Who is the greatest poet of all time and why is it T.S. Eliot?

Who is the greatest poet of all time and why is it T.S. Eliot?

lol

It's one of Homer/Dante/Shakespeare. Or Rumi and Du Fu if you expand outside the western tradition.

>Dante
>Shakespeare

Dante is some serious wank, and the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets are throwaway pieces.

>Rumi

is for navel gazing 14 year old girls. the real answer is Wallace Stevens.

Only possible answers:

Virgil
Homer
Ovid
Dante
Chaucer
Donne

Pick one

Chaucer is garbage, old English is complete shit.

It's Milton you mega plebs.

The highest education everyone else has here is high school, and they all work as cashiers. As someone who is collegiate, OP, I have to wholeheartedly agree. T. S. Eliot is the greatest poet, better than: Rilke, Shakespeare, the Greek poets, the Roman poets, Milton, Dante, the 20th and 21 century poets, the Martian poets, the Islamic poets, etc.

GOAT Tier
>Dante
>Homer
>Shakespeare
Great tier
>Virgil
>Milton
>Ovid
>Donne
>Yeats
>Whitman
Good Tier
>Romantics
>Eliot, Stevens etc
>Dickinson
>Sappho
Pleb tier
>Pound
>Poe
>Wilde

Criminally underrated
>Hardy

I don't know nearly enough to say this with any authority, but damn Stevens is indeed based.

No, Eliot is the greatest Modernist poet. He would never set himself among the classic greats, since half his job was deconstructing and reworking them. But holy fuck he's good. I did my MA thesis on Ash-Wednesday.

Your insecurity is only matched by your mediocrity.

hafiz is the best persian poet, citing rumi first is the sign of a pseud who reads coleman barks translations

milton isn't even close

Donne.

Nice post user, I liked it a lot.

>No, Eliot is the greatest Modernist poet
Hmm..that's too categorical

Amers is better than any Eliot poem. Untranslatable though, compared to Eliot.

Haha, I like John Ashbery the best. And there's nothing you intro-to-poetry canonsucking plebs can do to stop me.

>Ovid
>Dante
>Eliot

It's like everyone in this thread is the most annoying freshman English major.

How ironic.

What are you, the hipster of English lit? Fine, the greatest poet is Æ, dude.

Are you implying that JA is not a "successful artist" ???

Hah, no, my mistake. I meant to respond to the Perse guy. Ashbery is hugely lauded and successful.

So is Perse...

>tfw anglos overrate their poets next to me

>tfw people profess to prefer poetry that isn't written in their native language
You ain't foolin' anyone sport.

Well, who's your favorite poete, then, Gaspar?

>poetry

nah

>Not reading poetry in at least 3 languages...

>Dante
Self insert fanfiction, totally pathetic.

Baudelaire, or Rimbaud. English poetry is not as good as french one.

Baudelaire.

Góngora.

Considering English poets
>Chaucer
>Pearl poet
>Spenser
>Shakespeare
>Donne
>Milton
>Pope
>Wordsworth
>Coleridge
>Keats
>Tennyson
>Browning
>Hopkins
All of these are better. Eliot isn't even in the top 10

t. never read anything by Eliot

but Eliot really is "bourgeois" in the bad sense
his poems are all about how intellectual and bored he is in his comfy life

>implying that Baudelaire or Rimbaud are the best French poets
Read more

How the fuck is Milton not GOAT tier?

>hafiz is the best persian poet, citing rumi first is the sign of a pseud who reads coleman barks translations

Actually Saadi Shirazi is.

Cu:((/

m

m

in/gs

He's odd. Ash Wednesday is one of my favorite poems, but I think Waste Land is one of the most over rated.

Romantics are easily up there with Yeats and Whitman, possibly even higher

...

Portrait of a Lady and Prufrock are top tier.

dude, like, what if this mirror is, like, a reflection of post-modern critical theories pulled out of a textbook and formed into a poem?

so basically reading this dude's diary entries is like a really obscure Critical Theory 101

the bait is too subtle for Veeky Forums senpai

There are Martian poets?

Nobody on earth (outside of France) thinks this. The only nation with a comparable poetry canon to 'Anglo' is Iran.

t. Anglo-Iranian.

I like Byron and Milton.

There's no such thing as a best poet though, dont be infantile.

You're a perceptive man. Likely of anglo or persian stock.

lel,

>Pound
>Pleb Tier

I'm actually mad about this

>There's no such thing as a best poet though
There actually is though, and it's already been established that it's T.S. Eliot, can't you read the OP?

It isn't, I just didn't feel like responding to it

Because you know you're wrong.

>No William Blake
Pleb

Literally an anagram of TOILETS

>Blake
>good

Anything that deep into religion is trash.

Nice meme

how do I approach poetry?

is it better to try and understand everything or just enjoy the stories behind told

Because you think so, user, and yours is the only reality.

