He even looked like Uncle Sam. Photograph of Walt Whitman by George C. Cox in 1887 in New York – public domain image

(8) WALT WHITMAN (1819-1892)

“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world”

Who hasn’t wanted to sound a barbaric yawp at one time or another?

Also the poet everyone knows from Dead Poet’s Society, since he wrote the poem being quoted and indeed titled as “O Captain! My Captain!”

By the way, that poem was written for the death of President Lincoln in 1865. It was also not the only Whitman reference in the film or the book on which it was based – both were obviously influenced by Whitman fandom, but then so is much of American poetry and literary culture, which brings me to my next point.

With the possible exception of another special mention, Walt Whitman is the American poet. The Great American Poet as it were, in the same vein as those books touted as the Great American Novel. Although I don’t know why there’s debate on the contenders for the Great American Novel when it’s obviously Catch-22. Search your feelings – you know it to be true.

Yes – I hear your query. Wait a minute Stark After Dark – don’t you rank American poets over than Whitman in your top ten, including e.e. cummings in your top spot? Not to mention William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, and Ishmael Reed in eighth, ninth, and tenth place respectively. For that matter, you can claim T.S. Eliot as American poet, since he was born and raised in the United States, only moving to England at the age of 25 (in 1914). And there’s a few more American poets in special mentions to come.

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes”

And yes – while I’m tempted to argue for e.e.cummings as the American poet or the Great American Poet, I have to admit that Whitman is more lyrical, and more fundamentally, embodies the United States in so much of his verse.

What better image of the United States than a nation sounding its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world?

As per art historian Mary Berenson – “You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman”.

And Ezra Pound was even more blunt, calling Whitman “America’s poet… He is America.”

As for which Whitman poem to select for this entry, one is spoilt for choice. There’s the collection of poetry for which he is famed – Leaves of Grass. (To quote Homer Simpson when he finds out the grave that he thought was his mother’s was instead that of Walt Whitman – “leaves of grass, my ass!”.

There’s the most famous poem from that collection – Song of Myself, from which both that barbaric yawp and containing multitudes quotes come from – and so many others, including of course O Captain My Captain. However, I have to go with When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, another elegy written for the death of Lincoln.

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Hot damn, those are some fine muttonchops! Matthew Arnold by Elliott & Fry 1883, National Portrait Gallery, London

(7) MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822-1888)

“But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.”

A passage I’m fond of quoting from Arnold’s finest and best known poem, Dover Beach, for desperate last stands or holding one defensive line after another – I did it for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire because of course I did. All roads lead to Rome.

Anyway, Matthew Arnold “was an English poet, essayist, and critic from the Victorian era” – “considered one of the great Victorian poets…and one of the Victorian sages”, the latter for his essays on literary criticism and other topics.

Famously melancholic and pessimistic, particularly with respect to the decline of religious faith – that recurring source of angst and despair for Victorian poets or writers. Indeed, that melancholy, long, withdrawing roar retreating in Dover Beach is the tide going out for “the sea of faith” – that “was once, too, at the full and round earth’s shore”.

Arguably the most melancholic Victorian poet – although Alfred Lord Tennyson would give him a run for his money with Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Shortly after his death, Robert Louis Stevenson quipped about his bleak melancholy – “Poor Matt. He’s gone to heaven, no doubt – but he won’t like God”.

“Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

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Portrait of Lord Byron by English painter Thomas Phillips 1813 (public domain image)

(6) LORD BYRON (1788-1824)

Mad, bad and dangerous to know (according to Lady Caroline Lamb, who had an affair with him)

If Blake was a pioneer of the modern literary mythos, Byron was a pioneer of the modern literary hero or anti-hero – also the self-insert character, modelled on himself and thereafter named as the Byronic Hero, charismatic but deeply flawed.

“I awoke one morning and found myself famous”.

The original Byronic hero was the titular character of his epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – the same epic poem that made that fame and paid for his vices. Although as his longer narrative poems go, I prefer his Don Juan, in which he recast the infamous womanizing Spanish folk legend of Don Juan as more a male ingenue tossed between impulse and circumstance.

Perhaps the best example of a poet who truly lived (and died) their art – the Romantic poet and revolutionary who died fighting for the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence. And by died fighting I mean sadly from the medicine of the day being bled to death from fever rather than, you know, in combat or the more dashing death he might have expected, albeit he still died young.

And yes – he was an actual Lord, “who gave two memorable speeches in the House of Lords”, one for Catholic emancipation.

“She walks in beauty like the night”.

While he made his fame from his longer poems, his short lyric poems appeal to me more to represent him here for this entry – and what else but She Walks in Beauty?

