Favorite poets

I was browsing through my blog archive, when I came across this site: Primal Scream, one of my first web "design" -- yuck, tables! But I did get around to using CSS (I was enthralled by z-index -- now *that's* a catchy phrase) later on with &c.

Which is actually a convoluted segue to the subject of this post: my favorite poets. Here's the intro in full (duplicate content be damned):

Thus wrought the masters

FILMS, textbooks, your occasional cornball greeting card. You may have encountered their works in more mundane settings, but that does not make them any less great. Or edifying. Or enticing. However you may have met them, they still bring out from you deep-seated feelings, long-hidden traumas, heavily suppressed memories. That’s why they are so great -- they have achieved what every poet aims for: to touch the lives of those who read their words.

W. H. Auden

My first encounter with Auden was in the romantic comedy, Four Weddings and a Funeral. Who could forget Funeral Blues, a eulogy serving as a dedication in a wedding? Auden is best known for the remarkable variety of his body of work, ranging from ballads and sonnets to limericks and free verse.

e. e. cummings

When I first read somewhere i have never traveled, it struck me: hey, this is a song! (You know, the one that goes: "The first time I loved forever...", the theme song to that 1980s TV show "Beauty and the Beast".) The poem became a grist of many love letters, shameless plagiarisms all. "Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands." God, who wouldn’t fall for that? Despite the complex structure (or non-structure, as he is specially known for violating rules of composition) of his poems, his ideas are fairly straightforward and traditional.

T. S. Eliot

Eliot was -- and will always be -- unfathomable. I don’t mean that as a pejorative. With his copious endnotes and eclectic literary allusions, you can’t help but read up on themes like classic mythology, medieval romances, even Tarot cards and Eastern and Oriental mysticism, to get his point. The Waste Land is a major literary coup, with its obscure literary references -- some in foreign languages -- and a complex theme that portrays the decay of modern Europe and a longing for things past.

Allen Ginsberg

No one can beat the Beats, too. With a contemporary like Jack Kerouac, and a hangout like San Francisco, no wonder Ginsberg writes the way he does. My own take on why the Beats got their name is that they dance to a different beat. (Or is it: they beat to a different drum?) Beats me. Seriously: the Beats gave voice to that generation's growing clamor against conformity and false values, advocating peace and civil rights, thus setting the stage for radical protests in the 1960s.

Federico García Lorca

Along with Miguel Cervantes, García Lorca is one of the greatest Spanish poets and dramatists. The imagery he evokes are striking and delicate in its simplicity. Lament is his finest poem.

Pablo Neruda

Il Postino, where else? With a delightful soundtrack and a powerhouse of voice talents to render his words (Andy Garcia, Julia Roberts, Madonna, to name a few), one cannot resist being drawn to Neruda's "songs of love and despair". Neruda is better known, though, for his surrealist, sometimes violent, imagery, and a portrayal of universal chaos consistently cropping up in his themes.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I bummed a copy of Sonnets to Orpheus from a friend. I almost deliberately forgot to return it. Rilke is way up there in the pantheon of German literary greats along with Goethe and Kafka. His Letters to a Young Poet displayed his deft mastery of the craft.