Here’s a list of poets—then and now, so to speak—whose work I especially like. It’s a highly selective list, representing a subset of a much larger storehouse on my shelves. Alphabetical by last name. Longtime favorites in bold.
Auden, W.H.
Axelsson, Sun
Baraka, Amiri
Basho, Matsuo
Baudelaire, Charles
Bishop, Wendy
Brautigan, Richard
Bukowski, Charles
Burns, Robert
Cervantes, James
Chin, Marilyn
Clark, Kevin
Conoley, Gillian
Crabbe, George
Cullen, Countee
Daniels, Jim
DeFrees, Madeline
Dickinson, Emily
Doty, Mark
Dove, Rita
Dugan, Alan
Eberhart, Richard
Ekelöf, Gunnar
Haines, John
Hafiz
Halliday, Mark
Hayden, Robert
Hikmet, Nazim
Hopkins, Gerard Manley
Hotchkiss, Bill
Hughes, Langston
Hugo, Richard
Jarrell, Randall
Jeffers, Robinson
Jensen, Laura
Keats, John
Levertov, Denise
Lorca, Federico García
Machado, Antonio
Marvell, Andrew
Montale, Eugenio
Neruda, Pablo
Putnam, C.E.
Rexroth, Kenneth
Rumi
Sanchez, Sonja
Shapiro, Karl
Simic, Charles
Snyder, Gary
Spender, Stephen
Stafford, William
Stubbs, Andrew
Swenson, May
Tranströmer, Tomas
Weyant, Karen
Yevtushenko, Yevgeny
