Why poetry matters
Here’s a fellow lover of poetry:
WHEN I speak of poetry, I think of classic poems written by great poets of the past, poetry that modern educationalists think of as ‘elitist’ literature. Such writing may now be largely the preserve of private schools – those privileged places disliked by our Labour government. This is a tragedy. Great poetry should not be the preserve of the few but the birthright of all children. For poetry is the language of the soul (think of the Psalms) and we all have souls. This is a challenging statement for an age of spiritual mediocrity, the age in which we live now, but it matters urgently – if only to remind people that the language of beauty still exists and that if children are exposed to it through the words, the cadences, the rhythms and the imagery of traditional poems they will have a glimpse of the eternal which they will never forget.
Poetry always mattered to me, but I cannot tell you why. It was simply on my wavelength. Even as a child, I felt it speak in a way prose did not and different even from music, which was also wonderful. I started to write poetry in earnest when I was in third grade, and although I stopped for long periods of time I never really stopped. There were also the poems I was assigned to memorize, back in the day when memorizing traditional poetry (some of it quite bad, by the way) was standard in the NYC school system.
I didn’t realize it, but my mother had also been a child poet although she had quit writing poetry in adulthood and confined herself to clever song parodies. Her father wrote advertising jingles for a living.
My father seemed to have no poetry in him, but he once told me that when his own father died at fifty-nine, when they emptied out his pockets they contained some poems. And my older brother was a poetry admirer who sometimes shared poems he studied in school and admired, and so I was exposed to a very wide variety of poetry and thought that was normal.
I was an adult of about thirty before I realized that not everyone loved poetry. In fact, I was shocked to learn that a great many people – perhaps even the majority – didn’t care for it. So there’s something else, some unknown factor, that accounts for love of poetry. I can’t begin to explain it, although it has something to do with a deep appreciation of a fusion of ideas and emotion expressed with an economy of colorful and unexpected – and often beautiful – language.
In other words, many poems make me shiver, either with delight or with wonder or with awe or with dread or with some combination of all of them. And writing a poem – especially a sonnet, a form of which I’m very fond – is a source of tremendous satisfaction.
Can appreciation of poetry be taught, in the way described in that initial quote in this post? I don’t know, although I tend to doubt it and to think that a person either loves poetry or doesn’t, although I agree that all children should be exposed to it. Maybe you can share your experiences along those lines in the comments.
NOTE: Here’s an early post of mine on memorizing poetry. And here’s one on sonnets.
Poetry, like a lot of other art in the 20th century, left the mass of people behind and became the private playground of people who only wanted to impress each other. There’s little wonder so few people enjoy it any more. Poetry used to be something that ordinary people read to one another as entertainment, and wrote if they had any talent at all.
My own appreciation of poetry is limited by my not reading it aloud, I think, and I don’t get the same things out of it, and the kind of poetry I like is affected by that. I guess my favorites are W. B. Yeats and Robert Burns and the old Child ballads, composed by many hands over many years.
I felt like I had to fight my way through to poetry
Poems are taught in school, not as possible avenues to enjoyment and insight, but as tests all too easy to fail.
I suspect that there are quite a few people who once would have become poets, but instead became songwriters, or lyricists.
Leonard Cohen of course did both.
Niketas:
We’re not talking about contemporary poetry. This is about learning traditional poetry in childhood.
I agree about contemporary poetry, though. It’s mostly dreck.
@neo:We’re not talking about contemporary poetry. This is about learning traditional poetry in childhood.
Poetry was once part of almost every person’s daily life, and has become “the private playground of people who only wanted to impress each other”. And it’s now, for most people over the last few generations, something that you might not be exposed to outside of school, so it’s not surprising that many people would not naturally take to it having grown up without it, any more than they naturally take to algebra or Latin.
Young people now are frequently not exposed to much traditional poetry even in school. The Common Core exemplars don’t look to be all that bad, but there’s only four dozen there for all of K-12 and that’s not enough exposure to poetry to learn to like it.
I like this definition of poetry:
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poetry, literature that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through its meaning, sound and rhythm.
–Encyclopedia Britannica
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It’s fair to conclude from this definition that poetry will likely be more challenging than stories. Or plain speech. Most people don’t ordinarily get around to reading much poetry.
My point is that poetry requires a certain amount of experience to learn to appreciate poetry.
