TEN. Sara Teasdale (d. 1933) There are hundreds of women poets better than H.D. and Marianne Moore and who certainly rival Bishop, Plath, and Sexton, and clamor for second or third place behind Dickinson and Millay—and one of these is Teasdale, sadly neglected.
NINE. Christina Rossetti (d. 1894) Yet another representative of a chorus of neglected females languishing in the shadow of the two average poets who rode the Pound clique to some notoriety among academics—H.D. and Moore (who made Bishop). This entire underrated list includes poets like Amy Lowell and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (who wrote a lot more than Shall I Count the Ways? including heaps of dramatic verse and was far more famous than he was when she eloped with Robert), as well as an army of 19th and 20th century women—Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Fanny Osgood, Alice Cary, Anna Hempstead Branch, Elinor Wylie, Dorothy Parker, Ellen Wheeler Wilcox, Lucy Larcom, Emma Enbury, Emma Lazarus, Frances Harper, Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, Helen Whitman, Genevieve Taggard, Inna Donna Coolbrith, Lydia Sigourney—and the list goes on.
EIGHT. Rudyard Kipling. (d. 1936) The rip-roaring ballad is too rip-roaring for academia—which has taken over poetry in a manner today we can hardly understand and why the barroom music of Rudyard Kipling is an underrated treasure.
SEVEN. Archibald MacLeish. (d. 1982) OK. He went a bit too far in one poem; the lines that brought him fame eventually destroyed his reputation (funny how that works). If this: “a poem should not mean/but be” belonged to an essay rather than to a poem that vaulted him briefly and fatally to the top, he might be appreciated for his spectacular poems (check out “The End of the World”) far more.
SIX. Philip Sidney. (d. 1586) You know there are poets you ought to know and might even enjoy, despite their bygone status. Here is one of them. He was a soldier for his country, never saw any of his work published—his Sonnets rival Shakespeare, Donne, Millay.
FIVE. D.H. Lawrence. (d. 1930) Better known for his lousy sex novels (sex sells), David Herbert Lawrence wrote the kind of free verse poetry which should have been at the center of Modernism—instead, we got the clown show that was Pound, WC “Plums” Williams, and the Anglican weirdo, T. S. Eliot. Eliot belonged to an influential New England family connected to the Transcendentalists and Emerson—godfather of William James, brother of Henry James. “Prufrock,” Eliot’s best poem, is actually a Romantic/Victorian masterpiece—the Modernism fraud used Eliot’s versifying skill as a kind of Trojan Horse to convince us that truly talented Eliot’s circus friend, Pound, was a “master” of the “new”—one of the most spectacular cultural lies there is. Read Lawrence’s “The Snake.” Then attempt to enjoy Williams afterwards.
FOUR. Thomas Campion. (d. 1620) This may not seem “new” to Pound fans, but Thomas Campion, composer, as well as poet, who died broke, published his Art of English Poesie in 1602, arguing “against the vulgar…custom of riming.” Samuel Daniel—another underrated poet—greeted this with his “Defense of Rhyme” (rhyme aids “memory” and has “delight”) the following year. But we look at Campion’s poetry—and find it rhymes, so we must, in this case, be looking at his songs. It is a layered, rich, intoxicating contemplation—the one that considers poetry versus song. Here is my favorite poem by Campion:
When thou must home to shades of underground,
And there arrived, a new admired guest,
The beauteous spirits do engirt thee round,
White Iope, blithe Helen and the rest,
To hear the stories of thy finished love
From that smooth tongue whose music hell can move;
Then wilt thou speak of banqueting delights,
Of masques and revels which sweet youth did make,
Of tourneys and great challenges of knights,
And all these triumphs for thy beauty’s sake:
When thou hast told these honors done to thee,
Then tell, O tell, how thou didst murder me.
THREE. Leonard Bacon. (d. 1954) He won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1941. He’s utterly forgotten. But look at how he writes:
In short he was the very symbol of
The second nature of free verse—free love.
Or this:
Still polyphonic prose is simply prose.
Free verse is but the shadow of a song,
Though sham sham sham and pose repose on pose,
Though Greenwich Village pillage still in gutters,
Though Arensburg believe what Kreymborg utters. *
*Alfred Kreymborg published Pound’s Des Imagistes in 1913 and helped to advance the careers of Moore and Williams. Walter Arensburg used inherited steel money to fund Duchamp and the artistic circles associated with Kreymborg.
This by Leonard Bacon is perhaps more scandalous than any couplet I’ve ever seen:
She beat her bosom, which appeared to be
Flat as the level of democracy.
Despite winning the Pulitzer Prize, Bacon didn’t take the Modernists seriously. Bad move. He’s been cancelled.
TWO. Robert Hillyer. (d. 1961) He won the Pulitzer for poetry in 1934—objected strenuously to Pound’s post-WW II Bollingen Prize. He taught at Harvard. His papers are at Syracuse.
His work has a song-like beauty, and is worth remembering, but alas, he was no genius. Here’s a sample:
About the headlands and the rocky shoals
I hear the breath of twilight, sighing, sighing,
And over the wail and dash of breakers, crying,
The voices of old ships and wandering souls.
Through the wet air squadrons of gulls are flying,
Wheeling but once against the skies, then tossed
Into the wind like a flight of visions lost
With vanished souls into the darkness dying.
ONE. Howard Nemerov. (d. 1991) He won the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. That doesn’t matter. The shadows of oblivion have already touched his brow. Who speaks about him now? He was a pilot in WW II.
For a saving grace, we didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.
Seldom the ghosts come back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incomprehensible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,
Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
Per ardua, said the partisans of Mars,
Per aspera, to the stars.
That was the good war, the war we won
As if there was no death, for goodness’s sake.
With the help of the losers we left out there
In the air, in the empty air.
Reputations should depend on the poetry—not cliques, friends, and movements claiming to be “new”.