12 May 2004. The past few days I've been horrideously lethargic, as if I'd stopped taking my thyroid pills completely, which I haven't. I don't know what to make of it. I want to keep making daily entires to this blog of mine, though, so today will make a long-standing but very minor gripe of mine public. It is that so many visible writers on poetry ignore the second half of the twentieth century when listing "major poets" or "the best poets of the past century" or the like. This made sense when I started coming across such lists in the sixties, although even then I was annoyed that the listers seemed never to speak of "the twentieth century, to date." But it's ridiculous now. (I do think, however, that the list-makers really do believe that no superior poets have risen since the early part of the past century.) The latest instance is John Simon. In the May issue of The New Criterion, he wrote, "The four great twentieth-century anglophone poets are, in my reckoning, Eliot, Graves, Pound and Yeats, followed by Auden, Cummings, Frost, MacNeice, and Ransom." The man is probably the worst mainstream commentator on poetry going, so his opinion doesn't mean much to me--although it bothers me that he rates Cummings as high as he does. I commend him for the "in my reckoning," however--a phrase Harold Bloom would never use. Bloom's name jumps to mind because I recently read an introduction of his to one of the many stasguard books he has edited on knownstream poets, this one about Emily Dickinson in a series on "Major Poets." He stated that the six major American poets are Emily, Whitman, Eliot, Stevens, Frost and Hart Crane.

Since I know something about poetry, I have a different list of major American poets from Bloom's, and a different list of the last century's best anglophone poets from Simon's. Others might find me (some already have found me, in fact) as out of it as I find Simon and Bloom, or more out of it. There is one way that I am unquestionably their superior, though: I would never make a list like either of theirs without describing it as applying only to poets dead or old by 1950. I am as positive as can be that there are American poets who hit their prime after 1950 who are as great as my own three nominees for best all-time American Poets born before 1900, Stevens, Cummings and Roethke, for example, but I'm not quite ready to name them, for I admit to not knowing enough of the poets of the second half of the twentieth century and their output to be sure who of them were the very best (although I'm pretty sure of two or three). (Other poets on my list of major American poets born before 1950 are Jeffers, Pound, Williams, Eliot, Frost. Deplorably standard choices, I fear, though I do unstandardly exclude Whitman nor Dickinson. Others, I'm sure, should be on my list, but the ones I've named are the only ones I can think of at the moment.)