A Literary Blog of Twentieth-Century and Beyond Poetry in English

(1904 - 1972)

Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day Lewis, who with Auden and Spender was thought of as forming the original political-cum-poetical triumvirate of the thirties, was born in Ireland in 1904 and educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. He edited Oxford Poetry with Auden in 1927, and, after leaving the university, became a schoolmaster in turn at Oxford, Helensburgh, and Cheltenham until 1935. He was employed at the Ministry of Information during the war. Since then he has been occupied with writing, lecturing, and broadcasting. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1951 (being Auden's immediate predecessor in his position). The Buried Day (1960) is an autobiographical account of the earlier part of his life. It is worth reading (although inferior in candor and insight to Stephen Spender's World Within World) and Poet Laureate in 1968.

He is primarily a poet, but he also wrote novels, detective fiction (under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake), and stories for children. He wrote 25 novels, most of which were signed under the pen name Nicholas Blake. He confirmed himself as a master of crime and detective novels. In his novel The Sad Variety (1964) he showed his discontent with the course of Communism in the Soviet Union. This novel represents his breakup with Communism. He also wrote much criticism. His criticism includes A Hope for Poetry(1934);Poetry for You (1945), a book which was popular in schools; The Poetic Image (1947), which is the published form of his Clark Lectures at Cambridge; and Notable Images of Virtue (1954). His 1951 Warton Lecture, The Lyric Poetry of Thomas Hardy, has a special interest for readers of his poems.

From left to right: W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis and Christopher Isherwood

Cecil Day Lewis was a fluent poet with a large published output in verse. Collected Poems (1929-33) (1948) contains his work up to that time including both the pre-political poetry of From Feathers to Iron (1931), perhaps his best collection until Word Over All (1943), and the rather strident tub-thumping and pylon-praising of The Magnetic Mountain (1933). Later books include Overtures to Death (1938), Word Over All (1943), Poems 1943-1947 (1948), which is a volume of personal lyrics mixing the influences of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and An Italian Visit (1953).Collected Poems(1954) supersedes the 1948 collected edition and covers all the poetry from 1929 to 1953. The only volume since 1954 is Pegasus and Other Poems (1957).

Stephen Spender said that Day Lewis was a poet "who is least sure of himself when he writes of his immediate feelings". This statement can be accepted if such lyrics as "Marriage of Two" and "The Woman Alone" (from Poems 1943-1947) can be taken as exceptions proving the rule. It is true that as a personal lyric poet he often fumbles and produces blurred or trite effects. His abilities as a translator or as a narrative poet —a good specimen is "The Nabara" from Overtures to Death— can rarely be questioned in this way. Poems 1943-1947 contains an excellent example of translation in "The Graveyard by there Sea", a version of Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin. The parodies or imitations of Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Auden, and Dylan Thomas in An Italian Visit are further illustrations of a surprising poetic versatility. There is no real falling-off in quality in Pegasus and Other Poems—for many years now Day Lewis has been a remarkably consistent poetic performer. Anne Ridler notes of this last volume that it contains poems "generated at a low poetic temperature", but this criticism can be applied to volumes published in the thirties and forties and connects with the "professionalism" that the same critic comments on respectfully.

In brief it may be said that Day Lewis's failures are verbal, his successes rhythmical. This is a simplification, but the greater pleasure to be derived from his later volumes is more due, I think, to an increased power of making rhythmical patterns than to any change in subject-matter or deepening of sensibility. It is also worth mentioning his political commitment with the Spanish Civil War. He served as a partisan supporting the Republican Army. His books of poems: Overtures to Death (1938) is a manifest of his bitter memories during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism in Europe. "The Nabara" was the most significant poem he wrote inspired by the Spanish conflict. The long poem is the core of his book of poems Noah and the Waters (1947). In the late thirties he became so disillusioned with Communism that he abandoned his party membership and his leftish political ideas. He died on 22 May 1972, at Lemmons (Hertfordshire, England).

THE NABARA

They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender

Phase One

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage

Of statesmen, the tyrant's dishonored cheque, or the dreamer's mad

Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made

In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage

But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.

Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:

She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird

To home wherever man's heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:

Innocent is her touch as the dawn's, but still it unleashes

The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

I see man's heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.

As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone

Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one-

So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation

To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.

Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting

For those I tell of - men used to the tolerable joy and hurt

Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;

But history's hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting

Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.

The year, Nineteen-thirty-seven: month, March: the men, descendants

Of those Iberian fathers, the inquiring ones who would go

Wherever the sea-ways led: a pacific people, slow

To feel ambition, loving their laws and their independence-

Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.

Fishermen, with no guile outside their craft, they had weathered

Often the sierra-ranked Biscayan surges, the wet

Fog of the Newfoundland Banks: they were fond of pelota: they met

No game beyond their skill as they swept the sea together,

Until the morning they found the leviathan in their net.

Government trawlers Nabara, Guipuzkoa, Bizkaya,

Donostia, escorting across blockaded seas

Galdames with her cargo of nickel and refugees

From Bayonne to Bilbao, while the rest of war curled higher

Inland over the glacial valleys, the ancient ease.

On the morning of March the fifth, a chill North-Wester fanned them,

Fogging the glassy waves: what uncharted doom lay low

There in the fog athwart their course, they could not know:

Stout were the armed trawlers, redoubtable those who manned them-

Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.

[...]

[Fragment from the long poem "The Nabara" (Noah and the Waters)]

Nota Bene: The episode upon which this poem is based is related in G. L. Steer's The Tree of Gernika.

DO NOT EXPECT AGAIN A PHOENIX HOUR

Do not expect again a phoenix hour,

The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,

Sudden the rain of gold and hear's first ease

Tranced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.

By a blazed trail our joy will be returning:

One burning hour throws light a thousand ways,

And hot blood stays into familiar gestures.

The best years wait, the body's plenitude.

Consider then, my lover, this is the end

Of the lark's ascending, the hawk's unearthly hover:

Spring season is over soon and first heatwave;

Grave-browed with cloud ponders the huge horizon.

Draw up the dew. Swell with pacific violence.

Take shape in silence. Grow as the clouds grew.

Beautiful brood the corn lands, and you are heavy;

Leafy the boughs-they also hide big fruit.

Websites:

Cecil Day-Lewis Official Website
On "A Hope for Poetry"
Some Online Poems
C. S. Lewis as Poet
Poet Laureate
Poetry Foundation
"Do not Expect Again a Phoenix Hour" read by Cecil Day Lewis

En español:

Noticia en español sobre su hijo, el actor Daniel Day-Lewis
Poema "El voluntario" ("The Volunteer") en español.

Bibliography:

Cecil Day Lewis 1938: Overtures to Death and Other Poems. London: J. Cape.
—————— 1947: Noah and the Waters. New York: Transatlantic Arts.
——————— 1979: Collected Poems. London: Hyperion.
——————— 2002 (1960): Studies in Words. Cambridge: CUP.
Nicholas Blake (C. Day-Lewis) 1979: The Sad Variety. London: Harper Collins.
Albert Gelpi 1997: Living in Time: The Poetry of Cecil Day Lewis. Oxford: OUP.
Peter Stanford 2007: C. Day-Lewis: A Life. London: Bloomsbury.

En español:

Niall Binns 2004: La llamada de España: Escritores extranjeros en la Guerra Civil. Madrid: Montesinos.

E. E. CUMMINGS

(1894 —1962)

Poster by Dobson, ca. 1960: MIT General Collections

E(dward) E(stlin) Cummings was born in 1894 in the Establishment bastion of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his father as a Unitarian minister who taught at Harvard. Cummings received his B.A. (1915) and M.A.(1916) from the University, worked briefly at a mail-order company and then sailed first class to France to serve as an ambulance driver in the war. He saw no action, but indiscreet letters he and a friend sent home led the censors to believe they were spies or traitors, whereupon the French authorities imprisoned them for three months —an experience he enjoyed and wittily recounted in The Enormous Room (1922).

In the early twenties Cummings returned to Paris to write and study painting. He met Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, and other expatriates and learned of Cubism, Surrealism, and the other avant-garde movements firsthand. Cummings incorporated into his own experimental works the concrete detail of the Imagists with the wordplay and syntactical rearrangements of Gertrude Stein's pieces (where adverbs act as nouns, nouns become verbs, and so on). He also applied the new techniques of the visual artists through clever manipulations of typography, line spacing, and the stretching of words

across and down the page. The results are deliberately disorienting and convey a sense of actual, sensuous, spontaneous reality. The unconventional formats are appropriate, too, to mock the conventional behavior of "most people" such as "the Cambridge ladies" who live in "furnished souls."

When he returned to the United States in 1924 he was already well known for The Enormous Room and his first poetry collection, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). He published a collection of his artwork in 1931 entitled CIOPW (for charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, watercolor) and later had several one-man shows in New York where he lived in Greenwich Village with his third wife, the photographer Marion Morehouse.

In 1952 he was invited to be the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard but agreed only if the lectures could be "nonlectures". His i:six Nonlectures appeared the next year, followed by Poems 1923-1954. In 1957 he was awarded the Bollingen Prize, and 95 Poems was printed in 1958. Cummings died, of a brain hemorrhage, in 1962; he was then second-most popular American poet, after Robert Frost.

THE LETTER HORSE

Poem "The Letter Horse", by E. E. Cummings.

PITY THIS BUSY MONSTER, MANUNKIND

pity this busy monster,manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:

your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness

—electrons deify one razor blade

into a mountain range;lenses extend

unwise through curving where when till unwise

returns on its unself.

A world of made

is not a world of born—pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones,but never this

fine specimen of hyper magical

ultra omnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if—listen:there's a hell

of a good universe next door;let's go

AS FREEDOM IS A BREAKFASTFOOD

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talent gang

and water most encourage flame

as hayracks into peach trees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men's hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flat folk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common's rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy's the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree (this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond

any experience, your eyes have their silence:

in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,

or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me

though i have closed myself as fingers,

you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens

(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and

my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,

as when the heart of this flower imagines

the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals

the power of your intense fragility: whose texture

compels me with the color of its countries,

rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all rose)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Bibliography:

Harold Bloom (ed.) 2003: E. E. Cummings. Broomall: Chelsea House.

E. E. Cummings 2010 (1922): The Enormous Room. Boston: Hard Press.

—————— 1995 (1953): i-six nonlectures (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures). Boston: Harvard University Press.

—————— 2010: Erotic Poems. New York: Liveright.

