare, and his Lives of the Poets. Oh, and for the strangest of all biographies, written in “leechlike adoration” by James Boswell, “the most ridiculous of all biographers.”
     
     Dr. Johnson was one of the great literary critics, but critics like Edmund Wilson, Ford Madox Ford, William Hazlitt and T. S. Eliot slammed his poetry, or damned it with faint praise. They said he lacked creativity, that he used rarefied language, that he wrote mechanically as if to the oscillation of a pendulum (Ezra Pound’s “metronome”).
     
     Of course the same things can be said about his Augustan peers: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Gay.
     
     Dr. Johnson’s best-known poem is “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” an imitation of Juvenal’s tenth satire. His major influences were Juvenal and Horace.
     
     As Schmidt observed, “There is no other poetry in English with Johnson’s specific gravity.
     
     Ah, but gravity is not poetry.
     
     Poetry requires something beyond mere gravity: the spark and illumination of creative energy, imagination, the communication of emotion, music rather than the metronome.
     
     Ironically, Samuel Johnson left Pembroke College, Oxford, without a degree and became Dr. Johnson fifty years later when he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Oxford.
     
     But if anyone earned a doctorate, he did.

193. John Gay is best-known for his parodies Trivia and The Bagger’s Opera. Amusingly, after parodying operas, Gay became Handel’s librettist for Acis and Galatea and Achilles! Gay is lightly regarded today as a poet, but was esteemed highly enough in his day to be buried in Westminster Abbey.

194. Novalis is the pen name of the German poet Friedrich von Hardenburg. He was friends with Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel. A trinity of Friedriches! Novalis is best-known for his Aphorisms and Hymns to the Night. Jorge Luis Borges referred to Novalis frequently in his work.

195. Aphra Behn is the James Bond of poetry. She was a spy in Antwerp, spent time in a debtor’s prison, experienced a slave rebellion in the New World, lived in Surinam for eight years, lost her husband to the plague in 1665, then became the first Englishwoman to make a living by writing. She wrote 14 plays, songs for her plays, erotic poems, and fiction based on her life. Her poems include “Love Armed” and an erotic poem about male impotence, “Disappointment.”

196. William Cowper is best-known for his Olney Hymns and the poems “The Castaway,” “Lines Written During a Period of Insanity” and “The Task.”
     
     Cowper also translated Homer, Horace, Ovid and Virgil.

     
     Cowper was a religious poet and hymnist influenced by George Herbert and, ironically, the heretical Robert Burns.
     
     In turn Cowper influenced William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Cowper was not a Romantic, per se, but his hand was “on the latch.”
     
     In his lectures, Coleridge defined his own period, which we now call the Romantic period, as beginning with Cowper.
     
     Thomas De Quincy saw Cowper as being in the same meditative mold as Wordsworth and Edward Young.

     
     Later, Gerard Manley Hopkins would admire Cowper’s poems, especially “The Poplar Field.”
     
     Cowper suffered from depression, attempted suicide, and belongs to a school of poets associated with madness that includes his contemporaries and near contemporaries Christopher Smart, William Collins, William Blake, Lord Byron and John Clare (who claimed to be the reincarnation of Byron and even revised some of his poems).

     
     William Cowper is yet another poet much admired in his day, who is little read in ours.

197. Oliver Goldsmith is most famous for his poems “The Deserted Village,” “When Lovely Woman Stoops to Folly” and “The Traveller,” his Essays, the play She Stoops to Conquer, and his novel The Vicar of Wakefield.
     
     In “The Deserted Village” we have “arrived at the very frontier of Romanticism.” (Michael Schmidt)
     
     Poets influenced by Oliver Goldsmith include William Wordsworth and the Romantics, as well as later poets like D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot, who drew inspiration from Goldsmith’s illustrations of the impacts of urbanization on human societies. Goldsmith also influenced novelists like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Mary Shelley.

198. Trumbull Stickney is best-known for his wonderfully-wrought poems “Mnemosyne,” “Six O’Clock” and “Eride, V.” Stickney died at age thirty, or he would rank much higher on this list.

199. David Jones, a Welsh poet, esp. his long narrative poems In Parenthesis and The Anathemata.

200. Queen Elizabeth I mastered four languages, translated Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (at age 11, no less) and Horace’s Art of Poetry, and wrote several commendable original poems, perhaps most notably “When I was fair and young” and “On Monsieur’s Departure.”

201. George Crabbe was praised by Dr. Johnson, Wordsworth, Byron, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster and F. R. Leavis, among others. Few poets have been praised as highly, yet read so little. Crabbe’s best-known poetic works are The Village, The Borough and Tales. Benjamin Britten based an opera on “Peter Grimes.”

202. Henry David Thoreau is far better-known as a philosopher than as a poet. His most famous prose works are the essay “Civil Disobedience” and the book Walden. Thoreau’s poems are little-read today, if at all, and include the fine “Smoke” (“Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird”) and “Sic Vita” aka “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied”.
     
     Thoreau translated Aeschylus and was influenced by Longfellow and Emerson.

203. Rupert Brooke is one of the most famous war poets. His best-known poem, “The Soldier,” begins “If I should die…”
     
     And he did die, in 1915, during WWI.

204. Christine de Pizan/Pisan (1364 - c. 1430) was Europe’s first professional woman of letters and the first to have poems published via the newfangled printing press. She is considered one of the earliest feminist writers, although I would nominate Enheduanna, who wrote around 3,700 years earlier! Christine de Pizan ranks higher as a writer of prose for The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies.

205. Leigh Hunt is best-known for “Jenny Kiss’d Me” (inspired by the wife of Thomas Carlyle) and “Abou Ben Adhem.” Other notable but less well-known poems include “A Night-Rain in Summer,” “The Nymphs” and the narrative poems “Hero and Leander” and “Bacchus and Ariadne.”
     
     Hunt also published a translation of Torquato Tasso’s Amyntas, a Tale of the Woods.
     
     Hunt’s Autobiography, published in 1850, has been called “arguably the best autobiography of the century.”
     
     Hunt was a major figure of the Romantic Movement, not for his poems, but for discovering and introducing major poets to the reading public, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson.
     
     In his 1812 poem “The Feast of the Poets” the poets Hunt praised included Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey. Two years later he added to his praise list Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth (“the Prince of Bards”).
     
     Charles Dickens satirized Hunt as Skimpole in Bleak House.
     
     Leigh Hunt was influenced by Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray and William Collins.

206. Edward Fitzgerald is best-known for his splendid translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

207. Jones Very had a mystical experience that resulted in his mysterious poems “The Dead” and “The New Birth.”

208. Louisa May Alcott is better known as a novelist, esp. for Little Women, but she was a poet as well.

209. Thomas Lovell Beddoes was the son of a physician who discovered laughing gas and administered it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
     
     Beddoes wrote odd, strange, sometimes ghoulish poems. Ezra Pound dubbed him “prince of the morticians.” Harold Bloom called him “a unique poet, far superior to Poe as a reviver of Gothic morbidities.”
     
     The best-known Beddoes poems, although not well-known today, are “Song” (“Old Adam, the carrion crow”) and “Dream Pedlary.”
     
     Bloom considered his “masterwork” to be Death’s Jest Book; or the Fool’s Tragedy, in which Beddoes parodied the Jacobean dramas of John Ford, John Webster and Cyril Tourneur.
     
     After his death Beddoes’ poems were sent to Robert Browning who kept them in what he called “that dismal box.”
     
     Beddoes’ idol and primary influence was Percy Bysshe Shelley.
     
     The modern poet closest to Beddoes is probably John Ashbery.

210. James Thomson was a Scottish poet best-known today for writing the lyrics to “Rule Britannia.” But in his day Thomson was the best-selling poet for The Seasons. He was once “the poetic equivalent of the Gideon Bible; his poems were to be found in every inn and cottage in the land.” (Michael Schmidt)
     
     The Seasons was his best-seller, his meal ticket to fame and fortune, however fleeting, but Thomson’s best poem may have been The Castle of Indolence, unread today. But then so is The Seasons.
     
     Thomson was respected by Dr. Johnson as a “man of genius,” called a “born poet” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, praised by Oliver Goldsmith, eulogized by William Collins, and Thomson influenced William Cowper, George Crabbe, William Wordsworth and the Romantics with his nature-based Miltonian blank verse.
     
     Or at least he suggested a theme and a medium to Wordsworth, et al.
     
     I believe these lines influenced similar lines in Thomas Gray’s famous elegy:
     
     Assiduous in his bower, the wailing owl
     Plies his sad song. …
     
     And yet today Thomson is hardly, if ever, read.
     
     Why?
     
     His ideas and ways of expressing them wore thin.
     
     Schmidt opines: “His is the Whig epic. He prefigures Walter Bagehot.”

211. James Macpherson is remembered, if he is remembered, for his Ossian forgeries.

212. Anne Bradstreet (R#205) is not a personal favorite. She has been called the first notable American poet, although she was born in England and sounds English in her poems, and derivative to my ear. Her poetry collection The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America was published in England in 1652. Adrienne Rich opined that Bradstreet wrote “the first good poems in America.” Good, not great. John Berryman made her the focus of his first major poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Her best-known poem is “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”

213. Katherine Philips was called “the matchless Orinda” by John Dryden. She may remain matchless today, not being matched with readers often, if at all. I find her verse competent but not moving.

214. Charlotte Mew was among Thomas Hardy’s favorite female poets, and he was a hard man to please. Others who admired Mew’s poems include her publisher Alida Monro, the wife of the poet Harold Monro, and the poets John Masefield, Walter de la Mare and Elizabeth Jennings. Michael Schmidt noted Mew’s “originality of form” and “electrifying uniqueness.” Her most anthologized poem, “The Farmer’s Bride,” is certainly original and unique. And more that a bit disturbing. Other Mew poems of note include “The Fête,” “Fin de Fête,” “Fame,” “Madeleine in Church” and “The Cenotaph.” One notices odd things, such as Mew mentioning women’s hair as a sort of enchantment men can’t resist.
     
     Mew’s poetry shows the influence of Hardy and Robert Browning.

215. Seneca was an ancient Roman stoic philosopher, proto-scientist, chief advisor and speech-writer for Nero, and poet-playwright famous for his verse plays, particularly Medea, Agamemnon, Thyestes and Hercules Furens. How famous? Quintilian said that in his youth, “Seneca’s works were in the hands of every young man.” Seneca’s plays could be gore-fests. One wag called him “antiquity’s mashup of Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino.”

216. Lucretius was a Roman poet and philosopher who is best-known for his didactic poem De rerum natura (“On the Nature of Things” or “The Way Things Are”).

217. Plautus was an ancient Roman actor and playwright who wrote comedies in verse. His plays include Amphitryon, Asinaria (“The Comedy of Asses”), Pseudolus, Miles Gloriosus (“The Braggart Soldier”) and The Rope. Plautus influenced, , among others, Terence, Molière (The Miser is partly modeled after Plautus’s Aulularia) and Shakespeare (The Comedy of Errors is directly modeled on Plautus’s The Menaechmi). His plays are the earliest surviving intact works of Latin literature.

218. Menander, an ancient Greek poet/playwright, was one of the most popular writers and most highly admired poets in antiquity, but unfortunately most his work has been lost or exists only in fragments. If more of his work had survived, he would undoubtedly rank much higher. Harold Bloom included Menander’s Samia, or Girl of Samos, in his major texts of the Western Canon. Menander’s work was praised by Plutarch. Terence and Plautus created Latin adaptions of his plays.

