Oddballs, Outcasts & Unknowns: The World's Greatest Poets, Part III
These are some of the world's greatest poets: the oddballs and the unknowns, or under-knowns, the seers and the sages, the rapscallions...
THE WORLD’S GREATEST POETS, PART III: ODDBALLS, OUTCASTS & UNKNOWNS
by Michael R. Burch
Forget security!
Live by the perilous sea.
Destroy your reputation, however glorious.
Become notorious.
—Rumi, translation by Michael R. Burch
Some poets took Rumi’s advice to heart. Do you know the notorious French poet who killed a priest, or the equally notorious English poet who abducted a 15-year-old girl? Or the poet arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa? How about the young French prodigy who gave up writing poetry to become a gunrunner? Or the renowned German poet who kept a friend’s skull on his desk and wrote a poem for the skull? Or the great Chinese poet who, legendarily, got drunk, tried to toast the moon, fell out of his boat, and drowned? Or the great Irish poet who proposed to an old flame, and when she rejected his proposal, proposed to her daughter!
They all appear here.
Major poets were convicted of murder, treason and other crimes. Not all were guilty, but some were…
Part III of “The World’s Greatest Poets” focuses the oddballs and the unknowns, or under-knowns, the seers and the sages, the criminals and the rapscallions...
To see Part I of “The World’s Greatest Poets” please click or tap the hyperlinked title.
If you have seen Part I, or just prefer oddballs, please continue…
Li Bai was a notorious tippler and according to legend he died when he tried to toast the moon, lost his balance, fell out of his boat, and drowned!
François Villon was a French poet and one of poetry’s “bad boys and girls,” along with the heretical William Blake, the rebellious Robert Burns, the scandalous Edna St. Vincent Millay, the poet-turned-gunrunner Arthur Rimbaud and his lover Paul Verlaine, who shot Rimbaud in the wrist and ended up in prison for 18 months, the aptly-named Oscar Wilde, and the notorious Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot.
But Villon may have been the most notorious of them all, and his name is a near rhyme for villain!
Villon was arrested at least four times for crimes that included robbery, street brawling, and killing a priest. In fact, the only historical details of Villon’s life, outside his poems, are records of his crimes and incarcerations.
Villon’s masterpiece, Le Testament, consists of over two thousand verses inspired by the immediate and very real possibility of his being hung. But his death sentence was commuted to banishment from Paris and the villainous Villon was never heard from again.
The second poem below, “The Ballade of Fat Margot,” describes Villon acting as pimp.
Le Testament: Rondeau
by Francois Villon
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Death, I dispute your harshness:
You stole my girl from me!
And yet remain unsatisfied, I see,
Unless I languish in distress.
Since her loss I’ve lost all liveliness:
What harm to you, was she?
Death, I dispute your harshness,
You stole my girl from me,
Who were once one in our blessedness.
Since my heart is dead, I now foresee
That I must die, or live lifelessly
Like those heartless statues of lead.
The Ballade of Fat Margot
by Francois Villon
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Because I love and service Margot gladly,
men think me blind. But I swear I love her madly!
For she has charms to please the finest palate;
to claim her love, I’d storm King Arthur’s palace!
When her courtiers arrive, I fetch a pot
to dispense the wine they guzzle on the spot;
I bring them bread, the finest cheese, and fruit,
and if they tip me well, I cry, “Thanks, Brute,
please come again, next time you’re in rut,
to this old whorehouse where we two hold court.”
From time to time, there’ll be an epic clash,
when Margot comes to bed sans any cash:
Then I can’t stomach her and her foul ways;
I’ll snatch her dress, her petticoats and stays,
and swear, by God, I’ll pawn them for my cut!
Hands on her hips, that little Antichrist slut
Wheezes, howls and swears by the death of Jesus
that I’m the Devil. Then I’ll grab a dirk
and chase her ’round the bedroom, just for sport,
in this old whorehouse where we two hold court.
Ballade des pendus (”Ballade of the hanged men”)
by Francois Villon
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Brothers, who survive us,
Please don’t let your hearts be hardened against us!
Because, if you have pity for us,
Almighty God may have mercy on you.
You see us hanging here, a half-dozen corpses,
Though once as fit and healthy as you,
Now beginning to swell, putrefied.
Our once-solid bones now dangle limply.
But please don’t laugh at our misfortune:
But pray that God absolve us all!
If we call you brothers,
Please don’t disdain us because we were hanged
According to the law. Sometimes, you know,
Men may lack righteousness.
Please excuse us, now that we have passed
Into the bosom of the son of Mary.
Pray that her grace will embrace us,
Preserving us from hell’s infernal flames.
We are dead, why further defame us?
But pray that God absolve us all!
The rain has cleansed and purified us;
The sun has dried us out and withered us;
Crows and magpies have pecked out our eyes;
Ravens have plucked out our eyebrows and beards.
Our endlessly swinging bodies are never at rest;
The variable winds blow us this way and that,
However it pleases them, without ceasing.
Our flesh seems sewn together by bird peckings.
Still, do not abandon us,
But pray that God absolve us all!
Lord Jesus, who had mercy on thieves,
Preserve us from the tyranny of hell!
Let the Devil lay no claim on us!
Brothers, make no mockery here,
But pray that God absolve us all!John Wilmot, the notorious Earl of Rochester, was wicked in real life—he spent time in the Tower after abducting a 15-year-old girl—and was wickedly funny in his best poems. Andrew Marvell called Rochester the best English satirist. Voltaire, a great satirist, admired Rochester’s. The notorious Earl may have written the notorious play Sodom. but he also wrote some excellent love poems. Rochester’s best poems include “A Satire Against Mankind,” “The Disabled Debauchee,” “The Song of a Young Lady to Her Ancient Lover” and “Upon Nothing.”
Lord Byron is the baddest of poetry’s bad boys, along with John Wilmot.
Byron shone most brightly in Don Juan but is best-known today for his love poem “She Walks in Beauty (Like the Night).”
Byron is also notable for his creation of the “Byronic hero” — an antihero modeled on himself.
Byron was accused of “depravity” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Graves, among others. According to Graves, Byron shrouded his “colossal vulgarity” in a “cloak of aloof grandeur.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock, called Byron “a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices” who was furthermore “mad as a hatter.” Ford Madox Ford was also repelled by Byron’s “vulgarity.”
Byron launched attacks on Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats and Southey. Did he refrain from attacking Shelley because they were friends?Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote with a skull on his desk and even wrote a poem for the skull and its former occupant!
After his friend and collaborator Friedrich Schiller’s death in 1805, Goethe kept what he believed to be Schiller’s skull on his desk.
ON LOOKING AT SCHILLER’S SKULL
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Here in this charnel-house full of bleaching bones,
like yesteryear’s
fading souvenirs,
I see the skulls arranged in strange ordered rows. …Dante Gabriel Rossetti had affairs with three early supermodels: Elizabeth Siddal, his wife for two years until her tragic and premature death, Fanny Cornforth, and Jane Burden, the wife of the poet/painter William Morris.
After his first wife, Elizabeth Siddal, had died and been buried, Rossetti had her body exhumed illegally, by the dead of night, to recover a book of poems he had placed in her coffin!Kevin N. Roberts claimed to be the reincarnation of Algernon Charles Swinburne and there were resemblances in their writing styles and themes. Kevin also claimed to be able to speak to angels and kept their messages in a journal. He was the founder and first editor of Romantics Quarterly, and was widely acknowledged to be the best of the New Romantics. Kevin’s best poems, in my opinion, include “Allayne,” “Ophelia” and “Rondel.”
Algernon Charles Swinburne is known for the musicality of his poems. And sometimes for making music at the expense of sense. However, T. S. Eliot affirmed that Swinburne “did something that had not been done before.” What did he do? Swinburne used words to create moods more so than meanings. Eliot again: “Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne.”
One must read Swinburne’s poems and decide for oneself.
Sapphics
by Algernon Charles Swinburne
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and touched me,
Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,
Full of the vision,Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
Saw the reluctantFeet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene;Heard the flying feet of the Loves behind her
Make a sudden thunder upon the waters,
As the thunder flung from the strong unclosing
Wings of a great wind. ….
Sometimes we have to judge poets by how well they do what they attempt, not by what we think they should do. After all, we don’t judge AC/DC for not sounding like Mozart.
Swinburne’s notable poems include “Sapphics,” “August,” “The Garden of Proserpine,” “At Month’s End,” Atalanta in Calydon, “Anactoria,” and his translations of Francois Villon.
Swinburne was influenced primarily by Shelley. But he also admired Baudelaire, Blake, Landor, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Sappho, Whitman, even the Marquis de Sade!
Swinburne had an affair with the next poet in this list, but then almost everyone did…Adah Isaacs Menken was an American ballet dancer, tightrope walker, vaudevillian, painter, lecturer and poet, and the highest-earning actress of her time, the mid-1800s. Her sometimes-scandalous performances earned her international fame, particularly her role in Mazeppa, a drama based on Lord Byron’s poem, in which she wore nude-colored stockings and appeared to be naked.
Menken’s private life was equally scandalous. She wore her hair short, smoked cigarettes and was photographed in her undies. She even wrote free verse! What were shocked Victorians supposed to think?
We all know the first major free verse poet, but does anyone know the second?
While in New York, Menken met Walt Whitman. In 1860 she wrote a review, “Swimming Against the Current,” in which she praised Leaves of Grass, calling Whitman “centuries ahead of his contemporaries.” Menken then updated her own style and became the “first poet and the only woman poet before the twentieth century” to follow Whitman’s free verse lead.
Menken was very popular with the “gay blades” and the two topics on everyone’s minds were the progress of the Civil War and whatever Menken was up to. (Samuel Dickinson)
She had affairs with Bret Harte, Alexandre Dumas père and Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others.
Menken was also an early advocate of women’s rights, including the right not to marry. However, it was a right she failed to exercise five times, adding to her notoriety with each divorce and remarriage. She remarried before one divorce was official, resulting in accusations of bigamy. Her husbands included two musicians, a bare-knuckle boxing champion, a humorist and a gambler.
Her only book, Infelicia, a collection of 31 poems, was published days after her death in 1868. The book went through several editions and remained in print until 1902.
Menken is a vastly underknown, underread and underappreciated poet. I particularly admire her fiery early feminist poem “Judith.”Edna St. Vincent Millay was a very “bad girl” by polite society standards, but an outstanding poet in her best poems.
I like some of her love sonnets better than Shakespeare’s.
“I being born a woman and distressed” may be her best-known sonnet, or maybe “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink.” The villanelle-like “Recurdo” is another personal favorite. However, Millay’s most popular poem today is probably her much-anthologized epigram “First Fig.” In any case, she was an amazing talent and is vastly undervalued.
I have written a (hopefully) amusing and slightly embellished poem about Millay returning from a night of hard drinking and carousing to be confronted by a Vassar don, which you can read here if you care to: Millay Has Her Way with a Vassar Professor.Seneca’s plays could be gore-fests. One wag called him “antiquity’s mashup of Shakespeare and Quentin Tarantino.”
Aphra Behn is the James Bond of poetry. She was a spy in Antwerp, spent time in a debtor’s prison, experienced a slave rebellion in the New World, lived in Surinam for eight years, lost her husband to the plague in 1665, then became the first Englishwoman to make a living by writing. She wrote 14 plays, songs for her plays, erotic poems, and fiction based on her life. Her poems include “Love Armed” and an erotic poem about male impotence, “The Disappointment.”
William Butler Yeats had a thing for a mother … and her daughter!
Yeats’s best love poems were inspired by Maud Gonne, to whom he proposed several times, but who never accepted and eventually married another man.
