Literature Month III: My top 10 favorite poets of all time

Greetings, reader!

The third edition of Literature Month continues, with this week's post focusing on my love for poetry. While music lyrics are a form of poetry, I decided not to include lyrics as admissible material for this list, because I'm much more of a music geek than a poetry geek, so this would've just become a list of my favorite lyricists otherwise (hey, not a bad idea for the next time I do a music theme month!). Authors who are best-known for prose but have also written poetry are eligible for the list, but I will naturally only judge them for their poetic works here. This is my ranking of my top 10 favorite poets of all time!

Here are my honorable mentions: Eino Leino, James Baldwin, Robert Browning, Robert Service, Sirpa Kyyrönen.

10. Charles Bukowski

The English language doesn't have an exact translation for the brilliant Finnish term 'rappioromantiikka' ("decadent culture/art" comes the closest, I suppose), which is a damn shame, as the possibly all-time best example of that school of thought was the German-American poet Charles Bukowski. His poems are wonderfully crude, dirty, gritty and all over the place in a way that really captures the essence of a way of life that perhaps shouldn't be glorified, but is nonetheless the reality for many, and therefore deserves to be written about.

There is little elegance and symmetry in Bukowski's work, but his text is so raw that it hits hard and proves how large of a spectrum poetry can work on. I'm partially sad and partially glad that I only got acquainted with his works in this stage of life - Bukowski's poems would've resonated a thousand times more with the desperate-single Veikko from a few years ago, but that poor f**ker would've definitely become a little too obsessed with his works, so maybe this timing is for the best.

9. Robert Frost

A friend of mine once asked, 'does the U.S. even have its own culture?'. Her hypothesis was that my second home country is run by money and capitalism to such a degree that it wouldn't have a culture beyond that in the way that other countries do. Now, I'm as critical about the U.S. and about the ultra-capitalist way in which the country is run as anyone, but that being said, this question saddened me and made me very defensive. I get that someone who has only seen a certain side of the country in the media would think that way, but that's what made me sad - all the beauty of American culture that isn't visible for those who haven't witnessed it firsthand, and who only see the evils committed by the country's leadership and military worldwide.

My response to the question was something like "I ask you to listen to the music of Dylan and Springsteen, read the books of Steinbeck and Hemingway, watch some Spike Lee movies and read some poems by Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, and then tell me whether or not Americans have their own culture". I chose those examples because I find them to be some of the very best instances of the beauty in the American mindset and what America means to me - and if I had to single out just one example out of the bunch, I would very likely go with Robert Frost.

For my Finnish readers, I'd say that Frost is largely to the U.S. what Eino Leino is to Finland (sorry, Finns - Leino is a legend and only barely missed out on my top 10). His descriptions of American nature, and of the lives of ordinary people, are just brilliant. Poems like The Road Not Taken, as well as the one he wrote for John F. Kennedy's inauguration at the age of 86 years, are breathtaking pieces of American cultural history.

8. Walt Whitman

Not only is Whitman a legend within poetic literature - his words of wisdom are so good that they have made their way into some of my favorite movies and TV shows, making for some of the all-time memorable uses of poetry in other media. Dead Poets Society, one of my the best movies ever made, would not be the same without the quotations from Whitman delivered by the late great Robin Williams, particularly the use of the iconic O Captain! My Captain! poem. Furthermore, my #1 favorite scene in the TV series Ted Lasso quotes Whitman's immortal words "Be curious, not judgemental", which honestly condenses the show's entire premise and themes with perfection, with the words having moved me so much that they've stayed with me ever since, becoming somewhat engrained in my worldview.

Even beyond the brilliant use of Whitman's words in movies and TV, his material always makes for a great read on its own. A huge percentage of the best poets are people who belonged to one minority or another, as representing a marginalized group makes for unique perspectives and points-of-view, and Whitman is a classic example of this: he's one of those poets who many historians have analyzed with the "he never had a wife, and he had many close male friends, and his correspondence with Bram Stoker reads almost like love letters, I wonder what could be up with that?" classics. When you read his poems with this context in mind, themes of forbidden love and hidden identities are painfully clear in his writings, which is gripping on one hand and beautiful on the other.

7. William Shakespeare

Shakespeare is best-known for his plays (which quite often use the poetic measures of their time amidst the dialogue, with some of the plays being written pretty much entirely in poetic verse). But as fellow bookworms will know, his sonnets aren't far behind in terms of iconic status. The Bard certainly had a way with words, often finding delightful mixtures of insightful humor, romantic passion and beautiful atmospheres in his sonnets.

6. Sappho

How influential was this larger-than-life poet from ancient Greece? Well, if you've ever heard the term 'Sapphic', that will give you some idea. As for how iconic she was as a poet and a person - well, she lived on the island of Lesbos, loved many women, and if you think this is a coincidence, it isn't. The term 'Lesbian' literally comes from her, as the poet apparently was such a gay icon that the general term for people from that island became an euphemism for women who are into women, and the rest is history.

