Poetry
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Monday October 20 2008
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Waves crash onto a beach. Photograph: Graham Turner
Dover Beach is a 'honeymoon' poem. Written in 1851, shortly after Matthew Arnold's marriage to Frances Lucy Wightman, it evokes quite literally the "sweetness and light" which Arnold famously found in the classical world, in whose image he formed his ideals of English culture. In fact, those public values are privatised in the very word the poem conjures for us: honeymoon. Dover Beach fundamentally seems to be about a withdrawal into personal values. Historical pessimism moves in swiftly as a tide. Continue reading...
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Friday October 17 2008
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The stranger side of childhood: identical twins of the 1950s. Photograph: George Marks/Getty
As a species, we often appear to have two deeply held but conflicting attitudes towards the period of our lives that we call childhood. On the one hand, children are seen as fragile, innocent and in need of protection. On the other, they are seen as inherently corrupt and threatening and we set up rituals, ranging from religious initiations to ASBOs, to protect ourselves from them. Continue reading...
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Thursday October 16 2008
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Little poetry, lots of prurience ... Sylvia Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) and Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig) in the movie Sylvia
The news that the British Library has bought an extensive archive of
Ted Hughes's s letters, drafts, and diaries, was heralded by curators this week as "critical to the study of 20th century poetry". If only that was the case. It seems obvious that the trawling of these letters for new morsels of private information, and the fresh batch of articles on Hughes's life they'll no doubt spawn, will have little, if anything, to do with poetry, and everything to do with gossip. Continue reading... -
Monday October 13 2008
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More than a figurehead ... Robert Burns. Photograph: Getty
Scotland's most famous poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796) has in common with Russia's Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) something other than immense popularity and iconic status as his country's national bard. Both Burns and Pushkin were pioneering writers in the vernacular. While the young Pushkin's latent genius was nourished on the folk tales and songs told him by his nanny, Arina Rodionovna, Burns as a child listened to the songs and stories of a widowed relative, Betty Davidson, who lived with the family in their Alloway cottage. Continue reading...
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Friday October 10 2008
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Working the land: a farmer in Malawi. Photograph: Martin Godwin
As the old joke goes, I love work; in fact, I could watch it all day. I suspect this is true for many of us, but the way things are going with the global economy, even opportunities to watch work may be strictly limited for some time to come. Who knows – we may all come to long for the days when we could actually find some to do ourselves.
There is a long tradition of writing about the joys and sorrows of labour. In the classical world, poetry tended more towards a celebration of the former. This is an attitude that can be traced back to the Greek poet Hesiod, whose long poem Works and Days is both an exhortation to an industrious life of self-sufficiency and a practical handbook for those who wish to follow that path. Continue reading... -
Thursday October 9 2008
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Mick Imlah and Kathryn Simmonds
One of the striking features of poetry in the UK at present is variety and this applies to the UK's three big poetry prizes, and how they operate, too. They are so various that poets who win one may not even be shortlisted for the others.
At one end is the TS Eliot prize, judged only by poets appointed by the Poetry Book Society. At the other is the Costa prize, judged by media people with some relation to the arts, plus a poet and another writer. Continue reading...
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Boarding a train can introduce a poet to a world of characters. Photograph: Don McPhee
Planes are too expensive, cars shouldn't even be considered. Little wonder, then, that the train is the poet's preferred mode of transport
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Tuesday October 7 2008
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In a decade when our main political parties compete over an ever narrower patch of middle ground, a decade when individual introspection has replaced collective action, from "Not-In-My-Name" anti-war slogans to individuals worrying about their own carbon footprints, almost no one feels they can "change the world". But how has this affected formally radical poetry's relationship to radicalism? Is politically radical poetry dead and buried? Continue reading...
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Monday October 6 2008
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'What are these Things, and of what Sex?' ... Barn owl chicks at a sanctuary in Leiferde, Germany. Photograph: EPA
Anne Finch, née Kingsmill (1661-1720), brings to the armoury of the Augustan poets her own fluent technique, crisp wit, moderation and common sense. Her satirical writing may be gentle, but it is politically astute. That she is perfectly able to stand up to Pope is demonstrated in "An Answer", her contribution to a not-too-acrimonious poetic debate concerning the capabilities of women poets and the value of "female wit". Continue reading...
