Tag Archives: Poetry

Literature: A Reading Of “Letters Of John Keats To His Family And Friends” – “Inside His Brilliant Mind”

Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends by John KEATS (1795 – 1821) and Sidney COLVIN (1845 – 1927)

Read by: Nemo and Eva Davis

Chapters: 00:00:00  – 00 – Preface 00:21:11 – 01 – Letter 1 – to Charles Cowden Clarke 00:22:21 – 02 – Letter 2 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 00:24:06 – 03 – Letter 3 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 00:25:00 – 04 – Letter 4 – to Charles Cowden Clarke 00:26:57 – 05 – Letter 5 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 00:28:25 – 06 – Letter 6 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 00:29:52 – 07 – Letter 7 – to George and Thomas Keats 00:34:17 – 08 – Letter 8 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 00:42:14 – 09 – Letter 9 – to Leigh Hunt 00:50:13 – 10 – Letter 10 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 01:00:31 – 11 – Letter 11 – to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey 01:03:50 – 12 – Letter 12 – to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey 01:06:07 – 13 – Letter 13 – to Mariane and Jane Reynolds 01:10:34 – 14 – Letter 14 – to Fanny Keats 01:18:27 – 15 – Letter 15 – to Jane Reynolds 01:26:44 – 16 – Letter 16 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 01:34:49 – 17 – Letter 17 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 01:37:39 – 18 – Letter 18 – to Benjamin Bailey 01:43:58 – 19 – Letter 19 – to Benjamin Bailey 01:51:33 – 20 – Letter 20 – to Benjamin Bailey 01:54:19 – 21 – Letter 21 – to Charles Wentworth Dilke 01:55:20 – 22 – Letter 22 – to Benjamin Bailey 02:05:23 – 23 – Letter 23 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 02:11:23 – 24 – Letter 24 – to George and Thomas Keats 02:16:25 – 25 – Letter 25 – to George and Thomas Keats 02:26:06 – 26 – Letter 26 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 02:28:19 – 27 – Letter 27 – to John Taylor 02:29:30 – 28 – Letter 28 – to George and Thomas Keats 02:35:45 – 29 – Letter 29 – to John Taylor 02:37:09 – 30 – Letter 30 – to George and Thomas Keats 02:45:42 – 31 – Letter 31 – to Benjamin Bailey 02:53:40 – 32 – Letter 32 – to John Taylor 02:55:38 – 33 – Letter 33 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 03:00:19 – 34 – Letter 34 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 03:09:32 – 35 – Letter 35 – to John Taylor 03:10:23 – 36 – Letter 36 – to George and Thomas Keats 03:14:06 – 37 – Letter 37 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 03:20:52 – 38 – Letter 38 – to George and Thomas Keats 03:25:16 – 39 – Letter 39 – to John Taylor 03:28:39 – 40 – Letter 40 – to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey 03:29:39 – 41 – Letter 41 – to Benjamin Bailey 03:39:27 – 42 – Letter 42 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 03:46:04 – 43 – Letter 43 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 03:51:10 – 44 – Letter 44 – to Messrs. Taylor and Hessey 03:52:54 – 45 – Letter 45 – to James Rice 03:58:59 – 46 – Letter 46 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 04:06:50 – 47 – Letter 47 – to Benjamin Robert Haydon 04:12:07 – 48 – Letter 48 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 04:17:53 – 49 – Letter 49 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 04:20:39 – 50 – Letter 50 – to John Taylor 04:24:29 – 51 – Letter 51 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 04:29:41 – 52 – Letter 52 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 04:46:49 – 53 – Letter 53 – to Benjamin Bailey 04:52:06 – 54 – Letter 54 – to Benjamin Bailey 04:57:26 – 55 – Letter 55 – to John Taylor 04:59:14 – 56 – Letter 56 – to Thomas Keats 05:08:57 – 57 – Letter 57 – to Fanny Keats 05:18:23 – 58 – Letter 58 – to Thomas Keats 05:28:49 – 59 – Letter 59 – to Thomas Keats 05:39:49 – 60 – Letter 60 – to John Hamilton Reynolds 05:48:19 – 61 – Letter 61 – to Thomas Keats 06:01:55 – 62 – Letter 62 – to Benjamin Bailey 06:16:12 – 63 – Letter 63 – to Thomas Keats 06:30:05 – 64 – Letter 64 – to Thomas Keats 06:43:57 – 65 – Letter 65 – to Mrs. Wylie 06:50:42 – 66 – Letter 66 – to Fanny Keats 06:53:45 – 67 – Letter 67 – to Fanny Keats 06:55:12 – 68 – Letter 68 – to Jane Reynolds 06:56:23 – 69 – Letter 69 – to Charles Wentworth Dilke