But when an older, widowed Maude Gonne rejected Yeats’s last proposal of marriage, he then proposed to her daughter, the ravishing Iseult Gonne. Even major poets need backup plans!
Yeats attended séances and claimed to be able to communicate with the spirits of the dead, who provided him with inspiration and philosophical information.
Yeats was a poet of rare ability,verbal agility
and séance susceptibility.
—Michael R. BurchAlexander Pushkin, the great Russian poet, playwright and novelist, died from a pistol shot wound he sustained in a duel while defending his wife’s honor.
I Loved You
by Alexander Pushkin
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I loved you ... perhaps I love you still ...
perhaps for a while such emotions may remain.
But please don’t let my feelings trouble you;
I do not wish to cause you further pain.
I loved you ... thus the hopelessness I knew ...
The jealousy, the diffidence, the pain
resulted in two hearts so wholly true
the gods might grant us leave to love again.
Poetic Trivia: The famous composer Tchaikovsky created three operas based on Pushkin’s works, including Eugene Onegin. Rachmaninoff also created two operas based on works of Pushkin.Arthur Rimbaud was a French prodigy and one of the first great free verse poets. As a teenager he had an affair with the older poet Paul Verlaine that ended when a drunk Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist. Rimbaud was 18 at the time. He would give up poetry around age 20 to become a soldier, deserter, stone quarry foreman and gunrunner. Some say a slave trader but that is disputed.
Ophélie (“Ophelia”), an Excerpt
by Arthur Rimbaud
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
On pitiless black waves unsinking stars abide
… while pale Ophelia, a lethargic lily, drifts by …
Here, tangled in her veils, she floats on the tide …
Far-off, in the woods, we hear the strident bugle’s cry.
For a thousand years, or more, sad Ophelia,
This albescent phantom, has rocked here, to and fro.
For a thousand years, or more, in her gentle folly,
Ophelia has rocked here when the night breezes blow.
For a thousand years, or more, sad Ophelia,
Has passed, an albescent phantom, down this long black river.
For a thousand years, or more, in her sweet madness
Ophelia has made this river shiver.
Le Bateau ivre (“The Drunken Boat”), an Excerpt
by Arthur Rimbaud
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The impassive river carried me downstream
as howling warriors slashed the bargemen’s throats,
then nailed them, naked, to their former posts,
while I observed all idly, in a dream.
What did I care about the slaughtered crew,
the Flemish barley or the English freight?
The river had taught me how to navigate,
but otherwise? It seemed so much “ado.”
Stéphane Mallarmé called Rimbaud a “meteor” for what he accomplished at such a young age, only to vanish.
Paul Valéry opined that “All known literature is written in the language of common sense—except Rimbaud’s.”
Valéry may not have anticipated postmodern poetry.Paul Verlaine was a major French poet who had an affair with the teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud until Verlaine got drunk, shot Rimbaud in the wrist, and ended up in prison for 18 months.
Il pleure dans mon coeur (”It rains in my heart”)
by Paul Verlaine
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
It rains in my heart
As it rains on the town;
Heavy languor and dark
Drenches my heart.
Oh, the sweet-sounding rain
Cleansing pavements and roofs!
For my listless heart’s pain
The pure song of the rain!
Still it rains without reason
In my overcast heart.
Can it be there’s no treason?
That this grief’s without reason?
As my heart floods with pain,
Lacking hatred, or love,
I’ve no way to explain
Such bewildering pain!
Spleen
by Paul Verlaine
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The roses were so very red;
The ivy, impossibly black.
Dear, with a mere a turn of your head,
My despair’s flooded back!
The sky was too gentle, too blue;
The sea, far too windswept and green.
Yet I always imagined—or knew—
I’d again feel your spleen.
Now I’m tired of the glossy waxed holly,
Of the shimmering boxwood too,
Of the meadowland’s endless folly,
When all things, alas, lead to you!Ezra Pound was accused of treason, fascism and antisemitism, and ended up in an asylum for 12 years, in order to evade prison after the Allies won WWII.
Morals aside, Pound is an enigma for me. I love his Kensington Garden poem, a masterpiece. But his life’s work, the Cantos, will be a tough slog for most readers, probably all.
Pound’s more accessible and/or better poems include my favorite, “The Garden,” his haiku-like “In a Station of the Metro,” his loose Li Bai translation “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” the tactless “A Pact” (in which Pound grudgingly admits that Walt Whitman is his poetic father), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Homage to Sextus Propertius and “Planh for the Young English King.”
Pound’s translation of “The Seafarer” is worth reading, although I like to think mine is better.
Pound was accused of antisemitism, fascism and treason for supporting Benito Mussolini and becoming a radio propagandist for the Axis during WWII. After the war Pound spent 12 years in a mental institution, having been found unfit to stand trial. He was released after Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams and others lobbied for his freedom.
Pound was talented,
but balanced that by being unbalanced.
He said, “Make it new.”
Ad-vice he eschewed.
Why not just make it better?—Michael R. Burch
When Amy Lowell took the Imagists in directions Pound didn’t approve, he renamed them the Amygists and said, in effect, “Don’t blame me for the looniness.” But it was too late, and then he, too, went mad, if he wasn’t already.
None of that has prevented other poets from participating in the “no ideas but in things” trainwreck.
One mad hatter to rule them all.
If we don’t trust his economic theories or his racist theories, why does anyone trust Pound’s theories about poetry?
Ezra Pound flitted from Imagism to Vorticism to Fascism, like a nectar-drunk butterfly.Edgar Allan Poe may have died of alcohol poisoning.
Poe’s most famous poems include “The Raven,” “To Helen” (written when Poe was 15 or 16), “Bells,” “Eldorado,” “The City in the Sea,” “Sonnet to Science,” “Israfel,” “Ulalume,” “Alone,” “The Haunted Palace” and “A Dream Within a Dream.”
But my favorite Poe poem is the haunting “Annabel Lee.”
Poe influenced Charles Baudelaire, who translated Poe’s writings into French, and other French Symbolists, including Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Valéry.
Through the French Symbolists, Poe influenced the English Decadents, including Ernest Dowson and Oscar Wilde, and the Modernists, including Yeats, Rilke, Pound and Eliot.E. E. Cummings was arrested for “espionage” during WWII. But the real problem seems to have been that Cummings was a pacifist and had been mocking his superiors.
Cummings was the most whimsical of poets but he also wrote savage satires such as my favorite poem of his, and one of the great anti-war poems, “i sing of Olaf glad and big.”
Poetic Trivia: The world is divided about how to capitalize his name: Is it e. e. cummings or E. E. Cummings?Sappho of Lesbos was an odd bird because she invented an entirely new form of poetry: more feminine (which I mean in the best possible way), more introspective, written in the first person, and glorifying love and sensuality rather than macho heroes, kings and war.
I and others have proposed that Sappho was the first modern poet because she wrote introspectively in the first person about her innermost thoughts, fears and desires.
Sappho was also the first great confessional poet, anticipating poets to come like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.
Donald Davie proposed Walt Whitman as the first confessional poet, but Sappho beat him to the punch by 2,500 years. Now nearly all poets are confessionals, present company excluded except for my juvenilia.
It also bears noting that Sappho wrote the first “make love, not war” poem a mere 2,500 years ahead of her time. The poem has been titled “Some Say,” “Some People Say” and “Helen’s Eidolon.”
“Some Say”
by Sappho
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Warriors on rearing chargers,
columns of infantry,
fleets of warships:
some call these the dark earth’s redeeming visions.
But I say—
the one I desire.
Nor am I unique
because she who so vastly surpassed all other mortals in beauty
—Helen—
seduced by Aphrodite, led astray by desire,
departed for distant Troy,
abandoning her celebrated husband,
deserting her parents and child!
Her story reminds me of Anactoria,
who has also departed,
and whose lively dancing and lovely face
I would rather see than all Lydia’s horsemen, war-chariots
and columns of infantry parading in flashing armor.
Poetic Trivia: Sappho was exiled from Lesbos to Sicily around 600 BC, but no one knows why.Walt Whitman was the first openly gay modern poet, at least in his poems, and the first to write openly about homosexuality, masturbation, etc.
The then-scandalous Leaves of Grass was banned in Boston, widely rejected by public libraries, and burned by John Greenleaf Whittier when he received his copy!
Harold Bloom opined that Shakespeare invented the modern human. I might opine that Walt Whitman invented the modern, more tolerant and freethinking American, except that I fear Uncle Walt is still way ahead of us because we keep backsliding.Emily Dickinson has a reputation as a recluse and spinster, but she wrote marvelous erotic love poems like “Wild Nights” and her suggestive bee poems…
Come slowly—Eden!
Lips unused to thee—
Bashful—sip thy jasmines—
As the fainting bee—
Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—alights—
And is lost in balms!
Emily Dickinson especially admired Emily Brontë’s poem “No coward soul is mine” and Thomas Wentworth Higginson read it at her funeral.
Poetic Trivia: Emily Dickinson became such a recluse that she refused to leave her room. How reclusive? She watched her father’s in-house funeral from behind her cracked bedroom door.Robert Frost was “notoriously jealous and competitive, often belittling other poets” and at a 1930s Bread Loaf Conference he publicly heckled Archibald MacLeish during a reading of his poems, even setting a newspaper on fire to disrupt him!
Thus we know Frost did prefer fire to ice, for destruction, after all.
Poetic Trivia: Robert Frost was nominated 31 times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but never won. A travesty in my opinion and many others.Rainer Maria Rilke wrote poems in which it sounds as if he saw and communicated with angels. Other poets who claimed such experiences include William Blake, Rumi and my friend Kevin N. Roberts, who told me that he kept a journal of what his angels said.
First Elegy
by Ranier Maria Rilke
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!William Blake was the first major antiestablishment poet but he was considered mad. And he was quite the heretic.
Blake’s influences include Emanuel Swedenborg and the King James Bible. However, Blake was not a fan of the biblical god, whom he dubbed NOBODADDY because no one would want him for a father!).
Blake claimed to be able to communicate with angels, but his angels were rebel angels and he believed in free love, among other heresies. I find it amusing and ironic that the heretic who called the biblical god NOBODADDY saw his poem “Jerusalem” become a famous hymn, one of my mother’s favorites. When it was not included in her hymnal, she penned it in, from memory, on the inside cover.Wallace Stevens got in drunken fistfights with Robert Frost and Ernest Hemingway, breaking his hand and getting a black eye in the latter altercation. Don’t mess with Papa!
Percy Bysshe Shelley, known as “Mad Shelley,” was expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing a tract titled The Necessity of Atheism.
Shelley drowned in a boating accident at age 30 with a book of his friend John Keats’s poems in his pocket.Geoffrey Chaucer was captured in war and had to be ransomed, or England would have lost its first major poet.
Chaucer is the fifth most-quoted person in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare, the authors of the Bible, Sir Walter Scott and John Milton.
Merciles Beaute (”Merciless Beauty”)
by Geoffrey Chaucer
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.
Unless your words heal me hastily,
my heart’s wound will remain green;
for your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain.
By all truth, I tell you faithfully
that you are of life and death my queen;
for at my death this truth shall be seen:
your eyes slay me suddenly;
their beauty I cannot sustain,
they wound me so, through my heart keen.Sylvia Plath married the poet Ted Hughes, creating England’s most famous “poetry power couple” since Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But the marriage was troubled and while their divorce was pending Plath committed suicide by sticking her head in an oven with the gas turned on.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
—Sylvia Plath, excerpt from “Poppies in October”William Wordsworth apparently had a mystical experience as a boy that made him feel one with the universe.
