Which Poem(s) or Poet(s) Awakened Your Passion for the Craft?

The first poem I remember was in a fourth grade reader in primary school. Only a few verses and easy to memorize because of the rhyme and meter. After that I don't remember engaging with poetry until about fourteen or fifteen.

I discovered Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a Donald Duck comic of all places.

Donald entered some sort of poetry reciting competition and spouted lines from the Ancient Mariner. That piqued my interest and I ended up in the town library and borrowed the Oxford Book of English Verse. Keats blew me away, so did Blake. Currently, I think my favourite poet would have to be Robert Southwell.

William E. Harlan said:

Me too.

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Cool. Fella Morrisonite

Ken said:

Cool. Fella Morrisonite

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There's a song where Morrison is more talking than singing.
The music stops and he keeps going, "We had shoulders white and smooth as raven's claws."
Then the music comes back in.
I don't know the name of the song or the album but that moment is burned into my head.
I've never really understood much of what his poetry means, I just think it's beautiful.

It was both John Keats and Paul Dunbar that spark my interest as an poet. I felt that poetry was the genre that expressed my ideas the most.

Dream a dream (I think that's the name of it) by Edgar Allen Poe. I love that poem.

Do song lyrics count? If so anything by Ra

Ok and I was just thinking that Sylvia Plath's poetry has really had an influence on me. I'm trying out new things because of her. The two that have directly influenced me to write were "Daddy" and "Metaphors." I just keep discovering how serious she was about her craft. She's inspiring me with her dedication to her work.

William E. Harlan said:

Me too.
Then I forgot about it and did other stuff for a long time.
Then Eminem happened.
Words are too cool.

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Finally gave a listen to Eminem. 8 Miles. Really cool !

What I particularly like about rap tunes in general are real-time references to pop culture.
In 8 Miles, "Salem's Lot," and "Mickaih Fiffer." King novel and an actress I believe.

"Natural Born Killaz" by Dr Dre and Ice Cube is another such.
Lots of intrusive references in those. Manson, Dahmer, etc.

Back to Morrison, his "Unknown Soldier" is pretty straightforward stuff.
Antiwar tune. And very effective at that.

Mekhi Phifer is the actor that played his buddy in the movie 8 Mile.
That song is amazing.

I don't remember the first poem that made me want to write poetry. I was really small and assume it had to be Dr. Seuss or Shel Silverstein. I wrote many bad poems as a kid and read Maya Angelou and Plath in my teens. When I was 24, I was in a book store and opened the book Vice by Ai and it turned to the Poem Abortion. It was like thunder clapped and the earth opened up. It completely changed how I saw poetry and I've been eternally grateful.

I must amend my prior post. My daughter is reading The Outsiders in school, and I now suspect it is what got me to read Frost, my favorite poet. I can still recite Nothing Gold Can Stay from memory. My earliest dated poems are from 1983. l read the book during 8th grade, '82-'83. The film came out in '83 also.

I'm not suggesting that music wasn't also an influence, just that my answer missed a crucial element, perhaps a switch. I could not write music, but I could write words. This says something about memory too. If my daughter weren't reading the novel, I might never have remembered the influence it had. Music's influence is more constant.

I never thought about poetry, I only read novels. It was only when I first read Ezra Pounds "In a Station at the Metro", and was blown away with how much was in this image, that I became intrigued. It seemed endless in my mind. From then on I was obsessed with imagery. The phanopoeia, as Pound would call it, is still what thrills me. My main man however is Tomas Tranströmer. I am still not over him. I've read everything by him over and over again. It has a quality I have never seen in another poet, but maybe only heard in Arvo Pärt's and Henryk Gorecki's music. It's often so tender and both small and gigantic. Tranströmer masters imagery like no other. Pound and Eliot are close, and in many other ways better poets, but as image obsessed as I am this poet's writing is what realy woke me up.

My first book of poems was A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. It was the first book that was read to me, and the first book that I “read” (I had memorized the poems. and knew when to turn the pages.) ‘The Wind,' ‘The Keepsake Mill,’ and ‘Bed In Summer’ are still among my favorite poems (maybe that’s why I often write in rhyme and meter ) I read it to my kids, and gave them copies to read to their kids.

When I was about nine or ten I had a teacher who awakened an interest in English in me. I remember him telling me off for taking my dog to school. He called Patches a cur and told me to look the word cur up in a dictionary when I asked him what he meant.
Luckily he had a couple of pets of his own so I was spared the embarrassment of standing in front of the morning assembly reciting a poem about fishing for crabs by Walter De La Mere. (still haven't found it on the Internet)
A couple years later I narrowly missed becoming a published poet in a book called Theres Rosemary written by school children in Wales to celebrate the investiture of Prince Charles. My teacher at that time told me to submit it but I didn't. Can't remember exactly why I didn't submit my poem at the time but I was far too young to be anti-royalty then. I put it down to my general apathy.
Later I developed a taste for smutty limericks and bad poetry and so here I am today.

p.s. I refer to my own efforts of course...

In elementary school, it was my big brother Ken. In middle school, a huge influence was Steve Martin's Cruel Shoes, and then Poe. I was influenced by Led Zeppelin in high school, which is probably why all of my lines had four iambs. In college, one professor read aloud The Wasteland by Eliot, and I was spellbound. The next year, I discovered Raymond Carver in Poetry 108, and that probablyinfluenced me most of all. The discoveries never end. Though my high school andcollege years, I kept Robert Hayden's Those WinterSundays in mywallet.Lines from Roethke's Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical sat in my wallet until they disintegrated.