Hughes presents an uncompromising, Manichean view of nature through shamanic rhythms with as much grit to his language as the stone of his Pennine birthplace, that landscape an ever-present influence.

In Snyder’s poetry the transcendentalism of Zen Buddhism meets Native American practical wisdom, all bound together by Beat attitude and form to create a powerfully humane and environmental vision.

No other poet captures the joyous spirit of affirmation found in Thomas’ work, which manifests not only through his subject matter, but through the unbridled pleasure he takes in words themselves.

There’s a certain sentimentality to Harrison’s poetry, but rather than being cloying it acts as a mark of his profound humanity, something which also manifests in the socialist character of his work.

The most visionary of the Romantics, possessed of a propulsive sense of rhythm and as evinced by ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ the greatest craftsman of narrative poems in English literature.

Frost is a pastoral poet but he proceeds with a bracing directness and clarity which prevents his down-to-earth wisdom ever seeming trite or trivial, revealing instead the primacy of such sentiments.

Despite a hint of intellectualism and wilful opacity, Elliot’s richly symbolic works are endlessly rewarding whilst nobody can doubt the intensity yielded by the crystalline precision of his language.

As befits the author of ‘The White Goddess,’ Graves’ poetic preoccupations are mythological, both Classical and Celtic, but communicated in an unmannered style which emphasises their modern resonance.

Although it’s not read as often as his magnificent novels, Hesse’s poetry deals with similar themes such as spiritual growth, the journey towards individuation and the quest for knowledge through art.

Although Cummings’ poetry appears alienating on the page, his syntactic experiments reveal fresh rhythms with which to articulate his unexpectedly Romantic concerns of love, nature and the individual.

Not only a poet but a philosophical icon, inspiration to such titans as Hegel and Heidegger, with his potent grasp of tragedy and religious experience, Holderlin is the zenith of German Romanticism.

Conservatism prevails throughout Betjeman’s work, yet it is not mere reaction but a rejection of the modernity for its own sake he saw encroaching, a sense of the things which deserve to be preserved.

The most metaphysical of the ‘Metaphysical poets,’ Vaughan espouses a mystical Christianity which is surely heavily influence by the alchemy and hermetic philosophy practised by his brother, Thomas.