How can you be so stupid?

no love for seamus heaney??

whitman, heaney, and eliot are my favourites, though i really like verlaine/rimbaud and of course, shakespeare's stuff. richard ii, hamlet, macbeth have god-tier poetry.

excerpt from richard ii:

>Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs.
>Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
>Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.
>Let's choose executors and talk of wills.
>And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
>Save our deposed bodies to the ground?

there's something to be said for prose that approaches poetry; ulysses, moby dick, lolita, etc. reach such intense lyrical sublimity it's fucked up. prose poems, maybe?

moby dick:
>up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy apotheosis
ulysses:
>the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.
lolita's opening lines:
>Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

language is so goddamn pretty bros!!

What? Wrong about what?

Oh I'm guessing this is just your go-to response for any post phrased that way because you're a fucking brain-dead mongoloid who can't even be bothered to take two seconds to look at the context

How the fuck do you get into poetry, where do you start? Besides reading Homer and then going down the list.

>no such thing as a best poet
>likes Byron
Opinion discarded

With an anthology of poetry like norton or that sad meme fellow

Yeah, get Harold Bloom's Best Poems of the English Language and start from there.

Read it out loud or subvocalize. Look up words you don't know. It's usually not so much about storytelling as it is about rhythm and abstract emotional impact. If you read a few poems by the same poet and feel like you're not really getting anything out of them, then move on to another poet.

happy to see Hopkins being mentioned
Elliot is the birth of Hopkins though

Slightly finer than the Vogons

It's Verlaine

fuck off angloturds

Angloturds make the best poetry sorry.

no

>Verlaine
Not even the best symbolist poet

Prufrock has to be the most overrated poem of all time and is emblematic of hacks seeking refuge in the low-barrier-to-entry of vers libre.

That's simply not true though. Baudelaire and Rimbaud are middling-tier compared to most English poets.

not even a top 5 19th century French poet

That's pure bs, Baudelaire is up there for sure, but in any case it's the only 2 french poets this board knows. Valéry, Char, Perse, all these guys are worth any english poets.

you mean valery

English poetry is the only good poetry.

Shel Silverstein honestly. He is just this incredibly vivid, imaginative writer that evokes an incredible range of emotions in his readers. He is just incredible.

fuck off, reddit.

>Or Rumi and Du Fu
my sides hurt

Wordsworth and Coleridge were the pinnacle of Poetry

>>up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing-straight up, leaps thy apotheosis

man, my fave chapter. 23 I think, maybe 27? I just call it the Bulkington chapter.

> no love for seamus heaney??

he's not bad (he was my fave for a while a long while ago) but he's a bit too indebted to Yeats to be considered on the level of "best poet ever".

Also Richard II is good but I think Shakes' later, less restrained rhetoric is perhaps even more powerful. Or rather, makes more intelligent observations.

Things were going smoothly until you got to Pound. Why did you have to bungle everything up so completely? And Wilde is hardly 'pleb'; he just isn't metaphysical. I guess you're really pretty much just sucking off Papa Bloom. And his tastes are certainly on the whole excellent, but he made a grave error in regards to Pound.

God you're a bore.

You, also, are a bore. You can carp on the adolescent quality of Prufrock all you want, but it remains one of the ultimate expressions of ennui, at least in English. It may be babby's first poem, but it makes for a healthy poetic babby.

I understand quite well that at this point, 100 years on, Eliot is perfectly passe. But that does not remove the incredible metaphysical depth and eeriness of The Waste Land (especially What the Thunder Said) and the Four Quartets (especially Little Gidding), comparable to what was achieved by Shakespeare in Macbeth. Those two immensely short poems create independent worlds of themselves, as sublime, if not as pleasant, as our own. Criticizing Eliot is like criticizing the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy; any attacks made are one yourself, and not actually on the poem in itself.

>author is beyond criticism

Nope, no author is beyond criticism.

Eliot has his faults, too. He can be dry and pedantic sometimes, and even elitist (though it is debatable whether this is a valid criticism for Eliot).

One should never make idols out of authors. Once an artist is put in a pedestal and criticism of his work becomes taboo, the dialogue between the author, the work, and the reader stops, and interpretation becomes stale.

>but it remains one of the ultimate expressions of ennui
It's vulgar trash. Try to say something not found in a textbook next time.
>, comparable to what was achieved by Shakespeare in Macbeth
My sides

...

Lol you English/French tards. Portugal has the best poetry by far

Who's an easy poet to get into? I'm trying to ease myself into poetry. I own Bloom's poetry anthology, but it's massive. I'm looking for simple but good poetry to acclimate myself to reading metre.

Frost is relatively easy and accessible, but also very good.

Just read Eliot assuming you haven't already. It's pretty heavy going but thats the whole point.

I personally don't like to read summaries or anything before reading a poem, I find its better to do a dry entry and then read up about it's background, then read again.

Baby tier is Shakespeare's sonnets, easy to understand for the most part.

>acclimate myself to reading metre

If that's the angle you're going at it from, search up a reading of the poetry on Youtube and read with it, means you don't have to discern the form for yourself.

>I own Bloom's poetry anthology, but it's massive.

Why does that matter? You don't read an anthology cover to cover.

Start with Wordsworth, or Frost like the other user said.

>comparable to what was achieved by Shakespeare in Macbeth

His shortest, plebbiest play.

>Criticizing Eliot is like criticizing the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy

Literally the fourth best Hamlet soliloquy in the play.

I pronounce you a pseud.