W. B. Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

When i was at school in the 1970s my poetry text book could casually identify Yeats as ‘The Greatest Poet of the Twentieth Century’. If the claim seems premature, given there was a quarter of a century yet to run, changing fashions in academic approaches to poetry in that final quarter meant the claim took a battering. This isn’t the place to point out how limited and limiting those approaches were, but the poems have been resilient.

For me Yeats is the unavoidable English language poet. He was so very good at what he did. He wrote better lines, better images, better stanzas and better short poems than almost anyone else, and he did it more often. He also had the unusual capacity to go on getting better at what he did, thoughout a long writing life.

You can learn a great deal about writing poetry by reading Yeats carefully. But he’s also an enjoyable poet to read. If you have a copy of his collected that prints the poems in chronological order, you can start at the beginning and read through to the end as though you were reading a novel.

There will be much more of Yeats on future podcasts, the real problem he poses is which poems to read.

If you're interested in Yeats the man, he is the subject of a superb two volume biography by Roy Foster: 'W.B. Yeats a life'. Vol I: The Apprentice Mage, Vol 2 The Archpoet.

Rudyard Kipling's 'Mandalay'

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

I did say I did requests, and this was one.

My Copy of Kipling’s ‘Complete Verse, Definitive Edition’ ends with this short request:

The Appeal

If I have given you delight
By aught that I have done
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon

And for the little little span
The dead are borne in mind
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.

(Kipling)

So perhaps readers can forget what they think they know about the man’s politics, and take each poem on its own merits.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's 'They Flee From Me'

Sir Thomas Wyatt 1503-1542

The First great English poet? The first writer of great English lyric poems?

If you look behind Wyatt, it’s hard to find much that is worth reading between him and Chaucer. Since most modern readers don’t share Chaucer’s assumptions about poetry, Wyatt’s poems do feel like a new start. They are amongst the first English poems that can be read, as poems, by any literate reader for the pleasure they offer.

No matter how conventional or artificial the voice is, reading Wyatt is an encounter with a voice. Reading Wyatt’s collected is a depressing wade through forests of Tudor Pine, but there are gems and this is one of them. The idea that the woman in the second verse is Anne Boleyn is probably a critic’s fantasy.

Recently Wyatt was the subject of two excellent biographies, which complement each other. Nicola Shulman’s ‘Graven with Diamonds’ (2011) is very good on the poems and their place in the Court. Susan Brigden’s ‘Thomas Wyatt, the Heart’s Forest’ (2012) is a fine, detailed scholarly biography.

There will be more Wyatt on The Poetry Voice.

John Masefield's 'Cargoes'

John Masefield (1878-1967)

Does anyone still read Masefield? He was very popular in his own life time. He was the Poet Laureate for over thirty years. He may also be the only poet laureate to have been shanghaied.

But some poems are sufficient unto themselves, and this is one of them. It’s a pleasure to read. And a mini lesson in how to control rhythm.

It’s taken from ‘The Collected Poems of John Masefield’ . The publication details attest to his popularity…first published in 1923, it was reprinted 12 times before 1930, a new and enlarged edition, published in 1932, was reprinted four times before another ‘new and enlarged edition’ was printed in 1938. This was republished twice, the last time in 1942 which is the date of my copy.

Gerald of Wales 'Three stories from The Journey through Wales'.

Gerald of Wales (1145-1223)

My versions of three stories Gerald tells in ‘The Journey through Wales’. These are published in ‘A Presentment of Englishry’ (Shearsman 2019)

Gerald of Wales, or Gerald the Welshman (1145-1223), is one of the more fascinating characters of the twelfth century. A highly-educated, nobly born cleric, he made a career out of annoying people. He lectured Kings and Prelates undeterred by the fact they weren’t listening to him and he was witty, curious and an insatiable collector of stories. His ‘The Journey through Wales’, written in Latin Prose, can be read for pleasure, partly because Gerald takes breaks from telling the reader how brilliant he is, and how wrong everyone else is, to tell stories like these. 

The first ‘The scene of sorrows’ is a brutal miny tragedy, the second baffling, the third quietly humorous. They are curious artefacts from the past, to turn over and consider.

These poems first appeared as ‘Three Poems by Gerald of Wales’ in a translation special edition of ‘The High Window’.

Liam Guilar's 'Two stories from Bede'

These poems are from ‘A Presentment of Englishry’ (Shearsman Books, 2019) where they form the first of two ‘interludes’ between the three major narratives in the book.

Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’ was written in 731 AD.

Story One: Recovering Oswald’s Relics.

Oswald, King of Northumbria was defeated by Penda of Mercia in 642. Oswald’s body was dismembered and his head and limbs displayed on stakes. A year later, Oswald’s brother and successor, Oswiu, lead what modern media would describe as a ‘daring raid deep behind enemy lines’ to recover his brother’s head, hand and arm. The story about the raven is told by Reginald of Durham in the twelfth century.