219. Terence was an African-Roman playwright who wrote plays in verse. His plays include Adelphoe (”The Brothers”), The Eunuch, The Girl from Andros and The Mother-in-Law. Writers influenced by Terence include Molière, Montaigne and Shakespeare. Augustine admired Terence and quoted him 38 times.

220. Cicero is better known for his prose (speeches, letters, and philosophical works, esp. On the Gods), but he did write poetry and had serious poetic ambitions. His poetry was influential in his day and inspired later poets like Virgil and Lucretius. Cicero also influenced philosophers and politicians like Voltaire, John Locke, Thomas Paine (who explicitly quoted Cicero in his writings), Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

221. Edgar Lee Masters wrote 50 books of poetry but is known for only one today, Spoon River Anthology, a collection of brief epitaphs for the fictional dead of fictional Spoon River.
     
     As a young poet the prolific Masters wrote hundreds of poem in the style of Poe, Shelley and Swinburne. But he eventually settled on a Whitman-like style with shorter lines.

222. Chretien de Troyes wrote his masterpiece, Yvain: The Knight of the Lion, in 6,808 rhymed couplets circa 1177. His work has been called a step toward the modern novel.

223. Jean de La Fontaine was a fabulist who was one of the most-read French writers of the 17th century. For readers who lack French, I recommend the excellent translations of Norman Shapiro.

224. Thomas Traherne esp. “Shadows in the Water”

225. William Collins esp. “Ode to Evening”

226. Julia Ward Howe esp. “Battle-Hymn of the Republic”

227. Thomas Love Peacock esp. “The War-Song of Dinas Vawr”

228. Gregory Corso

229. George Darley was an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin whose best poem that I have read is “It Is Not Beauty I Demand.”
     
     Harold Bloom admired Darley’s work enough to include two of Darley’s poem in his anthology.

230. William Barnes wrote English dialect poems and was admired by Thomas Hardy, who aligned him with William Collins, Thomas Gray and Alfred Tennyson. Michael Schmidt says we find Barnes “warbling his native woodnotes” — perhaps like a less passionate, less memorable Robert Burns. C. H. Sisson praises the “solid actuality” of the speakers in Barnes’ poems.
     
     Poets who admired Barnes include Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the latter in correspondence with Robert Bridges and Coventry Patmore.

231. Coventry Patmore was an English poet and literary critic. He is best known for his book of poetry The Angel in the House.

232. Edward Taylor was an early American metaphysical poet. He was influenced by Du Bartas, Francis Quarles, John Donne and George Herbert. After his long-lost poems were rediscovered in 1937, Taylor became an influence on Robert Lowell. Edward Taylor showed formal skill in his poem “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” but I’m not a fan of religious verse, in general, and that is mostly what he wrote. He has one poem, “Huswifery,” in Harmon’s Top 500 Poems. Not sure why.

233. Diego de San Pedro was a Castilian writer who wrote poems in Spanish but is best known for his prose Cárcel de Amor (“Prison of Love”).

234. T. E. Hulme wrote the first poems, “Autumn” and “A City Sunset,” that, along with Hulme’s theories, created the modernist movement called Imagism; however, Hulme would prove more influential for his theories than his poetry.
     
     For instance, Ezra Pound’s dictate “Make it new!” originated with Hulme, who apparently got it from Remy de Gourmont.
     
     “Autumn” and “A City Sunset” are not bad poems, but certainly nothing to create a hare-brained school over.
     
     Hulme was influenced by Japanese haiku and tanka, and by Jules Laforgue, Wyndham Lewis, and the philosophers Henri Bergson and Jules do Gaultier.
     
     In turn, Hulme influenced the Imagists, the Vorticists and later, Charles Olson and the Projectivists.
     
     But as long as each of the schools lasted, not very, it may have been “much ado about very little.”

235. Coventry Patmore

236. William Morris has two poems in Harold Bloom’s anthology. Not sure why.

237. Francis Bacon is better known for other things, but “The World” was a favorite poem of John Donne.

238. Donald Davie is probably more important as a literary critic than as a poet. His poems, in general, tend to be philosophical and abstract, yet often evoke landscapes.
     
     Denis Donoghue described Davie’s poetry as “an enforced choice between masturbation and happily wedded love” bereft of drama.
     
     Davie was influenced primarily by Thomas Hardy, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

239. John Cleveland was once highly regarded as a poet, but today he is virtually unknown. His best-known poem, if it can be called that, is “Mark Antony.”

240. Abraham Cowley is another poet who was once highly regarded but is virtually unknown today. I can only remember reading two Cowley poems: “The Wish” and “Drinking.”

241. John Davidson was a Scottish poet, playwright and novelist who is best-known (although not well) for his ballads and songs. Yeats praised his 1891 book In a Music Hall and other Poems. Davidson also translated Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes and Victor Hugo’s Ruy Blas.

242. Sir Walter Scott esp. “Proud Masie”,” Lochinvar” and “Breathes There the Man with Soul So Dead”

243. Edward Lear esp. “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat” and “The Jumblies” plus a slew of limericks.

244. Lewis Carroll esp. “Jabberwocky,” “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and “Father William”

245. Eugene Field esp. “Wynken, Blynken and Nod”

246. Thomas Hood esp. “I Remember, I Remember”

247. Arthur Hugh Clough esp. “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth”

248. George Peele

249. Oliver Wendell Holmes

250. John Greenleaf Whittier

251. Robert Southey

252. /bookmark/bottom/

---

BEST FOR HUMOR

Hilaire Belloc, John Berryman, Ambrose Bierce, Lewis Carroll, Eugene Field, Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein (G#33, R#128), Mark Twain

BEST FOR SATIRE

Aristophanes, Chaucer, Desiderius Erasmus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucian, Martial, Molière, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Pope, Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Voltaire, Oscar Wilde, John Wilmot

SONGWRITERS

Adele, Joan Baez, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Marvin Gaye, Woody Guthrie, Dan Fogelberg (so good but underrated), Michael Jackson, Jewel, Billy Joel, Carole King, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Rod McKuen, Joni Mitchell, Jim Morrison, Stevie Nicks, Dolly Parton, Prince, Little Richard, Sade, Smokey Robinson, Tupac Shakur, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Bernie Taupin, Hank Williams Sr.

Leonard Cohen was a “real poet” before he became a songwriter.

Bob Dylan published a book of poems.

Jewel published a book of poems.

John Lennon published a book of poems.

Rod McKuen is better known as a songwriter but was one of the best-selling poets of the 1960s.

Joni Mitchell published a book of poems.

Tupac Shakur published a book of poems.

Paul Simon wrote many of his greatest hits as poems, then set them to music later.

THE MOST UNDERRATED POETS

The most underrated poets include Li Bai (in the West), Basho (ditto), Louise Bogan, Catullus, Hart Crane, Fukuda Chiyo-ni, John Clare, Ernest Dowson, William Dunbar, Enheduanna, Erinna, George Gascoigne, John Gower, Robert Hayden, Ono no Komachi, Charlotte Mew, Miklós Radnóti, John Skelton, Christopher Smart, Edmund Spenser and Tzu Yeh.

DARK HORSE POETS

My “dark horse” candidates include Anne Reeve Aldrich, The Archpoet, Buson, William Dunbar, Du Fu, Hafez, Robert Herrick, Robinson Jeffers, James Weldon Johnson, Ben Jonson, Eihei Dogen Kigen, Adah Isaacs Menken, Ezra Pound, W. S. Rendra, E. A. Robinson, Sarah Teasdale, Wang Wei and Elinor Wylie.

CONTEMPORARY POETS

It takes time to sort out which contemporary poets will be read in the future, but these are my personal picks for possible future readership, outside the obvious names like Eliot and Frost: Kajal Ahmad, Conrad Aiken, Margaret Atwood, Louise Bogan, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jared Carter, Rhina P. Espaillat, Seamus Heaney, Anthony Hecht, Robert Hayden, Randall Jarrell, Philip Larkin, Archibald MacLeish, Louis MacNeice, Tom Merrill, Robert Mezey, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, Richard Thomas Moore, Howard Nemerov, John Crowe Ransom, Kevin N. Roberts, W. D. Snodgrass, David St. John, A. E. Stallings, Allen Tate, Derek Walcott (esp. “Omeros”), Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur (esp. “The Death of a Toad”) and Bob Zisk.

David Whyte was nominated by Stoic Journeys in the comments.

STILL GOING STRONG: THE BEST LIVING POETS (AS OF NOV. 2025)

Kajal Ahmad (Kurdish), Simon Armitage (British), Margaret Atwood (Canadian), Christian Bök (Canadian), Jared Carter, Billy Collins, Wendy Cope (British), Carol Ann Duffy (Scottish), Bob Dylan, Rhina P. Espaillat (Dominican-American), James Fenton (British), Annie Finch, R. S. Gwynn aka Sam Gwynn, Daniel Hall, Rupi Kaur (Indian-Canadian), Janet Kenny (Australian), Walid Khazindar (Palestinian), John Kinsella (Australian), Yusef Komunyakaa, Ted Kooser, Lina Kostenko (Ukrainian), Li-Young Lee (Indonesian-American), Ada Limón (Mexican-American), Martin Mc Carthy (Irish), Tom Merrill, Andrew Motion (British), Paul Muldoon (Irish), Mary Oliver, Vera Pavlova (Russian), Claudia Rankine (Jamaican), Warsan Shire (British), Harvey Stanbrough, David St. John, Alberto Ríos, Sunil Sharma (Indian), Tracy K. Smith, A. E. Stallings aka Alicia Stallings, F. F. Teague (British), Natasha Trethewey, Ko Un (Korean), Ocean Vuong (Vietnamese-American), Gail White, David Whyte (Anglo-Irish), Charles Wright, Zhai Yongming (Chinese) and Bob Zisk.

YOUNGER POETS TO KEEP AN EYE ON

Annie Diamond, Amanda Gorman, John Masella, RS, Anais Vionet, Shannon Winestone

RECENTLY DEPARTED

Alfred Dorn, Anita Dorn, Ann Drysdale, Jim Dunlap, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Zyskandar Jaimot, Richard Thomas Moore, Adrienne Rich, Kevin N. Roberts, Joe M. Ruggier, Luis Omar Salinas, Derek Walcott, Richard Wilbur

NOTES ABOUT CONTEMPORARY POETS

Tom Merrill is one of my favorite contemporary poets, and a favorite poet period, exclamation mark. In our conversations Tom told me that he particularly admired A. E. Housman and Wallace Stevens.

David St. John is a personal favorite of mine. When I used to read the journals widely, his poems always stood out for me. In an interview David said: “I could talk forever about the poets who influenced me, writers like Eugenio Montale, Alexandr Blok, and Paul Éluard.”

ONE-HIT WONDERS

These poets had one poem that really stood out for me:

• The anonymous authors of “Beowulf,” “Wulf and Eadwacer,” “The Wife’s Lament,” “The Ruin,” “The Seafarer,” “The Song of Songs,” “The Song of Roland,” “Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song”

• The Archpoet “His Confession”

• Anne Askew “Newgate Ballad”

• Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy

• Rupert Brooke “The Soldier”

• Elizabeth Barrett Browning “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”

• Basil Bunting “Briggflats”

• Caedmon, the author of the oldest extant English poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn.”

• Thomas Carew “Song” (“Ask me no more where Jove bestows/ When June is past, the fading rose.”).

• John Cleveland “Mark Antony”

• Sir William Davenant “The Lark Now Leaves His Watery Nest”

• John Dowland The First Booke of Songes or Ayres

• Michael Drayton is best-known for Sonnet LVI from Idea (“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”).

