which poet in the anglo-american tradition has the highest hit rate?

and which has the worst?

and do you prefer poets who are always good to poets who are scattershot? and was there ever a poet who wasn't scattershot who was also prolific?

oh boy -- and asked before happy hour too....

Shakespeare, Donne, late Keats, early Wordsworth, Frost, Stevens, Merrill.

Hardy wrote at least 50 great poems from a mass of 900.

this thread brought to you by my despair at the wordsworth section of bloom's romantic period anthology being seventeen times the length of the coleridge section. xpost haha 'early wordsworth' you are cheating sir.

It's fascinating to watch Keats and Yeats sharpen their early obsessions into the grandeur of their maturity.

"Late Wordsworth" is code = "unreadable Tory shit"

is the despair from wordsworth's being so long or coleridge's being so short?

i feel like i'm not really at the point of understanding this way of reading poets yet. it's taken me years to get to the point of appreciating multiple poets and being able to read oooovrays with profit rather than just hunting for whatever individual poems hit some button for me. but i don't really have a feel for what that says about their success. like, i'd rather read more wordsworth or more dickinson than read... philip freneau, but not so much because of their hit rates (even if that's the real cause of the difference). they're just where all the cultural capital / literary epochness is.

Marvell, Herbert at the top of my list. Marvell probably highest proportion of really, really extraordinary poems; there's usually something in a Herbert poem, but sometimes it's like a minor technical flourish, or submerged word-game & I think he's more obviously got flat poems than M. Got more obviously flat poems than M. Obviously got more flat poems than M.

Rochester! Almost everything is sort-of-brilliant.

Donne I'm not quite convinced by as an answer to this q; again, usually something even in the duller poems, but then those verse letters… there's a lot that's a hard climb.

If you take Larkin, Bishop, Marianne Moore by their older, smaller canons, they'd be something like my c20th answer.

Poets that wrote a lot with a surprisingly high hit rate – Browning.

Scattershot v always good: well… no-one's always good. But I like putting a small collected in my pocket & knowing there'll be a consistent tone or sensibility for a while, that there's a focus and rightness there. But then there are poets who are up and down and all over the place and trying on things and making a mess - Auden say, Dryden, maybe Donne – and I come back to them a lot, and like being in their world. They're my favourite poets really.

Milton might lie between those two. When I want to read Milton, pretty much everything by Milton is astonishing.

Random thoughts:
TS Eliot's hit rate poor to start with given the size of his collected, becomes awful if you include the plays.
Thinking about Hopkins - out of town at the moment, can't check, isn't there a surprising amount of dull stuff in a small volume?

Woof you write good stuff on this kinda thing and make me want to read these poets, just wanted to say like

yeah, woof for next oxford professor of poetry

is the despair from wordsworth's being so long or coleridge's being so short?

i feel like i'm not really at the point of understanding this way of reading poets yet. it's taken me years to get to the point of appreciating multiple poets and being able to read oooovrays with profit rather than just hunting for whatever individual poems hit some button for me. but i don't really have a feel for what that says about their success. like, i'd rather read more wordsworth or more dickinson than read... philip freneau, but not so much because of their hit rates (even if that's the real cause of the difference). they're just where all the cultural capital / literary epochness is.

― j., Friday, 12 October 2012 22:16 (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this thread was also brought you by my last minute cramming for the GRE subject test, so i'm pretty sure i'm not at the point of understanding this way of reading poets yet either, to be honest. obviously i aspire to it, ha ha

i read about 60% of the irv of john wilmot a couple months ago and i would totally agree with at one. i don't think eliot's hit rate is all that bad. shakespeare pretty incontestable, yes. i've never read a dull page of chaucer but i've only read about forty pages of chaucer all told so i could be off there.

poets who are up and down and all over the place and trying on things and making a mess - Auden say, Dryden, maybe Donne – and I come back to them a lot, and like being in their world

different sort of mental work involved i think in being in the world of a dryden or a donne vs that of an auden -- even if you have the collected auden you still have fairly substantial chunks of the work as he decided he wanted to present it, whereas it seems like a fair bit of mental archaeology is necessary to read dryden or donne non-anachronously. this may be too obvious to require mentioning.

for a ludicrously prolific poet Ted Hughes had pretty good quality control i think, tho i've got to be fair and admit i don't know his last 10 years as well as i shd. Larkin is obv my 20th century answer to this. don't think Eliot's hit rate was that bad either, but am firmly excluding the plays. Keats is mostly perfect, Shelley is mostly spotty as, love love love Marvell and Rochester. i think it's fair to say most people can safely ignore most of Blake and not miss a lot - as writing, anyway. blind adoration of Pound means i can't judge. i think i probably love almost all of Tony Harrison too, maybe Basil Bunting, other people's mileages will vary wildly obv.

