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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…
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Once a week I cycle down a road in Stockwell past a house with a blue plaque for Edward Thomas (1878-1917). He’s sometimes known as a war poet—because he was killed at the Battle of Arras—but few of his poems are about war. His best known poem is Adlestrop, a poem about the stillness of…
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I spent some 11 years travelling to and from Bangladesh, came to love the country, and have many Bangladeshi friends. One friend gave me a 1971 copy of “Gitanjali,” a collection of Indian songs by Rabindranath Tagore with an introduction by W B Yeats. I have the thin book in front of me now. Tagore…
A Cairn of Poems 