Matthew Arnold mentioned Wordsworth’s “healing power” in a poem and, indeed, John Locke was cured of a terrible depression by reading Wordsworth.
My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold
by William Wordsworth
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.Rumi was a mystic who saw angels as a child, like William Blake.
He was later influenced by the Sufi mystic Shams al-Din Tabrizi aka Shams Tabrizi.
Forget security!
Live by the perilous sea.
Destroy your reputation, however glorious.
Become notorious.
—Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Your heart’s candle is ready to be kindled.
Your soul’s void is ready to be filled.
You can feel it, can’t you?
—Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Raise your words, not their volume.
Rain grows flowers, not thunder.
—Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This is love: to fly toward a mysterious sky,
to cause ten thousand veils to fall.
First, to stop clinging to life,
then to step out without feet ...
—Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Let yourself be guided by the strange magnetism of what you really love:
It will not lead you astray.
The lion is most majestic when stalking prey.
—Rumi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. BurchRobert Burns died tragically in poverty with just £1 to his name. But his fortunes improved…
Burns was not “just” the greatest Scottish poet, he was voted the greatest Scot of all time in a radio poll!
Bob Dylan called “A Red, Red Rose” his greatest inspiration as an artist.
William Wordsworth said the only “born” poets he knew were Burns and John Clare.
Poetic Trivia: The title of J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye is an allusion to “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye.”Langston Hughes dropped out of college at Columbia University, due to racism, and worked as a sailor, personal assistant and busboy, before completing his degree at the historically black Lincoln University. The then-famous poet Vachel Lindsay discovered Hughes while he was working a busboy and helped promote his work. His first book, The Weary Blues, was published soon thereafter.
Harlem
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?Du Fu is the first person in the historical record to be identified as diabetic.
The first Du Fu poem, “Moonlit Night,” is addressed to the poet’s wife, who had fled war with their children. Ch’ang-an is ironic because it means “Long-peace.”
Moonlit Night (I)
by Du Fu
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Alone in your bedchamber
you gaze out at the Fu-Chou moon.
Here, so distant, I think of our children,
too young to understand what keeps me away
or to remember Ch’ang-an ...
A perfumed mist, your hair’s damp ringlets!
In the moonlight, your arms’ exquisite jade!
Oh, when can we meet again within your bed’s drawn curtains,
and let the heat dry our tears?
Lone Wild Goose
by Du Fu
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The abandoned goose refuses food and drink;
he cries querulously for his companions.
Who feels kinship for that strange wraith
as he vanishes eerily into the heavens?
You watch the goose as it disappears;
its plaintive calls cut through you.
The indignant crows ignores us both:
the bickering, bantering multitudes.Dylan Thomas was a heavy drinker who may have died from alcohol poisoning, joining Edgar Allan Poe in a not-so-auspicious club.
Dylan Thomas was an amazing talent, and an influential poet. In fact the poetic school called the Movement was largely a reaction against his influence.
Poetic Trivia: It has long been disputed whether Robert Zimmerman derived his stage name Bob Dylan from Thomas’s first name. While the not-always-consistent Zimmerman has denied the connection, one of his early girlfriends confirmed it in an interview.Hart Crane died three months short of his 33rd birthday, by leaping from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico.
Poetic Trivia: Hart Crane’s father, Clarence Arthur Crane, was a candy maker who created Life Savers.John Donne remains highly regarded, paradoxically, for his “holy sonnets” and his erotic love poems.
Donne is also known for his eloquent sermons, some preached as Dean of St. Paul’s, particularly “No Man Is an Island.”
Poetic Trivia: Donne’s most famous sermon inspired the bitter refutation of a young troubadour, Paul Simon, who retorted unhappily: “I am a rock, I am an island.”Catullus was the first great poet to employ “gutter language” and shocking obscenities, but ironically he is best-known today for his love poems to a woman he called Lesbia. Harold Bloom included “Attis” in his texts of the Western Canon, but this is my favorite Catullus poem, by far:
Catullus CI: “His Brother’s Burial”
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Through many lands and over many seas
I have journeyed, brother, to these wretched rites,
to this final acclamation of the dead ...
and to speak — however ineffectually — to your voiceless ashes
now that Fate has wrested you away from me.
Alas, my dear brother, wrenched from my arms so cruelly,
accept these last offerings, these small tributes
blessed by our fathers’ traditions, these small gifts for the dead.
Please accept, by custom, these tokens drenched with a brother’s tears,
and, for all eternity, brother, “Hail and Farewell.”
Poetic Trivia: Catullus’s father was a friend of Julius Caesar.Federico Garcia Lorca was a Spanish poet who died young, the victim of foul play, or who knows what more he might have accomplished?
Canción del jinete (“Song of the Rider” or “The Horseman’s Song”)
by Federico Garcia Lorca
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Cordoba. Distant and lone.
Black pony, big moon,
olives in my saddlebag.
Although my pony knows the way,
I never will reach Cordoba.
High plains, high winds.
Black pony, blood moon.
Death awaits me, watching
from the towers of Cordoba.
Such a long, long way!
Oh my brave pony!
Death awaits me
before I arrive in Cordoba!
Poetic Trivia: As a boy Lorca’s favorite game was pretending to celebrate mass, which he would officiate. Lorca would allow his friends to play along, but on one condition: that the audience must burst into tears during the sermon!Charles Baudelaire created “decadent” poetry, and arguably modern poetry, with his 1857 collection of lyric poems Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”).
Baudelaire also translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe into French, helping to create the French Symbolist movement that in turn greatly influenced English Modernism.
Invitation to the Voyage
by Charles Baudelaire
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My child, my sister,
Consider the rapture
Of living together!
To love at our leisure
Till the end of all pleasure,
Then in climes so alike you, to die!
The misty sunlight
Of these hazy skies
Charms my spirit:
So mysterious
Your treacherous eyes,
Shining through tears.
There, order and restraint redress
Opulence, voluptuousness.
Le Balcon (“The Balcony”)
by Charles Baudelaire
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Paramour of memory, ultimate mistress,
source of all pleasure, my only desire;
how can I forget your ecstatic caresses,
the warmth of your breasts by the roaring fire,
paramour of memory, ultimate mistress?
Each night illumined by the burning coals
we lay together where the rose-fragrance clings—
how soft your breasts, how tender your soul!
Ah, and we said imperishable things,
each night illumined by the burning coals.
How beautiful the sunsets these sultry days,
deep space so profound, beyond life’s brief floods ...
then, when I kissed you, my queen, in a daze,
I thought I breathed the bouquet of your blood
as beautiful as sunsets these sultry days.
Night thickens around us like a wall;
in the deepening darkness our irises meet.
I drink your breath, ah! poisonous yet sweet!,
as with fraternal hands I massage your feet
while night thickens around us like a wall.
I have mastered the sweet but difficult art
of happiness here, with my head in your lap,
finding pure joy in your body, your heart;
because you’re the queen of my present and past
I have mastered love’s sweet but difficult art.
O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Can these be reborn from a gulf we can’t sound
as suns reappear, as if heaven misses
their light when they sink into seas dark, profound?
O vows! O perfumes! O infinite kisses!
Poetic Trivia: On an amusing note, my translations of erotic poems by Baudelaire and Sappho have been used by porn stars and escort services to advertise their (ahem) services!
Apparently the pros appreciate Monsieur Baudelaire.Ono no Komachi was a legendary beauty whose life and tragic demise inspired Japanese playwrights.
Komachi is best-known today for her recurring themes of autumn rains, wilting flowers and passionate dreams, and for her pensive, melancholic and erotic poems…
If fields of autumn flowers
can shed their blossoms, shameless,
why can’t I also frolic here —
as fearless, wild and blameless?
—Ono no Komachi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I had thought to pluck
the flower of forgetfulness
only to find it
already blossoming in his heart.
—Ono no Komachi, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Poetic Trivia: The name Komachi remains a synonym for feminine beauty in Japan.Mahmoud Darwish wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence and was imprisoned for his political activism. His famous poem “Identity Card” got him placed under house arrest. His work was debated in the Israeli Knesset. His love affair with Tamar Ben-Ami, a Jewish woman, was the subject of the film Write Down, I Am an Arab.
Palestine
by Mahmoud Darwish
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
April's blushing advances;
the aroma of bread baking at dawn;
a woman haranguing men;
the poetry of Aeschylus;
love's trembling beginnings,
a kiss on a moss-covered boulder;
mothers who dance to the flute's sighs;
and the invaders' fear of memories.
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
September's rustling end;
a woman leaving forty behind, still full of grace, still blossoming;
sunlight illuminating prison cells;
clouds taking on the shapes of unusual creatures;
the people's applause for those who smile at their erasure,
mocking their assassins;
and the tyrant's fear of songs.
This land gives us
all that makes life worthwhile:
Lady Earth, mother of all beginnings and endings!
In the past she was called Palestine
and tomorrow she will still be called Palestine.
My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life!A. E. Housman was an atheist, a heretic, a homosexual when the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde was on everyone’s mind, and an anti-war poet.
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.
—A. E. Housman
Poetic Trivia: Philip Larkin joked that he was “A. E. Housman without the talent or the scholarship.”T. S. Eliot’s first wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, was committed to a London asylum, but Eliot’s role in the proceedings has been disputed. They were divorced at the time.
Poetic Trivia: The formidable intellectual was nicknamed “Possum” and wrote the children’s poems that became the popular musical Cats. But was he playing possum when he wrote The Waste Land?Wilfred Owen was the greatest of all the war poets and anti-war poets, in my opinion. And he wrote his masterpieces in a brief span of time, before dying tragically one week prior to the armistice that ended WWI. His death, and the fact that his mother received the notification on Armistice Day, highlight the futility and tragedy of war that he exposed, sometimes graphically, in his poems.
His best-known war poem is the masterpiece “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
Dulce Et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Note: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” is from Horace’s Odes and means: “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.”
Wilfred Owen was influenced by his fellow war poets Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whom he met at Craiglockhart Military Hospital where the three poets were suffering from shell shock.
My tribute poem for Wilfred Owen mentions Craiglockhart:
At Wilfred Owen’s Grave
by Michael R. Burch
A week before the Armistice, you died.
They did not keep your heart like Livingstone’s,
then plant your bones near Shakespeare’s. So you lie
between two privates, sacrificed like Christ
to politics, your poetry unknown
except for one brief flurry: thirteen months
with Gaukroger beside you in the trench,
dismembered, as you babbled, as the stench
of gangrene filled your nostrils, till you clenched
your broken heart together and the fist
began to pulse with life, so close to death.
Or was it at Craiglockhart, in the care
of “ergotherapists” that you sensed life
is only in the work, and made despair
a thing that Yeats despised, but also breath,
a mouthful’s merest air, inspired less
than wrested from you, and which we confess
we only vaguely breathe: the troubled air
that even Sassoon failed to share, because
a man in pieces is not healed by gauze,
and breath’s transparent, unless we believe
the words are true despite their lack of weight
and float to us like chlorine—scalding eyes,
and lungs, and hearts. Your words revealed the fate
of boys who retched up life here, gagged on lies.
Poetic Trivia: Wilfred Owen’s first volume of poems was published after his death, by Dame Edith Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon.Thomas Hardy gave up writing novels to write poetry, after harsh criticism of his last novel, Jude the Obscure.
Poetic Trivia: Thomas Hardy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 11 times, but never won.Sir Thomas Wyatt spent time in the Tower of London for his alleged affair with Anne Boleyn and may have written “Whoso List to Hunt” about the dangers of her pursuit.
