LOUIS MACNEICE (1907 - 1963)

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast (Ulster) in 1907 and he died in London in 1963. He studied in Balliol College (Oxford University), where he met W. H. Auden and other great poets of the times. He became a member of the so called "Auden Group" or "Oxford Group" of poets. The poet Roy Campbell gave them the nickname of "The MacSpaunday Group" in his Talking Bronco collection of poems to appoint a "blend" of a single being made up of the four poets: "Mac" after "MacNeice"; "Sp" after "Stephen Spender"; "au-n" after "W. H. Auden"; and "day" after "Cecil Day-Lewis". "But it wasn't a relation of equals, the MacSpaunday poets were usually considered notable not because of how closely they resembled one another, but because of how much the other three looked like Auden" (David Orr). Like Roy Campbell, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, he visited Spain, but not during the Spanish Civil War. He visited Barcelona in 1936, right the outbreak of the Civil War and before the city fell to Franco. His long poem (3,000 lines) Autumn Journal(1938),that consists of 26 cantos, also gives a short account of his personal experience in Spain in its Canto V. His poetry is very varied, though there is a common denominator: the strong popular rhythmic patterns to be noticed throughout his poetry regardless its meaning or message.

Photo of three of the "Auden Group" with T. S. Eliot: MacNeice first on the left; Cecil Day, second from the left; T. S. Eliot; W. H. Auden.

Biographical account and literary career

Photo of the "Auden Group" with T. S. Eliot in the middle, from left to right: Louis MacNeice; Stephen Spender; T. S. Eliot; W. H. Auden; Cecil Day-Lewis.

"BAGPIPE MUSIC"

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.
It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It’s no go your maidenheads, it’s no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture.
The Laird o’ Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife ‘Take it away; I’m through with overproduction’.
It’s no go the gossip column, it’s no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother’s help and a sugar-stick for the baby.
Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn’t count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.
It’s no go the Herring Board, it’s no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.
It’s no go the picture palace, it’s no go the stadium,
It’s no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It’s no go the Government grants, it’s no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.

Comment on "Bagpipe Music".

"PRAYER BEFORE BIRTH"

I am not yet born; O hear me.
 Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
   club-footed ghoul come near me.

 I am not yet born, console me.
 I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
     on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

 I am not yet born; provide me
 With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
     in the back of my mind to guide me.

 I am not yet born; forgive me
 For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
   when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
     my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
       my life when they murder by means of my
         hands, my death when they live me.

 I am not yet born; rehearse me
 In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
   old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
     frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
       waves call me to folly and the desert calls
         me to doom and the beggar refuses
           my gift and my children curse me.

 I am not yet born; O hear me,
 Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
   come near me.

 I am not yet born; O fill me
 With strength against those who would freeze my
   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
     would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
       one face, a thing, and against all those
         who would dissipate my entirety, would
           blow me like thistledown hither and
             thither or hither and thither
               like water held in the
                 hands would spill me.

 Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
 Otherwise kill me.

A helpful class on "Prayer Before Birth".

Bibliography:

MacNeice, Louis, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: OUP, 1967.

MacNeice, Louis, Oración antes de nacer (Selección, traducción y prólogo de Eduardo Iriarte). Barcelona: Lumen, 2005 (Bilingual Edition: English/Spanish).

McDonald, Peter, Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Context. London: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice, London: Faber and Faber, 1976.

RUDYARD KIPLING (1865 - 1936)

Rudyard Kipling's poetry seems to be much more complex than his novels and short stories, though we should add that, in spite of this possible difficulty, his poetry brings out a particular stress and sense of rhythm that provides a singular tone and rhythmic pattern to his verses. "His poetry demonstrates that, despite his reputation, Kipling's skills were far beyond those of Edwardian versifier. On the contrary, he was a great modernist poet crafting his work out of the rawest materials of life, as contemporary in his outlook as Pound or Picasso. In his Introduction and in his choice of Kipling's work, Craig Raine reassess the poet's gifts, in particular his use of imagery, rhythm and sound".

"The Virginity"

Virginity (Nicola Berry)

Try as he will, no man breaks wholly loose
  From his first love, no matter who she be.
Oh, was there ever sailor free to choose,
  That didn't settle somewhere near the sea?

Myself, it don't excite me nor amuse
  To watch a pack o' shipping on the sea;
But I can understand my neighbour's views
  From certain things which have occured to me.

Men must keep touch with things they used to use
  To earn their living, even when they are free;
And so come back upon the least excuse --
  Same as the sailor settled near the sea.

He knows he's never going on no cruise --
  He knows he's done and finished with the sea;
And yet he likes to feel she's there to use --
  If he should ask her -- as she used to be.

Even though she cost him all he had to lose,
  Even though she made him sick to hear or see,
Still, what she left of him will mostly choose
  Her skirts to sit by. How comes such to be?

Parsons in pulpits, tax-payers in pews,
  Kings on your thrones, you know as well as me,
We've only one virginity to lose,
  And where we lost it there our hearts will be!

"A Ballade of Burial"

The Burial of Casagemas (Pablo Picasso)

("Saint Praxed's ever was the Church for peace")

If down here I chance to die,

Solemnly I beg you take

All that is left of "I"

To the Hills for old sake's sake,

Pack me very thoroughly

In the ice that used to slake

Pegs I drank when I was dry --

This observe for old sake's sake.

To the railway station hie,

There a single ticket take

For Umballa -- goods-train -- I

Shall not mind delay or shake.

I shall rest contentedly

Spite of clamour coolies make;

Thus in state and dignity

Send me up for old sake's sake.

Next the sleepy Babu wake,

Book a Kalka van "for four."

Few, I think, will care to make

Journeys with me any more

As they used to do of yore.

I shall need a "special" brake --

'Thing I never took before --

Get me one for old sake's sake.

After that -- arrangements make.

No hotel will take me in,

And a bullock's back would break

'Neath the teak and leaden skin

Tonga-ropes are frail and thin,

Or, did I a back-seat take,

In a tonga I might spin, --

Do your best for old sake's sake.

After that -- your work is done.

Recollect a Padre must

Mourn the dear departed one --

Throw the ashes and the dust.

Don't go down at once. I trust

You will find excuse to "snake

Three days' casual on the bust."

Get your fun for old sake's sake.

I could never stand the Plains.

Think of blazing June and May

Think of those September rains

Yearly till the Judgment Day!

I should never rest in peace,

I should sweat and lie awake.

Rail me then, on my decease,

To the Hills for old sake's sake.

"If"

The Energy of Our Ancestors (Voula)

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run --

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

Useful Bibliography:
Kipling, Rudyard, Selected Poetry. London: Penguin, 2001.
Kipling, Rudyard, Poemas. Sevilla: Editorial Renacimiento, 2002 (Bilingual Edition: English/Spanish).
Kipling, Rudyard, El himno de McAndrew y otros poemas. Sevilla: Editorial Renaciiento, 2006 (Bilingual Edition: English&Spanish).

Webliography:

Kipling's Poems

New Spanish-English dual language edition of Ray Bradbury's poetry published by Catédra

THE CENTER FOR RAY BRADBURY STUDIES (Indiana University, IU School of Liberal Arts)

http://iat.iupui.edu/bradbury/news/new-spanish-english-dual-language-edition-ray-bradburys-poetry-published-catédra

Posted on October 3, 2013

News Section:

• General Announcements

Professor Dr. Jesus Isaias Gómez López of the University of Almería (Spain) has recently published his dual-language edition of Ray Bradbury's poetry. The editor's description of the volume, as well as a link to the publisher's web site, appear below:

"Bradbury, Ray: Ray Bradbury, poesía completa, Cátedra, Madrid, 2013. This title is the first compilation of Ray Bradbury’s poetry arranged in chronological order of appearance. The book, published in an English and Spanish volume, includes all the poems from The Collected Poetry of Ray Bradbury, They Have Not Seen The Stars, seventeen additional previously published poems, and, most notably, two Bradbury poems published for the first time in this edition. Ray Bradbury, poesía completa begins with an in-depth analysis of Bradbury's poetry by the translator and editor, Professor Dr. Jesús Isaías Gómez López. The introduction demonstrates that Ray Bradbury’s body of poetry constitutes one of the greatest aesthetic, phenomenological, and scientific legacies of the creative spirit of the twentieth century. This annotated edition provides 155 textual notes to the introduction and 205 textual notes on the poems. The edition presents a comprehensive approach to Bradbury's poems, which illustrates the poet-philosopher's enormous imaginative universe."

http://www.edicionescatedra.es/fichaGeneral/ficha.php?obrcod=735595&web=01

http://iat.iupui.edu/bradbury/news/new-spanish-english-dual-language-edition-ray-bradburys-poetry-published-catédra

RAY BRADBURY (1920-2012)

Ray Bradbury posing on the "Time Machine" used in the movie The Time Machine (1960) based on H. G. Well's novel.

RAY BRADBURY, POESÍA COMPLETA

Link to TV Review on this bilingual edition on Television Española, "La aventura del Saber", minute 53:20

Right in the fifties, Ray Douglas Bradbury was already the writer who could instill a new world of ideas in the imagery of science fiction and fantasy. After literary recognition with the publication of The Martian Chronicles (1950), he reached popularity and became a literary celebrity with the publication of his first and only science-fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451 (1953). Bradbury conceives Science-fiction as "an utopian ideal" that allows him to rebel against society and the established and immutable order. During the last period of his literary career, he found in poetry the best way to express "The demands of our time", within his personal and unique utopian conception of the idea of science-fiction.

During the decades of the 70s and 80s, Bradbury's literary interests moved particularly to poetry, for almost thirty years he would be writing poetry and as a result of this dedication and love for poetry he published the following poetry books: "When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" (1973), in which as it is noticed in the title (a parody of Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed") the poet tries to speak with Walt Whitman and with all the romantic and naturalist tradition of poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries; Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns (1977); This Attic Where the Meadow Greens (1979); The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (1981); Death Has Lost its Charm for Me (1987); The Complete Poems of Ray Bradbury: They Have not Seen the Stars (2002); I Live by the Invisible: New And Selected Poems (2002), all the poems, except 7, from this last publication were already published in the previous books of poetry.

This new bilingual (English-Spanish) edition of Catedra brings together, for the first time in Spanish and in English the five books of poems published by the author throughout his life chronologically, and most importantly, it also includes a final Appendix with poems that had never been published before. This edition also provides a Introduction to Bradbury's poetry in which the style, the poetic voices and the different "dimensions" of the poems are analyzed from different approaches. Moreover, the edition is also annotated (209 notes on the poems).

The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies (School of Liberal Arts, Indiana University, USA)

Direct link to Editorial Catedra: Ray Bradbury, Poesía completa (edición bilingüe) / Ray Bradbury, collected poetry (bilingual edition)

Five Poems with permission of Ediciones Cátedra.

La última vez que los elefantes florecieron en el jardín (1973)

IF I WERE EPITAPH

What would I say of me,
If I were Epitaph?
That there were silly bones in him?
The grim but made him laugh?
The jolly made him serious?
The glum made him delirious?
That lawyers talked him sleepy,
And made him snooze at noon,
But bed was his by nine o’clock
So he could rise with moon?
Androll upon the meadows
While other people dreamed,
With windows up and chilly
He smiled and only steamed?
They sealed him in a coffin
But could not make him stay,
His laugh too large, his smile too wide For any Death to lay?
No matter what the molder,
The maggot in his bin,
No measuring-worm could inch and cir- Cumnavigate his grin?
If Universe should claim me
And keep me with a sleep
I’d open up my laughter
And drop the Abyss deep;
There we would lie all friendly,
The empty stars and I
And speak upon Creation
And with God occupy

The time that’s left for burning, A billion years to sup,
Then open wide God’s laughter And let Him eat me up.

