Poetry and wine are liminal things. They live on the borderlands between the wild and the civilized, between reason and irrationality. Their territory is the unplanned, the unexpected, the pathless.
Source: Harry Eyres, Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 48-49
Poetry is a lifelong companion and solace to many. To me it’s a distillation of life – whether in the grand sweep or in its small moments – painted and sculpted in words. At its best, it connects me to other people, places and times, stripping away the ephemera of surface difference to reveal what it is to be human; embracing both the joy and the striving of it.
As Adam Nicolson puts it, ‘a description, through a particular set of lenses, of what it is like to be alive on earth, its griefs, triumphs, sufferings and glories’.
All poetry is memorial. Much of it is elegy.
Source: Adam Nicolson, The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters (London: William Collins, 2015), 50
And paring down to the essence, it is one of the most vital and vibrant channels for capturing and transmitting human experience across distances of time and culture, or as a prism for understanding our own context. Ezra Pound described poets, like artists, as the ‘antennae of the race’, sending us signals from the past, the present and the possible, allowing us to fine-tune our sensibilities and our engagement with the world.
It also reminds us – me, at least – that the path we tread, a seemingly once-only learn-as-you-go time on this earth, has been trodden before. The finest poetry, that which endures, makes visible those footsteps on the sand. It’s a deep reassurance that we are not alone in our fears, hopes, or fragility.
This page brings together poetry-related posts including quotations, ideas and books that have delighted or edified me. Click on the book covers to read my whole-hearted quote-rich reviews.
We hold on to the highest poetry out of desperate need.
Source: Till I End My Song: A gathering of last poems, Harold Bloom (ed), New York: HarperCollins, 2010, xxii
Learning to write
How do you learn to write? My belief is that if fine writing comes from you, mostly it is due to fine reading, even if (or particularly when?) you forget the detail of what you have read but keep the imprint.Here Dante acknowledges Virgil not only as his...
The piling up of beauty
Clive James' spent decades working on his splendid translation of Dante, sometimes in 'back burner' mode, other times full on. It's the best translation I have read so far, judged as poetry - I am not in a position to comment on any translation's worth as...
A fair request
In an age where you are expected to shout, tweet, bluster and generally blather about everything you do, it is heartening to read Virgil's pithy injunction that reasonable requests should be responded to by silent action. "The answer to a fairRequest...
Wasps quick-bending
One of the many stretch metaphors used by Homer. When you see a comma followed by 'as ...' it can be a signal to take a good intake of breath to carry you through to the end of the image. Here it is feisty bees and quick-bending wasps who convey the...
Sweet-running river
Flowing like the sweet-running river it evokes, a meandering metaphor for Hector's strength and movement, likened to a thoroughbred horse breaking free and seeking out its remembered watering spots and pastures. Other riverine triologisms include:...
Something more pressing
Yes, you can find a thousand things more urgent than writing, or at least more insistent. Writing for this and other websites takes precedence over a series of children's stories I have begun. Blogs have a rhythm or schedule, books are open-ended. I find...
Being never wholly so
This line from a poem concerns being and being written or heard about. If it isn't written (and presumably, read) or told (and presumably, heard), it cannot fully be. I don't believe I fully agree but it's something to think about. '… what is neither...
Roughing out poems
Hand-written notes and journals have a magic to them. Durrell is a favourite poet and his house in Greece was as close to the coast as you can be without getting your feet wet. Were these spatterings the voice of the sea telling him when he had a fine...
Diving in head first
Keats was a bold player, keeping his eye determinedly focussed on achieving enduring greatness, not on the fads and fashions of the critical present. His letters reveal his willingness to fly in the face of, and transcend, the vagaries of reviewers. Here...
Insubstantial rock-hard durability
The durability of things and of cultures intrigues me; and particularly when those artefacts are themselves physically fragile or insubstantial. Here, Adam Nicolson demonstrates that durability need not be carved in stone; in many cases it is simply...
Barefoot erudition
Patrick Leigh Fermor wore his vast learning lightly, as real scholars often do. Here he more than meets his match - and sees through his own presumption - when an old man instantly discerns the metre of a local dirge. Long live lay learning! 'A little...
Fine writing, fine doing
My earliest impressions of Keats were as a languishing poetic type, not a man of action. Now, after getting to know him through his letters (among the best I have read), he comes across as a vital, life-loving and out-stepping person, even though...
The sonnet never written
This is one of the longest and most entertaining chapters in Machado de Assis' novel Don Casmurro, a fictional memoir of the eponymous narrator. Many of the other chapters are shorter than a sonnet, but I liked this one, describing the sonnet he almost...
Hospitality protocol 101
Homer is awash with examples of great hospitality and generosity between hosts and guests, even uninvited ones washing up on the beach. Here is a pithy proverb summing up the responsibility of each. Logue's magnificent rendition of several books of the...
To charm, to change …
Odysseus is a tricky hero, part noble, upstanding and brave, part slippery, trickery, too-clever-by-half. He is a compelling orator, and it is hard to tell if his apparent shuffling shyness is a feint to lull his audience, or win their sympathy.This is...
Treat ’em mean to keep ’em keen
This made me laugh, Keats' pithy analysis of the source of English literary brilliance. There are several references in his letters to his belief that he will be recognised as one of the great poets of his country, already star-studded with great poets,...
Keats’ correspondence
Here are Keats' own aspirations for his letter-writing. Whether he found interesting matter or just made matter interesting, his letters reveal a brilliantly alert, alive, playful, lovable human being. Andrew Motion's splendid biography also comments on...
Hopelessly insane: Homer fans
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a hard core of 'Unprofessional Ancient Greek Readers'. I don't know if I qualify, since the UAGR could refer only to those...
