Loading ...“Poetry” and “manly” don’t often go together in contemporary imagination, but maybe that’s about to change, since manly men Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman have just teamed up to make a movie named after a poem.
Here are the rules:
- American poets only. Otherwise, Homer (the real Homer) would win every time. OK, maybe David. But definitely one of them.
- Twentieth century poets only. Sorry – Walt Whitman’s cool, but I’m tired of him coasting on his beard.
- Twentieth century only poets. If you’re still alive and writing poetry, sorry, you’re not eligible. Wendell, Robert, Billy – get back to us in 90 years.
- I don’t mean to be chauvinistic or anything, but, if you ever moved to England and affected a British accent, or moved to Italy and started writing pro-Fascist propaganda, you’re not eligible. Yeah, that’s right, I’m talking to you and you.
With no further ado, the manliest 20th century American poets. These choices are mine and mine alone. If you disagree, leave a comment. It will be fun to get into an argument about poetry.
5. Wallace Stevens – If there were a Mad Men about poets, Stevens would be the star. Part-time poet, full-time insurance executive, Stevens turned against his family to marry his true love and once got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway. In his poetry, he wrestled with dense, philosophical ideas using ground-breaking imagery and rhythm. Some well-known poems: Sunday Morning, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,
4. William Carlos Williams – Another moonlighting poet, WCW lived a double-life as a New Jersey pediatrician-slash-literary giant. Can you imagine being a kid whose family doctor was a father-figure to Allen Ginsberg? Plus, he shares initials with a defunct wrestling circuit. WCW’s style focused on the concrete and local details from his native Paterson. He famously wrote “no ideas but in things.” Some well-known poems: The Red Wheelbarrow, Queen-Anne’s Lace, The crowd at the ball game.
3. Carl Sandburg – What’s the manliest city in the US? Quite possibly Chicago. And who wrote more good poetry about Chicago than anyone else? Sandburg. Not only that, but Sandburg also wrote the definite biography of Abraham Lincoln and won three — count ‘em! Three! — Pulitzer Prizes. How many Pulitzers have you won? The clincher, however, is that Sandburg’s best-known poem, “Chicago,” begins with the words “Hog Butcher.” If you can start a poem with the word “Hog Butcher” and still have it included in every middle-school textbook in America, that’s pretty manly. Some well-known poems: Chicago, Fog, Prayers of Steel.
2. Langston Hughes – When confronted with racism and injustice, what should you do? If your answer is “write a poem,” that’s usually not very manly, unless you’re writing poems like Langston Hughes wrote poems. A leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes expressed pride in being black and intense anger at America’s racist attitudes. He took the “manly poetry” of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, and transformed it for the black experience. Some well-known poems: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, I, Too, Sing America, Theme for English B.
1. Robert Frost – Frost might be America’s most misunderstood poet. Because of sentimental high school English classes, we have this image of Frost as the “Norman Rockwell of literature,” a poet who wrote about small town America, old-fashioned values, and family farms. In reality, Frost’s favorite subjects were despair, death, and the lonely isolation of the individual. It’s sort of like finding out your kindly old grandpa, who always gives you hard candy at Christmas, spent three years in prison for killing a man in a bar fight. Some well-known poems: Mending Wall, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Home Burial, The Death of the Hired Man.
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Bold topic, Mike! You’ve shed light on a subject that make most men cower. Poetry is not for everyone and those who are its most vocal critics are typically incapable of thinking on more intellectual levels. Hopefully a few guys will be open-minded enough to read some of your chosen selections and give it a try. Pretty cool stuff, especially from Sandburg, Hughes and Frost.
While I agree with several of your manly poet choices, I assume you disregarded Ginsberg because of his homosexuality. While that is certainly contrary to manliness, his poetry and other writings turned a post-war Ozzie-and-Harriet-America on its ear (thank God). I typically measure an artist’s significance by the ability to affect change on cultural norms, and Ginsberg definitely accomplished that. That said, a manly guy has to go into Ginsberg’s material with an open mind, and understand that, by reading his poetry, the reader is not going to be converted to the other side. It’s okay, guys. Words don’t hurt.
Ginsberg’s contemporary, Jack Kerouac, was also an interesting poet. He was primarily known for his novels, but he was a fairly prolific poet as well. And coming from the Beat scene, his take on subjects is far from stereotypically flowery poetry. It’s very gritty, streetwise material and definitely manly.
My final consideration is a familiar name, Edgar Allan Poe. Now that guy could write! He was a journalist, a writer of short stories and a poet. Anyone who can make the hair stand up on your neck with words is a skilled writer. His versatility is almost without equal, and who doesn’t dig a good reading of The Raven? Hell, even a football team was named after that poem!
Thanks again for the topic. Good stuff.
Poe isn’t a 20th Century poet, though. If you are stepping into the wayback machine, though, I don’t see how Stephen Crane could be left out… sweet mustache, Red Badge of Courage, short-and-to-the-point poems, a deep interest in the downtrodden…
Also, Bukowski wasn’t on the list, and that made me sad, but only kind of–because he’s gotta be 6th, right?
Right?
Hey Tim,
Thanks for the feedback! Good point about Ginsburg and Kerouac bringing a “toughness” to their writing. Honestly, Ginsburg didn’t even occur to me. I really like “Howl,” but not much else. I wanted to put Gary Snyder in the top 5, which would have given the Beats a representative. I admire Snyder’s writing on work (he was a logger, among other things), nature, and Zen Buddhism. Unfortunately (for my list, not for him), he’s still alive so he was excluded by my self-imposed rules.
Ginsburg’s homosexuality didn’t factor – for what it’s worth, Langston Hughes might have been gay, and I chose Queen as my pick for manliest band in our roundtable. My favorite poet is probably W. H. Auden, who was gay, but I didn’t include him because he falls into the same “Is he American? Is he British?” limbo as T. S. Eliot.
The Ed.,
Sure, Bukowski was 6th. Whatever makes you happy. I’d say more, but I have to go now and steal one of his books from Borders.
Dang it, forgot about the 20th century factor with Poe. My bad. I still think he’s one of the American greats, however. But playing by the rules, please disregard that choice.
Yeah, I know about you and Bukowski. And honestly, when it comes to poetry, I’m not his biggest fan either. But his fiction? Love it. At the same time, though, I can def. see arguments against, especially the whole “totally misogynistic jerk” one.