love
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Although I read poetry every morning, this passage of prose from Saint Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians seems more poetic to me than all the poetry I have recently read. The line between poetry and prose has never been clear and is perhaps becoming less clear as many poets abandon formal structures. I think of…
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This is the third poem I’ve posted by Wendell Berry (1934–), an American poet whom I discovered only this year. I love the directness and earthiness of his poetry. As well as being a poet he is a farmer and an environmental campaigner. He entered my life again when a doctor from Hawaii sent me…
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Love and freedom by Thomas Campbell: an anti-marriage, pro-adultery poem from the early 19th century
I came across the last four lines of this poem in Thomas Hardy’s “Jude the Obscure,” the most anti-marriage novel I know. Or was it in a book about the 150 poems Hardy wrote about his wife, 149 of them after she’d died. It doesn’t matter. Hardy had a very unhappy marriage, and there’s a…
A Cairn of Poems 