SI YO FUERA UN EPITAFIO

¿Qué diría de mí
si yo fuera un epitafio?
¿Que él tenía los huesos molidos?
¿Que la muerte le hizo reír?
¿Que la alegría lo volvió taciturno?
¿Que la melancolía le hizo delirar?
¿Que los abogados le convencieron adormilado,
y le hicieron echarse una siesta al mediodía,
pero él seguía en la cama a las nueve en punto
para poder lenvantarse así con la luna?
¿Y corretear por los prados
mientras otra gente dormía,
con las ventanas abiertas y aireadas
él sonreía y sólo echaba vapores?
Lo precintaron en un ataúd
pero no lograron que se quedara,
¿era su risa demasiado grande, su sonrisa demasiado ancha para que la Muerte lo tumbara?
No importa el moldeador,
ni la lombriz que hay en su caja,
¿ningún gusano medidor podría avanzar a rastras y cir- cumnavegar su rictus?
Si el Universo tuviera que reclamarme
y guardarme en un sueño
yo estallaría en carcajadas
y hundiría el Abismo en las profundidades;
allí todos yaceríamos cordialmente,
las estrellas vacías y yo
y hablaríamos sobre la Creación
y con Dios nos apoderaríamos

del tiempo que ha sido echado al fuego,
un billón de años que ir tragando poco a poco, y luego abrir de par en par las risas de Dios
y dejarLe comerme del todo.

(Courtesy of ediciones Cátedra)

Donde los ratones robot y los hombres robot circulan por ciudades robot (1977)

I DIE, SO DIES THE WORLD

Poor world that does not know its doom, the day I die.
Two hundred million pass within my hour of passing,
I take this continent with me into the grave.
They are most brave, all-innocent, and do not know
That if I sink then they are next to go.
So in the hour of death they Good Times cheer
While I, mad egotist, ring in their Bad New Year.
The lands beyond my land are vast and bright,
Yet I with one sure hand put out their light.
I snuff Alaska, doubt Sun King’s France, slit Britain’s throat,
Promote old Mother Russia out of mind with one fell blink,
Shove China off a marble quarry brink,
Knock far Australia down and place its Stone,
Kick Japan in my stride. Greece? quickly flown.
I’ll make it fly and fall, as will Green Eire,
Turned in my sweating dream, I’ll Spain despair,
Shoot Goya’s children dead, rack Sweden’s sons,
Crack flowers and farms and towns with sunset guns.
When my heart stops, the great Ra drowns in sleep,
I bury all the stars in Cosmic Deep.
So, listen, world, be warned, know honest dread.
When I grow sick, that day your blood is dead.

(Courtesy of ediciones Catedra).

Este ático en el que verdecen las praderas (1979)

IF PEACHES COULD BE PAINTERS

If peaches could be painters
And paint themselves each day, Would they incline toward Renoir Or grow themselves Monet?
How grow the summer fruit trees, Do they blush with Renoir,
Or tincture selves with sunsets That only Monet saw?
No matter, there the sap runs
In colors like God’s blood,
Renoir and Monet blended
And ripened toward the Good. And where Renoir stops painting And where Monet starts spell, Only the ripe-fruit summer
Can know, but will not tell.

SI LOS MELOCOTONES PUDIERAN SER PINTORES

Si los melocotones pudieran ser pintores
y pintarse todos los días,
¿se inclinarían por Renoir
o se convertirían en Monet?
¿Cómo maduran los frutales del verano?
¿Se ruborizan con Renoir?,
¿o se tiñen a sí mismos con los atardeceres
que sólo viera Monet?
No importa, allí corre la savia
con colores como la sangre de Dios,
Renoir y Monet se mezclaron
y tomaron el Mejor color.
Y donde Renoir deja de pintar
y donde Monet empieza a extasiar,
sólo la madura fruta del verano
puede saberlo, pero no lo dirá.

(Courtesy of Ediciones Cátedra)

La computadora encantada y el papa androide (1981)

OF WHAT IS PAST, OR PASSING, OR TO COME

Of what is past, or passing, or to come,
These things I sense and sing, and try to sum.
The apeman with his cave in need of fire,
The tiger to be slain, his next desire.
The mammoth on the hoof a banquet seems,
How bring the mammoth down fills apeman’s dreams. How taunt the sabertooth and pull his bite?
How cadge the flame to end an endless night?
All this the apeman sketches on his cave
In cowards’ arts that teach him to be brave.
So, beasts and fire that live beyond his lair
Are drawn in science fictions everywhere.
The walls are full of schemes that sum and teach,
To help the apeman reach beyond his reach.
While all his ape-companions laugh and shout:
«What are those stupid blueprints all about?!
Give up your science fictions, clean the cave!»
But apeman knows his sketching chalk can save,
And knowing, learning, moves him to rehearse
True actions in the world to death reverse.

With axe he knocks the tiger’s smile to dust,
Then runs to slay the mammoth with spear thrust;
The hairy mountain falls, the forests quake,
Then fire is swiped to cook a mammoth steak.
Three problems thus are solved by art on Wall:
The tiger, mammoth, fire, the one, the all.
So these first science fictions circled thought
And then strode forth and all the real facts sought,
And then on Wall new science fictions drew,
That run through history and end with... you.

SOBRE LO PASADO, LO PRESENTE O LO QUE ESTÁ POR VENIR

De lo que ha pasado, pasa o está por pasar,
estas cosas siento y canto, e intento recopilar.
El hombre-mono en su cueva que necesita fuego,
el tigre que ha de ser matado, su próximo deseo.
El mamut vivo parece un banquete,
cómo derribar al mamut colma los sueños del hombre-mono.
¿Cómo incordiar al felino y arrancar su mordisco?
¿Cómo aprovechar la llama hasta concluir una noche interminable?
Todo esto el hombre-mono bosqueja en su cueva
con las artes de los cobardes que le enseñan a ser valiente.
Así, las bestias y el fuego que viven más allá de su guarida están dibujados en la ciencia ficción por todas partes.
Las paredes están llenas de esquemas que suman y enseñan
a ayudar al hombre-mono a llegar más allá de sus posibilidades.
Mientras todos sus compañeros-mono se ríen y gritan:
«¡¿De qué van todos esos dibujos?!
deja tu ciencia ficción, ¡limpia la cueva!».
Pero el hombre-mono sabe que puede guardar su tiza de dibujar,
y sabiendo, aprendiendo, se mueve para ensayar
las verdaderas acciones del mundo para derrocar la muerte.

Con el hacha aporrea la sonrisa del tigre hasta hacerla polvo,
luego corre a matar el mamut embistiéndolo con lanzas;
la peluda montaña se derrumba, los bosques tiemblan,
luego el fuego se aviva para cocinar un filete de mamut.
Tres problemas son así resueltos por el arte de la pared:
el tigre, el mamut, el fuego, el uno, el todo.
Así toda esta primera ciencia ficción rondaba el pensamiento
y luego daba zancadas adelante y todos los hechos reales
[exploraba, y entonces en la pared otra ciencia ficción dibujaba,
que recorre la historia y termina... contigo.

(Courtesy of Ediciones Cátedra).

La muerte para mí ha perdido su encanto (1987)

GO PANTHER-PAWWED WHERE ALL THE MINED TRUTHS SLEEP

Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawwed where all the mined truths sleep To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of wealth
Springs up unseen, ignored, and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.
On your return along the jungle path you’ve made Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed; The small truths and the large have surfaced there Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware
Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined
In easy game of pace and pounce and find;
But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce. Attention must be paid, but by the ounce,
Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile
And metaphors like cats behind your smile
Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride.
Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside,
Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake Turned anteloping elephants that shake
And drum and crack the mind to awe,
To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.
Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty’s male,
Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.
This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,
Go panther-pawwed where all the mined truths sleep.

(Courtesy of Ediciones Cátedra).

STEPHEN SPENDER

(1909 - 1995)

Born in London on February 28th, 1909 in London, he was educated at University College (Oxford), where he met, among others, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and Louis MacNeice, with whom he was to develop a poetics of engagement and political commitment, writing powerfully of the confusion and alarm of 1930s Europe. He visited Spain during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937, where he assisted the Republican cause with propaganda activity. His pot-war memoir World Within World was recognized as one of the most illuminating literary autobiographies to have come out of the 1930s and 1949s, distilling a distinctively personal, humanistic socialism. His poetry has always been praised for its exploratory candor, its personal approach to the stresses of modernity, and its exact portraiture of social and political upheaval. His Spanish experience gave as a result quite a few poems inspired by the Spanish conflict. He composed poems telling his first-hand experience and view of the question and he also edited a "treasure" with John Lehmann, Poems for Spain, a collection of poems by poets, intellectuals and even soldiers who fought for the official Spanish Government (la Republica) against Franco. Some of the poems included in this volume are written by anonymous soldiers who died in the trenches. The edition would be published by The Hogarth Press, in London, in 1939. The poems I have chosen for our blog are born and inspired in Spain. The first one is dedicated to his friend Manuel Altolaguirre, a Spanish poet, script writer and film producer who worked on several movies with Luis Buñuel. Manuel Altolaguirre had invited Stephen Spender and many other European Intellectuals to participate on the Second International Writers Congress in Defence of Culture against Fascism held in Valencia in 1937. He had founded La Alianza de Intelectuales Antifascistas with other Spanish intellectuals like María Zambrano, Maux Aub, Rafael Alberti, Miguel Hernández among many other essential names of the Spanish letters of the times. The next three poems are an intimate portrait of the Spain he depicted.

"Ideally, the artist should transform the environment into his own world. But since we live in bodies, which are dressed in clothes, which inhabit buildings, which are parts of cities, which are placed in countries, the most we can expect to see art realize in our surroundings is a struggle between utility and an enhancing uselessness. The reason why 'poets adore ruins' and why —to almost everyone— its ruin can make a hideous modern building seem beautiful, may be that destruction celebrates the triumph of the useless over the useful". (Stephen Spender 1952: "Inside the Cage": The Making of a Poem, New York: Norton & Company, p. 16).

TO A SPANISH POET

(For Manuel Altolaguirre)

You stared out of the window on the emptiness

Of a world exploding:

Stones and rubble thrown upwards in a fountain

Blasted sideways by the wind.

Every sensation except loneliness

Was drained out of your mind

By the lack of any motionless object the eye could find.

You were a child again

Who sees for the first time things happen.

Then, stupidly, the sulphur stucco pigeon

Fixed to the gable above your ceiling

Swooped in a curve before the window

Uttering, as it seemed, a coo.

When you smiled,

Everything in the room was shattered;

Only you remained whole

In frozen wonder, as though you stared

At your image in the broken mirror

Where it had always been silverly carried.

Thus I see you

With astonishment whitening in your gaze

Which still retains in the black central irises

Laughing images

Of a man lost in the hills near Malaga

Having got out of his carriage

And spent a week following a partridge;

Or of that broken-hearted general

Who failed to breed a green-eyed bull.

