h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

If he can be called a poet for his nonsense verse..
Spike Milligan. Still a childrens favourite I believe.

Indeed he is. Love his nonesence stuff.

However my favourite poet has got to be Robert Frost.

I don't think I've heard much by him. Give me a snippet? (A short one!)

Put me down for Sam Leith.

My favourite by Frost

The Raod not Taken


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I vote for Robert Service, the English-born Canadian poet whose best-known works are ballads of the Yukon. In "The Shooting of Dan McGrew", about a shootout in a frontier saloon over a woman, he included the following in the middle:

"Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear;
But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear;
That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie;
That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die."

I've mentioned this before, but in a great piece of sports writing, a Houston Chronicle writer quoted the above the day after the Houston Oilers, in a playoff NFL football game, were ahead by 30 +/- points in the middle of the THIRD QUARTER ... and lost.

Frost or Larkin or Betjeman or Stevens or Dickinson or Wordsworth on a good day or Tennyson or Keats or Shelley or Byron or Auden or...

Oh, I think you get the idea.

Can't choose one, so I've gone for three:

Spike Milligan
Michael Rosen
John Hegley

For me - John Keats

shazz

This post has been removed.

Eh? What happened?

OK, here goes again: One of my favourite poems is 'Abort, Retry, Ignore?' - unfortunately the poet is unknown:
http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=3653

It's written very much in the same style as Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Raven' - see http://www.emule.com/poetry/?page=poem&poem=1446

My favourite poet?

Apart from Spike Milligan I like Roger McGough - unfortunately I'm having trouble finding any stuff online, plus I remember catching the end of a childrens tv show which included him reading a poem called "The River" I haven't been able to find a copy. There is also his shorter version of "I wandered lonely.."

"Wandering along the road
by the lake, I saw a load
of golden daffodils
Ten thousand, give or take.

"Now and then
I think of them again."

from http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/places/roger1.htm

Fashion Cat is tossing up between her two favourite poets

Rabbie Burns and Demon Drawer

*decides not to misconstrue DD's posting tempting as it is ...*

I thought Rabbie Burns was Deid!



The Rhym of the Ancient Mariner by old Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes some beating, and Lewis Carol's nonsense leaves you feeling somewhat perplexed but elated at the same time ...

Favourite Spike Milligan:

"As I was walking down the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish that man would go away."

Hey just cause a poet is dead doesn't mean he can't be your favourite after all mine Robert Frost died in 1963 before even I was born.

I realise that DD ... STC died donkeys years ago! ... I was being purile and deliberately misconstruing your comment about FC tossing up between your good self and Big Rabbie ...

I apologise for it's crudeness but my motto is "if it can be misconstrued, misconstrue it"

The one advantage of still being alive is that she gets to read an ever growing list of my stuff so she may well make her mind up soon.

If it is suitable for general consumption you can always drop some by me to run in the Poetry section of </>thepost</.> DD!

Has anyone mentioned Blake yet? Or John Masefield?

shazz