Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?

When read aloud, the rhythm is impeccable and almost addictive.

Another shout out has to go to A A Milne, particularly for Disobedience, which again is a delight to read aloud: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~ridge/local/disobedience.html

I met a traveler from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

– Percy Shelley

if you’re going to try, go all the way. otherwise, don’t even start.

if you’re going to try, go all the way. this could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.

go all the way. it could mean not eating for 3 or 4 days. it could mean freezing on a park bench. it could mean jail, it could mean derision, mockery, isolation. isolation is the gift, all the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. and you’ll do it despite rejection and the worst odds and it will be better than anything else you can imagine.

if you’re going to try, go all the way. there is no other feeling like that. you will be alone with the gods and the nights will flame with fire.

do it, do it, do it. do it.

all the way all the way.

you will ride life straight to perfect laughter, its the only good fight there is.

   Ek herhaal jou

   Ek herhaal jou
   sonder begin of einde
   herhaal ek jou liggaam
   Die dag het ’n smal skadu
   en die nag geel kruise
   die landskap is sonder aansien
   en die mense ’n ry kerse
   terwyl ek jou herhaal
   met my borste
   wat die holtes van jou hand namaak

The poem is in Afrikaans and the poet is South African.

For those who are interested, an English language Dutch film about her was made a few years ago called Black Butterflies.

I can however not say that I have seen any translations that do justice to the original.

    Daremne żale - próżny trud,
    Bezsilne złorzeczenia!
    Przeżytych kształtów żaden cud
    Nie wróci do istnienia.

    Świat wam nie odda, idąc wstecz,
    Znikomych mar szeregu -
    Nie zdoła ogień ani miecz
    Powstrzymać myśli w biegu.

    Trzeba z żywymi naprzód iść,
    Po życie sięgać nowe...
    A nie w uwiędłych laurów liść
    Z uporem stroić głowę.

    Wy nie cofniecie życia fal!
    Nic skargi nie pomogą -
    Bezsilne gniewy, próżny żal!
    Świat pójdzie swoją drogą.

    Useless remorses, toil in vain
    Impotent spells and curses.
    Outlived shapes won't be back.
    There will be no miracles.

    World won't return you,
    going back,
    translucent ghosts and spirits.
    Neither with sword nor with fire
    you'll stop a thought that's running.

    You're to go forward with alive ones
    You're to reach for a new life.
    Instead of wearing stubbornly
    withered crown of laurels.
    
    You won't turn back the waves of life
    Complains won't be of help.
    Impotent angers, remorse in vain
    World will go its own way.
    

    Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
    Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
    Their indices bedecked from one to n,
    Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
    Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
    And every vector dreams of matrices.
    Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
    It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

    In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space
    Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. 
    Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
    We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
    
    I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
    Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
    And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
    And in our bound partition never part.
        
    For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
    Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
    Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, 
    Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
    
    Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
    Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
    A root or two, a torus and a node:
    The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
    
    Ellipse of bliss, converse, O lips divine!
    The product of our scalars is defined!
    Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
    cuts capers like a happy haversine.
    
    I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
    I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
    Bernoulli would have been content to die,
    Had he but known such a squared cosine 2 phi!