Two Poems by Lionel Johnson
These two poems of Lionel Johnson, included by his friend William Butler Yeats in a little volume of 20 Poems of Lionel Johnson, attest to Johnson’s deep sense of the sacred.
These two poems of Lionel Johnson, included by his friend William Butler Yeats in a little volume of 20 Poems of Lionel Johnson, attest to Johnson’s deep sense of the sacred.
Thomas Hardy, though best known for his novels, was a poet who exercised significant influence on the next generation.
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
This poem by Alec Wilder was read at the composer’s funeral. Wilder is best known for several popular songs, especially “I’ll Be Around” (recorded by his friend Frank Sinatra) and “While We are Young,” but he also wrote chamber music pieces generally condemned as “unoriginal.”
As I came up into the town
Wherein my father’s house abide,
I met a man in tattered gown,
In ragged garment blowing wide,
Chatterton, a late 18th century poet, is more famous as a legend–the teenage poet who died at 17–than as a writer. The Romantics, French as well as English, lionized him. His best known poems are the medievalizing verses he attributed to a 15th century poet, but his talent for painting satiric portraits is evident in “Apostate Will”–a fine sketch of the clergy on the make,
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,