I had some great English teachers in high school — women who challenged my thinking and my reading. They exposed me to authors I’d never have come to on my own (Heinrich Böll), and spurred me to dig deeper into the writing of authors who are part of almost every high school syllibus (the entire Jane Austen oeuvre).
One thing was missing, though: poetry. Not one of my classes involved the study of poems, of rhyme or meter, of the great poets past and present. Beyond Shakespeare’s plays, which are written in verse, and someone making us write haiku at some point, I had no coursework related to poetry until my freshman year in college.
In English 101, we studied poetry for a few weeks, doing a section on sonnets (hello again, Mr. Shakespeare!), and one on poems about death. The former included all the usual 14-line suspects: Let me not to the marriage of true minds/admit impediments. The latter: a little Dylan Thomas (Rage, rage, at the dying of the light) and some Dickinson (Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me).
As a child, I was as open to reading poetry as I was to prose.My mom gave me books of it specifically written for children — Words Words Words by Mary O’Neill, Finding a Poem by Eve Merriam. And if I was bored she’d set me the task of memorizing a poem. I still have bits of Walt Whitman’s O Captain! My Captain! running around my head (which would have been a good addition to the section on death in freshman English), and can recite the entirety of Sister for Sale by Shel Silverstein.
Like many intense youth (is that redundant?), I spend parts of my adolescence and young adulthood writing poetry, plenty of it bad. But I had a dear friend in college who encouraged me, and gave me books — the complete works of Emily Dickinson, a book of poems by Robert Frost (so accessible — unlike many modern poets). But I have never felt comfortable enough with my knowledge of poetry to be an avid poetry reader. I’m sure I’m missing something — hidden meaning, nuance. It makes me feel stupid.
However, I have a longstanding goal of reading something by every winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. That means I have to read some poetry. So when news came last week of the passing of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, I took the opportunity to read some of his work — not a whole book’s worth, but a few poems. In retrospect, it’s strange that I had never read him — when I was doing my graduate work at University College Dublin, I was in a history class with his son Michael. And that was at a time when I was still writing my own verse.
So I read. And I found it lovely, evocative of Ireland — the wet, the green, the pastoral life outside the city. He wrote of a time past — In A Drink of Water, he writes of a woman pumping water for the day’s use. “The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter/And slow diminuendo as it filled”. He wrote of the history of Ireland, touching on the Easter Rising of 1916 in Requiem for the Croppies, and of his pride in his Irish heritage in a snarky little untitled verse written after he was included in an anthology of English poets: ‘Be advised, my passport’s green/ No glass of ours was ever raised/ To toast the Queen.’
More than a poet, he was a scholar, publishing a new translation of Beowulf in 2001. I’m not up for that, but I have ordered a copy of Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996.
Who is your favorite poet? What’s your favorite poem? Why?