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The Great Red Dragon and The Woman Clothed in the Sun painting by Blake (and featured in Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon). And yes – the Great Red Dragon does squats and doesn’t skip leg day

(5) WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827)

“To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wildflower

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour”

Romantic mystic poet – “everything possible to be believ’d is an image of truth”.

Inspired The Doors through Aldous Huxley – “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite”.

Also one of the first comics or multimedia creators, since he was also a painter and printmaker who designed his visual art around his poetry and vice versa.

Poetry or mythology, that is, as Blake was one of the pioneers for creating his own literary mythos or Verse (heh) in the parlance of modern popular culture (and TV Tropes). The Blake Poetry & Visual Art Universe, as it were, in the style of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, only trippier – “I must create a system or be enslav’d by another man’s”.

“Tyger tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night”

Blake excelled in poetic phrases and aphorisms but if I were to pick one of his whole poems for this entry it would be The Tyger, even if does have the same rhythm as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It was one of His Songs of Experience, in which each poem corresponded to one of his poems in his Songs of Innocence as a matched pair. The counterpart of The Tyger was The Lamb, but whereas latter invokes images of God knitting the lamb, the former is a fiery image of God literally forging the tiger.

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Yes – I couldn’t resist this pun from Rocky & Bulwinkle for the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam. And yes – the metafictional canned audience groaned too

(4) RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM

Not bad for a Persian poet getting pissed – which is what the Rubaiyat is when you boil it down.

Of course, there’s more to it than that, given the religious prohibition on alcohol in Islam – which lends itself as the springboard for existential ennui or philosophical musings on religion and life itself.

The Rubaiyat is “the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains (rubaiyat) attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed the Astronomer-Poet of Persia”.

Translation that is in the very loosest sense – indeed, FitzGerald himself apparently referred to it as a ‘transmogrification’.

“Many of the verses are paraphrased, and some of them cannot be confidently traced to his source material at all…To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely based on Omar’s quatrains rather than a translation in the narrow sense.”

For that matter, “the authenticity of the poetry attributed to Omar Khayyam is highly uncertain” – he was famed as an astronomer and mathematician, with the earliest references to his poetry being substantially after his death and “the extant manuscripts containing collections attributed to Omar are dated much too late to enable a reconstruction of a body of authentic verses”. There is an implausibly large number of quatrains attributed to him – varying from 1,200 to more than 2,000 – and “sceptical scholars point out that the entire tradition may be pseudigraphic”.

Fortunately, FitzGerald didn’t ‘translate’ or write that many quatrains. His original 1859 edition was a much more modest 75 quatrains, expanded in subsequent editions to the final edition of 101 quatrains – or a mere 404 lines.

Although “commercially unsuccessful at first”, the Rubaiyat subsequently became both highly popular and influential, albeit peaking in the 1880s – “the book was extremely popular throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous Omar Khayyam clubs were formed and there was a fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat”.

Of course, it helps that the quatrains are so eminently quotable.

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Collage of Jim Morrison from one of his most iconic photographs (left) and Jimi Hendrix from an album cover for Electric Ladyland (right)

(3) JIM MORRISON & JIMI HENDRIX

Mr Mojo Risin’ and the Voodoo Child.

And here we are at the apex of mojo.

The Doors with their “dark, theatrical blues-influenced psychedelic rock”, led by the poetic lyrics, deep silky voice and charismatic persona of Jim Morrison “aka Mr. Mojo Risin’ aka The Lizard King”. And Jimi Hendrix – “one of the most celebrated musicians of the 20th century” and “arguably the greatest instrumentalist in the history of rock music”.

But hold on Stark After Dark, I hear you say – aren’t they your apex of mojo…in music?

Well, yes they are – which is why I’m giving them special mention here, similarly at god-tier ranking, for their lyrical content.

Of the two of them, Morrison leads for his lyrical content. Obviously I like Hendrix but his lyrical content – and for that matter his vocal performance – was eclipsed by his virtuosity of performance on electric guitar.

As the vocalist of The Doors, Morrison was all about lyrical content, vocal performance and onstage theater – the latter showcased by the sprawling trippy Oedipal epic performance of The End, not unlike the Greek drama that inspired it.

As for lyrical content, at the suggestion of Morrison their very name came from the title of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, itself taken from William Blake – “When the doors of perception are cleansed, man will see things as they truly are, infinite” (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell).

