Recently I was interviewed by Paul Brookes and I made the statement than no living poet would get into my top 10. When I read this back I thought - is that really true? Who are my top 10?
In the end I went for non-living (a.k.a. dead) poets.
I was going to do this "in no particular order" but I decided in the end to get off the fence.These poets are not just poets who would appear in many such lists as they are genuinely great but speak directly to me and influence my own work - some that inspired me when I started and some whose work I have become more aware of and are increasingly growing in influence.
But hang on, you say - where are Hardy, Keats, Milton, Byron, TS Eliot? What about Shakespeare? I quickly discovered that getting down to just 10 was going to hard and I had to think about whether their work influenced me directly or influenced poetry as a whole and whether I actually liked the poems rather than just admiring them for their technicality. I also had to decide whether it mattered if the poet themselves were likeable. I decided that I had to like the poetry but didn't worry about whether I would invite the poet to dinner.
Five of the poets pretty much wrote themselves in but then it started getting tricky. In the end I've gone with my gut instinct and used a ranking technique that I use at work. Ask yourself - whose poetry would I miss if it didn't exist? Keep comparing contenders until you have you cut-off.
Oh, and by the way Tim, where are the women? Yes, I know. I apologise in particular to Sylvia Plath and Maya Angelou, who were both contenders up until the last few knock-out rounds.
I would also like to mention Pablo Neruda and C.P. Cavafy. With these poets, you are looking at translations of their work so you have a combination of the original work and the translator. I have no doubt that in both cases the work itself contributes greatly, but in the case of Cavafy I don't think the older translations do him justice and it's Ian Parks' recent translations and insights that mean I am starting to feel Cavafy's influence in my work already.
Anyway, here goes, counting down from 10 to 1.
10. Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
A difficult and perhaps controversial choice to start with. Larkin was not, at least in his public persona, a likeable figure and his private life had some quirks too. Sometimes his poems are acerbic and you aren't quite sure if his targets deserve it. However, I can't help but like his work. The poems are deeply layered and beautifully constructed yet you can get an immediate hit from them even before you start to analyse and unpick them.
"What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields." - ("Days")
Personal favourite -
Aubade
9. Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
A deeply flawed genius who met a self-inflicted early death but who left behind work of such verbal beauty that he shines like a beacon in 20th Century poetry. Without the intellectual pretencion of Eliot or the variation in form and tone of Auden he nonetheless becomes a favourite of many because of the sheer joy at the sounds his words make when read out loud.
"Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea." (from "Fern Hill")
Personal favourite -
Fern Hill
8 - William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
We now enter a run of "Romantic" poets with the pre-eminent figure in the movement. You cannot escape his influence and he epitomises what the general public still consider poetry to be if you ask them. Ask them for a poem and they'll probably name "I wandered lonely as a cloud" even if that's all they know of it. And if you've been brought up with that view then it has to rub off somewhere in your work. He was technically gifted to the point of showing off - writing his autobiography in blank verse, for example. You can read his work and it's like taking a warm bath - very comforting, even if it doesn't particularly challenge you.
"Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:" - (from "There was a boy", part of The Prelude)
Personal favourite -
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
7 - Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley was the most radical of the Romantics and his work remains quoted to this day - "Ye are many, they are few" from The Masque of Anarchy will no doubt ring a bell. It could be argued that he was a champagne socialist, railing against authority from his villa in Italy and suggesting that people should allow themselves to be slaughtered in protests rather than use violence, while not suggesting he himself do it. However his words were seditious (see the example below) and none of this detracts from the power of his poetry, linguistically and thematically.
"An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn,—mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in th' untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed—
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day." - ("England in 1819")
Personal favourite -
The Masque of Anarchy
6 - John Clare (1793-1864)
John Clare is a lesser known poet of the Romantic era but penned a number of lovely pastoral poems inspired by the area he grew up and lived in. He was born into a working class family and was an agricultural worker himself in Northamptonshire, not far from where my ancestors on my grandma Rita's side did the same thing in that same era. After early success he couldn't sustain he began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and by his 40's was in a mental hospital. He was the opposite in many ways of Shelley, accepting the lot in life given to him and his ancestors despite the authorities ripping up centuries of tradition in land enclosures and ploughing of pastures. As workers drifted to the towns Clare wrote passionately about a lost way of life, many while he was institutionalised.
"I ne’er was struck before that hour
With love so sudden and so sweet,
Her face it bloomed like a sweet flower
And stole my heart away complete.
My face turned pale as deadly pale,
My legs refused to walk away,
And when she looked, what could I ail?
My life and all seemed turned to clay." - ("First Love")
Personal favourite -
I am
5 - Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)
Heaney's work, for me, is characterised by his ability to write with complexity and depth yet engage you in thinking about what he is saying without it being inaccessible or preachy. The literary critic Helen Vendler described him as “a poet of the in-between.” He was sympathetic to the Republican cause yet never definitively espoused it - he lifted stones and let us see what was underneath. He wrote in the language of his people's oppressors - to a great depth, and the point where he was able to produce probably the best translation of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. He wrote about the past yet he was not stuck in it - stylistically or thematically.
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it." (from "Digging")
Personal favourite -
Death of a Naturalist
4 - William Blake (1757-1827)
We studied Blake at school and I was immediately drawn to his imagery - drawn in by "The Tyger" and then further by my favourite Blake poem "The Chimney Sweeper". Blake was a complex man with unconventional views. He was a committed Christian who railed against the established church - The Chimney Sweeper being an excellent example. His poem "The Little Black Boy" shows the idea of equality of people of all races. He is of the Romantic period but is perhaps slightly before, and possibly pre-empting them. He constantly questions his religion, the Church, society and the interaction between the three.
