His writing is best when edited into aphorisms and waved in the air. Otherwise not much of a prose stylist, but he was a very good poet. He could make highly structured meters sound completely natural, and the depth of emotion in his poetry can be stirring. He wrote a fantastic poem about his first wife, who had died in Guomindang custody. An interesting wrinkle is that Mao made it virtually impossible for anybody else to write in the classical style, so he really has no competition

I like most of the poets on ZB's list (Rilke, Auden, Carson, etc), but I don't know much about them, so perhaps I'm just pretentious. I like the no idiot day idea -- it makes my failure to post on that day a blow for civilization and a sign of self-awareness rather than a minor byproduct of personal inertia.