One Hundred Poets

Once I started, I could not stop until I set the limit of a hundred.  This list of authors and value judgments is unsystematic, the record of one reader’s reactions after sixty years of reading.  I restrict myself to a few lines of comment.  The writers mentioned below are not necessarily the greatest in my opinion.  The catalogue could have been significantly different.  I may collect a Part Two in the future.  There are plenty of candidates.  May someone someday read an unfamiliar poet on the basis of these insubstantial words. 

 

8^th century B. C. E.  Homer is grand and encyclopedic, an entire culture in a volume.  When read aloud by a someone able to do quantitative vowels, natural stresses, and pitch accents, he sounds like a symphony.

8^th – 7^th century B. C. E. Hesiod unquestionably preserves priceless mythological and historical data.  As a poet he is one of the first to leave words stamped with a distinct individual personality, cranky, anxious,  whistling in the archaic dark.

Circa 630 B. C. E.  Sappho is intense, incandescent.  The reader pleases the tongue by repeating the phrases of her melodious lyrics while recognizing along with the author the prodigious might of Aphrodite. 

ca. 518 B. C. E.  Pindar’s wonderful odes demonstrate the greatest mastery of the use of myth.  Though the only works that survive entire are those written to honor athletic victors, he could have been writing his high-flying associative poetry on any topic.   

84 B. C. E. Catullus, beloved for his enthusiastic eroticism, excels also at vituperation and pure verbal display, and there is never a misplaced syllable.

70 B. C. E.  The immense cultural weight of the Aeneid was intended from its composition, but Vergil’s epic was also repeatedly reinterpreted increasing its semantic density.  The poet’s georgics and eclogues are also fascinating in detail and impressive in impact.

65 B. C. E. Horace, the most craftsmanlike of Latin poets, recognizing the interpenetration of the grand and the mundane, wrote naturally of the gods and of everyday life, and his effortless line was marmoreal.

43 B.C.E.  a favorite of the Middle Ages, Ovid influenced the course of European poetry not only through the mythology he preserved in the artful tales of the Metamorphoses, but in addition he reshaped love poetry with his Ars Amatoria. 

365  Tao Yuanming was the great poet of the “fields and gardens” school, locating nature just outside his door.  His retirement from worldly activity, saying he would not "bow like a servant in return for five pecks of grain" became legendary.

699  An important painter as well as poet, Wang Wei is one of the greatest explicitly Buddhist poets, creating intricate works of art often within the four lined jueju form.

701  The West became fond of Li Bai through Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound, embracing him as he was said to have sought to embrace the moon’s reflection.  The Chinese seem to share the view of his as a Romantic and passionate natural poet.

712  Du Fu wrote on an extraordinarily broad range of topics.  He observed nature closely, engaged deeply with the turbulent history of his time, and wrote great-hearted poems of love and friendship.  He seems to me no less passionate for being a highly erudite poet.

8^th century  Through the chance survival of one manuscript, we happen to have the lone substantial Old English epic Beowulf in which the verse forms  native to the language are employed with full vigor in a beautiful and moving poem, with a heart-aching elegaic tone.

9^th century  For a time I was a Hanshan evangelist, giving out copies of Gary Snyder’s translations of this brilliant contemplative who wrote in the most colloquial dialect. 

1071  William IX, Duke of Aquitaine was a major lord whose work is the earliest in the Troubadour lineage.  His poems range from courtly love and piety to what looks like raucous locker room fooling, but all are artful.

early 12th century  Among the troubadours, Jaufre Rudel is unique for the intensity of his devotion to an absent lover. 