F. W. Dupee and George Stade (eds) 1972: Selected Letters of E. E. Cummings. New York: A. Deutsch.

George James Firmage (ed.) 1981: E. E. Cummings: Complete Poems (1904 — 1962). New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.

————————————1999: No Thanks. New York: Norton.

Richard S. Kennedy 1980: Dreams in Mirrors: A Biography of E. E. Cummings. New York: Liveright.

En español:

Alfonso Canales (Editor y traductor) 1973:E. E. Cummings: Poemas. Madrid: Alberto Corazón.

Antonio Ruiz Sánchez 2000: "Hijo del exceso": La poesía trascendental de E. E. Cummings. Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba.

Websites:

Some Poems by E. E. Cummings

The Poetry Foundation

Modern American Poetry

Link suggested by poet Harley White

Videos:

"Somewhere I have never travelled", read by E. E. Cummings.

"I Carry Your Heart With Me"

The life of E. E. Cummings with images

E. E. Cummings Biography Project

WALTER DE LA MARE (1873 — 1956)

Walter John de la Mare was born on Hughenot stock in Kent in 1873 and educated at St Paul's Cathedral Choir School. He spent eighteen years in business before devoting himself entirely to literature. His first book, Songs of Childhood (1902), was published under a pseudonym, and his first prose work, Henry Brocken, under his own name in 1904. His Memoirs of a Midget (1921) was awarded the James Tait Black Prize. He was an anthologist of genius, see, for example, Early One Morning (1935), which exploits absorbingly his preoccupation with childhood, and Love (1943), and a short-story writer whose powers of creating an atmosphere, particularly the atmosphere of the uncanny, were exceptional.

Graham Greene wrote illuminatingly on the short stories in A Tribute (mentioned below). His best-known tales of the supernatural are probably "All Hallows" and "Seaton's Aunt", both of which are excellent. Among his publications of poetry may be mentioned Collected Poems (1942), Collected Rhymes and Verses (1944), The Burning Glass (1945), The Traveller (1946), Rhymes and Verses, Collected Poems for Young People (1947), Winged Chariot (1951), and O Lovely England (1953). He died in 1956. There is a study of his world by Forrest Reid published in 1922, and in 1948 a volume entitled A Tribute to Walter de la Mare on his 75th Birthday was brought out. T. S. Eliot's following verses characterize the poetry of Walter de la Mare with great precision:

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?

The whispered incantation which allows

Free passage to the phantoms of the mind.

By you; by those deceptive cadences

Wherewith the common measure is refined;

By conscious art practiced with natural ease.

The British Council "Writers and Their Work" series included an essay on the poet by Kenneth Hopkins in 1953. Tea with Walter de la Mare (1957) by Russell Brain is also worth consulting.

The poems given here on this post are from Collected Poems with the exception of "A Portrait" from The Burning Glass.

THE CHILDREN OF STARE

Winter is fallen early

On the house of Stare;

Birds in reverberating flocks

Haunt its ancestral box;

Bright are the plenteous berries

In clusters in the air.

Still is the fountain's music,

The dark pool icy still,

Whereupon a small and sanguine sun

Floats in a mirror on,

Into a West of crimson,

From a South of daffodil.

'Tis strange to see young children

In such a wintry house;

Like rabbits' on the frozen snow

Their tell-tale footprints go;

Their laughter rings like timbrels

'Neath evening ominous:

Their small and heightened faces

Like wine-red winter buds;

Their frolic bodies gentle as

Flakes in the air that pass,

Frail as the twirling petal

From the briar of the woods.

Above them silence pours,

Still as an arctic sea;

Light fails; night falls; the wintry moon

Glitters; the crocus soon

Will open grey and distracted

On earth's austerity:

Thick mystery, wild peril,

Law like an iron rod:—

Yet sport they on in Spring's attire,

Each with his tiny fire

Blown to a core of ardour

By the awful breath of God.

THE LISTENERS

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
’Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
Louder, and lifted his head:
—‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
When the plunging hoofs were gone.

A PORTRAIT

Old: yet unchanged; —still pottering in his thoughts;

Still eagerly enslaved by books and print;

Less plagued, perhaps, by rigid musts and oughts,

But no less frantic in vain argument;

Still happy as a child, with its small toys,

Over his ink pot and his bits and pieces,—

Life's arduous, fragile and ingenuous joys,

Whose charm failed never— nay, it even increases!

Ev'n happier in watch of bird or flower,

Rainbow in heaven, or bud on thorny spray,

A star-strewn nightfall, and that heart-break hour

Of sleep-drowsed senses between dawn and day;

Loving the light —laved eyes in those wild hues!—

And dryad twilight, and the thronging dark;

A Crusoe ravished by mere solitude—

And silence —edged with music's fainted Hark!

And any chance-seen face whose loveliness

Hovers, a mystery, between dream and real;

Things usual yet miraculous that bless

And oversell a heart that still can feel;

Haunted by questions no man answered yet;

Pining to leap from A clean on to Z;

Absorbed by problems which the wise forget;

Avid for fantasy— yet how staid a head!

Senses at daggers with his intellect;

Quick, stupid; vain, retiring; arden, cold;

Faithful and fickle; rash and circumspect;

And never yet at rest in any fold;

Punctual at meals; a spendthrift, close as Scot;

Rebellious, tractable, childish —long gone grey!

Impatient, volatile, tongue wearying not—

Loose, too; which, yet, thank heaven, was taught to pray;

'Childish' indeed! —a waif on shingle shelf

Fronting the rippled sands, the sun, the sea;

And nought but his marooned precarious self

For questing consciousness and ill-to-be;

A feeble venturer —in a world so wide!

So rich in action, daring, cunning, strife!

You'd think, poor soul, he had taken Sloth for bride,—

Unless the imagined is the breath of life;

Unless to speculate bring virgin gold,

And Let's-pretend can range the seven seas,

And dreams are not mere tales by idiot told,

And tongueless truth may hide in fantasies;

Unless the alone may their own company find,

And churchyards harbor phantoms 'mid their bones,

And even a daisy may suffice a mind

Whose bindweed can redeem a heap of stones;

Too frail a basket for so many eggs—

Loose-woven: Gosling? cygnet? Laugh or weep?

Or is the cup at richest in its dregs?

The actual realest on the verge of sleep?

One yet how often the prey of doubt and fear,

Of bleak despondence, stark anxiety;

Ardent for what is neither now nor here,

And Orpheus fainting for Eurydice;

Not yet inert, but with a tortured breast

At hint of that bleak gulp — his last farewell;

Pining for peace, assurance, pause and rest,

Yet slave to what he loves past words to tell;

A foolish, fond old man, his bed-time nigh,

Who still at western window stays to win

A transient respite from the latening sky,

And scarce can bear it when the Sun goes in.

Websites:

Walter de la Mare Society Website

The Poetry Archive

Poetry Foundation

Video on "The Listeners"

En español:

El espejo gótico

Bibliography:

Brain, Russell 1957: Tea with Walter de la Mare. London: Faber & Faber.

De la Mare, Walter 1979 (1942): The Collected Poems of Walter de la Mare. London: Faber & Faber.

————————1984 (1944): Collected Rhymes and Verses. London: Faber & Faber.

———————— 1945: The Burning Glass. London: The Viking Press.

————————1951: Winged Chariot. London: The Viking Press.

————————1953: O Lovely England. London: Faber & Faber.

————————2002 (1947): Rhymes and Verses, Collected Poems for Young People. London: Henry Holt.

Duffin, Charles 1949: Walter de la Mare: A Study of his Poetry. New York: Haskell House.

Hopkins, Kenneth 1953: Walter de la Mare. London: Longmans.

KATHLEEN RAINE (1908 - 2003)

Kathleen Raine was born in 1908 and educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she specialized in biology and took her Natural Science tripos in 1929. She contributed to New Verse in the thirties, but her first collection of poems was Stone and Flower (1943), a book illustrated with drawings by Barbara Hepworth. Later volumes of verse are Living in Time (1946), The Pythoness and Other Poems (1949), and The Year One (1952). Her Collected Poems were published in 1956.

A concern with religious ideas and religious vision, missing from her earliest 'periodical' poems, is apparent in Stone and Flower. From her poems, too, one might perhaps infer an interest in Blake and the 'visionary' Coleridge, writers whom she introduced in the British Council 'Writers and Their Work' series. For her, Balke 'overtops all but the greatest men of genius that England .. has known', combining, as for her he seems to do, 'the intellectual honesty of the scientist with a saint's sense of the holy'. It is the scientist in Kathleen Raine who writes of the 'maypole dance & Of chromosome and nucleus', but it is the stronger inure of the visionary who asserts that

Behind the tree, behind the house, behind the stars

Is the presence that I cannot see

Otherwise than as house and stars and tree.

Kathleen Raine is most at ease in the 'timeless' short lyric, and the reader will be able to see from these poems that she writes musically in unaffected language and that she can express an apocalyptic element in feeling without inflation. To turn over the pages of her Collected Poems is to be won to admire a narrow independent talent very faithfully served.

PASSION

Full of desire I lay, the sky wounding me,

each cloud a ship without me sailing, each tree

possessing what my soul lacked, tranquillity.

Waiting for the longed-for voice to speak

through the mute telephone, my body grew weak

with the well-known and mortal death, heartbreak.

The language I knew best, my human speech

forsook my fingers, and out of reach

were Homer's ghosts, the savage conches of the beach.

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear,

familiar s the heart, than love more near.

The sky said to my soul, 'You have what you desire!

'Lift up your heart again without fear,

sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air,

this world you with the flower and with the tiger share.'

Then I saw every visible substance turn

into immortal, every cell new born

burned with the holy fire of passion.

This world I saw as on her judgement day

when the war ends, and the sky rolls away,

and all is light, love and eternity.

THE SPRING

(Song)

Out of hope's eternal spring

Bubbled once my mountain stream

Moss and sundew, fern and fell,

Valley, summer, tree and sun

All rose up, and all are gone.

By the spring I saw my love

(All who have parted once must meet,

First we live, and last forget),

With the stars about his head

With the future in his heart

Lay the green earth at my feet.

Now by the spring I stand alone

Still are its singing waters flowing;

Oh need thought I here to greet

Shadowy death who comes this way

Where hope's waters rise and play!

Websites:

The Guardian

Telegraph

Poetry Archive

The Currency of the Imaginal

The Collected Poems (Book Review)

En español:

Poesía y naturaleza

Bibliography:

Bernard, Philippa 2009: No End to Snowdrops: A Biography of Kathleen Raine. London: Shepheard Walwyn.

