Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality. James Joyce
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
For the poet Sylvia Plath the post-war American dream was a prison, not a paradise. She grew up in the age of Cold War witchhunts and conservative values. For clever ambitious girls, 1950s America was suffocating. Writing was her rebellion. Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar, BBC 2018
Embraced by the literary world for her astonishing poetry she spent her life besieged by inner demons. In her only novel The Bell Jar she told her own story: it was life as a woman in 1950s America laid bare. ibid.
Four weeks after The Bell Jar was published in 1963 Sylvia Plath committed suicide. ibid.
‘I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties, and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus. I guess I should have been excited the way most of the other girls were, but I couldn’t get myself to react.’ ibid.
Always be a poet, even in prose. Charles Baudelaire
Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. Charles Bukowski
The most popular and celebrated poet in Britain at that time ... morose and pessimistic but also witty and funny. A N Wilson, Return to Larkinland, BBC 2015
There was another Larkin: sour, two-faced, two-timing, crudely misogynistic, racist and course. Like others I reacted harshly to this other Larkin ... Good and bad can exist in one person ... These different sides of Larkin. ibid.
Who cares! I haven't read many books, but I've read all the ones that count. I know by heart the works of the four greatest poets of all time – Rumi, Iqbal, Miraz Ghalib, and a fourth fellow whose name I forget. I am a self-taught entrepreneur. Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger p6
Sassoon: Nothing of Importance: the book itself was of very great importance: it is the memoir of an officer who had served with Sassoon in the so-called Poets Battalion. War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme, BBC 2016
Poetry and prose that still relays what this particular battle felt like. ibid.
Sassoon found himself lionised – he was a war hero. Something that would make his future criticisms of the conflict more telling. ibid.
I’ve got to get her off poetry. I’ve got to get her away from this whole sick Oxford thing before she becomes a hopeless academic. The Comic Strip Presents s4e4: Oxford, Lenny Henry, BBC 1990
I would like to know who this Mr Neruda is: because he boasts about peace while supporting strikers who attack our law enforcement. Neruda 2016 starring Luis Gnecco & Gael Garcia Bernal & Alfredo Castro & Mercedes Moran & Diego Munoz & Pablo Derqui & Michael Silva& Jaime Vadell & Marcelo Alonso & Francisco Reyes et al, director Pablo Larrain, right-wing politician
Union leaders, communist party members, are being thrown into jail. And it’s all being done by your president. ibid. Neruda
It is said Neruda is the most important communist in the world. ibid. commentary
In Chile there’s no freedom of speech. There’s no freedom of fear. Today 6th January 1948: I’m being persecuted for remaining faithful to lofty human aspirations. And for the first time I had to sit before a court for reporting to the Americas despicable violations of those freedoms. ibid. Neruda
Catch him and humiliate him. Then we’ll throw a party. ibid. President
Neruda likes sex, murder and violence. ibid. wife
Poets organise an heroic resistance against Chile’s fascism. ibid. Picasso
Many writers in history have fallen foul of power. But only one became a legend. Exactly 2,000 years ago in A.D. 17 the most famous poet in Rome died here in exile on the shores of the Black Sea. Ovid: The Poet & The Emperor, BBC 2019
Ovid is one of the world’s greatest poets, one of the immortals … The most influential works in European literature. ibid.
He writes a book of imaginary letters from literary heroines. ibid.
The Art of Love is published here in Rome in the immediate aftermath of a sensational sex scandal which embarrassingly involved the emperor himself … The timing couldn’t have been worse. ibid.
The Book of Changes: it was six years in the writing and it’s one of the world’s great poems. ibid.
The Metamorphosis fascinated Shakespeare and his contemporaries. ibid.
He is also being subversive. ibid.
A poet who lived 2,000 years ago but whose words still have the power to move us over that great gap of time. ibid.
In 1811 while he was a student at Oxford, Shelley wrote and published a series of anonymous texts in defence of atheism and the freedom of the press. The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama, BBC 2020
He gets thrown out of Oxford and elopes with a 16 year old. ibid.
Shelley: The Masque of Anarchy (1819): ‘As I lay asleep in Italy, There came a voice from over the Sea, And with great power it forth led me, To walk in the visions of Poesy.’ ibid.
Romanticism was born looking for trouble. Some airy change in taste: what many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world by revolution if it came to it. But what happened … when the romance of revolution ended in political failure and bloody disenchantment? The Romantics & Us With Simon Schama II: The Chambers of the Mind
Long before the invention of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers of the darker deeper regions of the human mind. ibid.
We go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world of the creative mind … Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams assisted by opium that our true self was revealed to us. ibid.
It gets you every time doesn’t it … It was the Romantics who gave us this intense passion for the nation. Who in their poetry, music and art transformed the sentimental fondness we all feel for our place of birth into something bigger and deeper – the secular devotion of national belonging. Simon Schama, The Romantics & Us III: Tribes
Nationalism is above all the emotion of longing to go back or stay where you came from. ibid.
Phillis Wheatley: poems on various subjects were published in London in 1773 when she was 19. She was born in Gambia, and like Sancho, was separated from her family for ever when she was snatched … 400 Years of Taking the Knee I, Dotun Adebayo narrator, History 2020
Robert Burns achieved more with his poetry that any writer since Shakespeare. With poems about the ordinary world he inspired everyone from Byron to Beethoven. To this day his birthday is celebrated all over the world. In his own lifetime he was famous beyond belief, rock-star famous, and acclaimed as a genius. Robert Burns: The People’s Poet, BBC 2020
He would die a beggar … He was a man desperate to the end, fulfilling his father’s grave warning that he would fail in life. ibid.
Burns showed his true colours in these uncompromising lines. He didn’t hide the fact that he was a radical and a freedom lover. ibid.
After a day labouring out in the fields, Burns would come back to this farmhouse to write. It continues as a working farm to this date. ibid.
He accidentally turned up a mouse’s nest, and that gave rise to one of the most beautiful, most empathetic poems in any language: a political poem to a mouse. ibid.
The book Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was a runaway success. ibid.
The literati, the aristocracy, the Masons, Edinburgh had taken up Robert Burns in a way he could not have expected. ibid.
Every good poet includes a critic; the reverse will not hold. William Shenstone
It is the business of the comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind. William Congreve 1670-1729, The Double Dealer