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..
David Reyes
geoffrey hill
i have a couple yeats poems memorized. and many snatches of eliot.
Nathaniel Campbell
I see Hill mentioned all the time. Every time I've read him I was unimpressed. Which collection is the best, lad?
Jason Long
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
Henry Price
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.
Evan Clark
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
Owen Reyes
>First the child First the CHILL
Christian Lee
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.
Noah Fisher
>i was 15 >at brown >no drinking, no getting laid it's not necessary to refuse things you can't get anyway
Jace Turner
>Not mentioning Pound
Jack Moore
>not including Hughes
Hughes >> Heaney.
Nicholas Hughes
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
Mason Diaz
>
Jose Scott
>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
Joshua Reyes
Your post says more about yourself m8
Jaxon Rogers
Yeah, it says I know better than you
Bentley Garcia
Eavan boland is shit OP
Luis Carter
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?
Jaxson Parker
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.
Hunter Gutierrez
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.
James Allen
I believe I meant overestimating. user's right about staying at LC English levels; it's not good.
Sebastian Edwards
Pound of Frost
Nathaniel Thomas
i believe that was the original before ezra pound improved it, good sir.
Chase Richardson
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:
Skip to Main Content Poetry Foundation Navigation About Us Visit Contact Us Newsletters Give Need to make a toast?Find poems for weddings, commitment ceremonies, and other occasions. POEMS & POETS FEATURES RESOURCES PROGRAMS & INITIATIVES POETRY MAGAZINE Search the Site Search poems, poets, videos … Search Home Poems & Poets Browse Poems Blackberry-Picking by Seamus Heaney POEM RELATED CONTENT Discover this poem's context and related poetry. Facebook Twitter Tumblr Email Share Print 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.
Evan Garcia
Wallace Stevens
Isaac Cooper
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.
Ryan Lopez
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.
Kevin Myers
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
Christian White
>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.
Adrian Smith
Celebrating Pound because he re-affirms your world view is some atomic grade irony
Jaxson Nelson
It's very healthy. Vigorous and convalescent.
Ryder Thompson
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 .
Ethan Murphy
Geoffrey Hill or Alvin Feinman
Samuel Perry
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.