I'm tempted to think, at times, that MOST of the poets I admire are underrated, at least by critical establishment. I guess that's just the quirkiness of fandom. I think of Housman, for instance, whose popularity has never flagged, but who seems always to be damned with faint praise by serious critics.
Or I think of this poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Her reputation has long been eclipsed by her husband, but a sonnet such as this one gives you an inkling of why, during their lifetime, it was much the other way around:
Grief
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, espress
Grief for the Dead in silence like to death:
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet--
If it could weep it could arise and go.
I have no idea why she isn't represented by THIS in the Norton Anthology, instead of the same old Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Anthologies have a huge role to play in this issue, of course.
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