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Poets and Poetry
Poets and Poetry
POSTED AUGUST 19, 2018
While 'best-selling poetry" is an oxymoron today, four of the nine muses of ancient Greece had poetry as their domain - Calliope (epic poetry), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (hymns, sacred poetry) and Euterpe (music, song, and lyric poetry). Years ago, a high school English teacher said to our class, "I hope that some evening you will sit down with a book of poems and read and enjoy them." I've done so on occasion, but let's admit it - poetry is not one's go-to choice for entertainment.
While 'best-selling poetry" is an oxymoron today, four of the nine muses of ancient Greece had poetry as their domain - Calliope (epic poetry), Erato (love poetry), Polyhymnia (hymns, sacred poetry) and Euterpe (music, song, and lyric poetry). Years ago, a high school English teacher said to our class, "I hope that some evening you will sit down with a book of poems and read and enjoy them." I've done so on occasion, but let's admit it - poetry is not one's go-to choice for entertainment.
Poetry delivers its truth in a different manner than a novel or a newspaper or a scientific journal. John Ciardi's introductory essay "How Does a Poem Mean?" to his book of the same name provides some approaches to enjoying poetry. Ciardi discards the idea that the measurements of physical sciences "can be applied to all human processes" and "the belief that a dictionary definition is a satisfactory description of an idea or of an experience." Instead he writes that "that the language of experience is not the language of classification... [and that] the concern is not to arrive at a definition and to close the book, but to arrive at an experience...If the reader cared enough for poetry, he would have no need to study it. He would live into it...[The] passionate reader of poetry becomes alive to it by natural process....once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being." Quoting Matthew Arnold: “The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power . . . the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.”
Poetry delivers its truth in a different manner than a novel or a newspaper or a scientific journal. John Ciardi's introductory essay "How Does a Poem Mean?" to his book of the same name provides some approaches to enjoying poetry. Ciardi discards the idea that the measurements of physical sciences "can be applied to all human processes" and "the belief that a dictionary definition is a satisfactory description of an idea or of an experience." Instead he writes that "that the language of experience is not the language of classification... [and that] the concern is not to arrive at a definition and to close the book, but to arrive at an experience...If the reader cared enough for poetry, he would have no need to study it. He would live into it...[The] passionate reader of poetry becomes alive to it by natural process....once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being." Quoting Matthew Arnold: “The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power . . . the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new, and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them.”
To give us this experience, poetry employs various techniques (e.g., alliteration, meter, images, symbols, rhyme) and formats (from sonnets with strict rhyming and meter rules to free verse with no rhyme or regular meter) . Ciardi tells us that the American poet Robert Frost and the German critic Baumgarten both considered "the central impulse toward poetry (and toward all art) [to be] the play impulse." Poetry is, above all, performance. The play impulse figures in two ways - the immediate response of the reader to the performance and the "kind of play whose pleasure lies for the poet in overcoming meaningful and thoughtful (and “feelingful”) difficulties, and for the reader in identifying with the poet in that activity."
To give us this experience, poetry employs various techniques (e.g., alliteration, meter, images, symbols, rhyme) and formats (from sonnets with strict rhyming and meter rules to free verse with no rhyme or regular meter) . Ciardi tells us that the American poet Robert Frost and the German critic Baumgarten both considered "the central impulse toward poetry (and toward all art) [to be] the play impulse." Poetry is, above all, performance. The play impulse figures in two ways - the immediate response of the reader to the performance and the "kind of play whose pleasure lies for the poet in overcoming meaningful and thoughtful (and “feelingful”) difficulties, and for the reader in identifying with the poet in that activity."
