Tag: Poetry

Campaign to make Jeremy Prynne the new poet laureate

Charlotte Higgins is only joking, in her piece on the Guardian Culture blog: Jeremy Prynne for poet laureate! But I think it’s a great idea. He may write obscure and difficult poems, but wouldn’t it be refreshing to get the nation scratching its head on a regular basis? And after all, he is the most… Continue reading Campaign to make Jeremy Prynne the new poet laureate

Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams

I found this link, with audio of a lecture by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams. The notes say: First half of a class by Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams and prosody. Included are discussions on Williams’s poems: “Thursday,” “To Elsie,” “Horned Purple,” and “The Term.” This class also covers the importance of Williams… Continue reading Allen Ginsberg on William Carlos Williams

Poetry’s Popularity Soars Online: Telegraph

In light of traffic figuresto the Poetry Archive website, which is delivering 1 million page views a month and reaching 125,000 unique users, Andrew Motion suggests that the internet is providing a better medium for poetry than books: “Either books have not been doing the job or they are being outmanoeuvred by the internet.” Full… Continue reading Poetry’s Popularity Soars Online: Telegraph

The Theme of Regret in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry

One of Thomas Hardy’s most powerful themes is, as Joanna Cullen Brown puts it, that ‘one awakes to understanding too late’. Many of his poems cover this territory, but take the Self Unseeing as an example: Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet… Continue reading The Theme of Regret in Thomas Hardy’s Poetry

Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13: Ghosts, Memory and the Presence of the Past

Throughout Thomas Hardy’s Poems of 1912-13, written after the sudden death of his first wife and originally published in the volume Satires of Circumastance, there’s a dominant theme of ‘haunting’, in both the supernatural and the psychological sense. Often this is a direct allusion, such as in the poem The Haunter, where the ghost of… Continue reading Thomas Hardy’s Poems 1912-13: Ghosts, Memory and the Presence of the Past

Analysis: Second Glance at a Jaguar by Ted Hughes

Much of Ted Hughes’s early animal poetry is an attempt to capture the ‘Real’ in nature. Here he is not concerned with the effect of nature on man’s sensibilities but with ‘the thing itself’. One of his most successful poems in this respect is Second Glance at a Jaguar. The poem literally gets under the… Continue reading Analysis: Second Glance at a Jaguar by Ted Hughes

Audio: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage

Diane Middlebrook, the author of Hughes and Plath: A Marriage, discusses her book, and the influence that these two great poets had on each other and their work, in a podcast produced by Stanford University. It’s well worth listening to for an understanding of the context of their poetry, as well as providing an insight… Continue reading Audio: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage

Analysis: Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop

Elizabeth Bishop’s Sandpiper is concerned with the particular. Through a controlled tightening of focus, like the turn of the lens on a telescope, Bishop draws our attention ever closer to the minutiae of existence, of which the bird is solely conscious: from the water glazing over its feet, to its toes, to the spaces between… Continue reading Analysis: Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop