Best Poet

Homer was an ancient Greek epic poet traditionally credited with the Iliad and Odyssey, foundational works of Western literature from around the 8th century BCE.

Alexander Pushkin was a Russian poet and playwright, author of Eugene Onegin (1833) and a founder of modern Russian literature.

Walt Whitman was a 19th-century American poet whose 1855 Leaves of Grass reshaped U.S. poetry through free verse and democratic themes.

Rainer Maria Rilke was an Austrian poet writing in German, notable for Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923.

T. S. Eliot was an American-born British poet and critic, a central modernist whose The Waste Land appeared in 1922 and who won the 1948 Nobel Prize.

W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist who won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature and helped lead the Irish Literary Revival.

Virgil was a Roman poet, born in 70 BCE, whose Aeneid became Rome's national epic by linking Trojan legend to Augustan ideology.

Paul Celan was a Romanian-born German-language poet and Holocaust survivor, notable for Todesfuge and postwar European lyric poetry.

Federico García Lorca was a Spanish poet and playwright of the Generation of 1927, notable for Romancero gitano and his execution near Granada in 1936.

Du Fu was a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, born in 712, revered as a poet-historian for verse shaped by war, exile, and public duty.

Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet whose teenage works, including A Season in Hell in 1873, transformed Symbolist and modern poetry before he abandoned literature.

Luís de Camões was a Portuguese poet whose 1572 epic Os Lusíadas made Vasco da Gama's voyage a central monument of Portuguese literature.

Cesar Vallejo was a Peruvian poet whose 1922 collection Trilce became a landmark of Spanish-language modernism and avant-garde poetry.

Li Bai was a Tang dynasty Chinese poet, born in 701, celebrated for imaginative verse on friendship, wine, travel, and Daoist freedom.

Anna Akhmatova was a Russian poet and leading Acmeist, notable for Requiem, a cycle on Stalinist terror composed between 1935 and 1961.

Geoffrey Chaucer was an English poet whose late-14th-century Canterbury Tales helped establish English as a major literary language.

Constantine Cavafy was a Greek poet of Alexandria whose historically inflected modernist poems were largely published posthumously after 1933.

Osip Mandelstam was a Russian Acmeist poet, author of Stone (1913), who died in a Soviet transit camp in 1938 after Stalin-era persecution.

William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet whose 1798 Lyrical Ballads, with Coleridge, helped reshape English poetry around common life.

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

John Donne was an English metaphysical poet and cleric whose 17th-century verse is noted for intellectual wit and complex religious feeling.

Marina Tsvetaeva was a Russian poet, notable for intense lyric verse and exile writing after leaving Soviet Russia in 1922.

Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic in Anatolia, whose Masnavi became a major text of Islamic spirituality.

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

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

Mahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet whose work became central to modern Arabic literature and Palestinian identity after his 1964 book Olive Leaves.

Saint John of the Cross was a Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar whose 16th-century poems, including Spiritual Canticle, are classics of Christian literature.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a French Symbolist poet whose dense, suggestive style and 1897 poem Un coup de dés influenced modernist poetry and typography.

Ted Hughes was an English poet and children's writer, UK Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1998 and author of the 1970 sequence Crow.