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Testaments of John Davidson

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Chapter: 9 | Listen: 1

The oft-maligned Testaments of John Davidson work as a sublime, psychopathic post-Nietzchean (Zarathustra was merely Davidson’s springboard into a deeper transcendence) prologue to his impending suicide in 1909. After a warmly receptive life of ballad making and the like (benevolent pedagogy and inclusion in the chintzy Rhymer’s Club), a by then poverty-stricken, neglected Davidson could sharpen his mind toward the completion of a more pristine art. Subsequently, we are given the meanest gap between symbolism and modernism (an expressionistic, Schopenhauerian materialist monism in monologic profile a la Browning, a demented Kipling) on record, a Marlowe-level blank verse masterwork of the now, warping into a demented, ironically (intended or not, certainly unfunded and ignored by anyone in charge) nationalist individualism, a system of self-deification, the final scream of a decaying genius. (Summary by kilpatrick83) [chương_files]

Rainbows

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Chapter: 42 | Listen:

At age 16, London blueblood Olive Custance already figured in literary circles shared by Oscar Wilde and John Gray. She later wrote for the “Yellow Book”, a notorious British quarterly of the late 1890’s, featuring poems, essays, short stories and artwork by many well-known writers and artists of the age. In 1902 she married Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, famed for his relationship with Oscar Wilde. Opals, her first published poetry collection, appeared in 1897 when she was just 23, to be followed by Rainbows (1902), The Blue Bird (1905) and The Inn of Dreams (1911). – Summary by Nemo [chương_files]

Milton’s Minor Poems

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Chapter: 22 | Listen:

“On Shakespear 1630” typifies much of Milton’s poetry. By some miracle never yet explained, at age 24 he managed to get a 16-line encomium included in the Second Folio of the Bard’s collected works, 1632. Quite a coup! And this brand new M.A., never before published, used this brief poem to contradict Shakespeare’s chief rival, the great Ben Jonson, whose 80-line panegyric had graced the First Folio eleven years earlier. Jonson had said that Shakespeare’s monument was this living book, but Milton says, no, it is rather the readers who, stunned by the poet’s verse, become living statues in his honor. You will find the same audacity here in the minor poems as in Paradise Lost, which treats of “things unattempted yet in prose of rime.” You can hear it in the college student’s satirical invitation (likely to the classmate next on the program) “Rivers arise . . . ,” a travesty of the epic catalogue of rivers; and in his affectionately irreverent epitaph on Hobson (of “Hobson’s choice”), the stage coach driver for the boys of Cambridge; and again in a second epitaph on the same subject but offering a shameless burlesque of “Metaphysical” conceits. Even in his paraphrase of Psalm VII, where he takes issue with the King James Version on two points of grammar at the end of the second stanza, he is clearly the man who will write “How few somtimes may know, when thousands err.” Yet for all Milton’s iconoclasm, he knows discipline. Some of […]

Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Version 2)

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Chapter: 75 | Listen: 1

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) was one of the most innovative of English Victorian poets, best known now for his vivid and original imagery of the natural world in verses such as “The Windhover” and “Pied Beauty”. Hopkins was a master of miniaturisation and condensation. His poetry is characterised by freshness, concentrated originality and often unconventional syntax in which words may have multiple shades of meaning. One of his most important innovations was what he called “sprung rhythm”, a style intended to be read aloud in which — like natural speech — the stressed syllables ‘spring’ between a variable number of unstressed syllables, and in which the poetic lines are defined not by number of syllables but by number of stresses. At the age of 24 Hopkins converted to Catholicism and began training as a Jesuit priest. For seven years he wrote no poetry at all, believing that he was not called by God to do so. This period ended with a concentrated explosion of originality with “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, his greatest and longest poem (number 4 in this collection) which is dedicated to the memory of five nuns who lost their lives while attempting the sea passage from Germany to England in 1875. Sometimes considered ‘difficult’ by readers who approach it in printed form, the poem’s outlines become clearer when read aloud. It is divided into two sections, an introductory part in which the poet discourses with wonder on the sudden return of his poetic muse after so […]

Advice: A Book of Poems

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Chapter: 41 | Listen:

41 brief poems covering an assortment of subjects. – Summary by adr6090 [chương_files]

Calendar of Sonnets (Version 3)

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Chapter: 12 | Listen:

Helen Hunt Jackson wrote poetry, nonfiction and fiction and was a popular author in her own time. This sonnet sequence reviews the months of the year and demonstrates her poetic talent. – Summary by Newgatenovelist [chương_files]

Two Poems

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These inspiring tributes to Williams College and its graduates were written by Henry Rutgers Conger while still a Williams student. In each of these poems we experience Conger’s deep expressions of camaraderie, his devotion and gratitude to his alma mater, his aspirations for his future and that of his classmates and his profound articulation of lessons learned at Williams designed to serve him and his colleagues well in their lives and careers. Henry Rutgers Conger’s own brief life ended a mere twenty-one years after his graduation. This small book of Conger’s poetry, commemoratively published by his own graduating class the year following his death, is a superb tribute to the talent and potential of this poet of Williams College, which as a further honor awards the annual Henry Rutgers Conger Memorial Literary Prize to a current Williams student. – Summary by Bruce Kachuk [chương_files]

Al Que Quiere! (and 18 more poems)

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Chapter: 3 | Listen: 4

A book of William Carlos Williams’s early poetry. Included in this recording are 18 poems published by Williams in Volume 13 of ‘Poetry’ literary journal in 1919. – Summary by KevinS [chương_files]

Psalm Of Life

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Chapter: 22 | Listen:

LibriVox volunteers bring you 22 recordings of A Psalm Of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This was the Fortnightly Poetry project for February 3, 2019. —— This poem was first published in the October 1838 issue of The Knickerbocker, a New York City magazine. It then appeared in Longfellow’s first published book of poems, Voices Of The Night, in 1839. It is an upbeat psalmists answer to the biblical psalm that we are but dust heading for the grave, urging us instead to be heroic, to make the most of our lives, and set a good example for others to follow. (Summary by Michele Fry) [chương_files]

Spring Harvest

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Chapter: 51 | Listen:

G.B. Smith is best known for his close friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, who would go on to write the fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings. He was a talented poet and attended Oxford. In 1915, he fought for England in World War I, and died of wounds received in 1916. After his death, this volume of his poetry was published by Tolkien and dedicated to Smith’s mother. – Summary by Devorah Allen [chương_files]