Poetry
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Several times a year, we attend the opera — that is, we wander over to the Metropolitan Opera widescreen HD broadcasts at our local movie theater. Last week, it was Dvorak's Rusalka –overproduced, over-costumed, a mighty silly story, but nevertheless glorious. Sung in Czech. Of course, I didn't understand a word, but then I never do expect to…
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One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this brilliant piece of poetry: Crosspatch, Draw the latch. …
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The granddaughter, Lola, age 6 and a bit, has been reading to me — a child's version of Romeo and Juliet. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets distresses her. "Why do they have to fight. Why can't they just talk about it? Why don't they use their words?"
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I never "got" T. S. Eliot. When I first became serious about poetry and "intellectual" stuff, in the 50s, Eliot was the presiding grand khan of English literature. Because Eliot liked Donne, my teachers liked Donne. Because Eliot was down on Milton, my teachers were down on Milton. Eliot had pronounced that "a dissociation of thought and feeling" occurred in the later seventeenth…
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At a restaurant at the corner of Jena and Freret, the over-tattooed waitress, acknowledging our appreciation of the greens, fennel and kumquat salad, said, memorably, "People do not understand the beauty of the kumquat." An excellent instance of found poetry. And all the more brilliant in context, because I myself once asserted that "kumquat" is the most obscene-sounding…
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Edward Thomas died at the battle of Arras, in France, in April of 1917. He was thirty-nine years old. In this picture, he looks intense, suspicious, soulful, possibly even poetic, — but not the suffering-soul-kind of poet. When he joined the military, he transformed himself into the stereotype of an officer. The new "look"…
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I did not know that Edward Thomas sometimes made use of the entries in his journal as the raw material for his poetry. His practice is not unique. Ben Jonson boasted that he wrote all his poems in prose first, then re-wrote them into verse. So I decided to try an experiment. I took a…
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I've just finished a genuinely wonderful new biography by Matthew Hollis called Now All Roads Lead to France, a Life of Edward Thomas. I'm dazzled, and glad to be so. The book is carefully and comprehensively researched, literate, sensible, and compassionate. Its author is confident enough not to overwhelm the poor reader with pounds of extraneous…
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From a mosquito bite to his lip. Rupert Brooke was an immensely talented young poet, best known today for the hyper-nationalistic World War I sonnet, "The Soldier." He lived for just twenty-eight years and his death was a tragedy for letters. It's easy to be skeptical about the mosquito. I've been in the company of…