Raine, Kathleen 2001 (1956): Collected Poems. London: Counterpoint.

En español:

Raine, Kathleen 2008: Poesía y naturaleza (edición, traducción de Adolfo Gómez Tomé). Murcia: Tres Fronteras.

Raine, Kathleen 2006: Fragmentos de una visión sagrada: poemas escogidos (edición bilingüe de Emilio Alzueta). Madrid: Aljamía.

HART CRANE (1899 - 1932)

Born in Garretsville, Ohio, in 1899, he spent his childhood with his grandmother in Cleveland, far from his conflictive parents. His beautiful but neurotic mother made the boy her confidant, turning him against his father, a wealthy candy manufacturer. Torn between them, lonely, and dejected, Crane found solace in books and music, and at the age of ten he decided to become a poet. Mostly self-taught (he abandoned high school), the precocious teen devoured both the classics and the latest avant-garde journals.

First edition of White Buildings

In 1916 he traveled to New York, determined to become a writer. He got jobs in advertising and helped out at The Little Review and Seven Arts, where he made useful literary contacts. With the passage of time, he gave in fully to the carnal temptations the city offered in the Roaring Twenties, justifying his self-destructive drinking as necessary to attain the heightened sensibility from which his poetry flowed as well as the transcendence promised in Symbolist theory. His first collection, White Buildings, was published in 1926. One poem in the title, "At Melville's Tomb", first appeared in Poetry, but so puzzled the editor, Harriet Monroe, that she asked for an explanation. Crane provided a detailed exegesis with a defense of his "logic of metaphor"; Monroe printed both, the poem and their now-famous correspondence about it, in the same issue. Crane would often be accused of obscurity for his use of personal symbols, unusual connotations, compression, and elusive methods of association. But by bending logic and stretching words beyond their ordinary meanings, he hoped to achieve a style equal to his lofty vision.

First edition of The Bridge

That grand ambition propelled his bold new undertaking, a long homage «to the Brooklyn Bridge», for Crane not just an engineering triumph but in its great arches and harp like cables a multivalent symbol. His poem was planned as a "mystical synthesis of 'America'": an epic assimilation of the country's history and aspirations, an "organic panorama" linking past and present, he told his financial backer Otto Kahn in 1927. Unbeknownst to Crane while he was writing the poem, the window of his room at 110 Columbia Heights, from which he viewed the bridge, was the very same one from which its designer, engineer, and construction supervisor, Washington Roebling, had overseen the building of the span. The Bridge was finally finished in 1939 and printed first in Paris, then in New York.

Statue of Crane in Cleveland

On a Guggenheim fellowship, Crane sailed to Mexico planning to write another epic, based on Hernán Cortés. There he befriended the novelist Katherine Anne Porter and had his single affair with a woman, Peggy Baird, the ex-wife of the poet and critic Malcolm Cowley. Crane's excesses increased, his work became sporadic, then tapered off altogether; beginning to doubt his abilities, he attempted suicide. With his grant funds running out, Crane booked passage with Baird back to the United States on the Orizaba. Following a fight on board, on April 27, 1932, somewhere north of Havana, the poet jumped from the ship and vanished beneath the waves...

AT MELVILLE'S TOMB

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,

The calyx of death's bounty giving back

A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,

Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,

Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;

And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive

No farther tides... High in the azure steeps

Monody shall not wake the mariner.

This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Herma Melville's Grave, Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx

This poem is a little elegy upon Herman Melville, the author of Moby Dick, the great American novel of the sea and whaling. The general meaning of the poem is easy enough. The poet says that the spirit of the writer whose imagination was so vividly engaged by the sea, and who saw such grandeur in man's struggle with it, though his body might be buried on land, would find its real abiding place in the sea, this could also be related to Crane's suicide from the ship on April 27 (1932): "This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps". The imagery of the poem, however, provoked the editor (as we have already mentioned above) who first published the poem to write the poet to ask several questions concerning the detailed meaning:

Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how dice can bequeath an embassy (or anything else); and how a calyx (of death's bounty or anything else) can give back a scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph; and how, if it does, such a portent can be wound in corridors (of shells or anything else).

And so on. I find your image of frosted eyes lifting altars difficult to visualize. Nor do compass, quadrant and sextant contrive tides, they merely record them, I believe.

All this may seem impertinent, but is not so intended. Your ideas and rhythms interest me, and I am wondering by what process of reasoning you would justify this poem's succession of champion mixed metaphors, or which you must be conscious. The packed line should pack its phrases in orderly relation, it seems to me, in a manner tending to clear confusion instead of making it worse confounded (This correspondence between Harriet Monroe and Hart Crane appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse).

The first part of the poet's reply to the editor's letter containing these questions was concerned with the general justification of comparisons which are not scientifically and logically exact. The poet then undertook to analyze the implied points of reference behind his own use of imagery:

... I'll... come at one to the explanations you requested on the Melville poem: "The dice of drowned men's bones he saw bequeath An embassy."

Dice bequeath an embassy, in the first place, by being ground (in this connection only, of course) in little cubes from the bones of drowned men by the action of the sea, and are finally thrown up on the sand, having "numbers" but no identification. These being the bones of dead men who never completed their voyage, it seems legitimate to refer to them as the only surviving evidence of certain messages undelivered, mute evidence of certain things, experiences that the dead mariners might have had to deliver. dice as a symbol of chance and circumstance is also implied.

"The calyx of death's bounty giving back," etc.

This calyx refers in a double ironic sense both to a cornucopia and the vortex made by a sinking vessel. As sson as the water has closed over a ship this whirlpool sends up broken spars, wreckage, etc., which can be alluded to as livid hieroglyphs, making a scattered chapter so far as any complete record of the recent ship and her crew is concerned. In fact, about as much definite knowledge might come from all this as anyone might gain from the roar of his own veins, which is easily heard (haven't you ever done it?) by holding a shell close to one's ear.

"Frosted eyes lift altars"

refers simply to a conviction that a man, not knowing perhaps a definite god yet being endowed with a reverence for deity—such a man naturally postulates a deity somehow, and the altar of that deity by the very action of the eyes lifted in searching.

"Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive no farther tides."

Hasn't it often occurred that instruments originally invented for record and computation have inadvertently so extended the concepts of the entity they were invented to measure (concepts of space, etc.) in the mind and imagination that employed them, that they may metaphorically be said to have extended the original boundaries of the entity measured? This little bit of "relativity" ought not to be discredited in poetry now that scientists are proceeding to measure the universe of principles of pure ration, quite as metaphorical, so far as previous standards of scientific methods extended...

Obviously, this correspondence raises some very interesting questions that frequently appear in connection not only with poems like this one by Hart Crane, but also with all poetry. People sometimes say: "But the poet couldn't have been thinking of al this when he wrote the poem." And in the sense in which they are using the term "thinking" they are right. The poet certainly did not draw up an analysis of his intention, a kind of blueprint, and then write the poem to specification. But it is only a very superficial view of the way the mind works that would cast the question into those terms. The process of composing the poem is a process of exploring the full implications of the intended meaning and of finding a suitable structure. The process is probably one of movement by trial and error, governed by self-criticism.

In attempting to answer questions about his own poem, Crane is obviously acting int he role of observer or critic, and one is not to confuse this process of analysis with the process that probably occurred in the actual composition. Moreover, one is not to suppose that the reader necessarily must duplicate the process of analysis in experiencing the force of the poem. But as the preliminary discipline of the poet extends and enriches his capacity for creation, so the process of rudy extends the reader's capacity for appreciation.

TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE

The Brooklyn Bridge in 1925

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day ...

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

And Thee, across the harbor, silver paced

As though the sun took step of thee yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

All afternoon the cloud flown derricks turn ...

Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

Thy guerdon ... Accolade thou dost bestow

Of anonymity time cannot raise:

Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!

Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year ...

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

Bibliography

HarCrane, his poetry in presence and meaning (pdf)

Hart Crane 2001: White Buildings. Liveright: New York.

Hart Crane 2006: Complete Poems and Selected Letters. Library of America: New York.

Clive Fisher 2002: Hart Crane: A Life. Yale: Yale University Press.

Brian M. Reed 2006: Hart Crane: After his Lights. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.

Thomas Yingling 1990: Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text. Chicago: The University of Chicago.

Webliography

Hart Crane's Poetry, by John T. Irwin

The Bridge and Influence on Modernist Poetry

Hart Crane, his poetry in presence and meaning (pdf)

Allpoems: Short biography and some poems

Youtube: Short Poetic Biography

Youtube: At Melvill's Tomb

Youtube: Yale University

In Spanish

El puente (Editorial Pre-Textos)

Rolando Costa Picazo 2008: Hart Crane y El Puente: Una aproximación a la poética modernista. Colihue: Buenos Aires.

Sobre la homosexualidad de Hart Crane (Melville y Hart Crane): Rodrigo Andrés 2007: Herman Melville: Poder y Amor entre hombres. València: Universitat de València.

WORLD WAR ONE REMEMBERED
ISAAC ROSENBERG (1890 - 1918)

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890. Seven years later his family over to London where he attended an elementary school until he ws fourteen. At this age, he was apprenticed to an engraver and took evening classes in art at Birkbeck College. Although he began writing poetry as a boy, he wanted to make painting his career and in 1911 he was able to enter the Slade School. In 1912 he published Night and Day, the first of three pamphlets of poems, but neither these nor his paintings brought him any material success. He went to South Africa in 1914 in the hope of curing a

Isaac Rosenberg's self-portrait (1916)

weakness in his lungs, but he returned to England in the following year, enlisted in the army, and was killed in action in April 1918. Gordon Bottomley edited his Collected Poems (1922), this book contains a memoir by Laurecen Binyon. The Collected Works (poetry, letters, prose pieces) were published in 1937. The editors were Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding, and there is a foreword by Siegfried Sassoon. Collected Poemswas reprinted in 1949.

"God Made Blind" is one of Rosenberg's earlier pieces and is printed in preference to the better-known war poems such as the much-anthologized "Break of Day in the Trenches". It shows the effect of an enthusiastic reading of John Donne. Rosenberg's poems display an ability to conceive an idea in poetic terms and render it rhythmically, but they are often spoilt by his appetite for the extravagant and his unpleasing poetic diction. Some critics have looked on him as a poet with promise of greatness, a view we cannot wholeheartedly share; most critics are agreed that few of his actual poems are completely realized.

