Who are some 20th century poets Veeky Forums can get behind?

What do you guys think of the 20th century breakdown of strict meter, rhyme, syllables, etc?

>This Be The Verse

is this satire?

You're awful.

less rhythmic and musical and pleasing to the touch when spoken out loud.
I think modernist poets missed the point of actually have to read the work out loud to know if it sounds good and not awkward as fuck

like potholes on a shitty road.

personally I don't mind though. some I'm sure can pull off blank verse. adhering to form is never comfortable, although it gives you a set framework to work with

actually *having to read

Dylan Thomas
I’m not always sure what he’s on about but he does make it sound pretty.

i think reading colloquialisms sounds more natural than strict meter and rhyme desu

Sometimes brilliant, often an excuse for sloppy, lazy poetry that wants nuthing but to be original

H.D. Imagiste

like all 'radical' movements it starts off with genuine merit and purpose and devolves into shit

Larkin is trash, I'm sorry

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Yeah, Dylan Thomas is where it's at.

Last three lines of Fern Hill = best poem ending ever.

You're trash, and I'm not sorry.

Naaa, Larkin is good, but This Be The Verse isn't especially good and people just quote it all the time because it has bad language and they are 13-year-old boys (in spirit if not in actuality).

Larkin is a bad parody of rhyming poetry

Trash is an exaggeration, but he's certainly not brilliant. Nothing about his poetry is evocative or beautiful. He's a peasant among his supposed peers, and not an especially interesting one. Although of course nothing I could ever write is as good as his worst poems

This, for my money, is the best poetic work of the 2nd half of the 20th century.

I think you might like this.

yes, there's the appeal of that,
but I'm a bit of a lover of old shit sometimes. reading something like Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" never fails to put a smile to my face

I don't find anything wrong with modern poetry but half the time it seems like they took a paragraph and indented it wherever they feel comfortable, idk

then you just end up narrating something, as if you were reading somebody's essay

*blocks your path*

Sylvia Plath

Even despite her reputation as the neurotic college-girl's hero.

get out of here, connor. i mean it

The great poets do it well (Eliot, Stevens, Williams, H.D., etc).
But it gave licence to the amateurs to write worse poetry than they would have.

nothing wrong with the old stuff, but we'd be pretty bored if it never changed

agreed

desu rhyme and meter is not an objectively better standard

old/classical =/= better/refined

the bard of salford, obviously

I can agree with that
maybe I just want a little more beauty into the works

Don't get me wrong. Stevens is my favorite poets and lots of my favorite poems are free verse.
But lots of amateur poets think disregarding meter is the same as disregarding rhythm, and would be better off writing metered poems until they understand the difference.

Stevens, Crane, Frost, Eliot, Yeats, Williams, H.D., and Moore are my favorites

No. Larkin is good.

Me. I'm a pretty good poet if I say so myself.

prove it

Have you been writing for 20 years?

swag

>Pessoa (although, since this is an anglo board, these are mostly read as translations)
Most of his work is in English

Ezra Pound
David Jones
Basil Bunting
Paul Celan
William Carlos Williams
Ed Dorn
Charles Olsen

Basil Bunting is a fucking genius

Briggflatts

I
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.

Robinson Jeffers

Jeffers is good but he pretty much only said one thing. That one thing was something true that everyone else was studiously ignoring, so he is worth reading, but still, he's not exactly a balanced diet.

I can second the David Jones recommendation. Great stuff, almost criminally underappreciated.

yes it is actually

me

The only 20th century poets I'd get behind are H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva

Have you been writing for 20 years?

I always want to hate Plath, but can never manage it.

It's not a better standard, but it makes a clearer difference. Bad writing becomes very apparent when fit to meter and rhyme, whereas a more abstract approach forces the reader to do more work before realizing it's horse-shit. Since most people are lazy, this means there's still a lot of shit getting passed around that never would have survived before.

Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide's coming
When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves
Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of orgins
Unimaginable. You float near
As kneeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky's ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;

You defy godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom's border
Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.

My heart is a shipwreck.

Philip Larkin
Anthony Hecht
Elizabeth Bishop
John Betjeman
Thomas Hardy
Yvor Winters

Literally every one of those poets (with the possible exception of Basil Bunting) are unreadable. Well done.

t. too-cool "experimentalist" psued

if you're going to rhyme you should do it in a way that lets the poem flow naturally. Larkin's rhymes are blunt and inevitable and his meter is inflexible, it's ugly. there's no music to it.

I have been able to read and write since I was 4 years old. So yes.

You are a 21st century writer

This. I'd sure like to get behind Rupi Kaur