Ask HN: Who are your favorite poets?
Neruda is my favourite.<p><pre><code>    I want to do to you , what the spring does to the cherry trees.
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Here's another one<p><pre><code>    Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
    I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.
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How he is able construct such powerful verse out of simple words and concepts always blows me away. Though it looks easy I've never seen a good imitation of his style.<p>Then there's this poem by Phillip Larkin that I like.<p><pre><code>    They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
    They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

    But they were fucked up in their turn
    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
    Who half the time were soppy-stern
    And half at one another’s throats.

    Man hands on misery to man.
    It deepens like a coastal shelf.
    Get out as early as you can,
    And don’t have any kids yourself.
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Shakespeare's sonnets are good.<p><pre><code>    Let me not to the marriage of true minds
    Admit impediments. Love is not love 
    Which alters when it alteration finds,
    Or bends with the remover to remove:
    O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
    That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
    It is the star to every wandering bark,
    Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
    Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
    Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
    Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
    But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
    If this be error and upon me proved,
    I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 
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Classical poetry is just really hardcore when you consider how hard it is to write within the constraints of rhyme , meter and the chosen form. It's definitely in the hacker spirit of doing things like the JS1K contest , or maybe crazy assembly optimised demos.<p>Also checkout Charles Bukowski and Coleridge.<p>Genius.com is a wonderful way to read poetry.