Anna Akhmatova’s poems combine classical elegance and amazing passion associated with the drama of her own destiny. The poet began to create at a time when the very idea that a woman could be a poet was rather unusual.
All significant events of the 20th century became landmarks in the fate of Anna Akhmatova. She survived two world wars, the Russian Revolution and the Siege of Leningrad. What courage she needed when she was forbidden to publish, or when her son and third husband were in the forced labor camps! Certainly, Akhmatova became the voice of the people.
Anna Akhmatova’s genius did not fit into any framework. Her mysterious nature attracted many genius artists she met during her life. But Anna was very attentive to every image of her. She preferred to pose in profile both to artists and photographers. Let us show you the most famous examples of Akhmatova’s portraits!
Are you the first man to be born, created before the mountains? Have you listened in at God’s keyhole and crept away with his plans? What do you know that we don’t? What have you seen that we haven’t? We are old; our beards are white; we speak with the wisdom of age. Will you scorn religion’s comforts and reject our indulgent advice? What has taken hold of you? What has made you so wild that you spew your anger at God and spit out such insolent words? What is man – is he pure? Can a son of woman be sinless? If God mistrusts his angels and heaven stinks in his nose what of that vermin, man, who laps up filth like water?
Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1653. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, purchase, special contributions and funds given or bequeathed by friends of the Museum, 1961.
The earliest known image of Homer comes to us in the form of a Roman imperial copy of a head, now in Munich, that once belonged to a standing life-size statue dedicated at the Temple of Zeus Olympia in 460 bc. Later examples of original portraiture, each engendering families of sibling copies, run from the High Classical period (430 bc) to the Hellenistic and Roman periods and then on into later antiquity. As we know from ancient travelers and other writers, considerably more visual representations of Homer once existed in sundry media, sizes, and poses, but these were lost over time.
In most of the surviving images, Homer is shown as old and blind, listening quietly within to whatever divine voice moves him. In some he is sighted and, not infrequently, shown silently reading. His hair can be either elegantly coiffed or disheveled, sometimes with a bald forehead, but not in every case. The disparity is considerable. At a minimum, the variances serve as a confession of ignorance, which in turn reminds us that the mystery of Homer was as great and as insoluble in antiquity as it is today.
A 1932 Time magazine cover, featuring poet Robinson Jeffers.
With contemporaries like T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, it is little wonder that the name of poet Robinson Jeffers rings far fewer bells, even in the ears of avid poetry fans. Jeffers, who was born at the twilight of the 19th century and wrote most prolifically throughout the first half of the 20th, joined an audaciously talented chorus of American poets who—then, as now—were regarded as literary celebrities and cultural icons.
But, on April 4th, 1932 the portrait of a reclusive California-based poet named Robinson Jeffers, photographed in contemplative profile, was emblazoned on the cover of Time magazine, nine years after Amy Lowell received a similar honor, and eighteen years before T.S. Eliot would adorn its pages. With the publication of Tamar and Other Poems in 1924, Jeffers’ fame sprung into being virtually overnight. One decade and multiple collections of poetry later, he had become arguably the most famous poet in the United States.
Despite his prominence and critical success—and the numerous literary honors he accrued notwithstanding—one poet and literary critic writing in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune asked, “Why does so much deep silence surround the name of Robinson Jeffers?”
The writer, Horace Gregory, posed this question in 1954, only twenty-odd years after Jeffers’ Time cover. The lack of critical engagement with Jeffers’ oeuvre bewildered Gregory—particularly as it was not for lack of new material. Jeffers had published just shy of a dozen new volumes of poetry since striking a pose for Time—the last of which (the last he would ever produce) debuted in 1954, the same year that Gregory’s article appeared.
