Episode 218: Best of Series Our Favorite Poems, Ep. 54
This week on The Literary Life, our hosts talk about their favorite poems and poets. Cindy starts off by sharing the early influences on her developing a love of poetry. Thomas also shares about his mother reading poetry to him as a child and the poetry that made an impression on him as a child. Angelina talks about coming to poetry later in life and how she finally came to love it through learning about the metaphysical poets.
Cindy and Thomas talk about the powerful effect of reading and reciting poetry in meter. Thomas also brings up the potential of hymn texts as beautiful, high-ranking poetry. From classic to modern, they share many poems and passages from their most beloved poetry, making this a soothing, lyrical episode. If you want to learn more, check out Thomas\u2019 webinar How to Love Poetry.
We hope you will join us for the sixth annual Literary Life Online Conference, \u201cDispelling the Myth of Modernity: A Recovery of the Medieval Imagination.\u201d You can visit the HHL\xa0Facebook\xa0page or\xa0Instagram to find the post to share and enter our giveaway for a $20 discount code! During the live or later series of webinars, we will seek to dis-spell the Myth of Modernity and gain eyes to see and ears to hear Reality as it truly is. Speakers include Jason Baxter, Jenn Rogers, and Kelly Cumbee, in addition to Angelina and Thomas.
Commonplace Quotes:The knowledge-as-information vision is actually defective and damaging. It distorts reality and humanness, and it gets in the way of good knowing.
Esther Lightcap Meek
Perhaps it would be a good idea for public statues to be made with disposable heads that can be changed with popular fashion. But even better would surely be to make statues without any heads at all, representing simply the \u201cidea\u201d of a good politician.
Auberon Waugh
Reading in War TimeWhen you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock\u2013to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you use large and startling figures.
Flannery O\u2019Connor
by Edwin Muir
Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
And wives\u2019 and mothers\u2019 tears
Collected would be able
To water a little field
Untouched by anger and blood,
A penitential yield
Somewhere in the world;
Though in each latitude
Armies like forest fall,
The iniquitous and the good
Head over heels hurled,
And confusion over all:
Boswell\u2019s turbulent friend
And his deafening verbal strife,
Ivan Ilych\u2019s death
Tell me more about life,
The meaning and the end
Of our familiar breath,
Both being personal,
Than all the carnage can,
Retrieve the shape of man,
Lost and anonymous,
Tell me wherever I look
That not one soul can die
Of this or any clan
Who is not one of us
And has a personal tie
Perhaps to someone now
Searching an ancient book,
Folk-tale or country song
In many and many a tongue,
To find the original face,
The individual soul,
The eye, the lip, the brow
For ever gone from their place,
And gather an image whole.
A Little Manual for Knowing by Esther Lightcap Meek
The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
Songs of Innocence and of Experience by William Blake
The Book of Virtues by William Bennett
Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc
When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne
Now We are Six by A. A. Milne
Emma by Jane Austen
Oxford Book of English Verse ed. by Arthur Quiller-Couch
Immortal Poems of the English Language ed. by Oscar Williams
Motherland by Sally Thomas
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