Poetry

On looking over my bookshelves, I found, to my surprise, that I have really quite a lot of poetry. I had long thought that I preferred it at university because poems are shorter and therefore you don't have to read as much in order to get the weekly essay done (and no, I'm not proud of such ignoble thoughts...). However, some of it obviously went in and stayed there.

So let's have a look over the bookshelves.

Louis MacNeice has long been a favourite of mine. He is rather overlooked and certainly underrated compared to, say, Eliot and Auden, yet has a toughness about him that I find particularly gripping. His poems often look back on childhood, yet never descend into sentimentality. Consider this one, Nature Notes: each stanza starts with a reference to a childhood experience, but then moves on to an aspect of adult life (love, sex, confidence, life/death). He is also a master of the rhythm of everyday speech and the fascination that children have with linking objects to words. Another favourite is this one, Star-gazer. The words are almost plain prose, and yet somehow not, the poem moving from the most personal of experiences to visions of the vastest splendour and then back again. I suggest his Collected Poems (I see there is a new hardback edition coming out in September 2004), though there is also a shorter selection by Michael Longley.

Keith Douglas is the best of the World War 2 poets and, indeed, transcends that, such that he cannot properly be classified as 'a war poet'. A natural and very active soldier, he died 3 days after D-Day at only 24. His poems are often rather cynical commentaries on the people who surrounded him in the Army, but they go much further than that, becoming meditations on death. Consider this poem, Sportsmen, a wonderful tribute (tinged with scorn, envy and despair) to the upper middle classes with whom he served. And then also Vergissmeinnicht, a more overt comment on the waste of death. Neither are remotely sentimental.

Raymond Carver. So much has been written about Carver that I shan't add any more. Almost any of his poems is worth reading. Here is a simple but not untypical one about happiness.

Derek Walcott is, most unusually today, an epic poet. His great work is Omeros, a re-working of the Odyssey set amongst the fishermen of St Lucia and involves so many themes, threads and meditations that it is quite impossible to list them all (at least in a summary page like this). And I cannot really do him any justice by taking a short extract from an epic poem. What's that? Oh, you think it might help?... All right then, I will try and put something up soon.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Restoration poet, is worth more than the usual giggling about the tits, bums (and 'worse') that pepper his work. He was a savage poet and an extraordinary man, forever having to flee the palace and London for some terrible transgression against Charles. The great thing is that he was so human - one feels that many of his transgressions were along the lines of the great "White Picket Fence" scene in Cambridge Spies where Guy Burgess (played by Tom Hollander) drives straight through a series of such fences, enclosing neatly manicured suburban Washington gardens, before standing on the bonnet of the car screeching 'God bless the Ku Klux Klan' at the top of his voice (and then being arrested). Rochester would have done exactly the same thing. He died of syphilis at about 32.

Byron. By which, of course, I mean the Byron of Beppo and Don Juan, and decidedly not that of Childe Harolde. Auden's comments on him in The Dyer's Hand (a marvellous book in itself - see this review from 1963 in the New York Review of Books) are both amusing and apposite:

"Most of the literary works with which we are acquainted fall into one of two classes, those we have no desire to read a second time - sometimes, we were never able to finish them - and those we are always happy to reread. There are a few, however, which belong to a third class; we do not feel like reading one of them very often but, when we are in the appropriate mood, it is the only work we feel like reading. Nothing else, however good or great, will do instead.

For me, Byron's Don Juan is such a work.... To enjoy it fully, the reader must be in a mood of distaste for everything which is to any degree a bore, that is, for all forms of passionate attachment, whether to persons, things, actions or beliefs."

Again, I cannot quote much from Don Juan to reflect its wonderfulness, but try Beppo as a fun introduction.

The Odyssey (Robert Fitzpatrick version)
Far Eastern poets
Li Po
Tu Fu
Po Chu-I
Penguin Book of Chinese Verse
Penguin Book of Zen Poetry
Eliot
Auden
Quevedo
Machado
Nanao Sakaki
Gary Snyder
Douglas Dunn
Seamus Heaney
Paul Muldoon
Gongora
Robert Lowell
Joseph Brodsky
Robert Graves
Donne
Spenser's Faerie Queene (I put this in for the sake of completeness - I have never been able to read it).

Last modified: 5 Jul 2005 12:46