Hail, Euterpe!, or; my favorite poets

 

Poetry is good for you. How come?

It’s wordplay. It’s rhyming and meter schemes that enter your head and don’t leave. Poetry catches thoughts and feelings that can’t be expressed in other terms. It’s heightened language; it has the virtues of compression and intensity. When a good poem hits you where you live, it moves you, it changes your outlook on things. It’s an art form that persevered for thousands of years, predating even written language. There is something in the human soul that keeps producing it.

It’s a skill that’s fiendishly difficult to sustain. That being said, there is a lot of bad poetry out there, just like any other discipline. I oughta know, I wrote enough of it in my twenties. (I lost the ability to think in that way quickly and switched to prose.) I just took a look at those early efforts of mine . . . they are . . . OK. Everybody should try it sometime. Poetry can be anything -- silly, tragic, sarcastic, angry, political, philosophical, romantic, confused, bitter, hope-inducing. It doesn’t even have to make sense – try Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, or Shel Silverstein and you'll see what I mean.

Sometimes it doesn’t stand the test of time. Did you ever try to read Alexander Pope, or Lord Byron? Undoubtedly talented, their efforts don’t resonate (for me) today. Still, we study these venerable wordsmiths and others, and once in a while we find something that clicks in our heads when it’s read – and it feeds our souls in a way that could not be comprehended before.

Given the rising tide of illiteracy in our country, reading poetry is an act of defiance. It’s the least utilitarian of literary skills – it solves nothing, it doesn’t increase your bank balance. But it seems to be something we need.

I have a list of favorite poets, but there are plenty to choose from, across the stretch of time and from around the world. (Great poets require great translators.) Whatever your outlook on life is, there is a poet for you. Just off the top of my head, here are other names to conjure with – Homer, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, John Milton, John Donne, Rabindranath Tagore, Rumi, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pushkin, Langston Hughes, Rudyard Kipling, Maya Angelou, Tu Fu, William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Bukowski, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hardy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Sandberg, the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth), Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, John Keats.

I guarantee that if you dive into the discipline, you will find something you like. One of the best ways to find “your” poets is to pick up an anthology. I grew up with F.T. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury; other fine collections include such entries as the Norton Anthology of Poetry and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.

Here are my faves, pals I go to again and again through more than 60 years of reading. As you will see, I kind of got stuck on the Imagists, a group of poets in the early 20^th century who pioneered modernism. I just love that generation.

Virgil (70 B.C.E. – 19 B.C.E.) – The Aeneid. A story of the downfall of Troy and the founding of Rome.

Ovid (43 B.C.E. – 17 A.D.) –  The Metamorphoses. Myths and legends made real.

Li Po (701-762)

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) – The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. A trip through Hell, the redemption of Purgatory, and the splendors of Heaven.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400) – The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Cressida. You can try reading these in their original Middle English, but read a modern translation first. Once you get used to his mode of expression, you will find him hilarious.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) – Sonnets.

Andrew Marvell (1621 – 1678)

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) – Leaves of Grass.

Charles Beaudelaire (1821 – 1867) – The Flowers of Evil. A pioneer in tackling poetic subjects that aren’t “pretty.”

Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955)

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880—1918)

William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963)

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886 – 1961)

e.e. cummings (1894 – 1962)

Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)

Hart Crane (1899 – 1932)

W.H. Auden (1903 – 1973)

Pablo Neruda (1904 – 1973)

Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

John Berryman (1914-1972) – The Dream Songs.

Octavio Paz (1914 – 1998)