So now you get "10 for " three times a week. Saturday and Sunday is a general mix of stuff that I found interesting whilst the new Monday post is purely poetry. As of this one, which is only the second, all the ideas are from Interesting Literature but I suspect that may not continue into the future.
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Helen in Egypt: H. D.’s Modernist Epic
vie Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle visits Egypt courtesy of H. D.’s response to the epic poem
Helen of Troy was a mere phantom conjured by the goddess Hera. The real wife of Menelaus, the woman we know as ‘Helen of Troy’, spent the duration of the Trojan War in Egypt, having been taken there by Hermes and kept out of harm’s way, while some pretender was used back in Troy as a stand-in for the real Helen. The Greeks and the Trojans both went to war over what was, effectively, an illusion.
‘The Way through the Woods’: A Poem by Rudyard Kipling
via Interesting Literature
Following yesterday’s tree-themed poem, today we share ‘The Way through the Woods’, one of the best-loved poems by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Although he is not known for writing obscure poetry (some of his short stories are true head-scratchers, mind!), Kipling leaves the meaning of ‘The Way through the Woods’ somewhat ambiguous.
Of course it is not likely to be "yesterday" for you but more like last week or even the week before.
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via Interesting LItersture
‘Tintern Abbey’ by William Wordsworth, or to give it its fuller title, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, or to give it its absolutely full title, ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798’, is one of Wordsworth’s finest and most celebrated poetic achievements. So ‘Tintern Abbey’ seems like a good poem to select for our new ‘post a poem a day’ feature, which will see us sharing one of our favourite poems every day.
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via Interesting Literature
Among all of the Great War poets Britain produced, Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) stands as the greatest. Like a poet he greatly admired, John Keats, he was dead at the age of 25 but in his short life he managed to find his own distinctive poetic voice and used it to write poems of great emotive power and technical skill. ‘Greater Love’ is a fine example of what makes Wilfred Owen England’s pre-eminent poet of the First World War. For Remembrance Day and the centenary of the Armistice, here is one of Owen’s most moving poems.
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via Interesting Literature
‘O my Luve is like a red, red rose’ is one of the most famous similes in all of poetry, one of the most recognisable opening lines, and one of the best-known romantic lines. Yet its true origins are a little less straightforward than we might think (did Robert Burns even write it?), so it’s worth subjecting ‘A Red, Red Rose’ to some closer scrutiny and analysis.
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Describing a group of new soldiers departing for the trenches by train, ‘The Send-Off’ is one of Wilfred Owen’s best poems. ‘The Send-Off’ muses upon the unknown fates of those young men who left for war. Do they now mock the women who gave them flowers to wish them goodwill as they left for the horrors of the Front?
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The poet A. E. Housman is best-known for A Shropshire Lad (1896), which became a bestselling volume of poetry at the turn of the century and would later be popular among soldiers during the First World War. ‘The Lent Lily’ is not one of the best-known of Housman’s poems, but it contains the signature twist we find in much of his poetry, as melancholy breaks in on hope.
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‘Trees’: A Poem by Joyce Kilmer
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‘I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.’ As opening lines of poems go, it’s instantly recognisable, and perhaps one of the most self-undoing. ‘Trees’ by Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), an American writer and poet, delights in the beauty of trees even as it acknowledges the limits of the poet’s craft.
NB: ‘Joyce’ was actually a man, whose full name was Alfred Joyce Kilmer; he was killed at the Second Battle of Marne in July 1918, aged just 31.
NB: ‘Joyce’ was actually a man, whose full name was Alfred Joyce Kilmer; he was killed at the Second Battle of Marne in July 1918, aged just 31.
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I remember singing a setting of this for a school choir festival.
I remember singing a setting of this for a school choir festival.
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‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes’: with this arresting opening line, Emily Dickinson begins one of her most studied and powerful evocations of grief and suffering, and the ‘element of Blank’ (as she puts it in another of her poems about pain) that follows a painful event or experience. The language and imagery Dickinson employs in this poem will take a bit of unravelling and analysis…
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via Interesting Literature
Lord Byron (1788-1824) sent his poem ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’ to his friend Thomas Moore in a letter of 1817. Byron prefaced the poem with a few words: ‘At present, I am on the invalid regimen myself. The Carnival – that is, the latter part of it, and sitting up late o’ nights – had knocked me up a little. But it is over – and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music… Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find “the sword wearing out the scabbard,” though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine.’ ‘So, we’ll go no more a roving’ is about world-weariness and disillusionment: a quintessential theme of Byron’s poetry.
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