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For poets it’s easy to write to the dead. It seems natural. I haven’t written anything to the dead, although I did the other day spend hours writing memories of my dead mother and father; but I didn’t write to them as I did every week for eight years when at medical school and in…
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I’ve enjoyed the poetry of Paul Durcan ever since I heard him read his poems in the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. He has a distinctive voice, far removed from that of Yeats and yet retaining some of Yeats’ romanticism and lyricism. Humour and unexpectedness are the hallmarks of his poetry. The poem below…
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Shakespeare’s nearly 40 plays are stuffed with magnificent poetry, and thanks goodness that Ted Hughes took the trouble to hack out from the plays individual poems that are as good as (and mostly better than) anything written in English specifically as a poem. A Choice of Shakespeares’s Verse also includes many of his sonnets, which…
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Poets seem to be good at dismissing the poems of others. Philip Larkin disliked the poems of most poets who lived around the same time as him, saying of the lifetime work of one well-known poet that he didn’t write one good poem. Larkin also disparaged his own earlier poems. R S Thomas as well…
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Although I read poetry every morning, this passage of prose from Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians seems more poetic to me than all the poetry I have recently read. The line between poetry and prose has never been clear and is perhaps becoming less clear as many poets abandon formal structures. I think of…
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This is a crucial poem in the history of 20th century English poetry. It’s the poem that led Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) to replace W B Yeats (1865-1939) as Philp Larkin’s (1922-1985) prime poetic influence and serve as midwife to Larkin’s wonderful poems. All three poets are at the top of the rankings of 20th century…
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I find John Keats (1795-1821) an intoxicating poet. Reading his poems is to drink a “beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth.” I studied The Eve of St Agnes at school, find it the sexiest of…
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James Reeves (1909-1978) might be described as a jobbing writer, writing plays, poems, essays, and whatever was called for, and working as an editor and anthologist. His name rings for me a distant bell but no more. The poem below was sent to me by a friend, herself a poet. She read it first when…
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John Lennon was shot dead aged 40 on 8 December 1980 outside the Dakota building in New York City. Although I was 28 at that time, I always feel that it’s the day that I grew old. His death was a huge shock, much more so for me than the death of John Kennedy. People…
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A good way to find new poems is to follow up a quotation. I came across “One night they kissed my soul out in a burning mist” in Aldous Huxley’s After Many a Summer (the title itself a quote from Tennyson), and thanks to the magic of Google I quickly found that the quote came…
A Cairn of Poems 