Poetry Poll
Norm is having one of his regular polls, this time looking for your three favourite English language poets (not 'the best', thank goodness) but even so I'm not sure I have three favourites in the sense that I go to their work rather than to particular volumes or poems (with the possible exception of Hardy) but nevertheless:
and now it gets difficult to choose from:
Ted Hughes (for Birthday Letters)
Robert Frost
Ogden Nash
Rudyard Kipling (vastly underrated)
John Betjeman
Christopher Logue
e e cummings
John Milton
Derek Walcot
D H Lawrence
and of course Bob Dylan.
I suppose this is a strange mix.
I have only read Birthday Letters once - I did read it, from cover to cover soon after it was published and it made a huge impression on me, but it was so painful that I haven't been able to read it again.
I used to like much of Marianne Moore's work, but the the poem in BIrthday Letters about her and Sylvia Plath so destroyed my mental picture of her that I haven't read anything by her since.
Frost I have liked since O level - Apple picking, Mending wall, The road not taken etc - all read at 16 but unusually I wasn't put off.
I read Milton then too - Paradise Lost - and still dip into it at regular intervals. I am no more likely to finish than I was at 16, but I love the rolling, sonorous feel of it.
Nash is of course not a major poet but wonderful fun. cummings is I think a major writer, but his greatness is masked for many by the form he chooses.
My favourite poetry book (after Hardy's collected poems) is a collection called Conductors of Chaos, compiled by Ian Sinclair and if I was forced to choose in Desert Island Dics fashion it would probably be that rather than any particular writer. Having said that Logue's War Music series would be a close second.
My final three therefore:
Thomas Hardy
e e cummings
Robert Frost
Norm also asked for links to a favourite poem, so here is "The Revisitation" from Hardy
