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On May 12 each year, the international poetry community stops to recognize a quirky, off-kilter poetic form: the limerick. Celebrated on the birthday of English artist, illustrator, and poet Edward Lear (1812-1888), the holiday pays tribute to the five-line, rhyming form and to Lear himself, who helped popularize the form throughout his career.
Renowned English poet Robert Browning was born in 1812 in the London suburb of Camberwell. Finding school irritating and uninteresting, Browning left formal institutional learning behind and was educated at home by a tutor. He also utilized his father's six thousand volume personal library. By the time he was twelve, he had written his first volume of poetry, though the manuscript does not survive.
The course of Browning's writing career is an interesting one. Initially, his poems and dramatic monologues were well received; Charles Dickens even offered him praise for his monologue, Paracelsus. But, as he continued writing and honing his style, many readers and critics believed his poems were too obscure in reference and illusion. It was not until his collection Men and Women (1855) that he began to see a more positive response to his work. In 1868, he published his long poem comprised of dramatic monologues, The Ring and the Book. This book was critically acclaimed and ushered in a new era of respect and commercial success for Browning. He died in 1889 and is buried in Westminster Abbey in Poet's Corner, near Alfred Lord Tennyson. Here are five interesting facts you might now know about this influential poet.
Maybe you visited the Bahamas on a recent vacation. Or perhaps you’ve enrolled in a postcolonial literature course. Whatever the reason, we’re excited anytime readers want to begin collecting the complicated classics of Caribbean literature. Why are the classics complicated, you ask? In short, the Caribbean is a fluid region that has been shaped by many different cultural practices from various regions of the globe. Given that the islands in this part of the world have been subject to colonization by numerous European nations while also playing a key geographic role in the transatlantic slave trade, the layers of Caribbean literary history are deeply entwined in histories of imperialism and violence. Where should you begin if you want to start a collection of literature from this region? We’ll suggest a couple writers and titles to get you started.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry...Is there any other way?”
That’s Emily Dickinson in the late 1870s talking about how she defines that inexplicable moment when a poem moves you—when a piece of poetry elicits an emotional, non-rational, sometimes transcendent response as you subconsciously identify with an image, a moment, a phrase, a scene. It’s an experience that’s often difficult to intellectualize and describe, and sadly, one that many casual readers can’t easily access as poetry is pushed more and more to the fringes of contemporary publishing, relegating it to near niche status.
Even when they’re successful, some writers prefer to keep their day jobs. For example, Wallace Stevens was an executive at a Connecticut insurance company, and he believed that work kept the poetic spirit properly anchored. Goethe worked as an enthusiastic civil servant and administrator long after the smashing success of Young Werther. To this camp also belongs Geoffrey Chaucer, who stayed gainfully employed despite being a prolific poet. Chaucer’s day job, however, was far from the typical cubical-and-office grind. He worked in the court of the King.
On April 15, 1931, Tomas Gösta Tranströmer was born in Stockholm, Sweden. Although he passed away in March of last year, this Nobel Prize-wining poet’s legacy lives on in the books and broadsides that reflect a style described in his New York Times obituary of “deceptively spare language, crystalline descriptions of natural beauty, and explorations of the mysteries of identity and creativity.” We’d like to take the opportunity to celebrate Tranströmer’s birthday by looking into some of his most famous (and most collectible) works.
In the last 30 or 40 years, it’s become increasingly rare for a poet to achieve the same massive readerships as poets in the early part of the 20th Century. Yet the work of one 20th Century poet at the height of his popularity accounted for nearly 2/3 of all the book sales of living poets, according to the BBC.
That poet was Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), Irish national treasure and 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature winner whose work has influenced countless poets, writers, critics, and intellectuals worldwide. Born in Northern Ireland, writer Robert Lowell called Heaney “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” During his long, illustrious career, he received nearly every prestigious literary award or honor in the English speaking world and taught at some of the world’s finest colleges and universities, including Harvard, Oxford, and a host of others.
The Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda hasn’t been alive—at least in physical form—since September 1973. Yet his work continues to live on, and often in unexpected ways. In June 2014, archivists at the Fundación Pablo Neruda in Santiago, Chile discovered a series of boxes that contained poems written by Neruda and published only in Spanish by Seix Barral. However, in many ways these poems became “lost” to a global audience as they were never translated into English. Thus, the project became known as “The Lost Poems of Pablo Neruda.” This month, the book is set to become available to English-language readers everywhere.
Wislawa Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, said poetry is something only two in a thousand people really care about. It may have been the poet’s invented statistic, but it doesn’t sound far off the mark. When was the last time, after all, you saw someone in the cafe invested in a collection of verse? A poetic debut tends not to generate the same buzz as a novel or new biography. What gives? Why has the preferred mode of Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare come to be so...neglected?