Beyond the violet violence of the news,

The meaningless photographs of the stricken faces,

The weeping from entrails, the vomiting from eyes,

In all the peninsular places,

My imagination reads

The penny fear that you are dead.

Perhaps it is we who are unreal and dead,

We of a world that revolves, dissolves and explodes

While we lay the steadfast corpse under the ground

Jut beneath the earth's lid,

And the flowering eyes grow upwards through the grave

As through a rectangular window

Seeing the stars become clear and more clear

In a sky like a sheet of glass,

Beyond these comedies of fallen stone.

Your heart looks through the breaking body,

Like axle through the turning wheel,

With eyes of blood.

Unbroken heart,

You stare through my revolving bones

On the transparent rim of the dissolving world

Where all my side is opened

With ribs drawn back like springs to let you enter

And replace my heart that is more living and more cold.

Oh let the violent time

Cut eyes into my limbs

As the sky is pierced with stars that look upon

The map of pain,

For only when the terrible river

Of grief and indignation

Has poured through all my brain

Can I make from lamentation

A world of happiness,

And another constellation,

With your voice that still rejoices

In the centre of its night,

As, buried in this night,

The stars burn with there brilliant light.

(Selected Poems, pp. 64-66)

AT CASTELLON

Backed to the brown walls of the square

The lightless lorry headlamps stare

With glinting reflectors through the night

At our gliding star of light.

Houses are tombs, tarpaulins cover

Mysterious trucks of the lorries over.

The town vacantly seems to wait

The explosion of a fate.

Our cigarettes and talking stir

Beneath the walls a small false ember.

A sentry stops us at his hut

Stamping with his rifle-butt.

Beside him stands a working man

With cheeks where suns have run.

'Take this comrade to the next village.'

The lines ploughed with ravage

Lift to a smile, the eyes gleam

And then relapse into their dream.

Head bent, he shuffles forward

And in without a word.

The car moves on to suns and time

Of safety for us and him.

But behind us on the road

The winged black roaring fates unload

Cargoes of iron and of fire

To delete with blood and ire

The will of those who dared to move

From the furrow, their life's groove.

(Selected Poems, pp. 58-59)

Bird's-Eye View of Castellón de la Plana

PORT BOU

Bird's-Eye View of Port Bou

As a child holds a pet

Arms clutching but with hands that do not join

And the coiled animal watches the gap

To outer freedom in animal air,

So the earth-and-rock flesh arms of this harbor

Embrace but do not enclose the sea

Which, through a gap, vibrates to the open sea

Where ships and dolphins swim and above is the sun.

In the bright winter sunlight I sit on the stone parapet

Of a bridge; my circling arms rest on a newspaper

Empty in my mind as the glittering stone

Because I search for an image

And seeing an image I count out the coined words

To remember the childish headlands of this harbor.

A lorry halts beside me with creaking brakes

And I look up at waving flag-like faces

Of militiamen staring down at my French newspaper.

"How do they speak of our struggle, over the frontier?"

I hold out there paper but they refuse,

They did not ask for anything so precious

But only for friendly words and to offer me cigarettes.

In their smiling faces the war finds peace, the famished mouths

Of the rusty carbines brush against their trousers

Almsot as fragilely as reeds;

And wrapped in a cloth -old mother in a shawl-

The terrible machine-gun rests.

They shout, salute back as the truck jerks forward.

Over the vigorous ill, beyond the headland.

And old man passes, his running mouth,

With three teeth like bullets, spits out "pomp-pomp-pom."

The children run after; and, more slowly, the women

Clutching their clothes, follow over the hill.

Till the village is empty, for the firing practice,

And I am left alone on the bridge at the exact centre

Where the cleaving river tricks like salive.

At the exact centre, solitary as a target,

Where nothing moves against a background of cardboard houses,

Except the disgraceful scurrying dogs; and then the firing begins,

Across the harbor mouth from headland to headland,

White flecks of foam gashed by lead in the sea

And the echo trails over like an iron lash

Whipping the flanks of the surrounding hills.

My circling arms rest on the newspaper,

My mind seems paper where dust and ink falls,

I tell myself the shooting is only for practice,

But my body seems a cloth which the machine-gun stitches

Like a sewing machine, neatly, with cotton from a reel;

And the solitary, irregular thin "puffs" from the carbines

Draw on long needles white threads through my navel.

(Poems for Spain, p. 90).

FALL OF A CITY

All the posters on the walls

All the leaflets in the streets

Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain,

Their words blotted out with tears,

Skins peeling from their bodies

In the victorious hurricane.

All the names of heroes in the hall

Where the feet thundered and the bronze throats roared,

FOX and LORCA claimed as history on the walls,

Are now angrily deleted

Or to dust surrender their dust,

From golden praise excluded.

All the badges and salutes

Torn from lapels and from hands

Are thrown away with human sacks they wore,

or in the deepest bed of mind

They are washed over with a smile

Which launches the victors when they win.

All the lessons learned, unlearnt;

The young, who learned to read, now blind

Their eyes with an archaic film;

The peasant relapses to a stumbling tune

Following the donkey's bray;

These only remember to forget.

But somewhere some word presses

On the high door of a skull, and in some corner

Of an irrefrangible eye

Some old man's memory jumps to a child

-Spark from the days of energy.

And the child hoards it like a bitter toy.

(Selected Poems, pp. 56-57)

References:

Grey Gowrie (ed.) 2009: Stephen Spender, Selected Poems, London: Faber & Faber.
Stephen Spender & John Lehmann 1939: Poems for Spain, London: The Hogarth Press.
Stephen Spender 1952: The Making of a Poem, New York: Norton & Norton.
Stephen Spender 2009: Poemas de España, Valencia: Pre-textos.
The Paris Review (Interview)

LAURIE LEE

(1914 - 1997)

Laurence Edward Alan was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and educated at Slad village school and at Stroud Central School. At the age of nineteen he walked to London and then travelled on foot through Spain, where he was trapped by the outbreak of the Civil War, to which he would later return by crossing the Pyrenees (as described in his book As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning). He published five books of poems: The Sun My Monument (1944), The Bloom of Candles (1947), My Many-Coated Man (1955), The Pocket Poets (1960) and Selected Poems (1983). His other works include a verse play for radio, The Voyage of Magellan (1948); a record of his travels in Andalusia, A Rose for Winter (1955); his best-selling autobiography, Cider With Rosie (1959); and I Can't Stay Long (1975). His last book, Two Women (1983) was a collection of his photographs, with his own accompanying text. While in Spain, he met accidentally Roy Campbell and his wife in Toledo, where Laurie Lee was playing his flute and singing as a street musician. They met in a tavern. They became great friends, but they would finally break up their friendship after Roy Campbell supported Franco with his poems and Laurie Lee joined the International Brigades against Franco.

From left to Right, with The Alcázar of Toledo in the background: Laurie Lee, Roy's Wife (Mary Garman) and Roy Campbell.

"The evening now was close and smoky. The lamp was lit, and the great doors shut. I was getting used to this pattern of Spanish life, which could have been that of England two centuries earlier. this house, like so many others I'd seen already, held nothing more than was useful for living —no fuss of furniture and unnecessary decoration, being as self-contained as the ark. Pots, pans, the chairs and tables, the manger and drinking trough, all were of wood, stone, or potter's clay, simply shaped and polished like tools. At the end of the day, the doors and windows admitted all the creatures of the family: father, son, daughter, cousin, the donkey, the pig, the hen, even the harvest mouse and the nesting swallow all bedded together at the fall of darkness" (Chapter 4: Zamora, Toro: As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning, p. 74).

MUSIC IN A SPANISH TOWN

Patio Cordobés, Oil on Canvas by Carmen Medina

In the street I take my stand

with my fiddle like a gun against my shoulder,

and the hot strings under my trigger hand

shooting an old dance at the evening walls.

Each saltwhite house is a numbered tomb

each silent window crossed with blood;

my notes explode everywhere like bombs

when I should whisper in fear of the dead.

So my fingers falter, and run in the sun

like the limbs of a bird that is slain,

as my music searches the street in vain.

Suddenly there is a quick flutter of feet

and children crowd about me,

listening with sores and infected ears,

watching with lovely eyes and vacant lips

(Córdoba, 1936)

GUADALQUIVIR

Guadalquivir, Oil on Canvas, by José Luis Suárez Suárez

Here on this desert plain

the fields are dust,

strangled by wind,

burnt by the quicklime sun.

But where the river's tongue

scoops out its channel deep

across the iron land

trees grow, and leaves

of vivid green

force back the baking air.

Fish and small birds

do strike with diamond mouths

the windows of the water,

while memories of song

and flowers flow

along the slender cables

of the mud.

So to the wires of love

do my limbs leap,

so does your finger draw

across my arid breast

torrents of melting snow

on threads of seed.

STORK IN JEREZ

Image of Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Jerez de la Frontera

White arched, in loops of silence, the bodega

Lies drowsed in spices, where the antique woods,

Piled in solera, dripping years of flavor,

Distil their golden fumes among the shades.

In from the yard —where barrels under fig trees

Split staves of sunlight from the noon's hot glare—

the tall stork comes; black-stilted, sagely-witted,

Wiping his careful beak upon the air.

He is a priestlike presence, he inscribes

Sharp as a pen his staid and written dance,

Skating the floor with stiffened plumes behind him,

Gravely off-balance, solemn in his trance.

Drunk on these sherry vapors, eyes akimbo,

He treads among the casks, makes a small leap,

Flaps wildly, fails to fly —until at last,

Folded umbrella-wise, he falls asleep.

So bird and bard exchange their spheres of pleasure:

He, from his high-roofed nest now leveled lies;

Whilst I, earth-tied, breathing these wines take wing

And float amazed across his feathered skies.

Laurie Lee "The House of Peace-Granada" from A Rose for Winter, p. 60: "Granada is probably the most beautiful and haunting of all Spanish cities; an African paradise set under the Sierras like a rose preserved in snow. Here the art of the nomad Arab, bred in the raw heat of deserts, reached a cool and miraculous perfection. For here, on the scented hills above the green gorge of the Darro, he found at last those phantoms of desire long sought for in mirage and wilderness —snow, water, trees and nightingales. So on these slopes he carved his palaces, shaping them like tents on slender marble poles and hanging the ceilings with decorations like icicles and the walls with mosaics rich as Bokhara rugs. And here, among the closed courts of orange trees and fountains, steeped in the languors of poetry and intrigue, he achieved for a while a short sweet heaven before the austere swords of the Catholic Kings drove him back to Africa and to oblivion".

Granada, La Alhambra y Sierra Nevada, Oil on Canvas, by Chico Montilla

Almuñécar, oil on canvas, by Chico Montilla

References:

Niall Binns "El Violinista de Almuñécar" 2004: La llamada de España: Escritores extranjeros en la Guerra Civil (See chapter: El violinista de Almuñécar: Los dos viajes de Laurie Lee), Valencia: Montesinos, pp. 94 - 116).

Laurie Lee 1969: As I walked Out One Midsummer Morning, New York: Atheneum.

Laurie Lee 1991: A Moment of War, London: Penguin.

Laurie Lee 1955: A Rose for Winter: Travels in Andalusia, London: Penguin.

