Six Poets

The inimitable Alan Bennett selects and comments upon six favorite poets and the pleasures of their works In this candid, thoroughly engaging book, Alan Bennett creates a unique anthology of works by six well-loved poets. Freely admitting his own youthful bafflement with poetry, Bennett reassures us that the poets and poems in this volume are not only accessible but also highly enjoyable. He then proceeds to prove irresistibly that this is so. Bennett selects more than seventy poems by Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Philip Larkin. He peppers his discussion of these writers and their verse with anecdotes, shrewd appraisal, and telling biographical detail: Hardy lyrically recalls his first wife, Emma, in his poetry, although he treated her shabbily in real life. The fabled Auden was a formidable and off-putting figure at the lectern. Larkin, hoping to subvert snooping biographers, ordered personal papers shredded upon his death. Simultaneously profound and entertaining, Bennett’s book is a paean to poetry and its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice. its creators, made all the more enjoyable for being told in his own particular voice.

Writers like to elude their public, lead them a bit of a dance. They take them down untrodden paths, land them in unknown country where they have to ask for directions. In this personal anthology, Alan Bennett has chosen over seventy poems by six well-loved poets, discussing the writers and their verse in his customary conversational style through anecdote, shrewd appraisal and spare but telling biographical detail. Ranging from hidden treasures to famous poems, this is a collection for the beginner and the expert alike. Speaking with candour about his own reactions to the work, Alan Bennett creates profound and witty portraits of Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice and Philip Larkin, all the more enjoyable for being in his own particular voice. Anybody writing poetry in the thirties had somehow to come to terms with Auden. Auden, you see, had got a head start on the other poets. He'd got into the thirties first, like someone taking over the digs.

It follows the exploits of a group of hapless bards, more intimately connected than they themselves can possibly know, in their attempts to navigate the hazards of London literary society. Reid's colourful cast includes an ageing ex-offender, a lecherous academic, a fading grande dame and her underachieving best friend, and two young graduates, one as feckless as the other is ambitious. Hard as each may try, the poets' attempts at literary and social advancement are continually hampered both by fate and by a variety of personal shortcomings, ensuring that their story accelerates irrevocably towards comic catastrophe and collapse. Six Bad Poets is a delicious romp through a world that the author has observed closely over many years, and from which he reports with merciless accuracy, zest and humour.

Anthology. The Greek origins of the word gesture at a bouquet, a garland; “a flower-logic, a petal-theory, a blossom-word.” In Stone-Garland, Dan Beachy-Quick brings the term back to its roots, linking together the lives and words of six singular ancient Greeks. Simonides: honest servant to patrons. Anacreon: lustful singer, living on in the work of his acolytes. Archilochus: cruel critic, beloved of the Muses. Alcman: who took birds as his teachers. Theognis: chronicler of human excellence and vice. Callimachus: cosmopolitan head librarian at Alexandria. These are the poets who appear in these pages, sometimes in fragments, sometimes in sustained glimpses. Drawing inspiration from the Greek Anthology, first drafted in the first century BC, Beachy-Quick presents translations filled with lovers and children, gods and insects, earth and water, ideas and ideals. Throughout, the line between the ancient and the contemporary blurs, and “the logic of how life should be lived decays wondrously into the more difficult possibilities of what life is.” Spare, earthy, lovely, Stone-Garland offers readers of the Seedbank series its lyric blossoms and subtle weave, a walk through a cemetery that is also a garden.

Although many books deal individually with each of the major writers treated in Poets of Reality, none attempts through analyses of these particular men and their works, to identify the new directions taken by twentieth-century literature. J. Hillis Miller, challenging the assumption that modern poetry is merely the extension of an earlier romanticism, presents critical studies of the six central figuresâe"Joseph Conrad, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williamsâe"who played key roles in evolving a poetry in which âeoereality comes to be present to the senses, and present in the words of the poem which ratify this possession.âe A new kind of poetry has appeared in the twentieth century, the author claims, a poetry which, growing out of romanticism and symbolism, goes far beyond it. The old generalizations about the nature and use of poetry are no longer applicable, and it is the gradual emergence of new forms, culminating in the work of Williams, that Miller traces and defines.

Six Polish Poets makes available to the English-language reader the poetry of the younger generation of poets who whose first collections (with one exception) have been published in the past decade. Unlike the poets of the previous generation who, in the period of new-found freedom after the fall of communism, adopted a highly individualistic, anarchic, sometimes brutal style, the poets represented here re-examine and experiment with traditional poetic forms, themes and cultural references in poems that are refined and witty, moving and informed, ranging across every aspect of human existence. This anthology is both thought-provoking and full of warmth and humanity, and while it cannot claim to be representative of contemporary Polish poetry as a whole, it nevertheless provides an insight into today's literary scene in Poland. Parallel text: Polish / English

A collection of 247 poems by American authors Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes, including introductory essays on each poet.

Six poets. Eighty-one poems. They offer more than just a view of the Vietnamese-American war seen from the inside: they are a slice, albeit a living slice, of Vietnam's culture and history enduring one of the most horrific and longest wars of the twentieth-century. They are, in a sense, to borrow a phrase from Philip Gambone, a long love poem to ... its people. For that reason it is more than a record of war: it's a record of human struggle in the face of extremity, of love, life, and death. There is in each of the poems an unmistakable quality of heart, a heart that has never failed to feel the deep pain of its fellow human beings. And it is that quality of heart--that deep pain--that gives the poets and their friends the abiding strength to struggle, to overcome, and to endure. --Nguyen Ba Chung.