Five Poets to Read Before You Die

Those of you who are not students of literature may never find yourselves reading poetry. This is, of course, a huge mistake. In the right hands, words take on a life and soul of their own, becoming fertile ground for ideas and imaginations. In a world where desire and conflict interact so disastrously, it is paramount that we do not sacrifice art in favour of systematising our problems because if we do not understand our world we can bring no solutions. The poets in this list are and have been huge figures in understanding the world around us and so to read them is to make both your understanding of your world and your life as a whole more complete. It is by no means a complete list, and certainly, there are hundreds of poets to read that will change your life, but this is a good start.

1. Seamus Heaney

Heaney is perhaps the best thing to come out of Northern Ireland in the last century. Recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, his work invokes the powerful imagery of the conflict dominated cities and farms of his homeland. He is deliberately pre-modern in his tone, a stern traditionalist, but from tradition, he draws incredible beauty, especially in the nature images his work is renowned for. Paradoxically political in his work and resentful of his political role, Heaney is a figure who addressed the complexities of the power struggles of 20th century Ireland in a way that no others could compare, and his understanding of such conflict can be drawn right to the accident of his birth as a Catholic in Protestant Northern Ireland. In 2009, two-thirds of all poetry collections sold in the UK were Heaney, something otherwise unheard of in poets of the modern era.

I would recommend the Nobel Prize winning Death of a Naturalist as your introduction to all things Seamus Heaney, which stands as a testament to the glory of his writing which will surely outlive us all.

2. Pablo Neruda

Few poets have ever been or will ever be as controversial as Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, pen name Pablo Neruda. A Chilean diplomat whose life was dominated by the realms of 20th-century revolutionary politics, he was a communist during the war, which helped to develop one of the greatest and most terrible cults of personality ever to exist - that of Joseph Stalin. Aside from the political, there is no better poet to bring into the bedroom, especially if you are fluent in Spanish, and even from his first works, he was marked as controversial for his explicit celebrations of sexuality. From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair to the Spanish Civil War to the conspiracies surrounding his death under Chilean dictator General Pinochet, there is no one better for changing your perspective of life; he is the spokesman of love, and while he believed that writing carries its own inherent oblivion, I feel that much of his work is eternal.

I recommend Isla Negra: Poems, a poetry autobiography named for one of Neruda's homes. It blends his past, present, and future, and is one of the best ways to understand the life and works of one of the greatest poets ever to live.

3. Sylvia Plath

Thirty years Plath had on this Earth, and in those thirty years, Plath demonstrated nothing but genius, even in the face of manic depression. She has developed an unfortunate reputation as the angsty teenage poetry girl's best friend, and while she is far deeper than that it is clear why this has come about. Feminism lauds her as an icon of a woman suffering at the hands of an authoritarian father and an unfaithful husband, as well as pointing at the drain motherhood had on her genius. Death also took on life in her poetry, and they became inseparable. She became like some sort of love child of Virginia Woolf and Feodor Dostoevsky. As issues of mental health became more and more evident, it is paramount that we learn to understand the dramatic effects it can have, and the devastation it causes in place of beauty, and it is in the morose tone and resolution of the disconnection between the perceiver and the thing-in-itself that we can truly see that life and death are intrinsically intertwined, and often both come with extreme hardships. When Sylvia Plath writes of Dachau as if she had been there, it is because horror is present, and we need to recognise that.

I recommend Ariel, Plath's posthumously published second collection because it is there that you can truly marvel at the power and substance of works written when you know your life will come to an end soon.

4. Robert Burns

No poet is as beloved as Rabbie Burns is by the Scots. Fact. He was chosen as the greatest ever Scot by the Scots, and as anyone whose family is predominantly Scottish knows, they do not like anyone, not even each other, and they can never agree on anything. He was a pioneer, stylistically and ideologically, with Romanticism, liberalism, and socialism standing at his beck and call. His use of languages (plural) was phenomenal, and while much of his work is in the Scots language, other works were in English with a Scottish dialect, and also in standard English, the latter of which bore much of his most scathing political commentary. He was a staunch Republican and alienated himself from many of his friends because of his vocal support for the French Revolution. He also made clear his criticisms of the Kirk (the church of Scotland) and clericalism in general. His work ranges from the great highs of humour in Tam o' Shanter, to the political drive and subtle critiques of Scots Wha Hae. While it is a pity that Burns did not write Auld Lang Syne he is still an international icon, and Burns Night is celebrated from Scotland to the US, to the largest celebration in China.

The natural place to begin is with the Collected Poems of Robert Burns and come his 25th of January birthday, eat some haggis and enjoy the sweet satire of Holy Willie's Prayer.

5. John Agard

I have a deep love for this poet, he is a man I have met in person twice. A charming, funny figure, he is by far the greatest voice of modern poetry. With his distinctive Guyanan accent he can drive home the power of the race and national dynamics of education in former British colonies such as he does in Checking Out Me History and then have you in stitches as he proclaims his Alternative Anthem, or tells his story of the old man with Viagra in my Cocoa. In 2012 he was selected for a Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and it is no wonder, as he is the closest thing to the puckish rogue poetry has had in a century. It is a wonder that things as simple as fairy tales and nursery rhymes can have such power in a postcolonial world, and that is where the strength lies in Agard's voice; he represents the sun setting on empire and the way assimilation emboldened different cultures to rebel to try to stand out. It is not hard to understand why he asks why Guyanan children learn about the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, and not about Toussaint L'Ouverture when one has relevant contextual relatability and the other is the history of distant oppressors.

Agard is a wonderful man and hugely entertaining, and while I could recommend Travel Light Travel Dark, which is a beautiful collection of poetry, I would instead beseech you to watch even one reading by John Agard, because truly it is through the performance that he is best presented.