The lowest grade I ever received on any school / college exam – from 1st grade thru graduate school – was on a poetry exam. I was a senior in high school and
I scored a 17 % (yep, a seventeen %) out of 100%.
I am convinced that 10 of those points were given to me because I correctly wrote my name on the test paper.
Poetry and I simply did not get along.
However, I still remember the first line or so of a poem I had to recite in 5th grade;
” By the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard round the world.”
Don’t know why I still remember these lines; perhaps because it refers to a historical event and I read a lot of history books back then.
Unfortunately for me, this poem was not on the poetry exam that I took as a senior in high school.
If it was, I could have scored perhaps 25 % instead of 17%.
Adolescence is when poetry grabbed me hard. For me, prose told, but poetry evoked. My mind and the poet’s mind met like flint and steel, sparks dropped into the duff and tinder of an unplowed mind, a puff of smoke, a tiny flame, then a raucous flareup of heat and light as the world burned with new meaning. This is why the word “gobsmacked” was coined.
I memorized many poems and even tried writing poetry in free verse as well as the meters of various ages (iambic pentameter, Dante’s terza rima, and so forth). The poems were not very good, naturally, but the effort of forcing meaning into a specific pattern was a worthy challenge.
With advanced age and disuse, the entirety of the poems in my memory are lost. But snippets remain: “Because I could not stop for death / he kindly stopped for me” (Dickinson); “Does a dream dry up like a raisin in the sun…or does it explode” (Langston Hughes); “our vegetable love” (Marvell); “Terence, this is stupid stuff” (A E Housman).
When an experience in the world brings one of these snippets to mind, I dig out the old books and find the poem. It is very much like having an old friend drop in unexpectedly. I uncork the dusty whisky bottle, pour a finger’s worth for us both, and we sip and reminisce about a time before 140 characters and emojis.
Poetry and I simply did not get along.
John Tyler:
Could be and that’s fine. The fact that you recall that line signifies that you can get powerful language.
In my experience as an amateur poet and as a lover of poetry, I found that if I showed a friend a poem that I thought was good, they usually got it.
There is a terrible signal-to-noise ratio in poetry, not limited to contemporary poetry. Quite a lot of poetry really is tedious for civilians. Quite a lot of poetry really isn’t very good.
Here’s one of the poems neither old nor new that let me know that I could get poetry and that there was gold in them thar hills:
___________________
Question
Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead
How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye
With cloud for shift
how will I hide?
–May Swenson (1913-1989)
The textbook for my sophomore college English class was Sound and Sense, which I thought was very good. I see it is still available, wonder to what extent the poems are the same in the more recent editions.
Jeff Sypeck, whose blog was once very active but now only occasionally updated, published a book of poems about the various gargoyles on the National Cathedral. I particularly like A Mother Consoles Her Daughter, which can be found here:
https://quidplura.com/2012/10/18/looking-up-poems-from-the-national-cathedral-gargoyles-2/
Searching Chicago Boyz for posts about or including poetry…one I posted in 2017 in honor of the eclipse included an Archibald Macleish poem that I found at Neo’s site…I also included George Meredith’s Lucifer in Starlight:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/55857.html
Al Alvarez, in his book The Writer’s Voice:
“When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it’s usually talking about what its owner is feeling; but neither the medium nor the message is the point. The point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have heard and it is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way. It may be talking to you from centuries ago or from a few years back or, as it were, from across the room–bang up-to-date in the here-and-now. The details are secondary; all that really matters is that you hear it–an undeniable presence in your head, and still very much alive, no matter how long ago the words were spoken:
Western wind, when wilt thou blow
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Nobody knows who write that poem or even precisely when he wrote it (probably early in the 16th century). But whoever it was is still very much alive–lonely, miserable, hunkered down against the foul weather and a long way from home, yearning for spring and warmth and his girl. Across a gap of five centuries, the man is still our contemporary.”
I still have my copy of Sound and Sense, now 58 years old and the only printed remnant of my high school education. It is a wonderful introduction to poetry, I especially remember the ‘Great poetry’ section and in particular ‘Death of a Hired Hand’, which I go back to probably once a year–to me it epitomizes the best of what poetry can do.
For those who haven’t read it, you can find “The Death of the Hired Man” at:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44261/the-death-of-the-hired-man
“Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.”
