My personal fav was Dylan Thomas.

Maya Angelou and Bob Dylan.

I am not so sure who is the best, but I am sure that I like Marie Howe’s poem.
This is my favorite poem from Marie Howe.

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living room windows because the heat's on too high in here, and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss -- we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:

I am living, I remember you.

~ Marie Howe ~
http://www.panhala.net/Archive/What_the_Living_Do.html

http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/readings/images/poets/mhowe.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Howe

William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939) is the great poet of 20th century. He was both poet and playwright. This towering figure in 20th century literature in English won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. He is a master of traditional verse forms and at the same time an idol of the modernist poets who followed him.

Britain’s (WWI) War poets made a huge impression on me as a schoolboy and seem especially poignant now that I am an ex-pat living in the USA. One such poet – who was killed in 1917 – was Edward Thomas who reflected in his poem “October” on the beauties of his beloved English countryside that he would never see again:

The green elm with the one great bough of gold
Lets leaves into the grass slip, one by one, --
The short hill grass, the mushrooms small milk-white,
Harebell and scabious and tormentil,
That blackberry and gorse, in dew and sun,
Bow down to; and the wind travels too light
To shake the fallen birch leaves from the fern;
The gossamers wander at their own will.
At heavier steps than birds' the squirrels scold.
The rich scene has grown fresh again and new
As Spring and to the touch is not more cool
Than it is warm to the gaze; and now I might
As happy be as earth is beautiful,
Were I some other or with earth could turn
In alternation of violet and rose,
Harebell and snowdrop, at their season due,
And gorse that has no time not to be gay.
But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?
Some day I shall think this a happy day,
And this mood by the name of melancholy
Shall no more blackened and obscured be.

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/EXID12879/images/StantonMoor(1).jpg

Thomas was perhaps not as well known as war poets like Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon but his work – I think - compares favorably with their own. Rupert Brooke was, of course, famous for the lines:

“If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England.”

From his poem “The Soldier,” Brooke was killed in France in 1915.

Canadian Army Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918) penned “In Flanders Fields” as a result of the carnage he observed as a surgeon in this “war to end all wars” (See Video).