What is the greatest opening line in the history of poetry?

[Violet16]

A truly great opening line can do an enormous amount of work in an incredibly small amount of space, setting tone, hooking attention and sometimes even summarising an entire poem's emotional core before the reader has even reached the second line. Some of literature's most enduring opening lines have become genuinely famous in their own right, quoted and referenced far beyond the poems they actually belong to, from the deceptively simple opening of Dante's Inferno describing waking up lost in a dark wood midway through life's journey, to the sweeping, immediate drama of Homer's invocation of the muse at the very start of the Iliad.

More modern examples carry their own kind of punch, T.S. Eliot's famous opening comparing an evening spread out against the sky to a patient etherised upon a table remains one of the most jarring and genuinely unexpected images ever used to open a major poem, immediately signalling to readers that this was going to be a very different kind of poetic experience to what had come before it. Meanwhile Sylvia Plath's opening lines and Allen Ginsberg's explosive beginning to Howl each demonstrate a completely different but equally effective way of grabbing a reader's attention from the very first breath of the poem.

A genuinely great opening line has to earn its reputation across generations of readers rather than simply being memorable for a moment. So which one do you think actually deserves the title of the single greatest opening line in the history of poetry?

[WWFGareth98]

Genuinely think this list is missing something from a completely different tradition or language entirely, English language poetry gets an unfair amount of attention in these discussions compared to equally powerful openings that exist in translation from other literary traditions worldwide.

[David]

Eliot's etherised patient line still stops me cold every time I read it, decades after modernist poetry was supposed to have lost its shock value. That single unexpected medical image completely reframes how you read everything that follows in the poem.

[LAKnight_King]

I think people undersell how much work Homer's opening invocation actually does, immediately establishing scale, stakes and a direct address to the divine before a single actual event of the story has even happened yet.

[BretHart_Core]

Sometimes the simplest possible opening does the most work though. A single striking image or plain declarative statement can hit just as hard as anything more elaborate or metaphorically dense, depending entirely on what the rest of the poem is actually trying to achieve.

[Zidane]

Dante's opening about being lost in a dark wood midway through life's journey has aged incredibly well precisely because it captures something so universally relatable about hitting a genuine crisis point, regardless of the specific century you happen to be reading it in.

[VoidWalker63]

The etherised patient line wins for me specifically because of how completely it subverted expectations for what a poetic opening was even supposed to sound like at the time it was first published. That kind of genuine shock value rarely ages as well as it somehow still has