Isaac Babel wrote that no iron can enter the human heart so chillingly as a period placed just right. That’s what good poetry does.
Poetry has, or rather had, some unexpected fans. Ian Fleming, speaking through James Bond, called Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Brahma” one of the most sinister poems in the English language, especially the third stanza:
If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished gods to me appear;
And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt;
And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven,
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
Those lines float to the surface of Bond’s memory at a menacing turn in the story (IIRC, in “Diamonds Are Forever”)–similar to the experience described by Yukon above. Who knew Bond was a poetry reader? And American poetry at that?
Young people now are frequently not exposed to much traditional poetry even in school.
I suspect the situation with music (classical music in particular) is much worse.
David Foster:
My friends had copies of “Sound and Sense.” We went to different schools together.
I recall “Western Wind” from Ezra Pound raving about it in his “ABC of Reading.” He quoted it (of course) in Middle English:
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Westron wynde when wyll thow blow
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne
Cryst yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne.
–“Westron Wynde” transcribed by Charles Frey
________________________________
I’m pretty sure Bob Dylan adapted it as the refrain in an early song:
________________________________
Yes, and only if my own true love was waitin’
Yes, and if I could hear her heart a-softly poundin’
Only if she was lyin’ by me
Then I’d lie in my bed once again
–Bob Dylan, “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”
________________________________
Dylan was much more well-read than most people realize.
huxley…”Dylan was much more well-read than most people realize” Indeed, Here’s his Nobel Lecture:
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/
In fifth grade, we were assigned a recital of “Casey at the Bat.” I hammed it up, and got some positive feedback for it. Little did I know what was in store for me. I was later told I would recite the poem on the stage, in front of the whole school. I did it, and to the best of my knowledge I didn’t freeze up. Nonetheless, the experience left me with a bad taste in my mouth, as my being required to recite in front of the whole school was a shock for me.
Maybe my memory is faulty. Perhaps before the in-class recital we were told that the winner would recite it in front of the whole school, and I didn’t realize until I was on the stage that being on the stage would make me uncomfortable. I suspect that was the case, as my teacher was not a jerk.
In 8th grade we read Rime of the Ancient Mariner. I still remember this:
Through 8th grade I liked Reading/English class. That was not the case from 9th grade through college, where English classes forced students into the role of Junior Literary Critic. Looking for symbolism, metaphor, simile etc.–especially when I was making SWAGs about what the metaphors/symbols etc. were–took the joy out of reading prose and poetry.
I took only two English classes in college. Fortunately, I had a good experience with my last English class: Shakespeare. I read each play twice, and got the only semester A I ever got for an English class in high school or college.
For those who don’t know: SWAG=Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
Poetry hit me in high school, when I was sixteen or so. I think I had responded to a couple of poems in middle school textbooks, but to the best of my memory it was reading Shakespeare in sophomore English that made me consciously realize what a great thing it was. That’s when I was first electrified by language, mainly in poetry. I’d always loved stories, but poems were another level. I was on trajectory to become an English lit prof until circumstances closed that option. Now that I’m retired I’m continuing, in a hit-and-miss wandering way, my literary education. Currently reading Pope.
I’m another who benefited greatly from Sound and Sense. I still have my copy from second semester freshman English in college, 1967.
I strongly, strongly recommend the web site Poems Ancient and Modern to anyone who is at all interested in poetry. It’s run by two accomplished and extremely knowledgeable poet-critics, Sally Thomas and Joseph Bottum. Five days a week they publish and discuss a single poem, almost always, for practical reasons, something old enough to be out of copyright. I thought I was halfway familiar with poetry in English but they are constantly introducing me to work, often to poets, I’ve never heard of. Today’s entry, for instance:
https://poemsancientandmodern.substack.com/p/todays-poem-ode-written-in-the-beginning
And for contemporary poetry that might surprise you with its quality, try New Verse Review. Here’s a sample, two poems by Benjamin Myers:
https://www.newversereview.com/1-1-benjamin-myers
Traditional forms have made quite a comeback in recent decades.
I had and loved Sound and Sense too. Seems like a pattern is emerging.
My copy came from my brother, though.
