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I’ve been reading my way through the collected poems of Kathleen Raine (1908-2003) every other morning for nearly two years. I’ve read all of the several hundred poems at least twice, and as poetry comes from our soul I fee I’ve come close to Raine. Along the way I’ve read a novel about her relationship…

Anybody who thinks poetry “difficult and dull” should read the poems of Ogden Nash (1902-1971). His poems are usually short, easily understood, funny, quirky, and often have unusual rhymes. After a brief career as a teacher and copy writer for an advertising company, Nash made his living through writing and performing. Many of his poems…

Might this be the most beautiful of all love poems? Our daughter had it read at her wedding by a friend, and when she read “they were married next day by the turkey who lives on the hill,” she gave the vicar a sly look.  Edward Lear (1812-1888) was gay and had an unrequited love for…

Poems with their rhythms and rhymes are impossible to translate. Rather they must be recreated by another poet. Some of my favourite poems—for example, Ithaca by C P Cavafy—I can read only in translation. The Iliad, Odyssey, the Aeneid, The Nature of Things, and Dante’s Inferno would all be lost to me without translations. Nor,…

Although I studied “My Last Duchess” for 0-level (in 1968), I’ve never been a great enthusiast for Robert Browning (1812-1889). His complicated syntax makes for difficult reading, but he was a hugely popular poet in Victorian times. I’ve come across “The Statue and the Bust” in “Precipice,” Robert Harris’s novel about the start and early…

So much for memory: I’ve just discovered that I’ve posted this Larkin poem once already-in June. https://acairnofpoems.com/2024/06/13/aubade-by-philip-larkin/ But, hey, it’s such a great poem that I’ll post it again—with some different words at the beginning. Philip Larkin (1922-1985) is undoubtedly one of England’s greatest poets of the past century, and yet he is almost embarrassing,…

Last night I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem “Autumn Journal.” It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines. The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised…

“The Road Not Taken” is the best-known poem by Robert Frost (1874-1963), and we all have a road not taken. “Out, out—”, one of my wife’s favourite poems, is also a great poem. It tells of a dreadful accident, the sort of thing that happens to somebody somewhere every day. The scene is rural Vermont,…

Christoher Marlowe (1564-1593) was a great poet and playwright and could have been a greater rival to Shakespeare had he not been murdered in a brawl in a tavern in Deptford. I recently visited the churchyard off Deptford High Street where he is buried. His poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” is perhaps best…

For me Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson are the two great—and importantly distinctive—American poets. Whitman swaggers, sings, and saunters across all the vastness and plurality of America, while Dickinson sits in a room in Massachusetts and pulls magical spells out of her head. I’ve rolled through pages of Whitman, travelling with him, but I…