• Queen Elizabeth I for “When I Was Fair and Young”

• Philip Freneau “The Indian Burying Ground”

• Julia Ward Howe “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

• Lionel Johnson “The Dark Angel”

• Emma Lazarus “The New Colossus”

• Andrew Marvell “To His Coy Mistress”

• John McCrae for “In Flanders Fields.”

• Thomas Nashe “Litany in Time of Plague”

• Alfred Noyes "The Highwayman" (the most musical poem in the English language and the best ghost story, in my opinion).

• Sir Walter Raleigh “The Lie”

• Henry Reed "Naming of Parts"

• Adrienne Rich “Diving into the Wreck”

• James Shirley “Dirge” (”The glories of our blood and state / Are shadows, not substantial things …”)

• Christopher Smart “Jubilate Agno”

• Robert Southwell “The Burning Babe” and “The Nativity of Christ”

• Allen Tate “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

• Chidiock Tichborne’s famous elegy for himself “My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares”

• James Thomson “Rule Britannia” and The Seasons

• Edmund Waller “Go Lovely Rose”

• Sir Henry Wotton “On His Mistress, the Queen of Bohemia”

POETS I LIKE BUT HAVEN’T READ ENOUGH TO RANK

“So much to read, so little time!”

Let me note that I have translated some of the poets in this category, but translating a few poems doesn’t mean that I’m familiar with their oerves. I have read all the poets below, but not enough to compare them to the poets I have ranked.

Outstanding poets by reputation but ones I haven’t read enough to rank include:

Maya Angelou (G#2, R#136), Guillaume Apollinaire, Simon Armitage, John Ashbery, Alvares de Azevedo

Ingeborg Bachmann, Amiri Baraka, John Barbour, John Berryman, John Betjeman, Eavan Boland, Christian Bok, Jose Luis Borges (G#50, R#59), Joseph Brodsky, Rupert Brooke, Sterling A. Brown, Charles Bukowski (G#47, R#50)

Luis de Camoes (R#26), Thomas Campbell, Constantine P. Cavafy, Anne Carson, Margaret Cavendish, Lucille Clifton, Billy Collins (R247), William Congreve, Wendy Cope, Abraham Cowley, Countee Cullen

Ruben Dario, Elizabeth Daryush, Donald Davie, James Dickey, Rita Dove, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Laurence Dunbar, John Dyer

William Empson, Louise Erdrich

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ahmed Faraz, James Fenton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Dana Gioia, Khalil Gibran (C#50, G#50, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Gunter Grass, Robert Graves, Fulke Greville, Margaret Ann Griffiths, Gulzar, Thom Gunn, Ivor Gurney

Donald Hall, Tony Harrison, Anthony Hecht, Roger Hecht, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Zbigniew Herbert, Johann Gottfried Herder (R#46), Nazim Hikmet, Geoffrey Hill, Thomas Hoccleve, John Hollander, A. D. Hope, Ted Hughes (R#187), Victor Hugo (C#46, G#46, R#42)

Rahat Indori, Allama Iqbal

St. John of the Cross, Lionel Johnson, Donald Justice

Rupi Kaur, Patrick Kavanagh, Sarah Kay, Nasir Kazmi, Walid Khazindar, Yusef Komunyakaa, Stanley Kunitz

Sidney Lanier, Denise Levertov, Li-Young Lee, C. Day-Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Lyn Lifshin, Audre Lorde, Amy Lowell, Lucretius, John Lydgate, John Lyly

Hugh MacDiarmid, Antonio Machado, Derek Mahon, Robert Manning of Brunne, Jose Marti, John Masefield, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Claude McKay, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Charlotte Mew, Czesław Miłosz, Mir Taqi Mir (R#139), Gabriela Mistral, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Thomas Moore, Andrew Motion, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray

Sarojini Naidu (G#29), Gerard de Nerval (R#259)

Mary Oliver (G#27, R#268)

Octavio Paz, Fernando Pessoa (R#30), Ambrose Philips, Katherine Philips, Robert Pinsky, Matthew Prior, J. H. Prynne

Li Qingzhao

Craig Raine, Adrienne Rich (G#32), James Whitcomb Riley, Alberto Rios, Yiannis Ritsos, Richard Rolle of Hampole, Theodore Roethke

Hans Sachs, Siegfried Sassoon, Delmore Schwartz, Robert Service, Vijay Seshadri, Parveen Shakir, Tupac Shakur, Warsan Shire, Stevie Smith, Tracy K. Smith, Cruz e Sousa, William Stafford, Mark Strand, Kamala Surayya aka Kamala Das, Arthur Symons, Wisława Szymborska

Torquato Tasso, Jean Toomer, Georg Trakl, Natasha Trethewey

Cesar Vallejo, Lope de Vega, Ocean Vuong

Derek Walcott, Rosanna Warren, Isaac Watts, Phillis Wheatley (R#226), Isabella Whitney, David Whyte, Anna Wickham, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Charles Wright, James Wright, Judith Wright, Richard Wright, John Allan Wyeth

Zhai Yongming, Edward Young

UNEXPECTED POETS

Scipio Africanus, Alfred the Great, Muhammad Ali, Sir Francis Bacon, Samuel Beckett, Jimmy Carter, King David, Ben Franklin, Queen Elizabeth I, Erasmus, Ernest Hemingway, King Henry VIII, King James I of Scotland (The Kingis Quair), King James IV of Scotland, Thomas Jefferson, James Joyce, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Marilyn Monroe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Leonard Nimoy, Plato, Ronald Reagan, George Santayana, King Solomon, James Stewart, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, Herschel Walker, Oscar Wilde

POETS WHO ARE NOT MY CUP OF TEA

Outstanding poets by reputation who have never appealed to me personally include: A.R. Ammons, Robert Bly, Dante, John Dryden, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Herbert, Kenneth Koch, Andrew Marvell, Frank O’Hara, Alexander Pope, Gertrude Stein (R#160), Henry Vaughan, Charles Wesley, William Carlos Williams

POETS I HAVEN’T READ AT ALL, YET

Fleur Adcock, Ferdowsi, Kalidasa, Francis Ponge, Rustaveli, Tomas Transtromer

WORLD’S GREATEST POETS TRIVIA

William Blake self-published his books and invented a new method of engraving, which he said was revealed to him by the spirit of his deceased brother!

Cecil Day-Lewis, better known as C. Day-Lewis, was the father of the acclaimed actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Sappho was called the Tenth Muse by her ancient peers and the other nine Muses were goddesses!

Walt Whitman self-published his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, and even wrote his own glowing reviews!

NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENTS

Caedmon wrote the first extant English poem, “Caedmon’s Hymn.”

William Empson helped popularize the English villanelle in its now-traditional form.

Enheduanna, an ancient Sumerian female poet, is the first poet we know by name, and the first creator of a poetry anthology and hymnal. She may well have been the first librarian as well.

Sappho wrote the first “make love, not war” poem 2,500 years ahead of her time.

LAST POETS ADDED

Wisława Szymborska, Louise Gluck, Joseph Brodsky, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Ivor Gurney, John Allan Wyeth, Jean Toomer, C. Day-Lewis



SELECTED POEMS AND EXCERPTS

A number of full poems appear later on this page, after epigrams and snippets.

KEATS

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.
Its loveliness increases; it will never
pass into nothingness ...
―John Keats

SHELLEY

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

SAPPHO

Eros harrows my heart:
wild winds whipping desolate mountains
uprooting oaks.
—Sappho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Eros the limb-shatterer,
rattles me,
an irresistible
constrictor.
—Sappho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

She keeps her scents
in a dressing case.
And her sense?
In some undiscoverable place.
—Sappho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A short transparent frock?
It's just my luck
your lips were made to mock!
—Sappho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

That enticing girl’s clinging dresses
leave me trembling, overcome with happiness,
as once, when I saw the Goddess in my prayers
eclipsing Cyprus.
—Sappho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

TAGORE

Come as you are, forget appearances!
Is your hair untamable, your part uneven, your bodice unfastened? Never mind.
Come as you are, forget appearances!
—Rabindranath Tagore

SEISHI

Grasses wilt:
the braking locomotive
grinds to a halt
―Yamaguchi Seishi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

DICKINSON

Come slowly—Eden
Lips unused to thee—
Bashful—sip thy jasmines—
As the fainting bee—
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—alights—
And is lost in balms!
—Emily Dickinson

KOMACHI

If fields of autumn flowers
can shed their blossoms, shameless,
why can’t I also frolic here —
as fearless, wild and blameless?
—Ono no Komachi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I had thought to pluck
the flower of forgetfulness
only to find it
already blossoming in his heart.
—Ono no Komachi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

RADNOTI

I toppled beside him—his body already taut,
tight as a string just before it snaps,
shot in the back of the head.
"This is how you’ll end too; just lie quietly here,"
I whispered to myself, patience blossoming from dread.
"Der springt noch auf," the voice above me jeered;
I could only dimly hear
through the congealing blood slowly sealing my ear.
—Miklós Radnóti, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

“Postcard 4” was Radnoti’s final poem, written October 31, 1944 near Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary, on a Nazi death march during the Holocaust. "Der springt noch auf" means something like "That one is still twitching."

EURIPIDES

Love distills the eyes’ desires,
love bewitches the heart with its grace.
—Euripides, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Fools call wisdom foolishness.
—Euripides, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Fresh tears are wasted on old griefs.
—Euripides, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

RUMI

Forget security!
Live by the perilous sea.
Destroy your reputation, however glorious.
Become notorious.
—Rumi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Love calls, everywhere and always.
We're sky bound.
Are you coming?
—Rumi

Elevate your words, not their volume.
Rain grows flowers, not thunder.
—Rumi, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

HAFEZ

The imbecile
constructs cages
for everyone he knows,
while the sage
(who has to duck his head
whenever the moon glows)
keeps dispensing keys
all night long
to the beautiful, rowdy,
prison gang.
—Hafez, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

TZU YEH

I heard my love was going to Yang-chou
So I accompanied him as far as Ch'u-shan.
For just a moment as he held me in his arms
I thought the swirling river ceased flowing and time stood still.
―Tzu Yeh, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Will I ever hike up my dress for you again?
Will my pillow ever caress your arresting face?
―Tzu Yeh, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I will wear my robe loose, not bothering with a belt;
I will stand with my unpainted face at the reckless window;
If my petticoat insists on fluttering about, shamelessly,
I'll blame it on the unruly wind!
―Tzu Yeh, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

BLAKE

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
—William Blake

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.
—William Blake

SWINBURNE

Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
—Algernon Charles Swinburne

ROBERTS

Despite the days and realms that we amassed,
Our time has passed.
—Kevin N. Roberts

DANTE

INSCRIPTION ON THE GATE OF HELL:
Before me nothing created existed, to fear.
Eternal I am, and eternal I endure.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
—Dante, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Midway through my life’s journey
I awoke to find myself lost in a trackless wood,
for I had strayed far from the straight path.
—Dante, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Little sparks may ignite great Infernos.
—Dante, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

She made my veins and even the pulses within them tremble.
—Dante, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

In Beatrice I beheld the outer boundaries of blessedness.
—Dante, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

NERUDA

I do not love you like coral or topaz,
or the blazing hearth’s incandescent white flame;
I love you like phantoms embraced in the dark ...
secretly, in shadows, unrevealed & unnamed.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
I stalk the streets, silent and starving.
Bread does not satisfy me; dawn does not divert me
from my relentless pursuit of your fluid spoor.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Please understand that when I awaken weeping
it's because I dreamed I was a lost child
searching the leaf-heaps for your hands in the darkness.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

As if you were set on fire from within,
the moon whitens your skin.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You can crop all the flowers but you cannot detain spring.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

While nothing can save us from death,
still love can redeem each breath.
—Pablo Neruda, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

