26/09/2024
Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems
This is a collection of poems on various topics by Vachel Lindsay. Please note that the Booker T. Washington trilogy had to be omitted from this collection. – Summary by Carolin [chương_files]
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26/09/2024
Undying One and Other Poems
“The Byron of our modern poetesses,” was the verdict of Henry Nelson Coleridge, the eldest son of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, writing in an 1840 issue of The Quarterly Review about the poet Caroline Norton. Born Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Sheridan in 1808, she was the granddaughter of the famous Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan. On their introduction to London Society, Caroline and her two sisters were dubbed The Three Graces for their beauty and accomplishments. Her disastrous marriage to George Norton in 1827 ultimately led to her campaigning successfully to change those Laws of England relating to Divorce, child custody and women’s property rights. Caroline and her tragic experiences and life were the inspiration for many works by Victorian writers including Alfred Tennyson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens and George Meredith. She died in 1877. “The Undying One and Other Poems” published in 1830 was her second book. The title poem is an epic based on the legend of the Wandering Jew, the sinner who is doomed to roam the earth until Judgment Day. (Summary by Noel Badrian) [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Psalms of David
Isaac Watts was a poet, hymn-writer and musician. He wrote many of what we regard as “classical hymns” such as “Joy to the World” and “When I survey the wondrous cross”. His translations of the Psalms are therefore poetical and musical, as they were designed to be sung. He captures in elegant English the feel of the original Psalms as they would have been heard by the Israelites thousands of years ago. – Summary by Beth Thomas [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Poems of Jonathan Swift, Volume One
Sit back and listen to these light-hearted witty rhymes and see the world Jonathan Swift saw — and maybe recognize your own. Think there is such a thing as corrupt rich guys who pretend they’re God’s gift to the world? So did Swift. Think some of these types strut around as if calls of nature don’t apply to them? So did Swift. In one hilarious poem, he even describes gold diggers fighting over the loaded gentleman’s gaseous offerings! His poem On Poetry, A Rhapsody, censored for treasonous mocking of the royal family, is in its rare uncensored form here. As free as he himself is with his sharp tongue against the blackened rich and corrupt , he knows others might have to kiss up to eat. So he includes many verses of advice on how to go about lying for a living, for example, “Your interest lies to learn the knack Of whitening what before was black.” Despite the decay and hypocrisy he sees all around him he stays upbeat throughout — even making fun out of his own tragic onset of deafness. You already know this giant of English literature for the great feast of prose he left us. Think of these delicious poems here as your sinful dessert. – Summary by Arthur Krolman [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Burning Wheel
Though Aldous Huxley is best known for his later novels and essays, he started his writing career as a poet. The Burning Wheel is his first work, a collection of thirty poems that pay homage in style to poets who wrote in the Romantic or the French symbolist styles. Many of the poems deal with themes of light, darkness, sight, music, art, war, and idealism vs. realism. Though the optimism in his early works waned as he became older, his characteristically optimistic and determined point of view shines through. – Summary by Mary Kay The last poem was read collaboratively by ezwa, AlgyPug and Larry Wilson. [chương_files]
26/09/2024
War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Sassoon was one of the first to write poetry about the brutal reality of war, based on his real-life experiences in the trenches. He served in World War I on the Western Front and was awarded the Military Cross for bravery under fire. However, he later became a convicted pacifist, threw his Military Cross into the Mersey river, and continued to write and publish poems and political statements against the war. His poems capture the despair he felt towards the war overall, and he paints vivid word pictures that make the reader “pray you’ll never know, the hell where youth and laughter go”. (Summary by Elizabby) Note: This work is in the public domain in the USA and Canada. If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws. [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Jonah
Though Aldous Huxley gained popularity from his novels and essays, he started his writing career as a poet. Jonah, his second compilation of poetry, is a collection of twelve poems (four of which are written in French). He published it, at the age of 23, for Christmas in 1917. He stated his intention to stop writing poetry at the end of the volume, but actually went on to publish numerous compilations after Jonah. (Mary Kay) [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Cottage Poems
Patrick Brontë (father of the famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anna) is mainly remembered as a father, reverend and teacher, but he also was a poet and a novelist. Cottage Poems, his first published work, he gives gentle spiritual advice and guidance to the community, colleagues and members of his congregation in the form of lyrical letters. Even if one is simply interested in his daughters’ works, it is still interesting to see where the sisters’ inspiration to write may have come from. (Summary by Mary Kay) [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Lancashire Dialogues
A scion of the Byroms of Byrom Hall in Lowton, Lancashire, John Byrom was born and lived in Manchester and Salford for much of his life. Educated at Cambridge, Byrom become a member of the Royal Society and a leading poet of his day. In addition to his poetical works, he invented a system of shorthand, composed the Christmas carol “Christians awake! Salute the happy morn”, and coined the phrase “Tweedledum and Tweedledee”. Byrom’s work included three early poems in the Lancashire dialect, for which he was well remembered by the Lancashire dialect writers of the 19th century, in the form of satirical dialogues on topics of current political interest. – Summary by Phil Benson [chương_files]
26/09/2024
Ebony and Crystal
As stated in L’Alouette: A Magazine of Verse, “Ebony and Crystal is an artist’s intrepid repudiation of the world of trolleys and cash-registers, Freudian complexes and Binet-Simon tests, for realms of exalted and iridescent strangeness beyond space and time yet real as any reality because dreams have made them so. Mr. Smith has escaped the fetish of life and the world, and glimpsed the perverse, titanic beauty of death and the universe; taking infinity as his canvas and recording in awe the vagaries of suns and planets, gods, and daemons, and blind amorphous horrors that haunt gardens of polychrome fungi more remote than Algol and Achernar. It is a cosmos of vivid flame and glacial abysses that he celebrates, and the colorful luxuriance with which he peoples it could be born from nothing less than sheer genius. The summation of Mr. Smith’s exotic vision is perhaps attained in the long phantasmal procession of blank verse pentameters entitled, “The Hashish-Eater; or, the Apocalypse of Evil.” In this frenzied plunge through nameless gulfs of interstellar terror the Californian presents a narcotic pageant of poisonous vermilious and paralysing shadows whose content is equalled only by its verbal medium; a medium involving one of the most opulent and fastidiously choice vocabularies ever commanded by a writer of English.” Clark Ashton Smith, referred to as one of the big three of Weird Tales, was a romantic-style poet, a Lovecraftian-style writer and a literary friend of H.P Lovecraft. As a poet, he was considered one of […]