love
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Shakespeare’s nearly 40 plays are stuffed with magnificent poetry, and thanks goodness that Ted Hughes took the trouble to hack out from the plays individual poems that are as good as (and mostly better than) anything written in English specifically as a poem. A Choice of Shakespeares’s Verse also includes many of his sonnets, which…
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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 