Who is your favorite 20th century poet? Why?

Question

This is kind of a broad question. I think Ezra Pound was a genius, and I love his stuff, and I like TS Eliot, but I think Langston Huges has a rhythm that no one can touch. When I was a young kid my mom used to read me Ogden Nash, whose light verse is actually really good for kids.

Answer 1

Robert Desnos is my favorite international poet (I've translated some of his poetry from the French). His surrealist poetry seems based on repetitive patterns of thought, and his early poems showed his amazing skill with wordplay. There's a certain childlike energy and exploration in his early work, and his later work is obsessed with chivalric love of an absent woman (an eternal theme).

American poets are something else. Thought it's pretty cliché, lately I've been obsessively reading Allen Ginsberg. There's a great deal of his writing that I don't like, but I appreciate that he's an American descendent of surrealist literature, the style of Guillaume Apollinaire's "Zone."

I've heard many critics draw a strict dichotomy between Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound (Pound himself affirmed this). And for several years, I only read very formal poetry, so my current love of long, wild, rambling lines is probably a reaction against my earlier tastes.

The best *poem* of the century, though, is no doubt Eliot's "The Wasteland."

Answer 2

My favorite is Sabines, but from your choices I would stick with Pound.