19 June 2004. Someone listed his top ten poets in English at New-Poetry the other day. That got me thinking about what mine would be. It wouldn't be much different from anyone else's I don't imagine. Since I seem unable to think of anything else to write about here, for some reason, I guess I'll take care of my blogging duty by presenting here. First, a few necessary additional specifications: the list is of lyric poets only. In other words, I'm not considering epic, narrative or satirical poets. That won't have much effect since there are just a few epic poets in English, and almost all the good narrative poets were equally good lyric poets. Pope and Swift are about the only superior satirical poets in English that come to mind, and neither would have made my top ten even if I included satirical poets, though I consider Pope a major poet. The list is also limited to poets born before 1900 or so, so includes no one who reached his prime after 1950 or so.

The rankings of my top ten are very tentative. I really consider the first five pretty much tied for no. 1, and Keats and Shelley even.

Final comment: Cummings and Pound are on my list as much for innovativeness as for the excellence of their poems, though each composed several of the first rank. I find it interesting, how uninnovative most of the great poets in English have been. About the only ones who were innovative at all were Blake, Whitman, Pound and Cummings. Roethke, too, unless someone else consciously used nonsense seriously in Anglophonic verse before him. Eliot, unless he was just inspired by Pound. Gertrude Stein was certainly innovative, but not a great poet. Who else before the fifties? Possibly as many as twenty or thirty, majorly, since then.