GOD MADE BLIND

It were a proud God-guiling, to allure

And flatter, by some cheat of ill, our Fate

To hold back the perfect crookedness its hate

Devised, and keep it poor,

And ignorant of our joy-

Masked in a giant wrong of cruel annoy,

That stands as some bleak hut to frost and night,

While hidden in bed is warmth and mad delight.

For all Love's heady valor and loved pain

Towers in our sinews that may not suppress

(Shut to God's eye) Love's springing eagerness,

And mind to advance his gain

Of gleeful secrecy

Through dolorous clay, which his eternity

Has pierced, in light that pushes out to meet

Eternity without us, heaven's heat.

Ant then, when Love's power hath increased so

That we must burst or grow to give it room,

And we can no more cheat our God with gloom,

We'll cheat Him with our joy.

For say! what can God do

To us, to Love, whom we have grown into?

Love! the poured rays of God's Eternity!

We are grown God - and shall His self-hate be?

BREAK OF DAY IN THE TRENCHES

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat,

As I pull the parapet’s poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver—what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe—

Just a little white with the dust.

The poem handwritten by the poet himself

Websites:

Break of Day in the Trenches

Analysis of "Break of Day in the Trenches"

First World War

The Guardian

Bibliography:

Al-Joulan, Nayef 2007: 'Essenced to Language': The Margins of Isaac Rosenberg. Peter Lang: Bern.

Liddiard, Jean (ed.) 2004: Isaac Rosenberg: Selected Poems and Letters. Enitharmon: London.

Wiest, Aimee Jeanne 1984: The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg. University of Maryland: Maryland.

Wilson, Jean Moorcroft 2009: Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet. New York: Phoenix

In Spanish:

Archivo digital de poesía de la Primera Guerra Mundial

Poesía de la Primera Guerra Mundial (Anglopoesía)

Versos de la trinchera (ABC)

Poetas Siglo XXI

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902 - 1964)

Afro-American poet, essayist and social activist, he was arguably one of the most well-known American poets of the past century. Hughes, along with other black artists and intellectuals, is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance. This period in American social and cultural history is known as such because during the "Roaring 20s" and the "Jazz Age" of the 1930s that followed, Harlem became a Mecca for new ideas and a new creativity among blacks which garnered the attention of the entire world. At this time, there was an explosive resurgence in creativity and vitality within the Afro-American community which produced not only some of the most influential literature, dance, and visual art in American history, but which served as a testament to an exciting reawakening of the African American culture and overall spirit of cultural pride and awareness. His poetry is an exposition of what we can define as "Poetical Blues" or, simply put, "Blues Poetry".

Jazz and blues were the music of the day for Langston Hugues. As art forms, both are quintessentially American and the contributions made by Afro-American performers and musicians would have been something with which Hughes was very much in tune. The lyrical structure of blues music lends itself well to uncomplicated lyrics that tell of life experiences common to people in general. The blues were born out of the life struggles of its creators. Langston Hughes transformed blues music and lyrics into a poetic art form which has remained unparalleled well into the 21st century. The author's blues and jazz poetry draws on his ability to write for the masses while retaining elements of more standard written poetic form.

THE WEARY BLUES

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
     I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
     He did a lazy sway . . .
     He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o’ those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
     O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
     Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man’s soul.
     O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
“Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
       Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
       I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
       And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
“I got the Weary Blues
       And I can’t be satisfied.
       Got the Weary Blues
       And can’t be satisfied—
       I ain’t happy no mo’
       And I wish that I had died.”
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

WAKE

Tell all my mourners

To mourn in red—

Cause there ain't no sense

In my bein' dead.

TOO BLUE





I got those sad old weary blues.


I don’t know where to turn.

I don’t know where to go. 


Nobody cares about you 

When you sink so low.


What shall I do? 

What shall I say? 

Shall I take a gun and 

Put myself away?


I wonder if 

One bullet would do? 

Hard as my head is, 

It would probably take two.


But I ain’t go
Neither bullet nor gun– 

And I’m too blue
To look for one.



LATE LAST NIGHT BLUES






Late Last Night 

I
Set on my steps and cried. 

Wasn’t nobody gone, 

Neither had nobody died.

I was cryin’ 

Cause you broke my heart in two. 

You looked at me cross-eyed 

And broke my heart in two -

So I was cryin’ 

On account of
You!


Websites and Videos:

Three Blues Poems with Audio

The Weary Blues

The Poetry Foundation


Bibliography:

De Santis, Christopher C. 1995: Langston Hughes and The Chicago Defender. Chicago: University of Illinois.

Hughes, Langston 1990 (1959): Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics.

Myers, Elizabeth P. 1981: Langston Hughes, Poet of his People. Michigan: Dell Pub.

Kutzinski, Vera M. 2012: The Worlds of Langston Hughes. New York: Cornell University.

Tracy, Steven C. 2001: Langston Hughes and the Blues. Chicago: University of Illinois.

En Español:

Dissertation by Antonio F. Calvo: "Langston Hughes y Federico García Lorca: Encuentro en el Lenguaje".

DOROTHY PARKER (1893 - 1967)

In reading through Dorothy Parker's poetry, it is not so much the witty, terrifically bitter, pithy lines that are easy to remember and provoke an edgy smile, but rather it is the collected despair of her work that lingers, nags, and haunts.

Who was Dorothy Parker, the woman? Dorothy Parker was a brilliant, strong, and paradoxically sad, vulnerable woman, if one reads autobiography into a poet's work, which in her case I think is appropriate. She was a "confessional" poet, but she definitely did it her way. As strung-out emotionally as Sylvia Plath -with all her fury and melancholy-, Parker was as clever can be with language and with melancholy, almost to the point of frustration. Often, she would suddenly, and with great agility, tie up a poem with a dazzling ribbon of distraction. For example, the poem "Well-Worn Story" has the sway and song of Emily Dickinson until the last stanza where she cuts herself off from the intense emotion of the earlier lines. I wish she had stayed with the passionate emotion instead of becoming so deftly pen-to-paper aware. And yet-and yet- in some poems like "Afternoon", with its yearning for both the lived and unloved life, and "Résumé", wit and pain marry into a strong union. Here she tells the reader she's been to that side of town. But in doing so she doesn't splatter herself onto the page. There's nothing to clean up.The merging of despondency and humor are sulfated into rock, solid. The poem evokes a quiet, uncomfortable smile or, when read aloud to a group, a quiet, nervous laugh instead. A quiet, nervous yes.

In all her writings (poetry, short stories, plays, criticism) Dorothy Parker was consistently amusing, poignant, biting, desperate, and desperately memorable, as in "Cherry White", quick with Dickinson's dashes, and Plath's pathos. But it is clearly Parker's pessimism all the way, tragic and lightly dismissive, mind-bending, and specially heart-breaking.

Born on August 22, 1893, Dorothy Rothschild is remembered nowadays as Dorothy Parker, having taken the surname of her first husband, Edwin Pond Parker II. Her mother Annie died when she was only four years old, and her father Jacob remarried shortly thereafter. Parker was educated at Miss Dana's School in Morristown, New Jersey, and the Blessed Sacrament Academy, a school contained in a New York City convent. Surprisingly, Parker, one of America's most celebrated and quick-minded witticisms, never received a high school diploma. She entered the workforce at an early age, helping to provide financial assistance to her father, whose once-successful garment business had begun to decline. In 1933, her father died, and Parker, on her own at this point, supported herself as a dance instructor until her literary and intellectual career began in 1914.

The beginning of the Great Depression in the 1930s brought

The Algonquin Circle: She usually met with her close friends at the
Algonquin Hotel for lunch and talks

another marked change in Parker's life and poetry. The Jazz Age in which she had participated so enthusiastically was essentially over; writing in reaction to fascism, her poetry took on a more political turn. In addition to poetry and reviews, Parker also wrote short stories, publishing the collections Laments for the Living in 1939 and After Such Pleasures in 1933. That same year, Parker married Alan Campbell, and the couple moved to Hollywood to write screenplays together. Her poetry continued to shift from the witty, light-hearted style of the '20s to a more serious, introspective style, as shown in her 1936 volume Collected Poems: Deep as a Well. This trend continued, and in the 1949s, Parker endorsed and supported several radical causes, including communism. She continued to publish poetry and endorse emerging activist movements, Civil Rights and feminism chief among them, until her death on June 7, 1967.

ONE PERFECT ROSE

A single flow'r he sent me, since we met.

All tenderly his messenger he chose;

Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—

One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;

"My fragile leaves," it said, "his heart enclose."

Love long has taken for his amulet

One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

One perfect limousine, do you suppose?

Ah no, it's always just my luck to get

One perfect rose.

RÉSUMÉ

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

NEWS ITEM

Men seldom make passes

At girls who wear glasses.

AFTERNOON

When I am old, and comforted,

And done with this desire,

With Memory to share my bed

And Peace to share my fire,

I'll comb my hair in scalloped bands

Beneath my laundered cap,

And watch my cool and fragile hands

Lie light upon my lap.

And I will have a spriggèd gown

With lace to kiss my throat;

I'll draw my curtain to the town,

And hum a purring note.

And I'll forget the way of tears,

And rock, and stir my tea.

But oh, I wish those blessed years

Were further than they be!

Websites:

Poets.org
Modern American Poetry

In Spanish:
Revista Clarín

Youtube:

Anne Hathaway Reads Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker reads "One Perfect Rose"
Dorothy Parker reads "Résumé"

In Spanish:
Revista Clarín

References:

Breese, Colleen (ed.) 2002: Dorothy Parker: Complete Stories. London: Penguin.
Fitzpatrick, Kevin C. 2013: A Journey into Dorothy Parker's New York. Berkeley: Roaring Forties Press.
Parker, Dorothy, 2010: Complete Poems. London: Penguin.
Pettitt, Rhonda S. 2000: A Gendered Collision: Sentimentalism and Modernism in Dorothy Parker's Poetry and Fiction. London: Associated University Presses.

In Spanish:
Parker, Dorothy 2011: Dorothy Parker, Narrativa completa. Barcelona: Lumen.

LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON

(1901 - 1991)

Laura (Riding) Jackson was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City on January 16, 1901. Her mother's invalidism and her father's inability to find steady work cast a pall over Riding's childhood; as she grew, she eventually came to resent her father's Marxist politics and blamed him for much of the family's misfortune. Subsequently, she renounced politics in favor of poetry. In 1914, the Reichenthals moved from a tenement on Manhattan's East Side to an apartment in the Bedford- Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 1918, Riding was admitted to Cornell University on a scholarship, and in 1920 she married Louis Gottschalk, a history instructor at Cornell, and moved with him as he found teaching positions in Urbana, Illinois, and then Louisville, Kentucky. In a bold and decidedly feminist gesture, she asked her new husband to take her name, and he became Louis Reichenthal Gottschalk. In 1923, she changed her own name to Laura Riding Gottschalk. They finally divorced in 1925.