Yukon on January 2, 2025 at 6:52 pm said:
“Adolescence is when poetry grabbed me hard. For me, prose told, but poetry evoked. My mind and the poet’s mind met like flint and steel, sparks dropped into the duff and tinder of an unplowed mind, a puff of smoke, a tiny flame, then a raucous flareup of heat and light as the world burned with new meaning. This is why the word “gobsmacked” was coined.”
I am not blessed with “getting” poetry much at all, but whatever talents you believe you have, or don’t have, as a poet, I thought that prose example was a very strong image generator.
Something y’all might find interesting: back in 2018 on my blog I did a year-long series called 52 Poems–just what the title says, one poem a week, usually with a bit of commentary, for a year. I did most of the posts myself but other people joined in, too.
https://www.lightondarkwater.com/52-poems-the-complete-list.html
Neo:
Here’s an early post of mine on memorizing poetry.
I substituted in a fifth grade class where the students recited poems they had memorized. I was told that while this had once been a problem class, poetry memorizing and reciting had help turn the class around. Certainly for that particular school, they were well behaved.
How could memorizing and reciting poetry help turn a class around? One conjecture is that current pedagogy, in viewing memorization as “drill and kill,” has forgotten that memorizing is an appropriate model for younger students. Phonics, for example, has drills for associating sounds with letter combinations. Students enjoy phonics drills: they get to talk, and the repetition reinforces their learning. While Education professors would be bored with those phonics drills, they forget that children and adults have different perspectives.
Similarly, before you can reason about certain facts, you need to know certain facts. Knowledge–memorization–precedes reason. If you don’t know certain facts about the Civil War, you cannot discern the reasons why the Civil War turned out the way it did.
Memorizing a poem gives a student–especially a “problem” student–a feeling of accomplishment.
The reciting helps for teaching proper classroom behavior. A student who is reciting a poem in front of a class wants the rest of the class to listen to him. Students come to realize that such behavior is reciprocal. If you want others to listen to you, you need to listen to others.
I don’t know how often Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is read by young people these days. It’s long, archaic, and they won’t get the references. There’s a few parts that stick with me:
Perhaps because of my love for Dr. Seuss, the emotions of poetry don’t touch me much. Perhaps it’s my enjoyment of songs and song lyrics.
I guess that recorded pop music, so dependent on poetic rhymes, satisfies the mild poetic itch many folk have.
While not a fan of hip hop nor rap, it seems the rhymes & rhythms of many songs by Eminem are poems set to a not completely monotonous beat.
His palms are sweaty,
Knees weak, arms are heavy.
There’s vomit on his sweater already.
…
I’d guess more readers know the next line than know a missing line in any of the above poems.
Mom’s spaghetti.
Both specific and universal, with a hint of a great thought about performance anxiety, but describing one person’s details in rhythm. I wouldn’t call it great or classic poetry, but why not?
Too easy & clear? Not elitist enough?
Without the music, it’s not so good, not any better than most poems.
Happier with song lyric poetry, still.
I think the love for poetry was beat out of me in school.
My grandfather loved poetry and recited it regularly when I was very young. He had a thick tome entitled “The Best Loved Poems of the American People” from which he read to us kids regularly.
I was so enamored of it and enjoyed it so much he actually gifted me a copy of the book with a dedication from himself hand written inside the cover. I still have it.
He passed when I was (I think) 10. Maybe if he’d lived to reinforce it longer, it would have stuck.
At any rate, when I got high enough in the grades that we started “studying” poetry. It wasn’t to enjoy it or appreciate it…it was to analyze and dissect it.
I often got into arguments with my teachers even as high as English Lit class in college: how do you know that’s what they author meant by that passage? Did he/she tell you? If not, then how can you discount my interpretation of it as “wrong”? You’re just regurgitating what you were taught by your professors, or wrapping the passage in the cloak of your own biases and personal experiences.
Anyway, that clinical approach to poetry pretty much ruined it for me. I don’t even really enjoy reading the old poems that my Grandfather used to read or recite to me. I haven’t cracked that book open in probably 30 years and then it was just for nostalgia’s sake.
I can still enjoy a good turn of phrase when I hear it, but I don’t seek out poetry and other than a passing admiration for the talent required to create it, poetry really doesn’t evoke any strong emotions in me any more. If you’re trying to say something, just say it…no need to pretty it up for me.
I’ve always loved poetry. Still have my parents’ copy of A Treasury of the Familiar, edited by Ralph Woods.