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Friday October 3 2008
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Home no more ... a repossessed home in California. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty
Here in Ireland, the decade 1996 to 2006 witnessed an unprecedented rise in property prices, with double-digit inflation most years. It's a bubble that has, inevitably, just gone pop, and that pop is contributing in no small way to the current recession in the Irish economy.
One of the things that fascinated me about the so-called boom was the way it affected people's attitude to the place they lived in. I know that there have always been those who live by speculating in bricks and mortar, but suddenly everyone was at it. Any twenty-something who could get a 100% was buying-to-let, but nobody seemed at all interested in the idea of buying somewhere to settle themselves, at least until the kids had grown. Continue reading... -
Wednesday October 1 2008
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Surreal legacy ... Picasso in 1971. Photograph: Ralph Gatti/AFO
Pablo Picasso was, we know, the most influential artist of the 20th century. His innovations in perspective and technique dazzled (and sometimes baffled) the art world for decades, while paving the way for many of the important artistic movements of the last century. What we're inclined to overlook, though, is that Picasso was also a poet. Now it's not unusual for artists to work in mediums outside their own. What makes Picasso's experiment in poetry different, however, is the skill he displayed. In fact, it has been argued that if Picasso had never picked up paintbrush he would today still be remembered as a major Spanish poet. Continue reading...
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Monday September 29 2008
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Near the North Pole in the Russian Arctic. Photograph: Galen Rowell
The short life of Hart Crane (1899-1932) was packed with incident and accident. The child of a disastrous marriage, he left his birthplace in Ohio for New York at the age of 17, but he was consistently to feel at odds with 1920s America, even in its more Bohemian manifestations. His homosexuality apart, the visionary nature of his poetics set him at a difficult angle to his period. Ultimately, at the age of 33, he committed suicide; his body was never recovered from the Gulf of Mexico where he drowned. Continue reading...
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Friday September 26 2008
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The transforming power of atmospheric moisture ... Figures reflected in a rain-covered window in London. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak / Getty
Over the last few months, the cheapest and most readily-available form of entertainment here in the western half of Ireland has been looking through panes of glass at falling water. Rain: it's one of those natural phenomena that can be very difficult for nature to get right, and this year there's been just a touch too much, for my tastes at least. Continue reading...
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Monday September 22 2008
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Wordsworth's most grievous loss. Photograph: Martin Jones/Corbis
Wordsworth's sonnets are disclosures of intense emotion. Whether or not they have an identified addressee, they seem to require a listener. Wordsworth's poetic goal, expressed in the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, was to use direct, natural diction close to that of ordinary speech. The sonnets achieve this: their rhetoric, for the period, is naturalistic, their figures rarely complex. But they are dramatic - almost, at times, in a Shakespearean way (that of the plays rather than the sonnets). They ask to be heard, or overheard, because they seem to speak.
In a poem addressed to the frowning "critic", Scorn Not the Sonnet, we learn some of Wordsworth's own opinions about the form and its practitioners. How does his own work fit into the tradition? Milton's sonnets were a major influence on him, but Wordsworth writes neither the Miltonic sonnet of "soul-animating strains" nor "the glow-worm lamp" that "cheered mild Spenser", but a kind of combination. There is a certain grandeur about many of them, but it's a grandeur in carpet-slippers, natural and uninhibited. The tone is intimate, but not as intimate as a "glow-worm lamp". Continue reading...
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Friday September 19 2008
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The charms of Morpheus ... Photograph: AB/Getty
The ancient Greeks believed dreams to be messages sent to us by the gods to suit one divine purpose or another, the problem being that the dreamer could never be sure if their dream had been sent to instruct or deceive. For Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, they were windows into the human psyche through which our forbidden thoughts and desires might be glimpsed. One way or another, dreams have always fascinated and baffled us in equal measure.
Continue reading...