Laura wearing the traditional costume of Mallorca

In 1926, Riding's book The Close Chaplet was published, its name derived from a poem by Robert Graves. That same year, she accepted an invitation from Graves to join him and his wife, Nancy, and their two children in England. This began Riding's famous fourteen year association with Graves. Together they founded Seizin Press and cowrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry. In 1927, she formally changed her name to Laura Riding. Although her time in England was for the most part non-turbulent, she threw herself from a window and fractured her spine in 1929. It appears that Riding's suicide attempt was in part an attempt to escape from her complex emotional entanglement in the Grave's household. After a full recovery, she relocated later that year to Mallorca with Graves, who had separated his wife.

Riding published many collections of poems Love as Love, Death as Death; Poems: A Joking Word; Twenty Poem Less; and Collected Poems (1938). In 1939, the year her relationship with Graves ended, she denounced poetry, which she saw as a hindrance to words' ability to convey truth. In June 1941, Riding married writer Schuyler B. Jackson in Elton, Maryland. Jackson left his wife and children in Pennsylvania. They worked together, until his death, on a substantial book called Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words, published at long last in 1997. it was intended to clarify the relation between human goodness and diction. She died in Wabash, Florida, on September 2, 1991.

DEATH AS DEATH

To conceive death as death

Is difficulty come by easily,

A blankness fallen among

Images of understanding,

Death like a quick cold hand

On the hot slow head of suicide.

So is it come by easily

For one instant. Then again furnaces

Roar in the ears, then again hell revolves,

And the elastic eye holds paradise

At visible length from blindness,

And dazedly the body echoes

"Like this, like this, like nothing else."

Like nothing——a similarity

Without resemblance. The prophetic eye,

Closing upon difficulty,

Opens upon comparison,

Halving the actuality

As a gift too plain, for which

Gratitude has no language,

Foresight no vision.

O VOCABLES OF LOVE

O vocables of love,

O zones of dreamt responses

Where wing on wing folds in

The negro centuries of sleep

And the thick lips compress

Compendiums of silence——

Throats claw the mirror of blind triumph,

Eyes pursue sight into the heart of terror.

Call within call

Succumbs to the indistinguishable

Wall within wall

Embracing the last crushed vocable,

The spoken unity of efforts.

O vocables of love,

The end of an end is an echo,

A last cry follows a last cry.

Finality of finality

Is perfection's touch of folly.

Ruin unfolds from ruin.

A remnant breeds a universe of fragment.

Horizons spread intelligibility

And once more it is yesterday.

REFERENCES:

Baker, Deborah, 1993: In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding. New York: Grove Press.

Friedmann, Elizabeth 2005: A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson. New York: Persea Books.

Graves, Richard Perceval, 1990: Robert Graves: The Years with Laura. London: Viking.

Jackson, Laura (Riding) 2001: The Poems of Laura Riding: A Newly Revised Edition of the 1938-1980 Collection. London: New York: Persea Books.

Jackson, Laura (Riding) 2007: The Failure of Poetry: The Promise of Language. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.

Jackson, Laura & Schuyler B. Jackson, 1997: Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

WEBLIOGRAPHY:

Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation

Film clips on Laura (Riding) Jackson

In Spanish:

"Poema de la ocasión inmediata"

Laura (Riding) Jackson: Admonición de la Poesía.

Campbell, Roy 2010: Poemas escogidos. Almería: Universidad de Almería, p. 315.

In Portuguese:

Translation of some poems.

ROBINSON JEFFERS

(1887- 1962, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)

The son of the Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, a professor of Old Testament literature and exegesis at the Western Theological Seminary, and Annie Robinson Tuttle, a church organist. His father quickly immersed Jeffers in a rigorous classical education of Greek, Latin, and Presbyterian doctrine. Jeffers spent much of his childhood in Europe with his family, where he attended boarding schools in Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Leipzig, and Vevey.

At the age of fifteen he was already fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and German. Graduating from Occidental College (Los Angeles) in 1905, he soon began graduate studies in literature at the University of Souther California. He also studied medicine at the medical school at USC and later he studied forestry at the University of Washington for one year. In 1912 he published his first volume of poetry, Flagons and Apples. The next year he married Una Kuster, a married lady with whom he had a love affair in 1906. They married on August, 1913.

Jeffers, Una and their Bulldog (1916)

Californians. Jeffers began construction on Tor House, a stone cottage for his family, and in 1919, built the forty-foot Hawk Tower with his own hands. Tamar and Other Poems, released in 1924, was a breakthrough for Jeffers. A wide number of critics compared Jeffers's Tamar to the great Greek tragedians. This led to an expanded reissue called Roan Stallion, Tamar, and Other Poems, which was a critical and popular success. It was in these poems that Jeffers first began to express the ideas that he would later call "Inhumanism" -the assertion that mankind was too egocentric, too unmoved by the "astonishing beauty of things".

Jeffers had finally found his muse, an emotional and intellectually compatible partner. In 1914, Jeffers published his second volume of poetry,

In 1948, Jeffers published his mot controversial collection of poetry, The Double Axe, in which he formally defined Inhumanism but also criticized the Allies' role in World War II, putting Roosevelt and Churchill on the same moral level as Hitler and Mussolini (prompting his publisher, Random House, to include a disclaimer). Shortly thereafter, Jeffers's dearest Una fell ill with cancer and died in 1950. Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954), Jeffers's last volume of poetry, contains a moving eulogy to Una. Jeffers died in 1962 at Tor House.

THE DAY IS A POEM

(September 19, 1939)

This morning Hitler spoke in Danzig, we hear his voice.

A man of genius: that is, of amazing

Ability, courage, devotion, cored on a sick child's soul,

Heard clearly through the dog wrath, a sick child

Wailing in Danzig; invoking destruction and wailing at it.

Here, the day was extremely hot; about noon

A south wind like a blast from hell's mouth spilled a slight rain

On the parched land, and at five a light earthquake

Danced the house, no harm done. Tonight I have been amusing myself

Watching the blood-red moon droop slowly

Into black sea through bursts of dry lightning and distant thunder.

Well: the day is a poem: but too much

Like one of Jeffers's, crusted with blood and barbaric omens,

Painful to excess, inhuman as a hawk's cry.

CARMEL POINT

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban

houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean

cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the

outcrop rock-heads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a

tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the

pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.

—As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and become

confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

WEBSITES:

Robinson Jeffers Association

Modern American Poetry

Poetry Foundation

Youtube:

Robinson Jeffers Reading his Poetry

En español:

Círculo de poesía

Jordidoce

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Hart, George (2013): Inventing the Language to Tell it: Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of Consciousness. New York: Fordham University Press.

Hunt, Tim (Ed.), 2002: The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Phillips, J. R. (2013): Robison Jeffers: Resurrecting God from the Grave. Los Angeles: CreateSpace.

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)

ROBERT HAYDEN

(The First African-American Poet Laureate)

(1913-1980)

Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913. His parents, Asa and Sheffy, had separated before his birth. Unable to raise him, his mother gave him over to foster parents named William and Sue Ellen hayden; because the Haydens lived next door, she was able to visit her son frequently throughout his childhood. Hayden would later remember these visits from his mother as the most edifying and enjoyable moments of his upbringing, for the relations with his adoptive family were quite strained. After completing high school, Hayden entered Detroit City College on a scholarship allegedly obtained with the assistance of a woman who had seen him reading a book of Countee Cullen's poetry while standing in a welfare line. However, even with the scholarship, the costs of college proved too much for Hayden and he was forced to drop out in 1936, one credit short of graduation. Having already published a few poems in various literary magazine, Hayden was able to get a job with the Work Progress Administration researching black history and culture, especially the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad. Much of this research would inform his later poetry.

In June 1940, Hayden married Erma Inez Morris, a music teacher and concert pianist, and published his first volume of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust. Published locally, it received only minimal attention from the literary community, and Hayden himself would later criticize the volume. Hayden enrolled in the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to pursue graduate studies in 1942, the same year that poet W. H. Auden began teaching there. Auden would become an enormous influence on Hayden's poetry from that time on. After serving as a teaching assistant for two years, Hayden was able to obtain a professorship at Fisk University in 1946. Hayden continued to write poetry and publish volumes throughout the 1940s and '50s, but they were never very widely distributed and he continued to go largely unnoticed. It was not until the 1960s that his literary reputation began to take root, and in 1966, it blossomed: Hayden received the Grand Prix de la Poésie at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal for his volume A Ballad of Remembrance. That same year, he was appointed Senegal's Poet Laureate. Now with an international audience, Hayden republished

a selection of his best work from the last several decades. His Selected Poems (1966) brought him instant acclaim as a poet of rare artistry–and as one of the leading African-American poets of the day. The most trenchant criticism of his poetry, however, came from within the black literary community itself, as politically motivated poets concerned Hayden for not taking a more vociferous stance on racial issues in his work.

Despite this condemnation, Hayden's reputation reached new proportions in the 1970s. In 1975, he was elected to the Academy of American Poets and, in that same year, he was appointed Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (later renamed Poet Laureate), becoming the first African-American ever to hold that position. He continued to teach and to publish poems, many of them his best, until his death in Ann Arbor in 1980. Although he did live to receive the kind of respect as a poet that he sought throughout his career, he is only now beginning to receive widespread recognition as one of his generation's greatest practitioners of the art of poetry.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueback cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

Homage to the Empress of the Blues

Because there was a man somewhere in a candy stripe silk shirt,

gracile and dangerous as a jaguar and because a woman moaned

for him in sixty-watt gloom and mourned him Faithless Love

Two-timing Love Oh Love Oh Careless Aggravating Love,

She came out on the stage in yards of pearls, emerging like

a favorite scenic view, flashed her golden smile and sang.

Because grey laths began somewhere to show from underneath

torn hurdygurdy lithographs of doll faced heaven;

and because there were those who feared alarming fists of snow

on the door and those who feared the riot-squad of statistics,

She came out on the stage in ostrich feathers, beaded satin,

and shone that smile on us and sang.

Websites:

Poetry Foundation

Afropoets

Bibliography:

Robert Hayden 1962: A Ballad of Remembrance. Boston: Paul Breman.

