Poetry
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The fairly small number of Hardy’s poems that I read as an undergraduate have been among my favorites ever since. “The Darkling Thrush,” for instance, is one that I probably think of as often as I think of any poetry, and I made it the first in the 52 Poems series that appeared here in
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A friend heard Kenneth Branagh recite this poem in the film Coming Through, which is about D.H. Lawrence's affair with Frieda Weekley, who left her husband for him. The poem is in the dialect of Lawrence's native Nottinghamshire, and my friend liked the way it sounded but couldn't understand some of it. So she looked
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The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every
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Not exactly or only the nativity–the Incarnation, the boldness of it. Glorious the sun in mid career; Glorious th' assembled fires appear; Glorious the comet's train: Glorious the trumpet and alarm; Glorious th' almighty stretch'd-out arm; Glorious th' enraptur'd main: Glorious the northern lights a-stream; Glorious the song, when God's the theme; Glorious the
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Most of the poetry I read is from the 19th and 20th centuries. The tendency of the first is strongly in the direction of passion; of the second, of alienation and obscurity. Both tend to treat the experience of poetry, both as writer and reader, as a somewhat eccentric thing, very much off the track
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Today, November 22nd, is St. Cecilia's feast day (and also that other day that many of us remember). Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern observes the occasion with Dryden's "Song For St. Cecilia's Day," a wonderful poem which you should read. Read it twice, actually: once slowly and perhaps haltingly for comprehension, making sure
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It occurred to me just now as I was typing it that I could quibble with the title of this anthology. The date refers to the lives of the poets included, not to the dating of the poems. The oldest of the poets, Paul Mariani, was born in 1940. So I doubt that any poem
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Cluny Media is a publisher whose main line of business is the reprinting of Catholic classics, or classics which are in some way connected to and compatible with the Catholic tradition. And when I say reprinting I don't mean a sloppy scan of an old book run through a print-on-demand process. I mean very high-quality
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I read The Prelude in a Norton Critical Edition collection, Wordsworth's Poetry and Prose. Like all the excellent NCEs, this volume includes a selection of criticism from Wordsworth's own time to ours, or nearly–that depends on what you're willing to encompass in "our time." I was following my usual practice of avoiding talk about the
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Why "thing"? I couldn't decide on the right word. Calling it a "journal" or "publication" doesn't seem quite accurate, though the former would do. Neither does calling it a "site," as it's one of a great many…things…at Substack.com. It is in fact a Substack entity. Somehow referring to a specific Substack, as simply that: "a
Light On Dark Water 