Poetic Trivia: Wyatt’s poems were originally published in Tottel’s Miscellany, the first English poetry anthology, in 1557. Unfortunately, Tottel tried to “improve” Wyatt’s meter by making it more regular. That was like a flat-earther trying to “improve” Einstein’s theories. Before Shakespeare was Bowdlerized, Wyatt was Totteled.Charles d’Orleans spent time in the Tower as a prisoner of war being held for ransom by the British.
He has been called the "Father of French lyric poetry" and has also been credited with writing the first Valentine's Day poem while under lock and key.
Oft in My Thought
by Charles d'Orleans
translation/interpretation/modernization by Michael R. Burch
So often in my busy mind I sought,
Around the advent of the fledgling year,
For something pretty that I really ought
To give my lady dear;
But that sweet thought's been wrested from me, clear,
Since death, alas, has sealed her under clay
And robbed the world of all that's precious here―
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
For me to keep my manner and my thought
Acceptable, as suits my age's hour?
While proving that I never once forgot
Her worth? It tests my power!
I serve her now with masses and with prayer;
For it would be a shame for me to stray
Far from my faith, when my time's drawing near—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Now earthly profits fail, since all is lost
And the cost of everything became so dear;
Therefore, O Lord, who rules the higher host,
Take my good deeds, as many as there are,
And crown her, Lord, above in your bright sphere,
As heaven's truest maid! And may I say:
Most good, most fair, most likely to bring cheer—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
When I praise her, or hear her praises raised,
I recall how recently she brought me pleasure;
Then my heart floods like an overflowing bay
And makes me wish to dress for my own bier—
God keep her soul, I can no better say.
Poetic Trivia: Charles d’Orleans appears as the Duke of Orleans in Shakespeare’s historical play Henry V.Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who called himself Walt Whitman’s twin. He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, excerpt from “Spring and Fall”Pindar wrote odes to athletes who were victorious in the ancient Olympics and was apparently paid for his compositions by the victors, their families, or other patrons.
Ovid was exiled by Emperor Augustus for his poem Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love” or “Seduction”) and he died in exile, never returning home despite pleas, and leaving his best work unfinished.
Ovid is widely considered to be one of the three “most major” Latin poets, along with Virgil and Horace.
“The Amores” Book I, Elegy II: Darted!
by Ovid
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Why can I say except that my mattress feels hard to me
and that my sheets and clothes keep tumbling to the floor
through these long, sleepless, endlessly tossing nights?
Why do my weary bones ache?
Why is my restless body wracked with pain?
But if I was being assailed by desire, surely I’d know it!
Certainly, Cupid’s crept in and wounded me with some secret art.
That’s it: a sliverous dart has found and lodged fast in my heart,
where cruel Love now commands my conquered breast.Hafez aka Hafiz was a Sufi mystic, like Rumi, and Sufi mystics believe in free love, a no-no to the fundamentalists.
Infectious!
Hafez
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I became infected with happiness tonight
as I wandered idly, singing in the starlight.
Now I’m wonderfully contagious—
so kiss me!
Dispensing Keys
by Hafez
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The imbecile
constructs cages
for everyone he knows,
while the sage
(who has to duck his head
whenever the moon glows)
keeps dispensing keys
all night long
to the beautiful, rowdy,
prison gang.
Goethe allegedly said, “O Hafez, my wish is to be one of your disciples!”
Poetic Trivia: Hafez was born Khwāja Šamsu d-Dīn Muḥammad Hāfez-e Šīrāzī. He earned the title “Hafez,” which means “memorizer,” for memorizing the entire Quran.Wang Wei was captured by rebels during the An Lushan rebellion (755-763). After the rebels were defeated, he was accused of collaborating with them and tried for treason. However, poems he had written in captivity were used to confirm his innocence.
"Lu Zhai" ("Deer Park")
by Wang Wei
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Uninhabited hills ...
except that now and again the silence is broken
by something like the sound of distant voices
as the sun's sinking rays illuminate lichens ...
"Lovesickness"
by Wang Wei
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Those bright red berries you have in the South,
the luscious ones that emerge each spring:
go gather them, bring them home by the bucketful,
they’re as tempting as my desire for you!
The Ormosia (a red bean called the “love pea”) is a symbol of lovesickness.
Farewell (I)
by Wang Wei
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Where the mountain began its ascent,
we stopped to bid each other farewell...
Now here dusk descends as I shut my wooden gate.
Come spring, the grass will once again turn green,
but will you also return, my friend?Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva were friends and fellow Russian poets who opposed the Soviet government that oppressed them and their fellow poets for speaking their minds.
Poems about Moscow
by Marina Tsvetaeva
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
5
Above the city Saint Peter once remanded to hell
now rolls the delirious thunder of the bells.
As the thundering high tide eventually reverses,
so, too, the woman who once bore your curses.
To you, O Great Peter, and you, O Great Tsar, I kneel!
And yet the bells above me continually peal.
And while they keep ringing out of the pure blue sky,
Moscow’s eminence is something I can’t deny ...
though sixteen hundred churches, nearby and afar,
all gaily laugh at the hubris of the Tsars.
The Guest
by Anna Akhmatova
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Everything’s the same: a driving snow
Hammers the dining room windows.
Meanwhile, I remain my usual self.
But a man came to me.
I asked him, “What do you want?”
“To be with you in hell.”
I laughed: “It’s plain you intend
To see us both damned!”
But he lifted his elegant hand
to lightly caress the flowers.
“Tell me how they kiss you,
Tell me how you kiss.”
His eyes, observing me blankly,
Never moved from my ring,
Nor did a muscle move
In his implacable face.
We both know his delight
is my unnerving knowledge
that he is indifferent to me,
that I can refuse him nothing.
THE MUSE
by Anna Akhmatova
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
My being hangs by a thread tonight
as I await a Muse no human pen can command.
The desires of my heart—youth, liberty, glory—
now depend on the Maid with the flute in her hand.
Look! Now she arrives; she flings back her veil;
I meet her grave eyes—calm, implacable, pitiless.
“Temptress, confess!
Are you the one who gave Dante hell?”
She answers, “Yes.”
The evening light is broad and yellow
by Anna Akhmatova
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The evening light is broad and yellow;
it glides in on an April rain.
You arrived years late,
yet I’m glad you came.
Please sit down here, beside me,
receive me with welcoming eyes.
Here is my blue notebook
with my childhood poems inside.
Forgive me if I lived in sorrow,
spent too little time rejoicing in the sun.
Forgive, forgive, me, if I mistook
others for you, when you were the One.
I have also translated this tribute poem written by Marina Tsvetaeva for Anna Akhmatova:
Excerpt from “Poems for Akhmatova”
by Marina Tsvetaeva
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You outshine everything, even the sun
at its zenith. The stars are yours!
If only I could sweep like the wind
through some unbarred door,
gratefully, to where you are ...
to hesitantly stammer, suddenly shy,
lowering my eyes before you, my lovely mistress,
petulant, chastened, overcome by tears,
as a child sobs to receive forgiveness ...
I Know The Truth
by Marina Tsvetaeva
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I know the truth—abandon lesser truths!
There’s no need for anyone living to struggle!
See? Evening falls, night quickly descends!
So why the useless disputes, generals, poets, lovers?
The wind is calming now; the earth is bathed in dew;
the stars’ infernos will soon freeze in the heavens.
And soon we’ll sleep together, under the earth,
we who never gave each other a moment’s rest above it.Edmund Spenser took part in the English occupation and subjection of Ireland, where Sir Walter Ralegh was one of his warlike neighbors.
Spenser is a major poet who has been deleted entirely by many modern anthologists. But even if his longer poems are too long and/or seem dated, the three lyric poems I mention below all deserve inclusion, especially because there was nothing like them when Spenser wrote them and because they still read wonderfully well today.
Spenser is best-known for his epic poem The Faire Queene and The Shepheardes Calendar. The latter has been called called “the first work of the English literary Renaissance.” But Spenser was also an exceptional lyric poet who created a version of the English sonnet called the Spenserian sonnet, with the best-known being “One Day I Wrote Her Name upon the Strand.” He also wrote other lovely lyrics such as “Epithalamion” and “Prothalamion.”
Spenser was called the “Prince of Poets” in his day and has been called the “poets’ poet” in ours. He has also been called the “first and most perfect representative of humanism in English poetry.” Spenser is notable for being the first English poet to write verse that was “fluid, limpid, translucent and graceful.” He was arguably the first great English Romantic poet and the creator of a Spenserian tradition that includes Milton, Blake, Burns, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Swinburne, Tennyson, Longfellow, Hardy, et al.
Harold Bloom identified a Romantic tradition that began with Spenser and flowed through Milton, to the High Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats), then to Tennyson, Robert Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence and Hart Crane.
Bloom called Eliot a “secret Romantic” but I would counter “not so secret” in Prufrock. To the best of the Romantic tradition I would add Thomas Gray, Thomas Chatterton, Robert Burns, Dylan Thomas and Kevin N. Roberts.
Spenser’s influence on Burns is undeniable in “Afton Water.”
When he died, Edmund Spenser was buried next to Chaucer at Westminster Abbey. Before his death Spenser was “widely recognized as the most important living English poet.”John Milton has been dropping in terms of his poems appearing in modern anthologies and according to LitHub is now tied for 28th place with poets I don’t consider major, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Andrew Marvell and Claude McKay. However, Milton may be hampered by the length of his best poems, with both anthologists and readers.
Milton remains most famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost but wrote other notable long poems in Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes and the pastoral elegy Lycidas. His great masque Comus was produced by Henry Lawes, the leading English composer and songwriter of his day.
Milton also wrote the prose Areopagitica, which has been cited as one of the most compelling arguments for freedom of the press, but Milton has also been accused of censorship and supporting the autocratic Cromwell government by being its chief propagandist. Politics and poets do make strange bedfellows.
England was a fenbefore Milton
and vaster
thereafter.
—Michael R. Burch
In his preface to Paradise Lost the aging, blind Milton claimed that he would “justify the ways of God to man,” but William Blake said Milton was of the Devil’s party and didn’t know it. Paradise Lost “positively bristles with learning” (Michael Schmidt) but Milton ended up making Satan and Eve romantic heroes for the ages, while making Jehovah seem like an amoral tyrannical despot. Which, according to the Bible, he was.
Poetic Trivia: Milton is the fourth most-quoted person in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, after Shakespeare, the authors of the Bible, and Sir Walter Scott.Dante Alighieri is not a personal favorite of mine, either for his infatuation with hell or his verse. By reputation, Dante is elite, among the top four poets of all time, but I don’t see it myself. Perhaps in the original Italian. An enigma for me among the great poets.
Dante is famous for his Divine Comedy, which consists of the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, and for the lyric poems of La Vita Nuova (“The New Life.”)
Midway through my life’s journey
I awoke to find myself lost in a trackless wood,
for I had strayed far from the straight path.
—Dante, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
INSCRIPTION ON THE GATE OF HELL
Before me nothing existed, to fear.
Eternal I am, and eternal I endure.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
—Dante, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Please feel free to correct me in the comments if you disagree about Dante or any other poet or poets. But please don’t tell me that I haven’t read Dante. Hell, I have translated 24 of Dante’s poems and epigrams, including excepts from the Divine Comedy. You can find my Dante translations here if you care to investigate: Dante Translations by Michael R. Burch.Enheduanna (circa 2285 BC) is the first poet we know by name, and she wrote the first anti-war poem over 4,000 years ago!
Enheduanna was also the first anthologist, the first creator of a hymnal, and probably the first librarian as well.
And she was almost certainly the first feminist, as she revamped the Sumerian pantheon to put her goddess, Inanna, in charge of all the demoted male gods!
Lament to the Spirit of War
by Enheduanna
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You hack down everything you see, War God!
