I Used to Know That_ Stuff You Forgot From School - Caroline Taggart [14]
☞ RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936, English)
Prolific chronicler of the soldier’s lot in South Africa and India, but best known for “If:”
If you can keep your head while all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same…
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
☞ JOHN MILTON (1608-74, English)
Best known for his epic poems, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, which were composed in his later years while blind; Areopagitica, Milton’s treatise on censorship, also earned him recognition.
☞ PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822, English)
One of the great Romantic poets, married to Mary, the author of Frankenstein. Lived mostly in Europe, latterly Italy, where he drowned in a boating accident. Author of “Ode to a Skylark” (Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!), “Ozymandias” (Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!) and Adonais, an elegy on the death of Keats.
☞ EDMUND SPENSER (c.1552-99, English)
Author of The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I, and known to his peers as “the prince of poets.” His poem “Epithalamion” has 365 long lines, representing the sum of 52 weeks, 12 months, and 4 seasons of the annual cycle, and 24 stanzas, corresponding to the diurnal and sidereal hours.
☞ ALFRED LORD TENNYSON (1809-92, English)
Another prolific one. His great work is “In Memoriam,” written on the early death of his friend Arthur Hallam; but most people are probably more familiar with “Come into the Garden,” “Maud,” and “The Lady of Shalott”:
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack’d from side to side;
‘The curse is come upon me!’ cried
The Lady of Shalott
☞ DYLAN THOMAS (1914-53, Welsh)
Famous drunkard, but you forgive him most things for having written “Under Milkwood” and enabling Richard Burton to record it for posterity.
☞ WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850, English)
The most important of the Lake Poets (the others were Coleridge and Robert Southey). I have to say, I think “prolix” rather than “prolific” is the mot juste for Wordsworth. He churned it out, and goodness he was dull. The often-quoted “Daffodils” (I wander’d lonely as a cloud) is one of his, as is the “Sonnet Written on Westminster Bridge” (Earth hath not anything to show more fair).
☞ W(ILLIAM) B(UTLER) YEATS (1865-1939, Irish)
Theosophist and Rosicrucian as well as poet and playwright; dedicated his early poems to Maud Gonne. Best known are “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree).
North American Poets
Although this is an extremely short list of extraordinary poets, the writers listed here captured the voice and history of their generations. Hopefully they will inspire you to seek out the many remarkable poets that followed in their footsteps.
☞ ANNE BRADSTREET (1612-72)
A puritan, she immigrated with her family in 1630 to the New World. Anne, who was used to an Earl’s manor, had to adjust to near-primitive living conditions. She struggled to take care of her home and raise eight children but still found time to write and became the first female writer to publish work in colonial America. Some notable poems include “The Prologue” and “To My Dear and Loving Husband.”
☞ EMILY DICKINSON (1830-1886)
Dickinson spent a large part of her 55 years writing about death and immortality. After all, her home overlooked the Amherst, Massachusetts, burial ground, and since Emily was a bit of a recluse and spent