Selections from some of my favorite poems and poets
Selections from some of my favorite poems and poets
Andrei Vosnesenzky was a Soviet and Russian poet and writer who had been referred to by Robert Lowell as "one of the greatest living poets in any language." He was one of the "Children of the '60s," a new wave of iconic Russian intellectuals emboldened by the "Khrushchev Thaw". Voznesensky was considered "one of the most daring writers of the Soviet era", and he was once threatened with expulsion by Nikita Khrushchev. (Wikipedia)
Andrei Vosnesenzky was a Soviet and Russian poet and writer who had been referred to by Robert Lowell as "one of the greatest living poets in any language." He was one of the "Children of the '60s," a new wave of iconic Russian intellectuals emboldened by the "Khrushchev Thaw". Voznesensky was considered "one of the most daring writers of the Soviet era", and he was once threatened with expulsion by Nikita Khrushchev. (Wikipedia)
His "Autumn in Sigulda" has long been one of my favorites. I came across it again in a book of his poetry a couple of years back but it appeared to be a slightly different translation* than the one I remembered. The particular lines, as I recall them, are:
His "Autumn in Sigulda" has long been one of my favorites. I came across it again in a book of his poetry a couple of years back but it appeared to be a slightly different translation* than the one I remembered. The particular lines, as I recall them, are:
"Thank you, life, for having been
"Thank you, life, for having been
in the shooting gallery where the top score was ten
in the shooting gallery where the top score was ten
I tried to make a hundred
I tried to make a hundred
thank you for letting me make that mistake"
thank you for letting me make that mistake"
*Translating poetry must be one of the most difficult tasks imaginable for a translator. How do you get the connotations and meter and rhyme to be as the original?
The French surrealist poet Robert Desnos asserted that a poet during his lifetime elaborates one great poem, of which only fragments can be brought to consciousness. He was active in the French Resistance, was captured and died from typhoid contracted in a concentration camp - but not before saving the lives of some of his fellow prisoners with an act of imagination.
The French surrealist poet Robert Desnos asserted that a poet during his lifetime elaborates one great poem, of which only fragments can be brought to consciousness. He was active in the French Resistance, was captured and died from typhoid contracted in a concentration camp - but not before saving the lives of some of his fellow prisoners with an act of imagination.
"Robert Desnos is being taken away from the barracks of the concentration camp where he has been held prisoner. Leaving the barracks, the mood is somber; everyone knows the truck is headed for the gas chambers. And when the truck arrives no one can speak at all; even the guards fall silent. But this silence is soon interrupted by an energetic man, who jumps into the line and grabs one of the condemned. Improbable as it is...Desnos reads the man's palm. Oh, he says, I see you have a very long lifeline. And you are going to have three children. He is exuberant. And his excitement is contagious. First one man, then another, offers up his hand, and the prediction is for longevity, more children, abundant joy.
"As Desnos reads more palms, not only does the mood of the prisoners change but that of the guards too. How can one explain it? Perhaps the element of surprise has planted a shadow of doubt in their minds. If they told themselves these deaths were inevitable, this no longer seems so inarguable. They are in any case so disoriented by this sudden change of mood among those they are about to kill that they are unable to go through with the executions. So all the men, along with Desnos, are packed back onto the truck and taken back to the barracks." (Wikipedia)
"Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
"Far from me and like the stars, the sea and all the trappings of poetic myth,
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing
Far from me but here all the same without your knowing
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly
Far from me and even more silent because I imagine you endlessly
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know
Far from me, my lovely mirage and eternal dream, you cannot know
If you only knew."
If you only knew."
- from Robert Desnos' "If You Only Knew"
- from Robert Desnos' "If You Only Knew"
Robert Desnos image from Discogs
Peter Larkin
Peter Larkin
From "Coming"
It will be spring soon -
And I...
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.
From "Spring"
Green-shadowed people sit or walk in rings
Their children finger the awakened grass
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings
And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me...
Opening lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
Opening lines from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
Closing lines from "Prufrock"
Closing lines from "Prufrock"
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
From "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth
From "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth
(Emphasis mine. I love these three lines.)
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
"When I Have Fears" by John Keats
"When I Have Fears" by John Keats
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;
When I behold upon the night’s starred face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;–then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
Wikipedia portrait of Keats by William Hilton may be subject to copyright.
John Keats was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, despite his works having been in publication for only four years before his death from tuberculosis at the age of 25. He wrote the sonnet "When I Have Fears" at the age of 22.
