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Top 10 most quoted lines of poetry in English?

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Photo by  Taylor Ann Wright  on  Unsplash Mark Forsyth ( The Inky Fool )  has analysed Google Search query result data for lines of verse requested online. Here is the Top Ten: 10 .  Tis better to have loved and lost 2,400,000 Tennyson 9. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair 3,080,000 Shelley 8. To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield 3,140,000 Tennyson 7. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams 4,860,000 W.B. Yeats Anthony Hopkins recites He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by W.B Yeats 6. Not with a bang but a whimper 5,280,000 T.S. Eliot 5. And miles to go before I sleep 5,350,000 Robert Frost 4. I wandered lonely as a cloud 8,000,000 Wordsworth 3. The child is father of the man 9,420,000 Wordsworth 2. I am the master of my fate 14,700,000 William Ernest Henley 1. To err is human; to forgive, divine 14,800,000 Alexander Pope Complete Top 50 Commentary English:Fun Facts & FAQ Teaching Pack

What makes Philip Larkin one of the greatest poets in the English language?

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Larkin outside the university library where he worked in Hull.  Larkin was not given to blowing his own trumpet (nor listening to ones played by the 'sour' Miles Davis). He was doggedly self-deprecatory, referring to himself as   “the dude/ Who lets the girl down before/ The hero arrives, the chap/ Who’s yellow and keeps the store.” Since his death, however, Larkin has been increasingly been recognised as the preeminent poet of his generation - heading  a recent Times poll of the best (post-1945) British writers  But what makes for literary greatness. According to Martin Amis there are two key qualifications: memorability and originality. I would add a third: humour. He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she’s there all day, And the money he gets for wasting his life on work She takes as her perk To pay for the kiddies’ clobber and the drier And the electric fire ... From  'Self's the Man' The Whitsun Weddings    Michael Dirda gives