It isn’t an exercise that makes much sense to try and rank poets in a sort of hierarchy of greatness. Still, the great poets are easily recognizable – in a moment the minds knows, the heart feels, the spirit senses a quality involving silence and attention. Read it, and at once you know the poetry that will last all your life. Among West Indian poets, I have that sense especially about Derek Walcott and Martin Carter and Lorna Goodison.
I also have that sense of greatness about the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, of course, and Seamus Heaney and lately I’ve been reading again Zbigniew Herbert’s poems, in translation, and have felt the frisson that shivers in one as a real poet goes to work.
Zbigniew Herbert was born in 1924 in Lwow. In his teens he fought in the Polish underground resistance against the Nazis. After the war he studied Economics, Law and Philosophy at the Universities of Krakow and Warsaw. His poetry, for long banned under Communism but increasingly acclaimed as it gradually saw the light of day throughout Europe, resists simple categorization. The most you might say is that he is speaks for the individual conscience.