Poet Mary Oliver "chose to live in the moment and be dazzled by it"
Poet Mary Oliver "chose to live in the moment and be dazzled by it"
POSTED JAN 20, 2019
"The quiet, plain-spoken poet Mary Oliver died this week. An outpouring of emotion and tributes spanned the globe. She was both mourned and wildly revered by those for whom her words were a totem. With stark simplicity, she offered us both spiritual guidance and common sense, all of which was garnered from lessons she learned while simply meandering in the woods.
"The quiet, plain-spoken poet Mary Oliver died this week. An outpouring of emotion and tributes spanned the globe. She was both mourned and wildly revered by those for whom her words were a totem. With stark simplicity, she offered us both spiritual guidance and common sense, all of which was garnered from lessons she learned while simply meandering in the woods.
"Mary Oliver’s gift was her ability to marvel at the world with an unsentimental acceptance that it (and we) are temporary. She looked clear-eyed and with unflinching certainty at the impermanence of our existence. In it she found not despair but rather joy. She chose to live in the moment and to be dazzled by it."
"Mary Oliver’s gift was her ability to marvel at the world with an unsentimental acceptance that it (and we) are temporary. She looked clear-eyed and with unflinching certainty at the impermanence of our existence. In it she found not despair but rather joy. She chose to live in the moment and to be dazzled by it."
Here are some selections from her poetry read by the author.
Here are some selections from her poetry read by the author.
Toni Morrison: “Something that is loved is never lost”
Toni Morrison: “Something that is loved is never lost”
POSTED AUGUST 12, 2019
Nobel-prize-winning writer Toni Morrison passed away at the age of 88 on August 5. Her novels explored black identity in America, and, as the Dallas Morning News put it:"She faced, ferociously and luminously, the horror of America’s racist sins and the waves of pain and destruction that washed over the generations that followed."
Nobel-prize-winning writer Toni Morrison passed away at the age of 88 on August 5. Her novels explored black identity in America, and, as the Dallas Morning News put it:"She faced, ferociously and luminously, the horror of America’s racist sins and the waves of pain and destruction that washed over the generations that followed."
Here are some Toni Morrison quotes and brief excerpts from her works.
Here are some Toni Morrison quotes and brief excerpts from her works.
“You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” ― Song of Solomon
“At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.”
"It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times. Porous borders are understood in some quarters to be areas of threat and certain chaos, and whether real or imagined, enforced separation is posited as the solution. Walls, ammunition — they do work. For a while. But they are major failures over time, as the occupants of casual, unmarked, and mass grave sites haunt the entire history of civilization." - From a convocation address at Oberlin College in 2009
"It is not possible for me to be unaware of the incredible violence, the willful ignorance, the hunger for other people’s pain." - Paris Review interview, 1993
"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."
From Beloved, which won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1988:
"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old — as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once — the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn’t have a number then, because Cincinnati didn’t stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them." (Opening paragraph)
“She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.”
“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.”
Links clockwise below from top left: Vox.com article on Morrison's Nobel Prize acceptance speech; Britannica.com article on Beloved; Maria Popova on Toni Morrison's prescient wisdom in lectures from 2002 and 2009; NPR listeners honoring her legacy by reading their favorite quotes; Washington Post article on Toni Morrison's life and legacy
Maria Gainza's thoroughly unique first novel
Maria Gainza's thoroughly unique first novel
POSTED SEPTEMBER 2, 2019
"Optic Nerve", the first work of fiction from Argentinian art writer Maria Gainza, was published in English earlier this year. It is a most unique and beautiful novel - a series of vignettes from the life of an Argentinian woman, also called Maria, whose obsession is art. Indeed, Maria sees her life through the prism of art. Each story is tied to an artist whose paintings have affected her and includes anecdotes from the painters' lives, jargon-free observations on their paintings, and most importantly how the work affects her. We get insight into the art of seeing and on the relationship between art and life. Gainza occasionally throws in well-placed quotes from painters, writers and thinkers, and her narrator comments at one point, perhaps with a wink at the reader, "Being good with quotations means avoiding having to think for oneself."
