Favorite poets?

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Whoever wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight had a magnificiently balanced and stand-offishly knowing view of then-popular medieval romantic poetry. He also wrote Pearl, which is just gorgeous. The guy who wrote Beowulf rocked too.

As for poets whose names we know, I like the early c.19th romantics and those who straddled the romantic/modernist boundary. Lord Byron's Don Juan was tremendously funny, scathing and irreverant and I enjoy Shelley's bombast and melodrama.

Then you've got the guys who wrote at the end of the 19th century, when the memory of the romantics remained but everyone was getting all bleak and modernist. It produced some beautiful, lightly melancholy stuff such as this:

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven - W.B. Yeats

I like poems that speak of loss and pine for a not too remote past. Seems that in the postmodern era thats just about all we do, so its good to remember that we're not the first ones to do so.

 

It is, isn't it? I especially liked that the translation has the word 'ass' in it.