Books and scroll ornament from a 1923 magazine – public domain image
The gods speak in verse –
And move in dance
I live in a mythic world so I tend towards a mythic view of poetry – not unlike that of (and overlapping with) Robert Graves who saw all poets writing, consciously or otherwise, to the Theme of the Goddess.
As for what poetry is, there’s a plethora of quotations about poetry or poets, often in poetry or by poets, poetic of themselves and worthy of their own top ten.
One of those was by poet W.H. Auden – “Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best – memorable speech”.
Wikipedia offers a somewhat fancier definition – “Poetry (from the Greek word poiesis, “making”) is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, literal or surface-level meanings.”
You know what? I prefer the more playful definition by TV Tropes:
Pretty words.
No, really. That’s what poetry is. Sometimes it rhymes, sometimes there are more line breaks than usual. All you really need to make a poem, though, is to put it together so it sounds good, or at least sounds the way you want it to sound.
Anyway, this is exactly what it says on the tin – counting down my Top 10 Poetry, by poem and poet.
(10) ISHMAEL REED –
I AM A COWBOY IN THE BOAT OF RA (1972)
“Who was that
dog-faced man? they asked, the day I rode
from town”
One mythic trippy poem but then – “O the untrustworthiness of Egyptologists who do not know their trips”.
What’s not to love about this fusion of Egyptian mythology (and my favorite dog god Anubis), the American West and much more in the whole damn fantasy kitchen sink? Afro-American poet Ishmael Reed rocks it – or perhaps more precisely, jazzes it – in his most well-known poem that has been “dazzling, confusing, confounding and infuriating readers” since it was first published.
“Bring me my Buffalo horn of black powder
bring me my headdress of black feathers
bring me my bones of Ju-Ju snake
go get my eyelids of red paint.
Hand me my shadow
I’m going into town after Set”
RATING: 4 STARS****
X-TIER (WILD TIER)
(9) SYLVIA PLATH –
LADY LAZARUS (1963)
“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call”
Sylvia Plath – broken-winged angel, haunted by her own ghost. She loved her pale rider and his name was death. She wrote poems that “play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder”.
Lady Lazarus – dying and rising writhing from her own resurrection.
I know that feeling. I believe in the underworld – I’ve been there. And although I came back from the black abyss, I’m not sure that I came all the way back – or worse, that I brought it back with me.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(8) WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS –
THE IVY CROWN (1954)
“We are only mortal
but being mortal
can defy our fate.
We may
by an outside chance
even win!”
Is there a poet in the house? William Carlos Williams – tweeted poetry, most famously in that poetic ear-worm about plums. The dude was a doctor – must have had a great bedside manner
Forgive me
It’s malignant
So sad
And so young
And then there’s “The Ivy Crown” with its cosmos-crossed lovers (“I love you or I do not live at all”)
“Just as the nature of briars
is to tear flesh,
I have proceeded
through them.
Keep
the briars out,
they say.
You cannot live
and keep free of
briars”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
Posthumous portrait by William Hilton c.1822
(7) JOHN KEATS –
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN (1819)
“What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?”
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
Ode on a Fury Road – if Keats were to replace pipes and timbrels with flame-throwing electric guitar – and ecstasy with insanity, all shiny and chrome?
Although I’m probably the only one to think of Ode on a Grecian Urn for Mad Max Fury Road. It’s just how my mind works.
John Keats – a life tragically cut short at the age of 25 by tuberculosis, but attributed by Byron to bad reviews by the Quarterly Review
“Who killed John Keats?
I, says the Quarterly
So savage & Tartarly
‘Twas one of my feats”
Ode on a Grecian BURN, Quarterly!
Typical pagan sensuousness from Keats, evocative of a damn good night out, although with maidens perhaps a little less loath – but that’s classical mythology for you.
Beauty in art transcends life, although lacking the actual consummation of the latter – as with the lovers who are left for the urn’s eternity without, you know, actually getting it on:
“Forever warm and still to be enjoyed
Forever panting and forever young”
O yes!
Also a touch of darkness a la The Wicker Man?
“Who are these coming to the sacrifice?”.
O yes, who indeed? Spoiler – it’s just a heifer… or is it? Perhaps it’s someone – a virgin – in the costume of a heifer…”and all her silken flanks in garlands dressed”? You heard it here first – John Keats was the trope creator of the folk horror genre! It’s surprising how few of the lines you have to change in the poem to play it as The Wicker Man, beat for beat – it totally works!
Again I’m probably the only one to think of Ode on a Grecian Urn for The Wicker Man. Still – animal sacrifice? That urn is metal!
And of course the aesthetic philosophy of Keats in two lines, dropping goodness from the usual transcendental trinity for the duality of beauty and truth:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
1795 portrait of Coleridge by Peter Vandyke. To be honest, it looks like he took some opium before this too
(6) SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE –
KUBLA KHAN (1816)
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – opium dope fiend, who attributed his best poem “Kubla Khan” as a “A Vision in a Dream. Or, a Fragment” and prefaced it to be part of a much longer epic poem upon waking from a literal opium dream, only to be sadly interrupted in writing it by “a person on business from Porlock”. Yeah sure, Coleridge – we know you just ran out of poem.
“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!”
