[nyctom]

Alicia just said something on the Larkin thread that I found interesting and wondered what other people thought. I had written that Larkin often left me cold, though I could admire the talent and skill. It is what I call the living room couch painting phenomena: just because you can admire Picasso doesn't mean you want to look at one of his paintings every day as it hangs over the sofa. But I truly love Larkin's "Church Going" (perhaps because I am wrestling right now with my own spiritual issues and he gave me a way to "voice" them--to myself at least).

Anyway, this is what Alicia said:

Some poets kind of explode onto the scene of your imagination, but later turn out to be so much smoke and mirrors (or sound and fury).

So a question for all you 'Spherians, both free versers and metricists: which poets exploded for you, which of those poets still reverberate for you, which have faded? Similarly, which poets "grew on you" and, what I am most interested in hearing, why they did?

Looking forward to hearing from all of you.

Tom

[Tim Murphy]

A great many poets exploded into my teenage consciousness. Two of those early enthusiasms have fizzled out, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. In both cases I now find them to be immature poseurs. The poets who have grown and grown on me are Hardy, Frost and Wilbur. The more I've seen of the world the better I've understood how very much of this world is encompassed in their work.

[Solan]

I'm sure people will soon tire of hearing me say "Borges". But Borges grew on me. When I first encountered his poems together with his stories, I found the stories great but the poems to a good degree boring and lifeless, though their ropics were interesting. When Tim posted other translations than the ones I had read initially, my view of Borges' poetry changed, and I really appreciate his poetry as poetry and not just as a kind of prose with interesting background ideas. The Norwegian poet and champion of metered verse, Andre Bjerke, is also in this category.

On the bang-and-fade side, there is another Norwegian poet, Jan Erik Vold, who was a lot of fun when I was a teen-ager. I remember well one of his poems, "Kulturuke" ("Culture week"), which began on that word, and then ran through all pronouncable permutations of the letters, ending up in "Kuruketul" ("Cow dung nonsens"). Most of his poems were of the same nature. I won't disparage the man, but his poetry no longer holds the fascination it once did.

My bang-and-keep list ... I would say Goethe, Poe, Blake ... though there are some acclaimed poems by Blake that just fail to move me. The Eddas are also bang-and-keep.

But there's a fourth category: Bang, but I didn't realize at the time. I know that might sound weird, but Ibsen fell into that category. Part because I didn't even realize that he wrote in verse(!) - but that was ignorance on my part.

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Svein Olav

.. another life

[Clive Watkins]

Interesting thread....

Frost "clicked" with me while I was still a teenager. The effect has lasted. Of later-born poets, the same is true of Auden, Heaney, Edward Thomas, Wallace Stevens and Anthony Hecht.

At one time, I was much drawn to Robert Graves, an attraction which waned years ago, though there are still poems of his I like. At university, I used to promote the merits of some of the poems in Ed Dorn’s 1965 volume, Geography. I remember, too, the enormous relish with which I devoured James Wright’s 1963 collection, The Branch Will Not Break. There are poems in it I still admire.

Ted Hughes never "did it" for me; nor, in earlier generations, did Dylan Thomas or Yeats.

Poets who have crept up on me, often from many years back now, include Philip Larkin, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, Richard Wilbur, Robert Francis, David Jones, Elizabeth Bishop, and the New Zealander, Allen Curnow.

Svein mentions poets in languages other than English (and Norwegian). High on my list of "modern" poets - across all the languages of which I have any knowledge - are the Frenchman, Philippe Jaccottet, the Italian, Eugenio Montale, the German, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and the Chilean, Pablo Neruda. Some I came to in later years, such as Jaccottet and Enzensberger, some in my twenties.

Why have my tastes changed? I’ve no real idea. It perhaps says more about me than about the merits of any of these writers. I would not necessarily want to back my judgement today in any absolute sense against my judgement as a twenty-five-year-old. Age has its prejudices just as much as youth. As a school-boy I enjoyed both watching and playing tennis. Now, though I still enjoy playing, I cannot bear watching! So?

