A Place for Poets discussion

Who do you consider to be the most important poet of the last century?

Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Snyder, Dickinson, Maya Angelou, William Stafford, Billy Collins?
Maybe Billy Collins for his encouragement in schools and supporting so many poets, past and present.

Nice. Don't forget Eliot and Pound though.....

Eliot had an an interesting life and ideas. I watched Tom & Viv about his first marriage.

John Ashbery.

router back up. i may be too late for this discussion.
here go: Ashberry may have broke new ground with his early work: The long prose piece & tennis court ... but Neruda is far more consisent book by book by ... Neruda touched the cosmic while remaining earth bound, engaged. His odes, ode to spoon & other objects are commonplace beautiful.

Anna Akmatova, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mahmoud Darwish, Roque Dalton, Nicolas Guillen...

The Beats definitely were top on the list. There's so much online about them, the Merry Pranksters and more.

i've had a love hate thing with Ashbery for the longest time. He's clearly an important poet, but is he major? & many of his long poems have left me speechless, sometimes with awe, and other times wondering why i should endure the dopey irony line after line after ... Major poets show growth, change.
Ashbery seemed to come close. From the early work and Self Portrait/Convex ... but after that, he lost big mo, got sort of tiresome to all but his diehard fans. But, I'll admitt, them fans/he's got lots of them and that says something.

forgot: Flow Chart came after Convex Mirror. I think the lack of change factor started to settle in after Ashbery finished that long and important work.

W.S.Merwin is a strong candidate for best 20th century American poet poet after the early modernist. HIs Epic, Folding Cliffs, is as good as anything I've read in the last 10 years.

ezra pound

In no particular order, I'd choose Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Frost, and John Ashbery. In terms of service to the art, I'd have to choose Robert Pinsky, a fine writer and a major voice when Poet Laureate.

Pound

In terms of Canadian poetry, now that I think of it (being Canadian and all), I'd have to say bpNichol. The breadth of his experimentation in poetry, sound poetry, and visual has had a huge influence on a new generation of Canadian poets.

stuart, do us a favor and hook us up with other radical canadian poets.

From a provincial English point of view, I'd choose one of a selection of Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Seamus Heaney and Wilfred Owen.

all good. 20th century was a fine century for poetry. i think you have to take into consideration not just the quality of the poet's poems, but also the influence the poet stylistically and for lack of a better word socially. pound made contributions to the careers of many of these poets -- eliot, frost, yeats, joyce, hemingway, olsen, williams, hd, even dh lawrence. stylistically, he greatly influenced subsequent generations, perhaps more so than any poet since the romantics. he was also one of the pioneers of internationalist poetry -- bringing chinese, italian, provencal, french, spanish, greek and egyptian poetry to english readers. also, through his direct participation as an editor in the creation of ulysses and the wasteland he influenced the writing of the two masterpieces of 1922 that changed the course of writing for the rest of the century. there are plenty of great poets -- mayakovsky, neruda, apollinaire, celan, ginsberg, ashberry, loy, dylan thomas, yeats, cendrars, valery, cocteau, huidobro, bishop, etc etc but i think you'd have a hard time making the case that any one of them had his or her hand on the tiller quite like pound. and as for a poetry peeing contest, i'd put the pisan cantos up against any book of the 20th century.

It makes more sense to split the 20th century into before WWII and after. For the before you have all those modernists like Pound, Williams, Stevens, Rilke, hd, etc. My pick for after the war is Paul Celan, because his concerns about how to bring/return meaning to a degraded language are something all writers increasingly have to struggle with.

how can one even seriously have this discussion? are we determining most important by country? by most widely read? by the most influential?

I wouldn't dream of electing a "best poet" without qualifying that judgment - as everybody here has surmised, it's meaningless. You can speak only for yourself and on that account, for the 20th Century's most underrated craftsman, let me nominate Philip Larkin. Don't let his dour affectation of "Little Englishness" fool you for a minute.