I am intrigued by the reality of this story, hence the poem.

Story Two. The Death of King Sigbert of East Anglia

The details of Sigbert’s story are basically as told by Bede. He was another of Penda’s victims. Or of his upbringing. Or circumstance. How much choice do you have?

Jacqui Rowe's 'Done'

This is taken from Jacqui Rowe’s ‘Blink’ Published by V. Press in 2017.

Some background:

When John Donne married Anne Moore in 1601, he did so in secret and offended both her uncle, Sir Thomas Egerton who was Donne’s employer, and Anne’s father, who was ‘Lieutenant of the Tower’. They welcomed Donne into their family by throwing him in prison, along with the officiating priest and the marriage witness.

When released, and knowing his secular career was probably gone, Donne is supposed to have quipped: ‘John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone.’

John Donne's 'Song'

John Donne (1572-1631)

 Really John? Not one woman, anywhere?

I think most of Donne’s poems were published posthumously, and it may be that Donne never intended this particular piece to be printed. But it was, and I think it’s a fine example of a writing problem.

It’s easy to imagine someone who is hurt, feeling betrayed, confused and humiliated by someone he or she had trusted.  You wouldn’t expect them to be thinking clearly for a while.  They might say things they’d later regret.

It’s also easy to imagine someone in that situation turning to poetry as a form of catharsis.

But when you’ve expressed your bitterness and confusion, after you lashed out at whoever hurt you, what do you do with the end product?

Show it to a few friends, who understand your situation and sympathize, without taking your exaggerations seriously or as representing what you normally believe?

Show it to the individual who hurt you? As a form of revenge?

Publish it?

The modern fashion for selfie poems would seem to approve the last choice. But once the poem is published and available to strangers, it shifts the way it asks to be read. It goes from being a private, contingent howl, a statement of an emotion the poet should grow out of, to a public statement of considered fact that’s going to be around long after the emotion that inspired it has been reconsidered.

And once published readers have every right to feel that there is something wrong with this poem. The beautiful opening line, the obvious metrical control, the inventive images, the obvious skill of the maker, all seem strange vehicles for such an obviously out of control argument. 

 

Liam Guilar's 'Prologue to the stories of Vortigern'

It’s the week the podcast turns fifty, so something unusual to celebrate. This is from ‘work in progress’. I needed to hear how it sounded.

A Presentment of Englishry (Shearsman 2019) ends in the ruin of Roman Britain and points forwards to the story of Vortigern, Hengist and Rowena.

I’m currently working on that story. The ‘historical background’ is set out on www.liamguilar.com under ‘The Legendary History’.

This Prologue is set in Britain in the mid sixth century. A small group of survivors are fleeing west and north. They seek shelter from a storm in a ruined villa, where they find a solitary old man living in the rubble.

To pass the time, they tell a story. It’s a familiar one; the story of Vortigern. It’s so well known everyone contributes. The old man claims he was a participant. No one believes him.

This prologue, if it’s ever finished, will provide a narrative overview which will be contested, confirmed or denied by the story that follows it.

A ‘Latimer’ was a translator. Vortigern’s translator was called Keredic.

Liam Guilar's 'Lute Recitals'

The Poetry Voice is fifty! And here is something different to celebrate.

This poem was inspired by a contrast; Allan Alexander’s ‘Castles In the Sky’, a Cd that alterted me to the pleasures of the lute, and a bizarre conversation with a lutenist, who derided ‘Castles in the Sky’ for not being ‘Authentic’. Apparently everything has to be ‘authentic’. I started wondering what an authentic Dowland performance would have been like.

The music i’m playing in the background is Allan’s ‘Dance of the Washerwoman’….his guitar arrangement of a Renaissance lute piece.

‘Lute Recitals’ first appeared in the journal 'Southerly' and then in my book, "I'll Howl before you bury me'.

Edna St. VIncent Millay's 'Bluebeard'.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950).

This sonnet first appeared in ‘Renascence and Other Poems’. (1917). It’s a version of the Bluebeard story., perhaps best known in Perrault's tale from the 17th century.

By the twenty-first century the rewritten fairy tale has become a genre of its own. Angela Carter aside, few attempts are as interesting as Millay's original use of this story.

Christina Rossetti's 'A Chilly Night'.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

At some stage i will get round to reading her ‘Goblin Market’ which is a poem I admire very much. But it requires a day when no dogs bark, no one rings the door bell, the wind isn’t rattling the windows and the traffic is muted or slient. Until such a day, this strange piece.

It’s not in my copy of ‘Selected Poems’, but in a fascinating anthology called ‘Poets on Poets’ (1997) edited by Nick Rennison and Michael Schmidt and published by Carcanet.

