William Wordsworth's 'The world is too much with us'. (Any requests?)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

‘Getting and spending we lay waste our powers’. Says it all really.

This reading was a request. Which reminds me to point out that if you have a poem you’d like to hear read on the Podcast you can send your request via the contact form on www.liamguilar.com or to my author page on facebook.

Some poems don’t work well read aloud, and some just don’t work when I read them. I can’t promise there will be no parrots, dogs or traffic in the background, but i’ll see what I can do.

On the website you’ll also find an index of all 159 poems that have been read so far.

John Keats' 'When I have fears that I may cease to be'.

John Keats (1795-1821)

Sometimes poetry is the memorable expression of a commonplace thought.

Keats, more than most, was haunted by the threat of an early death.  A dedicated poet, he wanted to be ‘amongst the English poets at my death’.

He died of Tuberculosis, in his mid twenties, a long way from home, coughing his lungs up in a rented room in Italy and he felt he’d failed. The epitaph he choose for himself, ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’, sums up his disappointment.

Amongst the unfinished epics and plays, he’d written a handful of poems that guaranteed his place in any anthology of English poetry. But he didn't know that when he died.

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John Keats' 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'

John Keats (1795-1821)

John Keats

In Tennyson’s Lady of Shalotte, the metaphor is buried by the story. In La Belle Dame sans Merci, the story is the metaphor. The narrative is as straightforward as a fairy tale, though it also reads like a nightmare.

 There are several suggestions as to what the story ‘means’: La Belle Dame is tuberculosis, Infatuation, Fanny Brawne, male fear of the feminine. You can take your pick.

What Keats thought it meant is a different matter.  The poem first appeared in a long letter he wrote to George and Georgina Keats.

At the end of the poem he wrote:

Why four kisses-you will say-why four because I wish to restrain the headlong impetuosity of my Muse-she would have fain said ‘score’ without hurting the rhyme-but we must temper the Imagination as the Critics say with Judgement. I was obliged to choose an even number that both eyes have fair play: and to speak truly I think two a piece quite sufficient-suppose I had said seven: there would have been three and a half a piece-a very awkward affair, and well got out of on my side- 

Which doesn’t sound like he was taking it or himself too seriously.

The poem is also a candidate for the prize for worst editing of a poem by the person who wrote it. When Keats published the poem in The Indicator, he changed the first line to: 

Ah what can ail thee wretched wight…

Which is awful.  His defenders claim that by this time his illness was so advanced his judgement was impaired.

The poem, even more than the Lady of Shalotte, appealed to painters in the 19th century.

John Clare's 'I Am'

John Clare (1793-1864)

Clare is one of the contested figures in the ‘Romantic Movement’. He has the credentials, a farm labourer, his nature poetry was based on detailed observation of the world around him, he was mostly self educated and he ended his life in what was then called a lunatic asylum.

But his poetry sits awkwardly against his more well known and better connected peers. His ‘nature poetry’ reads like the product of man who had lived and worked in the landscapes he described. Attempts to claim he is central to the period sound like special pleading.

His biography is worth reading for an insight into the reality of poetry in the Romantic period.

Percy Bysshe Shelley's 'Ozymandias'

Percy B. Shelley. (1792-1822) A close tie with Wordsworth for my least favorite Romantic Poet. But this is one of the classic poems in English, and since it was requested by a friend, here it is.

A few posts back in the notes to the Rime of the Ancient Mariner I mentioned Richard Holmes’ superb biography of Coleridge. He also wrote a superb biography of Shelley. Didn’t make P.B.S sound like someone I’d like to meet, but it is an excellent biography.

And yes, if you wish to hear a poem read, send suggestions via the website and I’ll see what I can do.

Byron's 'To Thomas Moore'

George Gordon, Lord Byron, mad bad and dangerous to know unless you were one of his small circle of friends, and Thomas Moore was one of them. Poems about friendships aren’t that common, and this is one of the better ones. It’s self-conscious, over-exaggerated, and humerous as though the genuine sentiment had to be protected by the bluster. That doesn’t make the sentiment any less genuine.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'

STC, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

Hundreds of thousands have written and published poetry over the centuries, and very, very few of them wrote poems that are still worth reading. An even smaller number might be justifiably called ‘original’. STC was one of these, and he produced a body of work that is unlike anyone else’s. Before he wrecked his talent on an excess of Drugs and Wordsworth which both had a disasterous effect on his lack of self-confidence, he produced some of the outstanding poems in English.

It’s hard to believe now that Wordsworth was embarassed by The Rime and even tried to drop it from later editions of ‘Lyrical ballads’, claiming it had been ‘an injury to the volume’. But this was the man who dumped the first part of Christobel.

It’s even harder to believe the reaction to the poem amongst some of the critics: ‘A poem of little merit’ said one, another, Charles Burney, in the Monthly Review, wrote ‘..the strangest story of a cock and a bull that we ever saw on paper; yet, though it seems a rhapsody of unintelligble wildness and incoherrence, (of which we do not perceive the drift, unless the joke lies in depriving the wedding guest of his share of the feast) there are in it poetical touches of an exquisite kind’.

This is taken from Coleridge, sellected poems, Edited by Richard Holmes.

Anyone interested in Coleridge should read Holmes’ 2 volume biography, which is one of the great literary biographies.