poetry

Lope de Vega was born in Madrid in 1562. A poet, dramatist, novelist, and critic, he was also a soldier, and one of the survivors of the tragically misnamed Invincible Armada. He is generally acknowledged as the father of the Spanish drama, and, since his death in 1635, has been widely considered “the Spanish Shakespeare.” The poem presented here is drawn from his collection of “Sacred Sonnets.”

Ryan Wilson holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Boston University. Recent work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in a number of magazines, including 32 Poems, First Things, The Hopkins Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, River Styx, and Sewanee Theological Review, among others. Currently living with his wife in Baltimore, he is a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America.

Meleager (135 BC – 50 BC) was born in Gadara and lived a long life at the eastern end of the Mediterranean, settling finally in Cos which he described as “the island he loved best.” He published a great deal of satirical prose and an anthology of other poets, all lost. What we have are one hundred and thirty four of his own epigrams, celebrating love for pretty women and pretty boys.

John Whitworth, moving effortlessly into old age, has published an indecent number of books of poetry, most with his friend and mentor, the late Harry Chambers; the most recent, Girlie Gangs, with the excellent Enitharmon Press. He is published widely in Australia, New Zealand and the United States but lately less so in the UK, where a high-minded atheist, left-leaning muse is gaining ground pretty well everywhere but in The Spectator, where his poems still find a home.

Giovanni Pascoli (1855 – 1912), the son of an estate manager, grew up in an idyllic rural setting that was very soon to change. He lost his parents and other members of his family early on in tragic circumstances. Nevertheless, thanks to some financial help, he was able to continue his studies and gain a degree in classics, teaching first in high schools, later in universities. Eventually, in 1906, he was appointed to the chair of Italian Literature at Bologna University recently vacated by his friend and mentor, Giosuè Carducci.

N.S. Thompson lives outside Oxford, UK.

Paul the Deacon (c. 720 – c. 799), during the 780s, was part of the circle of poets and thinkers at the court of Charlemagne, King of the Franks. Apparently descended from a noble Lombard family, Paul later wrote a six-book history of his people and compiled a collection of his homilies at Charlemagne’s request.

Jeff Sypeck taught medieval literature at the University of Maryland University College for ten years and wrote the 2006 book Becoming Charlemagne. Born and raised in New Jersey, he now lives in Washington, DC, where he writes and edits as a contractor for a large government agency.

Hesiod is arguably the first writer we know about as a person in Western Literature. Probably writing in the late 8th century BC, he lived in the town of Askra, in Boeotia, Greece (a place he called “miserable in winter, vile in summer, unpleasant all the year round.”) He was a farmer himself and won a tripod in a poetry contest. He was embroiled in a lawsuit with his wastrel brother Perses over a property inherited from their father, and complained of corrupt judges; Modern Greeks would recognize this iron-age state of affairs today.

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who has lived in Greece since 1999. Her most recent collection is Olives. Her translation of Hesiod’s Works and Days is forthcoming from Penguin Classics.