swap_horiz Derek Mahon Alternatives

1

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was a significant 20th-century poet born in Austria. He is best known for his deeply philosophical an...

Lyric German Austrian Spiritual

9.7 Brilliant

2

Du Fu

Du Fu was a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty (712-770). His work is notable for its deeply personal reflection...

Lyric Tang Historical Chinese

9.6 Brilliant

3

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats is a significant figure in modernist literature. The Irish poet’s work explored themes of mythology...

Modernist Irish Nobel Symbolist

9.6 Brilliant

4

Paul Celan

Paul Celan was a significant 20th-century poet writing in German. Born in Romania, he experienced the Holocaust firsthan...

Lyric Holocaust Dense Germanlanguage

9.6 Brilliant

5

Li Bai

Li Bai is a prominent figure of the Tang Dynasty, renowned as a Chinese poet. His evocative lyricism frequently explores...

Nature Lyric Tang Chinese

9.5 Brilliant

6

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova remains one of Russia’s most significant lyric poets. Her work offers profound insights into personal suf...

Lyric Russian Witness Acmeist

9.5 Brilliant

7

Sappho

Sappho was an archaic Greek lyric poet from Lesbos, active around 600 BCE and famed in antiquity for personal poems in A...

Lyric Ancient Greek Lesbos

9.4 Excellent

8

Friedrich Hölderlin

Friedrich Hölderlin was a German lyric poet, notable for Hyperion (1797-1799) and odes that bridged Classicism and Roman...

Lyric German Romantic Philosophical

9.4 Excellent

9

Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet, notable for intense lyric verse and exile writing after leaving Soviet Russia in 19...

Lyric Russian Modernist Exile

9.4 Excellent

10

Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet whose work became central to modern Arabic literature and Palestinian identity af...

Lyric Political Palestinian Exile

9.3 Excellent

11

Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin was an English poet and University of Hull librarian, noted in postwar Britain for the 1964 collection The...

Lyric Postwar British Plainstyle

9.3 Excellent

12

Horace

Horace was a Roman poet, born in 65 BCE, whose Odes, Satires, and Epistles shaped Latin lyric and moral reflection under...

Lyric Ancient Roman Latin

9.2 Excellent

13

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet whose 1820 lyric Ode to the West Wind reflects his radical politics an...

Lyric Romantic English Radical

9.2 Excellent

14

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature and explored rural life, language, and histor...

Modern Rural Irish Nobel

9.2 Excellent

15

Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was a Welsh poet and broadcaster, internationally known for Do not go gentle into that good night and the r...

Lyric Modern Welsh Sound

9.2 Excellent

16

Antonio Machado

Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet of the Generation of 1898 whose Campos de Castilla in 1912 became a defining meditati...

Lyric Spanish Modernist Landscape

9.1 Excellent

17

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky was a Russian Futurist poet and playwright, author of A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and a major early S...

Russian Urban Futurist Revolutionary

9.1 Excellent

18

Paul Verlaine

Paul Verlaine was a French poet linked to Symbolism and Decadence, noted for the musical verse of Romances sans paroles,...

Lyric French Musical Symbolist

9.0 Excellent

19

Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov was a Russian Romantic poet, author of Demon and A Hero of Our Time (1840), who died in a Caucasus due...

Lyric Romantic Russian Heroic

9.0 Excellent

20

Patrick Kavanagh

Patrick Kavanagh was an Irish poet and novelist whose 1942 poem The Great Hunger transformed rural Irish life into moder...

Lyric Modern Rural Irish

7.8 Good