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Tag Archives: poetry
“The rhythm is jazz.” — Hart Crane
“What I want to get is … an ‘interior’ form, a form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a pecularity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition of them separate from … Continue reading
“Didacticism is the death of art.” — poet Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
“In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or… art … Continue reading
“There’s a difference between writing about something and living through it. I did both.” — poet/novelist Margaret Walker
Photo by Carl Van Vechten Margaret Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents were interesting accomplished people, and her childhood was filled with literature and music. Her father gave her a love of heavy-hitters like Schopenhauer, classic … Continue reading
“I know why the caged bird sings, ah me…” — poet Paul Laurence Dunbar
It’s the birthday of poet/novelist/playwright/editor Paul Laurence Dunbar. The child of freed slaves, he was publishing poetry when he was still a teenager, and went on to be the first Black American writer who gained an international reputation. He was … Continue reading
“[Poetry is] a way of trying to come to peace with the world.” — poet Lucille Clifton
It’s her birthday today. Rita Dove said of Lucille Clifton’s body of work: In contrast to much of the poetry being written today—-intellectualized lyricism characterized by an application of inductive thought to unusual images—-Lucille Clifton’s poems are compact and self-sufficient…Her … Continue reading
“And the role of the fatal chorus / I agree to take on” — Anna Akhmatova
“This I pray at your liturgy After so many tormented days, So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia Might become a cloud of glorious rays.” — Anna Akhmatova, “Prayer” Anna Akhmatova – born Anna Andreyevna Gorenko on this day – … Continue reading
“I like variety in poetry. I love how it comes in so many guises. As rock lyric, as rap, as note on a fridge.” — Paul Muldoon
“I’m very much against expressing a categorical view of the world. I hope I can continue to discover something, and not to underline or bolster up what I already know.” – Paul Muldoon It’s his birthday today. Like Seamus Heaney … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, Paul Muldoon, poetry, Seamus Heaney
2 Comments
“There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.” — James Weldon Johnson
“Nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.” – James Weldon Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Music, On This Day, writers
Tagged Harlem Renaissance, James Weldon Johnson, poetry
4 Comments
“That is no country for old men.” — William Butler Yeats
“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jeanette Winterson, John Millington Synge, Jonathan Swift, Louis MacNeice, Maud Gonne, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Richard Ellmann, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Ulysses, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden
15 Comments
“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson
“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey It’s his birthday today. Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes … Continue reading