These are the letters of John Keats, as written to family, close friends and others during his brief, eventful years as an artist. (However, the editor chose to exclude love letters to Fanny Brawne, respecting their private nature.) The celebrated Keats letters were written between 1816-1820, and include those colorful entries penned during his 44-day tour with Charles Brown as they rambled through England, Ireland and Scotland. Also included are the famous, lengthy ‘journal letters,’ written to his brother George and sister-in-law in America. Not only a poetic genius, Keats shines in epistolary form. His letters brim with the emotion, wit and intelligence he routinely shared with intimates. – Summary by NemoR

Travel & Quarantines: Author Frances Mayes Writes Of Poet John Keats In Naples, Italy In 1820 (NYT)

From the New York Times (March 26, 2020):

I have seen Naples from his vantage of a ship anchored offshore — one of the most sublime locations in the world, that sweep of coast stacked with apricot, carmine, azure and rose villas; the blue, blue U of the harbor; the emphatic Vesuvius anchoring the view. 

Frances Mayes
Frances Mayes

In October of 1820, typhus raged in Naples. With his artist friend, Joseph Severn, the British poet John Keats rocked in the city’s harbor for 10 days, not nearly the quaranta giorni — 40 days — that give us our word quarantine.

Before this journey, Keats always felt intense melancholy. In “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time,” he wrote “… mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.” (And in the smooth pentameter of “Ode to a Nightingale”: “I have been half in love with easeful death.”) Not a holiday, this voyage out of England was a desperate trip to the sunny climate of Italy. His cough had grown steadily worse. Since the morning he’d seen a splotch of blood on his pillow, he knew he had little chance of surviving the consumption that had invaded his lungs. His last-ditch: Go to Rome. Meanwhile, exile at sea.

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Nature Video: “Woodland Words – The Laboratory with Leaves” (Oxford)

Sarah Watkinson is Wytham Woods’ first poet in residence. She leads us through a delicate maze of woodland and words, weaving together nature, research and poetry. In their work, scientists are objective: they don’t express opinions, they don’t talk about themselves. Poetry would seem science’s diametrical opposite: it’s traditionally inward-looking and self-reflective. Sarah’s writing combines her scientific background and her love for form and words in the most delicate and unexpected way: observing the world, for her, is a form of poetry.

Profiles: 73-Year Old British Novelist And Poet Ruth Padel On Her Book “Beethoven Variations”

Ruth Padel Beethoven Variations Poems on a Life bookLike Beethoven, the poet Ruth Padel first came to love and understand music through playing the viola. Her great grandfather, a concert pianist, studied music in Leipzig with Beethoven’s friend and contemporary. Her latest collection Beethoven Variations (Chatto) is simultaneously a biography in verse of the great composer and a passionate and highly personal account of how one creative genius can feed, and feed on, another.

London Review Bookshop Podcast logoShe was joined in an evening of readings and conversation about Beethoven, poetry and music by poets Raymond Antrobus and Anthony Anaxagorou, both of whom are currently engaged in creative projects working on and from the life and work of Beethoven.

Ruth Padel Slient Letters of the Alphabet bookRuth Sophia Padel (born 8 May 1946) is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, in whose work “the journey is the stepping stone to lyrical reflections on the human condition”. She is known for her explorations through poetry of migration and refugees,science, and homelessness; for her involvement in wildlife conservation,  Greece, and music; and for her belief that poetry “connects with every area of life” and “has a responsibility to look at the world”. She is Trustee for conservation charity New Networks for Nature, has served on the Board of the Zoological Society of London, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3 and 4 on poetry, wildlife and music. In 2013 she joined King’s College London, where she is Professor of Poetry. 

