This week I have read a lot of modernist poetry, notably the poems of HD (Hilda Doolittle), who seems less a modernist than a thorough-going classicist (Ancient Greek influence, mainly). She was called an "Imagist" and a "Vorticist", but I really don't get those labels. Her poems on Cassandra, Helen (of Troy), Calypso and the Sea GodsMare much more firmly classical. Her poetry really grabs you and its hard to see why she wasn't rated highly with her contemporaries: Pound, ee cummings, Millay, Yeats. Her poetry is pretty hard to find, but I did find her collected poems at the local library. She had a volume, Sea Garden, that is incredible, describing shore life, mainly in short lyrics. I give it an A+.
ee and Edna have also been on the list this week, reading more sonnets. They were both convincing, of course: ee cummings with experimental sonnets, Edna with the traditional lyrical love sonnets.
Bobby Burns is so rhapsodic and vigorous and his dialect poems evoke late 18th Century beauty. Actually, there's nobody like Burns. Maybe Sir Walter Scott, a little bit. I shouldn't say that until I blaze through a Scottish anthology or two, but he seems pretty primal. When he goes on about the bonnie Doon and Wallace, you really are plugged into the deep Scottish State, as it were, but musically and emotionally so. I can't read him aloud, I always get choked up. Beautiful, beautiful stuff and a direct connection to my late father-in-law. I read Burns to him the night before he passed away. That's a really indelible memory and feeling.
I'm thinking I need to communicate more than by email with my adviser, so will request that once my latest work packet is returned.
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