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These three poems on death by three of the greatest poets in English—William Shakespeare (1564-1616), W B Yeats (1865-1939), and T S Eliot (1888-1965)—are all very familiar to me—and probably to you. If you are reading even one of them for the first time you are in for a treat. I came across the three…
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This famous poem by the German priest Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) came into my mind because of the orgy of hate that is being whipped up in Britain against asylum seekers. I’m currently on a large, well-equipped boat crossing the English Channel. I look in to the cold waves and think how terrifying it must be to cross this…
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Until around a century ago many children died without reaching adulthood. A couple might have seven children and five or even all of them die. It’s still the case in some low-income countries. The death of a child now is a catastrophe, even though children may be more comfortable with death than adults, but we…
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E O Wilson (1929-2021) is an American biologist, the inventor of sociobiology, a lover of ants, and a gifted writer who twice won the Pulitzer Prize and first warned us of the dangers of biodiversity loss. I took the found poem below from The Diversity of Life published in 1992. Wilson in his taxonomic diagnosis is thinking…
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I had never heard of Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) until I read this poem this morning. Indeed, I wrongly assumed that Hayden was a woman. I now know that he was a prolific and successful American poet influenced by jazz and blues, a tenured professor, and poetry editor of Harper’s (a favourite magazine of mine) who lived for…
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I found this poem in Virginia Woolf’s (1882-1941) marvellous essay A Room of One’s Own. Some call it the best essay of the 20th century. Her topic is “women and fiction,” but she wanders widely and wonderfully. Her essay, which is based on a talk she gave at Girton College, Cambridge, is funny and much more enjoyable to…
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I came across this poem in H20 and the Waters of Forgetfulness, a book by Ivan Illich published in 1986. Illich, a former Catholic priest and critic of industrial society, is the intellectual who has had the biggest impact on me. I heard him deliver a condemnation of modern medicine as a medical student in Edinburgh…
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I came across this poem in an anthology called Poems to Make Grown Men Cry. It’s a stupid title, leading the moderately well-known men who have selected the poems to mention tears without either conviction or credibility. Nevertheless, the selection of poems is wide and marvellous with both familiar and new poems, prompting me to order Poems…
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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,…
A Cairn of Poems 