Alicia, I agree with the tenor of your remarks on EBB, but I do think that her most famous anthologized poem, "How do I love thee," is indeed one of the best and most moving sonnets ever penned by man or woman. I think it may have been done in by its fame, in fact. I knew of this poem even before I started reading poetry, and as a youngster I tended to dismiss it is effusive and sappy dribble, but lately I've found that the fame that rendered it cliche had in fact deceived me into overlooking its profundity and depth. Anyway, I'm probably preaching to the choir.

I certainly put EBB at least on the same level of her husband, and quite possibly higher ("My Last Duchess" is great, but I'm hard pressed to come up with anything else he wrote that truly moves me). Also, I'm grateful to EBB for serving as an inspiration to Emily Dickinson, whom I tend to think of as underrated even as she is widely revered.

Originally posted by A. E. Stallings:

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare
Beneath the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, espress
Grief for the Dead in silence like to death:
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: the marble eyelids are not wet--
If it could weep it could arise and go.

I have no idea why she isn't represented by THIS in the Norton Anthology, instead of the same old Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Well, I like this but Elizabeth needed to work on it a bit more. In the third line "through the midnight air" is obvious filler just there for the rhyme, very trite compared with the rest of the poem. And in lines 6&7 "bare" and "glare" seem to be struggling. And line 8 has some counting problems.

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of dispair,
Half-taught in anguish, disbelieving, dare
Beat upward to God's throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls, as countries, lieth silent there
Under the blanching and absolute glare
Of the Heavens. Deep-hearted men express
Grief for the dead in silence like to death:
Most like a monumental statue set
In ever lasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it: The marble eyelids are not wet--
If it could weep it could arise and go.


ewrgall

PS--Gee, its fun to crit a poet that you know isn't going to talk back.






[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited March 15, 2002).]

Daud kamal..... underrated poets
 

Hello Gail,

Hope you'll be doing fine. Thanks a lot for providing a rare opportunity to post the works of some underrated poets, hope if I mention one from Pakistan won't hurt anyone. Professor Daud Kamal is one such fine poet. He got his early schooling Burn Hall at Kashmir;graduated from the Peshawar University, NWFP, Pakistan, obtained his tripos from the university of Cambridge. He then became a professor and was appointed chairman of the Department of English in 1980.
Duad Kamal was writing poetry in English since his youth and was soon recognized, in a limited circle though, as an accomplished English poet. Ian Robinson editor of Oasis Book once said about Daud Kamal, he 'could teach a lot of English poets a thing or two'. The precision and definiteness of his language is a great skill he developed as a fine imagist poet. Here is a poem of his:


Hoof-Prints

The vein
in the sky's forehead
swollen today
will burst tomorrow.

Angry rivers
do not discriminate
between mud houses
and ripening corn.

What use is a rainbow?
my child asks,
twisting a curl
on her thoughtful head.

I remember
a particular mountain pass
and hoof-prints
in the snow.

Bury remorse
deep in the rocky earth
and let the water
remove its own stains.

.................................................. ..........

Stone Bridge

The rain's insistent
drumbeat
and a wisp of smoke
between the beams. Rose-petal flames
then jagged hills
and finally
a desert of ash
in the fireplace. The room
is suddenly cold - windows shiver-
death is a hungry wolf. Oasis, oasis-
someone shouts. Musk-melons
in the marketplace. Embroidered caps
laughter- cascading beauty
of the young. But you
have drifted
back to sleep-
under a stone bridge
and out
to an undpredictable
sensuous sea.

I have selected here some of his lesser known poems but do hope friends will like them, for he used to say:

What
are these words
but intertangled weeds
left behind
by the receding tide.

Thanks a lot for listening, take care...warmest regards/Abid

Never mind

It seems I was wrong about dredging up old threads. David ought to know. Sorry to have sounded grouchy.

Abid,
Good to hear from you.
I very much like the poems you posted.
Take care,
David

We remember, even if we don't really read, Ogden Nash and Dorothy Parker from the golden age of American light verse, but there were a number of very fine and popular poets of that time who are forgotten. Auden wrote an introduction to a Phyllis McGinley best seller. Joseph Auslander, who also wrote other poetry and was a major Petrarch translator, was one of the first poetry consultants at the Library of Congress, the position that evolved into our Poet Laureate. There were at least a half dozen similar others who were widely read at the time, such as David McCord.

The reason why Parker survives and McGinley does not is at least twofold--McGinley relies more heavily on topical references that we no longer recognize, and Parker at her best (which was not as common as one would hope) is just plain better. It's also true that humor of the period will sometimes make even someone with a non-PC self-image cringe--particularly the dialect poems, which were extremely popular at the time.

I'd add some samples but I am away from my beloved books.

Great topic! I found a page on Joseph Auslander here, where there are a few of his poems and a bio. The only Petrarch by him I could find is this audio sample from a CD of Auslander’s translations of Petrarch. And what a fine translation it is.

It made my morning to learn about Auslander. Thanks, Mike.

After five or six, I was all set to turn away from McGinley forever, and with sound reasons. Then I found this:

The 5:32

She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two,
Blacked out, dissolved, I think I would remember
(As if transfixed in unsurrendering amber)
This hour best of all the hours I knew:
When cars came backing into the shabby station,
Children scuffing the seats, and the women driving
With ribbons around their hair, and the trains arriving,
And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.

Yes, I would remember my life like this, she said:
Autumn, the platform red with Virginia creeper,
And a man coming toward me, smiling, the evening paper
Under his arm, and his hat pushed back on his head;
And wood smoke lying like haze on the quiet town,
And dinner waiting, and the sun not yet gone down.

Thanks,

Bill

Just a thought arising out of what Alicia wrote on this subject nine years ago. One of my favourite anthologies of all time is a little Signet volume edited by Auden entitled 19th-Century British Minor Poets (and I have just failed to find it on the bookshelf where it should be). It has a great introduction by Auden and the choices show his wonderful taste and breadth of interest. In particular, he is very good in his choice of comic poetry, which, as he says in the introduction, is what had been automatically excluded by such influential anthologists as Quiller-Couch. My question is why aren't there more anthologies like this? I don't need anthologies that include Wordsworth, Byron, Tennyson, Browning... I do need ones that introduce me to the best poems of Praed, Barnes, Felicia Hemans. It also makes the book a manageable size.