Fav poet of 20th century: Yeats, TS Eliot, or Heaney

I suppose Evan Boland might be thrown in there just to place the feminists, but she really can't be said to be in same league as those others. Which is your favorite and why? Bonus points if you can repeat your favorite poem from one of those without having to look it up. I had a professor during one "advanced college" thing that required the class to literally memorize about 70 diff poems from the Norton.

Since everyone else was busy drinking and screwing and I was in library memorizing, I ended up throwing off grade curve for entire class and I was not very popular....

Also, I got to meet Seamus Heaney that same summer..

geoffrey hill

i have a couple yeats poems memorized. and many snatches of eliot.

I see Hill mentioned all the time. Every time I've read him I was unimpressed.
Which collection is the best, lad?

i guess i'll say wallace stevens since i read him for thesis. i only completely memorized two shorter poems. cool that you met seamus heaney. not everyone is a chad, don't be so hard on your fellow student to flatter yourself

>fave women poets
>doesn't choose bishop

I think it was worse (for them) since I was 15 and taking the class at Brown, their intro to eng lit. Professor was really cool, would use the Tolkein Technique of reading very loudly. Also knew Yeats when he was young, really cool guy. I dint think he expected anyone to really memorize ALL the poems, but when I want to get a professor to respect me, will put in autistic amounts of work and time.

So, no drinking, no getting lid, but came away from it with having memorized from "Sir Gaiwan and the Green Knight" right up until "the Wasteland."
Of course, that was also before they made ephedra illegal because, like, one dude died out of 300 million and when you used to be able to sit down and just inhale the entire contents of a book.

If I had to pick...I would have to go with Yeats. "Sailing to Byzantium," "To a little Girl Dancing in the Wind," "Easter 1916."

MY favorite Eaney poems are the volume he wrote on the death of his mother, called "Clearances." Every HHEaney poem was like a crossword puzzle because you'd sit with the OED and by the time you went through all the meanings, you'd realize the poem meant something completely different from what you thought.

I should have limited it to 20th century because I love some of Dickson's stuff e.g.:
Remembered if outlived
As a freezing person recollects the snow
First the child, then the stupid
then the letting go

>First the child
First the CHILL

read the early stuff. the later stuff is completely different. everything up to tenanbrae is gold to me. mercian hymns is probably his most popular work, but his metered and rhymed poems are amazing, he has such precision of diction and moving slant rhymes. everything up to and including tenanbrae is gold to me.

>i was 15
>at brown
>no drinking, no getting laid
it's not necessary to refuse things you can't get anyway

>Not mentioning Pound

>not including Hughes

Hughes >> Heaney.

I'm Irish and was very lucky we got to study Irish poetry in school. I went to John Montagues funeral last month, Heaneys wife and Michael Longley were there. Love his work, he unknowingly mentioned my father in one of his classic poems. I uploaded his literary essays and short stories to bookzz if anyone interested

>

>my knowledge of poetry is still limited to the leaving cert

Irish poetry is fucking embarrassing tripe, I'd be ashamed of being from this country if it was all our literature was known for

Your post says more about yourself m8

Yeah, it says I know better than you

Eavan boland is shit OP

TS Eliot

I pretty much got the beginning of the Wasteland down

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of dirt, mixing
Memory and desire.
You and I,
Lied out like a patient under the table of the sky.
And shall we be euthanized?
Etherized? Castrated? and shall I chop my balls off, sir?
That's the way the world ends
That's the way the world ends
Not with a whimper but a bang
Hey nonny ho

How'd I do?

