The modesty of genius
Humility comes through Keats' letters, though he was also quietly conscious of having something the future would acclaim, even when...
Horace’s idyll
Horace wrote the original script of all our Tuscan dreams of sun-opened flowers and hilltop villas.
‘O you who rejoice...
Be sweet, be useful, and even be true
It seems Horace wanted to fulfill this injunction, intending his poems to be ‘helpers of humanity’.
Perhaps another reason his...
Zeus dispenses with practicalities
Zeus here neatly rebuffs his daughter Athene's requests. I like his suitably arch reaction, which puts all supplicants in their...
Fate goes as ever fate must
This translation by Seamus Heaney rings like a proverb on the immutability of fate. Elsewhere, he brings it up close and...
Hopelessly insane: Homer fans
Here Christopher Logue highlights the sheer vital durability of Homer and the magnitude of such sustainability, kept alive through a...
Of wine and poetry
Here we have a poet and a vintner who connects the magic between wine and poetry. Wine can be poetic...
The tum-ti-tums of poetry
The best and most memorable summary of the difference between an 'iambic', a 'spondee' and a 'trochee', by the author...
Of facts and poetry
Having also tried various neat distinctions which inevitably crumble in the face of precise examples that don't fit, I liked...
Ever-present goodness
Sir Philip Sidney suggests that poetry can ease the pain of our 'death-dealing sins' by providing the consolation of 'never-leaving...
Poetry as a ship at sea
The sea flows through Beowulf's culture as much as any Greek epic, and its warriors are likewise mariners. Heaney uses...
The poetic dragon
One of the most imaginative tales in Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days concerns a reluctant dragon. He has no interest in dragonly archetypes:...
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