Laurie Lee Official Website

El violinista de Almuñécar

Revisiting Laurie Lee's Spain

Laurie Lee and Andalusia

Laurie Lee's Daughter

W. H. DAVIES

William Henry Davies, born on July 3, 1871, in Newport (Wales), is best known today for his popular poem "Leisure", included in many anthologies since its first publication in 1911. Jobless, penniless and homeless for most of the first half of his life, Davies roamed the streets from the Welsh docklands to North America, losing his leg free riding a train in Ontario along the way. At forty he wrote his life story, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, which made him famous. He befriended G. B. Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Dame Edith Sitwell and other influential writers and artists of the times. He found himself at the centre of London's literary life during and after the First World War. Retiring to the Cotswolds with his wife, a former prostitute half his age. The story of his marriage with Helen, who outlived him for forty years, came to light in an autobiographical novel published years after his death, Young Emma. W. H. Davies died in 1940 leaving his copyright and estate to a small boy he had never met, the grandson of a local chemist who supplied prescriptions for him while living his last days in Cotswolds.

LEISURE

What is this life, if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare,

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

THE WHITE MONSTER

Last night I saw the monster near; the big

White monster that was like a lazy slug,

That hovered in the air, not far away,

As quiet as the black hawk seen by day.

I saw it turn its body round about,

And look my way; I saw its big, fat snout

Turn straight towards my face, till I was one

In coldness with that statue made of stone,

The one-armed sailor seen upon my right-

With no more power than he to offer fight;

The great white monster slug that, even then,

Killes women, children, and defenceless men.

but soon its venom was discharged, and it,

Knowing it had no more the power to spit

Death on the most defenseless English folk,

Let out a large, thick cloud of its own smoke;

And when the smoke had cleared away from there,

I saw no sign of any monster near;

And nothing but the stars to give alarm--

That never did the earth a moment's harm.

Oh, it was strange to see a thing like jelly,

An ugly, boneless thing all back and belly,

Among the peaceful stars-- that should have been

A mile deep in the sea, and never seen:

A big, fat, lazy slug that, even then,

Killed women, children, and defenceless men.

REFERENCES:

The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp

William Henry Davies, The Complete Poems of W. H. Davies, London, Cape, 1968.

Barbara Hooper, Time to Stand and Stare, A Life of W. H. Davies, the Tram-Poet, Peter Owen, London, 2004.

OGDEN NASH (1902 - 1971)

Born Frederick Ogden Nash on August 19, 1902 in Rye (New York), mostly regarded as a poet who composed humorous light verse, it is true he reached popularity for these sort of puns and rhymes; nevertheless, we was the creator of an inimitable and illimitable poetic style that draws the lyric voice to a unique specialization of ordinary speech.

"I have never in my life said anything other than laudatory

Of the work of Ogden Nash, whose innovations were chiefly auditory,

Meaning that he brought a new kind of sound to our literary diversions

And didn't care much about breaking the poetic laws of the Medes and the Persians.

He uses lines, sometimes of considerable length, that are colloquial and prosy

And at the end presents you with a rhyme, like a twin-flowered posy

Or really, when you come to think of it, a pair of dwarf's gloves.

This bringing together of the informal and the formal is what his genius chiefly loves"

(Anthony Burgess, "Introduction" to Candy is Dandy: The Best of Ogden Nash, André Deutsch, London, 1981)

MORE ABOUT PEOPLE

When people aren't asking questions

They're making suggestions

And when they're not doing one of those

They're either looking over your shoulder or stepping on your toes

And then as if that weren't enough to annoy you

They employ you.

Anybody at leisure

Incurs everybody's displeasure.

It seems to be very irking

To people at work to see other people not working,

So they tell you that work is wonderful medicine,

Just look at Firestone and Ford and Edison,

And they lecture you till they're out of breath or something

And then if you don't succumb they starve you to death or something.

All of which results in a nasty quirk:

That if you don't want to work you have to work to earn enough money

(so that you won't have to work.

SPECULATIVE REFLECTION

I wonder if the citizens of New York will ever et sufficiently wroth

To remember that Tammany cooks spoil the broth.

THE OYSTER

The oyster's a confusing suitor;

It's masc., and fem., and even neuter.

But whether husband, pal or wife

It leads a painless sort of life.

I'd like to be an oyster, say,

In August, June, July or May.

THE LAMA

The one-l lama,

He's a priest.

The two-l llama,

He's a beast.

And I will bet

A silk pajama

There isn't any

Three-l lllama.

THE KITTEN

The trouble with a kitten is

THAT

Eventually it becomes a

CAT.

I HAPPEN TO KNOW

Hark to the locusts in their shrill armadas.

Locusts aren't locusts. Locusts are cicadas.

To seals in circuses I travel on bee lines.

Seals aren't seals. Seals are sea lions.

I'm a buffalo hunter. Want to see my license?

Buffaloes aren't buffaloes. Buffaloes are bisons.

I'm too old to be pedantically hocus-pocused.

I'll stand on the buffalo, the seal and the locust.

THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN IS MEN

A husband is a man who two minutes after his head touches the pillow is snoring like an overloaded

[omnibus,

Particularly on those occasions when between the humidity and the mosquitoes your own bed is no

[longer a bed, but an insomnibus.

And it you turn on the light for a little reading he is sensitive to the faintest gleam,

But if by any chance you are asleep and he wakeful, he is not slow to rouse you with the complaint

[that he can't close his eyes, what about slipping downstairs and freezing him

[a cooling dish of pistachio ice cream.

His touch with a bottle opener is sure,

But he cannot help you get a tight dress over your head without catching three hooks and a

[button in your coiffure.

Nor can he so much as wash his ears without leaving an inch of water on the bathroom linoleum,

But if you mention it you evoke not a promise to splash no more but a mood of deep melancholium.

Indeed, each time he transgresses your chance of correcting his faults grows lesser,

Because he produces either a maddeningly logical explanation or a look of martyrdom which

[leaves you instead of him feeling the remorse of the transgressor.

Such are husbandly foibles, but there are moments when a foible ceases to be a foible.

Next time you ask for a glass of water and when he brings it you have a needle almost threaded

[and instead of setting it down he stands there holding it out to you, just kick

[him fairly hard in the stomach, you will find it throughly enjoible.

REFERENCES:

Isabel Eberstadt (ed), Candy is Dandy: The Best of Ogden Nash, André Deutsch, London, 1981

ARCHIBALD MACLEISH (1892 - 1982)

Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois, on May 7, 1892. After completing his education at Yale University and at Harvard Law School, he moved to Paris, where he spent five years during which he published his first books of verse. He was heavily influenced by two of the greatest modernist poets of his age: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

From 1949 - 1962 he was the Boylston Professor at Harvard. Alonge among the leading figures of modern American poetry, he was involved himself in the great events of his time. He was Librarian of Congress (1933 - 1944), during which time, working also as a columnist and broadcaster, he became an important opinion-maker in the United States who alerted his fellow citizens of the threat of fascism in Europe.. He was also Assistant Director of the Office of War Information (1942 - 1943), Assistant Secretary of State (1944 - 1945), and the first American member of the Board of UNESCO, in 1946.

In his volume Poetry and Experience (Penguin, 1960) he delivered his considered verdict on the nature of poetry. As a literary critic, with this title, he discussed the function of words, images, and metaphors. He then went on to study these in relation to four major poets: Emily Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, Rimbaud, and Keats. MacLeish made the assumption (as he put it) "That our deepest human need is to make sense of our lives", and the proposition "that poetry is one -and in some ways the most effective- of the means by which life can be brought to sense". His approach was to examine how a poem works on our emotions, and how it is related to the experience which inspired it. The result is a clear and sensitive introduction to one of the best ways to appreciate poetry.

As an essay writer he illustrated his concern with the issues of the modern world, and included titles such as The American Cause, A Time to Speak, A Time to Act, Poetry and Opinion, and Freedom is the Right to Choose. Combining the roles of a poet and a man of affairs, MacLeish was uniquely qualified to speak on that crux of debate for every generation of poets, the relation between poetry and experience.

"The man about to be poet is a man lost in himself. He is not capable of outward vision but only of inward ... He is a solipsist, a candle flame consuming its own fat, a pearl diver emerging blind and breathless from the ocean of himself" ("Words as Sounds", in Poetry and Experience, p. 15).

ARS POETICA

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone

Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless

As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time

As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean

But be.

AN ETERNITY

There is no dusk to be,
There is no dawn that was,
Only there's now, and now,
And the wind in the grass.

Days I remember of
Now in my heart, are now;
Days that I dream will bloom
White the peach bough.

Dying shall never be
Now in the windy grass;
Now under shooken leaves
Death never was.

THE END OF THE WORLD

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing -- nothing at all.

REFERENCES AND WEBSITES

Funny Student's School Project on Archibald MacLeish's life and career.

Annual Tribute to Archibald MacLeish

Bernard A. Drabeck, Hellen E. Ellis (eds.), Archibald

MacLeish: Reflections, University of Massachusetts, 1986.

Archibald MacLeish, Poetry and Experience, London,

Penguin, 1960.

------------------------, Collected Poems, New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1985.

WALLACE STEVENS (1879 - 1955)

Over the six decades since his death, Wallace Stevens has steadily grown in the estimation of literary historians, who generally rank him with Yeats and Eliot. In his times, he was regarded in his profession as "the dean of surety-claims men." Wallace Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania. He credited his businessman-lawyer father for his rational, practical side and said his imagination came from his mother, a schoolteacher who read to her children from the Bible each night. Stevens, nevertheless, acquired his agnosticism at Harvard University. At Harvard, Stevens also came under the influence of philosopher William James, the study of Nietzsche, the post-Darwinian universe and he would be heavily influenced by the Spanish-American George Santayana and his ideas about the mind's imaginative relation to physical reality and religion as an imaginative construct. In 1900 Stevens left Harvard without a degree and went to New York where he worked as a reporter. With publication of the Collected Poems in 1954, Stevens finally received wide recognition when the book was awarded both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. After a short illness, he died on August 2, 1955.

Throughout his work Stevens is concerned with fundamental questions -above all, how to find meaning in a world where orthodox belief is no longer tenable. But for Stevens the "disappearance of the gods" is not cause for despair, because in disillusionment mankind also finds freedom, liberation from outmoded concepts such as providential authority. Without the consolations of the old myths or support from theological frameworks, humanity feels alone and dispossessed but still has the will to believe and a "blessed rage for order". Stevens lamented that a celebratory "poetry of the earth" had yet to be formed, and in his own work he insists, instead of indulging in nostalgia for religion and "empty heaven" -"aesthetic projections of a time that has passed" -that people in their changed consciousness nut "resolve life and the world on [their] own terms".

THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Useful Websites:

Original video-musical composition with hip-hop and rap rhythms based on "The Emperor of Ice-Cream".

Slide-Reading composition of "The Emperor of Ice-Cream".

Colorful Video-Reading of "Anecdote of the Jar".

Students' reading of "Anecdote of the Jar", supported with appropriate video images.

The Wallace Stevens Society.

Major References:

Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Vintage Books, New York, 1990.

James Longenbach, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991.

Edward Ragg, Wallace Stevens and the Aesthetics of Abstraction, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010.