Rising on fearsome wings
you rush to destroy our land:
raging like thunderstorms,
howling like hurricanes,
screaming like tempests,
thundering, raging, ranting, drumming,
whiplashing whirlwinds!
Men falter at your approaching footsteps.
Tortured dirges scream on your lyre of despair.
Like a fiery Salamander you poison the land:
growling over the earth like thunder,
vegetation collapsing before you,
blood gushing down mountainsides.
Spirit of hatred, greed and vengeance!
Dominatrix of heaven and earth!
Your ferocious fire consumes our land.
Whipping your stallion
with furious commands,
you impose our fates.
You triumph over all human rites and prayers.
Who can explain your tirade,
why you carry on so?
Poetic Trivia: Enheduanna was a high priestess who revamped the Sumerian pantheon to put her goddess, Inanna, in charge of all the male gods!Fukuda Chiyo-ni, also known as Kaga no Chiyo, was a wonderful female haikuist who has long been a personal favorite of mine.
She renounced the world to become a nun.
Because morning glories
hold my well-bucket hostage
I go begging for water
―Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Ah butterfly,
what dreams do you ply
with your beautiful wings?
―Fukuda Chiyo-ni, translation/interpretation by Michael R. BurchTzŭ-Yeh was a courtesan of the Jin dynasty era (c. 400 BC) also known as Lady Night or Lady Midnight. Her poems were pinyin ("midnight songs"). Tzŭ-Yeh was apparently a "sing-song" girl, perhaps similar to a geisha trained to entertain men with music and poetry. She has also been called a "wine shop girl" and even a professional concubine!
Will I ever hike up my dress for you again?
Will my pillow ever caress your arresting face?
―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Night descends ...
I let my silken hair spill down my shoulders as I part my thighs over my lover.
Tell me, is there any part of me not worthy of being loved?
―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I will wear my robe loose, not bothering with a belt;
I will stand with my unpainted face at the reckless window;
If my petticoat insists on fluttering about, shamelessly,
I'll blame it on the unruly wind!
―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
When he returns to my embrace,
I’ll make him feel what no one has ever felt before:
Me absorbing him like water
Poured into a wet clay jar.
―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I could not sleep with the full moon haunting my bed!
I thought I heard―here, there, everywhere―
disembodied voices calling my name!
Helplessly I cried "Yes!" to the phantom air!
―Tzu Yeh, translation/interpretation by Michael R. BurchErnest Dowson was a sensitive, troubled soul who is one of my favorite unknown or under-known poets, and I consider him a major poet for his best poems. I particularly admire his Cynara poem “Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae” in which Dowson coined the phrases “gone with the wind” and “the night is thine.” I also admire “Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat inchohare longam” in which Dowson coined the phrase “the days of wine and roses.” Another Dowson favorite is “A Last Word.”
Dowson was a rather obvious influence on T. S. Eliot in “The Hollow Men” and The Waste Land.John Clare spent years in an asylum and was one of the great nature poets. He tells us that the world is sometimes beautiful, often ugly, and always sad.
Clare was influenced by Robert Burns, Lord Byron and James Thomson. Influenced so much that Clare, who spent considerable time in insane asylums, at times imagined himself to be Burns and Byron, and even revised some of the latter’s poems!
My favorite Clare poems include “The Badger,” “The Skylark,” “I found a ball of grass among the hay,” “The Fallen Elm,” “A Vision” and “I Am.”
Clare’s poetry was admired by Harold Bloom, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney, Thomas De Quincy and Edward Thomas, among others.
Bloom called Clare “frequently a major poet, an eminence obscured by the proximity of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.” I would add Robert Burns, another major poet who was considered a “peasant poet” and is far better known than Clare today.
Heaney opined that “Clare is a sponsor and a forerunner of modern poetry in post-colonial nation languages.”
Edward Thomas praised Clare’s “lowly fidelity” and his love “not only of the wild, but of the waste places.”Fadwa Tuqan, the Grande Dame of Palestinian letters, is also known as "the Poet of Palestine." She is generally considered to be one of the very best contemporary Arab poets. The sister of the poet Ibrahim Tuqan, she was born in Nablus in 1917. She began writing in traditional forms, but became one of the pioneers of Arabic free verse. Her work often deals with feminine explorations of love and social protest, particularly of Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
The eye-patched Israeli general Moshe Dayan famously said that reading a Fadwa Tuqan poem was like facing 20 enemy fighters.
Enough for Me
by Fadwa Tuqan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Enough for me to lie in the earth,
to be buried in her,
to sink meltingly into her fecund soil, to vanish ...
only to spring forth like a flower
brightening the play of my countrymen's children.
Enough for me to remain
in my native soil's embrace,
to be as close as a handful of dirt,
a sprig of grass,
a wildflower.
Existence
by Fadwa Tuqan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
In my solitary life, I was a lost question;
in the encompassing darkness,
my answer lay concealed.You were a bright new star
revealed by fate,
radiating light from the fathomless darkness.The other stars rotated around you
—once, twice —
until I perceived
your unique radiance.Then the bleak blackness broke
and in the twin tremors
of our entwined hands
I had found my missing answer.Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant!
Don't you remember the coalescence
Of our spirits in the flames?
Of my universe with yours?
Of the two poets?
Despite our great distance,
Existence unites us.
Nothing Remains
by Fadwa Tuqan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Tonight, we’re together,
but tomorrow you'll be hidden from me again,
thanks to life’s cruelty.The seas will separate us ...
Oh!—Oh!—If I could only see you!
But I'll never know ...
where your steps led you,
which routes you took,
or to what unknown destinations
your feet were compelled.You will depart and the thief of hearts,
the denier of beauty,
will rob us of all that's dear to us,
will steal our happiness,
leaving our hands empty.Tomorrow at dawn you'll vanish like a phantom,
dissipating into a delicate mist
dissolving quickly in the summer sun.Your scent—your scent!—contains the essence of life,
filling my heart
as the earth absorbs the lifegiving rain.I will miss you like the fragrance of trees
when you leave tomorrow,
and nothing remains.Just as everything beautiful and all that's dear to us
is lost—lost!—when nothing remains.
Labor Pains
by Fadwa Tuqan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Tonight the wind wafts pollen through ruined fields and homes.
The earth shivers with love, with the agony of giving birth,
while the Invader spreads stories of submission and surrender.
O, Arab Aurora!
Tell the Usurper: childbirth’s a force beyond his ken
because a mother’s wracked body reveals a rent that inaugurates life,
a crack through which light dawns in an instant
as the blood’s rose blooms in the wound.
Poetic Trivia: There is nothing trivial about Fadwa Tuqan or her work. Read it, imagine being in her shoes, and think.Miklós Radnóti was the greatest of the Holocaust poets, in my opinion, and therefore foremost among the outcasts. The postcard poems below were written on what became his death march, as Nazi soldiers herded Jewish concentration camp prisoners away from the advancing Russian armies.
Postcard 1
by Miklós Radnóti
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
glowing within my conscience—incandescent, intense.
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever:
still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle hiding in the heart of a rotting tree.
Postcard 2
by Miklós Radnóti
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A few miles away they’re incinerating
the haystacks and the houses,
while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
the shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
Now, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
sets the silver water a-ripple
while, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
seem to swim like drifting clouds.
Postcard 3
by Miklós Radnóti
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
The oxen dribble bloody spittle;
the men pass blood in their piss.
Our stinking regiment halts, a horde of perspiring savages,
adding our aroma to death’s repulsive stench.
Postcard 4
by Miklós Radnóti
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
I toppled beside him — his body already taut,
tight as a string just before it snaps,
shot in the back of the head.
“This is how you’ll end too; just lie quietly here,”
I whispered to myself, patience blossoming from dread.
“Der springt noch auf,” the voice above me jeered;
I could only dimly hear
through the congealing blood slowly sealing my ear.
“Postcard 4” was Radnóti’s final poem, written October 31, 1944 near Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary. “Der springt noch auf” means something like “That one is still twitching.”Robert Lowell spent time in an asylum and was the first of the modern confessional poets.
Lowell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet best-known for his poetry collections Lord Weary’s Castle and Life Studies. My favorite Lowell poems include “For the Union Dead,” “The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket” and “Skunk Hour.”Marcus Valerius Martial, better known simply as Martial, was an ancient Roman poet famous for his acidic wit and scathing epigrams. But Martial was also capable of tenderness, especially in his touching elegy for the little slave girl Erotion.
Epitaph for the Child Erotion
by Marcus Valerius Martial
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Lie lightly on her, grass and dew ...
So little weight she placed on you.
Epigrams
You ask me why I’ve sent you no new verses?
There might be reverses.
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You ask me to recite my poems to you?
I know how you’ll “recite” them, if I do.
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You ask me why I choose to live elsewhere?
You’re not there.
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You ask me why I love fresh country air?
You’re not befouling it, mon frère.
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You never wrote a poem,
yet criticize mine?
Stop abusing me or write something fine
of your own!
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
There’s no need to brag
when outstripping some inglorious nag.
—Martial, translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Martial influenced Juvenal, Lord Byron, Ben Jonson, A. E. Housman, Thomas More, Alexander Pope and Oscar Wilde, among others.
I must admit that I’m partial
to Martial.
—Michael R. BurchRobert Herrick had a bewitching way with words and something of a lingerie fetish for a vicar: “erring lace,” “tempestuous petticoat,” “the liquefaction of her clothes,” etc.
Upon Julia’s Clothes
by Robert Herrick
Whenas in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
The liquefaction of her clothes.
Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free,
Oh, how that glittering taketh me!
Delight in Disorder
by Robert Herrick
A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness:
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction—
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher—
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly—
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat—
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility—
Do more bewitch me than when art
Is too precise in every part.
Another: Upon a Child
by Robert Herrick
Here a pretty baby lies
Sung asleep with lullabies:
Pray be silent, and not stir
Th’ easy earth that covers her.Samuel Taylor Coleridge became addicted to opium and is remembered as a poet primarily for “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished dream poem “Kubla Khan” whose composition was interrupted by the infamous “person from Porlock.”
“Christabel” is another notable but unfinished poem. William Hazlitt opined of Coleridge that “There is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested.”
Other notable poems by Coleridge include “Dejection: An Ode,” “Frost at Midnight,” “This Lime Tree Bower My Prison” and “The Aeolian Harp.”
Coleridge is considered to be one of the “Big Six” poets of English Romanticism, along with William Blake, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his close friend William Wordsworth.Archibald MacLeish is ironically best-known for a poem he would come to deny. In “Ars Poetic” he goofily and wrongly said that a poem “should not mean / but be.” That was in his youth, in 1926. But when confronted with Hitler, the Nazis and WWII, which resulted in his brother’s death, MacLeish became all about meaning in poems like “The Silent Slain” and “Memorial Rain.”
Poetic Non-Trivia: Archibald MacLeish was involved in the drafting of two important UN documents related to human rights, although his contribution is often overlooked. Those document are the preamble to the United Nations Charter (UNC) and the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).Abu ‘L’ Ala Ahmad ibn ‘Abdallah al-Ma’arri, commonly known as al-Ma’arri, was a blind Arabic seer who was arguably the greatest antinatalist (anti-procreation) poet to ever pick up a pen or quill.
Antinatalist Shyari Couplets by Abul Ala Al-Ma’arri
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Lighten your tread:
The ground beneath your feet is composed of the dead.Walk slowly here and always take great pains
Not to trample some departed saint’s remains.And happiest of all is the hermit with no hand
in making sons, who dies a childless man.
