French newspaperL'Humanité once considered the following poets to be the best in the XX century:

-Ezra Pound
-Saint-John Perse
-T S Eliot
-Fernando Pessoa

Later on, the was a Yeats hype and he was then so considered.

After that came W H Auden (everybody seemed to think that quoting him was soooooo fashionable.

Others who frequently are claimed to be at the very top of said list are:

-Rainer Maria Rilke
-Konstantinos Kavafis
-Federico Garcia Lorca
-Paul Celan

I even go so far as leaving the following to your consideration:

-Robert Frost
-Juan Rámon Jimenez
-Paul Valéry
-Khlebnikov

What say you on the matter ?

I would concur with Yeats, Auden, and Pound. And probably add T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin. And probably Frost, although I think his better poems are the ones less frequently cited.

Sadly at my tender age of 20 I have yet to enjoy many of the authors cited here but, from my experience pound & eliot are both amazing. On the flip side I don't much care for walt whitman or dylan thomas (who are often cited as peoples favorites) I've yet to meet any such people.

I love Whitman and Dylan Thomas. But Wallace Stevens will forever trump them all.

I don't much about poetry but I know what I like and I like Ezra Pound's work very much.

Poetry is the greatest thing in the world, after sex and staring at the ocean.
Try reading Edwin Muir, just for a beginning if you are new to poetry. Dreamlike, eerie and muscular prose creating a world completely his own. i.e "The Horses"
Too many poets, too little time. Just read. Just read.

How about reading poetry while staring at the ocean?

I do love Pessoa (Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis is about Pessoa), Yeats, Keats, the Brownings, Robert Frost (I'm just beginning to realize what a true genius he was), Baudelaire, Pablo Neruda (a favorite), and so many others.

I'm trying to learn to write Haiku, which I suppose is a different topic indeed.

Neruda's Canto General & The Heights of Machu Pichu are both wonderful collections.

I agree with all the poets you list, and there are so many more, including William Blake, whose work is always with me wherever I go.

A recent work which is in my all-time favourite works is Ted Hughes translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Imagery, strong imagery is my particular fancy with poetry, so I tend to not like a lot of conversational poesy.

Rilke's Duino Elegies are favorites of mine as well. I also like Guillaume Apollinaire. Poetry is an area in which I still have a LOT to learn, but I do love it.

INTRODUCTION TO THIS POETRY

I feel a strong connection with, a strong influence from, the poetry of Roger White. I find the famous literary critic Harold Bloom places my relationship as a poet with the poetry of White in a helpful perspective. The work of other poets, too, help to define my own work. And so I open this section with poems that describe and define some of these relationships. There is a strong introspective sense in this poetry and I have included here an interview which explores the 'phenomenological' orientation of my poetry, thus providing some sense of the philosophy underpinning my poetic narrative.



FLUID

What readers make of all this poetry, or some part of it, should they ever delve into it to any depth, will depend, of course, on how they focus and what they bring---what stories and plots and words from their own lives1---to their reading of what I see as an extended poetic narrative, an epic poem. Readers inevitably attribute meaning to words in quite personal ways. Words are themselves not fixed or definite in meaning; they are fluid and functional, not irrevocable things. The inferences, the meanings, behind this epic poem, now composed of nearly six thousand individual poems and two to three million words, can be drawn in so many different ways by both myself and the many readers who come to this oeuvre in the decades--and I like to think--centuries, ahead. For what is here are, as Virginia Woolf expressed it so beautifully, "flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its myriad messages through the brain."2 -Ron Price with thanks to Marguerite Harkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1990, 1p.53 and 2p.13.



There's so much messiness,

stuff all over the place

that just keeps accumulating

as the years go by

adding up their days

relentlessly, unobtrusively,

obscurely, silently--

hardly worth recording--

probably wouldn't

if I was more interested

in gardening, or art

or one of a dozen things

that keep my wife busy

from dawn to dusk

year after year.



But I give all this stuff order,

the undisciplined flux,

the fleetingness of thought,

the transitoriness

that can't be integrated

and made solid--

I give it a shape, a form,

and all is form, at least

Wilde saw it that way.



And so mysterious connections

that rumble in my private world

become shapes on pages

and I can call it poetry.1

1 Drusilla Modjeska, "A mystery of connections," The Weekend Australian Review, December 1, 2002, pp.4-5.

---Ron Price 1 December 2002

Hey Ron, thanks for introducing me to Roger White. Been reading a little of his work on various websites.

I see yr a Baha'i. I have some Baha'i friends in Brisbane, where I normally live.

Over on the religion thread, I've been trying to get people to discuss the Baha'i faith as its a little different.

Why not wander over and tell us from the horse's mouth so to speak.

How about

Charles Bukowski: Burning in water, drowning in flames

and

Why no mention of Allen Ginsberg?