A celebration of creative energy and the poet as shamanic figure. 1980s band Frankie Goes to Hollywood characteristically adapted it into a celebration of roving male (homo)sexual energy in their “Welcome to the Pleasuredome” – “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a pleasure-dome e-RECT!”. But there’s nothing like that in the original, is there?…
“And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced”
Oh my! Welcome to the Pleasuredome!
As for the poet as shamanic figure –
“And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
William Butler Yeats photographed by Alice Boughton in 1903
(5) WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS –
THE SECOND COMING (1919)
“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold”
The Apocalypse according to Yeats, which sees Christianity winding down (or is that up?) and something else about to take its place. Something not pretty – something with a lot of apocalyptic chaos and violence, drowning out the innocent and good.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity”
Well that or he predicted the internet.
And like any good apocalypse, the focus is its beast, modelled on Great Beast of the Apocalypse, or as I like to call it, that sixy beast. Spoiler alert – it’s the sphinx. Or some kind of apocalyptic Godzilla-sphinx, as featured in the most famous lines of the poem.
“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(4) ALFRED LORD TENNYSON –
ULYSSES (1842)
“I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me”.
Well there’s a job description for you!
Alfred Lord Tennyson – archetypal poet of Victorian literature and poet laureate.
And his Ulysses – poem in blank verse and dramatic monologue. Dramatic monologue to whom is not clear, but by whom is of course the classical hero of Iliad and Odyssey, Odysseus, or as the Romans called him, Ulysses.
Companion poem to his similarly Homeric “The Lotus Eaters” but complete opposite in tone and thought – where “The Lotus Eaters” resists the heroic call to action for slacking off and, well, eating lotus (because we’re just so wasted, man), “Ulysses” accepts it and indeed issues it
“Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world”
Tennyson often tended to the heroic, particularly in the Victorian mold – which can stick in the modern craw a little, as with “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (although it is damn fine poem and eminently quotable). Even Ulysses has been accused as “part of the prehistory of imperialism” and admittedly its protagonist does sound a little like a “colonial administrator”
However, Ulysses is particularly effective – and emotive – as that last call to heroic action, literally riding (or sailing) off into the sunset in one’s own twilight.
“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.
RATING: 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(3) e.e. cummings – i carry your heart with me (1952)
“i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)”
e.e. cummings – modernist free-form poet, delighting in the sheer exuberance of wordplay, idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation. yes – he even made punctuation sing.
“i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you”
what earns him god-tier ranking is my love of quips and koans, something i strive to emulate in my own writing – and he was the poet of quips and koans. he has some cracking one-liners – some of my favorites in literature or anywhere.
as in “Buffalo Bill’s” – “how do you like your blue-eyed boy Mister Death”
or “pity this busy monster, manunkind” – “we doctors know a hopeless case if – listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go”
while i was tempted to give the top spot to one of his erotic poems, i chose one of his more conventional – or as conventional as they get – love poems. indeed – perhaps his most classic love poem
“here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
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(2) DYLAN THOMAS –
DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT (1951)
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night”.
Wales’ leading poet, druid dude and pantheistic Jedi of the Force – “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. Also “prince of the apple-towns” in Fern Hill and the young dog in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
“Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
A “roistering, drunken and doomed poet”, who left the world at 39 – “I hold a beast, an angel and a madman in me”. Don’t we all?
“And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
(1) T.S. ELIOT – THE WASTELAND (1922)
“And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust”
Apocalyptic poet. Also one of the most name-dropped poets, including in Catch-22 (“Name me a poet who makes money!”)
Also Old Possum, as in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Yes – T.S. Eliot is the origin of the musical Cats.
Also – the Warrior of the Wasteland! The Ayatollah of Rock and Roll-ah! Well, not quite. That is the Lord Humungus from Mad Max: The Road Warrior. But Eliot was the Poet of The Wasteland.
It would be interesting to adapt The Wasteland in the style of Mad Max. Except it would involve a lot less BDSM leather kink and a lot more mind-screw.
It would also be interesting to adapt The Wasteland into horror – it verges on it already. That fear in a handful of dust for one. For another, the titular theme of the mythic Waste Land as post-apocalyptic setting without redemption or resurrection – “That corpse you planted last year in your garden. Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” The Wasteland as zombie apocalypse, perhaps? Or slasher film?
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper”
Even The Wasteland is laid waste in The Hollow Men, a more straightforward and shorthand poem of the same themes. Shout-out also to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the third of the Eliot holy trinity. The central bathos is there in the title – the juxtaposition of the lofty “love-song” with the commonplace and ludicrous banality of the protagonist himself.
“I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.”
RATING: 5 STARS*****
S-TIER (GOD TIER)
TOP 10 POETRY
(TIER LIST)
S-TIER (GOD TIER):
(1) T.S. ELIOT – THE WASTELAND
(2) DYLAN THOMAS – DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
(3) e.e. cummings – i carry your heart
If T.S. Eliot is my Old Testament of poetry, Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings are my New Testament.
A-TIER (TOP TIER)
(4) ALFRED LORD TENNYSON – ULYSSES
(5) WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS – THE SECOND COMING
(6) SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE – KUBLA KHAN
(7) JOHN KEATS – ODE ON A GRECIAN URN
(8) WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS – THE IVY CROWN
(9) SYLVIA PLATH – LADY LAZARUS
X-TIER (WILD TIER)
(10) ISHMAEL REED – I AM A COWBOY IN THE BOAT OF RA