Tag: analysis
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Are we being educated here?
In one of the lectures he gave while Oxford Professor of Poetry – on ‘clarity and obscurity’ – the now Poet Laureate Simon Armitage recalled attending a poetry reading with a non-poet friend (all the lectures are available to listen to here). After the reading, the friend asks Armitage about the mini-introductions the readers had…
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Boom, Boom: Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘View of the Capitol’
Elizabeth Bishop is (maybe) most famous for her poems of place: she spent much of her life living in South America and wrote collections called Questions of Travel and Geography III (there was no ‘I’ or ‘II’). ‘View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress’ was written while working at the Library of Congress…
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Into My Own: The Misanthropy of Robert Frost
Poems are not social in any normal sense of the word. You have to spend a lot of time alone to write or read them. The reader might share them or even read them to someone else (it does happen) and you can say that this is a kind of socialness. Here we get a…
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Pandemic Poetry
Poets are often thought of as more solitary than most, but a poem is never entirely solitary – it’s a signal sent up into the sky, trusting someone will receive it. Hoping, anyway. Perhaps that’s one reason why they are everywhere right now. Simon Armitage has already written his first Coronavirus poem. You can follow…
Jeremy Wikeley 