SEAMUS HEANEY

(1939 - 2013)

Seamus Heaney has been internationally the most famous poet writing in English till last August 30th, when he unfortunately passed away. He has also been the most significant Irish poet since W. B. Yeats. Paradoxically, Seamus Heaney was born in 1939, the year of W. B. Yeats's death. But aside from nationality and popularity and Nobel Prize recognition, the two poets share not a great deal and are in fact often antithetical in ideas and in style. In contrast to Yeats's self-consciously dramatic gestures, high-flown and flamboyant rhetoric, and esoteric notions and occult theories, Heaney's manner is straightforward, his voice plainspoken (though exceptionally musical and perfectly pitched), and his focus down-to-earth, literally. From the primeval soil and peat bogs and the fields of his father and farming ancestors he draws his inspiration and deepest reflections on the history of Ireland.

He was raised as a member of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland and, therefore, he had to tread conflicting political, religious, and social lines carefully. In spite of being very tactful, he never escaped criticism from both sides of the border when he refused to be a "spokesman" for either. Throughout his work Heaney's abiding concerns have been perennial human issues that transcend sectarian causes —love and work, parenthood and family bonds, the personal burdens and gifts of memory. All in all, like, Leopold Bloom, the major character of Ulysses, by James Joyce, another great Irish master of the word, Heaney is also another "citizen of the world" or, put it better, we should say "a poet of the world".

PUNISHMENT

I can feel the tug

of the halter at the nape

of her neck, the wind

on her naked front.

It blows her nipples

to amber beads,

it shakes the frail rigging

of her ribs.

I can see her drowned

body in the bog,

the weighing stone,

the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first

she was a barked sapling

that is dug up

oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head

like a stubble of black corn,

her blindfold a soiled bandage,

her noose a ring

to store

the memories of love.

Little adulteress,

before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,

undernourished, and your

tar-blac face was beautiful.

My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you

but would have cast, I know,

the stones of silence.

I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed

and darkening combs,

your muscles' webbing

and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb

when your betraying sisters,

cauled in tar,

wept by the railings,

who would connive

in civilised outrage

yet understand the exact

and tribal, intimate revenge.

BLACKBERRY-PICKING

Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached out boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely capfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

LIMBO

Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,

A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly

Till the frozen knobs of her wrists

Were dead as the gravel,

He was a minnow with hooks

Tearing her open.

She waded in under

The sign of the cross.

He was hauled in with the fish.

Now limbo will be

A cold glitter of souls

Through some far briny zone.

Even Christ's palms, unhealed,

Smart and cannot fish there.

Useful websites on Seamus Heaney:

The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry

The Poetry Foundation

Irish Writing Blog

Channel 4 Interview (1999)

Blackberry Picking, read by Seamus Heaney

Useful Bibliography:

Atfield, Joy Rosemary, A Jungian Reading of Selected Poems of Seamus Heaney, Bloomington, Edwin Mellen Press, 2007.

Cavannagh, Michael, Professing Poetry: Seamus Heaney's Poetics, Boston, Catholic University of America Press, 2009.

Heaney, Seamus, Selected Poems, Opened Ground: Selected Poems (1966 - 1996), New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.

Montezanti, Miguel Ángel, Seamus Heaney en sus textos: Identidades de un poeta moderno, Mar de Plata, Eudem, 2009.

ANNE SEXTON (1928 - 1974)

She was born Anne Gray Harvey, in Newton, Massachussetts, November 9, 1928. She grew up in an apparently well-to-do surrounding, though life at home was not that pleasant. It is well know that her father was an alcoholic and that both parents could have also abused her. She also had trouble in school and would be sent to a boarding school where she started writing poetry. With the passage of time, she would be serving in the Korean War, she also became a fashion model and she finally married a salesman with whom she had two daughters. She suffered from depressions and attempted suicide several times. Her alcoholism and repeated suicided attempts kept friends on edge and alienated many, which increased her isolation.
Her husband became abusive and as a result she started being unfaithful to him. In 1973 she decided to put an end to her marriage. Her physical and mental health declined noticeably while relations with her daughters were also really difficult. Once she was divorced and living alone, she had several affairs and continued therapy, without any relief. On October 4, 1974, she met Maxine Kumin, an old friend, for lunch, then drove home and asphyxiated herself in the garage. A fatal ending in much the same way as Sylvia Plath's suicide.

Her poetry has always been praised for its technical skill. In spite of her constant mental breakdowns, she became a glamorous figure and highly popular as a reader. She received honorary degrees and taught at Colgate and then, from 1969 until her death, at Boston University. After the publication of her Love Poems (1969) she achieved her greatest critical and popular success. All her books of poems are pioneering, presenting deep personal problems directly as well as from a distinctively female point of view, and resonate with many different readers, quality and style than can specially be noticed in her book Transformations (1972), a self-assertive feminist manifesto. The following poems capture the essence and gist of her talent and major themes.

HOUSEWIFE

Some women marry houses.

It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,

a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.

The walls are permanent and pink.

See how she sits on her knees all day,

faithfully washing herself down.

Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah

into their fleshy mothers.

A woman is her mother.

That's the main thing.

IN CELEBRATION OF MY UTERUS

Everyone in me is a bird.

I am beating all my wings.

They wanted to cut you out

but they will not.

They said you were immeasurably empty

but you are not.

They said you were sick unto dying

but they were wrong.

You are singing like a school girl.

You are not torn.

Sweet weight,

in celebration of the woman I am

and of the soul of the woman I am

and of the central creature and its delight

I sing for you. I dare to live.

Hello, spirit. Hello, cup.

Fasten, cover. Cover that does contain.

Hello to the soil of the fields.

Welcome, roots.

Each cell has a life.

There is enough here to please a nation.

It is enough that the populace own these goods.

Any person, any commonwealth would say of it,

“It is good this year that we may plant again

and think forward to a harvest.

A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this:

one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,

one is at the aquarium tending a seal,

one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,

one is at the toll gate collecting,

one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,

one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,

one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,

one is dying but remembering a breakfast,

one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,

one is wiping the ass of her child,

one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is

anywhere and some are everywhere and all

seem to be singing, although some can not

sing a note.

Sweet weight,

in celebration of the woman I am

let me carry a ten-foot scarf,

let me drum for the nineteen-year-olds,

let me carry bowls for the offering

(if that is my part).

Let me study the cardiovascular tissue,

let me examine the angular distance of meteors,

let me suck on the stems of flowers

(if that is my part).

Let me make certain tribal figures

(if that is my part).

For this thing the body needs

let me sing

for the supper,

for the kissing,

for the correct

yes.

Useful Websites:

Short Blog article on the feministic attitude of her poetry.

Academic article on her poetry.

Youtube:

Anne Sexton Speaks

Video made by students on Anne Sexton: "Impressions"

Bibliography:

Middlebrook, Diane, Anne Sexton: A Biography, London, Vintage, 1992.

Sexton, Anne, The Complete Poems, New York, Mariner Books, 1999.

Sexton, Anne, Transformations, New York, Mariner Books, 2001.

Sexton, Anne, The Death NoteBooks, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1974.

Sexton, Linda Gray (editor), Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1978.

In Spanish:

Sexton, Anne, Poemas de Amor, Madrid, Linteo, 2010.

Sexton, Anne, Poesía completa, Madrid, Linteo, 2013.

ROBERT FROST (1874 - 1963)

"I want to reach out to all sorts and kinds," Robert Frost once said, and he succeeded. Five decades after his death he still remains one of the most recognized poets of the Twentieth century. Some of his poems have also been memorized by more people probably than those of other widely acclaimed poets like Dylan Thomas.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and lived there until he was eleven. When his father died of tuberculosis, he moved with his mother to the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where in high school he fell in love with Elinor Miriam White, his co-valedictorian. She enrolled at St. Lawrence College; he went to Dartmouth but dropped out after one term, afraid he might lose her. Frost was admitted as a special student at Harvard but left after two years, without a degree. Eventually he accumulated forty-four honorary ones, including Litt.D.'s from Oxford and Cambridge, and liked to quip that he was "educated by degrees".

In 1912, having had little success getting his work published, Frost sold his grandfather's farm in Derry (New Hampshire), which had been giving him an annuity, and he sailed with his family (wife and four children) to England in September, and by October he had sold his first collection of poetry. In April 1913 A Boy's Will was published and was well received. Frost's second collection, North of Boston, soon followed in 1914. Ezra Pound was fundamental in his career as he introduced him to important literary friends and patronized him. Finally, Frost made his reputation in England. With the outbreak of World War I, he decided to return home.

In 1917 Amherst College invited him to become a professor, an association he maintained the rest of his life except for intervals at Michigan, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale as poet-in-residence, a type of academic appointment he inaugurated. Frost's later books appeared at regular intervals, and he became a hugely popular reader of his own work. With the passing years Frost was showered with honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes; of the major awards, only the Nobel Prize, which both Eliot and Yeats won, eluded him.

Although a large number of his poems are tinged with melancholy, grave ambivalence about life, and black intimations, after his death the avuncular image he so carefully cultivated was forever shattered and his dark side revealed when his letters were published, and even more so when Lawrence Thompson exhaustive, three-volume biography appeared. Fans were dismayed to discover, behind the charming mask, selfishness and hunger for fame, calculation and callousness even toward his own children, and spite and jealousy, especially toward rival poets. In spite of this, the stature of Frost the artist was not diminished.

We could say that Frost was too wise to be a great optimist. By temperament and in method he was a classical modernist. He preferred grace and clarity of language to obscurity, structure to fragmentation, and strove for coherence and balance. At the very least, as his famous description has it, poems can provide "a momentary stay against confusion".

PROVIDE PROVIDE

The witch that came (the withered hag)

To wash the steps with pail and rag,

Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.

Too many fall from great and good

For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.

Or if predestined to die late,

Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!

If need be occupy a throne,

Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;

Others on being simply true.

What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

THE ONSET

Always the same, when on a fated night

At last the gathered snow lets down as white

As may be in dark woods, and with a song

It shall not make again all winter long

Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,

I almost stumble looking up and round,

As one who overtaken by the end

Gives up his errand, and lets death descend

Upon him where he is, with nothing done

To evil, no important triumph won,

More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:

I know that winter death has never tried

The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap

In long storms an undrifted four feet deep

As measured against maple, birch and oak,

It cannot check the peeper's silver croak;

And I shall see the snow all go down hill

In water of a slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year's withered brake

And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.

Nothing will be left white but here a birch,

And there a clump of houses with a church.

DESIGN

RwNelson85

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—

A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

the wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.

leasttern

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the ones less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

REFERENCES:

Robert Frost Society

Analysis of Robert Frost's Poetry suggested by poet Harley White

Robert Frost by Harold Bloom

Book Review in "The New Criterion", submitted by poet Harley White

Ciudad Seva (Luis López Nieves)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert Frost 1995: Collected Poems, Prose & Plays. Ann Arbor: Library of America.

Robert Frost 2001: Poems by Robert Frost (Centennial Edition). London: Signet Classics.

Jay Parini 2007: Robert Frost: A Life. London: Picador.

William H. Pritchard 1984: Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Oxford: OUP.

John H. Timmerman 2002: The Ethics of Ambiguity. Cranbury: Rosemont Publishing.

YOUTUBE

Lecture on the Poetry of Robert Frost (Yale University)

Analysis of the Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken, read by Robert Frost

Design

Provide ("in motion")

Analysis of "Design"

Robert Frost: Portrait in a Minute

TED HUGHES
(1930 - 1998)

Illustration by Jonathan Burton

He was born Edward James Hughes in 1930 in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. He studied English, anthropology, and archaeology, which are reflected in the use of myth, folktales, and legends throughout his work, as well as its hard Darwinian view of existence as a struggle between prey and predator. He received his degree from Pembroke College (Cambridge), then took various jobs, from schoolteacher to night watchman.