Bittersight
by Michael R. Burchfor Abu al-Ala Al-Ma’arri
To be plagued with sight
in the Land of the Blind,
—to know birth is death
and that Death is kind—
is to be flogged like Eve
(stripped, sentenced and fined)
because evil is “good”
as some “god” has defined.
Notable antinatalist poets include al-Ma’arri (many), William Blake (“Infant Sorrow”), Heinrich Heine, Homer, Philip Larkin (“This Be The Verse”), Lucian, Tom Merrill (“Branding Breeders” and many others), Plato, Sappho, Seneca and Sophocles.Robinson Jeffers was an American poet who esteemed animals more than his fellow human beings, perhaps with good cause as we continue to destroy our planet and its inhabitants. I especially admire the prophetic poem Jeffers wrote for his sons, “Shine Perishing Republic,” the poem he wrote for his wife, “For Una,” and his best nature poems such as “Hurt Hawks” and “Birds and Fishes.” Other Jeffers poems popular with anthologists include “Boats in Fog” and “The Purse-Seine.”
Jeffers began learning Greek when he was five and later translated Euripides’ Medea “magnificently.” (Schmidt)Adrienne Rich was an activist poet most famous for her much-anthologized poem, and one of the better extended metaphors in the English language, “Diving into the Wreck.”
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail…Oscar Wilde did hard time in Reading Gaol for the “crime” of being homosexual.
Wilde was an Irish poet, playwright, novelist, journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, fop and wit. Perhaps in reverse order, though.
Wilde the poet wrote a masterpiece, “Requiescat,” but didn’t have the output of the greatest poets, perhaps because he spent so much time writing plays, prose and witty epigrams. Many consider the Divine Oscar Wilde to be the world’s greatest epigrammatist, along with Martial and Mark Twain. As I do.
Nod to the Masterby Michael R. Burch
for the Divine Oscar Wilde
If every witty thing that’s said were true,Oscar Wilde, the world would worship You!
Wilde’s best-known poem is his “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” but “Requiescat” is his devastating masterpiece. He wrote “Requiescat” for the sister he lost when she died at age ten, when he was twelve. Other notable Wilde poems include “Les Ballons,” “Helas!” (“Alas!”), “The Sphinx,” “Ravenna” and “Symphony in Yellow.” The poet considered “Charmides” his “most finished and perfect” poem.
what was Wilde reading
in reading gaol?
was the reading Wild(e)?
—michael r. burch
Wilde’s major works include the novella The Picture of Dorian Gray, his autobiography De Profundis, the plays The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, A Woman of No Importance, Lady Windermere’s Fan and Salome, his best-known poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” and Intentions, a book of criticism.
The composer Harold Vincent Jervis-Read set a number of Wilde’s poems to music.
Wilde was a leading figure of the Aesthetic Movement, perhaps the leading figure. One might propose that Wilde lived the Movement’s motto: “Art for the sake of art.”
Poetic Trivia: Oscar Wilde self-published his first book of poetry in 1881, joining other luminaries like William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walt Whitman.Paul Celan was a Holocaust poet whose best-known poem is “Todesfuge.”
Paul Celan was the pseudonym of Paul Antschel. (Celan is an anagram of Ancel, the Romanian form of his surname.) Celan was born in Czernovitz, Romania in 1920. The son of German-speaking Jews, Celan spoke German, Romanian, Russian, French and understood Yiddish. During the Holocaust, his parents were deported and eventually died in Nazi labor camps; Celan spent eighteen months in a Nazi concentration camp before escaping.
Todesfuge (”Death Fugue”)
by Paul Celan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Black milk of daybreak, we drink it come morning;
we drink it come midday; we drink it, come night;
we drink it and drink it.
We are digging a grave like a hole in the sky; there’s sufficient room to lie there.
The man of the house plays with vipers; he writes
in the Teutonic darkness, “Your golden hair Margarete …”
He writes poems by the stars, whistles hounds to stand by,
whistles Jews to dig graves, where together they’ll lie.
He commands us to strike up bright tunes for the dance!
Black milk of daybreak, we drink you each morning;
we drink you at midday; we drink you at night;
we drink you and drink you.
The man of the house plays with serpents, he writes …
he writes when the night falls, “Your golden hair Margarete …
Your ashen hair Shulamith …”
We are digging dark graves where there’s more room, on high.
His screams, “You dig there!” and “Hey you, dance and sing!”
He grabs his black nightstick, his eyes pallid blue,
cries, “Hey you, dig more deeply! You others, keep dancing!”
Black milk of daybreak, we drink you each morning;
we drink you at midday, we drink you at night;
we drink you and drink you.
The man of the house writes, “Your golden hair Margarete …
Your ashen hair Shulamith.” He toys with our lives.
He screams, “Play for me! Death’s a master of Germany!”
His screams, “Stroke dark strings, soon like black smoke you’ll rise
to a grave in the clouds; there’s sufficient room for Jews there!”
Black milk of daybreak, we drink you at midnight;
we drink you at noon; Death’s the master of Germany!
We drink you come evening; we drink you and drink you …
a master of Deutschland, with eyes deathly blue.
With bullets of lead our pale master will murder you!
He writes when the night falls, “Your golden hair Margarete …”
He unleashes his hounds, grants us graves in the skies.
He plays with his serpents; he’s a master of Germany …
your golden hair Margarete …
your ashen hair Shulamith.
O, Little Root of a Dream
by Paul Celan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
O, little root of a dream
you enmire me here;
I’m undermined by blood —
no longer seen,
enslaved by death.
Touch the curve of my face,
that there may yet be an earthly language of ardor,
that someone else’s eyes
may see yet see me,
though I’m blind,
here where you
deny me voice.
You Were My Death
by Paul Celan
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You were my death;
I could hold you
when everything abandoned me —
even breath.Taras Shevchenko is widely held to be the foremost Ukrainian poet.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814-1861) was also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (”The Bard”). The foremost Ukrainian poet of the 19th century, Shevchenko was also a playwright, writer, artist, illustrator, folklorist and political figure. He is considered to be the father of modern Ukrainian literature and, to some degree, of the modern Ukrainian language. Shevchenko was also an outspoken champion of Ukrainian independence and a major figure in Ukraine’s national revival. In 1847 he was convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, for writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and for ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. He would spend 12 years under some form of imprisonment or military conscription.
Dear God!
by Taras Shevchenko
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Dear God, disaster again!
Life was once calm … serene …
But as soon as we began to break the chains
Of bondage that enslaved us …
The whip cracked! The serfs’ blood flew!
Now, like ravenous wolves fighting over a bone,
The Imperial thugs are at each other’s throats again.Mikhail Lermontov was a Russian poet, writer and painter known as “the poet of the Caucasus.”
Lermontov died in a duel at age 26, or who knows what else he might have accomplished.
Lermontov’s lyricism was greatly admired by Anton Chekhov who said, “I know no better language than that of Lermontov.”Bertolt Brecht was a German poet and playwright who fled Nazi Germany along with Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and many other German intellectuals. So he was writing the poems below from bitter real-life experience.
The Burning of the Books
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
When the Regime
commanded the unlawful books to be burned,
teams of dull oxen hauled huge cartloads to the bonfires.
Then a banished writer, one of the best,
scanning the list of excommunicated texts,
became enraged — he’d been excluded!
He rushed to his desk, full of contemptuous wrath,
to write fiery letters to the incompetents in power —
Burn me! he wrote with his blazing pen —
Haven’t I always reported the truth?
Now here you are, treating me like a liar!
Burn me!
Parting
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
We embrace;
my fingers trace
rich cloth
while yours encounter only moth-
eaten fabric.
A quick hug:
you were invited to the gay soiree
while the minions of the “law” relentlessly pursue me.
We talk about the weather
and our eternal friendship’s magic.
Anything else would be too bitter,
too tragic.
The Mask of Evil
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
A Japanese carving hangs on my wall —
the mask of an ancient demon, limned with golden lacquer.
Not altogether unsympathetically, I observe
the bulging veins of its forehead, noting
the grotesque effort it takes to be evil.
Radio Poem
by Bertolt Brecht
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You, little box, held tightly
to me,
escaping,
so that your delicate tubes do not break;
carried from house to house, from ship to train,
so that my enemies may continue communicating with me
on land and at sea
and even in my bed, to my pain;
the last thing I hear at night, the first when I awake,
recounting their many conquests and my litany of cares,
promise me not to go silent all of a sudden,
unawares.
Brecht is best-known today for writing the lyrics to “Mack the Knife.”Ben Jonson was convicted of murder in 1598 after killing the actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel, but escaped execution by pleading “benefit of clergy” (by proving he could read) and was branded on the thumb. He later also faced accusations for the seditious content of his plays, leading to imprisonment and torture.
Jonson was an English poet and playwright who was friends with William Shakespeare.
I especially admire the lovely “Song: To Celia” (“Drink to me only with thine eyes”) and the touching elegies “On My First Son” and “On My First Daughter.”
Michael Schmidt called Jonson the “most versatile writer in the history of English poetry. After all, he wrote plays, epistles, elegies, epigrams, epitaphs, songs, poems, masques, country house poems, translations (including Horace’s Ars Poetica), etc.Georg Trakl was an Austrian poet who wrote poems in German. He died young, of a cocaine overdose at age 27, or he would be much better known today, I’m sure.
To the boy Elis
by Georg Trakl
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
Elis, when the blackbird cries from the black forest,
it announces your downfall.
Your lips sip the rock-spring’s blue coolness.
Your brow sweats blood
recalling ancient myths
and dark interpretations of birds’ flight.
Yet you enter the night with soft footfalls;
the ripe purple grapes hang suspended
as you wave your arms more beautifully in the blueness.
A thornbush crackles;
where now are your moonlike eyes?
How long, oh Elis, have you been dead?
A monk dips waxed fingers
into your body’s hyacinth;
Our silence is a black abyss
from which sometimes a docile animal emerges
slowly lowering its heavy lids.
A black dew drips from your temples:
the lost gold of vanished stars.
I believe that in the second stanza the blood on Elis’s forehead may be a reference to the apprehensive bloody sweat of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. If my interpretation is correct, Elis hears the blackbird’s cries, anticipates the danger represented by a harbinger of death, but elects to continue rather than turn back. From what I have been able to gather, the color blue had a special significance for Georg Trakl: it symbolized longing and perhaps a longing for death. The colors blue, purple and black may represent a progression toward death in the poem.Boris Pasternak was an accomplished Russian poet, novelist, composer and translator. Pasternak is best-known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago, which became a blockbuster movie. When Pasternak was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, he was forced to decline it by Soviet authorities, who had banned Doctor Zhivago.
Sir Walter Ralegh aka Sir Walter Raleigh was executed for treason, perhaps on trumped-up charges.
Ralegh is best-known today for “Even Such Is Time,” his nymph’s reply to Christopher Marlowe’s passionate shepherd, and the poems of The Ocean to Cynthia.
But my favorite Ralegh poem, by far, is “The Lie.”
Go, soul, the body’s guest,Upon a thankless errand;
Fear not to touch the best;
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Go, since I needs must die,
And give the world the lie.
Say to the court, it glowsAnd shines like rotten wood;
Say to the church, it shows
What’s good, and doth no good.
If church and court reply,
Then give them both the lie…
This is another personal favorite:
The sun may set and rise;
But we, contrariwise,
Sleep after our short light
One everlasting night.
Ralegh was held in high regard as a poet. Edmund Spenser called him “the summer’s Nightingale” with a capital “N.”
Ralegh was more a man of action than most poets and has been credited with introducing both the potato and tobacco to the Old World, from the New.
Ralegh was, at one time, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, to whom he dedicated, The Ocean to Cynthia, comparing her to the moon and himself to tides compelled to rise in her wake. Rather naughty, no?
