Last 21 March was International Poetry Day, approved by UNESCO in 1999. It is a day to commemorate one of the literary formats with a recognized worldwide tradition. Therefore, it is important to know part of the world’s culture, as poets have served as inspiration for many of the works that are written today.
Of course, there is no limit to the number of international poets, which is why we have chosen 10, those whose work we consider essential for any lover of literature. Some of you may already know them, others may know their names but have not read their work, and others may not know who they were.
Poetry serves as a form of entertainment and has been around for thousands of years. However, nowadays there are other types of entertainment such as juegos de casino or online platforms for watching films and series.
Whether your level of poetic knowledge is high, or you are unfamiliar with the field of poetry, this publication on 8 international poets you should know, invites you to continue delving into this field of literature.
Sappho of Mytilene
Also known as Sappho of Lesbos or Sappho, was a Greek poetess later considered one of the “nine lyric poets”. It is commonly known that the philosopher Plato named her “the tenth Muse”. There is almost no biographical information about her. Most of the information about her life is deduced from her poems.
Her work was written in Aeolian dialect and in a stylistic sense was characterised by the fact that in this literary field it was the first time she spoke in the first person. His poems dealt with personal feelings.
Yalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī
Also known as Mavlāna or Mevlânâ or Rumí, meaning “native of Roman Anatolia”. He was a celebrated Persian Muslim mystic poet. Over the centuries he has had a significant influence on Persian, Urdu and Turkish literature. His poems are known worldwide, translated into several languages internationally, and read daily in Persian-speaking countries such as Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Pierre de Ronsard
He was a 16th century French writer and poet, known as “the prince of poets and poet of princes”. He was considered one of the most representative members of the French Renaissance poetic group La Pleiade, along with the poet Joachim du Bellayo.
His poetry was influenced by Petrarch, Platonism and classical formalism with its humanist vitalism. Of his many works, the following stand out: Odes (1550), Amores (1552), Hymns (1555-56), La franciada (1572) and Sonetos para Helena (1578).
Emily Dickinson
She was an American poet, renowned for her passionate and intense poetry, which made her one of the fundamental American poets along with Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson had a particular and very closed life in her community. She gradually withdrew into her own home, to the point where her poetic talents were constantly on display in her private life. Not a dozen of his nearly 1800 poems were ever published. It was only after his death that notebooks were found with a large amount of verse and poetic material for publication.
His poetry is characterised by short, untitled lines, the rhymes are imperfectly consonant, and the themes he often wrote about revolved around death and immortality, also present in his correspondence with his friends.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Born in Prague, Bohemia, at that time considered the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he is recognised as one of the most important Austrian poets in German and world literature of the 20th century. The content of his poems tends to focus on conflicts over values, Christianity and loneliness, which are closely related to the social context of his time.
His best-known works are the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, while his prose works include Letters to a Young Poet and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He is also the author of several works in French.
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was one of the most prolific poets in Latin American and world literature. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1971, Neruda lived through one of the most difficult moments in his country’s history. After his death, his poems have made him immortal.
As he himself said in one of them: “Don’t think that I am going to die. I happen to be going to live”.
Alejandra Pizarnik
She was an Argentine poet and translator. Her poetry was a continuous introspection into her inner self, characterised by her constant personal dialogue that sprang forth in verse. Death, childhood, guilt, suffering, alienation, success… were recurring themes. Her particular style was characterised by Pizarnik’s narrative voice that was underlying behind herself.
The concept of literary recognition was a great concern for the author, who questioned herself to such an extent that her behaviour was directed towards that literary success to which she felt predestined. Her poetry was based on a destructive-destructive tendency, which transited between the possibility of her own visibility and, at the same time, the channel for the expressive outlet of her communicative sensitivity.
Anna A. Akhmatova
She was a well-known Russian poet. Along with Nikolai Gumiliov and Osip Mandelshtam, she was one of the most representative figures of the Acmeist poetry of the Silver Age of Russian literature. The recurring themes of his poetry are universal: death, love, time, the homeland… His poetic language possessed a strength and expressiveness that were forged from sobriety and simplicity, with agile and dynamic rhythms. It is precisely because of these characteristics that they are difficult to translate. Although his poetic trajectory evolved, he maintained a stylistic hallmark, both in his earliest stage of innocence and romanticism, as well as in his later stage, which had a maturity marked by the political-social context.
His most important collection of poems was Requiem, in which he expressed the situation in the Soviet Union and his vision, for example, that the only ones at peace were the dead and that the living lived moving from one concentration camp to another. The book was published without his consent and knowledge in 1963 in Munich.
