My NINE FAVOURITE POETS; in chronological order; excluding sacred texts 

(as I get time I will make these more elaborate)  

 

Bai Juyi, China, 772-846 AD

Bai Juyi was the greatest hermit monk poet of the timeless T’ang tradition in human poetry. He combines the austerity of the dharma with humour, and together with Basho is the finest exemplar to my mind of a man trying to live with both Zen and poetry. 

Su T’ung Po (Su Shih), China, 1030-1101 

This man was fine scholar, antiquarian, high government official, and brilliant almost conversational poet. He elevates the ordinary day to the poetic heights. 

John Milton, England, 1608-1674 

Paradise Lost is the most brilliantly sustained poem I have encountered. In the end Satan becomes human, which is its beauty of morality. The unrhymed epic metre, his blindness. 

Matsuo Basho, Japan, Edo period, 1644-1694 

Basho was the consummate Zen poetry master, and I have long been attracted to the philosophy of Zen. As a poet, Basho understands that in doctrine based on space and wordless silence, why are we talking so much? His haiku exquisite pollen. 

Friedrich Hölderlin, Germany, 1770-1843 

Hölderlin’s unique verse is the most deeply stirring poetry I have read in that vast genre of man coming to terms with his god. Hölderlin takes the  obvious renaissance absurdity of a persecutory church and pictures of classical gods everywhere, and turns it into a profound inner conflict, between a Teutonic god of the  soil, or the river, and the Christian god, and the natural world itself as holy and the struggle to reconcile all this with the strict doctrine of his time and place. His struggle is beautiful and maddening for him. He is one of the great warrior-poets; there could not have been Wagner without Hölderlin.  

John Clare, England, 1793-1864 

John Clare was confined to an asylum for very many years of his life for writing too much poetry. Ordinarily that is qualification enough for me, but Clare takes English nature poetry to a height of simplicity and detail based on hands on knowledge and an essential happiness. 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Germany, 1875-1926 

Rilke struggles with the angels, was he one of them or one of us? 

e.e.cummings, USA, 1894-1962 

Cummings for his love poetry, which is eternally fresh and uplifting, never getting bogged down in poetic structure, but structured. 

Pablo Neruda, Chile, 1904-1973 

One of the most prolific poets in his work and in his very life as a poet; endless imagery, profound love for and contact with his people. Iconic stature for his humanity, world famous in his time, known by the ordinary folk and the most refined literati.