Paula Meehan's 'My Father perceived as a vision of St. Francis'

Paula Meehan 1955-

I first heard Meehan’s voice when she was being interviewed on ABC Radio, back in the day when the ABC had its token one hour poetry program. She had the kind of voice I wanted to borrow and bring home. I would invite it to stay and ask it to read bulky instructional booklets for long lost appliances. I would be attentive to every syllable the voice uttered no matter what it was reading.

Some voices are like that.

I scrambled to find her poems. it’s a poetry of Dublin domestic, and that is more compliment than description. You can sometimes be forgiven for thinking all British and Irish poets were born wearing cloth caps, and grew up on farms speaking obscure but ancient dialects. While writing odes to vegetables, they can effortlessly help a cow calve, skin rabbits with their teeth, and name the fifty two different species of flowers growing on the family dung heap.

Meehan’s is an urban poetry of streets and small houses, gardens, markets, meetings. The view from the upstairs window to the fields beyond. Flecked through with humour and rage and non-sentimental compassion. I come from Coventry. It makes sense.

This poem is the first in the collection ‘Pillow Talk’, Gallery Press 1994

Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ozymandias'

Percy B. Shelley. (1792-1822) A close tie with Wordsworth for my least favorite Romantic Poet. But this is one of the classic poems in English, and since it was requested by a friend, here it is.

A few posts back in the notes to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I mentioned Richard Holmes’ superb biography of Coleridge. He also wrote a superb biography of Shelley. Didn’t make P.B.S sound like someone I’d like to meet, but it is an excellent biography.

And yes, if you wish to hear a poem read, send suggestions via the website and I’ll see what I can do.

Charlotte Mew's 'The Farmer's Bride'

This poem is taken from ‘Modern Women Poets’ edited by Deryn Rees-Jones (Bloodaxe 2005). It’s an excellent anthology, as is the companion volume of analysis, ‘Consorting with Angels’.

I know very little about Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) despite my attempts to learn more. But I admire this poem because it creates the Farmer’s Bride through the incomprehension of the farmer. A modern writer would probably be more stident, condemn the farmer as an animal, and bore the reader.

But Mew suggests his incomprehension is genuine. His feeling that something unnatural is happening is grounded in his version of what is natural which is reflected in the animals and changing seasons around him. The poem both accepts this and criticises it as limited.

The poem allows the reader to sympathise with both characters.

This makes it far more interesting, and thought provoking, than something which beats the reader with slogans.

Lesley Saunders' 'Ephemera'

This is the second reading from ‘Nominy Dominy’ Two rivers press, 2019.

I love this because it celebrates something I care about.

Whether you call it culture, or civilisation, it’s the result of a fragile paper trail, and it relies on the saints and scholars and scribes, and the anything but saintly students of the word, whether the word is Greek or Latin or Arabic, whether the religion is Christian or Muslim, Hindu or Bhuddist, whether sacred text or medical treatise, this thing called culture relies for its survival on the humans who often stuffed a book in their pocket or their bag before they ran, and on the men and women who spent lifetimes translating, copying, deciphering, who were curious and cared for something both precious and fragile in their own varied ways.

And despite the barbarians and their barbaric indifference, there have always been those who cared.

‘The infidel tribe of philologues’ doesn’t make the history books that often. But without them there are no books, and no history.

Saunders dedicated ‘Ephemera’ to Jo Balmer.

Byron's 'To Thomas Moore'

George Gordon, Lord Byron, mad bad and dangerous to know unless you were one of his small circle of friends, and Thomas Moore was one of them. Poems about friendships aren’t that common, and this is one of the better ones. It’s self-conscious, over-exaggerated, and humerous as though the genuine sentiment had to be protected by the bluster. That doesn’t make the sentiment any less genuine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

STC, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Hundreds of thousands have written and published poetry over the centuries, and very, very few of them wrote poems that are still worth reading. An even smaller number might be justifiably called ‘original’. STC was one of these, and he produced a body of work that is unlike anyone else’s. Before he wrecked his talent on an excess of Drugs and Wordsworth which both had a disasterous effect on his lack of self-confidence, he produced some of the outstanding poems in English.

It’s hard to believe now that Wordsworth was embarassed by The Rime and even tried to drop it from later editions of ‘Lyrical ballads’, claiming it had been ‘an injury to the volume’. But this was the man who dumped the first part of Christobel.

It’s even harder to believe the reaction to the poem amongst some of the critics: ‘A poem of little merit’ said one, another, Charles Burney, in the Monthly Review, wrote ‘..the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper; yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintelligble wildness and incoherrence, (of which we do not perceive the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast) there are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind’.

This is taken from Coleridge, sellected poems, Edited by Richard Holmes.

Anyone interested in Coleridge should read Holmes’ 2 volume biography, which is one of the great literary biographies.