Hughes met Sylvia Plath at a party in Cambridge in February 1956. Both were instantly smitten, and a torrid love affair led to marriage in June. Later Plath typed up Hughes's poems and sent them to a first-book contest in New York. From almost three hundred entries, his was chosen by W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore, and Hawk in the Rain was published to much acclaim that fall. Hughes's distinctive style was forcefully evident: tense, terse lines filled with vivid images of nature made palpable in a severe, sometimes eerie atmosphere conjuring an un-human world of primal energy, instinctual violence, and stark beauty. Here and in later books the poems gripped attention by their boldness and sheer physicality as well as their range of tones and originality in use of language.

In the early sixties, the Hughes's marriage was in serious trouble, and the two separated after Sylvia Plath learned of Hughes's involvement with Assia Wevill. Late in 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard and settled in Devon, where he bought Moortown Farm, bred cattle and sheep, and avoided the public. Over the next two decades he was very prolific in all genres, poetry, children's books, theater, reviewing, and editing. In December 1984 Hughes was named Poet Laureate after the dying Philip Larkin declined the post. In 1985 he brought out his Collected Poems for Children, 1961-1983, which was followed by still more books for children and enlarged editions of the Moortown poems. In 1992 he published his original theories in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, and in 1994 he edited A Choice of Coleridge's Verse. Hughes's Collected Animal Poems and New Selected Poems: 1957-1994 followed in 1995. Tales from Ovid, his robust rendering of the Metamorphoses, was published in
1997. In 1998 Hughes finally broke a long silence with The Birthday Letters, in which he gives a detailed portrait of his marriage to Sylvia Plath through poetic letters addressed as if to her, using several of her own motifs and images.

Hughes portrays Sylvia Plath as brilliant but violent, mad, and thus doomed. He again professes his love for her; but despite his efforts to make her happy, he says it was impossible since she continued her obsession with her dead father and ultimately it killed her. A few months after it was published, Hughes died of cancer in Devonshire.

HAWK ROOSTING

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

RELIC

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.

Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

Basic Bibliography:

Elaine Feinstein 2003: Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet. New York: Norton & Company.

Ted Hughes 1999: Birthday Letters. London: Strauss & Giroux.

Paul Keegan 2005: Ted Hughes: Collected Poems. London: Strauss & Giroux.

In Spanish:

Ted Hughes 1999: Cartas de cumpleaños. Barcelona: Lumen.

Websites:
The Ted Hughes Society Journals

Videos

Analysis of Hawk Roosting

Hawk Roosting adapted

Movie Trail on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

MARGARET ATWOOD

(1939 - )

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, November 18, 1939. Her father was a zoologist. Due to the job of her father, who was doing researches in forest entomology regularly in the backwoods of northern Quebec, the whole family had to accompany him, and thus Margaret did not attend school for a full academic year until the eighth grade. But she read constantly and eclectically, everything from the classics to comic books. The whole family finally moved to Toronto in 1946, and following high school Margaret Atwood entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1957.

In her several endeavors Margaret Atwood has been exceptionally original and influential for over five decades, attaining the stature, now very rare, of all-around person of letters. Equally unusual for a contemporary author, she has been not only prolific in multiple genres but highly proficient in each of them, gaining a huge popular audience while garnering the respect of serious critics and scholars. Although she is more famous for her fiction, Atwood began as a poet (like Aldous Huxley, to put an example) and so she has remained. Well into the eighties she brought out superb poetry collections at two- or three-year intervals between her probing novels, along with important anthologies ande collections of her own short stories, nonfiction, or literary criticism. Margaret Atwood is particularly adept at portraying situations of conflict from the perspective of a female protagonist, and her lines more with propulsive force toward dramatic conclusions.

Margaret Atwood's early poetry, well represented in her Selected Poems 1965-1976 (1976), is probably her strongest and remains fresh: continually surprising both for bold ideas and vigorously inventive use of language. Margaret Atwood published a great deal of poetry books but her accomplishments as a poet began to be eclipsed by the acclaim that followed the publication of some of her novels: Life Before Man (1976), Bodily Harm (1981), and the extremely successful The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a grim vision of the future, in a Orwellian or Huxleyan manner. The next decades Margaret Atwood's output in poetry diminished in quantity, and was sometimes of uneven quality compared with the superlative earlier work. Following the Selected Poems of 1976, she published Two-Headed Poems (1978), True Stories (1981), Interlunar (1984), Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1987), Morning in the Burned House (1996), Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965-1995 (1998), and The Door (2007). Among the many international acclaim, she was given the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2008.

HABITATION

Marriage is not

a house or even a tent

It is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge

of the desert

the unpainted stairs

at the back where we squat

outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far

we are learning to make fire

FROM SONGS OF THE TRANSFORMED

PIG SONG

This is what you changed me to:

a greypink vegetable with slug

eyes, buttock

incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,

a skin you stuff so you may feed

in your turn, a stinking wart

of flesh, a large tuber

of blood which munches

and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile

I have the sky, which is only half

caged, I have my weed corners,

I keep myself busy, singing

my song of roots and noses,

my song of dung. Madame,

this song offends you, these grunts

which you find oppressively sexual,

mistaking simple greed for lust.

I am yours. If you feed me garbage,

I will sing a song of garbage.

This is a hymn.

NIGHT POEM

There is nothing to be afraid of,

it is only the wind

changing to the east, it is only

your father the thunder

your mother the rain

In this country of water

with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,

its drowned stumps and long birds

that swim, where the moss grows

on all sides of the trees

and your shadow is not your shadow

but your reflection,

your true parents disappear

when the curtain covers your door.

We are the others,

the ones from under the lake

who stand silently beside your bed

with our heads of darkness.

We have come to cover you

with red wool,

with our tears and distant whippers.

You rock in the rain's arms

the chilly ark of your sleep,

while we wait, your night

father and mother

with our cold hands and dead flashlight,

knowing we are only

the wavering shadows thrown

by one candle, in this echo

you will hear twenty years later.

Recommended Bibliography:

By Atwood:

Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems: 1965 - 1975 (Boston: Houghton), 1976.

---------------------, Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986 (Boston: Houghton), 1987.

---------------------, The Door (Boston: Houghton), 2009.

In Spanish:

La puerta (Barcelona: Ediciones B), 2009 [Translator: Pilar Somacarrera.]

On Margaret Atwood:

Harold Bloom (ed.), Margaret Atwood (New York: Chelsea House), 2009.

Reingard M. Nischik (ed.), Margaret Atwood: Works & Impact (New York: Candem House), 2002.

Websites:

Youtube:

Atwood reading "Night Poem"

Atwood on the Writing Process.

ROBERT GRAVES (1895 - 1985)

Robert Von Ranke Graves was among the most versatile writers of the previous century. He was born in 1895 in Wimbledon (London). He had a scholarship to Oxford, but when the Great was declared he enlisted, at age nineteen, in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He befriended Siegfried Sassoon while they served in France. As a result of his experiences in the conflict, Graves published Over the Brazier (1916), which he later suppressed, believing it inferior to the war poetry of poets like Sassoon and Owen.

Robert Graves was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and was reported killed in action, but miraculously he survived to read his obituary in The Times. Believing him dead, Sassoon wrote an elegy, "To His Dead Body". But their friendship came to an end when Sassoon objected to inaccuracies and the unauthorized use of his work in Goodbye to All That (1929), Graves's brilliant memoir of his Victorian childhood and the English way of life that came to an end with the war, whose horros he described in very graphic details.

Shortly before the Armistice, Graves married the painter and feminist Nancy Nicholson, with whom he had four children. He attended St. John's College, Oxford, where he became friends with T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), whose biography he wrote in 1927. In 1926 he took his degree and went to teach in Cairo, accompanied by his family and his new lover, the domineering American poet Laura Riding. After his marriage broke up, he and Riding moved to Majorca, where they collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). But Laura Riding's strange behaviour ruined their relationship. She tried to commit suicide several times. They finally got divorced.

After World War II Robert Graves was able to return to Majorca with his new love, Beryl Hodge, whom he met in 1946 and married in 1959 and with whom he had another four children. The royalties from Goodbye to All That and the immensely popular historical novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1943), freed him to write poetry, his first love, and to pursue other interests like mythology, history and classical literature. In his most controversial study, The White Goddess (1948), "a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth", Graves proposed as the font of artistic inspiration a prototypical female deity of birth, love, and death associated with the moon. He was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1961-1966 and was recognized with many of the most prestigious literary awards in the United Kingdom and the United States. He died on Majorca in 1985.

THE LAST POST

The bugler sent a call of high romance -

"Light out! Light out!" to the deserted square.

On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,

"God, if it's this for me next time in France...

O spare the phantom bugle as I lie

dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,

dead in a row with the other broken ones

lying so stiff and still under the sky.

Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die."

THE KISS

Are you shaken, are you stirred

By a whisper of love,

Spellbound to a word

Does Time cease to move,

Till her calm grey eye

Expands to a sky

And the clouds of her hair

Like storms go by?

Then the lips that you have kissed

Turn to frost and fire,

And a white-steaming mist

Obscures desire:

So back to their birth

Fade water, air, earth,

And the First Power moves

Over void and dearth.

Is that Love? no, but Death,

A passion, a shout,

The deep in-breath,

The breath roaring out,

And once that is flown,

You must lie alone,

Without hope, without life,

Poor flesh, sad bone.

THE PERSIAN VERSION

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon

The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

As for the Greek theatrical tradition

Which represents that summer's expedition

Not as a mere reconnaissance in force

By three brigades of foot and one of horse

(Their left flank covered by some obsolete

Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)

but as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt

To conquer Greece -they treat it with contempt;

And only incidentally refute

Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute

The Persian monarch and the Persian nation

Won by this salutary demonstration:

Despite a strong defense and adverse weather

All arms combined magnificently together.

OGRES AND PYGMIES

Those famous men of old, the Ogres
They had long beards and stinking arm-pits.
They were wide-mouthed, long-yarded and great-bellied
Yet of no taller stature, Sirs, than you.
They lived on Ogre-Strand, which was no place
But the churl's terror of their proud extent.
Where every foot was three-and-thirty inches,
And every penny bought a whole sheep.
Now of their company none survive, not one,
The times being, thank God, unfavorable
To all but nightmare shadows of them.
Their images stand howling in the waste,
(The winds enforced against their wide mouths)
whose granite haunches king and priest must yearly
Buss and their cold knobbled knees.
So many feats they did to admiration:
With their enormous lips they sang louder
Than ten cathedral choirs, and with their grand yards
Stormed the most rare and obstinate maidenheads,
With their strong-gutted and capacious bellies
Digested stones and glass like ostriches.
They dug great pits and heaped great cairns,
Deflected rivers, slew whole armies,
And hammered judgments for posterity
For the sweet cupid-lipped and tassel-yarded
Delicate-stomached dwellers
In Pygmy Alley, where with brooding on them
A foot is shrunk to seven inches
And twelve-pence will not buy a spare rib.
And who would choose between Ogres and Pygmies
The thundering text, the sniveling commentary
Reading between such covers he will likely
Prove his own disproportion and not laugh.

Recommended Bibliography:

D. N. G. Carter, Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement (London: Macmillan, 1989).

Robert Graves, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003).

