I’m in the process of compiling an anthology of poems, essentially to give to my children as an introduction to poetry, and through poetry to wider concerns in philosophy, history, theology, science, etc. A lot of my own education is anchored by poetry. You start with a poem, or a poet’s body of work, and travel outwards in expanding rings of interpretation. It’s a good way to learn, and helps maintain focus. For copyright reasons, however, I cannot always post the particular poem that I would like to append to each ‘blurb’. So I’ll just name it. If you’re interested, you can go look it up.

Plath:

Poppies in October

Plath is a cult figure. She was married to Ted Hughes, who she met at Cambridge University. They married in 1956, and seperated in 1962. Plath committed suicide in 1963. She had suffered from depressive episodes most of her adult life. Her one novel, The Bell Jar, is a record of an earlier suicide attempt, and of her subsequent treatment, that pre-dated her Fullbright Scholarship to Cambridge. A lot of her later poems are records of extreme states of mind, and one or two raise moral and aesthetic issues in their choice of subject matter. She rather infamously made reference to the Holocaust, or Shoah, in a reverse-telescope sort of way: not to contextualise her own suffering or to treat of the Holocaust  from a wider cultural and historical perspective, but as metaphor and imagery for her own subjective states. This has led Seamus Heaney, for example, to assess her as a definitive poet, but not a great one. She was certainly a poetic genius, her use of language is driven by a sense of rythmn that generates chains of metaphor and imagery and allusion, a spectacle that unfolds in front of you without hidden, background preparation. In that way she is a naked writer. Very quickly on reading her work, you sense it’s origin, usually in a psychic disturbance. The distance it travels from conception in the poet’s mind to completion and autonomy on the page is very short, so you gain a sense of incipience and unfolding which is very infectious, and which leaves you with the sensation that you know her privately, which is one of the reasons, no doubt,for her achieving cult status. I read her very closely for a few years. I think of her as sort of a distant Aunt. Poppies in October records the kind of surprise that many of her poems must have induced within herself, when they arrived so sudden, as given.

(Poppies in October)

Pome of the day. The poem below is by William Wordsworth. I’m not a big fan. He is often categorised as a Nature Poet and Romantic. However, compared to Ted Hughes and DH Lawrence, for example, he tends to describe nature in the abstract, and under philosophical headings. This poem is one of his smaller pieces, and though we do not know who She was, the poem is insistant on emphasising the fact that she has ceased to be. What is significant is the vocabulary he uses: Motion, Force. These are terms taken from Physics. The Romantic movement was in some respects a reaction to the rise of science and it’s triumphant consolidation into a theory unifying the mundane and the celestial, the Newtonian synthesis. No matter how much he may laud his own sensibilities and muse on the mystical face of Nature, somewhere in the recesses of his mind must have lurked a fear, born of the implications of the success of science: it’s obliterating impersonality that cared not a fig for his delicate imaginings. In this little poem he tests himself, his nerve: for eight lines he peeks at the machine as it processes a figure of romantic longing into an object with the same status as ‘rocks, and stones, and trees’. The implication by the end is that the machine just keeps going….

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stone, and trees.