I have been thinking about essential poets. Poets that I feel must be read. Or better yet, that I must re-read.

So I made for myself a quick list of essential poets (in no particular order):

• Walt Whitman
• W.B. Yeats
• John Milton
• William Blake
• P.B. Shelley
• John Keats
• William Wordsworth
• Carl Sandburg
• W.H. Auden
• Ted Hughes
• Seamus Heaney
• T.S. Eliot
• Amy Lowell
• Ranier Maria Rilke
• Osip Mandelstam
• Robert Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• Mary Oliver
• John Donne
• Robert Frost
• William Carlos Williams
• Wallace Stevens

Reviewing the list now, I see a number of holes (Victorians, contemporary), but overall I think I am satisfied with it.

What do you think? Who has been left off?