------------------ 1966: Selected Poems. New York: October House.

------------------ 1997: Collected Poems. New York: Liveright.

Goldstein & Robert Chrisman (eds.) 2001: Robert Hayden, Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.

Youtube:

To Robert Hayden, by Eduardo Corral.

Those Winter Sundays

Homage to the Empress of the Blues

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

(First Pulitzer Prize Awarded Woman: "The New Woman")

(1892-1950)

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine, on February 22, 1892. Her parents, Cora Lounella and Henry Tolman Millay, divorced when Millay was eight years old. After the breakup, her mother moved Edna and her sisters to Camden, Maine, and raised them on her own. Millay's mother provided for her family by nursing, and by most accounts, she soundly encouraged her daughters' ambitions and ensured for them strong literary and musical backgrounds. In high school, Millay concentrated on literature and theatre, and in 1912, she made her literary debut. Encouraged by her mother, Millay entered a poetry contest sponsored by the literary magazine The Lyric Year, and her long, mystical poem "The Renaissance" instantly caught the eye of Ferdinand Earle, one of the contest's judges. Earle persuaded Millay to change the poem's title to "Renascence," and although it only ranked fourth overall, the poem was published in The Lyric Year that November. The poem earned Millay a scholarship to Vassar as well as acclaim from many prominent literary figures, including Witter Bynner.

Millay in front of Washington's Arch (1938)

At Vassar, Millay (whom close friends called "Vincent") continued to write and publish poetry and remained active in theatre. In 1917, the year of her graduation, she published her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems. Also while at Vassar, Millay began having intimate relationship with several women, including the English actress Wynne Matthison, and from this point forward would live more or less openly bisexual. Her second book of poetry, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), dealt uninhibitedly with feminist issues and lesbian sentiments, as did the first of her three lyric plays, The Lamp and the Bell, which was commissioned by Vassar and published in 1921. With college behind her, Millay placed herself in the centre of New York City's bohemian neighborhood, Greenwich Village. She continued both her poetry and drama writing and was heralded as the voice of her generation. The Harp Weaver and Other Poems, her fourth book of poetry, was published in 1923 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the first to be awarded to a woman for poetry. She also began seeing a number of male lovers at this time, including a man named Floyd Dell, who tried unsuccessfully to quell her lesbian tendencies and obtain her hand in marriage. In 1923, she did marry–but not to Dell. After returning from two years in Europe as a correspondent for Vanity Fair, Millay wed a man named Eugen Jan Boissevain.

Millay, by William Zorach (ink, charcoal, pencil)

Many surmise that Boissevain's successful turn at publicizing Millay's poetry may have been one motivation for their sexually open marriage, and Boissevain continued to manage Millay's career until his death in 1949. Millay died one year later in her home in Austerlitz, New York. In later years, a political awareness and a mature, tender tone replaced the fashionably cynical touch of Millay's early lyrics, but she will always be remembered as the prototypical reckless, self-determined, romantic "New Woman".

"Millay became a diva of the sonnet, publishing some of he sexiest, wisest, most passionate, and mot feminist poetry of the twentieth century, each a rhythmical, sometimes whimsical, sometimes savagely intense fourteen lines" (Molly Peacock).

RECUERDO

We were very tired, we were very merry–

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable–

But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,

We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;

And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.

We were very tired, we were very merry–

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;

And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,

From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;

And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,

And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.

We were very tired, we were very merry,

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

We hailed, "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,

And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;

And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,

And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

FIRST FIG

My candle burns at both ends;

It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–

It gives a lovely light!

LOVE IS NOT ALL:

IT IS NOT MEAT NOR DRINK

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution's power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

Websites:

Edna St. Vincent Society

Poetry Foundation

The Reconstructionists

Online Poetry:

1917: Renascence and Other Poems (Bartleby)

1920: A Few Figs from Thistles (Digital Library Upenn)

1923: The Harp Weaver and Other Poems (ebooks.adelaide.edu)

Bibliography:

1917: Renascence and Other Poems. Mitchell Kennerley: New York.

Gray, James 1967: Edna St. Vincent Millay. University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.

Milford, Nancy Winston 2001: Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House: New York.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent 2011: Collected Poems. Harper Perennial: New York.

Youtube:

"First Fig"

"Love is not All"

"Recuerdo"

En Español:

Milford, Nancy Winston 2003: Edna St. Vincent Millay. Circe: México.

Campodemaniobras

Cierzo-vientosdeleste

Evalangui

"Love is not All"

La taberna del librero

DENISE LEVERTOV

1923 - 1997

Denise Levertov was born on October 24, 1923, in the town of Ilford in Essex, England. Her Welsh mother descended from a line of mystics, and her Russian father was raised as a Hasidic Jew but later converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Levertov grew up in a book-loving, book-filled household. Her mother read Tolstoy and Dickens aloud to the family, and Levertov received all of her instruction at home. Undoubtedly this lively, spiritual, literary atmosphere encouraged Levertov's writing, which began when she was five. Entranced by the poetry of T. S. Eliot, she sent him some of her own work at age twelve, and Eliot returned it to her with his advice and encouragement. Five years later, her first published poem appeared in Poetry Quarterly. During World War II, Levertov cared for injured veterans returning from the front, and in 1946, she published her first full volume of poetry, The Double Image, comprising poems written between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one.

Nineteen forty-eight married a major turning point in Levertov's life, both personally and poetically. Married to the American writer Mitchell Goodman, she left her native England and moved to America, settling in New York City. There, largely influenced by the poetry of William Carlos Williams, she began work on new poems that captured a more "American" sensibility. The traditional English forms of The Double Image were dropped in favor of open, experimental forms and a riskier, more expressive range of diction. Within a year, Levertov gave birth to her first son, and by 1956 she became a naturalized U.S. citizen. America proved tremendously stimulating to Levertov. She tapped into the Transcendentalist ideals of Thoreau and Emerson; found inspiration in the poetry of Ezra Pound, Robert Creely, and Wallace Stevens; and like so many others, learned from Charles Olson's seminal essay, "Projective Verse." The first of her American books, Here and Now and Overland to the Islands, appeared in 1956 and 1958, respectively. In 1959, poet and publisher James Laughlin accepted her next book, With Eyes at the Back of Our Heads, for publication with New Directions.

Throughout the course of the 1960s, Levertov produced five more volumes of poetry and became a political activist. Although she apparently perceived the Beats as sexist, she absorbed the spirit of the Beat movement; her poetry grew increasingly socially aware and prone to passages of sweeping sorrow and rage. In 1965, Poetry magazine ran her highly influential essay, "Some Notes on

Organic Form." In the essay she drew a distinction between free verse, whose primary formal concern was to maintain freedom from all constriction, and "organic" verse, whose primary formal concern was to remain faithful to the nature of perception and experience. Her own "organic" verse continued to evolve politically through the 1970s and '80s. Beginning in 1982, she was a professor at Stanford University, a position she held for a decade; upon retiring, she relocated to Seattle, Washington, and remained a vital, productive poet until her death on December 20, 1997. Her last volumes include Breathing the Water (1987), A Door in the Hive (1989), Evening Train (1992), The Sands of the Well (1996), and the posthumously published This Great Unknowing: Last Poems (1999).

COME INTO ANIMAL PRESENCE

Come into animal presence.

No man is so guileless as

the serpent. The lonely white

rabbit on the roof is a star

twitching its ears at the rain.

The llama intricately

folding its hind legs to be seated

not disdains but mildly

disregards human approval.

What joy when the insouciant

armadillo glances at us and doesn't

quicken his trotting

across the track into the palm brush.

What is this joy? That no animal

falters, but knows what it must do?

That the snake has no blemish,

that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings

in white star-silence? The llama

rests in dignity, the armadillo

has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.

Those who were sacred have remained so,

holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence

of bronze, only the sight that saw it

faltered and turned from it.

An old joy returns in holy presence.

TALKING TO GRIEF

Ah, grief, I should not treat you

like a homeless dog

who comes to the back door

for a crust, for a meatless bone.

I should trust you.

I should coax you

into the house and give you

your own corner,

a worn mat to lie on,

your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living

under my porch.

You long for your real place to be readied

before winter comes. You need

your name,

your collar and tag. You need

the right to warn off intruders,

to consider

my house your own

and me your person

and yourself

my own dog.

A WOMAN ALONE

When she cannot be sure

which of two lovers it was with whom she felt

this or that moment of pleasure, of something fiery

streaking from head to heels, the way the white

flame of a cascade streaks a mountainside

seen from a car across a valley, the car

changing gear, skirting a precipice,

climbing...

When she can sit or walk for hours after a movie

talking earnestly and with bursts of laughter

with friends, without worrying

that it's late, dinner at midnight, her time

spent without counting the change...

When half her bed is covered with books

and no one is kept awake by the reading light

and she disconnects the phone, to sleep till noon...

Then

selfpity dries up, a joy

untainted by guilt lifts her.

She has fears, but not about loneliness;

fears about how to deal with the aging

of her body—how to deal

with photographs and the mirror. She feels

so much younger and more beautiful

than she looks. At her happiest

—or even in the midst of

some less than joyful hour, sweating

patiently through a heatwave in the city

or hearing the sparrows at daybreak, dully gray,

toneless, the sound of fatigue—

a kind of sober euphoria makes her believe

in her future as an old woman, a wanderer,

seamed and brown,

little luxuries of the middle of life all gone,

watching cities and rivers, people and mountains,

without being watched; not grim nor sad,

an old winedrinking woman, who knows

the old roads, grass-grown, and laughs to herself...

She knows it can't be:

that's Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby from

The Water-Babies,

no one can walk the world any more,

a world of fumes and decibels.

But she thinks maybe

she could get to be tough and wise, some way,

anyway. Not at least

she is past the time of mourning,

now she can say without shame or deceit,

O blessed Solitude.

Bibliography:

Gelpi, Albert 1993: Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism. Michigan: University of Michigan.

Greene, Dana 2012: Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life. Chicago: University of Illinois.

Lacey, Paul (ed) 2013: The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov. New York: New Directions.

Levertov, Denise 1992 (1965): New and Selected Essays. New York: New Directions.

——————— 2013: Denise Levertov: Antología poética (bilingual edition). Madrid: Hiperion.

Rodgers, Audrey, T, 1993: Denise Levertov: The Poetry of Engagement. Cranbury: Associated University Presses.