And I stand by L.A. Woman – both album and its titular single – as one of the great lyrical poems of the twentieth century. The title track song has so much mojo that it famously features the refrain of Mr. Mojo Risin’, an anagram of Jim Morrison no less, in the song’s break with its rising crescendo of unmistakably sexual rhythm (and a figure I’ve adopted into my own pagan mythology – I believe in L.A. Woman and Mr. Mojo Risin’).

Mr Mojo’ Risin’, Mr Mojo Risin! Whoa yeah!

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Norton Anthology of Poetry – 6th edition 2018 cover

(2) NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF POETRY

This may seem as a bit of a cheat, particularly ranked as my top special mention and in god tier to boot, given that it is an anthology – that is, a collection of poetry from different poets in contrast to the individual poets of my Top 10 Poetry (and most of the balance of special mentions).

Indeed, it is the most comprehensive collection of poetry, both in poems and in poets, from the very earliest poems in English to the present day, that I know – my favorite single volume anthology or collection of poetry.

And that essentially gives away the method to my madness behind it as my top special mention. In short, the Norton Anthology of Poetry is the means by which I encountered most of my favorite poems or poets, including those in my top ten or these special mentions.

It is one of a series of Norton Anthologies which tend to be favorite volumes for schools, colleges or universities. Two other Norton Anthologies come close to it in my education – the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Anthology of American Literature – and one other comes close to it in my personal reading – the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

But no other anthology, Norton or otherwise, has ever matched the Norton Anthology of Poetry for my discovery and enjoyment of poems and poets – and I still discover or rediscover poems and poets within its pages to this day.

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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Title page of the First Folio – containing 36 of Shakespeare’s plays and one of the most influential books ever published – from 1623 with copper engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout (public domain image)

(1) WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564-1616)

The Bard of Avon – or simply, the Bard.

“He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s pre-eminent dramatist…His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. Shakespeare remains arguably the most influential writer in the English language, and his works continue to be studied and reinterpreted.”

What else is there to say than this introduction to the Wikipedia article on Shakespeare? Shakespeare is so definitive and so influential as a writer – indeed, as THE writer, “the only playwright most people can name” as per TV Tropes on Shakespeare – that his very name evokes all you need to say.

Well, except perhaps why I rank him as (only) special mention, albeit as my top special mention in god tier, in my Top 10 Poetry instead of Top 10 Literature?

The latter is perhaps easier to address. For me, Shakespeare primarily wrote poetry – obviously in his sonnets but also even in his plays. Yes – he did write some prose in his plays but mostly he wrote them in blank verse. I’m reminded of Don Marquis writing in jest as Shakespeare’s publishers remonstrating with him to stop doing so much of that poetry stuff and do more of the ghosts or gore the audience liked.

As for the query why only special mention, as influential as he is – including for me potentially as a subject worthy of several top ten lists – he just lacks the same influence for me as those entries in my Top 10 Poetry or Top 10 Literature lists. There’s also the sheer volume of writing, which makes it difficult to pick any single play, let alone sonnet, as the best or most influential above all others.

Although if push came to shove and I had to nominate one play for this special mention entry, it would be Macbeth – not coincidentally, the major Shakespeare play I studied at school and which remains a major influence on me, particularly when it comes to Shakespeare.

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Runners-up would be those other plays I studied, Julius Caesar and Henry V, although I also have a soft spot for Romeo and Juliet from the Baz Luhrman film adaptation.

And speaking of adaptations, the depth of his influence on drama, literature and culture remains long, ongoing and profound – back to Wikipedia on his legacy, “Shakespeare’s work has made a significant and lasting impression on later theatre and literature…he expanded the dramatic potential of characterization, plot, language, and genre.” His plays have been almost endlessly adapted, imitated, parodied, deconstructed and reconstructed – not just in drama or theater, but in novels and literature in general as well as films and television.

His influence extends even to music – “scholars have identified 20,000 pieces of music linked to Shakespeare’s works” – and art, to the study of psychology and the English language itself. “His use of language helped to shape modern English…expressions such as ‘with bated breath’ (Merchant of Venice) and ‘a foregone conclusion’ (Othello) have found their way into everyday English speech.”

And far beyond England or English for that matter – “this master, this titan, this genius, so profoundly British and so effortlessly universal, each different culture – German, Italian, Russian – was obliged to respond to the Shakespearean example; for the most part, they embraced it, and him, with joyous abandon, as the possibilities of language and character in action that he celebrated liberated writers across the continent. Some of the most deeply affecting productions of Shakespeare have been non-English, and non-European. He is that unique writer: he has something for everyone.”

Although perhaps nothing will ever top his finest stage direction – “Exit, pursued by a bear” (from A Winter’s Tale).

RATING: 5 STARS*****

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