Who are your favorite and least favorite poets and why?

Question

My favorite is E.E. Cummings because of the way he treated the English language and its grammatical constructions totally differently than anyone else ever has, and my least favorite is Robert Frost because to me his poetry seems to be nothing more than shallow metaphor.

Answer 1

Did you know that less than 2% of the American population reads poetry? I am an e.e. cummings fan, what with his swinging lines: "how do you like your blue-eyed boy mr. death?/ the moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy/etc." but he is not my favorite.

I am interested in Pound as well, rakish, jolting around Paris, ending up in a madhouse... But I haven't the time to read his Cantos, so he is not my favorite either.

So far, my favorite poet is John Shade. This is a cheating answer, because, though the best of poets with true moral fibre, he is fictional and belongs to a favored book.

My least favorite poet is probably T.S. Eliot (toilets, rearranged), because his wasteland of words and conversion to Anglicanism is too much to redeem his happy peach and toast meals for me.

Answer 2

The nice thing about favorites is that they can change from day to day, depending on how you're feeling and what you're thinking on any given day.

I'm into e.e. cummings too. Probably my favorite poem of his begins,

Pity this busy monster man(un)kind not;
progress is a comfortable disease.

My favorite living poet is Billy Collins. He personally believes that poetry should be ACCESSIBLE, understandable to all readers, not just the academic elite. Here's what he says, "As I'm writing, I'm always reader conscious. I have one reader in mind, someone who is in the room with me, and who I'm talking to, and I want to make sure I don't talk too fast, or too glibly. Usually I try to create a hospitable tone at the beginning of a poem. Stepping from the title to the first lines is like stepping into a canoe. A lot of things can go wrong." (See Wikipedia.)

Any of his books are fresh and engaging; for example, TheTrouble with Poetry; Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning.

When he was Poet Laureate (one of our best), he was determined to bring accessible poetry to the attention of everyone, so he put together a collection of poems by many contemporary poets, entitled 180 Poems, one brief poem to be read aloud each day of the school year (over a school intercom, for example). It was so popular that he did another one, 180 More Poems. These collections, like Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, have something for everybody, whether they consider themselves readers of poetry or not.

Go back a generation, and I would choose, among others, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Ferlinghetti is associated with the Beat Generation, and his City Lights bookstore became a mecca for new poets, many of whom were discovered after their readings there. Though I have several of his books, my favorite one is still Coney Island of the Mind. I like just about every selection in that one.

Here's how he describes the work of the poet:

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of the day
performing entrachats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence

I can't think of a better way to describe my favorite poets than as little charleychaplin men hoping to catch the fair eternal form of Beauty.

Least favorite? I don't take time to remember those. But the ones I don't like most are those academic poets whose purpose seems to be to write something nobody else can understand but themselves. They get jobs at universities and write strictly for each other and serve on committees that give each other awards. I can't think of any of their names right now 'cause I've blocked them from my memory. Just call them T. S. Eliot Wannabe.

Answer 3

Favorite poet: Mr. John Keats, five feet high. Because he more than anyone else understood the importance of the poetic imagination...because he wanted to do something good for the world, and he succeeded.

Least favorite...well I despise Whitman...he gushes too much. And I'm not much of a cummings fan because while incredibly original, he never really said anything mind-blowing. He basically uses words to paint physical pictures first, and metaphorical pictures second. I also am not a big fan of Ted Hughes. Again, Ted had talent--no doubt. But his use of that talent to me reflects the kind of...evil...that we saw in his personal life. Plath describes him as "an Aryan man with a mein kamph look, and a love for the rack and the screw." We don't know much more about Hughes from Plath because after her suicide, her loving husband burned her journals.

That poem by Billy Collins listed above is AWFUL. He should be ashamed. I think it's one thing to dislike excessively constricting forms (his parodelle is a riot), but it is quite another to have no reason for your form whatever.

Answer 4

That's interesting

Answer 5

I too like e.e. cummings because his words flow in sort of a subconscious way. I hate Emily Dickinson because all of her poems can be sung to the tune of "The Yellow Rose of Texas". Try it sometime.

Answer 6

Here's the list of my favourite poets:

PABLO NERUDA
Universally considered as one of the greatest and most influential poets of the 20th century. I like his works because it accomplished a wide variety of styles, ranging from erotically charged love poems, surrealist poems, historical epics, and even overtly political manifestos. I especially loved his work, IL Postino, which was later on turned into a film.

E. E. CUMMINGS
Much like you, I like him for his avant garde poetic style and unusual typography. His works often deals with themes of love and nature, as well as satire and the relationship of the individual to the masses and to the world, which is something we all could relate to.

JIM MORRISON
The lead singer and lyricist of the rock band The Doors. Considered to be one of the most charismatic frontmen in the history of rock music. As a poet, I consider Jim's works as full of mysticism. The Doors indeed wed rock music unlike any ever heard before with poetry and with a hybrid of theater and drama.

Answer 7

I have too many favorites to list here, from Wallace Stevens to Leonard Cohen to T S Eliot to many more.

It's not that I have least favorites because I wouldn't bother reading poets I didn't like. But I have a list of over-rated poets.

Answer 8

I agree about Robert Frost. I personally enjoy the works of Jesse Lacey and Conor Oberst.

Answer 9

least favorite? Whitman. the man rambles on and on and never does make a point, lol.

favorite - i like Dickinson (most of her works), but i love George Gordon, Lord Byron. his poems were generally amusing, quite lyrical, but had a point when you cared to look. and i also like some of Poe's poetry.

one of my favorite poems, tho, is my Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "the pains of sleep."

so yeah.... favorite is hard to do, but mine seem to be pretty much stuff that's less well-liked, go figure.

Answer 10

Reading the publication instead of seeing the movie is the best way to see what the writer expected. Reading uses your thoughts, hones your reading skills, and can transform your vocabulary