The poet was also a conscientious objector, life model, sailor, journalist and intelligence officer, and his letters, to Ezra Pound especially, are both challenging and moving
The Letters of Basil Bunting Alex Niven OUP, pp. 496, £35
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it, ‘Basil’, in which he describes England’s most important modernist poet sitting stranded in the newspaper offices, surrounded by up-and-coming Bri-Nylon-clad jack-the-lads, wearing his ancient blue sweater, puffing on his untipped Players, clearly ‘too old for the job’ and ‘bored out of his mind’. ‘Bury all joy/ Put the poems in sacks/ And bury me here with the hacks.’
Good old/poor old Basil: the sweater-wearing, sharp-bearded Bunting is periodically disinterred by poets and scholars seeking out alternative histories of English verse in which the off-beat, the eccentric, the experimental and the downright odd are shown to truly express and characterise the national spirit rather than the usual bland mainstream pap.
The academic and poet Alex Niven – one of the UK’s rather more interesting younger cultural critics, the author of both New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England (2019) and a short book about Oasis’s Definitely Maybe – now adds to this history with a selected edition of Basil Bunting’s letters. In his introduction to the volume, Niven acknowledges that even during his lifetime, Bunting was a ‘relatively unknown figure’ and that there is a ‘gappiness’ to the correspondence. Gappiness is well put – and a bit of an understatement. In both Bunting’s letters and the poetry there are years of billowing nothing. But what is there is remarkable and certainly deserves to be added to the alt. Eng. Lit. canon.
On the trestle table beneath the balconies and chandeliers of the Winter Gardens in the old spa town there was a run of pocket-sized poetry journals. The coats that carried a copy when it had just come out would have also contained an identity card and a ration book, probably a crumpled packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, and perhaps a notebook made from rough ‘economy’ paper.
Illuminated by my interest as I riffled the pages, the woman on the stall named a price for the lot, a score or so issues, which I took. That will probably be the only sale I make all day, she said, lugubriousness being an art perfected by second-hand booksellers.
I like looking at old periodicals because they give you a sense of their time, the cross-section of a moment. You seem to catch the tone, the style of that day. These survivals offered that in particular because of the character of their editor. Charles Wrey Gardiner (1901-1981) was a key figure in the poetry world of wartime London, who ran the Grey Walls Press and edited the journal I had just bought in a six inch ziggurat, Poetry Quarterly. He was also a poet himself and the author of several volumes of frank autobiography.
His magazine favoured new young poets, typically in their early twenties, who often drank and smoked and talked together in informal circles around Soho and Bloomsbury. It was loosely aligned to the Apocalyptic and the New Romantic movements of the time, a reaction against the ‘pylon poets’ of the Thirties, but also a rediscovery of the power of symbol and myth.
Title page to a set of etchings for Paradise Lost published in 1896 by the Scottish printmaker and painter William Strang. Here Strang has depicted Milton — said to be a ”master of music” — playing the bass-viol, while his daughters sing from a song-sheet
John Milton’s Paradise Lost has been many things to many people — a Christian epic, a comment on the English Civil War, the epitome of poetic ambiguity — but it is first of all a pleasure to read. Drawing on sources as varied as Wordsworth, Hitchcock, and Conan Doyle, author Philip Pullman considers the sonic beauty and expert storytelling of Milton’s masterpiece and the influence it has had on his own work.
A correspondent once told me a story — which I’ve never been able to trace, and I don’t know whether it’s true — about a bibulous, semi-literate, ageing country squire two hundred years ago or more, sitting by his fireside listening to Paradise Lost being read aloud. He’s never read it himself; he doesn’t know the story at all; but as he sits there, perhaps with a pint of port at his side and with a gouty foot propped up on a stool, he finds himself transfixed.
Suddenly he bangs the arm of his chair, and exclaims “By God! I know not what the outcome may be, but this Lucifer is a damned fine fellow, and I hope he may win!”
Which are my sentiments exactly.