Bishop would be my pick for 20th century. She wrote at most a hundred poems, at least three quarters of which is of extraordinary concentration and imagination. Contrast her output to Ashbery, a machine whose consistency (dullness too if read in bulk) is such that a favorite poem from 1986 isn't much different from one in last month's New Yorker.

Thanks Darragh, Thomp. Not sure I can follow Hill in the Poetry Chair, big weird shoes.

Elliot's hit rate - yeah, I was being a bit harsh - it's just that when I open the collected nowadays I think that I just don't like very many of these poems, even the big ones - Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, maybe even not that bothered about a lot of Four Quartets (though I should reread them). But then I find him a tricky poet to approach with an open mind - he's so much the fabric of mid-century eng lit culture (maybe a more general english highbrow culture (and Cats)) that I feel like I'm poking around in a historical event rather than reading poetry.

And Auden/Dryden - ha, yeah, that is very much imo, since I did a lot of the mental archaeology for Dryden thoroughly back in the day, so I feel comfortable with the history and literary culture - it's true though that he's not a self-reviser and self-presenter in the way Auden (or nearer his time Pope, or Congreve) is - he didn't oversee a sensible, concise 'here is my poetry' edition - but then I feel nowadays the collected poems leaves out a lot of what I like in Auden - The English Auden has more of the mess and throwaway stuff and works he'd excluded (and The Orators), and it's more… exciting? for that.

Donne's a diff story I guess, the history barriers pop up more often and I have to do more work to trample them down. And obvs in terms of 'how he wants to present it' his work is a total mess - coterie poet (so the textual history is confused iirc) and the great early poems aren't anything he'd want reprinted during his church career.

srsly you should curate a thread in which you could post selections from your favourites of english poetry for those of us who are too addled to actually sit down and read an anthology of the augustan poets or whatever

i don't think i have read a high enough proportion of any of these to gauge a measure of their consistency

so many pedestrian moments in "Four Quartets" -- and gorgeous ones.

i always want to defend the four quartets but then at the same time i can't be bothered to read them again, or properly

woof what was your thing precisely? restoration popular culture of some sort? or just culture?

re: auden i didn't even know there was a 'collected' exactly, i have 'the english auden' and 'collected longer poems'. the former bugs me because i always feel like there ought to be a 'the american auden' volume next to it.

I'm pleased at all the Rochester love! He's great. Think I'd probably go for him and Marvell and Bishop and Larkin, just to join the chorus. I admit to being pretty much in love with Christina Rossetti, too; maybe too many slips into sentimentality, but also often a startling cold-eyed perceptiveness.

Cosign on Stevens & woof's "When I want to read Milton, pretty much everything by Milton is astonishing."

It's been a v.long time, but IIRC Thomas Wyatt had a decent hit rate (if he's yr thing); A.Curnow/K.Smithyman for the local brigade.

It's hard to distinguish Stevens' average from the great ones: not much tonal or formal variety. He's a guy made for an idiosyncratic iPod playlist if such a thing were possible (check out an obscure poem called "The Novel," a favorite of mine).

xps

Once I'm back home, I'll maybe start a thread for digging around in the canon's ghostly reaches.

woof what was your thing precisely? restoration popular culture of some sort? or just culture?

literally actually dryden - d.phil on his later poetry (+ 1690s culture).

re: auden i didn't even know there was a 'collected' exactly, i have 'the english auden' and 'collected longer poems'. the former bugs me because i always feel like there ought to be a 'the american auden' volume next to it.

There's a posthumous collected poems, but iirc it's the texts from collected longer + collected shorter (which only goes to somewhere in the 50s or 60s & is heavily revised by him, with no Spain, no September 1, 1939) and the late poetry collections stuck on the end. It's ok – I think a completely new edition of the poems is due out in the Yale collected works. But, yes, something like an The American Auden wld be awesome- select from the prose and the librettos, get The Platonic Blow into print properly.

On thread topic, Housman is a (the?) traditional answer for high hit rate, but I don't really like him much.

first reactions are Donne and Eliot, with a sentimental nod to cummings actually. My wife would echo alfreds love for bishop, she wrote her thesis on her, and if i were a better husband i prob would have delved in and checked her out more by now.