Showing results by narrator "Gideon Wagner" in All Categories

Throughout the long centuries of human history is the want, and the need, to share information, to exchange ideas and for that knowledge and experience, for curiosity and learning, to be the basis of a civil society. In literature the ambition is much narrower. In order to be known, to be popular, you had to be published. And for that people had to know you existed and your ideas worth reading. Obviously for most of humanity's time people couldn't read and texts couldn't be published in any great number.

The most enduring and popular theme of poems and poets is that of love. Love changes; its rhythms pause and pulse on the tiniest of things and the biggest of thrills. Within its shades all other feelings, all other emotions, gently reside, waiting for their moment. In these 50 poems, the many, many shades of love reveal themselves.

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst Massachusetts. Rightly regarded as a major American poet, her life was sheltered, introverted, and reclusive. Despite writing over 1800 poems, only a dozen or so were published during her lifetime. Her structures and wordings are at times difficult to get to grips with, though recurring themes of religion and death certainly shadow many of her works.

Sometimes we just want the best. But that involves choices, judgements, decisions. And that all depends on our feelings, our mood at the time. Even more so with poetry. Would we like a little more pathos, or love, or humour with that? Can we only choose one Keats? And ’If’? Surely Kipling wrote something else? So difficult to decide. This one or that? Is it easier to choose your 50 favourite poets or your 50 favourite poems?

Keats. A short life but a legacy of works that few, if any, can rival. And of course his end was to be tragically Romantic. Keats was returning one night to his home in Hampstead when he coughed. He coughed a single drop of blue blood upon his hand and said, ‘I know the colour of that blood, it is arterial blood, it is my death warrant, I must die’. And so it was that tuberculosis took its slow, devastating hold.

For centuries England has always had a leading and admired reputation for its poets and poetry. In this volume we explore those born in the West Midlands who created such revered, enduring and respected verse.

The ninth month of the Gregorian calendar strides onto stage with the autumn equinox and the first glimpses of a new season. Nature may adorn the coming days with a blaze of Indian summer, or the early showers and storms of autumn may begin their symphony. Regardless of Nature’s elemental whims the landscape is a riot of colours, hues and swathes, the harvest of crops continues, the orchards heave with bounty.

Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night. From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

The year reaches its end with the Twelfth month. The landscape may be bleak, a sculpture of lines, monochrome dominates. The air carries the sounds of winter: wind, storms, silence. Our classic poets flex their lexicons with verse that describes all manner of events, sights and sounds. Among their ranks are Hardy, Shakespeare, Rossetti, Nesbit, Burns and a wealth of others, who, with their thoughts and desires express the world in lines of inky marvel.

Do men need poems? Is the gender of brawn and ‘can-do’ really a candidate for honeyed verse? Obviously yes. Through the centuries men seem to dominate the writing of poetry. From books of epics to quatrains of love poetry it seemed to be a man’s world. His domain. A volume purely for men, to show other facets of their personalities and characters seems to be an obvious choice. One verse fits all is, in fact, far removed from the truth. Men needs words. They need support, understanding as well as goals, ambition and structure. They need purpose, desire; the need to love and be loved.

The Elizabethan age had almost departed, and the world had seen the rise of great European empires that continued to hunt with mischief between themselves as they traversed the globe in search of more spoils and territories. In England, the Civil War had brought about the will of Parliament and the replacement of the Crown as the governing body. But with these Puritan times, and the subsequent Restoration, poetry had entered a golden age. John Milton, John Dryden and Ben Jonson are but a few of the luminaries whose great verse followed in the wake of the immortal William Shakespeare.

The ships of Europe explore the globe. The Age of Mercantilism sets the stage for centuries to come. The Reformation is underway, and scientific thinking begins to challenge the Church even as nation falls upon nation. In the Americas and Asia, ancient empires clash. Cultures resonate and express themselves with the fruit of the Ottoman, Safavid, Moghul and Chinese expansion. In England, the Elizabethan age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson and Spenser dawns.

William Morris was born in Walthamstow, London, on 24 March 1834 and is regarded today as a foremost poet, writer, textile designer, artist and libertarian. Morris began to publish poetry and short stories in 1856. Morris' fascination with the ancient Germanic and Norse peoples dominated his writing, and he was the first to translate many of the Icelandic sagas into English. He also published limited-edition illuminated style books, with his design for The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer standing out.

The church building has been pivotal to man’s spiritual and religious life for centuries. For many the interior of a church is literally their one to one with God. The interiors, whether soaring or simple, ornate or minimal, are built for communion, for worship. Outside and surrounding our many churches is the churchyard; the burial ground, the repository for faithful souls. An all-weather idyll of calm around where many a poet has sat and contemplated the surrounding world.

Hugh John Lofting was born in Maidenhead, Berkshire, on January 14th, 1886 to English and Irish parents. Lofting was initially educated at Mount St Mary’s College in Spinkhill, Derbyshire, a Jesuit boarding school, from the age of eight. By 1905, at age 18, he was to study abroad, taking classes in civil engineering at the esteemed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the USA. Thereafter he embarked on a quest to travel widely before settling down to write of his adventures.

Strictly speaking The Lake Poets were not a movement or school of poetry. They were only so named as such by The Edinburgh Review so that they could be disparaged. It was a spectacular backfire! The three main figures would be rightly seen as among the most monumental figures in English poetry - William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the underrated but immense Robert Southey, himself a 30-year poet laureate.

John Donne was born on 22nd January 1572 in London into a Roman Catholic family when Catholicism was illegal in England and there was turbulence and unrest with both state and church throughout much of Europe. His father, also named John, died when he was four, and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, married a wealthy widower, ensuring the family were looked after. He received a good education in both Oxford and Cambridge but was unable to obtain a degree without taking the Oath of Supremacy, which as a Catholic he refused to do.

Robert Southey was born on the 12th of August 1774 in Bristol. A poet of the Romantic school and one of the 'Lake Poets'. Although his fame has been eclipsed by that of his friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Southey's verse was highly influential and he wrote movingly against the horrors and injustice of the slave trade. Among his other classics are Inchcape Rock as well as a number of plays including Wat Tyler.

Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was born on August 12th, 1880 to wealthy parents who separated while she was still an infant. Her parents thereafter paid little attention to her. Hall was educated privately, and then at King’s College London. Later she travelled to Europe, settling in Dresden, Germany. With the death of her paternal grandfather she inherited a large estate and was then able to live as she pleased. In Germany, Hall met Mabel Batten and fell in love despite the 23 year age difference.

Israel Zangwill was born in London on 21st January 1864, to a family of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire. His writing earned him the sobriquet ‘the Dickens of the Ghetto’ primarily based on his much-lauded novel Children of the Ghetto: A Study of a Peculiar People in 1892 and its glimpse of the poverty-stricken life in London's Jewish quarter.