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White Canoe and Other Verse

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Chapter: 15 | Listen: 1

This early collection of Alan Sullivan’s work is from the pen of a young Canadian author who portrays Canada’s short Summer season as the voyage through a Summer of life in an allegorical “white canoe”. During that voyage Sullivan shares with the reader his expressions of joy, loss, doubt, uncertainty and hope for a blissful conclusion. Sullivan’s later career would embrace classic and unique depictions of the early development of his country, winning a Governor General’s Award for his 1941 novel “Three Came to Ville Marie” (Sullivan’s 1891 poem “Fifty Years Hence” included in “The White Canoe and Other Verse” seems curiously prescient in this regard). This selection of a nascent Alan Sullivan’s poems makes an important contribution to the work of Canadian poets of this era. – Summary by Bruce Kachuk [chương_files]

Sheaf of Roses

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Chapter: 3 | Listen: 1

The rose, the flower of love, the flower of life, the floral symbol of all life’s occasions whose presence both motivates and adorns indelible life memories is the subject of these wonderful poems. From the pen of poet Elizabeth Gordon the rose becomes an integral component of life as she shares tales embodying the poignancy of our existence, the pathos of our being – thorns and prickles not excluded. These wonderful poems are uplifting, inspirational and remarkably filled with facets of a life we all share while being accompanied by the comforting and beautiful presence of this heartening heavenly floral offering, the rose. – Summary by Bruce Kachuk [chương_files]

Inn of Dreams

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Chapter: 40 | Listen: 1

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. These poems are read by Nemo with the Dedication read by Eva Davis. [chương_files]

Five Nations Vol I

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Chapter: 28 | Listen: 1

Rudyard Kipling was the first English recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature and the youngest at the time to be so rewarded. His children’s stories and poems have been enduring expressions of his times, many tied to India, the country of his birth. Five Nations is a collection of poems covering the wide range of the British Kingdom at the time, though there is some debate as to what the Five Nations refer. There are two groups of poems in these volumes, unnamed poems and the service poems. Many of these have military themes and range over many wars of the British Empire. (Summary by Larry Wilson) [chương_files]

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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Single Author, Sonnets
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]