Which Poets Have Inspired you?

[alaina_wray]

I love to hear Gertrude Stein's poetry read aloud. I can't stand reading it on the page. Good Ghost Bill is one of my most influential poets recently. Look some of his slam pieces up if you haven't heard of him!

[Platonov]

Vasko Popa.

[ekatemari]

So, I've recently started reading Japanese poetry (in translation) and this particular stanza from a tanka by Ishikawa Takuboku really sings to me:

I write in the sand
The word 'great'
More than a hundred times.
Then I go back home,
Dropping all thought of death.

[ursellb]

Maya Angelou inspired me with her poems, and all that she did.

[thefirsttime23]

Rumi is the most influential i must say

[romymaria]

Take a look at Rainer Maria Rilke, specifically the Duino Elegies

[rosered769]

Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, and Edgar Allen Poe.

[Reviews4U]

It's really hard for me to decide because I have a lot of favorite poets. One of my favorite poems is The Cross of Snow. When you read and carefully go through the poem, it has a much deeper meaning, and it makes you feel something.

-- 07 May 2015, 21:45 --

The Cross of Snow is an amazingpoem by Henry Wadsworth. It has a deep meaning, and I love it everytime I read it.

[TCRPI11]

I fell for poetry at a young age when I studied Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickerson, and Maya Angelou. My favorites continue to grow...

-- 10 May 2015, 17:41 --

I fell for poetry at a young age when I studied Langston Hughes, Shakespeare, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickerson, and Maya Angelou.

[Kayo Smada]

One poem that changed me in college was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot. The lines "For I have known them all already, known them all:/ Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,/ I have measured out my life in coffee spoons" have stayed with me all these years. The opening lines are another of my favorite lines: "Let us go then, you and I,/ When the evening is spread out against the sky." His descriptions of truths as they are from the point of view of the somewhat apathetic narrator really opened my mind at that time in my life.

[deftlyspeaking]

Sonia Sanchez, e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and John Keats.

[LitisLife4+]

I cannot read William Carlos Williams' "The Widow's Lament in Springtime" without crying my eyes out. Love it.

[Emmers00]

I personally adore Sara Teasdale her works had such an ethereal and melancholy vibe to them while still being hopeful. Also Vladimir Nabakov, Tyler Knott Gregson and Rumi.

[H0LD0Nthere]

Kipling
Gerard Manley Hopkins (just one of his poems - "The Grandeur of God")
Dylan Thomas
Shakespeare
J.R.R. Tolkien
C.S. Lewis
Robert Frost
Maya Angelou
T.S. Eliot
G.K. Chesterton (though he would hate to be on the same list with Eliot!)
Shel Silverstein
Bob Dylan

It may appear from this list that I read poetry very often. I don't. Just occasionally. But to really make an impact, an author just has to have one really terrific poem that echoes in your mind for days, right? Which is not say that's true of all those on this list ... many of them have MANY terrific poems ...

[Thesaurus Rex]

None of them.