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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…

W H Auden (1907 –1973) wrote some very fine poems, some of my favourites, but he also wrote many impenetrable poems. I’m reading my way through a collection of his poems, and end a lot of them unmoved and without understanding. (“Why,” you might ask, “are you reading them?” I would answer “That’s a good…

This morning I read “Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas, a soaring, hymn-like poem. It’s a beautiful poem best heard read by Thomas himself, Richard Burton, or some other person with a resonant singsong Welsh voice. I’ll share that poem soon, but for now I want to share a different, much less grand poem, a…

I’ve been very tied up with Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), whose life was coterminous with that of my grandmother, who was also called Kathleen. For almost a year I’ve been reading through her collected poems, and I’ve just finished “Remember the Rowan,” a novel about by Kirsten MacQuarrie about Raine’s intense but ultimately destructive love for…

I always imagine William Shakespeare (1564-1616) sat at a desk and writing exquisite poetry at break neck speed with a quill pen. I don’t suppose that it can possibly have been like that, but my image has its origins in his poetry seeming to flow effortlessly in a torrent. As I watch his plays I’m…