I love poetry but have a hard time finding some really good material?

Question

Can anyone recommend poets that have really good material?
Thanks

Answer 1

Edgar Allan Poe (a bit dark, but deep...)
- Dream Within a Dream
- Eldorado
- The Raven *** (most famous)
- To Helen

Maya Angelou
-On The Pulse of Morning
-Million Man March Poem
-Phenomenal Woman
-Recovery
-Equality

Robert Frost

Emily Dickinson

E. E. Cummings

Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends) simple and fun...

(Of Course...)
William Shakespeare

Answer 2

ENGLISH:
William Shakespeare
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Edgar Allan Poe
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Wallace Stevens
Robert Burns
Sir Walter Scott
Robert Frost
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Carl Sandburg
Sir Philip Sidney
Ednay St. Vincent Millay
William Blake
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rudyard Kipling
Algernon Swinburne
Lewis Carroll
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Edward Lear
Dorothy Parker
Ogden Nash
Jack Keruac
Tuli Kupferberg
Robert W. Service
James Agee
ee cummings
Bob Dylan
Gertrude Stein
Dame Edith Sitwell

FRENCH:
Pierre Louys
Charles Baudelaire
Stephane Mallarme
Paul Verlaine
Arthur Rimbaud
Paul Eluard
Charles, Duc d'Orleans
Paul Armande Silvestre
Gerard de Nerval
Clement Marot
Aloysius Bertrand
Alphonse de Lamartine
Guillaume de Machaut (the Mass writer)
Tristan L'Hermite
Theophile Gautier
Paul Valery
Jean Cocteau
Maurice Fombeure
Raymond Radiguet
Louise Lalanne
Louise de Vilmorin
Marie Laurencin (thought of primarily as a painter)
Jean de La Fontaine
Catulle Mendes
Theodore de Banville
Max Jacob
Robert Desnos
Andre Breton
Leon-Paul Fargue
Jules Laforgue
Louis Aragon
Victor Hugo
Guillaume Apollinaire
Pierre de Ronsard
Francois Villon
Paul Claudel
Leconte de L'isle
Auguste Villiers de L'isle-Adam
Alfred de Vigny
Claude Debussy (the composer)
Blaise Cendrars
Chretien de Troyes

SPANISH:
Federico Garcia-Lorca
Pablo Neruda
Jorge Luis Borges

ITALIAN/LATIN:
Dante Allighieri
Petrarch
Boccaccio
Juvenal
Martial
Catullus
Lucilius
Seneca
Virgil
Horace
Ovid

GREEK:
Euripides
Homer
Aeschylus
Callimachus
Sappho
Sophocles

GERMAN:
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Rainer Maria Rilke
Thomas Mann
Bertolt Brecht
Wolfram von Eschenbach

OTHER:
Suleiman the Magnificent
Aleksandr Pushkin
Li Po
Omar Khayyam
Pindar

Yes, I've read all these and more. My advice for the non-English stuff is to get editions that are bi-lingual.

Answer 3

Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Frost
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth

Answer 4

Geez talk about terrible answers.
"Read shakespeare and poe" say all of them.
Why would anyone elect to read crap that wasn't entertaining in high school? I guess those answers are better than "read the bible"...

I can afford to talk smack because nobody will ever see my answers. After all those repetetive ridiculous answers.

Anyway - if you want something that is actually interesting that a person would actually read for enjoyment - not just to do a book report on, try Charles Bukowski, William Bronk, e.e. cummings, whatever that gay dude's name is - the one who sleeps in the gutter but looks toward the stars....If you wanna get really freaky deaky pull up some old Burroughs...

Anyway that's the kind of poetry that I like.
Freaking shakespeare.
Are these people joking?
He's a bloody playwright anyway. You asked about poets.

Answer 5

The cool thing about poetry is that it requires your mind to play along with it. Since your mind and its contents change constantly, poetry changes as well.

Libraries and the internet have so much; just check things out and explore. When you find something you like, see who else was writing around the same time and place -- historically poets have tended to pay a lot of attention to each other. If something doesn't work for you now, move on.

If you have independent book stores in your area, see if the owner/staff are interested in poetry. And look for a writer's group on-line or local. Having people to talk about it with is brilliant.

Chain bookstores tend to have just the tried and true, so it can actually be a useful place to browse and learn about the classics. That's the only use for them, so we may as well use it. ;-)

The ones I keep coming back to:
Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Dylan Thomas, Edna Vincent Millay, William Blake, Aldous Huxley, William Carlos Williams, ee cummings, JRR Tolkien, Sorley McLean, and Leonard Cohen.