CUMMINGS

... you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you ...
―e. e. cummings

BASHO

The first soft snow:
leaves of the awed jonquil
bow low
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Winter in the air:
my neighbor,
how does he fare? ...
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Let us arrange
these lovely flowers in the bowl
since there's no rice
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Come, investigate loneliness!
a solitary leaf
clings to the Kiri tree
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

A solitary crow
clings to a leafless branch:
nightfall
―Matsuo Basho, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

DONNE

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils foot…
—John Donne

CHIYO-NI

Ah butterfly,
what dreams do you ply
with your beautiful wings?
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Because morning glories
held my well-bucket hostage
I went begging for water!
—Fukuda Chiyo-ni, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

OWEN

They move not from her tapestries, their pall,
Nor pace her terraces, their hecatombs,
Lest aught she be disturbed, or grieved at all.
—Wilfred Owen

HOUSMAN

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
—A. E. Housman

FROST

And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
—Robert Frost

POUND

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
—Ezra Pound

KIGEN

This world?
Moonlit dew
flicked from a crane’s bill.
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Seventy-one?
How long
can a dewdrop last?
—Eihei Dogen Kigen, loose translation/interpretation of his jisei (death poem) by Michael R. Burch

YOSHITAKA

Both victor and vanquished are dewdrops:
flashes of light
briefly illuminating the void.
—Ouchi Yoshitaka, loose translation/interpretation of his jisei (death poem) by Michael R. Burch

SHITAGO

This world—to what may we compare it?
To autumn fields darkening at dusk,
dimly lit by lightning flashes.
—Minamoto no Shitago, loose translation/interpretation of his jisei (death poem) by Michael R. Burch

SENRYU

Like a lotus leaf’s evaporating dew,
I, too ...
vanish.
—Senryu, loose translation/interpretation of his jisei (death poem) Michael R. Burch

SHUGYO

Oh, fallen camellias,
if I were you,
I'd leap into the torrent!
― Takaha Shugyo, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Our life here on earth:
to what shall we compare it?
It is not like a rowboat
departing at daybreak,
leaving no trace of us in its wake?
― Takaha Shugyo, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Wild geese pass
leaving the emptiness of heaven
revealed
― Takaha Shugyo, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

ISSA

Petals I amass
with such tenderness
prick me to the quick.
—Kobayashi Issa, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

This world of dew
is a dewdrop world indeed;
and yet, and yet ...
—Kobayashi Issa, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lowly snail,
climb holy Mount Fuji,
but slowly, slowly!
—Kobayashi Issa, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

BUSON

A kite floats
at the same place in the sky
where yesterday it floated ...
―Yosa Buson loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Picking autumn plums
my wrinkled hands
once again grow fragrant
―Yosa Buson loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

ROSSETTI

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
—Christina Rossetti, “Song”

VOLTAIRE

Once fanaticism has gangrened brains
the incurable malady invariably remains.
—Voltaire, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Love is a canvas created by nature
and completed by imagination.
—Voltaire, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

PAVLOVA

I shattered your heart;
now I limp through the shards
barefoot.
―Vera Pavlova, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

DOWSON

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.
—Ernest Dowson

KO UN

At Auschwitz
piles of glasses,
mountains of shoes ...
returning, we stared out different windows.
―Ko Un, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

RANSETSU

The childless woman,
how tenderly she caresses
homeless dolls ...
—Hattori Ransetsu, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

TENNYSON

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.
—Alfred Tennyson

SPENSER

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away…
—Edmund Spenser, “Amoretti Sonnet #75”

WORDSWORTH

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration; the broad sun
Is sinking down in its tranquillity…
—William Wordsworth

COLERIDGE

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge

MARTIAL

Lie lightly on her, grass and dew ...
So little weight she placed on you.
—Martial, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

LI BAI aka LI PO

The spring breeze knows partings are bitter;
The willow twig knows it will never be green again.
―Li Bai, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Water reforms, though we slice it with our swords;
Sorrow returns, though we drown it with our wine.
―Li Bai, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Moonlight illuminates my bed
as frost brightens the ground.
Lifting my eyes, the moon allures.
Lowering my eyes, I long for home.
―Li Bai, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

My interpretation of this famous poem is a bit different from the norm. The moon symbolizes love, so I imagine the moon shining on Li Bai’s bed to be suggestive, an invitation. A man might lower his eyes to avoid seeing something his wife would not approve of.

The Solitude of Night
by Li Bai
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

At the wine party
I lay comatose, knowing nothing.
Windblown flowers fell, perfuming my lap.
When I arose, still drunk,
The birds had all flown to their nests.
All that remained were my fellow inebriates.
I left to walk along the river—alone with the moonlight.

CAPITO

Warmthless beauty attracts but does not engage us;
it floats like hookless bait.
—Capito, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

GOETHE

Here in this charnel-house full of bleaching bones,
like yesteryear’s
fading souvenirs,
I see the skulls arranged in strange-ordered rows.
―Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

She says an epigram’s too terse
to reveal her tender heart in verse ...
but really, darling, ain’t the thrill
of a kiss much shorter still?
―from “Xenia” by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

GIBRAN

Thought is a bird of unbounded space,
which in a cage of words may unfold its wings
but cannot fly.
—Khalil Gibran, translation by Michael R. Burch

SHIKI

I'm trying to sleep!
Please swat the flies
lightly
—Masaoka Shiki, loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Music When Soft Voices Die (To —)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Requiescat
by Oscar Wilde

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast,
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear
Lyre or sonnet,
All my life's buried here,
Heap earth upon it.

The Wild Swans at Coole
by William Butler Yeats

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Island
by Langston Hughes

Wave of sorrow,
Do not drown me now:

I see the island
Still ahead somehow.

I see the island
And its sands are fair:

Wave of sorrow,
Take me there.

Come As You Are
by Rabindranath Tagore
loose translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch

Come as you are, forget appearances!
Is your hair untamable, your part uneven, your bodice unfastened? Never mind.
Come as you are, forget appearances!

Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.
If your feet glisten with dew, if your anklets slip, if your beaded necklace slides off? Never mind.
Skip with quicksilver steps across the grass.

Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?
Flocks of cranes erupt from the riverbank, fitful gusts ruffle the fields, anxious cattle tremble in their stalls.
Do you see the clouds enveloping the sky?

You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.
Who will care that your eyelids have not been painted with lamp-black, when your pupils are darker than thunderstorms?
You loiter in vain over your toilet lamp; it flickers and dies in the wind.

Come as you are, forget appearances!
If the wreath lies unwoven, who cares? If the bracelet is unfastened, let it fall. The sky grows dark; it is late.
Come as you are, forget appearances!

Merciles Beaute ("Merciless Beauty")
by Geoffrey Chaucer
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart's wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.

By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.

Geoffrey Chaucer (circa 1340-1400) is generally considered to be the first major English poet and the greatest English poet of the Medieval Period. He is best known for The Canterbury Tales but was also a master of lyric forms such as the rondel and balade. Chaucer has been called the "Father of English literature" and has been credited with helping to legitimize the English vernacular for literary purposes at a time when French and Latin were preferred by the "upper crust" in England. Chaucer was also the first writer to have been buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.

Sweet Rose of Virtue
by William Dunbar
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness,
delightful lily of youthful wantonness,
richest in bounty and in beauty clear
and in every virtue men hold most dear―
except only that you are merciless.

Into your garden, today, I followed you;
there I found flowers of freshest hue,
both white and red, delightful to see,
and wholesome herbs, waving resplendently―
yet nowhere one leaf nor petal of rue.

I fear that March with his last arctic blast
has slain my fair flower and left her downcast;
whose piteous death does my heart such pain
that I long to replant love's root again―
so comforting her bowering leaves have been.

Cradle Song
by William Blake

Sleep, sleep, beauty bright,
Dreaming in the joys of night;
Sleep, sleep; in thy sleep
Little sorrows sit and weep.

Sweet babe, in thy face
Soft desires I can trace,
Secret joys and secret smiles,
Little pretty infant wiles.

As thy softest limbs I feel
Smiles as of the morning steal
O'er thy cheek, and o'er thy breast
Where thy little heart doth rest.

O the cunning wiles that creep
In thy little heart asleep!
When thy little heart doth wake,
Then the dreadful night shall break.

Rondel
by Kevin N. Roberts

Our time has passed on swift and careless feet,
With sighs and smiles and songs both sad and sweet.
Our perfect hours have grown and gone so fast,
And these are things we never can repeat.
Though we might plead and pray that it would last,
Our time has passed.

Like shreds of mist entangled in a tree,
Like surf and sea foam on a foaming sea,
Like all good things we know can never last,
Too soon we'll see the end of you and me.
Despite the days and realms that we amassed,
Our time has passed.

The Kind Ghosts
by Wilfred Owen

She sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms
Out of the stillness of her palace wall,
Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.

She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms,
Not marvelling why her roses never fall
Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms.

The shades keep down which well might roam her hall.
Quiet their blood lies in her crimson rooms
And she is not afraid of their footfall.

They move not from her tapestries, their pall,
Nor pace her terraces, their hecatombs,
Lest aught she be disturbed, or grieved at all.

Wilfred Owen was a war poet, or, more properly, an anti-war poet. Who is the woman portrayed in the poem? Wilfred Owen may have had Britannia, the female personification of Britain, in mind. Or perhaps the war-prone British aristocracy, or rulers of warring nations in general.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell worked as a control tower operator during World War II, an experience which influenced and provided material for his poetry.

Song
by John Donne

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
And swear
No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
Yet she
Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In My Craft Or Sullen Art
by Dylan Thomas

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

The Garden
by Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.

She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

Lullaby
by W. H. Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's carnal ecstacy.

Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost.
All the dreaded cards foretell.
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought.
Not a kiss nor look be lost.

Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of welcome show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find our mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness find you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

The Most of It
by Robert Frost

He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree—hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder—broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter—love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

They Flee from Me
by Sir Thomas Wyatt

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle tame and meek
That now are wild and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
Twenty times better; but once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
And she me caught in her arms long and small;
And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

It was no dream, I lay broad waking.
But all is turned thorough my gentleness
Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
And I have leave to go of her goodness
And she also to use newfangleness.
But since that I so kindly am served,
I would fain know what she hath deserved.

My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
by William Wordsworth

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Upon Julia's Clothes
by Robert Herrick

Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!

Delight in Disorder
by Robert Herrick

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction—
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher—
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly—
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat—
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility—
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.

A Noiseless Patient Spider
by Walt Whitman

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

The Ruins of Balaclava
by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855)
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Oh, barren Crimean land, these dreary shades
of castles—once your indisputable pride—
are now where ghostly owls and lizards hide
as blackguards arm themselves for nightly raids.
Carved into marble, regal boasts were made!
Brave words on burnished armor, gilt-applied!
Now shattered splendors long since cast aside
beside the dead here also brokenly laid.
The ancient Greeks set shimmering marble here.
The Romans drove wild Mongol hordes to flight.
The Mussulman prayed eastward, day and night.
Now owls and dark-winged vultures watch and leer
as strange black banners, flapping overhead,
mark where the past piles high its nameless dead.

Adam Bernard Mickiewicz (1798-1855) is widely regarded as Poland’s greatest poet and as the national poet of Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. He was also a dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor and political activist. As a principal figure in Polish Romanticism, Mickiewicz has been compared to Byron and Goethe.