"Optic Nerve", the first work of fiction from Argentinian art writer Maria Gainza, was published in English earlier this year. It is a most unique and beautiful novel - a series of vignettes from the life of an Argentinian woman, also called Maria, whose obsession is art. Indeed, Maria sees her life through the prism of art. Each story is tied to an artist whose paintings have affected her and includes anecdotes from the painters' lives, jargon-free observations on their paintings, and most importantly how the work affects her. We get insight into the art of seeing and on the relationship between art and life. Gainza occasionally throws in well-placed quotes from painters, writers and thinkers, and her narrator comments at one point, perhaps with a wink at the reader, "Being good with quotations means avoiding having to think for oneself."
Maria's family has fallen from a place of prominence among the Buenos Aires elite ("You spent the first half of your life rich, the second poor."), and we first see her working as a tour guide showing rich foreigners around art galleries and private collections. In a series of flashbacks - a fire in the study when she was ten, a flamboyant great-uncle, a trip to Mar de Plata with her boyfriend and his surfer friends - we gradually learn more about Maria and her dysfunctional family.
Maria's family has fallen from a place of prominence among the Buenos Aires elite ("You spent the first half of your life rich, the second poor."), and we first see her working as a tour guide showing rich foreigners around art galleries and private collections. In a series of flashbacks - a fire in the study when she was ten, a flamboyant great-uncle, a trip to Mar de Plata with her boyfriend and his surfer friends - we gradually learn more about Maria and her dysfunctional family.
While telling Maria's story, Gainza interweaves the lives and works of painters with her protagonist's life. Relating her trip to Mar de Plata, she recalls her intense fixation with "Stormy Sea" by the mid-nineteenth century master of sea paintings, Gustave Courbet: "When you stand before it, art disappears and something else rushes in: life in all its tempestuousness...I do not see "The Stormy Sea" as a symbolic painting, or a tragic meditation on life. It is Courbet's way of submitting to the order of things, in the same way Marcus Aurelius did when he came to Hron River in AD 178, "Let the universe decide."
While telling Maria's story, Gainza interweaves the lives and works of painters with her protagonist's life. Relating her trip to Mar de Plata, she recalls her intense fixation with "Stormy Sea" by the mid-nineteenth century master of sea paintings, Gustave Courbet: "When you stand before it, art disappears and something else rushes in: life in all its tempestuousness...I do not see "The Stormy Sea" as a symbolic painting, or a tragic meditation on life. It is Courbet's way of submitting to the order of things, in the same way Marcus Aurelius did when he came to Hron River in AD 178, "Let the universe decide."
Maria relates her visceral reaction to Alfred de Dreux's "Deer Hunt" as a "kick galvanic". Noting "that all art rests in the gap between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which truly captivates you," she describes the painting...
Maria relates her visceral reaction to Alfred de Dreux's "Deer Hunt" as a "kick galvanic". Noting "that all art rests in the gap between that which is aesthetically pleasing and that which truly captivates you," she describes the painting...
Dreux pulses with atavistic symbolism: the struggle between good and evil, light and dark. The deer is about to die. One of the dogs sinks its fangs into the back, another, a leg. The deer on the verge of giving in...is goggle-eyed with the same helpless astonishment as the hare in Lampedusa's The Leopard...[looking at the hunter] with no reproval but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things."
...and remembers the bizarre accident that took the life of her college friend on the edge of a hunting reserve in France:
...and remembers the bizarre accident that took the life of her college friend on the edge of a hunting reserve in France:
She dropped to the ground: according to the Frenchman, her look was one of pure surprise. "Was that all?" it seemed to say. "Is that it?"
Maria confronts aging, self-imposed limitations and her own mortality: in two paintings, a paralyzing fear, and a serious illness.
Maria confronts aging, self-imposed limitations and her own mortality: in two paintings, a paralyzing fear, and a serious illness.
