For Mr. Milosz you may as well obtain a copy of his Collected Poems and browse around in it, as it will have everything and you can make your own selection. I second Phillip Larkin and Seamus Heaney as fitting your non-esoteric, non-saccharine requirements very well.
I generally find that just pulling a volume of a particular poet and attentively reading segments of three or four poems gives me a pretty good gauge of how they strike me. However, I realize that what strikes me one way today may strike me another way next summer, so I allow myself to repeat this exercise several times before I make up my mind more solidly about a poet's congeniality to my tastes.
― Aimless (Aimless), Tuesday, 7 March 2006 19:18 (nineteen years ago)