The Eagle
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveller hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands,
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveller to the shore,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Excerpt from "The Sunlight on the Garden"
by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Grass
by Carl Sandburg

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work―
I am the grass; I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Excerpt from "Macbeth"
by William Shakespeare

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Let No Charitable Hope
by Elinor Wylie

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

Acquainted With The Night
by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

To Earthward
by Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of — was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young:
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass or sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
by Wallace Stevens

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one ...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae
by Ernest Dowson

"I am not as I was under the reign of the good Cynara"—Horace

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed
Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;
And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,
Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;
Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:
I have been faithful to you, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long;
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

On My First Son
by Ben Jonson

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;
My sin was too much hope of thee, loved boy.
Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay,
Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.
O, could I lose all father now! For why
Will man lament the state he should envy?
To have so soon 'scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
Rest in soft peace, and asked, say, "Here doth lie
Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry,
For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such
As what he loves may never like too much."

This Is Just to Say
by William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

This Living Hand
by John Keats

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

Other poems of note:

• Anonymous masterpieces like “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song,” Beowulf, “Wulf and Eadwacer,” Gawain and the Green Knight, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Pearl

• “Bread and Music” and the Senlin poems by Conrad Aiken

• “And Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou

• Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto

• “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

• “Lullaby” and “Funeral Blues” and “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” by W. H. Auden

• “The World” by Francis Bacon was a favorite poem of John Donne

• “One Art” and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop

• “The Tyger,” “The Sick Rose,” “Cradle Song,” “London” and “Jerusalem” by William Blake

• “After the Persian” and “Song for the Last Act” by Louise Bogan

• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks

• “Meeting at Night” and “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning

• “Afton Water,” “A Red, Red Rose,” “To a Mouse” and “To a Louse” by Robert Burns

• “So We'll Go No More A-Roving” by George Gordon, Lord Byron

• “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll

• “Mouse's Nest” and “I Am!” by John Clare

• “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” “Voyages” and “The Broken Tower” by Hart Crane

• “i sing of Olaf glad and big” and several other poems by e. e. cummings

• “It Is Not Beauty I Demand” by George Darley

• “Wild Nights” and “A Certain Slant of Light” by Emily Dickinson

• “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam” and “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” and “A Last Word” by Ernest Dowson

• “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Four Quartets” and “La Figlia Che Piange” (“The Weeping Girl”) by T. S. Eliot

• Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

• “Take, Oh, Take Those Lips Away” by John Fletcher

• “Directive,” “To Earthward,” “The Most of It” and “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost

• “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

• “The Deserted Village” by Oliver Goldsmith

• “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray

• “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Clare Hamer or Mary Elizabeth Frye (disputed)

• “The Darkling Thrush” and “The Convergence of the Twain” by Thomas Hardy

• “Punishment” and “The Forge” by Seamus Heaney

• “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

• “To Daffodils” by Robert Herrick

• “For My Funeral” and the Syrian Garden poem by A. E. Housman

• “The Windhover” and other curtal sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins

• “Harlem” (aka “A Dream Deferred”), “Minstrel Man” and other poems by Langston Hughes

• “Shine, Perishing Republic” and “Hurt Hawks” by Robinson Jeffers

• “This Be The Verse” and “The Whitsun Weddings” and “Church Going” by Philip Larkin

• “Piano” by D. H. Lawrence

• “You, Andrew Marvell,” “The Silent Slain” and “Memorial Rain” by Archibald MacLeish

• “Bagpipe Music” by Louis MacNeice

• “Cargoes” by John Masefield

• “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae

• “Love Is Not All” and other fine sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay; also “Recuerdo”

• “Paradise Lost” by John Milton

• “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes is the most musical poem and the best poetic ghost story in the English language, in my opinion.

• “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “The Unreturning” by Wilfred Owen

• “Daddy” and “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath

• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Alan Poe

• “The Lie” by Sir Walter Ralegh

• “Luke Havergal” and “Mr. Flood’s Party” and “The Mill” by Edward Arlington Robinson

• “I Knew A Woman” by Theodore Roethke

• “Remember” and “Song” and “Uphill” by Christina Rossetti

• “Sudden Light” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

• “That Man” and numerous fragments by the immortal Sappho of Lesbos

• Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, Othello and the Sonnets by William Shakespeare

• “Ozymandias” and “To the Moon” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Edmund Spenser for “The Faerie Queene” and a number of lyric poems

• “The Snow Man” and “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” and “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” and “The Old Lutheran Bells at Home” and “The Idea of Order at Key West” by Wallace Stevens

• “Wild Asters” and “Advice to a Girl” and “I Shall Not Care” by Sara Teasdale

• “Tears, Idle Tears” and “In Memoriam A. H. H.” by Alfred Tennyson

• “Fern Hill” and “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” and “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” by Dylan Thomas

• “Adlestrop” by Edward Thomas

• “Omeros” by Derek Walcott

• “Go, Lovely Rose” by Edmund Waller

• “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” by William Wordsworth

• “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me” by Sir Thomas Wyatt

• “Cold-Blooded Creatures” and “The Eagle and the Mole” by Elinor Morton Wylie

• “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” and at least a dozen more poems by William Butler Yeats

Poems of particular note by contemporary poets:

• “Phenomenal Woman” by Maya Angelou

• “For Her Surgery” by Jack Butler

• “After the Rain” by Jared Carter

• “Friday” and “Word Made Flesh” by Ann Drysdale

• “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “All Along the Watchtower” by Bob Dylan

• “The Skeleton's Defense of Carnality” by Jack Foley

• “Skaters” by Conrad Geller

• “Release” by R. S. Gwynn

• “The Forge” and “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney

• “Sarabande On Attaining The Age Of Seventy-Seven” by Anthony Hecht

• “The Rushish Baths” and “I Empty” by Zyskandar A. Jaimot

• “First Confession” by X. J. Kennedy

• “Du” by Janet Kenny

• “Little Thrush” by Martin Mc Carthy

• “Advice for Winston” and “Leitmotif” and “Novenas” and “Come Lord and Lift” and “Time in Eternity” by Tom Merrill

• “In the Dark Season” and “Depths” and “The Freeze” by Richard Thomas Moore; also his epic poem “The Mouse Whole”

• “The Lovemaker” by Robert Mezey and his “after Borges” sonnets

• “Allayne” and “Rondel” and “It Is Too Late” and “Astrologia” by Kevin N. Roberts

• “Part 6 from The Dark Side of the Deity: Interlude” by Joe M. Ruggier

• “Sometimes Mysteriously” by Luis Omar Salinas

• “The Ghost Ship” by A. E. Stallings

• “Sea Fevers” by Agnes Wathall

• “A Sweet Nosegay” by Isabella Whitney

• “The Examiners” by John Whitworth

• “The Death of a Toad” and “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur

• “Hideous” by Shannon Winestone

GOOGLE’S TOP 50 GREATEST POEMS OF ALL TIME

I used the search term “world’s greatest poems of all time.” There are a few more than 50 poems here because Google’s ratings change slightly over time and I have consulted the list periodically.

• “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

• “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas

• “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• Sonnet 18 (”Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) by William Shakespeare

• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

• “And Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou

• “If” by Rudyard Kipling

• “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth

• “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot

• “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

• “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Alfred Tennyson

• “The Tyger” by William Blake

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

• “She Walks in Beauty (Like the Night)” by Lord Byron

• “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

• “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley

• “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

• “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman

• “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus

• “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll

• “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman

• “A Poison Tree” by William Blake

• “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes

• “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep” by Clare Harner

• “A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns

• “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop

• Paradise Lost by John Milton

• “Harlem” (“A Dream Deferred”) by Langston Hughes

• “The Lady of Shalott” by Alfred Tennyson

• “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

• “Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen

• “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams

• “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks

• “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams

• “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes

• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

• “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae

• “Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Thayer

• “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath

• “When I Consider How My Life Is Spent” by John Milton

• “A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• “Hope is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson

• “Lycidas” by John Milton

• “Fire and Ice” by Robert Frost

• “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold

• “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

POETRY DEFINITIONS

What is poetry?

Walter Pater called poetry “the finer edges” of words.

I have called poetry “the rightness of words” and “finding the right word at the right time.”

BEST POETS BY COUNTRY AND LANGUAGE

Best African poets: Chinua Achebe (Nigeria), Toyin Adewale-Gabriel (Nigeria), Dennis Brutus (South Africa), Christopher Okigbo (Nigeria), Niyi Osundare (Nigeria), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, Nobel Prize 1986), Warsan Shire (Somalia)

Best Akkadian and Sumerian poets: Enheduanna (the first poet we know by name), the author(s) of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Best American poets aka US poets: Conrad Aiken, Maya Angelou, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Cullen Bryant, Jared Carter, Sam Cooke, Hart Crane, Stephen Crane, e. e. cummings, J. V. Cunningham, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan (Nobel Prize 2016), T. S. Eliot (Nobel Prize 1948), Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck (Nobel Prize 2020), Robert Frost, Robert Hayden, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Carole King, Stanley Kunitz, Sidney Lanier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Archibald MacLeish, Tom Merrill, Joni Mitchell, Marianne Moore, Stevie Nicks, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Prince, E. A. Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton, Paul Simon, Wallace Stevens, Trumbull Stickney, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Carlos Williams, Yvor Winters

Best ancient Greek poets: Aeschylus, Aesop, Alcaeus of Mytilene, Alcman/Alkman, Anacreon, Antipater of Sidon, Archilochos, Aristophanes, Callimachus, Erinna, Euripides, Hesiod, Homer, Ibycus/Ibykus, Lucian, Menander, Plato, Pindar, Sappho of Lesbos, Simonides, Sophocles, Theocritus

Best ancient Hebrew poets: King David, King Solomon, Isaiah, the authors of the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and the book of Job

Best Arabic poets: Mahmoud Darwish, Fadwa Tuqan

Best Austrian poets: Ingeborg Bachmann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ernst Jandl, Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl

Best Australian poets: Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb, A. D. Hope, Janet Kenny, John Kinsella, Les Murray (a writer of “bush balladry”), Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Banjo Peterson, Judith Wright

Best Canadian poets: Margaret Atwood, Bliss Carman, Leonard Cohen, John McCrae, Lucy Maud Montgomery, E. J. Pratt (R#218), Joe M. Ruggier, Robert Service

Best Chilean poets: Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize 1945), Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize 1971)

Best Chinese poets: Li Bai aka Li Po, Du Fu aka Tu Fu, Xu Hui, Li Qingzhao, Su Shi, Lao Tzu, Wang Wei, Tzu Yeh

Best Czech poets: Karel Havlíček Borovský, Sylva Fischerová, Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Karel Hynek Mácha, Jan Neruda, Jaroslav Seifert (Nobel Prize 1984), Franz Werfel

Best English Poets by Era:

Best Anglo-Roman poets (55 BC-760 AD): Aldhelm, Gildas aka Saint Gildas and Gildas Sapiens (Gildas the Wise), Hygeburg (the author of the Latin Hodoeporicon is “the first known Englishwoman to have written a full-length literary work.”)

Anglo-Roman poets wrote verse in Latin during the period Rome governed England and for some time thereafter.