She is startled by a painting of a young girl in a painting by Augusto Schiavoni. The girl looks exactly as her younger self and sends a supernatural chill down her spine.
She is startled by a painting of a young girl in a painting by Augusto Schiavoni. The girl looks exactly as her younger self and sends a supernatural chill down her spine.
...it felt like it was just me and the girl in the room, as though all the figures around us, on her side of the canvas and mine, had been redacted with thick, black daubs of paint. Her and me; me and her. Why deny it? it was the sensation of seeing myself, a version of myself in need of affection, that had acted on me so strangely: I felt like running to the little girl and throwing my arms around her...but isn't all artwork - or all decent art - a mirror? Might a great painting not even reformulate the question what is it about to what am I about? Isn't theory also in some sense always autobiography?
The second painting is by Miguel Carlos Victorica. After Maria notes that, although she is a "woman hovering at the midpoint of life",
The second painting is by Miguel Carlos Victorica. After Maria notes that, although she is a "woman hovering at the midpoint of life",
...it is in my power to flit from the Schiavoni painting...to the Miguel Carlos Victorica they hold in the Sivori Gallery. In other words, to make the shift from childhood to old age in an instant...Aunt Cecilia has been through a great deal, some of it extraordinary, but rather than change who she is, these experiences, like a sudden gust of wind stripping a tree of all its dead leaves, have given starker definition to an already present personality. She feels not nostalgia but something close to an intrigue when she looks back over her life; for her, it is a landscape to be contemplated dispassionately.
"One day, you develop a fear of flying. A propos of nothing, it must be your age." Her fear has become paralyzing - she cannot board a plane to Geneva where she was to be a judge for the awarding of an art grant. Maria realizes that this fear will limit her ability to view the originals of the paintings she so loves. She describes painter Henri Rousseau's passion for hot-air balloons and muses that she would rather fly in a balloon, ultimately consoling herself with a quote from Cezanne.
"One day, you develop a fear of flying. A propos of nothing, it must be your age." Her fear has become paralyzing - she cannot board a plane to Geneva where she was to be a judge for the awarding of an art grant. Maria realizes that this fear will limit her ability to view the originals of the paintings she so loves. She describes painter Henri Rousseau's passion for hot-air balloons and muses that she would rather fly in a balloon, ultimately consoling herself with a quote from Cezanne.
"The cloud inside a paper bag" was a thing of such beauty that it made people gasp, but it was also entirely useless, the definition of "art for art's sake"...seen from above, the earth, and all earthly concerns, took on their true dimensions. When you were in the air you forgot your troubles. Rousseau, though, not having the chance to go up himself, had to make do with imaging what that would be like...Rousseau dream of going up, up, up - and then coming face-to-face with his father. Might his children also be there?..Could there exist a God, lost in time, that might provide the answers he sought?
...maybe you've just convinced yourself, in line with your progressive and alarming tendency to limit your own means, that big planes and great works are unnecessary. Cezanne said, "The grandiose...grows tiresome after a while. There are mountains like that; when you stand before them you shout Nom de Dieu, but for everyday a simple hill does well enough."
In the final pages, we see Maria and her fellow patients at the Radiotherapy Center - the nurse, the thoracic surgeon, the widower, the "Buddha" - buoying each other up and stoically confronting their cancers. A rare snow starts to fall in Buenos Aires.
In the final pages, we see Maria and her fellow patients at the Radiotherapy Center - the nurse, the thoracic surgeon, the widower, the "Buddha" - buoying each other up and stoically confronting their cancers. A rare snow starts to fall in Buenos Aires.
I saw them from the corner, men and women in dark coats, lining up at the Radiotherapy Center doors. They come here hoping for extra time. Above the sky is gray, the mortal gray of an ice rink, and when the first flakes start to fall they all look up but not in surprise; these are not the kind of people who surprise easily...The snow drifts slowly down...and I lean over to the glove compartment and take out the black woolly hat I put there when all of this began. This is the first time I put it on, pulling it down over my ears and walking straight toward them.
