I just came across a poem called Sleeping with a Dictionary. I can’t recall sleeping with but have dozed with a dictionary. Continue reading “Sleeping with a Dictionary”
Category: Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Poetry
The Norton Anthology of Poetry is one of the best and most comprehensive collections of English poems from Old English to the present day. I was going through the poems after reading about the death of the literary critic MH Abrams.
Abrams, who died on April 21 at the age of 102 in Ithaca, New York, was the founding editor of the Norton Anthology of Literature, first published in 1962. He was also an adviser to the editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter and Jon Stallworthy acknowledge his contributions in the preface to the book. Continue reading “The Norton Anthology of Poetry”
Wordsworth and I
Today is the birthday of William Wordsworth (April 7, 1770 – April 23, 1850), a poet who grows on you. He strikes a deeper chord in me now than when I was young. Many of his poems, of course, can be appreciated at any age. For example, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.
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.
There is romance and freedom in the first two lines – wandering lonely as a cloud – and then follows the exultation of catching a glorious view of daffodils dancing in the breeze. Continue reading “Wordsworth and I”
TS Eliot, ‘mixing memory and desire’
Today is the birthday of TS Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965). I still remember how strange and romantic it felt when I first read The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock in my last or penultimate year in high school.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table…
The metrical foot: Foot and meter in poetry
I just came across this poem by Coleridge explaining metrical feet, the unit of measurement in poetry. He wrote it for his son, Derwent.
A metrical foot is a set of syllables, usually two or three, only one of which is normally stressed, as in the words, po´-em and po´-et-ry. The first syllable is stressed in both these words when we say them. Poetry was meant to be recited, read aloud, so syllables count. A set of two syllables is called a trochee when the first syllable is stressed, as in po´-em. A set of three syllables is called a dactyl when the first syllable is stressed, as in po´-et-ry. The words come from Latin and Greek, like poem and poetry.
Here is Coleridge’s poem.
Continue reading “The metrical foot: Foot and meter in poetry”
Poetry Please: The 10 most popular poems
Here are the top 10 on Poetry Please, the 10 most popular poems on the longest running poetry programme broadcast anywhere in the world, according to the BBC. Started in 1979, the BBC 4 programme presents poems requested by listeners. It reaches two million listeners a week. The top 10 list is from the book, Poetry Please. The poet Roger McGough, who presents the weekly programme, says in his foreword to the book: “The 350 poems here have all been asked for more than once in the programme’s history…” The top 10 includes some of my own favourites. (See also Selected Poems)
#1
httpv://youtu.be/hfOxdZfo0gs
Poems that make grown men cry
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry. The title made me pick up the book. And it was revealing. It brings together poems which have made writers cry.
So we have Salman Rushdie confessing he is moved to tears by the last lines of WH Auden’s famous poem, In Memory of WB Yeats.
Sebastian Faulks, author of Birdsong and the James Bond sequel Devil May Care, names Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight, adding: “I read this poem at my daughter’s christening.”
The former Times and Sunday Times editor Harold Evans says he could not hold back his tears when he read Wordsworth’s Character of the Happy Warrior at his predecessor, Sir Denis Hamilton’s funeral service.
The writer Melvyn Bragg mentions Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX. “I have never been able to read this sonnet without stumbling and then stopping. It is the final couplet that finishes me off,” he says. Continue reading “Poems that make grown men cry”
