No good English poets

[milo]

I think English poetry essentially died after Shakespeare. After him, we have an endless parade of charlatans like Browning, posers like Larkin, and effete pseudo-madmen like Shem. Broken here and there with true voices of genius in Henry Vaughan, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. 

It's quite a bold claim... Shem was never that interesting.

At first I thought you meant English language poets and then perhaps you meant 'English type poetry', if there is such a thing. Dylan Thomas confused it a bit further with him being Welsh, which would narrow your list even more.

So none of the Romantics or the war poets or Blake or Ted Hughes?

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I actually meant poets from the British isles. English is a lazy shorthand shorthand.
So Ireland is part of it. Pillory me if you want for that, but Trump has endured worse.

The younger romantics were great. They all died before they got boring.

Tennyson was the best of the craftsmen, but a thoroughgoing racist and his poetry falls short as a consequence. Was Hitler a fine artist?

Blake was great. Yeats was great.

Owen and Sassoon wrote some fine poems.

Ok, there were perhaps eight or nine exceptions. The rest were miserable individuals who shouldn’t be read at all. Larkin is like the Jeremy Corbin of poetry. He’s miserable and wants you to join him. We should read only about elevated things, like Jesu.

This just reminded me how much I like Heaney . . .