Best Anglo-Saxon poets aka Old English poets (600-1066): Ælnoth or Ailnoth of Canterbury, Alcuin of York, Alfred the Great, The Venerable Bede, the Beowulf poet(s), Caedmon, Cynewulf, Deor, Saint Godric, the Wulf and Eadwacer poet, Wulfstan the Cantor

“Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe.” — John Earle, the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford

Best Maltese poets: Oliver Friggieri, Dun Karm Psaila, Joe M. Ruggier

Best Norman and Anglo-Norman poets (1066-1340): Robert Biket, Chretien de Troyes, Layamon, Marie de France, Thomas d’Angleterre aka Thomas of Britain (Tristram), Wace (Roman de Brut), Walter Map

Best Middle English poets (1200-1500): Charles d’Orleans, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, the Gawain poet, John Gower, Thomas Hoccleve, William Langland, Richard Rolle de Hampole, John Lydgate, Robert Manning de Brunne, the Pearl poet, Orm (“Worm”), John Skelton, John Wycliffe

Best Tudor poets (1457-1558): Anne Askew, Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Skelton, Thomas Vaux aka Lord Vaux, Sir Thomas Wyatt

Best Elizabethan/Jacobean/Caroline/Interregnum poets (1558-1660): Thomas Campion, Margaret Cavendish, George Chapman, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Edward Dyer, John Fletcher, George Gascoigne, Barnabe Googe, Fulke Greville, Aemilia Lanyer (allegedly Shakespeare’s mistress), Thomas Lodge, John Lyly, Christopher Marlowe, John Milton, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Sir Walter Ralegh, Mary Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, Chidiock Tichborne, George Turberville, Edward de Vere, Isabella Whitney (the first Englishwoman to publish a collection of poems), Mary Wroth

The “tribe of Ben” and Cavalier poets: Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, William Cavendish, Sir William Davenant, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling

The best Metaphysical poets: John Donne, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Edward Herbert, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Edward Taylor, Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, Edmund Waller

Best Restoration/Georgian poets (1660-1700): Aphra Behn, Anne Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Finch, Anne Killigrew, Katherine Philips, Matthew Prior, James Shirley, Edward Taylor, John Wilmot

Best Augustan poets (1700-1770): William Collins, William Cowper, George Crabbe, John Dryden, John Gay, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Ambrose Philips, Alexander Pope, Christopher Smart, Charlotte Smith, Jonathan Swift, James Thomson, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, Phillis Wheatley

Best English Romantic poets (1770-1837): William Blake, Lord Byron, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Wade, William Wordsworth

Best Victorian poets (1837-1901): Matthew Arnold, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, John Clare, Arthur Hugh Clough, Ernest Dowson, Thomas Hardy, Felicia Dorothea Hemans, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Walter Savage Landor, Edward Lear, George Meredith, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson

Best Georgian poets (1901-1936): W. B. Yeats (Nobel Prize 1923), Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Charlotte Mew, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Rudyard Kipling (Nobel Prize 1907), Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon

Best Modern English poets and British/UK poets (1936-): Simon Armitage, W. H. Auden, John Betjeman, Basil Bunting, Wendy Cope, Noel Coward, Donald Davie, Keith Douglas, Ann Drysdale, T. S. Eliot (Nobel Prize 1948), William Empson, Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, Robert Graves, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Doris Lessing (Nobel Prize 2007), C. Day Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Mina Loy, Walter de la Mare, Alfred Noyes, Harold Pinter (Nobel Prize 2005), F. T. Prince, Henry Reed, Stevie Smith

Best French poets: Antoinette Du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Charles Baudelaire, Bertran de Born, André Breton, René Char, Anatole France (Nobel Prize 1921), Christine de Pisan, Victor Hugo, Jean de La Fontaine, Jules Laforgue, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean de Meun (esp. Part II of The Romance of the Rose), Frédéric Mistral (Nobel Prize 1904), Molière, Jacques Prévert, Pierre Reverdy, Pierre de Ronsard, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valery, Paul Verlaine, Francois Villon, Voltaire

Best German poets: Rose Ausländer, Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Stefan George, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gunter Grass (Nobel Prize 1999), Heinrich Heine, Hermann Hesse (Nobel Prize 1946), Paul von Heyse (Nobel Prize 1910), Hildegard of Bingen, Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike, Lisel Mueller, Herta Müller, Novalis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nelly Sachs (Nobel Prize 1966), Friedrich Schiller, Angelus Silesius, Theodor Storm

Best Greek poets (also see Best ancient Greek poets): Constantine P. Cavafy, Vasiliki “Kiki” Dimoula, Odysseas Elytis, Yiannis Ritsos, George Seferis (Nobel Prize 1963), Angelos Sikelianos

Best Hebrew poets and Israeli poets: Yehuda Amichai, Dalia Ravikovitch, Adi Wolfson

Best Hungarian poets: Endre Ady, János Arany, Attila József, Ferenc Juhasz, Sándor Márai, Sándor Petőfi, Miklós Radnóti

Best Indian poets: Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Prize 1913), Mirza Ghalib, Gulzar, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sarojini Naidu (“the Nightingale of India”), Kabir, Kalidasa, Amir Khusrow, Subramania Bharati, Mahadevi Varma, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Sujata Bhatt

Best Indonesian poets: Chairil Anwar, Toeti Heraty, W. S. Rendra

Best Irish poets: Amergin, Samuel Beckett (Nobel Prize 1969), Eavan Boland, Ethna Carbery, Seamus Cassidy aka Jim McManmon, Austin Clarke, George Darley, Seamus Heaney (Nobel Prize 1995), James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, Thomas Kinsella, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Derek Mahon, Martin Mc Carthy, John Montague, Thomas Moore, Paul Muldoon, Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats (Nobel Prize 1923)

Best Italian/Latin/Roman poets: Apuleius, The Archpoet, Ludovico Ariosto, Julia Balbilla, Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, Giovanni Boccaccio, Boethius, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Tommaso Campanella, Catullus, Guido Cavalcanti, Giosuè Carducci (Nobel Prize 1906), Dante, Guido Guinizzelli, Horace, Juvenal, Leonardo da Vinci, Primo Levi, Lucan, Lucretius, Martial, Michelangelo, Eugenio Montale (Nobel Prize 1975), Ovid, Petronius, Propertius, Seneca, Statius, Sulpicia, Torquato Tasso, Virgil

Best Jamaican poets: Louise Bennett-Coverley, Claude McKay, Lorna Goodison, Mervyn Morris, Claudia Rankine

Best Japanese poets: Matsuo Basho, Yosa Buson, Fukuda Chiyo-ni, Kobayashi Issa, Ono no Komachi, Masaoka Shiki

Best Korean poets: Ko Un, Han Kang (Nobel Prize 2024), Hwang Chini aka Hwang Jini, Yun Dong-ju aka Yun Tongju

Best Latino poets and Hispanic poets: Richard Blanco, Jorge Luis Borges, Julia de Burgos, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Rubén Darío, Federico García Lorca, José Martí, Gabriela Mistral (Nobel Prize 1945), Pablo Neruda (Nobel Prize 1971), Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz (Nobel Prize 1990), Luis Omar Salinas, César Vallejo

Best Nigerian poets: Chinua Achebe, Toyin Adewale-Gabriel, Christopher Okigbo, Niyi Osundare, Wole Soyinka (Nobel Prize 1986)

Best Norwegian poets: Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Nobel Prize 1903), Jon Fosse (Nobel Prize 2023), Henrik Ibsen, Jonas Lie

Best Polish poets: Zbigniew Herbert, Yala Korwin, Bronisław Maj, Adam Mickiewicz, Czesław Miłosz (Nobel Prize 1980), Wisława Szymborska (Nobel Prize 1996), Olga Tokarczuk (Nobel Prize 2018), Adam Zagajewski

Best Portuguese poets: Eugénio de Andrade, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Luís de Camões, Florbela Espanca, Antònio Ferreira, Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago (Nobel Prize 1998)

Best Rappers: The Notorious B.I.G., Drake, Eminem, Lauryn Hill, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, Nicki Minaj, Nas, Tupac Shakur aka 2Pac and Pac, Lil Wayne

Best Roman poets and Latin language poets: Catullus, Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Lucan, Martial, Ovid, Propertius, Seneca, Statius, Sulpicia, Tibulus, Virgil, Thomas Campion, Gildas, Andrew Marvell, John Milton

Best Romanian poets: Tudor Arghezi, George Bacovia, Lucian Blaga, Paul Celan, Mihai Eminescu, Eugène Ionesco, Herta Müller (Nobel Prize 2009), Nichita Stănescu, Tristan Tzara

Best Russian poets and Soviet Union poets: Bella Akhmadulina, Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Blok, Joseph Brodsky (Nobel Prize 1987), Afanasy Fet, Velemir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Lermontov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Nekrasov, Boris Pasternak (Nobel Prize 1958), Vera Pavlova, Alexander Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Fyodor Tyutchev, Sergei Yesenin

Best Scottish poets: John Barbour (esp. The Bruce), Robert Burns, John Davidson, Gavin Douglas, Carol Ann Duffy, William Dunbar, Saint Gildas the Wise, Stephen Hawes, Robert Henryson, Kathleen Jamie, Hugh MacDiarmid, James Macpherson (Ossian forgeries), Edwin Morgan, Edwin Muir, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, James Thomson

Best Spanish and Spanish language poets: Diego de San Pedro (Spain), Juan Ramon Jimenez (Spain, Nobel Prize 1921), Fray Luis de León (Spain), Federico Garcia Lorca (Spain), Lope de Vega (Spain), Luis de Góngora (Spain), Antonio Machado (Spain), Gabriela Mistral (Chile, Nobel Prize 1945), Pablo Neruda (Chile, Nobel Prize 1971), Octavio Paz (Mexico, Nobel Prize 1990), St. John of the Cross (Spain), George Santayana (Spain/US), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Spain)

Best Swedish poets: Dan Andersson, Karin Boye, Nelly Sachs (Nobel Prize 1966), Edith Södergran, August Strindberg, Tomas Tranströmer (Nobel Prize 2011)

Best Turkish poets: Yahya Kemal Beyatlı aka Yahya Kemal, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Nazim Hikmet, Attilâ İlhan, Rumi

Best Ukrainian poets: Natalka Bilotserkivets, Nikolai Gogol, Lina Kostenko, Mixa Kozimirenko, Taras Shevchenko, Lesya Ukrainka

Best Urdu poets: Amjad Islam Amjad, Jaun Elia, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Ahmad Faraz, Nida Fazli, Mirza Ghalib, Gulzar, Rahat Indori, Sir Muhammad Iqbal aka Allama Iqbal, Ada Jafri, Nasir Kazmi, Amir Khusrow, Mir Taqi Mir, Parveen Shakir

Best Welsh poets: Dannie Abse, Gillian Clarke, W. H. Davies, Dafydd ap Gwilym, David Jones, Alun Lewis, Owen Sheers, Dylan Thomas, Taliesin, R. S. Thomas, Henry Vaughan, Waldo Williams, Hedd Wyn

Best West Indies/Caribbean poets: Edward Kamau Braithwaite (Jamaica), Louise Bennett-Coverley (Jamaica), Claude McKay (Jamaica’s national poet and an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance), Claudia Rankine (Barbados), Derek Walcott (St. Lucia, Nobel Prize 1992)

Best Translators: George Chapman (Homer), Arthur Golding (Ovid), W. S. Merwin (Neruda), Ambrose Philips (Sappho), Alexander Pope (Homer), Ezra Pound (Li Bai), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Dante), W. B. Yeats (Ronsard)

Poetic Power Couples: Robert Browning and his wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning; William Cavendish, the first Duke of Newcastle, and his wife Margaret Cavendish; Albert Dorn and his wife Anita Dorn; Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes; Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, Christina Rossetti and her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein); Sir Philip Sidney and his sister Mary Sidney; twin brothers Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan, William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth

THE BEST LOVE POEMS

• “Voyages (I-VI)” by Hart Crane

• “Music When Soft Voices Die (To —)” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

• “To Earthward” by Robert Frost

• “Song for the Last Act” by Louise Bogan

• “Bread and Music” by Conrad Aiken

• “Whoso List to Hunt” and “They Flee from Me” by Sir Thomas Wyatt

• “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

• “She Walks in Beauty (Like the Night)” by Lord Byron

• “The Lovemaker” by Robert Mezey

• “Allayne” and “It Is Too Late” by Kevin N. Roberts

THE BEST STORY POEMS

• “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes is the most musical poem and the best poetic ghost story in the English language, in my opinion.