Clive Watkins




[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited March 27, 2002).]

[Tim Murphy]

Part of the pleasure of participating in this Eratosphere is hearing the wisdom of poets like Clive who are so senior in the craft to myself. Given a starry-eyed seventeen-year-old, I would read him Dylan Thomas, TS Eliot, and Yeats, the poets who intoxicated me at that age. Probably because I've not the imagination to do differently. I'll add though, that Robert Francis and AD Hope have "exploded" upon my consciousness in recent years. When that happens in your late forties, folks, it's not going to fizzle out. Housman is another poet I just wasn't ready for as a kid. Just as Caleb is warming to him, so have I. I'm also studying Edward Thomas in an effort to understand Watkins.

[Deborah Warren]

Like Tim, I was bowled over by Dylan Thomas. The music. (Of course I have enough Welsh blood in me to smell faintly of leeks.) Poseurs? Strong word; I'll gladly agree for Eliot, if not Thomas. My apostasy-list includes Keats, not because I don't like him but because I loved him too much.

[Bruce McBirney]

When an enthusiasm for a poet wanes, I think it's often because the enthusiasm was sparked by one or two poems, not by the poet's most typical work. I can think of a number of poets who knocked me out with the first couple poems I read (Seferis--"The King of Asine"; Eliot--"Prufrock," "Burnt Norton"; Oliver--"Wild Geese," "The Journey"), but whose other work I then read voraciously without finding anything that moved me as much. No one ever said better than Thomas in "Fern Hill" and "Do Not Go Gentle" that youth (and life) are precious, but brief. But that's about all he said. I still love those poems, but I wouldn't head to him first for balance or advice.

Alicia said on the Housman thread that a poet who writes just four or five superb poems that must be included in any honest poetry anthology deserves to be called great. I really think that's true. Which indicates how hard it is to write just one, even in a lifetime.

The poets I've appreciated more and more, like Frost, did it a fair number of times--and on a variety of subjects. I'm curious, anyone, how many poets who you feel strongly about have written 10 or more poems that you really carry with you--not just poems you admire or have to teach each semester, but ones you personally couldn't do without?

[Clive Watkins]

Bruce has invited us to name the poems we "personally couldn't do without".

Though it probably constitutes an improper rhetorical shift to say so, there is a sense in which - for me - there are no poems I could not do without; or, to rephrase the double negative, there is no poem which I regard as indispensable to me personally. Indeed, despite my almost lifelong addiction to it (a kind of disease), I have sometimes wondered - and increasingly in recent years - how "necessary" poetry is at all, a heresy liable to result in my poetic damnation, I suspect.

Sorry, Tom! This takes things a bit away from your interesting thread.

Clive Watkins

[Freda Edis]

Tastes and needs change.

Those who have stayed - Blake, The English Metaphysicals, Milton, Geoffrey Hill, R.S.Thomas, Thomas Blackburn, Emily D., Kabir, Hafiz, Milarepa, Judah HaLevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol (these last 5 in spite of translation problems).

Why did they grow and stay? I'll risk sounding corny, but it's the appeal of the 'eternal' which has always drawn me in poetry, ad how freshly that is expressed.

Those who are still around but at the bottom of the pile - Hughes, the Confessionals, Dylan Thomas, Thom Gunn, Keith Douglas, Wilfred Owen, Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Heaney.
There are a good many more at other levels in this pile.

Those who have gone - most of the 70s feminist and agit-prop poets.

erm....excuse my present biases showing.

Freda

[Robt_Ward]

I'm sure it won't surprise anyone that I answer both questions with "Theodore Roethke" and "W.B. Yeats".

Other exploders and lasters: Frost, Aiken (amazingly enough), Dylan Thomas, e. e. cummings.

Exploders and faders: T.S. Eliot, Robert Lowell.

Heck, I could go on forever, but I'm atypical: I can quote from memory hundreds of poems, many of which I wish I could forget. That'd make a great thread: "Poems I Wish I'd Never Read".

(robt)

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(The former bear_music, in his own name)