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I came cross this poem in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems in the English Language, a marvellous 963-page book that I bought in Garrison Keillor’s bookstore in Saint Paul and return to again and again. The poems are accompanied by Bloom’s thoughts on each poet, and his judgements are often severe. He has “not much…
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Francisco Gomez de Quevedo (1580-1645) was a Spanish nobleman, politician, and poet. He used the style conceptismo, which has been defined as “a brilliant flash of wit expressed in pithy or epigrammatic style.” Conceptismo uses rapid rhythm, directness, simple vocabulary, witty metaphors, and wordplay. Multiple meanings are conveyed concisely. The style can be philosophical, satirical,…
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I had never heard of Elinor Wylie (1895-1928), but I stumbled across her and this poem because she follows on from Ezra Pound in Harold Bloom’s The Best Poems of the English Language, having been born in the same year as Pound. Wylie, who was “obsessed with Shelley,” was a popular Jazz Age poet who…
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At school between 1963 and 1970 I heard a reading from the Bible five days a week in school assembly. Now I rarely hear readings from the Bible, only at weddings and funerals, but I hear phrases from the Bible every day in ordinary speech. There are many Bibles, each of them a political as…
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I’ve just finished reading At the Loch of the Green Corrie by Andrew Greig, and much of the book is a tribute from a young poet to an older poet, Norman MacCaig (1910-1996). MacCaig loved to talk, drink whiskey, smoke, joke, fish, laugh, and be with friends. Greig praises the simplicity, directness, and intensity of…
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Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004), the Polish-American poet, won the Nobel prize for literature in 1980. Growing up in Poland and surviving the German occupation, he later moved to the United States. He wrote mostly in Polish. I have brushed up against his poetry, reading his poems in anthologies, and copying one, Eyes, into my files, but…
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Despite studying his poem My Last Duchess for O-level, Robert Browning (1812-1889) has never been a poet who spoke to me as directly as many other poets, including other Victorian poets. His poems are often tricky and require untangling (a pleasure with Donne’s poems but somehow irritating with Browning’s) but some poems are simple and…
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Anonymous has written many wonderful poems. Indeed, anonymous is possibly our greatest poet. I’m reading my way for the second time through The Rattle Bag, an anthology of poems collected by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes, and anonymous has more poems than anybody else and some of the best poems. Anonymous like Homer is not…
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The first poem in my Cairn of Poems was In Praise of Marriage by Judith Wright (1915-2000). https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/05/28/in-praise-of-marriage/ I spent a year reading through her collected poems, and I must have encountered this short, simple and beautiful poem. But I didn’t remember it when I encountered it again in 100 Poems on the Underground. The…
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I’m reading my way through “Voice at 3:00 am,” a collection of poems by Charles Simic (1938-2023), the fifteenth United States Poet Laureate. The collection was given to me by an American friend. (What better present can there be than a collection of poetry?) Simic’s poems have been called “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes,” and…
A Cairn of Poems 