That incredible fun fact aside, Sappho's poetry is just brilliant. Tragically few of her works have survived, but those that did have been translated and analyzed over the years, and they're just so good. I never knew I needed Greek mythology juxtaposed with queer undertones in a mixture of historical artefact and groundbreaking poetic structure, but reading Sappho's works most definitely deepened my appreciation for the poetic arts. The last poem in the collection Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments ends with the words "I declare; That later on; Even in an age unlike our own; Someone will remember who we are", and reading these words thousands of years after they were written moved me to tears, considering how true they turned out to be.

5. Tommy Tabermann

When I graduated high school, my homeroom teacher Maarit, who also happens to be the all-time greatest teacher of Finnish and literature, gave me Nathan Hill's book The Nix as a present - and as you can surmise from The Nix's placement in my top 10 favorite books of all time, there's no one quite like a literature teacher who knows you when it comes to giving just the right book to the right person at the right time in their life. The same turned out to be true a year later, when she gave me a going-away present when I finished my civil service year at the same school - this time, it was Tommy Tabermann's Kukkiva Kivi (1978) collection.

In that specific stage of my life, Tabermann's poems resonated with me to a profound degree. I keep the book at my parents' home, and every once in a while I return to the several parts that I bookmarked due to certain poems speaking to me so much that I felt a compulsion to return to them now and again. They hit different every time, but have remained very important to me throughout it all. Tabermann certainly had a way with words, and his wildly emotional ramblings, delightfully interpretational phrases and depictions of sensations from sweet romance to erotic lust and everything in between are quite incredible.

4. J.R.R. Tolkien

I know people mostly associate Tolkien with his prose, for obvious reasons, but hear me out - in addition to everything else in his celebrated legacy, J.R.R. Tolkien was extremely underrated as a poet. His gift for the art form can be seen sporadically throughout works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, where various poems from the fictional world of Middle-Earth are delightfully sprinkled into various places, and they always make for a great read.

But what really kindled my love for Tolkien's poetic chops was when I read The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, an entire book comprised of Middle-Earth poems by Mr. Tolkien. The intersection of Tolkien's unbridled gift for fantasy worlbuilding and the nature of the poetic arts is quite perfect, as the collection is filled with just the zaniest and most imaginative descriptions of fascinating lore, atmospheric locations and testaments to the beauty of nature.

3. Mohammed el-Kurd

I recently read Rifqa, a deeply touching and painfully relevant collection of poems by the Palestinian Mohammed el-Kurd. In what is one of the most powerful instances of activism through poetry and revolutionary poetry that I have encountered, he details his own experiences and those of his family, through creatively structured and heartbreaking poems. A large underlying theme is the collection's namesake, el-Kurd's grandmother Rifqa, who was older than the state of Israel and lived through the Nakba, years of occupation and bloodshed, before dying at the age of 103 a year before the collection was released. Here are just a few of my favorite quotations:

"She worked; worked; and worked; until survival was a funny story to tell; on evenings with; what remains of the family"

"Was it because there were no more graves in Gaza; that you brought us to the beach to die?"

"Gaza - woman; lives where bulldozers rest on clouds. Her hospital bed is her home's rubble; nothing left of her husband but a bloodied beard"

"[Martyr's] death ten years later the government sends out Hallmark cards, and Washington spat on Mandela a few breaths before it kissed him"

And yes, these were all written and published way before 2023. I wish people had listened.

2. Maya Angelou

"You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise"

These words, like a vast majority of the words of this voice of the Civil Rights Movement, have truly aged like wine. As much effort as the American establishment has put into maintaining systematic racism and painting the architects of activism as villains, those voices were simply too powerful to be silenced, and Angelou's words have continued to resonate and inspire for decades, and will continue to do so for as long as it takes. Poems like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, On the Pulse of Morning and Still I Rise are among the very best examples of poetry, and art in general, changing and reshaping society with its revolutionary themes.

1. Emily Dickinson

I often find myself thinking about the tragic life of Emily Dickinson. She lived for 55 years, by all accounts a lesbian in a time when this wasn't accepted by society, and spent her life writing poems that didn't get published or appreciated during her lifetime. Her last words are reported to be "I must go in, the fog is rising", because even when faced with death, she was better with words than anyone who has ever lived.

Thankfully, her sister discovered her poems after her death, and their publication lead to Dickinson finding the acclaim she deserved posthumously, becoming one of the most influential and appreciated poets of all time. Her Poems for Youth collection is some of the very best poetry I've read, with many of the poems including veiled references to her sexuality that aged in a heartbreaking yet beautiful manner, and all of the poems being atmospheric, beautifully worded and structurally genius.

Thank you for reading! Tune in next week for the incredibly niche final instalment of Literature Month III: a ranking of the top 10 best opening lines from the books of the King of opening lines (Stephen King).