No good English poets

[busker]

Crndl, we have been friends ever since you declared yourself to be an expert on dogs.
Because dogs are the best.

Regarding matsun, I admire his passion.

But I think, matsun, your inability to call a spade a spade is a problem.
Would you take seriously a man who writes elegantly about the aesthetics of a sunset and the meaning of suburban life, but also sincerely believes that the world resides inside a giant walnut on the shelf of the BongoBongo diety of eastern Djongbo (no offence to the Djongonans)?
Becusee TS Eliot is that man. 

He lived through the great intellectual revolutions of our time, in physics, math, and engineering. And yet he believed in the virgin birth of his diety. And he never explained it, never prefaced it with a “and this is symbolic and this is real, and Jesus was not really the son of god.”

Whatever the excuse they may have had in the 1500s ceased to exist in the 1900s, by when they had flushing toilets. So men like Eliot were essentially vapid TikTok stars of the day, except they declaimed about life’s miseries instead of how to achieve financial success.

And Larkin was born too late to have his craft trump his racism. If you include poets from all over the world in the 20th century, not just those in the Anglosphere, Larkin isn’t even fit to polish some shoes.

still waiting for you to offer even a scrap of actual, substantive critique on either Larkin or Eliot's poetry, other than to say "Larkin was a grumpy poo poo head" and "Eliot believed silly things in his personal faith so his generation-defining poetry is actually crap"

I mean I can still tell you so many details about where I was and what it felt like when I first read "shanti shanti shanti" and I know I'm not alone in that experience; I don't really care if he thinks the world is an ovoid sac dangling between the legs of a cosmic bull, I just wanna read great poetry and it seems he wrote quite a bit of it.

matsun - I would if I had the time, but specifically for Eliot: I actually love his verse.
It is hypnotic.
The last couple of strophes from East Coker get your hair on end. I recite them oft from memory when I’m walking the dog and need something other than my business biography audiobook (apparently Jensen Huang has no time for literature but is a voracious reader of business books, this despite being one of the finest chip designers of his time and the founder of NVIDIA).

“Multifoliate rose” and “tumid river” coming as they do when they do in the Hollow Men are genius.
But Mahomet, the celebrated and deeply venerated prophet of the Saracens, warned against poetry for this very reason. It can lead readers away from the true path.

In this instance, Eliot seduces you into believing that there’s a world view underneath all those layers of hypnotic verse that is not about eating and drinking the supposed saviour and waiting for him to make a re entry upon large accumulations of water vapour. But there isn’t, and so you’re left with the unpleasant prospect of realising that the town supply of hot water that kept you warm through winter was actually  coming from heat exchangers at the furnaces in Auschwitz.

This is not the problem when we read Spenser, because we assume that in all matters related to actually understanding how the world works, he is an idiot as is everyone else of his generation. His art is Neanderthal art, but charmingly so. There’s a lost innocence in the savagery of the past.

Larkin is a pure wanker. That’s for another time.