Rank poets

>the mood of his poems is suffocatingly nihilistic
That is so incredibly off-base that I almost don't even want to respond to you because you're so fucking stupid. The bleak nature of some of his early stuff is fairly justified considering the entire fucking continent he was on was laid to waste in a matter of a few years. And even then, that does not equate to nihilism. Be became a fucking devout christian for christsake.

Read the Four Quartets you faggot.

>he over-uses quotation and allusion way too much
People have been leveling this meme argument against him since 1922 and it's been refuted countless times since then. Read up on the Mythical Method.

Tennyson is probably the best poet of the 19th century you complete hack

Pound was the best poet to live, right beside Shakespeare.

Quit being a snowflake contrarian faggot.

I'd also like to add that most of Pound's "poetry" were actually imitations and translations of little known poets, usually uncredited. Not only was he a poser, he was a plagiarist. We don't know Pound the poet but by his poetic masks, but then again we don't want to.
>your judgements are subjective so I can dismiss them out of hand
Nihilism wasn't the right word, but Eliot is consistent in his contempt for life and for sex. Can you show me any poem of Eliot where there is not a persistent undercurrent of disgust? Christinanity comes natural to people like Eliot who hate life.
He tricked you. Pound didn't know shit, he pretends erudition to trap the unwary. Even Eliot couldn't take him seriously. No poet has done so much damage on poetry as an art than Pound.

Yeah they're all rank poets, but that might be because of their language.
Here's a list of non-rank poets :

>God tier: Homer, Pindar, Aeschylus
>Great tier: Hesiod, Sappho, Alcaeus
>Ok tier: Callimachus, Theocritus, Bacchylides, Anacreo
>Irredeemably shit tier: Euripides

You are a fucking imbecile

Good argument.

Also, another funny characteristic of Eliot's poetry is his abuse of juxtaposition. He loves to put high-culture and low-culture together for shock value and irony, but, sadly, the novelty wears off quickly. Plus, Laforgue did it better.

Rumi
Rilke
Borges

at least poems are mercifully short. the po-mo novelists do this for 900 dense pages

God tier: Milton
Great tier: Yeats, Heaney, Whitman, Shakespeare, Pope

>Eliot is consistent in his contempt for life and for sex. Can you show me any poem of Eliot where there is not a persistent undercurrent of disgust?

Have you literally only read poems from when he was relatively young? He has no contempt for life itself, just certain contexts within it that were growing more prevalent. Again, the fucking world was at war for the first time in history, being kind of dejected is 100% justified. And I have no clue where you're getting the sex thing from. Dude liked to fuck.

Most of the Ariel Poems, Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets, and the fucking cat poems have no form of what you're reductively calling "contempt for life."

Four Quartets and Ash Wednesday aren't at all nihilistic.

I rate Byron and Kipling poetry.

After his release from St. Elizabeths he became incredibly depressed and would tell everyone that his whole life had been a waste and his poetry "botched." The biography by Humphrey Carpenter contains all of this from his family & people in Italy who saw it, though the most noted testimony about this comes from when Allen Ginsberg met him in Venice.

How much you want to trust the evaluation of a mentally ill old man is anyone's guess. The weird thing about Carpenter's biography is that he expends a huge amount of space and energy arguing that Pound really wasn't insane even though he was legally declared such... but after he was released he spent the next 20 years refusing to speak, eat and basically suicidal (I believe he tried once at that castle his daughter has.)

Absolutely correct.

Pound is trash, even Nabokov rightfully called him a hack

Incidentally I found these random webpages years ago from someone who was a schoolboy and used to visit Pound at St. Elizabeths. He had some interesting observations, not just of Pound but of the people around him (Sheri Martinelli, John Kasper, etc.) The site is dead, for all I know the author may be as well.

web.archive.org/web/20121023013602/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/ramblings/pound.html
web.archive.org/web/20121023013438/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/snapshots/sheri.html
web.archive.org/web/20121023013604/http://www2.hawaii.edu/~lady/ramblings/pound3.html

His comments on his own poetry are accurate. He realized too late in life that his poetry was nonsensical and that his artistic ambitions were doomed to fail.

The Waste Land isn't about the war you idiot, it's about Eliot's personal frustrations, in his own words, "rhythmical whining"

Thanks for the link user. Pretty interesting stuff.

The older i get and the more poetry i write, im less inclined to believe that good exists at all. Rather when people argue about quality, they're arguing for taste. I like Keats and Shakespeare because negative capability is a nice idea to me. I like O'hara and Parra because conversational poetics is a nice idea to me. Etc.

>Eliot, while publishing in post WWI Europe, was nihilistic.

Okay there, uneducated retard.

I'm not necessarily saying it's about the war, just that the environment created by the war is very obviously going to impress itself on an artist like him, and to write it off as "nihilism" or whatever is really stupid.

But actually it is totally about the war and it's pretty foolish to take an offhand comment like that at face value, especially when Eliot was notorious for making vacuous or otherwise misleading comments about his own work. Not to mention Eliot's whole ethos as a poet was to strive towards impersonality.

A Game of Chess is the only part that kinda seems to be built off his own experience.

The impersonal, oracular voices of Eliot and Pound makes them historians, not true poets. Pound tries to write like a God, Stevens and Bishop merely write like angels. And Merrill too.

WHY DO YOU AUTISTIC FUCKS ALWAYS MANAGE TO ARGUE ABOUT SOMETHING AND THEN DISCUSSIONS OF OTHER THINGS CAN'T COME TO LIGHT BECAUSE Veeky Forums'S COMMENT SYSTEM IS LINEAR, REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

I'm not a fan of Pound as poet but Pound as critic and historian of poetry is very good.

Quality translator too.

But these kids love to hate.

Pound's criticism is garbage, he was one of the biggest psueds in the history of poetry. He distorts the relative quality of poets to be contrarian, but his actual learning was superficial. I mean, look at his ABC of Reading, he omits the Romantics but elevates poets of doubtful quality like the Earl of Rochester and Mark Alexander Boyd. He blames Wordsworth for narrowness but praises Landor, whose work mostly consists of translations of Latin epigrams. Pound was basically just pretending, nobody can be a super-highbrow in all the things Pound pretended to be. And his own pronouncements are usually very empty. Even a cursory look at Pound's poetry shows that his insistence on "precise" poetry was a sham, because most of his poems are very vague and Swinburnian.

God tier: Yeats, Chaucer
Great tier: Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot
OK tier: Donne, Keats
Irredeemably shit tier: Wordsworth, Shelley, Whitman, Spenser, Ezra Pound