Instinct with poetry
A fine and subtle way to depict a look which appears to express more than the person looking is capable of feeling. And I've always been struck when I come across commonplace proverbs and phrases in their original setting, and see how readily they are used by people...
Poetry pressed out by pain
Poetry is one of the strongest channels for expressing pain, and I liked the use of the word 'pressed'. It implies a wine-making process, as if you emptied vat loads of painful must and then pressed out a small quantity of distilled language to be savoured over time....
A voice answering a voice?
More than just the writing of poetry, isn't writing in general often 'a voice answering a voice'? This touching quotation comes towards the end of Orlando and the end of Orlando's long endeavours to complete her poem. It is the first and last time she clearly...
Shorter but longer
This pithy summary of the difference between prose and poetry is as much as Orlando gleans from the convoluted accounts of a poet to whom he has opened his home, larder, wine cellar, purse and poetic aspirations, in the hope of some helpful guidance. Not forthcoming....
To see at a distance
Thoreau has many striking things to say about poets, and even if I can't seize on them as definitive or universal in their application, they make me think. This one is a little clunky in its expression, as if he is thinking out loud, but I like the idea of the poet...
As free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat
First, the unusual simile, I never thought of a lamb's bleat as free or lawless. Then the idea that a true poetic sentence is free and lawless. I found several similar comments in Thoreau, and something about them gave me a sense of liberty. I was once criticized by...
Thoughts as shells
The thoughts of poets likened to two types of shell, those that come from the depths and those that are washed up on shore and so exposed to the elements. Thoreau has numerous comments on the nature of poets and poetry - I will be citing a number, even where I'm not...
Imply vs express, whole vs part
Again, a wonderful, provocative and pithy comment by Thoreau. I'm now looking at poetry and asking how far it implies the whole truth and whether it needs to do so to be fine poetry. As to philosophy, I am so woefully refractory as to be incapable of comment. Luckily...
Bat-haunted cave
In general, I would run a mile from anything bat-haunted - apparently random, erratic flight patterns bring out some primeval panic in me. But this isn't any old cave. This is allegedly the cave I read about a thousand times in the beautifully illustrated Pied Piper...
A luminous spot in Chicago
What makes a city great? What makes a civilization? How about a bright, quiet, dazzling new building in the heart of a town, housing 30,000 volumes of poetry? A place where you can step off the street into poetry through a single glass door. Before going to Chicago,...
A reader’s choice – The Good-Morrow
For World Poetry Day, I wrote about learning poems by heart and asked readers to share any they love and have learned. This came back from Tanya, about a beautiful and difficult poem by John Donne, The Good-Morrow. I like the complex reasons she cherishes this poem,...
On memorizing poetry
A few years ago I wrote this piece on memorising poetry. For World Poetry Day, I share it here in the hope it will encourage you to learn a poem by heart, if you don't do so as a matter of course. I still memorise poems and regularly revisit those I haven't turned...
water is…
One bitingly cold morning I was crossing a square in central Liverpool, and noticed some words on the ground. I followed them, and discovered a fluid, limpid elegy to water and its relationship to a coastal city, circumnavigating the square. I love when words are...
Beginnings
According to Adam Nicolson, some of the earliest poems were found in Sumer in cuneiform, dating from nearly two thousand years before Homer's epics were committed to papyrus, around 2600 BC. Only fragments remain. I wonder if anyone has thought of posting those...
Roiling poetry
Written by a poet, this suggests that poems aren't written, but rather roil and form of their own volition. Having had moments of sensing that lines were being written not by but through me, I liked this elemental action of a poem in the making. 'Something nameless...
The illuminated space of the poem
Reading can extend life, as Umberto Eco put it: a reader can live 5000 years as opposed to the three score and ten biblical allocation. Here, Bloom gives a sense of poetry that allows at least a momentary suspension of time, a stilling of the ticking clock, or 'a...
There is no method but yourself
Wisely or no, this has pretty much been my haphazard method of reading poetry since I left formal study. With occasional blinding insight provided by some of the best writers on poetry, which is to say, its best readers. 'There is no method but yourself, once you have...
Time and poets
This summary of where Mandelstam places the poet versus the ‘man of letters’ on the time spectrum intrigues me. Yes, there are poets who converse with readers waiting in the future: Homer and Keats come to mind. But there are also poets who write for their own time,...
Poetry as plough
Elsewhere Mandelstam connects poetry to recall. Here it is a time-turning plough, bringing the deepest layers of time to the surface. And, you could add, enriching the present by turning it over with old soil, aerating both. ‘Poetry is the plow that turns up time so...
Poetry as connector
Since good poetry (good writing, for that matter) transcends time, I liked this phrase of Molly Peacock, a Canadian poet, that ‘poetry exists against time’, together with the ‘indiscriminate gusto’ it permits her in traversing poetic landscapes near and far, across...
Poetry as recall
Slowly I’m building a collection of quotations defining poetry. With a few more in the bag, we can lay them all out and see what it looks like. This one has had me thinking: composing poetry as a recollection of things that haven’t yet been uttered. Could that...
Gift-bearing ambassadorial winds
Having a love of Persian poetry, known only through translation, and of Chinese poetry, engaged with tentatively and carefully in its original spareness, I loved this embroidered, sweeping, generous sentence. May you be blessed with gift-bearing ambassadorial winds...
How to speak to an editor
Clearly, authors are simply too humble in approaching editors. This is how it should be done, straight to the point and don’t forget to pay me. In this story, the children need to raise some cash and Noel hits upon the brilliant idea of flogging his poetry. Except...
A man with no plan
We went to a charity bazarre the other morning, and came staggering out with a sack load of books. Before heading into the airy 1950s ‘salle communale’ across the road to load up on home baked cakes, scones and jams the International Women’s Club had churned out to...
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