In high school, my friend Peter and I were intensely romantic and intensely shy. We were each desperately in love with girls who barely knew we existed. Even if they had known we existed, we would have been too tongue-tied to talk to them. Instead, we sat in my room or in his room after school, and listened to Beatles albums and read poetry.

My literary first love in those days was Yeats. I found in him then a romantic intensity that matched my own, but had wings to soar in words. I find in him now a matchless excellence as a writer.

Anyone who writes poetry in the 20th century, or who reads modern poetry seriously, has to confront Yeats. Every serious writer is aware of him, either flowing through channels he cut or else trying to scramble out of them. You can try to push him off into the margins, but he keeps bounding back. You can pretend he doesn't matter, but at every turn in the literary landscape, you meet "WBY was here." Yeats was in many ways a bridge for the best of the 19th century to cross into the 20th, and that's a formidable legacy.

Kant knew that philosophy thrived when it was deemed trivial by priests and bankers and social reformers and prime ministers. If those people had thought philosophy important, they would have sought to control it or repress it or buy it or pervert it. The quest for truth can only occur in the autonomy known by the scorned and neglected. Yeats knew the same thing about poetry when he wrote "Adam's Curse." In a modern, commercial society, unless poets and philosophers are deemed dreamers and fools, no human thought will be free.

Recent critical biographies of Yeats seem to emphasize his muddy relationship with the women in his life (feminists have bristled at him ever since they read "Leda and the Swan"), and with what a silly fellow he was when it came to love and sex. Of course he was: it's the mark of a real male poet to be helpless and hopeless around women. "The White Goddess" got all that into print 60 years ago.

But he is, I admit, a man's poet, with all the folly and foolish nobility that implies. Lately I've been reading the later Yeats, "The Winding Stair and Other Poems" occupies my night table, and as my 40th birthday bears down I see these poems that I've known since I was 18 with fresh poignancy and power. I had read then, but never felt till now, his bitterness at leaving youth just when he'd finally mastered its arts. It's the saddest change since, at 12 or 13, it became awkward to play with toys and someone packed my knights in their tin castle and my Matchbox cars off to the attic, and it began to matter whether the clothes I wore fitted someone's measure of cool. I looked back then, for a long time, across that barrier, and I begin to look back now.

Here is where I meet Yeats, even more than in his youthful heart-flights. Awkward and shy when young, never handsome and bold, I stayed apart and now lament all the cricket-singing I never did, all the hesitation, and every night I went to bed alone. The powers I feel now, to please a young woman's heart, to lead her to the well of her sensual self and clear the rushes and clarify the water so that she may drink deeply and long, all these just-attained powers, learned through years of seeking not them so much as myself, but finding them in the seeking -- for what! To offer one the half-foul ruin of my undancing body?

Caught in that second shifting of life's force, from learning to becoming, now from becoming to completion, Yeats ushers me into the phase that ends in the grave, and teaches me to omit any word or deed not fit for a man who knows he will die.

The supremacy of word order is what makes English itself and gives its sentences their motion. William Carlos Williams knew this, and he was one of the first since the "Beowulf" poet to stop trying to dress his English in Hellenistic robes. English is not harmonious; it is blocky. It plods. It offers fewer chances than classical Greek for brilliance, wit, or flourish. But its rude moondances can be stunning. A Williams poem never seems to cast a look ahead or behind. Every word seems to touch only the one immediately before it, but it does so in the way the stones of an arch anticipate one another as they are set by the mason. A Williams poem has a keystone: the one word that can clinch the meaning of all that came before, resolve it, reveal an unexpected meaning. It is a trick that always delights me: it is also the technique of the punchline joke, which is the soul of Anglo-American comedy.

In college, I read and enjoyed the works of T.S. Eliot. His literary reputation has taken hard knocks since then, however, and some people now seriously question whether he belongs in the canon. There are two reasons for this, I think. The first is that people who don't read or understand poetry have made the astonishing discovery that, like most upper middle class Midwestern Americans of his generation, Eliot got from his cultural legacy a streak of anti-Semitism. The other is "Cats." I've been reading T.S. Eliot for 25 years now, and find less in him each time. Perhaps in my youth I was close to where that man was as a youth, but we have grown very different ways and I find myself unconnected to his mature verse, and increasingly remote from his early output, as the years pass.

Keats was a sensuous, tough-minded little guy. I made a pilgrimage to his house when I was in London. It's in the northern suburbs, up in Stevie Smith country, and worth the bus fare if you're ever there.

