Participants: Past Poets
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born in Florence and, like most of his compatriots, became involved in the long-running conflict between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines: he fought in Battle of Campaldino in 1289, and was later called to Rome as a representative of the ‘White Guelph’ faction. His most famous work, The Divine Comedy (La Divina Commedia), an allegorical and religious epic of 14,233 lines, which consists of 100 cantos in three canticas (Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso), was written between 1308 and 1321, and is widely considered to be one of the great works of European Literature.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87) was perhaps the most influential Brazilian poet of the twentieth century. Born in a mining village in southeastern Brazil, he trained (although never practised) as a pharmacist, and later worked in government service for most of his life, eventually becoming director of history for the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Service of Brazil. A key figure in Brazilian modernist poetry, he published over fifty books of poetry and prose, and his work has been translated by a number of American poets, including Mark Strand.
Gavin Douglas (c. 1474–1522), one of the original Scots Makars, was a student at St Andrews (1489–94) and later Bishop of Dunkeld (1515–22). His early poems included The Palice of Honour (1501), a dream-allegory of over 2,000 lines, but it is for the Eneados, his Scots translation of Virgil's Aeneid (completed 1513), the first full translation of a major work of classical antiquity in any dialect of English/Scots, for which he is famous. As well as providing a faithful translation of Virgil, Douglas also wrote a verse prologue for each book – a quotation from one of these was used as the epigraph for Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’.
Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco, and moved to New England at the age of ten. Throughout his life he owned a succession of farms in Hew Hampshire, and taught at various colleges, including Amherst in Massachusetts and Middlebury in Vermont. A poet of rural life and experience, attuned to nature and the spiritual side of life, and widely recognised as American’s unofficial poet laureate, Frost was great exponent of traditional verse forms: he once famously denounced free verse as like trying “to play tennis with the net down”. Frost came to live in England in 1912, where he met and befriended Edward Thomas; he returned to the US in February 1915.
Anthony McNeill (1941–96) was born and spent his childhood in Kingston, Jamaica. He left there to study at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Massachusetts, and published his poetry collection, Reel from ‘The Life Movie’, in the US in 1972. He returned to Jamaica in 1975, and published two more collections: Credences at the Altar of Cloud (1979), and Chinese Lanterns from the Blue Child, which was appeared posthumously in 1998. McNeill was known for his experimental style, influenced by contemporary jazz, as well as American poets such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and E. E. Cummings.
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was born in Pittsburgh, PA, but is now almost always associated with the coastal town of Carmel, CA, where he spent the last forty-eight years of his life. He rose to prominence in 1924 with the Whitmanesque poetry in his third collection Tamar and Other Poems. Another dozen or so books followed, but Jeffers’s uncompromising political views, expressed in collections such as The Double Axe (1948), made his later work unpopular in his own lifetime. His reputation has since been restored as one of the most significant and outspoken environmental poets of the last century – a key influence on Gary Snyder, Robert Hass, and others.
Edward Thomas (1878–1917) was born in London into a family of mainly Welsh descent. After studying at Oxford he went on to be a prolific journalist and writer – producing numerous reviews, several biographies, and a series of books about the countryside, including The South Country (1906). He met the American poet Robert Frost in October 1913, and it was with Frost’s encouragement that he turned his hand to poetry, writing 140 poems between October 1914 and January 1917. Thomas joined the Artists’ Rifles in July 1915, and in December 1916 volunteered for a frontline posting. He was killed at the Battle of Arras in April 1917. Poems (1917) was published posthumously.
R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) was born in Cardiff, grew up in Holyhead, and after studying at colleges in Bangor and Llandaff, was ordained as a priest in the Church in Wales in 1936 – he retired from the church in 1978. An advocate of simple living and of Welsh nationalism, his poetry was primarily concerned with the Welsh landscape and the Welsh people, and has both political and spiritual subtexts. He won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1964, and in 1996 was suggested as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize (the winner that year was Seamus Heaney).
Gael Turnbull was born in Edinburgh in 1928, grew up in England and Canada and for a time practised as a doctor of medicine in America before finally returning to Edinburgh where he lived until his death in 2004. In 1957, Turnbull started the influential Migrant Press, one of the first British-run presses to focus on poets in the modernist tradition. He produced innovative kinetic poems, texts for installation in which the reader became part of the reading experience. His own books include A Gathering of Poems 1950-1980 (1983) and Rattle of Scree: Poems (1997) and his collected poems, There are Words, published posthumously in 2006.
Ramón López Velarde (1888–1921) is one of the outstanding figures of early twentieth-century literature in Latin America. His short life had a fin de siècle poignancy. Born into a family of lawyers and landowners, Velarde was schooled in seminaries and then trained in law, moving to the capital to find work, while starting to publish poems and essays. His themes are the longed-for tranquillity of provincial life, the tumult of revolution, and love experienced as unrequited passion for unattainable women. He died aged just thirty-three, of pneumonia and pleurisy, in a lodging house in Mexico City.
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, in Cumbria. After studying at Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and St John's College, Cambridge, he spent 1791–3 in Revolutionary France. Two years after his return to England, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset: they went on to collaborate on the first volume of the groundbreaking Lyrical Ballads (1798). In 1799 Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Dove Cottage in Grassmere, Cumbria (Coleridge also came north). In addition to a prolific output of published poetry, from 1798 till his death he worked on The Prelude (1850), an epic autobiographical poem about ‘the growth of a poet’s mind’. He was made Poet Laureate in 1843.
Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503–42) was born in Kent and (like William Wordsworth) studied at St John’s College, Cambridge. As ambassador to France and Italy for Henry VIII, he was exposed to a variety of European poets and poetic forms, and Wyatt is widely credited with having introduced the sonnet into English, both through his translations of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74) and his own original compositions. His literary reputation was almost entirely posthumous: although his poems were privately circulated in his lifetime, his work did not appear in print until 1557, fifteen years after his death.
StAnza 2012 Events:
Thu 15 March | Past & Present
Jonathan Falla on Ramón López Velarde, Judith Taylor & A.C. Clarke on Gavin Douglas
The Town Hall, Queens Gardens – Council Chamber
Fri 16 March | Past & Present
Kwame Dawes on Anthony McNeill, Lavinia Greenlaw on Sir Thomas Wyatt
The Town Hall, Queens Gardens – Council Chamber
Fri 16 March | My Dante
Enthusiasts introduce their favourite passages from the great mediaeval poet
Parliament Hall, South Street
Sat 17 March | Past & Present
Chase Twichell on Robinson Jeffers, Keston Sutherland on William Wordsworth
The Town Hall, Queens Gardens – Council Chamber
Sat 17 March | Past & Present
Christopher Reid on Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Anna Crowe on R.S. Thomas
The Town Hall, Queens Gardens – Council Chamber
Sat 17 March | In Conversation
Matthew Hollis talks to Joyce McMillan about Edward Thomas and Robert Frost
The Byre Theatre, Abbey Street – Auditorium
Exhibitions, Films and Installations:
Sat 17 March | The Edinburgh Poem
Gael Turnbull’s famed kinetic poetry machine
The Town Hall, Queens Gardens – Supper Room