One of my favorites, that I still have memorized, is Kentucky Belle, by Constance
Woolston. And I can still recite a couple of poems by Robert W. Service, Henry W. Longfellow & John G. Whittier.
You can always rely on the Oxford Handbook of English Verse, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.
Poetry being all about the “making“, an old General’s sort of poetry:
Sing, goddess . . .
It is interesting that in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature — starting with the Haskalah, on to early Modern Literature — poetry tended to be the purview of men, while what women writers there were, tended to write prose.
It was not a hard and fast rule, just a tendency. But the other thing is that during the Haskalah, poetry tended to be thought of as a more “serious” form of literature. So even if women were writing poetry, they had less of a chance of being published.
Short attention span did in poetry, like it’s doing in everything else, only earlier. Poets of the Robert Lowell-John Berryman-Adrienne Rich generation started writing very complex works, but when they realized that people didn’t have the time to read them and that they didn’t want to devote the time to writing them, they began writing simpler works.
The aspiring modernists of the 20th century wanted to throw out Whittier and Longfellow and the other Lowells to make room for purer modernist works, but what they ended up doing was severing the connection between the public and poetry (not that it wouldn’t have been cut in any case by all the new media and demands on our attention).
My stay-at-home mom read us poems from the World Book Encyclopedia’s Childcraft series. She didn’t do that for my sister who was born ten years later, and I didn’t see many parents doing that in the 1970s and 1980s, let alone today. Conscientious parents still make a point of reading to their children. Some of the books they read from may rhyme, but they don’t read traditional poetry and nursery rhymes very much nowadays. Even Dr. Seuss isn’t as popular as he once was.
Tom Gray
Yes, indeed. While there are few people who memorize poetry today, nearly everyone has memorized the lyrics of some songs.
Sailorcurt
So I wasn’t the only one who reacted badly to the Junior Literary Critic model. 🙂
From what I have read about college English classes these days, there has been a trend to replace reading literature with reading literary criticism. Deadly.
A further deadly consequence of the Junior Literary Critic model has been to use literary criticism to teach composition. At least for me, my attempts at discovering metaphor/simile/symbols in literature were conjectures, wild guesses. When I wrote an essay on literary criticism, I was writing about something I didn’t know. The result was that I developed a great dislike of writing. Before high school, I loved to put pencil to paper. It is much better to write essays about something you KNOW.
By “simpler,” I meant to say “prosier.” Throwing out the complexity would also eventually mean throwing out a lot of what made poetry poetry.
I sympathize with those who were put off reading by college lit classes. Worrying about the meaning and about whether you’re getting what you’re supposed to get from a work kills off much of the joy of reading. I find that joy can come back with audiobooks. They have their disadvantages – you can’t linger over a page as easily to reflect and ponder – but if reflecting and pondering (or other reasons for lecturophobia) keep you from reading, audiobooks can be a way out and back to “reading” for pleasure.
I remember being 10 years old, [or maybe I was 7?], listening to my grandmother’s, vinyl record.
It was the soundtrack record, for the film, Doctor Doolittle.
(Doctor Doolittle was made in 1967.)
The song is, “At The Crossroads”.
In my words- the woman who sung it, sung it beautifully, and the orchestra performing the song with her, was amazing.
The song, and the lyrics…as a poem, have always been amazing and inspiring, to me.
“At The Crossroads”
Here I stand
At the crossroads of life
Childhood behind me
The future to come
And alone
Nothing planned
At the crossroads of life
But life will find me
More grateful than some…
It has known
Grateful to see
All the wonderful things I see
Grateful to be
What life expects me to be
So I stand
At the crossroads of life
This way or that way
Well, which shall I go?
Towards the left or the right?
Towards the day or the night?
Towards the dark or the light?
Only my heart can know
Only my heart can know
(p.s.- By the way, if you like this song, please listen to the soundtrack. To me- the film is kind of off. You’ll probably feel good, if you skip the film. Cheers.)
Perrine’s “Sound and Sense” is getting a lot of props here. I never encountered it, but we did have readers in grade school that included lots of child-appropriate poetry with enchanting illustrations. One poem in particular I remember was Robert Graves’ “I’d Love To Be a Fairy’s Child”:
Children born of fairy stock
Never need for shirt or frock,
Never want for food or fire,
Always get their heart’s desire:
Jingle pockets full of gold,
Marry when they’re seven years old.