How appropriate that a Yahoo search for Walter Savage Landor sends you to a site in Chinese. Landor's short verses are controlled, dignified, classical and romantic at the same time. They are some of the few poems from Western literature that can hold their own in the idiom of Tu Fu and Li Po. He's mainly revered as a prose stylist, but "Rose Aylmer" and "Twenty Years Hence" were among the first poems I knew by rote, not through trying to memorize them but through the matter itself clinging to the heart. Landor himself seems to have been a difficult character. "His whole life," according to one biography, "was a series of quarrels, extravagances, and escapades of various kinds." He got kicked out of Wales, England, several Italian states, and his own home.

Shelley has his erratic moments, but when he's on his game he's unstoppable. Every time I pass the oil painting of the company's founder in the wood-paneled lobby of the building where I work, in my head I recite "Ozymandias." And what passionate teen-ager, struggling against the monstrous wrongs of the world, can resist lines like:

They said that age was truth, and that the young
Marred with wild hopes the peace of slavery

One of my favorite poems about a poet is Robert Browning's evocation of Shelley's ghost in "Memorabilia". My friend Peter has written a wonderful screenplay about the electric relationship between Byron and Shelley when they lived together in Europe. Lord Byron remains the poet laureate of the pervert nation. "The great object of life is sensation -- to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this 'craving void' which drives us to gaming -- to battle, to travel -- to intemperate, but keenly felt, pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment."

He scorned his better-known contemporaries and fancied himself a literary descendant of Pope, but he had sense enough to befriend Landor and to fear Keats, when most everyone else only ignored them. It's impossible to separate his life from his art, and both can be a mess. But his best quality as a writer is also his best as a person: a sense of humor and ability to laugh at himself, which redeems a good deal of the arrogant excesses of the life.

Marriage from love, like vinegar from wine --
A sad, sober beverage -- by time
Is sharpened from its high celestial flavour,
Down to a very homely household savour.

These writers were like first loves to me: I read them intensely for days at a time. I still enjoy them immensely, though I don't read them as often. In part, that's because I have so much of them by heart. Like the Beatles albums we listened to on those long evenings.

Anyone who's serious about American poetry, or about poetry, or about America, has to read "Leaves of Grass." But be careful what you get. The 1855 original version doesn't have some of the better-known pieces, which were added over a lifetime of revising and expanding, but it crackles with wild lightning as Whitman surveys a new reality like some Blake titan. In each subsequent reprinting, he trimmed his vision to the unmoved world. In altering his poems to fit the (mostly negative) critical reception, Whitman marred their original angelic stride. He became a poet of causes, rather than a poet who contained causes. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but fortunately the 1855 original is still printed, and often sold more cheaply that the revised anthology of Whitman's work. The more I think about it, the more impressed I am that I grew up beside a city that actually has a "Walt Whitman Bridge" as a major artery -- given that name only after an end-run around Christians and patriots who despised his morals, but named that nonetheless. Hope for America hides in unexpected places.

I'm a champion of Robinson Jeffers, though he's not the most popular American poet. He is probably the best heir of Whitman's long-line style. He's also an embodiment of whatever California used to be in the '20s and '30s: the magical, wild place before half of America moved there and trampled it to fragments. California when California was a refuge from America's vulgarities rather than their factory. Trawlers coasting slowly through the fog, heron-cries, wild horses, hawks on the headland and cruel, cruel fires.

His father was a professor of Old Testament studies. He began learning Greek at age 5. Unlike many poets of his generation (Pound, Williams, Eliot), Jeffers turned his back on the city and sought a primeval situation, which he found on the (then) desolate California coast around Carmel. There, he felt, "for the first time in my life I could see people living -- amid magnificent unspoiled scenery -- essentially as they did in the Sagas or in Homer's Ithaca. ... Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life."

I love Robert Frost, which is not to say I love everything he wrote. There's a Norman Rockwell side to him, and both Guy Davenport and Donald Hall have written eloquently of the public mask of the down-home poet which Frost wore for much of his career. I'm not going to defend walls to mend, paths not to take or promises to keep. But he wrote a great deal more, and if you want something tough and rewarding, read "Directive" or "A Servant to Servants." Readers who only know the "Best-Loved Poems" Frost might be shocked by the nihilism of "Acquainted With the Night," the suicide musings of "Come In" or the sensuality of "Putting In the Seed." Other favorites from him are "For Once, Then, Something," "The Witch of Coos," "The Ax-Helve," "The Code," and "The Black Cottage."

Poets write about the stars all the time, and in most cases you can tell they don't know anything about them, that they've never spent an hour outside, in winter, lying on cold grass watching the night sky. But Frost knows the constellations of Vermont -- he really knows them. That doesn't surprise the common view of Frost as much as it surprises you to learn that he might have known more Greek and Latin poetry than Ezra Pound. With most great poets, the surprise is in the other direction.