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
I who was as shapeless as the water
That shaped the Jordan near my home
Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
And sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,
Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
As yet was in a molten form
The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
Swung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,
The darted hail, the childish snow,
And the wind was my sister suitor;
Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
The rack of dreams my lily bones
Did twist into a living cipher,
And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
Of gallow crosses on the liver
And brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structure
Of skin and vein around the well
Where words and water make a mixture
Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creature
To drift or drown upon the seas
Acquainted with the salt adventure
Of tides that never touch the shores.
I who was rich was made the richer
By sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
And I was struck down by death's feather.
I was a mortal to the last
Long breath that carried to my father
The message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,
Remember me and pity Him
Who took my flesh and bone for armour
And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

kek, I was just about to call out OP for listing Boland who is only really known because of the LC.

to be fair though, most of Veeky Forums wouldn't make it past the LC English paper. you're underestimating how common that shit is elsewhere. it'll be like the surprise french teenagers regard american college students loving camus as a philosopher when you find out how low standards are elsewhere.

I believe I meant overestimating. user's right about staying at LC English levels; it's not good.

Pound of Frost

i believe that was the original before ezra pound improved it, good sir.

Eliot is my brain's favorite. Heaney is my heart's favourite.

The only poem I think I ever memorised was "In Flanders Fields," but will share my favourite Heaney poem:

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Blackberry-Picking Related Poem Content Details
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
for Philip Hobsbaum
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

Wallace Stevens

Pound is easily the winner.

It gives me great pleasure to know that so many bleeding-heart fags were beaten at their own game by a literal fucking fascist.

Fernando Pessoa.

The frightful reality of things
Is my everyday discovery.
Each thing is what it is.
How can I explain to anyone how much
I rejoice over this, and find it enough?

To be whole, it is enough to exist.

I have written quite a number of poems
And may write many more, of course.
Each poem of mine explains it,
Though all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is always proclaiming it.

Sometimes I busy myself with watching a stone,
I don't begin thinking whether it feels.
I don't force myself to call it my sister,

But I enjoy it because of its being a stone,
I enjoy it because it feels nothing,
I enjoy it because it is not at all related to me.

At times I also hear the wind blow by
And find that merely to hear the wind blow makes
it worth having been born.

I don't know what others will think who read this;
But I find it must be good because I think it
without effort,
And without the idea of others hearing me think,
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

Once they called me a materialist poet
And I admired myself because I never thought
That I might be called by any name at all.
I am not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any value, it is not I who am
valuable.
The value is there, in my verses.
All this has nothing whatever to do with any will
of mine.

Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

By narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward by thee

Into ever-widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake

>It gives me great pleasure to know that so many bleeding-heart fags were beaten at their own game by a literal fucking fascist.

I really don't think such a tribalist worldview is healthy.

Celebrating Pound because he re-affirms your world view is some atomic grade irony

It's very healthy. Vigorous and convalescent.

Pound doesn't even think Pound is the winner; it's part of why he's such a bro publisher.
Housman's a good contrast for feels in the century, but that'd mean knowing more about poetry than basic /pol/ memeing .

Geoffrey Hill or Alvin Feinman

I'd certainly choose Yeats. Besides various snippets from his poetry, I have "Lapis Lazuli" (perhaps my favorite poem of its length and structure of all time), "Under Ben Bulben," both of the "Byzantium" poems (the second one is obviously superior btw, and is another one of my favorite poems ever), "The Old Stone Cross," "Dialogue Between Self and Soul," "The Wild Old Wicked Man," "Easter, 1916," "The Second Coming," and "Adam's Curse" by memory, along with several short poems primarily from his early period, of which my favorite are "The Sorrow of Love" (which, despite its superficially cliche title, is I think one of his most underappreciated poems), "He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven," and "All Things Can Tempt Me."

As near to my heart as Eliot and Pound are, Yeats obviously trumps them as an overpowering artistic-intellectual force. His A Vision, as gratuitous and frustrating as it sometimes is, is in itself one of my favorite books.The best literary artist of the 20th century, however, is to my mind clearly Joyce. He was truly the great epicist of our era, though he didn't break up his lines. Auden and Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane are certainly up there, too. William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore can eat dicks, however.

The only patrician in this thread.