I thought it would be interesting if everyone (1) listed their favourite poets and (2) provided a short poem from each of them. My reason is because although I don't read too much poetry (there's really only two poets I admire, who shall be listed here) it's always nice to discover the odd rhyme from time to time that grabs attention.

William Ernest Henley - Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.

Philip Larkin - This be the Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

As you can so, both very English poets; and "stiff upper lip" misery guts, lol. So who are you favourite poets?

"Invictus" is a wonderful poem.

My favorite poet is probably Thomas Hardy.

I personally prefer epic poetry over any other, and my favorite poet would have to be Dante. Even though I'm not religious, I still find the Divine Comedy to be amazing. Here's a short exerpt-

"Through me you pass into the city of woe:
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye.
Justice the founder of my fabric moved:
To rear me was the task of Power divine,
Supremest Wisdom, and primeval Love.
Before me things create were none, save things
Eternal, and eternal I endure.
Such characters, in color dim, I mark'd
All hope abandon, ye who enter here."

^(written on the gates of Hell)

If you want some good verses, I also like WB Yeats

The Second Coming-

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of "Spiritus Mundi"
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Kirby Doyle
E.E. Cummings
Denis Devlin
Anne Waldman
James K Baxter
Bob Kaufman
Charles Olson
Jack Kerouac

__________________
On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur.
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux

Ginsberg
Kerouac
Burroughs

I think there's something to be taken from every poem and every poet deserves a measure of respect for pouring themselves into words.

My favourite poet is Coleridge, but I enjoy a wide variety of poets. ee cummings and Whitman are noteworthy to me, at the moment, as well.

The man speaks to me on many levels in many of his works. Quite emotive and expressive.
http://etext.virginia.edu/stc/Coleri..._of_Sleep.html

I cannot advise on the poetry of cummings, there are so many better versed than I. It is a testiment to the man that he never fails to inspire me and a handful of my works are obviously inspired in and through him.
http://www.poemhunter.com/e-e-cummings/

In a poem such as this, one can find inspiration to act.
http://www.online-literature.com/wal...-of-grass/124/

I'm a big fan of William S. Burroughs, but I've never seen him write poetry... As for Kerouac, I always thought his poetry sucked. But Ginsberg is cool, however (I own the book "Howl" and love the poem called "A Supermarket in California).

Don't really have any favourites but live in Yeats' countryside and appreciate him and other Irish poets a lot. I also like Blake.

James Stephens - The Goat's Path

The crooked paths go every way
Upon the hill — they wind about
Through the heather in and out
Of the quiet sunniness.
And there the goats, day after day,
Stray in sunny quietness,
Cropping here and cropping there,
As they pause and turn and pass,
Now a bit of heather spray,
Now a mouthful of the grass.

In the deeper sunniness,
In the place where nothing stirs,
Quietly in quietness,
In the quiet of the furze,
For a time they come and lie
Staring on the roving sky.

If you approach they run away,
They leap and stare, away they bound,
With a sudden angry sound,
To the sunny quietude;
Crouching down where nothing stirs
In the silence of the furze,
Couching down again to brood
In the sunny solitude.

If I were as wise as they
I would stray apart and brood,
I would beat a hidden way
Through the quiet heather spray
To a sunny solitude;
And should you come I'd run away,
I would make an angry sound,
I would stare and turn and bound
To the deeper quietude,
To the place where nothing stirs
In the silence of the furze.

In that airy quietness
I would think as long as they;
Through the quiet sunniness
I would stray away to brood
By a hidden beaten way
In a sunny solitude.

I would think until I found
Something I can never find,
Something lying on the ground,
In the bottom of my mind.


Laurie Lee - Apples

Behold the apples’ rounded worlds:
juice-green of July rain,
the black polestar of flowers, the rind
mapped with its crimson stain.

The russet, crab and cottage red
burn to the sun’s hot brass,
then drop like sweat from every branch
and bubble in the grass.

They lie as wanton as they fall,
and where they fall and break,
the stallion clamps his crunching jaws,
the starling stabs his beak.

In each plump gourd the cidery bite
of boys’ teeth tears the skin;
the waltzing wasp consumes his share,
the bent worm enters in.

I, with as easy hunger, take
entire my season’s dole;
welcome the ripe, the sweet, the sour,
the hollow and the whole.

I couldnt possibley name a favorite poet, so I will pick a few that have written works I really connected with.

Robert Frost: Poetry snobs disdain this choice, but his words really reach to me. I read this poem, "Out, Out-" shortly after witnessing a suicide, and it struck me as being so very, very real.

Out, Out-
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behing the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them "Supper." At the word, the saw,
As if it meant to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. "Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!"
So. The hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the watcher at his pulse took a fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
The final line is really what captures it. The way the suicide (which was commited in school) left the thoughts and prayers of everyone over time. The "Rest in Peace" and "We will always remember" lines have disappeared from the AIM profiles and myspaces long ago. It feels sometimes only I remember.

Other Frost I like: "Aquainted with the Night".

So many poems, too little time. I will post another when my mood changes...

w00t!!