The Greatest

Finished Ammons's wonderful The Snow Poems today. In a couple of the final sections I caught myself thinking/feeling: This is better than The Wasteland. And Four Quartets. Then thinking: I can't possibly say that; do I really think/feel so? Then thinking: But how about those two other brilliant long poems of the 20C - Crow and Omeros? Is it really better? Then thinking: But it doesn't matter does it? Comparisons are odious/odorous, even if great fun.

Now sort of regarding AA as my idea of the greatest poet (in the English language) of the 20C. But realising that there's quite a list of writers who've occupied that spot in my mind over the years, if only temporarily: Tom Eliot / Yeats / Auden / Robert Lowell / Ted Hughes / Heaney - and, I suppose, Thomas Hardy since nearly all his verse was published after 1900.

Odd that there're no women in my list. Plath, I guess, comes closest, but she seems so much like a special case with a limited body of work. My goodness, what if she'd have lived? Imagine what she might have done had she outlived TH! Also vaguely wondering about Carol Ann Duffy, but she straddles centuries. What if she has a final great period and goes somewhere quite new, a bit like Yeats, unlikely as the comparison sounds?

Again, all a bit pointless, but I find it sort of useful as a way of getting myself doing a bit of thinking.