Missy Elliot 50 Cent

There is this guy Eminem. He has created a sense of what is possible.

— Poet and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Seamus Heaney, when asked if there is a figure in pop culture who has aroused interest in poetry

Seamus Heaney’s top hip-hop picks

50 Cent: " One detects, in the clamor of his brawny oratory, the distinct and pleasing odor of the material made ineffable. "

Lil’ Kim: " Like a calf freshly born on the pale fields of Mossbawn, she shimmers with the newness of life, staggers wetly, and speaks to the sky. "

Snoop Dogg: " Verse has found an amiable and challenging companion in the one they call Snizzle. "

Ludacris: " He has journeyed deep into the valleys of language, searching for a more organic phoneticism. For this, all poets owe him a blessing. "

Nelly: " That the young man Nelly is from the Southern states should be apparent, for he still wears the bandage of atrocity on his left cheek. Let us listen, though, to the deeper line. Here, the ornate vernacular of the rural bursts forth — imperial with leisure, pompous, liberated from the stubborn casings of form. His country grammar is uncompromising. "

P. Diddy: " If invention had wings, Diddy would fly. "

DMX: " For me it is quite simple: beneath growling menace, the din of self-proclamation. Beneath this, the authentic mutter of salvaged identity. I must call him a friend of Virgil, a maker of violent chronicles. The scarred heart issues a final, shattering truth — let us say, nullity. "

Outkast: " There are two of them, perhaps more, and in each the seed of improvisation is made bracing and new. "

Da Brat: " How so like the petulant faeries of County Sligo! The vaporous sprites said to haunt the knobbled plains of Derry! Miss Brat enters verse as a shadow upon precious water, rippling, incandescent, a dance between the inexorable and the wished for. "

Missy Elliot: " I listen to her and am lifted. "

Dr. Dre: " I cannot say if he is a doctor or not. This I do not know. But I do recall the shells which fell long ago on the pastures of Wicklow, cleaving the earth in two, and the sound of weapons crackling from the wireless. They are with me still, these songs of ruin. The sprung rhythm recognizes its own. "

Eve: " She is — let this be said — a sort of goddess. I speak here not of the antiquated muck of procreation, the spongy mechanisms of birth, but of the words rising from her throat like steam from rain-soaked humus. "