Webliography:

"A Woman Alone"

"A Woman Alone" (Prezi)

Image Journal: A Memoir Appreciation

"Come into Animal Presence"

On "Talking to Grief"

"With Eyes at the Back of our Heads"

The Dead Waterfly

The Poetry Foundation

"Talking to Grief"

Youtube:

The Paris Review Interview

Podcast: "Poetry as a Way to Prayer"

En español:

Denise Levertov en español: Blog.

Denise Levertov, Antología poética (edición bilingüe), Editorial Hiperión

WILLIAM STAFFORD

(1914-1993)

William Stafford was born on January 17, 1914, in Hutchinson, Kansas. He remembered the Depression very well. Despite his family's hardships, Stafford's father encouraged all his children in reading. While working as a paperboy or field hand, Stafford attended high school and, briefly, junior college. He was writing regularly even then. He enrolled in the University of Kansas, working at various jobs to pay his way. He took active part in the struggles that later became the Civil Rights movement.

Original typewriting

World War II brought Stafford to a troubled period in his life. He registered as a conscientious objector in 1942, and ended up at a series of alternative service camps in Arkansas, California, and Illinois. During this time, Stafford established the discipline of writing every morning, and in those years wrote a great number of poems, many of which are now considered among his best. During his California service in 1944, he met Dorothy Hope Frantz, a schoolteacher who taught and lived nearby. That same year, Stafford and Frantz were married; in time, they would raise four children together. They returned to California in 1948, and Stafford took teaching jobs at various colleges, finally selling into Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, in 1956.

West of Your City, was published, which was received well. But two years later, when he published his second volume, Traveling Through the Dark, it was instantly heralded. It received the National Book Award that year and established Stafford as a poet of the highest order. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966.

During this time, Stafford was publishing his poetry in literary magazines, and although the poems received much notice, it wasn't until 1960 that his first volume, titled

Stafford wrote poems and essays steadily the rest of his life. While teaching at Lewis and Clark, he embarked on reading tours often, gave poetry workshops and attended literary conferences. In 1970, Stafford served as the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (later renamed Poet Laureate). His later volumes of poetry, such as Allegiances (1970) and Someday, Maybe (1973), remained lively and brilliant. Though he favored simple, "spoken" diction and rhythms, his poetry always embodied the complicated relationships between nature and society, and between our obligations and our affections. He never descended into didacticism despite his continuing commitment to political activism. He retired from teaching in 1980, but continued to write, travel, and give poetry readings until his death in 1993.

THE STAR IN THE HILLS

A star hit in the hills behind our house

up where the grass turns brown touching the sky.

Meteors have hit the world before, but this was near,

and since TV; few saw, but many felt the shock.

The state of California owns that land

(and out from shore three miles), and any stars

that come will be roped off and viewed on week days 8 to 5.

A guard who took the oath of loyalty and denied

any police record told me this:

"If you don't have a police record yet

you could take the oath and get a job

if California should be hit by another star."

"I'd promise to be loyal to California

and to guard any stars that hit it," I said,

"or any place three miles out from shore,

unless the star was bigger than the state—

in which case I'd be loyal to it."

But he said no exceptions were allowed,

and he leaned against the state-owned meteor

so calm and puffed a cork-tip cigarette

that I looked down and traced with my foot in the dust

and thought again and said, "OK—any star."

TRAVELING THROUGH THE DARK

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fan lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

PASSING REMARK

In scenery I like flat country.

In life I don't like much to happen.

In personalities I like mild colorless people.

And in colors I prefer gray and brown.

My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,

syas, "Then why did you choose me?"

Mildly I lower my brown eyes—

there are so many things admirable people

do not understand.

Bibliography:

Andrews, Tom 1995: William Stafford: The Worth of Local Things. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan.

Stafford, William 1994: The Darkness Around us is Deep: Selected Poems. New York: Harper.

——————— 1998: The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. San Francisco: Graywolf Press.

En español:

Ulloa Garay, Ricardo, Gerardo César Hurtado, 2004: Poetas del siglo XX en lengua inglesa: Nuevas traducciones. San José: Universidad de Costa Rica.

Webliography:

Modern American Poetry

Selected Poems

The Paris Review: The Art of Poetry

The Poetry Foundation

Youtube:

Traveling Through the Dark (Story explained by the poet)

The Star in the hills (Reading by the poet)

JOHN UPDIKE

(Shillington, Pennsylvania 1932 - Danvers, Massachusetts, 2009)

John Updike, the great American novelist, author of the memorable Rabbit Novel Series among many other fundamental titles of Contemporary American Literature was also an accomplished poet. John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, in the home of his maternal grandparents. His father was a high-school mathematics teacher.

Graduated from Harvard College in 1954, Updike spent a year in England on the Knox Fellowship, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957, he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he contributed poems, short stories and book reviews. Since 1957, he lived in Massachusetts, where he passed away.

As a poet, we can say his earliest poems date from 1953, when Updike was just twenty-one, and the last were written after he turned sixty. His poems constitute, as he said, "the thready backside of my life's fading tapestry."

A family man, his first wife, Martha Bernhard and childs

Nature —tenderly intricate, ruthlessly impervious— is a constant and ambiguous presence in his poetry, along with the social observation one would expect in a novelist. No occasion is too modest or too daily to excite metaphysical wonder, or to provoke a lyrical ingenuity of language. Yet even the wittiest of the poems are rooted to the ground of experience and fact.

"Seven Odes to Seven Natural Processes" attempt to explicate the physical world with a directness seldom attempted in poetry. Updike's light verse, relegated to a separate section in his Collected Poems, was his youthful forte, and led critics such as David McCord to write of him as "a graceful border-crosser (light verse to poem) as Auden has been." Indeed, even the lightest verses within their giddy wordplay echo his recurring notes of confession, nostalgia, anxiety, and awe.

NOVEMBER

The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace

in falling, sweeping clean the clouded sky.

This brightness shocks the window like a face.

Our eyes contract to hold the sudden space

of barrenness—bare branches, blue, up high.

The light the sun withdrew has been replaced.

The tiny muscles of the iris taste

past time—old falls, slant light—recalling why

this brightness shocks the window like a face.

To children, years are each a separate case,

enormous, full of presents and surprise:

the light the sun withdraws the leaves replace.

For grown-ups, reminiscence scores the days

with traces veteran nerve-ends recognize

when brightness shocks the window like a face.

November, we know you—the grudging grace

of clarity you grant the clouded eye.

The light the sun withdraws the leaves replace

with brightness at the window like a face.

PLAYER PIANO

My stick fingers click with a snicker

As, chuckling, they knuckle the keys;

Light-footed, my steel feelers flicker

And pluck from these keys melodies.

My paper can caper; abandon

Is broadcast by dint of my din,

And no man or band has a hand in

The tones I turn on from within.

At times I'm a jumble of rumbles,

At others I'm light like the moon,

But never my numb plunker fumbles,

Misstrums me, or tries a new tune.

MOUSE SEX

In my cellar the poisoned mice, thirsty to death,

come out to die not he cement, in the center

of the floor. This particular corpse seemed fat,

so sideways-plump that pregnancy crossed my mind,

and, picking it up by the tail, I saw, sure enough,

at the base of the tail her tiny neat vagina,

a pumpkin-seed-shaped break in the dulcet fur.

I had murdered a matriarch, with d-Con.

Revelation of the vagina's simplicity

had come to me before. Tossing the tiny body

into the woods, I remember another

woods-surrounded house, where I and another

lay together upstairs, and had heard

a sound downstairs, her husband or the wind.

The phantom sound, like an alchemist's pinch,

turned my erection inconvenient.

We listened, our love-flushed faces an inch apart.

The sound was not repeated. In the silence,

as the house resumed its enclosing, she said,

her voice thickened and soft and distinct,

"Put it in me." In my wild mind's eye I saw

the vagina as a simple wanting, framed in fur,

kept out of sight between the legs but always there,

a gentle nagging, a moist accommodacy.

A man and not a mouse, but with a bed-squeak,

I fell to my duty, our ungainly huddle

and its tense outcome less memorable

than the urgent, imperiled invitation.

How dear she was—her husband, that creep,

creeping about for all we knew—to sock it to

herself and give me in words the carte blanche

boys dream of but seldom receive spelled out.

I loved her for it, and for afterwards

with a touch of a blush confessing,

"I don't want to be coarse for you," as if women

could be as bluntly brutes as men.

Until that moment I did not suspect

that sex had an equitable basis.

The cat creeps below, but lady mice

still put their dulcet selves at risk, and die.

Suppose that moment, frozen, were Heaven or Hell

our hearts would thump until the death of stars,

the trees outside would stir their golden edges,

the bed would squeak, the frightened inch

between our skins would hold the headboard's grain,

her brazen thighs would simply, frankly part,

our eyes and breath would forever entertain

our mutual inquisition. Put it in.

Suspended above the abyss of her desire,

I feel as far-flung as a constellation.

Colors: the golden-edged trees, the lilac sheets,

the mousy green of her self-startled eyes.

We are furtive, gigantic, our stolen hour

together a swollen eternity.

We enter into one another; the universe

rises about us like a hostile house.

RIO DE JANEIRO

Too good to be true—a city that empties

its populace, a hundred shades of brown,

upon its miles of beach in morning's low light

and takes the bodies back when darkness quells

the last long volleyball game; even then,

the sands are lit for the soccer of homeless children.

A city that exults in nakedness:

"The ass," hissed to us a man of the élite,

"the ass has become the symbol of Rio."

Set off by suits of "dental floss", girls' buttocks

possess a meaty staring solemnness

that has us see sex as it is: a brainless act

performed by lumpy monkeys, mostly hairless.

Still, the herd vibrates, a loom of joy

threaded by vendors—a tree of suntan lotion

or of hats, or fried snacks roofed in cardboard—

whose monotonous cries in Portuguese

make the same carnival mock of human need.

Elsewhere, chaste squares preserve Machado's world

of understated tragedy, and churches

honored in their abandonment suspend

the blackened bliss of gold. Life to the living,

while politicians dazzling int heir polish,

far off in Brasília's cubes, feign impotence.

SIN CITY, D. C.

(As of Our Bicentennial Summer)

Hays Says Ray Lies;

Gravel Denies

Gray Houseboat Orgy Tale;

Gardner Claims Being Male

No Safeguard Against

Congressional Concupiscence;

Ray Parlays Hays Lay

Into Paperback Runaway.

References:

Bob Batchelor 2013: John Updike: A Critical Biography. ABC-CLIO: Santa Barbara.

