Booklog

Poems of the Week: Edmund Blunden

Among the least remembered poets of World War I was Edmund Blunden, who lived to a miraculously ripe old age, spending some of it in Japan teaching English literature.  His verse is quiet, patient, descriptive, often taking a side look at what might have been the cause of terror and grief.  Here’s a poem I don’t recall having read before, though I have leafed through a good deal of his work.

Poems of the Week–A.E. Housman

A.E. Housman was one of the finest Latin scholars of the 20th century and one of the most distinguished classicists of the Anglo-American world.  He is better known, however, as a poet.  He had suffered disappointments in life, and his response was the melancholy stoicism that permeates so much of his work.  His poems are superficially simple but elegantly wrought.  In honor of a later Queen’s Jubilee, let us begin with Housman’s tribute–rather uncharacteristically patriotic–to Victoria.

Poems of the Week–More Marvell

An Epitaph

Enough: and leave the rest to Fame.
‘Tis to commend her but to name. . . .