Answer 6

Try reading some Wislawa Szymborska. She is the last poet to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (it usually goes to novelists or playwrights). Even in translation her poems are crisp and clear, laced with irony and humor. I have all her work. Here's one of my favorites:

"Some Like Poetry"

Some –
not all, that is.
Not even the majority of all, but the minority.
Not counting school, where one must,
or the poets themselves,
there’d be maybe two such people in a thousand.

Like –
but one also likes chicken-noodle soup,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes to prove one’s point,
one likes to pet a dog.

Poetry –
but what sort of thing is poetry?
Many a shaky answer
has been given to this question.
But I do not know and do not know and hold on to it,
as to a saving banister.


by Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Answer 7

Hello. I like you also love poetry. Some of my favourite authors are Robert Frost, William Shakespeare and mostly Larry S. Chengges. He writes those feel good poems that give you a tingly feeling after you've completed reading them. Here are a few of my favourite Chengges poems. Enjoy! =) :

Accept Me

I Am I
Do not change me
condemn me
nor put me down
Accept me for what I am
No...you need not agree with me
But accept me
for I am total in being
I have my faults
I have my guilts
But that is who I am
Perfect I will never be
Allow me to be uninhibited
Do not pressure me into feeling
what I do not feel
Accept me when I am flying high
As I have accepted you when
you were flying high
Do not put me down...nor make
me feel unhappy about me
I am I
and I like being what I am
Me.

Always Love Each other

If you can always be as close
and happy as today,
Yet be secure enough to grow
and change along the way.
If you can keep for you alone
your love as man and wife,
yet find the time to share your joy
with others in your life.

If you can be as one
and walk through marriage hand in hand,
yet still support the goals and dreams
that each of you have planned.

If you can dare to always go
your separate ways together,
then all the wonder of today
will stay with you forever.

You are the Reason

You are the dawn of every day to me,
the hope that sees me through
the light that guides the way for me,
the love that's always true.
You are the joy that fills the heart of me,
the dreams I'm dreaming of,
you'll always be a part of me,
you'll always be my love.

You are the reason for my tommorrows
you are the reason for today,
you are the reason for my lifes living,
you are the reason my life's complete.

You are the joy I have come to know,
the comfort I depend on,
you are the friend I share my dreams with,
you are the reason.

Answer 8

Obviously the greats of old for classic poetry. Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy are possibly two of the greatest works of literature.

But for modern, contemporary poets, I suggest you begin with Seamus Heaney, if you haven't already read him. Once you;ve read, read and re-read all his books, and absorbed a sense of nature's totality and beautiful simplicity, you'll be ready to explore similair writers such as Christie Brown, Philip Larkin and Dannie Abse. If you're feeling wicked, Baudelaire will do fro you what Kurt Cobain did for grunge fans, and Pablo Neruda will make you smile with delight.

For more cutting edge poets, see David Caddy, Lyn Wycherley, George Gunn, Leonard Cohen, Donna Hilbert. There are tons of great literary magazines such as Acumen, Tears in the Fence, the New Writer, Orbis...all brimming with new talent.

You can find info on all these on the net (wikipedia, etc)

If you're interested in finding more poetry, please feel free to drop me a line on [e-mail] - or look me up (Simon Zonenblick) on myspace. I am a writer and, like you, always on the look out for groundbreaking new talent.

Don;t forget the library!

Happy reading!

PS - Thomas Hardy "A Darkling Thrush." I'm going to switch off the pc and go to bed now, because poetry's an obsession and once I start I'll never stop!

Answer 9

William Blake
John Keats
Lord Byron
William Butler Yeats
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Answer 10

Edna St. Vincent Milay is my absolute favorite poet.

Also, believe it or not, Louis L'Amour has a volume of poetry called Smoke From This Alter that is beautiful.

And if you're just looking for thought provoking reading material, try The Star Thrower by Loren Eiseley. It is a compilation of short essays. My favorite is The Winter of Man.

Answer 11

I will try to recommend some poets that haven't been mentioned yet.

Charles Simic
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/27

William Stafford
http://poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/224

Anne Michaels
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Michaels

Galway Kinnel
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/212

Also a word of warning: Someone told you that you will find your answer on poetry.com. poetry.com is a SCAM SITE. They will encourage you to post your poems and then select you for some honor such as poet of the year. EVERYONE gets selected for this honor. Then they will invite you to a convention to claim your prize. It will be a costly trip and the prize will be very junky. They will also say they are publishing your work in an anthology and ask you how many copies you are buying. Yes, they publish your poetry, but the only people who are they are selling the book to is people they have published. You can google this, there are many sites detailing the variety of scams perpetrated by poetry.com.