Yet in the end I have to agree with Amy: simply for me, Neruda sets the most consistently high benchmark (for whatever criteria you choose to nominate) and continues more than anyone else to delight me time and again. Him and Sylvia Plath, maybe? Why has none of us mentioned her? How could one dream of nominating Maya Angelou without having Plath already in the mix?

http://www.freado.com/users/15282/ste...

neruda over yeats?

Neruda over Yeats? Oh, that's a tough one. But putting on my most ludicrously hypercritical spectacles: Neruda's range is greater, and his penchant for mystical sentimentality (dear God, am I really saying this about Yeats, one of my most revered poets?) slightly less...

P.S. Delighted that barely anyone has mentioned T S Eliot. Neither shall I!

eliot? nah, too intellectual. You see more Dickinson in Anthologies nowadays than Eliot. I guess we should be asking who is the most read, the most quoted, the most antholgized? give that person(s) a crown, golden with quills attached.

I agree with Neruda for the reasons above (though I haven't read nearly enough of him; the quality and strength of his vision is striking). I DO think Eliot was a poet of major importance. So sorry people don't dig the Wasteland as much as me. Yes Pound is an important influence though I don't know many people that actually do the grunt work of crawling through the Pisan Cantos...Pound's expositions about Modern Poetry; including his elucidations on Chinese ideograms and their particularly "sensory" effect have always stayed with me. He was a tremendous editor and theorist who wrote at least several poems of lasting effect; but nowhere near the output of Neruda. Then Plath, I AGREE! Why do people dismiss her lately; is this a trend? Stevens is good, Bishop ditto, Yeats, Thomas, good good good. But "the Beats?" Puh-lease. I feel that once one grows up one can safely AVOID the Beats altogether (and the person writing this, myself, is an avowed devotee of all things avante-garde-- the problem is they are just hokey). So sue me. I'd like to add Adrienne Rich.

Oh, I'd definately second Dickinson but wasn't she Nineteenth Century? I guess there is overlap. I second the woman; a powerhouse of tight, perfect, technique.

Very delayed response to the request for names of other "radical Canadian poets" (besides bpNichol, my nomination for MICanP20thC): bill bissett, Rachel Zolf, Steve McCaffery, David W. McFadden (esp the long poems), Lisa Robertson.

It is a choice too heavy with exclusions. All the poet given so far are poet I could not live without. But without defining "important", I believe the question bleeds over into matter of historic influence of a more practical or pragmatic but no less poetic nature. In matters of pure prosody, Pound's influence alone is an obvious choice. But I submit on ground of importance, Paul Celan. He created a new poetic language (out of German) and a poetic-philosophical foundation out of the central experience of the 20th century. Consider: Threadsuns, from Paul Celan, Fadensonnen, Atemwende, 1967

Threadsuns
over the gray-black desolation.
A tree-
high thought
captures the light tones: there are
still songs to sing beyond
mankind.


Fadensonnen
über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.
Ein baum-
hoher Gedanke
greift sich den Lichtton: es sind
noch Lieder zu singen jenseits
der Menschen.

Definitely the Beat poets. I'd say either Burroughs or Ginsberg. I'm inclined to say Ginsberg because I find him to be a superior writer, but Burroughs started earlier and was hugely influential on the younger Beats.

I don't think that Burroughs was a poet.

Stuart wrote: "I don't think that Burroughs was a poet."

He was primarily a novelist but he did write some poetry. For example: Pistol Poem No. 3

In my opinion, his novels resemble prose poetry more than just plain prose, and he was so heavily involved in poetic circles.

Neruda over Yeats. Cesar Vallejo in France and in America. Clarinet Alegría in El Salvador. gioconda belli in Nicaragua as well as Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal's Origin of Species in English translation was published earlier this year; it is a fantastic experiment in faith and evolution, Poetica and political insights.

Neruda over Yeats. Cesar Vallejo in France and in America. Claribel Alegría in El Salvador. gioconda belli in Nicaragua as well as Ernesto Cardenal. Cardenal's Origin of Species in English translation was published earlier this year; it is a fantastic experiment in faith and evolution, Poetica and political insights.