Essential Poetry

What are some essential poetry?

There isn't really, depends on who you like.

Elizabethans: Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare and Donne
Milton and Marvell
Pope
Romantics: Blake, Wordsworth and Keats
Victorians: Tennyson, Hopkins and Swinburne
Yeats, Housman and Hardy
Eliot
Auden, Larkin, Hughes

Dunno about American poetry.

>don't know about american poetry
>eliot
give him back you thief

probably tylo be chillin

Homer (duh)
Ovid
Bible
Rimbaud
everything else a shit

All you need is Mira Gonzalez, the voice of our generation

>eliot
>american

kek

omar Khayyam
Khalil Gibran
Fernando pessoa

American:

Whitman
Dickinson
Berryman
Crane
Stevens
Roethke
O'Hara

Can someone please give me some recommendations for working my way up to Blake or Tennyson? The essential people to read before them, that is. I assume Shakespeare and Milton influenced everybody after them in some way, but besides those two (or if they didn't influence X or Y poet at all), who is essential?

Good list so far but adding:
Holderlin
Ashbury
Rilke
Shelley

Thomas Shadwell
Matthew Arnold

>lived in america til age 25
>not american
pick uno

Could I get recommendations for pretentious and edgy poetry? I'm loving rimbaud and baudelaire atm if that helps.

Ginsberg

>romantics: ...
>no coleridge

read bulfinch

coleridge has two very powerful poems, two very good poems, and a mass of mediocre ones. and even his peak is below some of the other romantics, so that's not a justification for the scarcity of said peaks

I like poe's dark and gloomy poetry, right now The Conqueror Worm is constantly on mi mind. Any more like that? Read a couple from Byron and enjoyed them too.

Seconding this, and I'd like to add Savannah Brown to the list aswell.

Reading stupid old white people like Wordsworth or Shakespeare is pointless.

white males* (ofc)

Wallace Stevens
Marianne Moore
Elizabeth Bishop
etc

>american
please for the love of god everyone do yourself a favor and read whitman. genuinely changed my life

Iliad & Odyssey
Aeneid
Metamorphoses
Divine Comedy
Paradise Lost
Lyrical Ballads
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Leaves of Grass
The Waste Land

I'd add Billy Collins to the list, as he is probably one of the best modern American poets. Granted, his form isn't always the best, but he makes up for it in substance.

>most boring list ever

knowing the bible and milton really helps with understanding blake, as much, if not most, of his work is based on christianity and the political landscape of his time.

Aren't you forgetting someone? My boy Allen Ginsberg.

Un(?)popular opinions: only part 1