What/Who is Your Favorite Poem/Poet?

[Bonnie Wilde]

Sylvia Plath is by far my favorite poet. Her villanelle Mad Girl's Love Song is so passionate. It is tremendously hard to express yourself in a poem because there is very little room for words.Each word has to be placed with precision in order for the poem's intention to be clear. Every word she chooses in her poem is well thought out and flows beautifully. She perfectly depicts the emotions of young love.

[jhmende]

I think my favorite would probably be John Keats. His odes are great, and there are other works of his that are just sublime, too. But whoever wrote Beowulf needs to get some credit, too.

[Marianaleivap]

Roque Dalton!! Great guerrillero poet. He make you feel every word he said.

[alixcortez]

My favorite poem is "Heavy" by Mary Oliver. Anyone who has experienced grief or loss can relate to the sentiment she so perfectly expresses.

Another favorite is "i thank you god for most this amazing" by ee cummings. He paints a picture that always come to my mind at certain times of the year when I walk outside and the trees are green and the sun is shining. He embraces the details that we sometimes take for granted but that should stop us in our tracks and make us thankful for life.

One of my favorite books of poems is To Bless the Space Between Us by John O'Donohue. O'Donohue writes that this book isn't a collection of poems because poetry is dependent on specific linguistic rules and forms, while his words are meant to deal more obliquely with that is going on under the language. But, nevertheless, I think poetry is the best classification for this gorgeous book.

[Bill]

"Childe Rolande to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning.

[Jay57]

My favorite poet is e.h and my favorite poem is,
"She has a bookshelf for a heart,
And ink runs through her veins,
She'll write you into her story,
With the typewriter in her brain,
Her bookshelf's getting crowded,
With all the stories that she's penned,
Of the people who flicked through her pages,
But closed the book before the end,
And there's one pushed to the very back,
That sits collecting dust,
With its title in her finest writing,
"The One's Who Lost My Trust",
There's books she's scared to open,
And books she doesn't close,
Stories of every person she's met,
Stretched out in endless rows,
Some people have only a sentence,
While others once held a main part,
Thousands of inky footprints,
That they've left across her heart,
You might wonder why she does this,
Why write of people she once knew?
But she hopes one day she'll mean enough,
For someone to write about her too."
-e.h

[ndounkeu2014]

Le bateau ivre

[choward150]

Sylvia Plath is one of my favorite poets.

[StogieJones]

My favorite poet(s) are Lord Byron and S.T. Coleridge.

[MarisaRose]

Always and forever my answer to this will be Robert Frost. I remember the first time I read "The Road Not Taken," I was in 6th grade and I'm pretty sure that forever changed my views on reading, writing and life. What an amazing poet!

[Witty_Read]

Just about anything by Edgar Allen Poe. I love that satire type poetry. "The Black Cat" happens to be one of my favorites.

[Missalaeneous]

Never read the above Theodore Tilton poem. Like!

-- 24 Oct 2016, 23:02 --

I am a big fan of poetry. I love Longfellow, especially "Evangeline."

Here is one of Kipling's:

If—
BY RUDYARD KIPLING

00:0002:05Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.
(‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

[Jasmine M Wardiya]

Sylvia Plath has been mentioned a few times this page already, but it can't be helped. She's my favourite as well, and my favourite poem from her is called: Mirror. Funny story how I found it too. One of her collections was a required text in high school, and we were assigned another poem (which turned out to be on the other side of this two page spread). So I drifted off and read this poem instead, loved it, then realised that wasn't the one I was supposed to write an essay on. Pity, that.

Aside from Plath, William Wordsworth and Emily Dickinson are two other poets whose works I consistently like. Yeats is the other poet who showed up a lot in high school, but I tended to find his poems somewhat more distant (sometimes physically, and at other times emotionally).

[AmzA]

My top favourite poem ever is The highway man by alfred noyes

[kileiah]

I came across T.S. Eliot's work in high school and I've been obsessed ever since. The way he writes about cityscapes and human encounters feels so amazingly contemporary, even though it's been almost a decade since his works were published.