Samson Agonistes is incredible. It is quietly the most beautiful poem I have ever read. I need poets with grit. Tennyson to me is boring, as is Keats. Milton pioneered blank verse as the vehicle of narrative poetry, saying that the sublimity of the subject should carry the verse, not the rhyme. The rest of the poets are poisonous to me. They have beautiful-seeming images and lovely sentiments, but they turn to gall in my memory. Milton is revolting at first, but his music lingers in the mind, until in the back pan of memory he is revealed to be as nourishing as Manna. Poets like this, singing songs that heal, not titillate sentiment, whose song is not snuffed out in the night. Perhaps someone modern (but go easy on me; I am hard of heart to accept innovations in poetry).
This post has turned out more dramatic than I intended. Others that have fed my soul: J.R.R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Martin Shaw, the Bible, Dante Alighieri.
Any recommendations?
by ghirvinder_dhaliwal