1135  Bernart de Ventadorn brought troubadour lyric to a classic perfection, displaying in his cansos the full range of convention of the genre, though freely manipulated to represent a range of themes.

ca. 1170  Wolfram von Eschenbach, the author of Parzival, conveyed to the German language the profound mystery of the Arthurian stories, as well as writing lyric songs and other narratives.

ca. 1170  Walther von der Vogelweide was the most celebrated of the Minnesingers, composer of a substantial body of love songs and political verses

12^th century  One of the three great epic romances of the Middle Ages, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Iseult ascends the heights and plumbs the depths of love and fate and god and power with rare insight and beauty.

ca. 1200  The Nibelungenlied draws monumental archetypal power from early Germanic myth, with its archaic story, seemingly straight from the backbrain, still potent in Wagner’s revisions. 

1265  In his grand encyclopedic epic of the afterlife and for his refined love poems Dante used the vernacular with no loss of gravitas.

ca. 1332  Piers Plowman in its several forms is William Langland’s only known wok, a great elaborate symbolic dream, filled with lively images and righteous sentiments criticizing religious and secular powers

ca. 1330  Writing in French, Latin, and English, John Gower maintained a cultivated eloquence in the tetrameters of his grand narrative compilation The Lover’s Confession. 

1340  Geoffrey Chaucer is a monument, able to pull off every sort of effect from sublimity to comedy to pathos to the delectation of pure beauty.  Out loud the Middle English is for the most part not only soon comprehensible, but melodious.

circa 1373  John Lydgate wrote many volumes of somewhat irregular verse, much of it retellings and compilations, also including love allegory (the occasionally luminous Temple of Glas) and translations. 

Late 14^th century  The Pearl Poet wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of most bewitching Arthurian romances, as well as the deeply moving Pearl and the rather sensational Cleanness, and the more pedestrian Patience.

ca. 1431  The most celebrated exemplar of the criminal poet François Villon wrote moving celebrations of life and plaints on aging and mortality using a grand idiosyncratic rhetoric.  Villon also composed lyrics in the street slang of the underworld. 

ca. 1460 William Dunbar, one of the “Scottish Chaucerians,” wrote courtly entertainments, allegories, and satire with extravagant language, energetic if unoriginal in a century when much of the greatest British writing was done in Scots.

ca. 1463  Puttenham called him "rude rayling rimer," but John Skelton’s greatest appeal today is his use of native English words, his free way with meter and a voice with a great deal of character, whether speaking on personal or public topics.

 1503  Thomas Wyatt is highly musical while retaining in his language the sense of the spoken word.  He is capable of love poetry of haunting and delicate beauty that nonetheless sounds like a natural voice.

1517  Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’s sonnets are none the worse for being among the first in English.  He was also a pioneer in blank verse, using it for his translation of portions of the Aeneid. 

1552  Like Sidney a courtier poet, Walter Raleigh led a tumultuous life (in the end he, like Surrey, was executed) during which he found time to write beautiful poems, many of them occasional, nonetheless polished for using “plain style” language.

1552  Outstanding in pastorals and sonnets, author of an excellent elegy and a masterful epithalamion,  Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen is unique, a magnificent allegorical romance epic employing powerful mythic patterns in occasionally archaic language.  A poet’s poet. 

1564  Apart from displaying a mastery of rhetoric in the grad style of his plays, Christopher Marlowe wrote some unforgettable lyrics, the epyllion Hero and Leander, and a good translation of Ovid.

1572  John Donne’s lines are always fresh, if often rough in sound.  He plumbs the heights, sensual and spiritual, and what he made of the mingling of the two and preached great sermons.

1591  A master of light-spun lyric and the English poet most identified with the carpe diem sentiment,  Robert Herrick wrote charmingly of “brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,” but also of religious experience.  

1593  George Herbert, a dedicated priest by vocation, on the page harnessed the novel energy of the Metaphysical conceit to write some of the most muscular and concrete and authentic English poems on spiritual themes. 

1595  A painstaking craftsman influenced by both Jonson and Donne, Thomas Carew wrote intensely sensuous love poetry, including “A Rapture,” one of the most erotic poems in English.  

