Why You Should Read Poetry… Even If You Don’t Like To

There’s something about the power of poetry… what it can do that other forms of literature cannot. If you don’t know what I mean, read Robert Lowell’s collection Near the Ocean.

Harriet Zinnes, a poet, introduced me to Robert Lowell when I was in my junior year at Queens College, CUNY, in 1969. I bought a copy of Near the Ocean, a small volume then in its 4thedition.

I remember liking his poetry very much. Particularly this collection. But I hadn’t seen it in years. It had mysteriously disappeared. Then – just as mysteriously – it reappeared in my library at our home in Nicaragua. And so, when the family was at the tennis courts and Helen, my mother-in-law, was napping, I sat under the palapas-topped pavilion by the pool and read it.

Among its many virtues, is this example of concentration – loosely translating the Cleopatra story (from Book 1 of Horace’s Odes) to something modern and powerful and deep:

 

Cleopatra

Now’s the time to drink,

to beat the earth in rhythm,

toss the flowers on the couches of the gods,

Friends!

Before this, it was infamous

to taste the fruit of the vine,

while Cleopatra with her depraved gangs,

germs of the Empire, plotted

to enthrone her ruin in the Capitol,

and put an end to Rome…

Impotent,

yet drunk on fortune’s favors…

but Caesar tamed your soul

you saw with a now sober eye

the scowling truth of his terror,

Of Cleopatra, scarcely escaping,

and with a single ship, and scarcely

escaping from your limping feet, on fire,

Cleopatra, with Caesar running on the wind,

three rising stands of oars, with Caesar

falling on you like a sparrow hawk

fallen on some soft dove or sprinting rabbit

in the winter field. And yet you sought

a more magnanimous way to die.

Not womanish, you scorned our swords,

you did not search for secret harbors.

Regal, resigned and anguished,

Queen, you even saw your house in ruin.

Poisonous snakes give up their secrets,

you held them with practiced hands,

you showed your breasts. Then bolder, more ferocious,

death slipping through your fingers,

how could you go aboard Octavian’s galleys,

how could you march on foot, unhumbled,

to crown triumphant Caesar’s triumph –

no queen now, but a private woman?

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Great Poets

If you read poetry, there are many great American poets to choose from.

I recently read a list that recommended the following: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Henry David Thoreau.

Among modern and contemporary poets, the list included Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Louise Bogan, Robert Bly, E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Jane Hirshfield, Langston Hughes, W. S. Merwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

I don’t think Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jane Hirshfield, or Louise Bogan belong on this list. They are successful writers among academics and, in Angelou’s case, among the popular crowd but they are not great writers.

Missing from the list are Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, John Ashbery, Robert Lowell, and Charles Simic.

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Emily Dickinson

With her lifetime production of 1,700 poems, Emily Dickinson was one of the most prolific poets of all time.

You could replicate her feat by writing a poem a day (five a week) for less than eight years.

I did it for one year — and during the process my skills definitely improved. I don’t know if any of my poems will ever match her best stuff… but I know now that my good poems are better than her weak ones.

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