THE BEST DARK POEMS

• “Acquainted with the Night” by Robert Frost

• “In the Dark Season” and “Depths” by Richard Thomas Moore

THE BEST ELEGIES

• “Requiscat” by Oscar Wilde

THE BEST SOCIAL COMMENTARY POEMS

• “Punishment” by Seamus Heaney

• “Advice for Winston” and “Leitmotif” by Tom Merrill

THE BEST POETS BY GENRE

The best Aphoristic Poets:

La Tzu (in the Tao Te Ching), Desiderius Erasmus, William Blake, Goethe, Kahlil Gibran (esp. in The Prophet), Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Ambrose Bierce, Wallace Stevens, Ludwig Hohl, James Richardson, Søren Kierkegaard (a “poetic” philosopher)

By aphoristic poets, I mean those known for distilling complex ideas into simple, concise statements or epigrams.

The best Avant-Garde Poets:

Guillaume Apollinaire, e. e. cummings, Gertrude Stein, Dylan Thomas (see also Modernist, Post-Modernist, Objectivist, Surrealist and Symbolist Poets)

The best Confessional Poets aka the Confessionals:

John Berryman, Jericho Brown, Emily Dickinson, Carolyn Forché, Robert Lowell, Richard Thomas Moore (author of The Mouse Whole), Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Sappho (the first great confessional poet a mere 2,500 years ahead of her time), W. D. Snodgrass, Ocean Vuong, Walt Whitman

The best Didactic Poets and Direct Statement Poets:

Emily Dickinson, A. E. Housman, Tom Merrill, Milton, Sir Walter Ralegh (esp. “The Lie”), Sappho, Shakespeare (esp. the sonnets and soliloquies)

By “direct statement” I mean poets saying what they mean directly, without relying on imagery and/or metaphor. Such poets prove “no ideas but in things is nonsense” and that imagery and metaphor are options for poets, not requirements.

English Movement Poets:

Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain

The English Movement Poets wrote largely in reaction to what they perceived as the “over-emotionalism,” “romanticism” and “imprecision” of Dylan Thomas. But none of them captured the attention of the public like Thomas, and they are mostly forgotten today, except for Larkin and perhaps Gunn, but who can recite any of Gunn’s poems by heart?

The best Fabulist Poets:

Aesop, Jean de La Fontaine, Edward Lear, the anonymous poets of Mother Goose

The best Gnomic Poets:

Demodocus, Euenus, Phocylides, Simonides of Amorgos, Solon, Theognis and Xenophanes. Among more modern poets: Rumi, William Blake and Emily Dickinson.

The best Gothic Poets:

Edgar Allan Poe (esp. “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee” and “The Haunted Palace”), Charles Baudelaire (The Flowers of Evil), John Keats (esp. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” and “The Eve of St Agnes”), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (esp. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”), Lord Byron (esp. “Darkness”), Christina Rossetti (esp. “Goblin Market”), Alfred Tennyson (esp. “Mariana”), William Blake, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Emily Bronte, Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Butler Yeats

The best Early Humanist Poets and Writers:

Cicero, Petrarch (the “Father of Humanism” rediscovered Cicero’s lost Pro Archia and Letters to Atticus), Giovanni Boccaccio, Coluccio Salutati, Desiderius Erasmus, Sir Thomas More (Utopia), John Skelton (a “renegade humanist”), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire

The most influential Poets on human societies:

William Blake and Walt Whitman first, as co-equals, followed by Sappho, Lao Tzu, Voltaire, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Langston Hughes. With a nod to activist singer-songwriters like Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, John Lennon, Joni Mitchell and Pete Seeger.

The best Instagram Poets, InstaPoets, Twitter Poets/X-Poets and other Social Media Poets and Online Poets:

Atticus (one million Instagram followers), Kate Baer, Brian Bilston (the “Poet Laureate of Twitter”), Upile Chisala, R. M. Drake (two million Instagram followers), Nikita Gill, Amanda Gorman, Tyler Knott Gregson, Rupi Kaur (four million Instagram followers), Austin Kleon, Lang Leav, Amanda Lovelace, R. H. Sin, Maggie Smith, Ocean Vuong, Cleo Wade, Nayyirah Waheed, Najwa Zebian

The best Juvenile Poets:

Famous juvenile writers include Jane Austen, Marshall Ball, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Robert Burns, George Gordon (Lord Byron), Lewis Carroll, Thomas Chatterton, John Clare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Congreve, Abraham Cowley, William Cowper, e. e. cummings, Digby Dolben, John Dryden, Arthur Henry Hallam, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt, John Keats, John Milton, Thomas Moore, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope, Christina Rossetti, Robert Southey, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth

The best Love Poets:

Catullus, Charles d’Orleans, Hart Crane, e. e. cummings, Ono no Komachi, Sappho, Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Renee Vivien, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Tzu Yeh

The best Metaphysical Poets:

John Donne, John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, Edward Herbert, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Edward Taylor, Thomas Traherne, Henry Vaughan, Edmund Waller

The best Modernist Poets:

Hart Crane, H.D., T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats

The best Narrative Poets:

Chaucer, Dante, Homer, Milton, Shakespeare, Virgil

The best Nature Poets:

Aesop, Li Bai, Matsuo Basho, Elizabeth Bishop, John Clare, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Kobayashi Issa, Robinson Jeffers, John Keats, Marianne Moore, Mary Oliver, Gary Snyder, F. F. Teague, William Wordsworth

The best Non-Nobel-Winning Poets:

The greatest eligible poets not to win a Nobel Prize include W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorge Luis Borges, Constantine Cavafy, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, James Joyce, Federico Garcia Lorca, Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens and Dylan Thomas.

The best Objectivist Poets:

Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky

The best Postmodern Poets:

John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Bukowski, Italo Calvino, Bob Dylan, Louise Erdrich, Allen Ginsberg, Jorie Graham, Christopher Isherwood, John Lennon, Czesław Miłosz, Nicanor Parra, Adrienne Rich, Charles Simic

The best Religious Poets and Spiritual Poets:

John Donne, George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, St. John of the Cross, Hafez, Rumi, Henry Vaughan

The best Romantic Poets:

William Blake, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, Thomas Chatterton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Gray, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, W. B. Yeats

The best New Romantic Poets or Neo-Romantic Poets:

Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, Carmen Willcox, Mary Rae, Michael R. Burch

The best School of Night Poets:

George Chapman, Thomas Harriot, Christopher Marlowe, Henry Percy the Ninth Earl of Northumberland, Sir Walter Ralegh, Matthew Roydon

The best Storyteller Poets:

Lewis Carroll, Chaucer, Road Dahl, Eminem, Homer, Milton, Alfred Noyes, Shakespeare, Virgil

The best Surrealist Poets:

Louis Aragon, John Ashbery, André Breton (author of the Surrealist Manifesto), Aimé Césaire, Robert Desnos, Paul Éluard, David Gascoyne, Comte de Lautréamont, Joyce Mansour, James Tate, Octavio Paz, Valentine Penrose, Benjamin Péret, Tristan Tzara

The best Symbolist Poets:

Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Valery, Paul Verlaine

The best Vorticist Poets:

Richard Aldington, T. S. Eliot (briefly), Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis (the central figure but more a painter and writer than a poet), Ezra Pound (briefly)

According to a Poetry Foundation article: “The Vorticist movement ended three years after it began, when many of its members were called to serve in World War I. An alignment with aspects of Fascism also contributed to the movement’s early end.”

The best War Poets and Anti-War Poets:

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon

The best Poet-Critics:

Matthew Arnold, Louise Bogan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Dryden, T. S. Eliot, William Empson, Randall Jarrell, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Edgar Allan Poe, John Crowe Ransom, Adrienne Rich, Edgell Rickword, Susan Sontag, Allen Tate, Edward Thomas, Robert Penn Warren, William Butler Yeats

Poets who gave up writing poetry:

Matthew Arnold (stopped writing poetry when he could no longer “convey joy”), Charles Bukowski (gave up poetry for ten years during which he drank heavily), Michael R. Burch (gave up poetry for around a decade to hustle pool), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (gave up writing poetry to focus on criticism), William Faulkner (gave up poetry to write fiction), Arthur Rimbaud (gave up poetry to become a gunrunner!)

Poets who committed suicide:

John Berryman, Paul Celan, Thomas Chatterton, Hart Crane, Arthur Cravan, Randall Jarrell, Vachel Lindsay, Lucan, Gérard de Nerval, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sara Teasdale, Edward Thomas, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetaeva

FAMOUS FIRSTS

Enheduanna, an ancient Sumerian priestess and poetess who lived circa 2285 BC, is the first poet we know by name as well as the first creator of a poetry anthology and probably the first librarian as well. Enheduanna also wrote the first anti-war poem, “Lament to the Spirit of War,” which I have translated.

Christine de Pisan/Pizan (1364 - c. 1430) was Europe’s first professional woman of letters and the first to have poems published via the newfangled printing press.

Juliana Berners, born circa 1388, appears to be the first Englishwoman we can name who wrote verse, published in the The Boke of Saint Albans, a collection of rhyming poems about hunting, hawking and angling.

Johan Gutenberg invented the printing press, with his first printed book being the Mazarin Bible (1450-1455).

William Caxton was the first English printer of books, working from 1473 to 1491, prior to Columbus’s discovery of the New World. Caxton published more than a hundred books, around a third of them being his own translations, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virgil’s Aeneid and the first English translation of Aesop’s Fables. In addition to his own work, Caxton published Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, John Lydgate, Christine de Pisan and Sir Thomas Malory, among others. English book publishers who followed in Caxton’s footsteps included the delightfully named Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) was, in my opinion, the first great English lyric poet and the first modern English poet, for poems like “They Flee from Me” and “Whoso List to Hunt.”

According to Michael Schmidt, ancient ballads were the first form of journalism, a way of passing news, often subversive (pardon the pun) from community to community.

TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS ENGLISH POETIC SCHOOLS, PERIODS AND LANDMARKS

Many of the dates are approximate…

2285 BC — Enheduanna, daughter of King Sargon the Great, may be the first named poet in human history, for prayers and hymns such as The Exaltation of Inanna.

2100 BC — The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh appears to be the earth’s oldest extant major poem and the first great work of literature.

1268 BC — This is Robert Graves’ date for the Celtic Song of Amergin, but dating oral works of the Prehistoric Period seems iffy to me.

800 BC — Possible date for Homer, author of the epic poems Odyssey and Iliad, and the beginning of Classical Greek Poetry.

600 BC — Sappho of Lesbos is the first great lyric poet we know by name.

484 BC — Aeschylus wins first prize for tragedy at the City Dionysia in Athens. Sophocles wins in 468, Euripides in 441, Aristophanes in 425. Talk about tough competition!

55 BC — Julius Caesar invades Britain; the Anglo-Roman Period (55 BC-410 AD) makes Latin the language of rulers, clergy and scholars. Which is fortunate because there is no written English at this time!

20 BC — The height of Roman poetry with Horace, Ovid and Virgil all active.

All subsequent dates are AD.

200 — The oldest runic inscriptions, the Elder Futhark, give Germanic tribes a form of writing that their English descendants will inherit.

410 — Visigoths sack Rome and the Roman legions depart Britain, leading to the Anglo-Saxon Period or Old English Period (410-1066). Anglo-Saxons begin invading England, which will take its name from the Angles as the lingo becomes more Germanic. Anglo-Saxon scops create oral poetry like Beowulf and my personal favorite, “Wulf and Eadwacer,” which I have translated.

