Best British Poets

Another subjective list of those poets I return to most often. Shakespeare is not on here (yeah, I said it). I don't like his poetry though I understand it is good...
The Top Ten
1 Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Oh, Beauty, passing Beauty! Sweetest sweet!
How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs;
I only ask to sit beside thy feet...

~ Beauty ~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson

2 William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).
3 T.S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM, (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and one of the 20th century's major poets.
4 John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.
5 Dylan Thomas
6 Philip Larkin
7 Christina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English poet who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is famous for writing Goblin Market and Remember, and the words of the Christmas carol In the Bleak Midwinter.
8 Percy Bysshe Shelley Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric, as well as epic, poets in the English language.

This man had amazing talent. I see him as one of the most admirable people here.

9 Wilfred Owen

He died in the war he wrote so eloquently about.

10 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Contenders
11 William Shakespeare William Shakespeare was an English poet, playwright, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.
12 Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Woolf, born Stephen (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941), known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the 20th century.
13 John Donne
14 Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to be buried in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey.
15 William Blake William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
16 Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel ...read more.
17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
18 Robert Burns
19 Lord Byron George Gordon Byron (later Noel), 6th Baron Byron, FRS, (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an Anglo-Scottish poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement.
20 John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet, polemicist, man of letters, and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost (1667), written in blank verse.
21 Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 16, 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work.

Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book, Kim, and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King". His poems include "Mandalay", "Gunga Din", "The Gods of the Copybook Headings", "The White... read more
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