1613  The most baroque of the Metaphysicals, Richard Crashaw wrote from a devotional, almost mystical, sensibility.  His poems such as those concerning Teresa of Avila do not shrink fro m sensual and emotional express=ions of religiosity.

1618  Abraham Cowley had plenty of wit and learning, wrote Metaphysical-style love poems, but his distinctive form was the excited Pindaric ode.  

1621  Andrew Marvell kept a steady hand on his couplets in love, occasional and topographical poems.  His dizzying “Horatian Ode” on Cromwell shows that passionate political poetry can be subtle. 

1631  He needs a considerable number of footnotes today, but John Dryden was a master versifier and a first-rate translator

1636  Thomas Traherne ardently mystical poetry reflects a profound experience of god and nature that resists formulation in language.  His prose poetry in Centuries of Meditation opens his inner life to readers.

1647  It is true that John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester wrote the most obscene poetry until the twentieth century, but it is also true that he was immensely witty, writing about the complexities of love and expressing a wholly cynical, quite modern-sounding vision.

1685 John Gay wrote not only the memorable Beggar’s Opera, but a broad variety of poetry in other genres, including pastorals and fables, all of it witty, cynical, and always open to innovation.

1688  Pope has immense technical skills.  His masterful manipulation of sound values and syntax in the heroic couplet is dazzling.  He has as well a greater soul than some readers realize.

1700  Author of strong blank verse, including the affecting forward-looking nature poem The Seasons as well as the unlikely backward glance of The Castle of Indolence, a Spenserian allegory, James Thomson also wrote the words to “Rule Britannia.”

1716  Thomas Gray, known for a single work, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” wrote as well some stirring Pindaric odes.  Though Wordsworth singled him out as exponent of an outdated style, he clearly anticipates Romanticism.

1721  William Collins used all the devices of neo-Classicism including artificial epithets and an adherence to what he considered ancient models, yet his passionate enthusiasm quickened the form of the ode, and he anticipated the Romantics in love for nature, ruins, and the exotic.

1722  The author of the most extraordinary visionary poem of his century Christopher Smart also wrote more conventional magnificently modulated religious poems, fine fables, and some surprisingly elegant courtly love flirtations.

1731  An inspired nature poet, William Cowper was once exceedingly popular, due in part to his hymns and other religious poetry and his anti-slavery agitation.  He mastered many forms, but not his own habitual depression.

1754  George Crabbe retained a neo-Classical line, but employed it to tell tales of people in modest spheres of life.  While his couplets are in detail unremarkable, his focus on ordinary provincial life is itself an imaginative breakthrough.

1757  Blake is intoxicating because of his visionary mysticism, a rare example of thought rather than poetic technique underlying greatness.  Blake’s rhythm and forms are often elementary, but his ideas sublime.

1770  With his long loose composition expressing a rhapsodic reimagining of ancient Greek culture, Friedrich Hölderlin shaped German Romanticism.

1770  William Wordsworth moved poetry forward, contributing some memorable lines, some sublime passages, and a great many forgettable lines. 

1772  Samuel Taylor Coleridge not only collaborated on the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads in which his contribution foreshadowed Poe with his use of the exotic and fantastic; he excelled also at writing discursive “conversation poems” and seminal criticism.

1772  Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg) a formative figure of German Romanticism, sought cosmic harmony through poetry.  His “magical idealist” vision informs his passion for love and the night.  

1788  Lord Byron wrote a few very pretty lyrics, but his strong work is in longer compositions such as the dramatic and picturesque Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the grandly comic Don Juan.  He conctributed incidentally a good deal to the modern idea of the poet.

1793  John Clare, son of an agricultural laborer, wrote some of the most remarkable 19^th century poetry, including wonderful nature descriptions and, in his madness, some equally marvelous lyrics.

1795  An outstanding image-maker, John Keats charms as well with his earnest and passionate affect and his belief in Poesy. 

