Poetry Suggestions

Some suggestions from Poetry Day then!

First up, who doesn't want to read of Lord Byrons nightmare about the end of the world? It has less focused on rhyme or meter than most of his work so is a bit more raw - Darkness.

As I've said before, Mary Robinson's January 1795 might as well be January 2021 and most of the corruption and social inequality is still a talking point! One of Steve Atkins's favourite poets - I legit thought this was much more modern (bar the odd dated phrase) when I first saw it.

Tennyson's work tends to be long and scare people off, which is a shame as he was the great male English poet of the 19th Century - don't @ me, Browning fans. Charge of the Light Brigade is well known (and current governments ignore its lessons), In Memoriam is book length but captured the Victorian art of trying to mourn lost loves. But shorter and more in line with the classics is his Tithonus, about the man who got immortality but not eternal youth. It's split into lines used in Doctor Who and lines that will be used in Doctor Who!

Szymborska won the Nobel Prize (for Lit!) but isn't as well known in the UK. Shame, as translation shows her wit with phrases - see Negative here - this morose chap looking like a ghost trying to summon up the living is a great line.

I suppose I should mention some Scottish chap wrote some dreadful poetry early in life - I blame a love of McGonnagal...

But before this gets as daunting as the poetry I was trying to avoid mentioning (and I admit this is mix of old and new) - I can't go without mentioning three 20th Century poets. First, WS Merwin, whose For the Anniversary of My Death I first read in school, and it hit a philosophical chord with me - so much so that later on I tried to remember who wrote it and assumed Voltaire or another 18th Century voice! I assume Merwin (sadly no longer with us, though he made it past 90) would have taken that as the compliment intended. March 15th, incidentally.

The other modern poem from childhood is Vernon Scannell's A Case of Murder. Mrs Walker read it to us in Primary 6 as part of the national assessment and got complaints it was too grim. Too grim? It certainly had an effect on young me - luckily in terms of the whole writing grim tales, and not in terms of murdering pets, I hasten to add!

And finally I'd just like to add that my favourite poet of them all, if put on the spot, is probably the late great John Betjeman, satirist, wit, saver of grand train stations. Here he is savaging the great English religious hypocrite, and here he is on a car crash.

By Edwardx - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

Only really dips a toe in, and skips large chunks of poetry history (before anyone goes where's X).

But on that mark, here's Lawrence Ferlinghetti reading his own work. Ferlinghetti, one of the Beat generation, died last month at the utterly un-Beat age of 101. He was one of the great American poets and will be missed even after a good long life.