I have always thought e.e. cummings wrote some very beautiful love poems
I have always thought e.e. cummings wrote some very beautiful love poems
Jozanny-
I mean to say that Yeats loved Maude Gonne, even though Yeats detested violence. I suppose I should have clarified that in my post. Oops. I am a big fan of Yeats; perhaps this will clear up what I meant:
In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, then a twenty-three year old heiress and ardent Nationalist.[29] Gonne was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a "paint-stained art student."[30] Gonne had admired "The Isle of Statues" and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats developed an obsessive infatuation with her beauty and outspoken manner, and she was to have a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter.[31] Looking back in later years, he admitted "it seems to me that she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes."[32] Yeats' love remained unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her nationalist activism.[33] His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he had first met in 1896, and parted with one year later. In 1895, he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point "the troubling of my life began."[34] Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his horror, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride.[35]
Yeats' friendship with Gonne persisted, and in Paris in 1908 they finally consummated their relationship. "The long years of fidelity rewarded at last" was how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that "the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul."[34] The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: "I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too."[36] By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem "A Man Young and Old":
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take;
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WB_Yeats
Carving lucky charms out of these hard luck bones
That cleared up things substantially Cellar; much appreciated.
Either way though, Yeats is still one of the greatest poets; perhaps the greatest 20th century one. He seems to be the greatest first generation modernist, and was held even by them as such.
Do you believe this or are you repeating consensus?Originally Posted by JBI
I am, no pun intended, handicapped in my diffidence toward the man because his reputation was fed to me rather than studied so that I could make up my own mind--and as previously indicated, *the Celtic pathos* at some point becomes belabored victimization in my sensibility. Look at the Italian approach, in comparison. Italy wraps itself up in Old World corrosion and its authors remain perfectly contented to frolic on these grounds, from Dante through Eco. Irish writers seem to demand that their hurt feelings be indulged--and I'd argue that even Joyce does not transcend this. He makes it squarely front and center of his genius. It seems only now in the early 21st century that Ireland is dusting itself off and saying to the rest of the world, "hey, we're kind of pretty, ain't we?"
I seem to derive better rewards from other sources, and that's okay.
I believe it - I have read over his collected poems, time after time, and am amazed on every reading. Metrically, and in terms of syntax and form, there is no match - he understands the way words work, and uses them to create deeper meanings than what appear on the page. In terms of content, his later works especially transcend his "Irishness" as you have called it, in the sense that he seems to have purged the majority of personal experience out of his work, in an (successful) attempt to make his poetry universal.
If you look into his process, you can see exactly why he achieves such effects. He used to write an average of two lines a day - that is, spend so many hours writing but two lines, then thinking over them, and revising them. With such slow care, and skill with language, it is almost inevitable that such poetic strength will emerge.
I will take it under advisement JBI, with the caveat--(and I tried to explain this to luke, though elocution failed me to some degree)--I do not really like studying poetry while immersed in the process of publishing my own.
The only reason I've made some effort at it since *getting to know* you and quasi, in this forum, is I have not truly been working, and so what the hay
I guess that's the difference - I have no ambition to write poetry in the next little while, but all the ambition to write about poetry. Either way though, if I were writing poetry still, I would probably stick to obscure multicultural sources, as that is what critics are looking for / society is looking for.
(Rainer Maria Rilke) Autumn Day (Translated by M. D. Herter Norton, 1938)
Lord, it is time. The summer was very big.
Lay thy shadow on the sundials,
and on the meadows let the winds go loose.
Command the last fruits that they shall be full;
give them another two more southerly days,
urge them on to fulfillment and drive
the last sweetness into heavy wine.
Who has no house now, will build him one no more.
Who is alone now, long will so remain,
will wake, read, write long letters
and will in the avenues to and fro
restlessly wander, when the leaves are blowing.
"You are blocking my sunlight!"
Robert Burns, Ae fond kiss
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;
Dark despair around benights me.
I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy:
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her, and love for ever.
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met-or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!
Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweeli alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.
My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.
Logan Pearsall Smith, 1931
enchanting poesy!
excellent!
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When asked how World War III would be fought, Einstein replied that he didn't know. But he knew how World War IV would be fought: With sticks and stones.
-(:===============
Shakespeare's sonnet that starts:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun ...
Sonnet 130.
Dear Members,
Really,amazing! I thought I had contributed here.Anyway it was pleasure again to read all over again.I am glad so many read with so much variety.So here is my contribution.
By Florence Earle Coates
IF love were but a little thing—
Strange love, which, more than all, is great—
One might not such devotion bring,
Early to serve and late.
If love were but a passing breath— 5
Wild love—which, as God knows, is sweet—
One might not make of life and death
A pillow for love’s feet.
Cruised back four years (page 6) for this reference.
Dover Beach, by Mathew Arnold, is not only my favorite poem, but a great love poem.
The Industrial Revolution was on, and yet years before Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle naturalists had noted that the incessant waves had eroded the face of the "White Cliffs of Dover" revealing 10,000 years of limestone. Upon examination the shellfish fossils that made up the lime had changed very little in that time.
Therefore, the world was a lot older than the 6,000 years interpreters of the Bible said.
"Tain't so!" - What the Bible said, was the conclusion. Thus England entered the "Post Christian" phase.
Poetry changed.
Arnold in "Dover Beach," cuts to the heart of the matter: if heretofore life's "meaning" had crashed like a dove on Dover beach, what would replace it?
Dover Beach
by Mathew Arnold
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair.
Upon the straights;-on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where sea meets the moon-blanched sand,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then begin again,
With tremendous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its meloncholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wild, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
-1848
It seems like a vision poem like The Seine Net, by Robinson Jeffers. But that vision is not addressed to a loved one, nor is it about the conclusion that only love has meaning now.
In any event it gets my vote for greatest love poem (with the background info anyway).
Or at least I tend to agree with Arnold's viewpoint: If; then...
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