1809  Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry is more popular in France than in his native land, but it has always attracted me, primarily through sound.  “Ulalume,” for instance, has always been my favorite, though to Huxley it is “too poetical,” “a carapace of jeweled sound.”

1809  Alfred, Lord Tennyson was such an exemplary Poet Laureate that his posthumous reputation has suffered from his conventionality and his sheer volume of work.  Nonetheless, one of the most capable versifier ever, with a sharp dramatic sense.  

1812  Browning excels at images, conversation, and drama.  He wrote verse as comfortably  as prose, though today’s readers prefer to consume his work in smaller portions than his long poems.

1819  Like it or not, Walt Whitman is our grandpa and our national prophet.  It may be more true of Whitman than of Shakespeare that he might well have blotted a thousand lines, but we would not risk missing his lists, his glorious energy, his very extravagance.

1821  Charles Baudelaire contributed heavily to the modern notion of the artist as counter-cultural with his transgressive ideas couched in what appear to be Parnassian verse forms.

1830  With wit, precision, and buoyant spirit, Emily Dickinson worked out her states of mind, including unforgettable lightning flashes of insight, in unassuming stanzas often using common meter.

1837  Swinburne is a master of sound, but he has little else to sustain the reader.  His washed-out hedonism covers everything, his use of antiquity in particular. 

1842 Equally subtle in sound and image, Stéphane Mallarmé’s lyrics inspired subsequent poetic moves.  More even than most, his work defies translation.

1844  Gerard Manley Hopkins composed the most innovative and melodious poetry, managing to capture in dramatic imagery his startling experience of the divine.

1854  The bad boy punk who fragmented consciousness and poetry in a single act before leaving Europe and art, Arthur Rimbaud pioneered a collage technique of imagery.  For all his wildness the poet’s tender heart is perceptible and dear. 

1859  A. E. Housman, apart from being one of the preeminent Classicists of his age, wrote of love in limpid verses in A Shropshire Lad, quite rightly  set to music by a number of composers.

1865  William Butler Yeats, for all his cranky notions, is certainly one of the greatest poets of recent times.  From his early Romantic fogginess, through the mastery of his middle rhetoric to the gnomic pronouncements of Crazy Jane, Yeats excels in every style.

1871  Though better-known for his fiction, Stephen Crane’s spare intellectual poetry expressing a sort of late 19^th century existentialism in non-declamatory free verse still deserves readers.

1875  Rainer Maria Rilke’s poems are mystical and passionate, yet grounded in concrete images and in revaluations of Classical myth for the twentieth century.

1885  In Ezra Pound one finds the very finest free verse melodies and the most palpable images.  Though at times cranky and pedantic, he can make the reader weak in the knees with the beauty of his line.    

1879  Wallace Stevens builds with the essential materials of poetry: a love of the texture of words and of sharp and suggestive images.  He is perhaps the foremost English language Symbolist.

1887  A careful syllable-counter, Marianne Moore’s poetry has a delightful delicate dry beauty, demonstrating the aesthetics of restraint.  Passion and politics flow beneath the surface.

1888  A great critic as well as poet, T. S. Eliot, the  dominant Modernist for decades, may have been consciously conservative, but he was neurotic and innovative enough to represent the twentieth century and to alter the way people read and write poetry.   

1894  Ever so popular at his death in 1962, but little thought of these days, e. e. cummings, for all his Greenwich Village posing and sometimes unpleasant politics, wrote lovely, well-crafted lyrics, though readers are well-advised to ignore two out of three of his typographical idiosyncrasies.

1899  Hart Crane, America’s own symbolist, using what he called “the logic of metaphor,” crafted rock solid Modernist poetry lit with suffering and vision.

 

The list concludes with the end of the nineteenth century.  I might add the bare names of more or less contemporary poets whose work I particularly admire:  John Ashbery, Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Charles Olson, Kenneth Rexroth, Dylan Thomas.