The title question was raised by Dean Raider on his San Francisco Chronicle blog. His readers responded and they named Pablo Neruda as the number one poet. If you would like to see the full list, you can read it here.
For now, take a moment in this National Month of Poetry to consider the closing lines of Neruda's masterpice "The Heights of Macchu Picchu."
I come to speak for your dead mouths.
Throughout the earth
let dead lips congregate,
out of the depths spin this long night to me
as if I rode at anchor here with you.And tell me everything, tell chain by chain,
and link by link, and step by step;
sharpen the knives you kept hidden away,
thrust them into my breast, into my hands,
like a torrent of sunbursts,
an Amazon of buried jaguars,
and leave me cry: hours, days and years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.
And give me silence, give me water, hope.
Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.
Let bodies cling to me like magnets.
Come quick to my veins and to my mouth.
Speak through my speech and through my blood.
