Saturday, May 22, 2010

Your Favorite Poets II

Wow. This is already fascinating. There's a clear frontrunner, Mary Oliver, who garnered 9 mentions – a quarter of you picked her. Next come William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, with 5 and 4 mentions. But it's a very flat curve: of the 108 poets mentioned, only 21 get more than one mention. Which means, probably, there's plenty more where these came from. Another striking thing is the high incidence of poets whose native language is Spanish: eight mentions for them, including three of the more-than-one mention poets. The only other non-English-language poets (that I know of: judging just by names there may be a couple more) were Czeslaw Milosz and Jacques Prevert. Even from a sample as small and skewed as this, that's pretty strong evidence that the largest outside influence on modern English poetry has been Spanish.

Anyway, here's the data:

Mary Oliver ix

William Stafford v

Naomi Shihab Nye iv

Denise Levertov iii
Antonio Machado iii

Ellen Bass ii
Elizabeth Bishop ii
Robert Bly ii
Raymond Carver ii
Billy Collins ii
T.S. Eliot ii
Donald Hall ii
Joy Harjo ii
Jane Kenyon ii
Maxine Kumin ii
Federico Garcia Lorca ii
Czeslaw Milosz ii
Pablo Neruda ii
Anne Sexton ii

Kelli Russell Agodon
Sherman Alexie
John Allman
Yehuda Amichai
John Ashberry
W.H. Auden
James K. Baxter
Wendell Berry
John Betjeman
Edmund Blunden
Louise Bogan
Dionne Brand
Richard Brautigan
Rupert Brooke
Anne Carson
Amy Clampitt
Lucille Clifton
Imtiaz Dharker
Deborah Digges
Mark Doty
Carol Ann Duffy
Denise Duhamel
Stephen Dunne
Kate Durbin
Loren Eiseley
Elaine Feinstein
Carolyn Forche
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Amy Gerstler
Jack Gilbert
Louise Gluck
Jorie Graham
Robert Graves
Robert Haas
John Haines
Forrest Hamer
Matthea Harvey
Seamus Heaney
Adrian Henri
Michael Hettich
Jane Hirshfield
Tony Hoaglund
Marie Howe
Ted Hughes
Donald Justice
Terrance Keenan
Cate Kennedy
Robert Lax
Li-Young Lee
Jeffrey McDaniel
Roger McGough
Louis MacNeice
Louise McNeill
John McCrae
Ian McMillan
Rethabile Masilo
James Merrill
W.S. Merwin
Dubay Mikus
Leslie Norris
Frank O'Hara
Sharon Olds
January O'Neil
Wilfrid Owen
Brian Patten
Lucia Perillo
Sylvia Plath
Jacques Prevert
Kenneth Rexroth
Adrienne Rich
Theodore Roethke
Edna St Vincent Millay
Richard Siken
Anne Simpson
Colin Smith
Gary Snyder
Ruth Stone
Cole Swenson
Wislawa Szymborska
James Tate
Monica de la Torre
Michael Trussler
Michael Van Walleghen
David Whyte
C.D. Wright
Charles Wright
Dean Young

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