William Wordsworth: poet of nature and the common man
William Wordsworth: poet of nature and the common man
POSTED JULY 29, 2020
Besides being the 250th birthday of Beethoven, this year also marks the 250th birthday of the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, who once wrote that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and takes "its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," is one of the founders of English Romanticism.
Besides being the 250th birthday of Beethoven, this year also marks the 250th birthday of the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth, who once wrote that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" and takes "its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility," is one of the founders of English Romanticism.
Early influences on his poetry included his Lake District upbringing and a walking tour through Europe when he was 20 in the year following the storming of the Bastille. This walking tour of Europe deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth had been an instinctive democrat since childhood, and his experiences in revolutionary France strengthened and developed his convictions. His sympathy for ordinary people would remain with Wordsworth even after his revolutionary fervor had dampened. Wordsworth's most famous works include "Lyrical Ballads", co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and "The Prelude", a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.” [1]
Early influences on his poetry included his Lake District upbringing and a walking tour through Europe when he was 20 in the year following the storming of the Bastille. This walking tour of Europe deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth had been an instinctive democrat since childhood, and his experiences in revolutionary France strengthened and developed his convictions. His sympathy for ordinary people would remain with Wordsworth even after his revolutionary fervor had dampened. Wordsworth's most famous works include "Lyrical Ballads", co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and "The Prelude", a Romantic epic poem chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.” [1]
Along with Coleridge, Wordsworth is considered one of the founders of English Romanticism paving the way for the generation of Shelley, Keats and Byron.
Along with Coleridge, Wordsworth is considered one of the founders of English Romanticism paving the way for the generation of Shelley, Keats and Byron.
Below are selections from his poems. Link in sidebar to his "eight greatest poems."
Below are selections from his poems. Link in sidebar to his "eight greatest poems."
"Tintern Abbey" is my favorite of all of William Wordsworth's poems. In this passage, the poet reflects on the comfort that remembering his home gave him during his travels, and on what he considers "that best portion of a good man's life" - his "little, nameless, unremembered, acts Of kindness and of love"
"Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798" is the closing poem in Lyrical Ballads, which opens with Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
"...These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love..."
The full poem can be found here.
Wordsworth was a deeply reflective poet. He was intent on using a "language near to the language of men" - a revolutionary concept for the poetry of his time. Some of these deep reflections in common language are well-known throughout the English speaking world. "The world is too much with us" and "the child is father of the man" are both from Wordsworth.
In "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ", he celebrates the "natural insight and purity of the child." I find reading the poem to be a remarkably soothing antidote to the troubles of the day.
"Ode" begins with these most recognizable lines:
"The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety"
Wordsworth remembers his own childhood when he saw everything with a child's sense of wonder:
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more."
He proclaims the child, "whose exterior semblance doth belie Thy soul’s immensity; Thou, best philosopher, "
...and he concludes with a hymn of gratitude
"Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
I'll close this post with another of his famous poems and with a few excerpts from his magnum opus.
"I wandered lonely as a cloud" may be the most famous poem in the English language. Wordsworth opens his paean to daffodils:
"I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze."
He ends with the happiness that this memory gives him many years later as he reflects in the "bliss of solitude."
The full poem can be found here.
The Prelude, Wordsworth's autobiographical epic poem, provides a detailed portrayal of the writer’s sense of his self and his mind. It traces the history of Wordsworth’s life from his earliest childhood to the point at which he began writing the poem at the age of about thirty, and records his flaws, his fears, his loves, and his ambitions. [2] He worked on The Prelude for most of his life. The last version of the poem, published in 1850, is 8000 lines long. The Prelude has been called the poem at the heart of the Romantic movement. Here are three short passages.
"And is there one, the wisest and the best
Of all mankind, who does not sometimes wish
For things which cannot be..."
"And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much,
The self-sufficing power of solitude."
"...for there’s not a man
That lives who hath not known his god-like hours,
And feels not what an empire we inherit
As natural beings in the strength of Nature."
