[Richard Wakefield]

Over at General Talk we're having fun comparing the results of an online quiz that purports to reveal what poet(s) the quiztaker most resembles. People are getting some delightfully incongruent results. For example, I am told that I resemble Tennyson and Maya Angelou. (Of course my first impulse was to try to write a poem that blends the two, but I don't know enough about Angelou and don't have any of her poetry at hand.)

As Len Krisak points out in that thread, the quiz seems to be based entirely on what the poets write about, not on style or technique. So here's my question:

Who are the seemingly unlikely poets between (or among) whom you sense similarities, and why? The similarities can be in content, technique, both, or something else. I think in content, for example, Ginsburg could be Wordsworth after a very big dose of laudanum, both of them straining for transcendence, both feeling that they've been educated out of their innocence and insight, clapped into prison by society, so to speak.
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[Kate Benedict]

Plath: Dickinson after electroshock?
Collins: Sandburg without calluses?
Heaney: Yeats rimed by Frost?
Stallings: Sappho metamorphosed to a hip Y2K goddess?
Murphy: Housman as venture capitalist pigmonger?
Me: Demon spawn of Wilbur and Plath conceived after tea on Cottage Street, 1958?

But Richard, you are now called to write a poem called In Memoriam: A Phenomenal Woman . . .

[Carol Taylor]

I think the quiz had more to do with voice. There were only about 10 poets to choose from, and each question had to do with some well-known generalization identified with a given poet, such as depression or self-confidence or introversion or an affinity with cats. I answered yes to all the questions but one, and it told me I was 9 poets. I went back and changed one answer, and I was only 8 poets. If I'd felt an affinity with cats (and that was iffy), I expect I'd have been 10 poets. If I had answered no to all questions, I wouldn't be a poet at all. Writing quizzes must be a lot easier than writing poetry.

Carol

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Madonna & Walt Whitman.

Ok, maybe Madonna isn't a poet; but, there's the licensing of sexual/sensual expression via artistic expression...Singing the bodies electric, etc. She seems to be one more descendent of WW...

C.

[Richard Wakefield]

Kate: I had just about given up the idea of writing something in the combined voices of Tennyson and Angelou, but yesterday at my older daughter's track meet I realized that there's a poem waiting to be written called "Phenomenal Woman Crosses the Bar," about a female high jumper (one of my daughter's events).
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[Richard Wakefield]

P.S.: Another unlikely comparison is Bob Dylan and Ogden Nash, for their wonderful hypermetrical lines and two or even three syllable rhymes. Especially in concert, Dylan seems to take delight in driving fast across three county lines to reach an unexpected, elaborate rhyme that then seems utterly apt.
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