Some poets I think are worth reading
Some poets I like :)
Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967)
Irish poet from County Monaghan, he wrote about rural Irish life with an unsentimental, sometimes bitter eye, rejecting the romanticized "Celtic Twilight" version of the countryside. He moved to Dublin in the 1930s and worked as a journalist and critic while writing his major poems.
Highlights
- The Great Hunger (1942) — long poem on the bleakness of Irish farm life
- Raglan Road — later set to music, became a widely performed song
- Sonnet "On Raglan Road" and Canal Bank Walk reflect his later, gentler Dublin period
- A commemorative seat and statue sit along the Grand Canal in Dublin, a site he wrote about
Links
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013)
Northern Irish poet from County Derry, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. His work draws on rural upbringing, Irish history and politics (including the Troubles), and classical/mythic material, most famously in his translation of Beowulf.
Highlights
- Death of a Naturalist (1966) — debut collection
- North (1975) — bog-body poems addressing violence in Northern Ireland
- Translation of Beowulf (1999) — bestselling, award-winning
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 1995
- Professor of Poetry at Oxford and Harvard
Links
Desmond Egan (b. 1936)
Irish poet from Athlone, County Westmeath, published in over 20 languages. He founded The Goldsmith Press (1972) and, since 1987, has served as artistic director of the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival held annually in County Kildare.
Highlights
- Over 20 collections of poetry, plus translations of Sophocles' Philoctetes and Euripides' Medea
- Collected Poems (1983) — won the National Poetry Foundation of USA Award
- His poem Peace was translated into 35 languages for a Millennium peace project
- Founder and longtime director of the Gerard Manley Hopkins International Festival
Links
Paul Durcan (1944–2025)
Dublin-born poet known for a distinctive, often surreal and satirical voice mixing personal history, Irish public life, and dark comedy. His poems are frequently read as performance pieces, delivered in his own flat, incantatory reading style.
Highlights
- The Berlin Wall Café (1985)
- Daddy, Daddy (1990) — won the Whitbread Poetry Award
- Ireland Professor of Poetry, 2004–2007
- Known for collaged, headline-inspired poems commenting on Irish politics and society
Links
Brendan Kennelly (1936–2021)
Irish poet and academic from County Kerry, longtime professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College Dublin. Known for prolific output, epic-length narrative sequences, and a warm, public-facing engagement with poetry in Irish life.
Highlights
- Cromwell (1983) and The Book of Judas (1991) — large-scale narrative sequences
- Poetry My Arse (1995)
- Long tenure as Professor of Modern Literature, Trinity College Dublin
- Widely anthologized and a familiar broadcast voice on Irish radio and television
Links
Mary Oliver (1935–2019)
American poet best known for accessible, meditative poems rooted in close observation of the natural world. Won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and became one of the best-selling poets in the U.S.
Highlights
- American Primitive (1983) — Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- New and Selected Poems (1992) — National Book Award
- Wild Geese — one of her most widely quoted poems
- Long association with Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the natural landscapes of Cape Cod
Links
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
American poet, essayist, and environmental activist associated with the Beat Generation and San Francisco Renaissance. His work is deeply informed by Zen Buddhism, deep ecology, and years spent working as a logger, trail-builder, and Zen student in Japan.
Highlights
- Turtle Island (1974) — won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- Model for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums
- Decades of Zen Buddhist practice and study in Japan
- Influential voice in bioregionalism and environmental writing
Links
Robert Lax (1915–2000)
American minimalist poet, close friend of Thomas Merton, known for spare, chant-like, often single-word-per-line poems shaped by long periods of contemplative solitude, including many years living on the Greek island of Patmos.
Highlights
- The Circus of the Sun (1959) — celebrated long poem
- Decades of minimalist, meditative poetry written in isolation on Patmos, Greece
- Lifelong friendship and correspondence with Thomas Merton, chronicled in shared letters
- Influence on concrete and minimalist poetry traditions
Links
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
American poet known for "inhumanism" — a philosophy decentering humanity in favor of the grandeur and permanence of the natural world — and for narrative and lyric poems set on the rugged California coast around Big Sur and Carmel.
Highlights
- Built Tor House and Hawk Tower by hand at Carmel, California, which became central to his poetic imagery
- Roan Stallion, Tawny, and Other Poems (1925)
- Long narrative poems such as Cawdor and Thurso's Landing
- Once featured on the cover of Time magazine; deeply associated with the Big Sur landscape
Links
John Berryman (1914–1972)
American poet, central figure of the confessional poetry movement, best known for The Dream Songs, a sprawling sequence narrated by an alter-ego figure named Henry. His life was marked by struggles with alcoholism and mental health, and he died by suicide.
Highlights
- 77 Dream Songs (1964) — won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
- His Toy, His Dream, His Rest (1968) — won the National Book Award
- Taught for many years at the University of Minnesota
- Close ties to fellow poets Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz
Links
Ted Hughes (1930–1998)
English poet and children's writer, Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1984 until his death. Known for intense, often violent nature imagery and animal symbolism, and for his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath.
Highlights
- The Hawk in the Rain (1957) — debut collection
- Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970)
- Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, 1984–1998
- Birthday Letters (1998) — poems addressing his marriage to Sylvia Plath, published shortly before his death
Links
E. E. Cummings (1894–1962)
American poet and painter known for unconventional syntax, punctuation, and lowercase typography, along with playful, lyrical treatments of love, individuality, and nature.
Highlights
- The Enormous Room (1922) — prose account of WWI internment
- Tulips and Chimneys (1923) — debut poetry collection
- Signature lowercase style and unconventional line/word arrangement on the page
- Also an accomplished painter and visual artist
Links
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953)
Welsh poet known for a musical, densely imagistic style and dramatic public readings. Famous both for his poetry and for the radio drama Under Milk Wood, as well as for a short, hard-living life that ended in New York at age 39.
Highlights
- Do not go gentle into that good night — villanelle, one of the most widely known poems in English
- Under Milk Wood (1954, published posthumously) — radio drama set in a fictional Welsh village
- A Child's Christmas in Wales — prose memoir, a perennial holiday favorite
- Renowned live reader; toured the U.S. extensively giving performances of his own work
Links
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
English poet and Jesuit priest whose innovative "sprung rhythm" and dense, compressed language anticipated modernist poetics decades before his work was published. Almost none of his poetry appeared in print during his lifetime.
Highlights
- The Wreck of the Deutschland (written 1875–76)
- Pied Beauty and God's Grandeur — widely anthologized short poems
- Pioneered "sprung rhythm," a meter based on stressed syllables rather than fixed patterns
- Poems first published in 1918, nearly 30 years after his death, by friend Robert Bridges
Links
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
American poet from Amherst, Massachusetts, who lived a famously reclusive life and published almost none of her nearly 1,800 poems during her lifetime. Known for compressed, slant-rhymed, dash-punctuated verse on death, immortality, nature, and interior life.
Highlights
- Nearly 1,800 poems discovered after her death, most unpublished during her lifetime
- Distinctive use of slant rhyme, unconventional capitalization, and dashes
- Because I could not stop for Death and Hope is the thing with feathers among her best-known poems
- First posthumous collection published in 1890, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Links
W. B. Yeats (1865–1939)
Irish poet and dramatist, a central figure of the Irish Literary Revival and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923; his long career moved from early Celtic romanticism to a harder, more symbolic later style.
Highlights
- Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre, Dublin
- Nobel Prize in Literature, 1923
- The Second Coming — source of widely quoted lines including "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"
- Served as a senator in the Irish Free State in the 1920s
Links