And so we come to "Jerusalem", or as Blake titled it "And did those feet in ancient times". Beloved of the WI, sung by political parties across the spectrum, sung as a hymn in some churches and possibly England's best choice for a National Anthem. What did it mean if it appeals to such a range of people? For me you just need to look at the breadth of Blake's work to understand it - I'll probably write my own analysis of this separately as it's such a fascinating piece of work.
I think this poem, short and to the point, sums up Blake's view of the society in which he lived. And, astonishingly, could still be valid 200 years later.
Holy Thursday (from Songs of Experience)
Is this a holy thing to see,
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine.
And their fields are bleak & bare.
And their ways are fill’d with thorns.
It is eternal winter there.
Personal favourite -
A Poison Tree
3 - W.H.Auden (1907-1973)
For me, Auden's power was in his variety - subject matter and poetic form are a landscape that he roamed without fear and with equal success. Intellectually the poems are sometimes elitist, splattered with references that most people would not understand and yet somehow he makes them readable and allows at least one layer to be understood. They are also occasionally political, although his politics changed as he grew older and he also lost much of his support during his career after he left the UK for America just before the outbreak of World War II. One thing's for sure, when you read an Auden poem you know you'll want to read it again, and again and probably more times after that. You will have to work hard to get all the nuances, but it will be worth it.
"Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.
Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.
In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew;
Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that." (from "Refugee Blues")
Personal favourite -
Epitaph on a Tyrant
2 - Charles Causley (1917-2003)
I was introduced to Charles Causley 's work by his distant relative, folk singer Jim, who set some of his poems to music in 2013, although I had heard his most famous poem "Timothy Winters" before. I was instantly attracted by the accessibility of the work, by its gentle ballad rhythms and by the sensitivity of the feeling written into the work. This "accessibility" led to him being discounted as a Poet Laureate despite a campaign in the 1980s including support from Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Hughes called him "a man of the people, in the old, best sense" and was a friend of Causley's despite their poetry being so different. Much of his work and certainly his life was influenced by his time in the Navy during World War 2 and he also wrote a lot about his native Cornwall, although he was widely travelled and wrote about that too. His writing harks back to a time before modernism, with echoes of Houseman, Hardy and even Blake.
It's so hard for me to a pick a favourite from his many great poems but I, and I think many others, believe his best work to be Eden Rock.
"They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet."
The ending of this poem is, in my opinion, as fine a piece of poetry as has been committed to paper.
Then there's Innocent's Song, a dark Christmas ballad:
Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?
Of course you have to mention Timothy Winters, again a very simple and easily understood poem that contains beautiful and concise descriptive stanzas of one unfortunate pupil at the school in which Causley taught after the war.
However in the end I've gone for a more obscure poem, which you won't find online other than as an audio download of a reading by Charles himself - it costs 89p or you buy a whole album for £9.99. It's called A Wedding Portrait (of his mother and father) and contains this beautiful segment:
As I walk by them on the stair
A small surprise of sun, a ruse
Of light, gives each a speaking air,
A sudden thrust, though both refuse
- Silent as fish or water-plants -
To break the narrow stream of glass
Dividing us. I was nowhere
That wedding day, and the pure glance
They shaft me with acknowledges
Nothing of me. I am not here.
When you see the actual photograph it's exactly as you envisage it in his description - and the poem adds a deeper layer about existence and loss. It's brilliant and I really wish I could have met him to tell him so.
Get the audios here:
https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/charles-causley
1 - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) with honourable mention to Siegfried Sassoon
Wilfred Owen, before the First World War, was a competent but unremarkable poet in the Romantic style but his introduction to the cauldron of World War One changed his poetry, and the trajectory of his life and legacy, forever. When I first heard "Dulce et Decorum Est" at school it altered my view of poetry, and ultimately, of war itself. I had been brought up with a very conventional view of Britain as a great military power and of war being something we did and that you had to support. Since our prior war had been World War Two against the Nazis, this may have coloured the public mindset. However this poem triggered me to find out more about World War I and then put war into a historical context - prior conflicts that you learn via history as dates, battles and winners or losers mask the horror of death, disease and destruction that people experience in the midst of battle.
I had also been exposed to poetry largely as the kind of soft, romantic style - especially as much of it was learnt at chapel. T.S. Elliot had bypassed me, or I him, so when I saw familiar structures like sonnets being used to convey a far darker message than Shakespeare had it changed everything.
Owen's experiences, including spending a couple of days in a hole with fellow soldiers who were literally in pieces after a shell hit them, resulted in him suffering PTSD (then known as shell shock) and he was sent to Craiglockhart War hospital in Edinburgh where he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon. The men formed an instant friendship, with Sassoon becoming Owen's mentor. Owen would never admit that he had become better than Sassoon, but in my opinion he had.
Owen returned to the front in 1918 and was killed in action a week before the war ended. Before his death only 5 of his poems were formally published.
Owen sums up the ethos of his war poetry in this introduction:
“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory,
honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am
not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The
Poetry is in the pity.”
Technically, Owen draws on his love of classical style - particularly strong in half-rhymes and yet unafraid to write what he saw as the truth about War.
Go to this page to read some classic Owen poems and snippets -
Wilfred Owen quotes
I can't really pick a favourite so as my Owen poem I simply have to pick what may not be the best but the one that changed my life - Dulce Et Decorum Est.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