____________, The White Goddess (London: Faber & Faber, 1988).

Frank L. Kernowski, The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 20029.

Patrick J. Quinn, New Perspectives on Robert Graves (London: Associated University Presses, 1999).

En español:

Robert Graves, Cien poemas (Barcelona: Lumen, 1986).

Websites of Interest:

The First World War Poetry (Digital Archive)

Archival and Adacemic Information on Robert Graves

La Casa de Robert Graves en Deià

Videos:

Ogres and Pygmies (Poem)

Robert Graves about the Nobel Prize (1970)

THEODORE ROETHKE (1908 - 1963)

Theodore Roethke was born in 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan. His German immigrant grandfather, uncle, and father ran greenhouses, and as a boy he spent a great deal of time amid the soil and plants,

images that would figure prominently in his poetry. The greenhouse, he wrote, "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." When he was fifteen his uncle committed suicide and his father died of cancer, a trauma that left deep scars. In 1935 Roethke took a teaching post at Michigan State College but was soon hospitalized with debilitating depression, the first of many such episodes. In 1941 he published his first book, Open House, which was very favorably reviewed. While this volume imitated many of Roethke's favorite poets, it also violated Eliot's notion of impersonality; from the start he poet's emphasis was on his own innermost experiences. In 1948 he produced The Lost Son and Other Poems, a breakthrough volume in which he used the greenhouse as a symbol of the inner self, a world of organic growth where the poet worked through his pain over his absent father as well as his fears about the father figures in literary tradition, the Great Dead. In the book Roethke also used nursery rhymes, nonsense verse, puns, and other wordplay to conjure up a pre rational state. The idea of regression and other processes of psychoanalysis would become recurring motifs in Roethke's poetic explorations, inviting Freudian critics to speculate about the poet's unresolved conflicts, repression, filial anxiety, and so on, notions he did not deny.

He married in 1952 and received more awards, including large grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters that allowed time to write and travel in Europe. While staying at W. H. Auden's house on Ischia, he finished work on The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 (1953); the collection, which included new pieces in formal verse, won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.

Roethke continued to write, and to win awards, with remarkable proficiency. Following trips to Italy and England on a Fulbright grant, he published Words for the Wind in 1957. In August 1963, while swimming, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The poems he left behind were published posthumously in The Far Field (1964), which won the National Book Award, and The Collected Poems (1966). On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose was also published in 1966, the Selected Letters in 1968.

MY PAPA'S WALTZ

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrozen itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

LONG LIVE THE WEEDS

Hopkins

Long live the weeds that overwhelm

My narrow vegetable realm! -

The bitter rock, the barren soil

That force the son of man to toil;

All things unholy, marked by curse,

The ugly of the universe.

The rough, the wicked and the wild

That keep the spirit undefiled.

With these I match my little wit

And earn the right to stand or sit,

Hope, look, create, or drink and die:

These shape the creature that is I.

AGAINST DISASTER

Now I am out of element

And far from anything my own,

My sources drained of all content,

The pieces of my spirit strewn.

All random, wasted, and dispersed,

The particles of being lie;

My special heaven is reversed,

I move beneath an evil sky.

This flat land has become a spit

Wherein I am beset by harm,

The heart must rally to my wit

And rout the specter of alarm.

A WHEEZE FOR WYSTAM

"I had an Aunt that Loved a Plant", W. H. Auden.

If Auden's Aunt could love a Plant,

My Aunt could love a kiwi,

Her Features were so pinched and gaunt

She never seemed to see me.

She was Absurd: An Ostrich-Bird

That lived on cold Kohlrabi;

My uncle never said a Word:

Not-speaking was his Hobby.

They had a Child, -Oh what a Child!

Who can out-face a Foetus?

The neighbors swore that IT ran Wild-

IT never ran to meet us.

We'd come to call, and IT would howl

From right above the Ceiling;

Dear Auntie'd rearranged her Shawl

And ask how we were feeling.

Once we had Tea, and I'll agree,

The Fare was Oddly Simple:

Aspic of Newt and Manatee-

One bite was more than ample.

Then Spinach Scones, Three Buttered Bones,

And Various Processes Cheeses.

EPIDERMAL MACABRE

Indelicate is he who loathes

The aspect of his fleshy clothes, -

The flying fabric stitched on bone,

The vesture of the skeleton,

The garment neither fur nor hair,

The cloak of evil and despair,

The veil long violated by

Caresses of the hand and eye.

Yet such is my unseemliness:

I hate my epidermal dress,

The savage blood's obscenity,

The rags of my anatomy,

And willingly would I dispense

With false accouterments of sense,

to sleep immodestly, a most

Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

Websites:

The Poetry Foundation

Theodore Roethke Home Museum

On Theodore Roethke

On "Epidermal Macabre".

Bibliography:

Peter Balakian, Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of his Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).

Ralph J. Mills, Theodore Roethke, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1963)

Theodore Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft: Selected prose (Seattle: Washington U.P., 1965).

Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke(New York: Anchor Books, 1974).

Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991).

In Spanish:

Theodore Roethke, Meditaciones y otros poemas (Madrid: Ediciones Trea, 2012).

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS (1883 - 1963)

BORN in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, Williams was of British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry. In 1902 he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania where he eventually met Ezra Pound, who, though two years younger than Williams, adopted a patronizing manner from the first. Williams was cowed by Pound's erudition but appreciated his practical advice as well as his help later in persuading Elkin Mathews to publish his second book, The Tempers (1913). Through Pound he met Hilda Doolittle, who was also impressed by their friend's apparent brilliance. Williams took his medical degree in 1906, then interned in New York City, at a Hell's Kitchen charity hospital; in 1909-1919 he spent a year training in pediatrics in Leipzig. In his return from Germany he set up his practice in obstetrics in Rutherford, where he married Florence (Floss) Herman and remained the rest of his life.

Dr. Williams was not a simple baby doctor from the provinces. He kept a journal and jotted down poems between examinations and house calls, often on prescription pads; this habit, bred of necessity, helps explain the brevity of many of his pieces. He often crossed over to Manhattan where, like his friend Wallace Stevens, he visited art galleries and became acquainted with radicals such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. In his youth Williams had hoped to become a painter himself, and he kept up an interest all his life.

Part of his liberated feeling came from the realization that art did not have to deal with exalted subject matter: a bowl of plums and other prosaic items were equally admissible. Williams was comfortable at the typewriter, and following Guillaume Apollinaire's experiments in his Calligrammes (published in his friend the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's journal 291) he discovered how the placement of letters, words, and lines on a page could produce a visual as well as a verbal artifact, as in "The Red Wheelbarrow," where the long first line forms the "handle." Many of his differences with editors centered on such "merely mechanical" but significant matters of form.

"Williams is a suburban physician, who goes into a state of coma, but occasionally produces a good poem", Pound told on certain occasion, and the condescension indicates something of their ambivalent relationship.

He also found his own style, and from Al Que Quiere! (1917) onward the books flowed with remarkable frequency and in great variety: the prose improvisations of Kora in Hell (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), the anti-novel The Great American Novel (1923), the prose-verse collection Spring and All (also 1923), the historical essays of In the American Grain (1925). From 1920 to 1923 he edited his own little magazine, Contact. In 1924 he took time off for a trip to Paris where he visited Pound and was introduced to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and other luminaries of the times. But in 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land -"the great catastrophe," as Williams put it. In the Autobiography he remembered: "It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it ... I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I'm sure it did".

During the thirties Williams published three short-story collections and a novel, and in 1923 his Collected poems 1921-1931 was brought out by the small Objectivist Press. By the forties and fifties his growing influence on the younger generation was inescapable. With his collage like arrangements in Paterson, Williams presented his answer to Pound's Cantos. In the city of Paterson he thought he found and adequate subject and symbol, a microcosm to express his vision of America. Like the Cantos, the five books of Paterson are without plot or formal structure but composed of sharply observed fragments: descriptions of place, bits of history, interior monologues, "found objects" such as letters, paragraphs from textbooks, snatches of conversation... Although critical opinion remains divided, the enterprise made Williams a celebrity.

THE RED WHEELBARROW

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

This poem is in free verse, which, as the name implies, is verse that does not conform to a fixed pattern. But there is no knife-edge line between formal verse and free verse, just as there is no knife-edge line between verse and prose. Rather, there is a shading off from a scrupulous meter toward greater and greater informality. Over the years, there has been much debate about locating the precise point where informality in free verse because so marked that free verse should not be called verse at all. There is certainly a point where the sense of form can be lost (except the form dictated by the principles of prose-syntax, grammar, an the like).

What most obviously distinguishes a piece of free verse from prose? It is the lining on the page. Even in the dreariest piece of writing that aspires to be free verse, the fact of its being set off in lines has some significance. It is significant, for one thing, because it pretends to be significant.

The only line of "The Red Wheelbarrow" that is not absolutely arbitrary is the first one, which does have a certain intrinsic structured, the structure of a clause. The lining is so arbitrary that we have to see the poem in print before we have any notion that it is intended as a poem at all. But the very arbitrariness is the point itself. We are forced to focus our attention upon words, and details, in a very special way, a puzzling way. Now the poem itself is about that puzzling portentousness that an object, even the simplest, like a red wheelbarrow, assumes when we fix attention exclusively upon it. Reading this poem is like peering at some ordinary object through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the pin prick frames it arbitrarily endows it with a puzzling, and exciting, freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation. And that is what the poem is actually about:

"So much depends" -but what, we do not know! Do you know?

MARRIAGE

So different, this man

And this woman:

A stream flowing

In a field.

POEM

By the road to the contagious hospital,

under the surge of the blue

mottled clouds driven from the

northeast -a cold wind. Beyond, the

waste of broad, muddy fields,

brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen,

patches of standing water,

the scattering of tall trees.

All along the road the reddish,

purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy

stuff of bushes and small trees

with dead, brown leaves under them

leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish,

dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,

cold, uncertain of all

save that they enter. All about them

the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow

the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf.

One by one objects are defined-

It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf,

But now the stark dignity of

entrance-Still, the profound change

has come upon them; rooted, they

grip down and begin to awaken.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Copestake, Ian D., The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry (New York: Camden Houe, 2010).

Doyle, Charles (ed.), William Carlos Williams (London: Routledge, 1980).

Litz, A. Walton & Cristopher MacGowan (eds), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol I (1909-1939) (New York: New Directions, 1991).

MacGowan (ed.), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol II (1939-1962) (New York: Cercanet Press, 2000).

Marzón, Julio, The Spanish Roots of William Carlos Williams (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994).
Williams, William Carlos, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967).

———————————, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1971).

———————————, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992).

In Spanish:

Williams, William Carlos, Paterson (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001)

——————————, Antología bilingüe (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2009) [Selected and translated by Juan Miguel López Merino]

———————————, Viaje al amor (Barcelona: Lumen, 2009) [Translated by Juan Antonio Montiel]

———————————, Cuadros de Brueghel (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007) [Translated by Juan Antonio Montiel].