Every fairy child may keep
Two strong ponies and ten sheep;
All have houses, each his own,
Built of brick or granite stone;
They live on cherries, they run wild–
I’d love to be a Fairy’s child.
Wish I could remember the name of the series.
My mother loved poetry and the family bookshelves were full of it. When I was 15 or 16 I picked up her copy of the Penguin Book of Contemporary American Poetry (1962, edited by Donald Hall) and it was off to the races. I’ve still got the book.
And I grew up in Amherst, which had poets and traces of poets up the…er, make that everywhere–sometimes right up the street. Off the top of my head: Emily Dickinson, Eugene Field, Robert Frost, Robert Francis (whose cabin in the woods outside Amherst, “Fort Juniper”, is apparently a writers’ retreat), Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, Rolfe Humphries, Joseph Langland, and James Tate. So it was in the air. That was true of the surrounding area as well. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath did a stint at Smith College–Plath’s alma mater–in Northampton in the late 1950s. And I saw Stephen Spender, Richard Wilbur, and Marilyn Hacker read at the Glasscock Poetry Contest at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley in the mid-1970s.
I agree with the commenters who have observed that poetry started to lose its appeal and its audience when it became an academic discipline and career track instead of a form of entertainment. Philip Larkin said that poetry should be private and slightly disreputable–something you hide under the sofa cushions when you have company.
Neo may not remember, but I wrote a poem for her:
https://docisinblog.com/personal/humor/tater-mitts/
Re: Fairy Child
Hubert:
Yeats’ “The Stolen Child” slayed me when I found my way to the poem.
Faeries are enticing a child to leave his/her family and join the faeries. The refrain:
_____________________________
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
–W.B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child” (1889)
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/the-stolen-child
_____________________________
Loreena McKennit put the poem to her inimitable brand of new-age-folk-rock and did a gorgeous job. It starts with hunting hounds barking and on the trail of someone. The Good Folk left behind are searching for their Stolen Child.
–Loreena McKennitt, “Stolen Child”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0x5uPGVXDw
So far, I endorse every comment in this thread.
However, I’m surprised no one has noted that the earliest childhood introduction to poetry is nursery rhymes, although Abraxas does mention their current decline.
I also don’t think they are as ubiquitous as in the past, but you can find them on some children’s shows and sometimes new editions of Mother Goose.
As for Dr. Seuss, he is still read by kids, despite a relatively recent attempt by the wokerati to cancel him, but his style is not as popular now, possibly because it is copied so tediously by lesser rhymesters (IMO the parodies never scan properly).
@ Hubert > “Philip Larkin said that poetry should be private and slightly disreputable–something you hide under the sofa cushions when you have company.”
I confess to a fondness for poetic doggerel over the 300-page epics , but my all-time favorite serious poet, somewhat to my surprise, is Robert Graves.
@ Niketas > “I don’t know how often [insert a classic poem title here] is read by young people these days. It’s long, archaic, and they won’t get the references.”
I recently finished one of T. H. White’s juvenile works written in 1946, Mistress Masham’s Repose,
and thought much the same about his prose.
The story was engaging, but,
today’s child would constantly wonder “whut?”
Huxley: my favorite cover of that Dylan song is by Rod Stewart, from “Every Picture Tells a Story”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfWCrELKrOo
I encountered Yeats’ “The Stolen Child” in a course at UMass, along with “The Song of the Wandering Aengus”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55687/the-song-of-wandering-aengus
The last stanza of the latter has stayed with me.
AesopFan: I like doggerel and light poetry too. Ogden Nash is a favorite. So is contemporary British poet Wendy Cope:
Some Rules
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.
You fire off something fierce.
You’re sunk. It’s irretrievable. It’s signed.
You feel your spirits going “clunk.”
Don’t hide your face with too much gunk,
Especially if it’s old and lined.
Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.
Don’t live with thirty years of junk—
Those precious things you’ll never find.
Stop, if the car is going “clunk.”
Don’t fall for an amusing hunk,
However rich, unless he’s kind.
Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.
In this respect, I’m like a monk:
I need some rules to bear in mind.
Stop, if the car is going “clunk.”
Don’t answer e-mails when you’re drunk.
Mac: many thanks for the link to Poems Ancient and Modern. I spent about two hours on it this morning. Put a very enjoyable crimp in the day.
