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Edna St Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was once one of the most popular poets in the US, reading to audiences of thousands. Her poems tell of love, loss, and death, perennial subjects for all poets, but they are perhaps too sentimental for modern taste. They are not too sentimental for me, and I not only read…

By any measure Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was one of the best poets writing in English in the 20th century. But his misogynistic, xenophobic letters published after his death have damaged his reputation. I take the unfashionable view that the art and the artist are separate, and I don’t have a problem with reading great poems…

I came across this poem or song, which I already knew, in Robert Gibbings lyrical and beautiful book “Sweet Thames, Run Softly.” I heard a cuckoo very clearly a couple of weeks ago beside the Thames near Goring on our walk along the Ridgeway, the iron age route across England. I know the poem from…

Poetry is often funny, and because poetry lasts in the way that songs do but prose doesn’t the joke lasts. I read this poem for the first time a few days ago in “The Rattle Bag,” and I must confess that I thought that Adrian Mitchell (1932-2008) was one of the Mersey Poets. I confused…

John Donne (1572-1631) is a great poet of love and sex, perhaps the greatest to have written in English. He’s strong as well on death, recognising, including in this poem, how love/sex and death fit so snugly together. I have struggled with his poems, but that’s the whole point of his poetry: as Katherine Rundell…

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was a fine novelist but an ever finer poet. His true love, I was always feel, was poetry. He wrote novels for income. Some of his greatest poems came paradoxically after the death of his first wife, a woman he increasingly ignored while alive. Guilt, grief, and regret made for great poems.…

“Ithaka” is one of my favourite poems and C P Cavafy (1863- 1933) a favourite poet. Translated poems to be good have usually to be new poems, perhaps very different from the original, but Cavafy’s poems seem to translate easily. I read Ithaka to be death, and I like that Cavafy wants us to keep…

R S Thomas (1913-2000) is a favourite poet of mine.  An Anglican priest, he is thought by some to be the great religious poet of the 20th century writing in English. I’m not religious, but I connect easily with the spirituality in his poems. He is that classic figure, the tortured priest hovering on the…

Yesterday as I walked past Winchester Cathedral I saw people dressed to the nines for a wedding. They, particularly the woman, looked awful, uncomfortable, conspicuous, and doleful. Robert Herrick (1591-1674) bemoans a person being “too precise in every part” and prefers a “sweet disorder in the dress.” I entirely agree, perhaps because I am myself…

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) was a poet acclaimed around the world who seems to have passed out of fashion. She wrote clear, short-lined poems like those below but also more complex mystical poems strongly influenced by nature and the poets Blake, Shelley, and Yeats, whom she admired and studied. She has strong links with Northumberland and…