Top Ten Tuesday - Top 10 Poets Who Deserve More Recognition

This week I decided to devote some page space to some of the most undervalued writers out there: poets! Here are 10 of my favorites who I think deserve more recognition, along with some beautiful lines they’ve written. (As always, Top Ten Tuesday is a feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.)

1.  Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Sonnet II:

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide

2.  Robinson Jeffers, from “Hurt Hawks”:

            I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;

                        but the great redtail

            Had nothing left but unable misery

            From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that

                        trailed under his talons when he moved.

3. Garcilaso de la Vega, from Soneto V

               Whatever I own I confess I owe to you;

            for you I was born, for you I have life,

            for you I must die and for you I am dying.

4. Adrienne Rich, from “Transcendental Etude”

            No one who survives to speak

            new language, has avoided this:

            the cutting-away of an old force that held her

            rooted to an old ground

            the pitch of utter loneliness

5. W.H. Auden, from “Lullaby”

            Lay your sleeping head, my love

            Human on my faithless arm

6. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from Sonnet XXVIII

 My letters! all dead paper, mute and white!
And yet they seem alive and quivering

7. W.B. Yeats, from “The Lake Isle of Inisfree”

            I will arise and go now, for always night and day

            I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

            While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

            I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

8. Ovid, from The Metamorphoses

            They said, while they still might, in mutual words

            “Goodbye, dear love” together, and together

            The hiding bark covered their lips.

9. Rumi, from “The Breeze at Dawn”

            The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

            Don’t go back to sleep.

10. Skye Shirley (okay, full disclosure, she is my real life friend, but she also is a crazy talented, soon-to-be-famous poet), from “In the winter when I didn’t leave”

my parents walked on Walden
Pond, certain it froze solid.

What underappreciated poets speak to you? Hope you enjoyed some beauty on your Tuesday. :)

-Meg