Poets and Poems: Yvor Winters and "Selected Poems"

It was the Roaring Twenties, the age of the Lost Generation, T.S. Eliot’s poetry modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, speakeasies, Art Deco, keeping cool with Coolidge, and Expressionism. Everything in art and literature was fair game and often was. And young poets like Yvor Winters fit right into the moment. 

In Yvor Winters: Selected Poems, poet and critic Thomas Gunn tells us that Winters (1900-1968) began his poetry career when he was 20, and was something of a maverick, or avant garde poet. He published his first (and very short) collection, The Immobile Wind, in 1921, and followed it a year later with another short collection, The Magpie’s Shadow. He invented a poetic form, a single six-syllable line; his description of spring rain being “My doorframe smells of leaves.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Christina Rosetti: A Woman for All Seasons – Tessa Carman at Acton Institute. 

 

The Cook’s Second Tale, from The ‘Lost” Canterbury Tales – Paul Freeman at Society of Classical Poets. 

 

A Hobbit’s Journey Home: Crossing the Atlantic and the Tiber – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

10 Great Medieval Vibes Photos to Inspire Your Writing – Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Emma Lazarus and “Selected Poems”

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was a remarkable poet and writer by almost any definition. Born to a wealthy family in New York City, she saw her first poetry collection privately published by her father in 1866 and her first commercially published collection in 1867. She published translations of German poets. She published a second poetry collection a novel, and a play. 

In the 1880s, following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a period of pogroms against the Jewish population became official policy in Russia (the same pogroms led the parents of poet Charles Reznikoff to emigrate to America). Lazarus, mindful of her own Jewish heritage, turned to poetry and prose to protest the persecutions in Russia as well as the struggles of Jewish emigrants and citizens in the United States, articulating what she saw as the necessity of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Fantastic Modes; Or, Is Magical Realism Just Urban Fantasy? – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Remembering William Stafford, Whose Poetic Region Was All the World – Steve Paul at Literary Hub. 

 

Women Praying – poem by Jason Myers at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

“Belling the Cat” and “The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs” from Aesop’s Fables – Rob Crisell at the Society of Classical Poets.

 

Contemporary American Poets That Every Catholic Should Read (not to mention the rest of us) – an interview with James Matthew Wilson at Five Books for Catholics.

Yes, Edith Wharton Was Also a Poet

One of my favorite novels is Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. I first read it when I was 16, for my high school English class my junior year. It wasn’t required reading; my final class term paper was on three novelists of the Realist period – Wharton, Willa Cather, and Jack London. I found myself walloped by Wharton’s novel; I went on to read The House of Mirth and Age of Innocence and discovered that Ethan Frome was the major exception to what she usually wrote. 

Wharton (1862-1937) came from New York upper class families on both sides. And it was the upper class that she usually wrote about. Ethan Frome is the story of a New England villager who experienced an accident, as his fellow residents of Starkfield, Massachusetts, will tell you. The story begins more than two decades after the “smashup;” only gradually do we learn what actually happened. A man whose life was filled with misery made a single dash for freedom and happiness, only to compound his misery with tragedy. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Reading John Greenleaf Whittier, the "Abolitionist Poet"

Way back in high school (that’s way, way back), I always liked the poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892). I think it may have been more because of his middle name (it sounds vaguely Hobbit-ish) than any connection I made with his poetry. It also may have been a result of my English teachers defining 19^th century poetry as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Emily Dickinson. 

Whittier is known, now as well as when he was alive, as the “Abolitionist Poet.” His poetry included subjects and themes far beyond slavery, but it was those poems which made his reputation when he was alive. He lived a long life – almost 85 years. He saw his abolitionist sentiments become legal reality after a long, bitter, and destructive Civil War. He never married and had no family; he also outlived most of his friends and contemporaries. 

To continue reading, please see my post at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Francis Ledwidge: Reconsidering a War Poet

Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917) has not been one of the better-known poets of World War I. At first glance, this seems puzzling.

He saw action at Gallipoli, in the Balkans, and in the trenches in France and Flanders. His first collection of poetry was published in 1914, entitled Songs of the Fields. A second was being prepared for publication when he was killed during the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as Passchendaele) on July 31, 1917, just shy of his 30^th birthday. He was known, rightly or wrongly, as the “peasant poet,” which did him some injustice but which also helped to sell his poems and his poetry book. He didn’t come from the British upper and upper middle classes, like so many of the war poets, but his lack of reputation wasn’t a class thing.

Instead, it was a political thing. Ledwidge was Irish, and an Irishman who volunteered for the British Army. He was also an Irish Nationalist, but not like his more radical countrymen. He believed that fighting for Britain against the Germans would help Ireland gain independence. The fact that he was Irish didn’t help him or his reputation with the British, and the fact that he fought for the British didn’t help his reputation with the Irish.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

A Mistake Becomes a Discovery: John Holmes

Who was John Holmes?

I was working on two articles, both about lexicographer Samuel Johnson. One was a literary tour of his house in London; the other was how the man known for his great dictionary had a career actually bookended by poetry.

I had ordered the book Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage by Richard Holmes, a recent publication readily available on Amazon. For some reason, there was trouble fulfilling the order, but I was finally notified that the book had shipped. When it arrived, it wasn’t the book by Richard Holmes; it was a used book entitled Selected Poems of John Holmes. I contacted the shipper; they checked their records and discovered they had sent the wrong book. The right book was sent, and they refused my offer to send the John Holmes book back, telling me to keep it at no charge for my inconvenience.

I had never heard of John Holmes, but I had heard of the man who had written the introduction – the poet and literary critic John Ciardi. The first translation I had read of Dante’s The Divine Comedy was the one by Ciardi. Holmes had been one of Ciardi’s professors at Tufts University, and a revered professor at that. He had also had a great influence upon a number of poets, including Richard Wilbur, Anne Sexton, and May Sarton.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Poet John Holmes about 1940.