Jack De Bellis 200: The John Updike Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing: Santa Barbara.

John Updike 1989: Self-Consciousness: Memoirs. Random House: New York.

————— 1993: Collected Poems, 1953-1993. Knopf: New York.

In Spanish:

John Updike 2002: Poemas (edición bilingüe). Pre-textos: Valencia.

Websites:

The Other John Updike Archives

The Poetry Foundation

John Updike Biography

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"

DEREK WALCOTT

As a poet and a playwright, Derek Walcott spent a lifetime portraying, and bridging, the complex societies of his Caribbean homeland and European heritage. Blending folk traditions and avant-garde techniques, he invented in English a poetic language as lush and dramatic as a tropical landscape. But the conflicts between the two cultures during their long and tangled history are necessarily central topics in Walcott's work. Within his original narrative of West Indian life, a pervasive theme has been Walcott's consciousness both of estrangement from his native land and of isolation as a black artist in America.

Walcott was born on St. Lucia, in the Lesser Antilles, in 1930. His father was a British artist who died when Walcott was a few years old. His mother was West Indian and taught in a Methodist school; After attending college at Castries, he studied French, Latin, and Spanish at the University College of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. When he was eighteen he self-published a book of 25 poems. He taught school and then moved to Trinidad, where he wrote art and theatre criticism.

In "Blues", the title echoes Langston Hughes, another alienated black writer, Walcott describes a violent, racist encounter he suffered early on in Greenwich Village and mocks sociological clichés about deprivation. The poem was printed in The Gulf (1969), and, like The Castaway (1965), the name of the book itself indicates the separation. The poet's historical and personal explorations have indeed led him down lonely paths.

He addressed his growing remoteness from his own Caribbean roots most tellingly in the Joycean self-examination of Another Life (1973), The Fortunate Traveller (1981), and Midsummer (1984).

Sea Grapes (1976), The Star-Apple Kingdom (1979), Collected Poems: 1948-1984 (1986), and Arkansas Testament (1987). His most ambitious volume is the book-length poem Omeros (1990), a retelling in sixty-four chapters of the Homeric epics in a modern-day Caribbean setting, similar to James Joyce's Ulysses. Nowadays he has even a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at several colleges.

In the seventies and eighties, Walcott published poetry volumes regularly. From 2010 to 2012 Walcott was professor of poetry at Essex University. Nowadays Walcott has been offering conferences and lectures in different colleges. He is an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Blues

Those five or six young guys
lunched on the stoop
that oven-hot summer night
whistled me over. Nice
and friendly. So, I stop.
MacDougal or Christopher
Street in chains of light.

A summer festival. Or some
saint's. I wasn't too far from
home, but not too bright
for a nigger, and not too dark.
I figured we were all
one, wop, nigger, jew,
besides, this wasn't Central Park.
I'm coming on too strong? You figure
right! They beat this yellow nigger
black and blue.

Yeah. During all this, scared
on case one used a knife,
I hung my olive-green, just-bought
sports coat on a fire plug.
I did nothing. They fought
each other, really. Life
gives them a few kcks,
that's all. The spades, the spicks.

My face smashed in, my bloddy mug
pouring, my olive-branch jacket saved
from cuts and tears,
I crawled four flights upstairs.
Sprawled in the gutter, I
remember a few watchers waved
loudly, and one kid's mother shouting
like "Jackie" or "Terry,"
"now that's enough!"
It's nothing really.
They don't get enough love.

You know they wouldn't kill
you. Just playing rough,
like young Americans will.
Still it taught me somthing
about love. If it's so tough,
forget it.

Midsummer, Tobago

Broad sun-stoned beaches.

White heat.

A green river.

A bridge,

scorched yellow palms

from the summer-sleeping house

drowsing through August.

Days I have held,

days I have lost,

days that outgrow, like daughters,

my harbouring arms.

Websites

Buffalo University

I am ashamed of my country

Poetry is an island

poets.org

The Guardian

Bibliography

Burnett, Paula 2000: Politics and Poetics. Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Hammer, Robert D 1993: Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott. Boulder: Lynne Rienner.

Terada, Rei 1992: Derek Walcott Poetry: American Mimicry. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Walcott, Derek 1984: Collected Poems: 1948-1984. New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux.

—————— 1990: Omeros. New York: Ferrar, Strauss and Giroux.

En español:

Walcott, Derek 1994: Omeros (bilingual edition), Anagrama: Barcelona.

Doce poemas de Derek Walcott

A media voz

WILLIAM PLOMER

(1903-1973)

William Charles Franklyn Plomer, born at Petersburg, N. Transvaal, in 1903 and educated at Rugby School, was a farmer in the Stormberg and a trader in Zululand, and he also travelled widely, as he also lived at various times in Greece and Japan. . Between 1940 and 1945 he served at the Admiralty. A long list of books, including novels, short stories, biography, and poetry, stands to his credit, and he also edited the delectable Kilvert's Diary (1938-49) and a short selection of Melville's poems (1943). double Lives (1943) is an autobiography of great subtlety and interests.

Plomer's poetic output consists of seven volumes: Notes for Poems (1928); The Family Tree (1929); the Fivefold Screen (1932); Visiting the Caves (1936); Selected Poems (1940); In a Bombed House, 1941: Elegy In Memory of Anthony Butts; The Dorking Thigh (1945); A Shot in the Park (1955); A Choice of Ballads (1960); Collected Poems (1960); Taste and Remember (1966); On not Answering the Telephone (2008). He claimed himself that his "temperament and abilities are not those of a whole-time poet", and his real poetic originality, although there are some pleasant pieces in his 'serious' volumes, is to be found in his light verse and ballad satires ("That light verse can be serious it should not be necessary to insist..."). the satirical collections are The Dorking Thigh and A Shot in the Park. In a prefatory note to the earlier of these books, from which "Father and Son: 1939" and "A Ticket for the Reading Room" are taken, Plomer states:

These satires are concerned with points in human experience at which the terrifying coincides with the absurd, the monstrous with the commonplace. Such points are perhaps commoner in our time than usual, for we have seen horror and absurdity on an enormous scale ... The satires are intended to be read aloud, con brío.

They should also be read with Auden's satirical ballads in mind and some of the early Betjeman pieces such as "The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel". Plumber was less in love with his victims than John Betjeman, and he was less of a moral psychologist than the W. H. Auden of "James Honeyman", and "Miss Gee", but his effects are more pointed. "A Ticket for the Reading Room" ends rather weakly, but we could not resist such a poetic reflection of the seedy world of Graham Greene's pre-war novels.

A TICKET FOR THE READING ROOM

With a smile of secret triumph

Seedy old untidy scholar,

Inkstains on his finger-nails,

Cobwebs on his Gladstone collar,

Down at heel and out at elbows

Off he goes on gouty feet

(Where he goes his foxy smell goes),

Off towards Great Russell Street.

Unaware of other people,

Peace and war and politics,

Down the pavement see him totter

Following his idée fixe.

Past the rowdy corner café

Full of Cypriots and flies

Where the customers see daggers

Looking form each other's eyes.

Past the sad but so-called Fun Fair

Where a few immortal souls

Occupy their leisure hours

Shooting little balls at holes,

Past the window full of booklets,

Rubber goods and cures for piles,

Past the pub, the natty milk-bar

Crowded with galactophiles,

Through the traffic, down the side-street

Where an unfrocked parson thrives

('Palmist and Psychologist')

Cutting short unwanted lives,

Through the shady residential

Square in which a widow runs

A quiet gambling-hell, or 'bridge club',

Fleecing other women's sons,

On the shuffles, quietly mumbling

Figures, facts and formulae-

Bats are busy in the belfry,

In the bonnet hums a bee.

At the Reading Room he settles

Pince-nez on his bottle nose,

Reads and scribbles, reads and scribbles,

Till the day draws to a close,

Then returns to oh, what squalor!

Kippers, cake and dark brown tea,

Filthy sheets and filthier blankets,

Sleep disturbed by mouse and flea.

What has the old man been doing?

What's his game? Another book?

He is out to pour contempt on

Esperanto, Völapük,

To fake a universal language

Full of deft abbreviation

For the day when all mankind

Join and form one happy nation.

In this the poor old chap resembles

Prosperous idealists

Who talk as if men reached for concord

With their clenched or grasping fists.

IN THE SNAKE PARK

A white-hot midday in the Snake Park.
Lethargy lay here and there in coils,
And here and there a neat obsidian head
Lay dreaming on a plaited pillow of its own
Loops like a pretzel or a true-love-knot.

A giant Python seemed a heap of tyres;
Two Nielsen's Vipers looked for a way out,
Sick of their cage and one another's curves;
And the long Ringsnake brought from Lembuland
Poured softly through an opening like smoke.

Leaning intently forward a young girl
Discerned in stagnant water on a rock
A dark brown shoestring or discarded whiplash,
Then read the label to find out the name,
Then stared again: it moved. She screamed.

Old Piet Vander leant with us that day
On the low wall around the rocky spacee
Where amid broken quartz that cast no shade
Snakes twitched or slithered, or appeared to sleep,
Or lay invisible in the singing glare.

The sun throbbed like a fever as he spoke:
"Look carefully at this shrub with glossy leaves."
Leaves bright as brass. "That leaf on top
Just there, do you see that it has eyes?
That's a Green Mamba, and it's watching you.

"A man I once knew did survive the bite,
Saved by a doctor running with a knife,
Serum and all. He was never the same again.
Vomiting blackness, agonizing, passing blood,
Part paralysed, near gone, he felt

"(He told me later) he would burst apart;
But the worst agony was in his mind --
Unbearable nightmare, worse than total grief
Or final loss of hope, impossibly magnified
To a blind passion of panic and extreme distress."

"Why should that little head have power
To inject all horror for no reason at all?"
"Ask me another -- and beware of snakes."
The sun was like a burning-glass. Face down
The girl who screamed had fallen in a faint.

References:

Websites:

The Poetry of William Plomer, by John Robert Doyle (Essay)

Literary Tourism

Collected Poems (Online)

Teaching William Plomer (ColCampus)

Videos:

The Dorking Thigh

Bibliography:

Peter Alexander, 1989: William Plomer: A Biography. Oxford: OUP.

William Plomer, 1955: A Shot in the Park. London: Jonathan Cape.

——————, 1960: Collected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape.

En español:

Joseph Pearce, 2009: Escritores conversos: La inspiración espiritual en una época de incredulidad. Madrid: Palabra.

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

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