My mother loved poetry, wrote it herself and recited it wherever she went, so it was always around me. I tried to remember which poems first spoke to me, the misty moisty mornings of nursery rhymes, or Edward Lear’s owl and pussycat, who dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon; and hand in hand, on the edge of the sand, they danced by the light of the moon, the moon, the moon, they danced by the light of the moon.
Later there was the Highwayman, tlot tlot, tlot tlot, who came riding, riding, riding, up to the old inn door. And Xanadu, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. And Robert Frost, whose pony gave its harness bells a shake, to ask if there is some mistake. And Carl Sandburg’s fog, that comes on little cat feet, sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. And light verse too, like Ogden Nash whose daughter Isabel, Isabel, didn’t worry. Isabel didn’t scream or scurry. She washed her hands and she straightened her hair up, Then Isabel quietly ate the bear up.
But the first poem I remember stopping me short, the first time I read verses I seemed to know by heart as soon as I read them, as though I’d always known them, was this poem, even if not the best poem ever written:
Afternoon on a Hill
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.
I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.
And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!
Hubert–I’m delighted.
@ Hubert > “Some Rules”
I’m afraid that poem really does speak to me in my now-advanced days, although I am only guilty of answering emails (or writing blog comments) when I’m tired; everything else is spot on!
Sadly, I am somewhat past the time I could climb hills as Millay does, although I never memorialized my slight ascents so beautifully.
This post has been a very pleasant interlude from the sturm and drang of politics to the sound and sense of poets.
It’s been said that English, due to its complicated origins, has more words than any other language. That eases the task of searching for a rhyme.
But it requires the reader to have the appropriate vocabulary, so it pays to be more literate, especially when synonyms may differ in nuance or references.
Kipling, in his Epitaphs of The War, has four lines for a Native Water Carrier.
Prometheus brought down fire,
This brough up water.
The gods are jealous, now as then,
Giving no quarter.
You don’t get it unless you know who Prometheus was and why the gods visited such a horrifying punishment on him. And, to really get it, you had to have been, not just thirsty, you have to have been soldier-thirsty. Not an accident that Kipling’s most famous native character also carried water to the troops.
And you should have an idea of military medicine a hundred years ago. No antibiotics, primitive antiseptics, few or none local anesthetics. Wounds, frequently reinfected, had to be cleaned. My father, WW II, said certain slashing wounds healed outside in and had to be opened to be cleaned. Tough time on the ward trying not to listen to a guy who was trying not to….
And wiping a young guy’s butt while allowing him his dignity.
So in an epitaph for a dead nurse found washed ashore, you know what it means when
“whom neither spouse nor child shall mourn,
but men she nursed through pain.”
And the murderous resolve in the last lines,
“And, certain keels for whose return
The heathen look in vain.”
Had a heart operation some years back. The only times a nurse touched me was on my shoulder to see if I was awake. No problem, that’s how medicine works these days…IVs, monitors, so forth. But the “nursed” concept is different from those first reading Kipling’s epitaph.
Far as I recall, my K-12 poetry experience was pretty minimal. Our “english” was in “common learnings”, a two hour block covering history and associated readings plus learning composition. That went from seventh through eleventh grades. Probably a good idea, but little room for poets.
I’m probably a barbarian in these matters, but “free verse” always looked to me as if you took a paragraph and separated the sentences by a lot of white space.
Richard Aubrey,
Your suspicion
that free verse
is sometimes at least though not always
not distinguishable from prose
chopped
up
into
lines
is not altogether
unjustified
alas
Mac,
Absolutely hilarious. Thanks for the laugh.
Serendipitous advice from Matt Taibbi – I recommend the entire post, but his last paragraph made me laugh.
https://www.racket.news/p/goodbye-to-2024-americas-craziest
” Not normally one for predictions, my guess is 2025 will see a non-ironic return to the spiritual, on the part of demographics that haven’t visited that territory since the sixties or seventies. People need formulas for inner peace, and having discovered politics holds no answers, they’ll move on. Where? Who knows. One thing’s for sure: time will tell. I’m kidding. Anything, even reading more poems than tweets, would be an improvement over the way we’ve been living.”
Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
–e.e. cummings (1920)
Song of Myself 1
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
–Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1892)
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
–William Carlos Williams (1934)
In praise of free verse.