Not for the Faint of Heart

This month for our book list, I want to go in a slightly different direction. I want to talk about poetry. I know that for some, poetry is boring and hard to read and unnecessary for a happy and fulfilled life, but there are some people out there who really enjoy a good poem and this is for you. I want to focus on English writers because in college I studied mostly English writers and it makes writing this post easier if I write about what I know. I’ve chosen three poets and will list some of their best works (or at least some of my favorites). The three poets I’ve chosen are John Donne, William Blake and Percy Shelly.
Sir John Donne lived from 1572 to 1631. During his early life he was a bit of a wild child, and during his later life he became a priest, and both of these periods of his life are reflected in his poetry. Early in his life, he wrote poems like “The Flea”, which is a very funny poem in which a flee biting both Donne and his love is equated to marriage. Later in his life, his poetry took a distinctively religious turn as he wrote many sermons and holy sonnets. One reason that I enjoy Donne so much is because of the great love he had for his wife and the many poems that reflect that love. “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” is a beautiful poem about how he and his wife are so connected in love that there’s no need to be sad, or to make a fuss when they must be separated for a little while because their souls are connected still. Even in his later religious poetry, he writes about his love for his wife. He wrote “Holy Sonnet 17” after his wife passed away and the poem is a beautiful piece of writing about how God is the only thing that can fill the void left by his wife. The romantic in me loves this kind of poetry and John Donne is one of my favorite poets.
William Blake lived from 1757 to 1827. His most well known work is the collection of poems titled Songs of Innocence and Experience. Just as it sounds, the poems in the Innocence section are poems about innocence (shocking, right?), joy, religion, and the natural world. They’re generally upbeat and light. The poems from Experience are darker, usually concentrating on more serious subjects. Many of the poems from one section are shown from an opposite perspective in the other, such as “The Lamb” from the poems in Innocence and “The Tyger” from Experience. I enjoyed all the poems from this small collection. As a side note, Blake did all the illustrations for his poems himself. Some of them are quite intricate, with a lot of detail and I won’t go too far into an explanation, but Blake etched them out onto metal plates and filled with ink sort of like a stamp himself. He was an excellent artist.
Percy Shelly lived from 1792 to 1822. He wrote during the time of the Romantics (a period of English poetry, not romantic as in love). He was very dedicated to the idea of Romanticism, he even wrote a poem about a fellow writer, William Wordsworth, who he thought had betrayed the Romantic style of writing; was a sell out so to speak. The poem is called “To Wordsworth”, and is actually a poignant criticism of Wordsworth because he echoes a poem that Wordsworth once wrote (if anyone is interested in looking at this poem, it’s called “London 1802” and was written about John Milton, another poet). Most of Shelley’s poetry is quite lyrical and a few a quite political. Some other poems of Shelley’s that I enjoy are “Ozymandias”, “Ode to the West Wind” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”.