I should have made it Ten

[intertext]

From chickenfeet2003

Comment with the words "Top Ten" or "Top Five", and I will reply with a subject for which you will generate a top ten (or top five) list. Post the list and instructions in your own journal.

My topic is "Top Five Poets" which ought to be easy, but -damn- is it hard to choose five!

In no particular order, except that my number one is at the top:

Keats. Is my beloved. His early work is unpolished and a bit over the top, but "Melancholy" and "Autumn" and "Eve of St Agnes" and "Nightingale" are absolutely matchless. I could drown in them. And like him "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination"

The cranky, cynical and surprisingly moving Philip Larkin. I can't read "Myxomatosis" without crying. Then there's "This Be the Verse," which I love to give to my first years to shock them with.

TS Eliot. Difficult, intellectual, irritating, but oh so beautiful. The images are like wind and moonbeams. Of course, the still point in a turning world.

Yeats. Difficult, intellectual, less irritating, more emotional than Eliot, also oh, so beautiful (do you see a theme here?)

Eeek! How to choose number 5??? I'm going to cheat :) It's a TIE between Donne, Swinburne, Sheamus Heaney and Derek Walcott. Oh, and Auden's in there somewhere, too.

See, I told you it should have been Ten.

Comments

[brinian.livejournal.com]

You have more self-discipline than I! No way coudl I keep it to five or even six. Donne and Auden would be in there. Thinking along modern lines, I'm a fan of Brodsky as well, but probably only because I had him as a professor...gives me chills to read his work even now. I can HEAR him speaking the words! Same with Auden...somewhere I have audio tapes of him reading some of his works. Just amazing what you get from hearing the writer read their own work!

[intertext.livejournal.com]

Yeah and then afterwards I was thinking "oh cripes, how could I have forgotten Hopkins!" and there's Eavann Boland and Stevie Smith and Ted Hughes (though NOT Sylvia Plath) and HD and ... on and on.