Ralegh, a very busy man, was knighted in 1584, made the captain of the royal guard in 1587, sent to the Tower of London for two months in 1592 after impregnating the queen’s maid of honor and marrying her secretly without the queen’s knowledge, released to seek the fabled gold of El Dorado in 1595, sent to the Tower a second time in 1603 (this time by James I, for 13 years during which Ralegh wrote his History of the World), then released unpardoned in 1617 to seek El Dorado a second time, and finally beheaded in 1618 on charges of treason.Edward Thomas committed suicide at age 39 after writing poetry seriously for only around three years.
Thomas wrote his best poem, “Adlestrop,” while traveling by train to meet Robert Frost. The two became friends and Frost wrote his famous poem “The Road Not Taken” for Thomas.
Frost also recommended that Thomas take up writing poetry, which he did, starting at the late age of 36. Because he committed suicide three years later, that makes his accomplishments as a poet all the more impressive.
Edward Thomas’s notable poems include “Adlestrop,” “Rain,” “October,” “Liberty,” “Interval,” “Old Man,” “The Watcher,” “The Glory,” “The Thrush,” “The Owl” and “The Gallows.”Allen Ginsberg was the best-known of the Beat poets, but perhaps as much for his helter-skelter lifestyle as his poetry. Ginsberg is most famous for “Howl” and his poem about a mysterious encounter with Walt Whitman, “A Supermarket in California.” Other frequently anthologized poems include “America” and “To Aunt Rose.”
D. H. Lawrence wrote the magnificent “Piano” but is better-known for “Snake” and “Bavarian Gentians,” and even better-known for his racy-for-the-time novels such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Women in Love, The Rainbow and Sons and Lovers.
F. R. Leavis, a hard critic to please, considered Lawrence a major poet.H.D. aka Hilda Doolittle fell under the influence of Ezra Pound, whom she met in college, then followed to England, where she became Pound’s “crucial Imagist.” Or add an exotic “e” and change her name to “H.D. Imagiste” as Pound did. According to Michael Schmidt, she “never quite worked herself free of that early marketing ploy.”
Pound courted H.D. but she married the poet-novelist Richard Aldington instead. Later, she had an affair with D. H. Lawrence, then a baby by the composer Cecil Gray.
She had a nervous breakdown, was treated via extensive psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud himself, then later wrote and published her account of the sessions. Freud must have been a very good listener, as everything memorable was said by the patient!Christopher Marlowe aka Kit Marlowe may have been assassinated for being a heretic, a spy, or both.
Marlowe ranks highest as a playwright, for plays like Tamburlaine (the first English play written in blank verse); Dido, Queen of Carthage; The Jew of Malta and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
Was this the fact that launched a thousand ships
and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
—Christopher Marlowe, excerpt from Faustus
Marlowe was admired by his peers. George Peele called him “Marley, the Muses’ darling.” Ben Jonson praised “Marlowe’s mighty line.” Shakespeare paid tribute to Marlowe in As You Like It. Michael Drayton said his “raptures were / all air and fire.”
Marlowe’s best-known poems are Hero and Leander and “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love.”
If Marlowe had not died young, he might have rivaled Shakespeare, he was that talented.Anne Reeve Aldrich died young, at age 26, or she would undoubtedly be much better known. She was writing poems by age 15 and was published by age 17. My favorite poem of hers is “Servitude”:
Servitude
by Anne Reeve Aldrich
The church was dim at vespers.
My eyes were on the Rood.
But yet I felt thee near me,
In every drop of blood.In helpless, trembling bondage
My soul’s weight lies on thee,
O call me not at dead of night,
Lest I should come to thee!
Agony
by Anne Reeve Aldrich
I love to feel a bitter throe
Rise to its fullest height,
Then watch a conquering anodyne
Softly assert its might…
A Little Parable
by Anne Reeve Aldrich
I made the cross myself whose weight
Was later laid on me.
This thought is torture as I toil
Up life’s steep Calvary.
To think mine own hands drove the nails!
I sang a merry song,
And chose the heaviest wood I had
To build it firm and strong.
If I had guessed—if I had dreamed
Its weight was meant for me,
I should have made a lighter cross
To bear up Calvary!
“Passion and agony, the one because of the other, are the keys of Anne Reeve Aldrich’s nature and verse. This woman is of the few who nearest share the moods of Sappho and her talents.”—Springfield Republican, circa 1892, as quoted in The Book Buyer, volume X, no. 3, April, 1893
I think Aldrich’s best poems, rare flashes of emotional insight, compare with those of Sappho, Erinna, Emily Dickinson and Christina Rossetti.
“Since Mrs. [Elizabeth Barrett] Browning has died, no sweeter spirit has breathed its life into verse than that of Anne Reeve Aldrich.” — The Atlanta Constitution,Thomas Chatterton committed suicide at age 17, or he might have been another Shelley or Keats, both of whom admired his teenage poems.
William Wordsworth called Chatterton the “marvellous boy” in “Resolution and Independence.” John Keats dedicated Endymion to Chatterton’s memory and called him “the purest writer in the English language.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s first important poem was “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” and he revised it over the course of 30 years, making it one of his last finished poems. Coleridge said Wordsworth could name only two “born” poets: Chatterton and Burns. Thomas Warton called Chatterton a “prodigy of genius” and said he “would have proved the first of English poets” if he had lived to maturity.
Song from Ælla: Under the Willow Tree, or, Minstrel’s Song
by Thomas Chatterton, age 17 or younger
modernization/translation by Michael R. Burch
MYNSTRELLES SONGE // MINSTREL’S SONG
O! synge untoe mie roundelaie[1], // O! sing unto my roundelay,
O! droppe the brynie teare wythe mee, // O! drop the briny tear with me,
Daunce ne moe atte hallie daie[2], // Dance no more at holy-day,
Lycke a reynynge ryver bee; // Like a running river be:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys death-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe[3] tree. // All under the willow tree.
[1] roundelay = a poem/song with a refrain
[2] holidays were originally “holy days”
[3] a “weeping” willow suggests sorrow
Blacke hys cryne[1] as the wyntere nyghte, // Black his crown as the winter night,
Whyte hys rode[2] as the sommer snowe, // White his skin as the summer snow,
Rodde hys face as the mornynge lyghte, // Red his face as the morning light,
Cale he lyes ynne the grave belowe; // Cold he lies in the grave below:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
[1] cryne = crown
[2] rode = complexion, cross (as in “rood”)
Swote hys tyngue as the throstles note, // Sweet his tongue as the throstle’s note,
Quycke ynn daunce as thoughte canne bee, // Quick in dance as thought can be,
Defte hys taboure[1], codgelle stote, // Deft his tabor, cudgel stout,
O! hee lyes bie the wyllowe tree: // O! he lies by the willow tree:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
[1] tabor = portable drum
Harke! the ravenne flappes hys wynge, // Hark! the raven flaps his wing
In the briered delle belowe; // In the briar’d dell below;
Harke! the dethe-owle loude dothe synge, // Hark! the death-owl loudly sings
To the nyghte-mares as heie goe; // To the nightmares, as they go:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
See! the whyte moone sheenes onne hie; // See! the white moon shines on high;
Whyterre ys mie true loves shroude; // Whiter is my true love’s shroud:
Whyterre yanne the mornynge skie, // Whiter than the morning sky,
Whyterre yanne the evenynge cloude: // Whiter than the evening cloud:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow-tree.
Heere, uponne mie true loves grave, // Here upon my true love’s grave
Schalle the baren fleurs be layde. // Shall the barren flowers be laid.
Nee one hallie Seyncte to save // Not one holy saint to save
Al the celness[1] of a mayde. // All the coolness of a maid:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
[1] celness = coolness?, coldness?
Wythe mie hondes I’lle dente[1] the brieres // With my hands I’ll frame the briars
Rounde his hallie corse to gre[2], // Round his holy corpse to grow;
Ouphante fairie[2], lyghte youre fyres, // Elf and fairy, light your fires,
Heere mie boddie stylle schalle bee. // Here my body, stilled, shall go:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
[1] dente = fasten, gird, frame
[2] gre = grow
[3] ouph = elf
Comme, wythe acorne-coppe & thorne, // Come, with acorn-cup and thorn,
Drayne mie hartys blodde awaie; // Drain my heart’s red blood away;
Lyfe & all yttes goode I scorne, // Life and all its good I scorn,
Daunce bie nete, or feaste by daie. // Dance by night, or feast by day:
Mie love ys dedde, // My love is dead,
Gon to hys deathe-bedde, // Gone to his death-bed
Al under the wyllowe tree. // All under the willow tree.
Waterre wytches, crownede wythe reytes[1] // Water witches, crowned with plaits,
Bere mee to yer leathalle tyde. // Bear me to your lethal tide.
I die; I comme; mie true love waytes. // I die; I come; my true love waits.
Thos the damselle spake, and dyed. // Thus the damsel spoke, and died.
[1] reytes = reeds, water-flags
The song above is, in my opinion, competitive with Shakespeare’s songs in his plays, and may be the best of Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems. It seems rather obvious that this song was written in modern English, then “backdated.” One wonders whether Chatterton wrote it in response to Shakespeare’s “Under the Greenwood Tree.” The greenwood tree or evergreen is a symbol of immortality. The “weeping willow” is a symbol of sorrow, and the greatest human sorrow is that of mortality and the separations caused by death. If Chatterton wrote his song as a refutation of Shakespeare’s, I think he did a damn good job. But it’s a splendid song in its own right.
Thomas Chatterton influenced the Romantics — particularly Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Wordsworth — and through them the Modernists.Christopher Smart spent time in a mental asylum.
Smart was a prodigy who began writing poetry at age four.
Perhaps too smart for his own good? (Please pardon the terrible, too obvious pun.)
Donald Davie has suggested that Smart was the “greatest English poet between Pope and Wordsworth.” I would go further back, to Milton, and added Thomas Gray.James Weldon Johnson was a poet, songwriter, man of letters, diplomat and civil rights leader. In 1895 he founded the Daily American, the first Black-oriented daily newspaper in the United States. He later inaugurated the “Harlem Renaissance” or “Black Renaissance” with his 1917 publication of Fifty Years and Other Poems.
The executive secretary and de facto head of the NAACP for a decade, Johnson is best-known today for writing the lyrics of the Civil Rights anthem “Lift Every Voice and Sing” which his brother Rosamond Johnson set to music.
His other notable poems include “O Black and Unknown Bards,” “Mother Night,” “The Creation,” “Go Down, Death,” “My City,” “Beauty That Is Never Old,” “Fifty Years” and “Brothers.”Rudyard Kipling has been accused of being a white supremacist, a jingoist and an imperialist.
I like Kipling’s dialect poems like “Danny Deever” and “Tommy” but don’t care for his “white man’s burden” nonsense, imperialism or jingoism.
Nor do I care for Kipling’s most famous poem, “If,” which might have been written by Polonius.
“Recessional” is another Kipling poem with a dubious theme.
Kipling with his compulsion to tell readers what to think and do, reminds me of Dryden and Pope.
Kipling doesn’t suggest or persuade; he tells.
T. S. Eliot correctly observed that Kipling’s popular poems elicit a single response, the way hymns and prayers do.
Don’t think for yourself, just chant the “monkey-see, monkey-do” mantra.
Kipling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, but more for his prose than his poetry, one suspects.Emily Brontë ranks higher as a novelist, for Wuthering Heights. Her sisters Charlotte Brontë and Ann Brontë were also poets. As girls they published a book together, using male pseudonyms: Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. If they thought that bit of subterfuge would improves sales, they were wrong, as the book sold two copies the first year, leading them to become novelists.
