Fun Fact: The poem also directly lead to Edward Thomas' death as he took it too seriously and decided to enlist in the army https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)#War_servi...
On Easter Monday, 1917, the first day of the Arras Offensive, he paused for a moment to fill his pipe. A shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart; he died without a mark on his body.
http://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/edward-thomas
Thomas was an astonishing thing, an established literary critic who suddenly morphed into a great poet. All his poems were written in the three years before he died, and he kept getting better. The Other is hauntingly good: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239754. WWI famously killed many poets, but I wish Thomas hadn't been one of them. He had pure English in his veins, and I like him better than Frost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Thomas_(poet)#War_servi...
Still poetic in a meta kind of way.
I'm not criticizing your taste, by the way: I think everyone is entitled to look for what they want in art. I'm just interested in what you see here.
For comparison, here are some poems I like:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176996
Then there is the melody of the language and the original way he puts words together that sounds modern and old-fashioned at the same time. And how he can write about nature in a way that brings it to life, which is super rare—most nature writing is boring, and the way Thomas does it seems full of feeling, something that was about to fall out of modern poetry. And then it's just perfectly executed, except I wish he hadn't rhymed "mirth" with "earth".
To me that poem suggests a modernism that was possible but in the end never happened. I like Eliot and Pound, but their virtuosity is altogether different and they are far more detached and alienated. Of course we can't say what Thomas would have been like after WWI, which had a shattering effect on all art.
You're certainly right that we needn't all like the same things. Thanks for sharing those links. I admire the Elizabeth Bishop poem for its construction—it's clever how the middle lines all rhyme—but I'm somehow not convinced she means what she's saying. The Billy Collins poem is beautiful, though. Thanks!
I, for example, enjoy how the poem captivates with its poetic form and how it makes you search for meaning (in its parts and as a whole). I think just the prosody and the process of finding meaning in the poem are enjoyable enough to call it beautiful.
I'm not dang but this is how I feel about The Other.