The Confessionalists played an important part in the development of my poetic voice. The fact that they took their most intimate moments, both beautiful and ugly, and made them central to poetry allowed me to use language not merely as a tool to craft with but a medium for self-expression and catharsis. At best, Confessional poetry provides a Universal expression of individual experience and allows the reader to personalize the experience of the writer by drawing on similarities. At worst, it provides the writer an opportunity for grand excesses into exhibitionism and maudlin verse.

Anne Sexton. Her poetry is what truly turned me on to writing. She wrote with an intesive sense of immediacy, urgency. Of course, her last writings suffered from her inability to revise and edit her poems and pound them into taught pieces of art due to the actual urgency of her emotional situation, but all in all her best work holds up as a testament to the sculpting of real life into art.

Sylvia Plath. She's more literary than Sexton, certainly more complex (stylistically, that is), and equally intriguing.

Robert Lowell. Lowell started the whole movement, although in all honesty he was prompted by the emergence of beat poetry to make his own work more contemporary. I actually prefer his earlier work (before he delved into the confessional mode) with its stories of colonial Nantucket whaling communities and Quaker settlers. He's more of a recent influence on me, and more stylistically than in terms of content. His earliest work was a hybrid of the modernist ambition towards an ongoing literary canon based on the classics, and the Victorian mode of personal voice.

W.D. Snodgrass. His masterpiece, "Heart's Needle," still stands out as one of my favorite pieces of epic confessionalism.

The Modernists were important in restoring a link to the great traditions of the early literary canon. Although contemporary students of classicism tend to dismiss modernists' work as garbled and incomprehensible, these judgments are often passed out of ignorance, usually based on the brief segment on Moderism taught in high school English, which cites the two-line poems Pound wrote as typifying the entire genre, an utterly fallacious assumption. The Modernists were reacting against the sentimentalism which the Victorians had allowed to permeate every aspect of poetry. That trend, of course, had been started by the Romantic poets of the 18th century before the Victorians sent it into overkill orbit; which is not to say that I believe all Victorian poetry to be bunk -- I happen to be quite fond of Tennyson, but he's simply not an influence. The Modernists wanted the terser, tighter phrasing that defined ancient Greek lyricism, and often had a much closer resemblance to classic English or classic Greek poetry in terms of voice and narrative structure than did the Romantics or the Victorians; the Modernist poetry of the Harlem Renaissance tended to combine polyrhythmic African narrative styles with the English poetic form (my particular favorite from that movement is Langston Hughes); Anglo-American and English European Modernism was chock full of references to (if not actual quotes from) Greek poetry. The critics of Modernism tend to ignore this living link to the distant past and instead wish to conjure up more dead imitations of Victorian poetry, which was itself a severed limb of Romanticism kept alive by artificial means (not that all Victorian poetry was bad -- Longfellow was a wonderful poet; however, how much of the Brownings must one be forced to read before admitting that nineteenth century sentimentalism was really overwrought?).

T.S. Eliot. In spite of my roommate Jason's insistance that Eliot is the worst poet of all time (and Jason also has an English degree and opinions with which I usually tend to agree), I love The Wasteland and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" among others, except when he gets anti- Semitic.

Pound. His longer early stuff is great. His fascist years unfortunately really marred his career and my respect for him.

William Carlos Williams. Sometimes I like to spoof his stuff, imagining his wife finding a poem stuck to the fridge with a strawberry shaped magnet and mistaking it for a shopping list. But he actually has a great eye for images.

Sometimes I think that Americans and the English could take a few lessons in poetic language from the Irish. There is a lilt and rhythm to the Irish slant on the English language that fills it with a vibrancy that is sadly lacking from our everyday idiom. Perhaps it is because the Irish have their own language (a fact that most Americans are unaware of; they assume the Irish simply speak a funny dialect of English), which is one of only a few remaining Celtic languages, and this infuses their approach to English with the rhythm cadences of Irish Gaelic. I love hearing Irish poetry read aloud.

Dylan Thomas. Okay, so what if he was a Romantic? He had the sound-sense to make it enjoyable, as opposed to a lot of the drivel that passed for poetry in the rest of the English-speaking world. My roommate Jason was just in a readers' theatre production of Under Milkwood and it was one of the most ethereal and enjoyable experiences I have ever had that involved simply listening to spoken voice.

Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yes, a Jesuit priest, and bless the Lord for having sent him and making our world a more beautiful place. Hopkins' approach to poetry was forever altered when he started studying Old English and Welsh poetry, and his delving into our language's "dead" past to revive its current state with an inestimable gift. He is currently my favorite poet, because of the way sounds explode off the tongue when you read his poetry aloud. And I love him for his faith in God.

W.B. Yeats. I'm still learning to appreciate him. His allusions are much more literary and obscure, but again, he has a beautiful narrative voice. And Joni Mitchell turned his "The Second Coming" into her song, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Two great artists in one!

The Beat Poets were significant to me because of their love for the spontaneous and extemporaneous. Some of the best beat poetry can be startling, scintillating, and urgent; contain brilliant juxtapositions of humor and pathos; and be wonderful for psychoanalysing. Of course, a lot of it can also be just loose and lazy and piss-poor given the chance, since it shuns revision and editing, which is an important process for me. I recently read a review of a biography of, oh, I think it was Jack Kerouac, although it just as easily could have been Neal Cassidy or Allen Ginsberg, in which the reviewer declared that in relation to the actual body of significant works produced by the Beat writers, they have been received more biographical attention than any other movement of writers. I wouldn't call the assessment unfair.

Walt Whitman. He's the Great American Poet, not to mention he is to Beat Poetry what Neil Young is the Grunge and Unplugged.

Allen Ginsberg. His early stuff, "Howl" and such, is wonderful and exhilirating. His later stuff is crap, and basically nothing more than the meanderings of a dirty old troll.