From a Commonplace Book

Is William Butler Yeats Number One? A young professor at Columbia, one of the best lecturers on Shakespeare I ever heard and a man whose opinions I took very seriously, once remarked to me that Yeats was “the best poet in English since Shakespeare.” This would mean — going chronologically — that he was better than Donne, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. Today’s critical consensus on 20th-century poets in English looks something like this: Eliot and Yeats, tied for first; Frost second (not prolific enough after his earlier best stuff); Pound, Stevens, and Auden battling for third. (Of these six, four were American, one Irish, and only one English. For years English poets have resented the outsiders’ superiority.)

-- Jeffrey Hart