Bad Poets
Here's my question: how many dinosaurs did they find?
I'm working my way through an anthology of religious poetry, looking for a settable text (see yesterday). I have found some real clunkers. This one offers feeble apologetics:
There is no unbelief;(I notice that word "clod" showing up a lot. English is deficient in words rhyming with "God," apparently.) Then there is this illustration (from Robert Louis Stevenson) that we really didn't want inside our heads:
Whoever plants a seed beneath the sod
And waits to see it push away the clod--
He trusts in God.
God, if this were enough,Or a sentiment by a woman poet that, on its face, would make Naomi Wolf's hair curl:
That I see things bare to the buff
And up to the buttocks in mire[....]
A little bird I am,But then you notice it was written by Madame Guyon in the Bastille, and suddenly the entire character of the poem changes before your eyes.
Shut in from fields of air,
And in my cage I sit and sing,
To him who placed me there;
Well pleased a prisoner to be,
Because, my God, it pleases thee!
And what's with Carl Sandburg, poet of the people? They never told us about his angry streak:
The put up big wooden gods.
Then they burned the big wooden gods
And put up brass gods and
Changing their minds suddenly
Knocked down the brass gods and put up
A dough-face god with gold ear-rings.
The poor mutts, the pathetic slant heads,
The didn't know a little tin god
Is as good as anything in the line of gods[....]
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
7 Comments:
Hey Phred,
We thought you were ill today, but not toooooo ill I guess... Hope you are feeling better.
Glad your sickness hasn't stopped you from doing the important things in life. ;-)
Wm. Blake:
TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry
Gerald Manly Hopkins:
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
aaarrgghhh... Stop! Nothing good can come from me reading stuff like that. First I'll start thinking, "Even I can write better poetry than that," then I actually try, then I'm horrified with the result. But I can't bear to destroy it as I should so I stash it somewhere to be discovered by some some shocked relative who had no idea I was guilty of such a disgusting vice.
The best way I know to find good poems & poets that I'm not familiary with is to look in "Poets of the English Language," a stupendous anthology of most good English poetry from the Norman conquest to 1914 in five small volumes. It was edited by W. H. Auden, and so the selections are at once catholic and surprising and the introductions very funny and full of absurd generalizations. All of them except the one of Romantic poets have been out of print since the '70s, but a good library should have 'em.
How about Rabindranath Tagore? Not that I have an anthology to recommend or anything.
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