It would shock someone who only knew the easy Frost poetry to read this assessment of him by a sympathetic fellow-poet (Donald Hall) who had observed him well: "He was vain, he could be cruel, he was rivalrous with all other men; but he could also be generous and warm -- when he could satisfy himself that his motives were dubious. He was a man possessed by guilt, by knowledge that he was bad, by the craving for love and the necessity to reject love offered."

In the culmination of her audacious, supercharged "Sexual Personae," Camille Paglia christens Emily Dickinson "a female Sade," and says, "No major figure in literary history has been more misunderstood." It's hard to disagree. Publishers still print gilt-edged gift editions of her poetry, with the text broken up by sentimental clip-art Victoriana -- little birds and hearts and children. And the words and images are ghastly, more horrific than anything Quentin Tarrantino ever dreamed: dismembered flesh, pierced brains, gushing blood and ghoulish fascinations with rotting corpses.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was the sonnet queen, and, in a way, an heir of Dickinson. Like Berlioz was an heir of Beethoven, perhaps, though I'm out of my depth there. Edna was Emily let loose from her upstairs cloister, in the act of becoming modern, free to explore her fine, fractured mind, her welling moods and her janus-lusts. Her sonnets are a little less straight-laced than Dickinson's hymnal quatrains, but then Millay requires less lacing, because she has less to restrain.

Form is important in poetry, and I think the modern tendency to shatter all forms and only accept "free verse" (as though the "free" meant merely "free from form") throws out an awful lot of baby with a precious little bathwater. It's unfortunate that the very idea of form has become associated, in academic literary circles and somewhat in the common mind, with reactionary patriarchy. Take Wordsworth's definition of poetry as "powerful emotion recollected in solitude," or Frost's tighter version, "enthusiasm tamed by metaphor," and you see that form, or at least the awareness of it, is half of what allows poetry to be poetry. It is the magic ritual that allows us to approach the most terrifying aspects of our selves and our lives.

Some poets can safely dispense with it, but only those with a superhuman control of their souls. Whitman could do it because he had an agenda behind his free expression ("Song of Myself" could be called "Advertisement of Myself"), and even he tended to run on too long. Sylvia Plath had her own sense of control, more dangerous, more subtle, and ultimately fatal. Dylan Thomas reserved the strictest forms for his most violent images. Form also allows you to approach important topics that might easily slip into sentimentality. Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy" is one of the most moving things I've ever read: a tightly controlled little sonnet by a father about his child who has died.

Which brings me back to Millay. Not all of her is good, like Wordsworth, but also like him, the best of her verse (which I find in "Fatal Interview") expresses deep passions with a sure hand. Without that control, imposed by the sonnet form, the emotions would have leaked all over the page. The form doesn't stifle the woman's emotion, it concentrates it. Her poetry is not mere weeping, though it may weep. It is not screeching, though at times it must screech.

I'm going to take a stand for Ted Hughes -- go ahead, Sylvia-istas, take your pot-shots. As an American, I find a connection between his earthy, British accented poetry and the Anglo-Saxon rhymes and riddles I've read. He has a wonderful ability to penetrate the minds of the most interesting animals, be it a badger or an American.

On this side of the Atlantic, maybe Richard Wilbur comes closest to his stature. He's a master translator and puts the wildest, darkest, most hallucinogenic scenes of modern America into severe, classical forms, and he also brings a touch of Latin American surrealism to his work. But as our American Ted Hughes, for the juxtaposition of immediate brutality of the family drama, and careful crafting of phrase, I'd nominate Sharon Olds.

Thomas Hardy, better known for his novels, was neglected for generations by poetry lovers. Recently he's been rediscovered. It's Kipling with an edge, and his better work reminds me of the better Frost. George Meredith is another late Victorian poet who deserves to be more widely read. His sonnet cycle, "Modern Love," details the horror of a dead marriage with a frankness that is thoroughly, well, modern.

Once again, the tight lacing of the form allows the power of the content. Poetry shares this with music, and one of my favorite albums is the set of standard ballads that John Coltrane's quartet cut with Johnny Hartman on vocals in 1963. Coltrane was already pushing the boundaries of tonality, and his foursome was forging a style of "hard, unfaltering attack and furiously intense, extended improvisations that bordered on free-jazz." But he deliberately chose Hartman, a smooth-baritone crooner, and came out of the studio with a breathtakingly beautiful set of sides ("Lush Life" may be the most perfect thing ever recorded) that was elegant, respectful, and not a bit sentimental. McCoy Tyner's rich piano fills and the thirteen tenor notes Coltrane blows at the end of "Lush Life" are as thrilling for their restraint as for the intensity beneath it.