What makes a poem a poem? Poems by e. e. cummings and Stephen Crane e. e. cummings plato told him:he couldn’t believe it(jesus told him;he wouldn’t believe it)lao tsze certainly told him,and general (yes mam) sherman; and even (believe it or not)you told him:i told him;we told him (he didn’t believe it,no sir)it took a nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el;in the top of his head:to tell him…
Alexander Pope “An Essay on Criticism” 1685 saw the birth of three great composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, perhaps the greatest artist who ever lived; George Frederick Handel, almost his peer; and Domenico Scrlatti, who composed hundreds of keyboard sonatas. Scarlatti was the least of the three, but he merits our attention. I thought this as I listened to a recent piano performance which began…
The Silesian Weavers Heinrich Heine In gloomy eyes there wells no tear. Grinding their teeth, they are sitting here: Germany, your shroud's on our loom; And in it we weave the threefold doom. We weave; we weave. Doomed be the God who was deaf to our prayer In Winter's cold and hunger's despair. All in vain we hoped and bided; He only mocked us, hoaxed, derided. We weave; we weave. Doomed be the…
Spring and All [By the road to the contagious hospital] By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast – a cold wind. Beyond, the waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen patches of standing water the scattering of tall trees All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of…
Easter, 1916 I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But…
Writing this letter has been more difficult than any other I have written. I intended to address my consternation and confusion at what is going on in the Middle East, the slaughter of Israeli ‘innocents’ and the overpowering response of Israel, their slaughter of Gazan innocents. The numbers have changed since when I began, for in my original letter there were 12,000 Gazans dead, then 15,00, then…
One of the crises facing Jews in America today is antisemitism. For much of postmodern times, antisemitism has seemed rather deeply recessive. American Jews have lived in a nation where to be a Jew was, most often, neither particularly noteworthy nor exceptional. For some Jews, intermarriage and assimilation were major issues. But for most Jews and most Americans, being Jewish was not a…
When I was in college, I and my roommates loved to make fun of Shelley. His deeply un-self-conscious self-description cracked us up. “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!” We were so eager to get on with our lives, so caught up in the need to be self-confident and secure, that Shelley was an embarrassment. And those exclamation points! What could be more, well, ‘uncouth.’ Oh, and we so much…
Poems are strange things. Every once in a while – fairly rarely, it seems to me – something stands before us and we are amazed or, as the Brits would say, gob-smacked. The world is otherwise than it was before. We know more, understand more, see more. These letters, near their very beginning, dealt with a poem by Eugenio Montale [type ‘Montale perhaps one morning’ in Google], in which a man turns…
Essential Poetry: Four Poets of New England with Huck Gutman Thursdays, January 4 – 25 (4 sessions) 4-5:30 pm FREE to OLLI members (see below about how to register) New England has produced some of the finest poets in America's history. This lecture-based online program will look at Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and Elizabeth Bishop . This online program will be recorded…
No one who writes about poetry in English can avoid Shakespeare. Arguably the greatest writer the world has seen, he is best known for his dramas: Tragedies, comedies, histories. But he also wrote a remarkable poetic sequence, of sonnets. Many of them, I confess, are beyond me: Try as I might, they elude my full understanding. The one I am most attracted to is sonnet 73, which I find both…
Free course I am offering a short course on poetry written over the past two centuries. Although I am by training and leaning an Americanist, the course is on four British poets, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and Philip Larkin. It is free, but to take it, you can sign up with an organization at the University of Vermont known as OLLI. It costs 15 bucks to sign up, 12 if…
Miklós Radnóti was a Hungarian poet. (Born to Jewish parents, Radnóti converted to Catholicism.) He wrote poems celebrating love, affirmation, social criticism in the 1930’s. His poetry became more oppositional, although it retained his personal, lyric voice. The fascist government of Miklós Horthy saw him as an enemy, and imprisoned him in a forced labor camp. The war, as we now recognize,…
Stevens is an odd poet for me to write about. A corporate executive – I dislike major corporations, and I dislike those who lead them – and in politics a conservative Republican – not my cup of tea – and a very cerebral poet (or seemingly so) – another direction that repels me: Wallace Stevens seems exactly the kind of voice I do not want to listen to. I know that if I were at a dinner, I would…
The Present Moment There is currently an assault on ‘truth’ as we have understood it. Dominating our lives in the present, our ways of knowing seem to have absorbed the principles of Roy Cohn, evil genius, the counselor to Joe McCarthy and then later Donald Trump. His counsel: Say whatever you need to say to advance your agenda. ‘Is it true?’ does not matter. Just repeat what you have to say, and…
Poems need not be long or difficult to impress themselves on us deeply. Yehuda Amichai, an Israeli poet of surpassing brilliance, has written many poems which have left me speechless in admiration. One, in particular, is “The Diameter of the Bomb.” I don’t think it is particularly rich in difficulty or nuance. In fact, it is pretty simple. It elaborates on a geometric ratio. That’s it. But it…
For twenty years I taught American poetry of the nineteenth century. The armature of the course was the poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, two writers who are arguably the greatest of all American poets. It increasingly struck me that Herman Melville, the celebrated author of the novel Moby-Dick, was the only other poet of that century who had a power and poetic vision that rivalled those…
I don’t know where it was. Reading a newspaper? Listening to public radio? Skimming a book? Somehow, the phrase “all the” set a tiny anchor in my brain, and I thought, “I know that phrase. It is in a poem.” I searched the web but of course “all the…poem” did not yield what I was looking for. I thought, and then gave my efforts up. And then it hit me, welling up from some reservoir of memory.…
This poem is an example of the need to reread, and reread again, that I wrote of in my last letter. I came to this poem wanting to understand that, seen through the lens of time, all fades, that time is the destructive medium in which we live. I still think this is the ‘subject’ of this poem. But I have come to realize that this poem reshapes past time so that it is comfortable for the poet, and…
Thinking of writing a new letter, I pondered on whom to write about. With a sense of shock, I realized that I had not written extensively about William Butler Yeats, the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. Yes, yes, I know: “greatest” is not a term to be bandied about, especially since other poets were more dominant (Eliot) or more influential (Williams) or more ‘modern, (pick…