“Anglo-Saxon literature is the oldest of the vernacular literatures of modern Europe.” — John Earle, the Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford

Evidently, Anglo-Saxon scops, or minstrel-poets, brought their lyres with them, as the oldest lyres found in England date to around this period. The Anglo-Saxon term for the lyre was hearpe, the source of our modern word “harp.” We know from Anglo-Saxon literature that scops would literally “sing for their supper” and compete for rings, torcs and other prizes. Anglo-Saxon lyres could be fine musical instruments: for instance, some were made of maple wood with a soundboard of thin oak and a wrist-strap for two-handed playing. The Museum of London Archaeology describes the Anglo-Saxon lyre as the most important stringed instrument of the ancient world. If you see a busker playing a guitar and passing around a hat for tips, you are seeing someone carrying on an ancient Anglo-Saxon tradition.

He sits with his harp at his Thane’s feet,
earning his hire, his rewards of rings,
sweeping the strings with his skillful nail;
his hall-mates smile at the sweet song he sings.
—loose translation by Michael R. Burch

658 — “Caedmon’s Hymn,” the oldest known English poem, marks the beginning of English poetry (although it was still largely Germanic).

680 — Possible early date for the composition of the epic poem Beowulf, a masterpiece of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and Widsith.

1066 — William the Conqueror invades and rules England; the Norman Conquest begins the Anglo-Norman Period or Middle English Period (1066-1340). In one fell swoop, English becomes a peasant language. The elites will speak French and write in French, Greek and/or Latin.

1086 — King William commissions the Domesday Book, written in Latin, to catalog his English holdings.

1096 — Teaching begins at Oxford. French and Latin are the primary languages of rulers, clergy, scholars and fashionable poets.

1340 — The birth of Geoffrey Chaucer, the first major vernacular English poet; thus begins the Late Middle English Period (1340-1500).

1350 — An “alliterative revival” is led by the Gawain poet with Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness.

1362 — The Statute of Pleading replaces French with English as the language of law; English is used in Parliament for the first time.

1399 — Henry IV is the first English-speaking monarch since before the Norman Conquest!

1476 — William Caxton prints Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the first book published in England with moveable type.

1485 — The Tudor Period (1457-1603) ends the Middle Ages; English rules Henry VII’s court; England now speaks Early Modern English!

1503 — Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard introduce the sonnet, iambic pentameter and blank verse, in the English Renaissance (1500-1558).

1517 — Martin Luther publishes his 95 theses against the Roman Catholic Church, kick-starting the Protestant Reformation.

1532 — The English Reformation (1532-1649) has poets at war: some support the Pope, others the crown.

1552 — The birth of Edmund Spenser, the creator of the modern English style of poetry: “fluid, limpid, translucent and graceful.”

1558 — The Elizabethan Period (1558-1603) is a golden age with Spenser, Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

1572 — The birth of John Donne, the major poet of the Metaphysical Period (1572-1695); others were George Herbert, Henry Vaughn and Andrew Marvell.

1579 — Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender has been called “the first work of the English literary Renaissance.”

1591 — The birth of Robert Herrick, the first and best poet of the Cavalier Period (1591-1674); others were Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling and Thomas Carew.

1603 — The Jacobean/Carolinian/Interregnum/Restoration Period (1603-1690) sees the King James Bible, with early English free verse such as the poetic Song of Solomon, along with Shakespeare’s plays and Milton’s epic poems.

1690 — The Augustan Period (1690-1756) is marked by the sophisticated but not always satisfying work of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, John Gay, Jonathan Swift and Dr. Samuel Johnson. Too many overconfident clicking couplets spouting “wisdom” that turned out to be less than wise.

1742 — Thomas Gray begins writing his masterpiece, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, a major work of early English Romanticism.

1757 — William Blake kicks off the English Romantic Period (1757-1837) with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. To the stars of the Romantic Movement I would add Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton and Robert Burns, widely considered to be the greatest Scottish poet.

1836 — Ralph Waldo Emerson founds the Transcendental Club, which includes Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott.

1837 — The Victorian Period (1837-1901) is led by Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Clare, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

1848 — The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1882) is founded by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; aligned poets include William Morris, Christina Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

1857 — Charles Baudelaire publishes Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) and describes himself as “decadent.” The Decadents were a group of late 19th-century poets, writers and artists whose work explored themes of decay, intense sensation, and the darker aspects of human experience. The Decadents included Baudelaire, Aubrey Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Arthur Symons and Oscar Wilde.

1855 — Walt Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass, a landmark work of Early Modernism (1855-1901) that rocks the Victorians to their whalebone corsets!

1867 — Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach has been called a masterpiece of Early Modernism.

1871 — The birth of Stephen Crane. He would write poems and prose in a minimalist or “spare” style that would influence modernist writers like Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg.

1888 — T. S. Eliot, a major Modernist poet and critic, is born.

1890 — Fin-de-siècle (1890-1900) poets influenced by the French Symbolists include W. B. Yeats, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

1901 — The Edwardian/Georgian Period (1901-1936) is brief but fecund with W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling.

1909 — Two T. E. Hulme poems begin the modernist movement called Imagism (1909-1919); its leading poets and critics would be Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

1919 — The Harlem Renaissance (1919-1940) was led by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and James Weldon Jones. Paul Dunbar was a major influence.

1920 — The Neo-Romantics (1920-Present) include Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Kevin N. Roberts, Michael Pendragon, Carmen Willcox, Mary Rae and Michael R. Burch.

1922 — The Fugitives (1922-1925) aka the Agrarians were led by John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, Merrill Moore and Donald Davidson. Poets associated with the Fugitives and/or published by them include Randall Jarrell and Laura Riding.

1943 — The Beats (1940-Present) include Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Thomas Raine Crowe and Jack Foley.

1950 — The San Francisco Renaissance Poets (1950-Present) include Kenneth Rexroth, Madeline Gleason, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser.

1950 — The Confessionals (1950-1977) included Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, W. D. Snodgrass, Sharon Olds and Richard Thomas Moore.

1950 — The New York School (1950-Present) includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, Barbara Guest, James Schuyler, and currently Alice Notley and Kimiko Hahn.

1950 — Charles Olson calls Pound and other Imagists “inferior predecessors” and creates a new school of poetry, Projectivism (1950-1960).

1985 — The New Formalists (1985-Present) include Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Dana Gioia, X. J. Kennedy, Richard Thomas Moore, Rhina Espaillat, R. S. Gwynn, A. E. Stallings, Jared Carter and Michael R. Burch.

1901 — Leading voices of Modernism and Postmodernism (1901-Present) include Conrad Aiken, Maya Angelou, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Louise Bogan, e. e. cummings, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, D. H. Lawrence, Federico Garcia Lorca, Robert Lowell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Pablo Neruda, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur and William Carlos Williams. Outstanding singer-songwriters include Adele, Leonard Cohen, Sam Cooke, Bob Dylan, Eminem, Woody Guthrie, Michael Jackson, Carole King, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Willie Nelson, Prince, Smokey Robinson, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen and Hank Williams Sr. There are many other very worthy names, so anyone who says that poetry is “dead” or “dying” is obviously just not listening! Other labels applied to poets and/or poetry in modern times include: Language Poets, Deep Image, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism, Expressionism, Orphism, Purism, Dadism, Constructivism, Objectivism and other -isms too numerous (and obscure) to name.

APPENDIX A: MY CONSENSUS RANKINGS

I have based my consensus expert rankings on the opinions of anthologists and literary critics.

In consulting anthologies, I pay attention to which poets have the most poems and the most pages.

The expert sources I considered include:

The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies (more on this shortly).

The Norton Anthology of Poetry

Michael Schmidt in Lives of the Poets.

William Harmon in his anthologies.

• Harmon is especially good for my purposes here, because he based his The Top 500 Poems on how many times poems had been previously anthologized.

• Harmon’s top poets, based on their number of anthologized poems, are: William Shakespeare (29), John Donne (19), William Blake (18), Emily Dickinson (14), William Butler Yeats (14), William Wordsworth (13), Gerard Manley Hopkins (12), Alfred Tennyson (11), Thomas Hardy (11), Robert Frost (11), John Keats (11), Ben Jonson (9), Percy Bysshe Shelley (8), Robert Herrick (8), George Herbert (8), Andrew Marvell (8), A. E. Housman (7), Robert Browning (7), Wallace Stevens (6), Robert Burns (6), Lord Byron (6), T. S. Eliot (6), John Milton (6), E. A. Robinson (6), Ralph Waldo Emerson (6), Walt Whitman (5) and Sir Philip Sidney (5).

• However, my copy of The Top 500 Poems is dated 1992 and the youngest poet included is Sylvia Plath, so I have had to adjust my rankings for the better contemporary poets and non-English poets.

Harold Bloom, particularly in his anthology The Best Poems of the English Language.

• Harold Bloom’s “most major” poets, as far as I can determine, include, with the number of poems and pages in parens: Shakespeare (24/23), Emily Dickinson (20/26), William Blake (11/20), Wallace Stevens (11/17), John Keats (10/27), William Wordsworth (10/27), Alfred Tennyson (9/44), Walt Whitman (8/47), Percy Bysshe Shelley (8/28), Robert Frost (8/7), D. H. Lawrence (7/15), Hart Crane (7/16), John Milton (6/40), Edmund Spenser (6/35), Christina Rossetti (6/10), William Butler Yeats (6/7), Andrew Marvell (5/10), John Donne (5/7), Thomas Hardy (5/4), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (4/35), T. S. Eliot (4/19), Homer, Virgil and Dante.

• Shakespeare and Dickinson have the most poems, Whitman the most pages.

• For me the biggest surprises were that Tennyson had so many pages and Yeats so few.

• On the other hand, after calling John Ashbery and A. R. Ammons major poets, Bloom left them out of his anthology.

I also consider my own wide-ranging readings of literary criticism about non-English-language poets.

According to The Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry in Anthologies, prominent poems that consistently rank highly and/or are frequently anthologized include:

• “To Autumn” by John Keats (the new #1 most anthologized poem)

• “The Tyger” by William Blake (the longtime #1 most anthologized poem and quite possibly the most-read poem of all time)

• “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Laurence Dunbar

• “Birches” and “The Gift Outright” by Robert Frost

• “Sestina” and “The Armadillo” by Elizabeth Bishop

• “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

• “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” and by Sylvia Plath, who has four of the top 20 most anthologized poems by a contemporary American poet, the others being “The Colossus” and “Ariel.” The four poems are, respectively, number 2, 5, 19 and 20.

• “For the Union Dead” and “Skunk Hour” by Robert Lowell

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

• “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams

According to a Poetry Foundation article, the most-anthologized poems, in order, are:

1. “Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats

2. “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

3. “To Autumn” by John Keats, giving him two of the top three!

4. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe

5. “The Tyger” by William Blake, which consistently shows up in the top five.

6. “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning

7. “Love (III)” by George Herbert

8. “Because I could not stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson

9. “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy

10. “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell

11. Sonnet 63: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…” by William Shakespeare

12. “Ulysses” by Alfred Tennyson

13. “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats, giving him three of the top thirteen

14. Lycidas by John Milton

15. Sonnet 116: ““Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments…” by William Shakespeare, giving him two of the top fifteen.

16. “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

17. “London” by William Blake, giving him two of the top seventeen.

18. “Ode to the West Wind” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

19. “Go, Lovely Rose” by Edmund Waller

20. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot

If you disagree with my consensus rankings, please let me know why in the comments and I will consider revising the consensus ranking.

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