Eternity In an Hour - Poetry for the Ages

The list author says:
	"Hughes presents an uncompromising, Manichean view of nature through shamanic rhythms with as much grit to his language as the stone of his Pennine birthplace, that landscape an ever-present influence."

The list author says:
	"Nowhere else, in literature or otherwise, are the desiccated tenets of reason and materialism so thoroughly repudiated or the power of creativity and imagination so celebrated as in the work of Blake."

The list author says:
	"In Snyder’s poetry the transcendentalism of Zen Buddhism meets Native American practical wisdom, all bound together by Beat attitude and form to create a powerfully humane and environmental vision."

The list author says:
	"Although his concerns are primarily Romantic, Yeats eschews the excesses of its language for a more measured, modernist style and the very best aspects of both traditions are to be found in his work."

The list author says:
	"No other poet captures the joyous spirit of affirmation found in Thomas’ work, which manifests not only through his subject matter, but through the unbridled pleasure he takes in words themselves."

The list author says:
	"Whitman’s verse is an unbounded celebration of life, one grand ‘Yes!’ in which dualism is rejected and the union of body and soul constantly avowed in his ecstatic language and long, flowing cadences."

The list author says:
	"There’s a certain sentimentality to Harrison’s poetry, but rather than being cloying it acts as a mark of his profound humanity, something which also manifests in the socialist character of his work."

The list author says:
	"Whilst the freedom of Beat poetry encourages indulgence, Ginsberg best exhibits its potential, filtering Romanticism through the American pioneer-spirit, with a rhythm and attitude borrowed from jazz."

The list author says:
	"The most visionary of the Romantics, possessed of a propulsive sense of rhythm and as evinced by ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ the greatest craftsman of narrative poems in English literature."

The list author says:
	"Romanticism finds its apotheosis in Keats, whose statement ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ is a maxim for that movement, and whose language avoids the threat of indulgence to become wholly rapturous."

The list author says:
	"Frost is a pastoral poet but he proceeds with a bracing directness and clarity which prevents his down-to-earth wisdom ever seeming trite or trivial, revealing instead the primacy of such sentiments."

The list author says:
	"Although his disciple Sylvia Plath is probably better known, Lowell’s corpus is undoubtedly the greater, his uncompromising confessional poetry exhibiting a much greater breadth of style and allusion."

The list author says:
	"Despite a hint of intellectualism and wilful opacity, Elliot’s richly symbolic works are endlessly rewarding whilst nobody can doubt the intensity yielded by the crystalline precision of his language."

The list author says:
	"A violent honesty dominates Anne Sexton’s work, but in addition to the harrowing potency she lends to meditations on insanity, tragedy and loss, there’s always a powerfully sensual undercurrent."

The list author says:
	"As befits the author of ‘The White Goddess,’ Graves’ poetic preoccupations are mythological, both Classical and Celtic, but communicated in an unmannered style which emphasises their modern resonance."

The list author says:
	"As a Decadent Swinburne often risks coming across as all too ‘utterly, utterly,’ but his verse truly intimates the darkness at the heart of beauty which so fascinated the fin-de-siècle consciousness."

The list author says:
	"Although it’s not read as often as his magnificent novels, Hesse’s poetry deals with similar themes such as spiritual growth, the journey towards individuation and the quest for knowledge through art."

The list author says:
	"Like the Romantics, much of Edward Thomas’ poetry is a response to the natural world but he avoids their sentimentality and immoderation, opting for a subtle yet in many ways more direct appreciation."

The list author says:
	"Although Cummings’ poetry appears alienating on the page, his syntactic experiments reveal fresh rhythms with which to articulate his unexpectedly Romantic concerns of love, nature and the individual."

The list author says:
	"Much like Yeats in Britain at the same time, Rilke dealt with Romantic concerns in the age and language of modernity, synthesising the best of both traditions to create work of great spiritual power."

The list author says:
	"Not only a poet but a philosophical icon, inspiration to such titans as Hegel and Heidegger, with his potent grasp of tragedy and religious experience, Holderlin is the zenith of German Romanticism."

The list author says:
	"Stevens’ poetry is concerned with the gulf between perception and reality, where the world is given to us only in fragments and so dependent on our creative act, reality is the child of imagination."

The list author says:
	"Conservatism prevails throughout Betjeman’s work, yet it is not mere reaction but a rejection of the modernity for its own sake he saw encroaching, a sense of the things which deserve to be preserved."

The list author says:
	"Much more interesting than Heaney, to whom he is too often compared, Mahon is very much a successor to Yeats in tracing the Celtic heritage of his native land into modernity, preserving its wisdom."

The list author says:
	"The most metaphysical of the ‘Metaphysical poets,’ Vaughan espouses a mystical Christianity which is surely heavily influence by the alchemy and hermetic philosophy practised by his brother, Thomas."