WEBLIOGRAPHY:

Poetry Foundation

Modern American Poetry

University of Pennsylvania

Williams Center

Youngstown State University

Some poems translated into Spanish

VIDEOS:

William Carlos Williams Interview (1950)

William Carlos Williams Lecture: The Modern Poem (1955

William Carlos Williams read "The Red Wheelbarrow"

The Red Wheelbarrow

H. D. (1886 — 1961)

Hilda Doolittle became recognized by her initials after poet Ezra Pound blue-penciled her early poems, scowled "H. D., Imagiste" below them, and attached a cover letter to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine declaring the work was "Objective—no slither; direct... It's straight talk—straight as the greek!". Four of the poems were printed in Poetry in January 1913 and created much speculation about the mysterious author. Within months Doolittle asked Monroe to drop the "affected"Imagiste tag. But thus she was known ever after—to her frustration when her writing changed and broadened in scope, to longer sequences and narratives, but editors kept asking for poems in her terse early style.

Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1886, the only girl among five brothers. Her father, Charles Doolittle, taught mathematics and astronomy, subjects that she invested with mystical significance. Her mother was a member of the Moravian brotherhood, a dissident Protestant sect originally from Germany that believed in direct contact with and enlightenment from God. This numinous connection with the deity was passed down family to family, they taught, and the writer herself thought part of her gifts as a poet stemmed from this visionary tradition.

While she was a student at Bryn Mawr College, she had a romance with Ezra Pound, she inspired several of his early poems, and they were engaged for a time, then became friends with William Carlos Williams while the men were students at Penn. Strangely, Doolittle stayed in college only briefly. She failed English (her spelling and punctuation always remained shaky) and had a nervous breakdown, precipitated by her conflicted feelings about Pound.

In 1911, with her boyfriend, Frances Gregg, and Gregg's mother, she traveled to Europe intending only a short visit, but stayed the rest of her life. In London Pound introduced her to important literary friends like Richard Aldington, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. With the passage of time, Pound later admitted that he had hastily made up the Imagist "movement" mainly to get H. D. into print. But gradually, she, like his other "protégés," became weary of Pound's high-handed ways and began to distance herself and take her instruction from Aldington, who encouraged her reading, particularly of the French Symbolists.

In 1913, Doolittle married Aldington, who with Pound's help had acquired an editorial position at The Egoist, the important early little magazine. In 1917, after Aldington went off to fight in the Great War, H. D. had a brief liaison with the composer Cecil Gray and became pregnant. She had her daughter Perdita. She broke up her affair with Gray, Aldington separated after the war and her new friend and lover Bryher (writer Winifred Ellerman) adopted the child. When Bryher entered into a marriage of convenience with the gay novelist Robert McAlmon in 1921, H. D. accompanied them to Paris, where Bryher underwrote McAlmon's adventurous Contact Press, publisher of the earliest books of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Retaining her deep interest in classical mythology—which she recast from a feministic viewpoint or revised to present strong matriarchal figures— H. D. published the poetry volumes Hymen (1922), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Collected Poems (1925), Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), and Red Roses for Bronze (1931), as well as the experimental prose of Palimpsest (1927), which fictionalizes her early relationship with Bryher, and Hedylus (1928).

Bryher divorced McAlmon and in 1927 married Kenneth Macpherson, an avant-garde filmmaker, and together they started the cinema journal Close Up and a production company. H. D. Appeared in three of the movies and became acquainted with Sergei Eisenstein and other movie directors of the times. Bryher arranged for H.D. to meet Sigmud Freud in Vienna, and the poet became his analysand in 1933 and 1934. As a result of this friendship she wrote Tribute to Freud, her memoir of the experience, printed in 1956. During World War II, Bryher and H.D. moved to London. They lived in Hyde Park, where Bryher published the magazine Life and Letters Today while H.D. worked on new prose and poetry, including The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), her evocative reflections on existence in the ravaged London of the war years. It became the first volume of Trilogy, completed with Tribute to the Angels (1945) and the Flowering of the Rod (1946). Always interested in spiritualism and Moravian doctrine and ritual, she became more involved in the forties with the occult, astrology, Tarot cards, and other esoteric arts.

After the war H. D. had a sever nervous breakdown and returned to Switzerland for treatment. Her Selected Poems appeared in 1957, the novel Bid Me to Live in 1960, and Helen in Egypt in 1961.

In recent decades Doolittle's life and works have attracted increasing attention from literary historians, scholarly critics, and feminist theorists.

Extract from "HYMEN"

From the closed garden

Where our feet pace

Back and forth each day,

This gladiolus white,

This red, this purple spray—

Gladioulus tall with dignity

As yours, lady—we lay

Before your feet and pray:

Of all the blessings—

Youth, joy, ecstasy—

May one gift last

(As the tall gladiolus may

Outlast the wind-flower,

Winter-rose or rose),

One gift above,

Encompassing all those;

For her, for him,

For all within these palace walls,

Beyond the yeast,

Beyond the cry of Hymen and the torch,

Beyond the night and music

Echoing through the porch till day.

LEDA

Where the slow river

meets the tide,

a red swan lifts red wings

and darker beak,

and underneath the purple down

of his soft breast

uncurls his coral feet.

Through the deep purple

of the dying heat

of sun and mist,

the level ray of sun-beam

has caressed

the lily with dark breast,

and flecked with richer gold

its golden crest.

Where the slow lifting

of the tide,

floats into the river

and slowly drifts

among the reeds,

and lifts the yellow flags,

he floats

where tide and river meet.

Ah kingly kiss—

no more regret

nor old deep memories

to mar the bliss;

where the low sedge is thick,

the gold day-lily

outspreads and rests

beneath soft fluttering

of red swan wings

and the warm quivering

of the red swan's breast.

HEAT

O Wind, rend open the heat,

cut apart the heat,

rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop

through this thick air—

fruit cannot fall into heat

that presses up and blunts

the points of pears

and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—

plough through it,

turning it on either side

of your path.

Bibliography:

Bloom, Harold (ed), H.D (London: Chelsea House), 2002.

Doolittle, Hilda, End to Torment, A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions), 1979.

——————, HERmione (New York: New Directions), 1981.

——————, Collected Poems (1912 — 1944) (New York: New Directions), 1986.

——————, Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions), 2012.

In Spanish:

Hilda Doolittle, Poemas escogidos(México D.F.: Ambos Mundos), 1996 [Translated and selected with an Introduction by Pura López Colomé].

——————, Jardín junto al mar (Tarragona: Igitur), 2001 [Translated by Alison Bartolo and Alfredo Martínez].

Websites:

In Spanish:

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885 — 1939)

David Herbert Lawrence, the son of a coal-miner, was born at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire in 1885 and educated at Nottingham High School and University College, Nottingham. There is a large Larence literature, so that it is only necessary to note a few salient facts of his life: his qualifying as a school teacher —one of his best 'rhyming' pomes is "The Last Lesson of the Afternoon"; his friendship with Aldous Huxley; his marriage to Frieda in 1914; his travels in Italy, Australia, and New Mexico— see see Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia 81921), Mornings in Mexico (1927); and his death of tuberculosis near Nice in 1939. He also gained a high reputation as a novelist with The White Peacock (1911) and Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).

Lawrence's Collected Poems were published in 1928, to be followed by Last Poems (1933). Aldous Huxley edited his letters with a useful introduction in 1932. One of the best criticisms of Lawrence as a poet is to be found in The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets (1958) by A. Alvarez. I have chosen the poems "The Mosquito" and "Innocent England" for the post dedicated to D. H. Lawrence. "The Mosquito" is one of the less familiar pieces of "Birds, Beasts, and Flowers", a section of his Collected Poems containing a high proportion of his best poetry. "Innocent England" celebrates Lawrence's contempt and indignation at the suppression of his exhibition of paintings in London in 1928: the authorities feared for public morals because he painted pubic hair on his nudes. Louis MacNeice in a journalistic, provocative "An Alphabet of Literary Prejudices" (The Windmill, Vol. 3, n.1, 1948) remarks under the heading "Dark God":

As D. H. Lawrence was well slapped down in the twenties by Mr. Wyndham Lewis there is no need now to take another slap at one who, in spite of his unfortunate effect on adolescents, was a great writer and a godsend. Lawrence had imagination without common sense … and got away with it— but in most people this divorce will degrade imagination itself.

THE MOSQUITO

When did you start your tricks,

Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?

Why this length of shredded shank,

You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards

And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,

Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory

In sluggish Venice.

you turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilry

Into that translucent phantom shred

Of a frail corpus?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs,

How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,

A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;

Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:

Invisibility, and the anesthetic power

To deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air

In circles and evasions, enveloping me,

Ghoul on wings

Winged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanks

Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,

You speck.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air

Having read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,

And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.

Man or mosquito.

You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist.

Now then!

It is your trump,

It is your hateful little trump,

You pointed fiend,

Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:

It is your small, high hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?

Surely it is bad policy.

They say you can't help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.

But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan,

A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red blood

Super-magical

Forbidden liquor.

I behold you stand

For a second enspasmed in oblivion,

Obscenely ecstasied

Sucking live blood,

My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,

Such gorging,

Such obscenity of trespass.

You stagger

As well as you may.

Only your accursed hairy frailty,

Your own imponderable weightlessness

Saves you, wafts you away on the dry draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a paean of derision,

You winged blood-drop.

Can I not overtake you?

Are you one too many for me,

Winged Victory?

Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes

Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!

Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

INNOCENT ENGLAND

Oh what a pity, Oh! don't you agree

that figs aren't found in the land of the free!

Fig-trees don't grow in my native land;

there's never a fig-tree near at hand

when you want one; so I did without;

and that is what the row's about.

Virginal, pure policemen came

and hid their faces for very shame,

while they carried the shameless things away

to gaol, to be hid from the light of day.

And Mr Mead, that old, old lily

said: 'Gross! coarse! hideous! — and I, like a silly

thought he meant the faces of the police-court officials,

and how right he was, and I signed my initials

to confirm what he said: but alas, he meant

my pictures, and on the proceedings went.

The upshot was, my pictures must burn

that English artists might finally learn

when they painted a nude, to put a cache sexe on,

a cache sexe, a cache sexe, or else begone!

A fig-leaf; or, if you cannot find it

a wreath of mist, with nothing behind it.

A wreath of mist is the usual thing

in the north, to hide where the turtles sing.

Though they never sing, they never sing,

don't you dare to suggest such a thing

or Mr Mead will be after you.

—But what a pity I never knew

A wreath of English mist would do

as a cache sexe! I'd have put a whole fog.

But once and forever barks the old dog,

so my pictures are in prison, instead of in the Zoo.

Websites:

D. H. Lawrence Heritage Centre

D. H. Lawrence Society of North America

Poetry Foundation

Bibliography:

Boulton, James T., The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: CUP), 1997.

Gilbert, Sandra M., Acts of Attention: The Pomes of D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: Illinois University Press), 1990.

Lawrence, David Herbert, The Complete Poems (Kent: Wordsworth), 2002.

Lockwood, M. J., A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry (London: Macmillan), 1987.

Sagar, Keith, D. H. Lawrence: Poet (New York: Humanities-Ebooks), 2010.

Spender, Stephen, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prohet(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 1973.

In Spanish:

Lawrence, D. H., Poemas, (Buenos Aires: Argonauta), 1990.

Lawrence, D. H., Poemas escogidos (Madrid: Visor), 2011.

Videos:

The Search for D. H. Lawrence

Burgess on D. H. Lawrence

"The Mosquito"

"The Ship of Death"

Article 24

Article 23

"The Virginity"

Article 22

Article 21

Article 20

Article 19

Article 18

Article 17

Article 16

Article 15

Article 14

Article 13

Article 12

Article 11

Article 10

Article 9

Article 8

Article 7

Article 6

Article 5