I’m conscious, as I write this essay, that I have hardly any more pretensions to scholarship than that old gentleman. Many of my comparisons will be drawn from popular literature and film rather than from anything more refined. Learned critics have analysed Paradise Lost and found in it things I could never see, and related it to other works I have never read, and demonstrated the truth of this or that assertion about Milton and his poem that it would never have occurred to me to make, or, having made, to think that I could prove it. But this is how I read this great work, and all I can do is describe that way of reading.
See, they return; ah, see the tentative Movements, and the slow feet, The trouble in the pace and the uncertain Wavering!
See, they return, one, and by one, With fear, as half-awakened; As if the snow should hesitate And murmur in the wind, and half turn back; These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,” inviolable.
Gods of the wingèd shoe! With them the silver hounds, sniffing the trace of air!
Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood.
Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men! ______________________________
In his book Stone Cottage, James Longenbach writes about Pound’s poem “The Return” as follows: “[W.B.] Yeats knew what he was doing when in “A Packet for Ezra Pound” he quoted “The Return” to illustrate his belief that “every two thousand and odd years something happens in the world to make one [side of the balance] sacred, the other secular, one wise, the other foolish, one fair, the other foul, one divine, the other devilish.”
T. S. Eliot also understood the coded message of “The Return” when he alluded to the poem in the final movement of “Little Gidding”:
We die with the dying: See, they depart, and we go with them We are born with the dead: See, they return, and bring us with them.
And even Pound himself provided a gloss on the poem in a passage in Canto 113 which makes the movement toward the boundless ether explicit:
The hells move in cycles, No man can see his own end. The Gods have not returned. “They have never left us.” They have not returned. Cloud’s processional and the air moves with their living.”
R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet and Anglican priest who died a little more than a decade ago, left a body of work that is slowly becoming recognized as among the best and most important religious poetry of the twentieth century.
Like the century itself, however, it is not easily orthodox or pretty. Its bleak moods and near despair reflect the pull of doubt that defined those decades for many, including believers. As such, it stands outside the mainstream of the dominant, God-affirming, sacramental poetry that looks back to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s affirmation that “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.”
Yet Hopkins was also the poet of the “terrible sonnets”—bitter spiritual laments that Thomas described as “but a human repetition of the cry from the cross”: My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me? Thomas’s own prolific poetic outpouring explored this very question, and his work continues to resonate with compelling freshness and urgency as a new century of uncertainty unfolds.
His is, in many ways, an appropriate poetry for Good Friday, exemplified by his emblematic but enigmatic phrase, “The cross is always avant garde.” The line is from The Echoes Return Slow, a long autobiographical piece written in alternating pages of prose and poetry, and it suggests that for Thomas the cross always goes before us, and it presents a radical challenge to any easy resolution of the tough questions of faith.
A cluster of recurring images, symbols, and metaphors mark Thomas’s religious poems: silence, prayer, kneeling, waiting, watching, empty churches, a wound, the pierced side of Jesus-God-the natural world, a bare tree—and the cross, repeatedly described by Thomas as empty or “untenanted.”
Thomas is mostly interested in God’s silence or absence, the deus absconditus or hidden God, and what that means for forging an identity in the modern world. What language might be used to address such a God in a meaningful way? As Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has written, R.S. Thomas was—like one of the poet’s spiritual mentors, Soren Kierkegaard—a “great articulator of uneasy faith.”
An early poem, “In a Country Church,” from the 1955 book Song at the Year’s Turning, announces some of the themes that would dominate Thomas’s later poetry:
To one kneeling down no word came, Only the wind’s song, saddening the lips Of the grave saints, rigid in glass; Or the dry whisper of unseen wings, Bats not angels, in the high roof.
Was he balked by silence? He kneeled long, And saw love in a dark crown Of thorns blazing, and a winter tree Golden with fruit of a man’s body.
The opening stanza is a powerful image of silence. The only sounds comes not from words but from the wind, not from the wings of angels but of bats. While there is no word from God, the poet gropes for a signal of grace and wrests from the silence a vision of a wintry image of love and crucifixion—perhaps a divine response.
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