Elizabeth Barrett Browning Daffodil from My Garden (2016)
One week from today–Sunday, April 1–is not just Easter Sunday and April Fool’s Day but the first day of National Poetry Month. For the third year in a row, I am planning to take on the National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo) challenge to write a poem each morning and then publish it here. If you would like to know more about this annual event, and to see who else has taken up the challenge, take a look at the website generously hosted by Maureen Thorson, a Washington, D.C. poet.
Recently, someone asked me, “Who are your five favorite poets?” Only five? I found I couldn’t answer! Yet the question has been reverberating in me for days now. I have been thinking about which poets’ work I turn to again and again, each for distinct reasons. All of these have influenced my own work and, more importantly, given me great and abiding joy.
So, I am embarking on a maneuver worthy of April Fool’s Day. I am playing a trick on myself in deciding to share here a longish but necessarily incomplete list of those poets who have enriched my life with their own work. These are in no particular order, and have been listed without reference to my book shelves. Some I have met in person, some only through their work. The Universe of Poetry is vast and always expanding, and I am (sadly) limited to English and translations into English. I have included only the poets I return to again and again–and I know as I draft this that it is woefully incomplete. Scroll down, and see if your favorites are here. (I know that your own list will be different.) If you see any glaring omissions, do let me know! (As new names occur, I am adding them to the list(s) in purple–but still without recourse to the perusal of shelves–a heroic act of self-restraint!)
Happy Reading! Happy Reciting and Declaiming! Happy Writing!
Poets from the Old World
William Shakespeare
Geoffrey Chaucer
Dante
Petrarch
Horace
Virgil
Homer
Basho
William Wordsworth
Edith Sitwell
Alexander Pushkin
William Butler Yeats
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Rumi
Robert Browning
John Clare
John Keats
Wendy Cope
T.S. Eliot
Stephen Fry
Phillip Larkin
Ted Hughes
Seamus Heaney
W.H. Auden
Thomas Hardy
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Poets from the New World
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Billy Collins
May Sarton
Nancy Willard
Richard Wilbur
Rita Dove
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Natasha Trethaway
Susan Stewart
Maura Stanton
Maxine Kumin
James Wright
Frank Stanford
James Tate
Margaret Atwood
Ted Kooser
Wallace Stevens
Robert Service
Sylvia Plath
William Carlos Williams
Elizabeth Bishop
Robert Lowell
Mary Jo Salter
Marianne Moore
Robert Hass
Anne Sexton
Robert Frost
Robert Francis
Ron Padgett
Naomi Shihab Nye
Amy Lowell
Henry Longfellow
Louise Erdrich
Pablo Neruda
Janet Beeler Shaw
Alfred Nichol
Rhina Espaillet
Poets Whom I Have Been Lucky Enough to Encounter and Share Thoughts About Specific Poems
Amy Clampitt
Kim Bridgford
Karen Kelsay
Sally Nacker
John A. Wood
Doug Green
Stella Nesanovich
Ken McCullough
Rob Hardy
Emilio DeGrazia
Leo Luke Marcello
Ronald Wallace
Kelly Cherry
Janet Beelar Shaw
David Bottoms
Justin Caldwell
W.D. Snodgrass
I know you read poetry everyday, too, so I especially appreciate your comment and all the new poets you have introduced me to, Beth.
And I am going now to add Alfred Nichol and Rhina Espaillet to my list! Leslie
P.S. Thanks for cheering me on!
GO, LESLIE, GO!!!
I admire you enormously for taking on this challenge. I hope the gods and goddesses of poetry visit you every day!
Your list is fun. Must have been hard to narrow them even as much as you did. So many poets I keep discovering and enjoying. As Alfred Nicol said to our poetry seminar last week, “There are so many wonderful poems out there, don’t worry if you come across one you don’t understand or enjoy. Move on to one that thrills you!”
Anticipating Poetry Month with excitement!
Thank you, Julia! You remind me that I neglected to include Pablo Neruda! I will go back and add a new names in a color! I am less familiar with the work of Catullus, but he comes alive for me in W.B. Yeats’ poem, “The Scholars.”
Thank you so much for a wonderful list, and I can’t wait to read your poem a day in April!
I’ve always enjoyed Catullus and Spanish poetry (particularly Lorca), but I don’t know how they come in translation.
I will look for a good anthology of Russian Silver Age poets for you (Blok, Mandelshtam, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Gumilyov and many other). They are more concerned with the aesthetics and sound, but maybe some of it survives the translation.