Website

Bio from Wikipedia

 

New Books: “The Making Of Poetry – Coleridge, The Wordsworths And Their Year Of Marvels”

The Making of Poetry Coleridge, The Wordsworth and Their Year of Marvels Adam Nicolson 2020 US ReleaseIn The Making of Poetry, Adam Nicolson embeds himself in the reality of this unique moment, exploring the idea that these poems came from this particular place and time, and that only by experiencing the physical circumstances of the year, in all weathers and all seasons, at night and at dawn, in sunlit reverie and moonlit walks, can the genesis of the poetry start to be understood.

June 1797 to September 1798 is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and “Kubla Khan,” as well as his unmatched hymns to friendship and fatherhood, and William Wordsworth’s revolutionary songs in Lyrical Ballads along with “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s paean to the unity of soul and cosmos, love and understanding.

Excerpt from The Prelude by Wordsworth and Coleridge

The poetry Wordsworth and Coleridge made was not from settled conclusions but from the adventure on which they embarked, thinking of poetry as a challenge to all received ideas, stripping away the dead matter, looking to shed consciousness and so change the world. What emerges is a portrait of these great figures seen not as literary monuments but as young men, troubled, ambitious, dreaming of a vision of wholeness, knowing they had greatness in them but still in urgent search of the paths toward it.

The artist Tom Hammick accompanied Nicolson for much of the year, making woodcuts from the fallen timber in the park at Alfoxden where the Wordsworths lived. Interspersed throughout the book, his images bridge the centuries, depicting lives at the source of our modern sensibility: a psychic landscape of doubt and possibility, full of beauty and thick with desire for a kind of connectedness that seems permanently at hand and yet always out of reach.

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Poetic Tribute: “The Swan” By Mary Oliver (1935 -2019)

The Swan

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

– Mary Oliver

Art Criticism: “A Poet’s Response To Carpeaux’s ‘Why Born Enslaved!'” (MetCollects Video)

“It is critical to reckon with the power imbalance enacted when a white male artist transposes the body of a black woman into an emblem of enslavement.”

Why Born Enslaved! was first conceived in 1868 by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, one of the greatest French sculptors of the nineteenth century. The bust portrays a woman straining against a rope pulled taut around her arms, back, and breast. Her shoulders project forward and the right tendon of her neck protrudes as she twists her body in one direction and turns her head sharply in the other.

A poet's response to Carpeaux's Why Born Enslaved! MetCollects Video

In The Gallery by Wendy S. Walters

The figure’s defiant, uplifted gaze extends her spiraling movement and conveys her perseverance through pain as the work’s rhetorical title, inscribed on the sculpture’s base, proclaims, “Pourquoi Naitre Esclave!”

To read more: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/online-features/metcollects/why-born-enslaved

New Poetry & Art: “Giorgio De Chirico – Geometry Of Shadows” Translated By Stefania Heim

From a Hyperallergic.com online review:

De-Chirico_FC_hi-res-1080x1722“Everywhere is the wait and the gathering,” concludes “Resort.” A kind of soporific haze has seeped into de Chirico’s imagination, asserted through evocations of sleeping and dreaming. Even the violence and ambiguous sexual imagery of “The Mysterious Night” yield to a final note of definitive somnolence: “Everything sleeps; even the owls and the bats who also in the dream dream of sleeping.”

“My room,” he writes, “is a beautiful vessel,” and from there he propels his imagination outward across space and time, geography and history. Indeed, “faraway” (lontani, lontano) is one of his favorite adjectives. giorgio-de-chirico-the-changing-face-of-metaphysical-art-1He daydreams of Mexico or Alaska and invokes a future-oriented “avant-city” and a distant day where he is immortalized, albeit in an old-fashioned mode as a “man of marble.”

The paintings of Giorgio de Chirico invariably call to mind a cluster of adjectives: haunting, enigmatic, evocative, poetic. But unlike many artists whose poetry remains wordless and confined to the canvas, de Chirico was also a writer whose texts have been praised and even translated by such art-world luminaries as Louise Bourgeois and John Ashbery. A new collection provides us with more of de Chirico’s writings. Translated into English by Stefania Heim, Geometry of Shadows presents the relatively compact totality of the artist’s extant poems and poetic fragments written in Italian, complementing his memoirs and the novel Hebdomeros (in French), which have been available in English for some time.

To read more: https://hyperallergic.com/520898/geometry-of-shadows-by-giorgio-de-chirico/