References: [1] Poetry Foundation [2] Wordsworth.org
Three poems, three takes on getting older
Three poems, three takes on getting older
POSTED OCTOBER 10, 2022
I have enjoyed poetry since my high school years. I have not been doing much reading of it recently, but this year's celebration of the centennial of T.S. Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land re-awakened in me a desire to read some poetry.
Unlike my love of art, kickstarted by Monet's Étretat, or my love for classical music, kickstarted by Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, I can't name a specific poem that led me to enjoy poetry so much. Each reading or re-reading of a poem brings new insights. This is especially true when re-reading a poem decades after you first encountered it. Here are three such poems - two that I have always loved and one that I didn't really appreciate until recently. Age does that to you.
The poems, which, to a greater or lesser extent, all have to do with getting older, were written by the poets while still in their twenties.* Each poem, as we shall see, has a different take on what getting older would be like.
T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has a wistful, resigned flavor. You know from the opening lines that this is not going to be a pleasant journey.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets...
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
It's an evening in autumn, a season given to thoughts of change, decay and dying. Eliot hauntingly images the yellow fog of the night and the yellow smoke from chimneys as a cat that "rubs its back" and "rubs its muzzle" on window-panes before it
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
The aging narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, is having afternoon tea with a woman, wondering if he has "the strength to force the moment to its crisis?" He keeps telling himself that there "indeed will be time" for a "hundred visions and revisions" and experiences still to come. But then he acknowledges that he has "measured out my life with coffee spoons" and that he has "seen the moment of my greatness flicker" and has "seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker."
With all his past experiences and attempts to "squeeze the universe into a ball", he wonders if it was worth it all
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
Andrei Voznesensky's Autumn in Sigulda is more a poem of leave-taking than of aging.
Hanging out of the train, I
Bid you all good-bye.
Good-bye, Summer:
My time is up.
Sigulda is a beautiful town in Latvia known for its golden autumns, but, in Voznesensky's autumn, already "the woods have shed their leaves, empty and sad today," and "People...are also empty, as we leave behind (We have no choice) Walls, mothers, womankind: So it has always been and will be." A particular source of Voznesensky's sadness is, of course, a woman that he met there.
In the woods the leaves were already falling
When you ran into me, asked me something.
Your dog was with you: you tugged at his leash and called him,
He tugged the other way:
Thank you for that day.
I came alive: thank you for that September,
For explaining me to myself.
They are leaving on trains going in different directions and likely never to see one another again: "Instead of us this one or that one will come."
Now for the aging part, the looking back on life part. In what may be my favorite poetic passage, Voznesensky expresses that gratitude that is so much a part of happiness.
Thank you, Life, for having been.
In the shooting gallery,
Where the top score is ten,
I tried to reach a century:
Thank you for letting me make the mistake...
W.H. Auden's translation** of Autumn in Sigulda can be found here.
Unlike Love Song and Autumn which I liked instantly, it took nearly six decades for me to fully appreciate Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.*** The poem opens with the legendary Greek king - aged, idle, and sitting by his "still hearth" - remembering his younger years and not at all resigned to a slow slide towards death. Ulysses declares:
I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees...
He knows his life is far from over, with much still to see and do :
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
The poem closes with one of the most famous reflections on old age:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The poem in its entirety as well as a reading of it can be found here.
Notes:
*T.S. Eliot wrote The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock when he was 23; Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote Ulysses when he was 24; I am not completely sure when Andrei Voznesensky wrote Autumn in Sigulda but it had already been translated into English and in a collection by the time he was 32.
**Translating poetry must be one of the most difficult tasks imaginable for a translator. Obviously you need a poet to do the task, but how do you get the connotations and meter and rhyme to be as the original?
***Ulysses is the Latin name for the Greek king Odysseus. The word "odyssey" has come to mean a journey of epic proportions. The word comes from Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, written in the 8th century BC. The Odyssey speaks of the legendary journey of king Odysseus to return home, to his palace and family, after the Trojan War had ended.
Sources: Greeka, Wikipedia
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