poetry
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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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This is a crucial poem in the history of 20th century English poetry. It’s the poem that led Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) to replace W B Yeats (1865-1939) as Philp Larkin’s (1922-1985) prime poetic influence and serve as midwife to Larkin’s wonderful poems. All three poets are at the top of the rankings of 20th century…
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I find John Keats (1795-1821) an intoxicating poet. Reading his poems is to drink a “beaker full of the warm South, Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth.” I studied The Eve of St Agnes at school, find it the sexiest of…
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Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), the great Chilean poet, wrote this poem in 1936 as the Spanish Civil War began and Madrid moved from peace to war, from “the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,/wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea” to “the blood of children ran through the streets/without fuss.” Something similar happened in Chile…
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A friend who died a year ago pointed me towards the poetry of Mary Oliver (1935-2019), America’s best-selling poet in 2007. My friend had chosen Oliver poems to be read at her funeral. She recommended me to buy Oliver’s collected poems, but I was put off by the price of the book. But my friend…
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Tennyson’s In Memoriam AHH is to the 19th century what Eliot’s Waste Land was for the 20th century. (We still await the 21st century version.) In Memoriam AHH took Tennyson 17 years to write and is perhaps best thought of as a collection of linked poems rather than a single poem. AHH was Arthur Henry…
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Tithonus was the son of Laomedon, the king of Troy, and the lover of Eos, the goddess of the dawn. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth. Tennyson wrote his poem Tithonus a month or two after the unexpected and sudden death of his 22-year-old friend Arthur Henry Hallam.…
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I’m reading The Man Who Went Into The West, Byron Rogers’s hugely enjoyable and funny biography of R S Thomas, a poet I greatly admire and who seems to me a greater poet than the other great Welsh poet of the 20thcentury, Dylan Thomas. I came across this poem in the biography. RST is the…
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Yesterday I stepped down after six years as the chair of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change. The Alliance brings together 54 organisations of health professionals, including most of the royal colleges, to do what we can to counter the climate and nature crisis. We work to mitigate the crisis, promote adaptation, and explain…
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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…
A Cairn of Poems 