All three sisters were influenced by Byron and the not-so-ideal idea of the Byronic hero.George Meredith married the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock and after his divorce moved into “a perfectly mad household” with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, until being “rescued by his happy second marriage.”
Primo Levi was a Jewish-Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor, poet and writer. Levi is best-known for his books If This Is a Man, If Not Now, When? and The Periodic Table.
Shema
by Primo Levi
translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
You who live secure
in your comfortable houses,
who return each evening to find
warm food,
welcoming faces …
consider whether this is a man:
who toils in the mud,
who knows no peace,
who fights for crusts of bread,
who dies at another man’s whim,
at his “yes” or his “no.”
Consider whether this is a woman:
bereft of hair,
of a recognizable name
because she lacks the strength to remember,
her eyes as void
and her womb as frigid
as a frog’s in winter.
Consider that such horrors have been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them in your hearts
when you lounge in your house,
when you walk outside,
when you go to bed,
when you rise.
Repeat them to your children,
or may your house crumble
and disease render you helpless
so that even your offspring avert their faces from you.Anne Sexton committed suicide, following her friend Sylvia Plath in self-elimination.
Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was beheaded at the Tower of London, ostensibly for treason, but possibly for being too popular a knight for his king’s taste.
Henry Howard’s best-known poems include “Wyatt Resteth Here,” “The Soote Season” and “Love, That Doth Reign and Live within My Thought.”John Skelton was the creator of a helter-skelter, irreverent, rude-and-crude style of English poetry called “Skeltonics” and a courtier who tutored the young Henry VIII.
Despite being a cleric, Skelton was something of an incorrigible rascal in both his personal life and verse. Alexander Pope called him “beastly Skelton” and John Milton deemed him the “vicar of hell,” borrowing the phrase from Henry VIII, who had said it in jest.
John Skelton is best-known today for his helter-skelter “Skeltonics” in poems like Collyn Clout, The Bowge of Court, Phyllyp Sparowe and Speke Parrot.William Langland may have been the first English reformer poet, anticipating William Blake. Langland exposed corruption in church, state and English society.
Isaac Rosenberg was the first major Jewish voice to emerge in the English language. And his was a unique voice. Siegfried Sassoon called Rosenberg “scriptural and sculptural.”
Rosenberg died young fighting in WWI and is remembered as a war poet. And a very forthright, sometimes graphic one, in poems like “God,” “The Jew,” “Louse Hunting,” “Dead Man’s Dump,” “Through these pale cold days” and his best-known poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches.”Richard Lovelace was a Cavalier poet who was arrested for leading a group of men to seize and destroy a petition for the abolition of Episcopal rule in England. He was sent to prison where he wrote “To Althea, from Prison.”
Sir John Suckling was a Cavalier poet and a member of the “Tribe of Ben.” His best-known poems are “Song: Why so pale and wan, fond love?” and “Out upon it! I have loved / Three whole days together.”
George Chapman is notable for the strangeness of his verse, “as though Thomas Lovell Beddoes had an ancestor in the sixteenth century,” and for his ability to write enormously-long-but-still-readable sentences, anticipating Milton.
Voltaire was in trouble with the authorities for most of his life, but kept out-foxing them. Voltaire is better-known for other things, and ranks much higher for other things, but he was an accomplished poet.
Siegfried Sassoon wrote the heretical “They” and the even-more-heretical “Christ and the Soldier.” The latter is a story poem about a solider who meets Jesus Christ on the battlefield and gets no help, no comfort and no answers:
“O God,” he groaned, “why was I ever born?” …
The battle boomed, and no reply came back.Ivor Gurney was one of the better war poets. He thankfully managed to survive WWI but spent most of his post-war years in psychiatric hospitals after being poisoned with mustard gas. His notable poems include “To His Love,” the Hopkins-like “Pain” and “Old Dreams,” the latter with the devastating lines:
The high hills have a bitterness
Now they are not known
And memory is poor enough consolation
For the soul hopeless gone.Charlotte Smith is one of the better neglected English female poets. Indeed, she is “the first substantial” woman writer after Mary Sidney. (Schmidt)
Her major poem is Beachy Head.
Her Elegiac Sonnets contributed to the revival of the then-neglected form in England.
“She has done more and done better than other women writers.” (Robert Southey)Anne Finch pondered the situation of the female poet and found it lacking in poems like “The Introduction” and “The Answer’ (her witty feminist response to Alexander Pope’s Impromptu). William Wordsworth admired her poem “A Nocturnal Reverie,” as I do. Her poem “To Death” is well-argued and has a powerful ending. I deem her one of the best early English female poets.
Rupert Brooke is one of the most famous war poets. His best-known poem, “The Soldier,” begins “If I should die…”
And he did die, in 1915, during WWI.
Other popular Rupert Brooke poems include “The Hill,” “Peace,” “The Treasure” and his personal favorite, “The Dead.”Henry David Thoreau was a nonconformist who is much better-known as a philosopher than as a poet. His most famous prose works are the essay “Civil Disobedience” and the book Walden. Thoreau’s notable poems include the fine “Smoke” (“Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird”) and “Sic Vita” aka “I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied.”
James Merrill’s best-known work and masterpiece is his Ouija-board-inspired epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover, in which channeled spirits often answered questions YES NO. Merrill won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1977 for another book of occult poems, Divine Comedies.
Randall Jarrell died after being hit by a car, but some people who knew him thought it was suicide.
Jarrell worked as a control tower operator during World War II, an experience that influenced and provided material for his poetry, including his most famous poem:The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall JarrellFrom my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.Audre Lorde was a self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.” Her best-known poems include “From the House of Yemanjá,“ Hanging Fire,” “Power” and “Coal.”
Phillis Wheatley Peters was a slave and the first African-American poet to be published.
And despite being enslaved, Phillis Wheatley was one of the best-known poets of pre-19th century America.
Captured and sold into slavery at age seven, the precocious Wheatley learned to read and write, studied the Greek and Latin classics, and had her first poem published in 1767 at age 13.
Her most-anthologized poem is “On Being Brought from Africa to America” and it reprimands American Christians for treating their darker-skinned brothers and sisters far less graciously than God in Heaven:
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.
In one of her more notable poems “Niobe in Distress for Her Children Slain by Apollo, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book VI, and from a view of the Painting of Mr. Richard Wilson,” she translated Ovid.
Other notable Wheatley poems included the finely-wrought “A Hymn to the Evening,” “To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” “On Imagination” and “On Virtue.”
Abolitionists used Wheatley’s achievements to demonstrate that Africans were capable of living as free people.Sarojini Naidu was a political activist, feminist, poet, and the first Indian woman to be president of the Indian National Congress.
Gandhi called her “the Nightingale of India.”Plato famously damned poets, but wrote poetry in his youth. However it’s not clear how many poems and epigrams attributed him were actually his work.
Mariner, do not question whose tomb this may be,
But go with good fortune: I wish you a kinder sea.
—Michael R. Burch, after Plato
I’m the Apple your eager lover sent.
Accept me soon, before our youth is spent.
—attributed to Plato, translation/interpretation by Michael R. BurchOsip Mandelstam was tortured then sent to a corrective labor camp where he died, after writing poems critical of Joseph Stalin.
Digby Mackworth Dolben died young, of drowning, or he would surely be better-known today.
Thomas Lovell Beddoes was the son of a physician who discovered laughing gas and administered it to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Beddoes wrote odd, strange, sometimes ghoulish poems. Ezra Pound dubbed him the “prince of the morticians.” Harold Bloom called him “a unique poet, far superior to Poe as a reviver of Gothic morbidities.”
After his death Beddoes’ poems were sent to Robert Browning who kept them in what he called “that dismal box.”Gregory Corso spent several years in prison for robberies, starting at age 12!
He remained a street-wise poet, described as “an urchin Shelley.” (Bruce Cook in The Beat Generation)
Kenneth Rexroth described Corso as “a real wildman.”
Corso became a prominent Beat poet when he wasn’t behind bars.
Corso and Allen Ginsberg coauthored “The Literary Revolution in America,” an article in which the defiant reformist poets declared that America had poets who “have taken it upon themselves, with angelic clarions in hand, to announce their discontent, their demands, their hope, their final wondrous unimaginable dream.”Anna Laetitia Barbauld was an influential feminist, educator, editor, essayist, literary critic and poet, at a time — the late-18th-and early-19th-centuries — when women were mostly seen and not heard.
Her poem of compassion for an enslaved African woman, “Negro Woman,” may have inspired and/or influenced William Blake’s “Little Black Boy.”
She praised William Wilberforce in an “epistle” for trying to end the slave trade.
Some of her strongest poems were about social issues, including “The Rights of Women” and “To the Poor.”
In “The Rights of Women” she says it’s time for man to step down from his throne and kiss the scepter of woman.
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.
Barbauld is considered a proto-feminist because she championed women’s education and intellectual life, advocating for women to break free from domestic chains.Hannah More was an English abolitionist, educator, philanthropist, playwright and poet in the circle of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. One of her best compositions, “Slavery, a Poem,” not only called for an end to the cruelties of slavery, but spoke compassionately of the virtues of Africans who were being ripped from their homes and culture.
Sir Stephen Spender is famous, somehow, for “I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great.”
“Continually?” Do you, really?
Caveat Spender
by Michael R. Burch
It’s better not to speculate
“continually” on who is great.
Though relentless awe’s
a Célèbre Cause,
please reserve some time for the contemplation
of the perils of EXAGGERATION.John Greenleaf Whittier burned Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass upon receiving it in the mail.
Not the world’s most progressive thinker, perhaps?Hugh MacDiarmid was a Scottish poet who wrote poems in a Scots dialect and was called “brilliant, monstrous and ineradicable.” (Schmidt)
Charles Olson called Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot “inferior predecessors” and founded the Projectivists to supersede the Imagists, Vorticists and Objectivists, but how many Olson poems can you name, much less recite?
Dame Edith Sitwell was an eccentric English poet best-known today for her poem “Still Falls the Rain.” She has been accused of writing camp and nonsense that she took seriously. Her father was the eccentric baronet Sir George Sitwell. Like father, like daughter, perhaps? One of her books was titled The English Eccentrics and she confessed that “I was always a little outside life.”
The second part of “The World’s Greatest Poets” can be accessed by clicking or tapping the hyperlinked title. It contains the following topics:
TIMELINE OF THE VARIOUS ENGLISH POETIC SCHOOLS, PERIODS AND LANDMARKS
APPENDIX A: MY CONSENSUS RANKINGS & EXPERT SOURCES
APPENDIX Z: MY INFLUENCES
#POET #POETS #BEST #RANK #MRBPOET #MRBPOETS #MRBBEST #MRBRANK #MRBNUMERIC #MRBPOETRY #MRBGREAT #MRBGREATEST #MRBWGP
Notes to Self: publish Ersoy translations, check for other unpublished translations
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It is difficult for an Irishman to appreciate Spenser as a poet. Many Irish people believe that Oliver Cromwell engaged in genocide. The ground for Cromwell’s actions was prepared under the Tudors in a manifesto written by the poet Edmund Spenser. In his “View of the Present State of Ireland” (1596), Spenser argued that starvation was the best way to control the fractious Irish. Spenser described how the starving Irish population would “consume themselves and devour one another”.
The Irish quite naturally resisted . Cromwell re-conquered Ireland with a death toll of possibly 40% of the entire Irish population.
I have never been able to see the attraction of Maud Gonne. Her daughter was a stunner by anybody’s standards. I wrote about them here.
https://moleary.substack.com/p/revolting-gonne-girls-part-one