The Greatest English Poet of the Twentieth Century

The BBC Poetry Season offered a chance to re-evaluate things a little bit. The programme on Eliot made me realize just how long it's been since I actually read any of those classic poems, those huge icons of C20th English poetry. While looking at the considerable work of contemporary poets like Roddy Lumsden, Kathryn Simmonds, Carol Ann Duffy, Glyn Maxwell and Simon Armitage, one forgets to notice what a vast shadow a poet like Eliot still casts.
One is tempted to reinstate Eliot as the greatest C20th English poet immediately (whether by birth or use of the English language) after doubting if all that Modernism really caught on. Then one wonders how many great poems he wrote and I've always had my doubts about how great some of the poetry in The Four Quartets actually is. So are Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and The Waste Land enough to base a whole iconic reputation on, with Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men and Cats. Or does Auden's achievement, or Hardy's, amount to more.
I stared at the candidates and thought there might be a shortlist of five genuine contenders.
Hardy's enormous output is beautifully made, traditional and carries an immense emotional charge. One is almost weighed down by them, they become a bit repetitive and do roughly the same thing over and again. But he has the common touch, perhaps a bit mournfully but never less than honestly.
Yeats is a huge talent with at least two distinct periods after the Celtic twilight is replaced by a modernist aesthetic and in Byzantium he has become the fully-fledged artist after the beguiling sentimentalism of The Lake Isle of Innisfree. He must be on any shortlist and his influence on the powerful generations of Irish poets that followed him is immense. They all refer back to him incessantly.
With those poems listed above, Eliot can't be anything less than a major contender, even more so as the great critic who defined the taste and standard by which he was to be judged. Ezra Pound is the svengali behind the modernist movement, the 'kingmaker' who restyles Yeats and Eliot to his more radical way of thinking but his rarefied style is too far beyond the common reader for his own poetry to have sufficient appeal to make him greater than his acolytes.
Auden's early political commitment and greater humanity make second generation modernism more user friendly. His facility for making poems and side interest in light verse make him more attractive to general readers before he is thought by some to lose his way and become more rambling and prolix after moving to America, ostensibly to avoid the war. Auden was the candidate who I suspected might have taken Eliot's presumed title but he's not as universal a choice as one might expect. If he makes it look too easy, he is suspected of not extending himself. Greatness doesn't sit easily with complacency.
And Larkin did more recent poets a great service by cleaning up English poetry of all its difficulties and obfuscation. Some call it reactionary while others might say it is just common sense. A perfectionist techinician at his best, it will be claimed he was by definition a 'minor poet' but his reputation continues to rebuild itself as the considerations of political correctness are weighed off against an exemplary oeuvre of poetical correctness. Many have benefitted since from his example of clarity and ordinariness, his updating of Hardy's method.
I don't see any other poets being serious candidates for this somewhat subjective title. Although many will have serious objections to this shortlist because of the omission of their personal favourites, so have I because Thom Gunn isn't on it. There is a difference between 'best' and 'favourite' which is sometimes difficult to identify. But there is also a further difference between 'best', favourite' and 'greatest'. You need to be very good, relevant, memorable and influential to be a candidate for 'greatest' and then more so than anybody else.
But my apparent disquiet that, by 2009, we still haven't decided who was the greatest English poet of the C20th is perhaps misplaced. Do we actually know for sure that Keats was the greatest poet of the C19th? Or was it Wordsworth, Tennyson, Shelley or somebody else. It wasn't Shelley, was it. Was Pope the greatest poet of the Augustan period? Not my period, not for me to say. But what about the C17th? Donne is challenged by Shakespeare and Milton and suddenly Marvell starts to look out of his depth.
So perhaps it is far too early to decide. Maybe there isn't an answer. Taste and fashion will continue to change and perhaps one day everyone will love dear old Dylan Thomas again. It is possible that one shouldn't worry about it and one less thing to worry about must be a good thing.