
Anthology: Is Poetry Important?, & Poems by Emily Dickinson, Shakespeare, Virgil, R. S. Thomas – Human Voices Wake Us
An episode from 1/1/22: The first eleven minutes of this episode are probably the best job I’ve done yet, talking about poetry’s lagging popularity these days. For those would like to reverse this trend, I suggest that we ought to study the kinds of poetry that did have an immediate, popular, and lasting influence. Taking a look at why certain forms of folklore and myth last is also a good idea.
In part, I’m responding to a remark from a poet whose tweet seems to have garnered more attention than she ever wished for. For this reason, I don’t name the poet who wrote the tweet, or link to it, because I don’t think it was meant to mistaken as a “public pronouncement.”
As with other “Anthology” episodes, I then move on to read a handful of poems, each succeeding poem being older than the one before it:
- “Affinity,” by R. S. Thomas (1913-2000)
- #1142, by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
- Sonnet #27, by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
- from The Aeneid, Book 6, by Virgil (70 BC – 19 BC) (translated by Allen Mandelbaum)
You can join Human Voices Wake Us on Patreon, or sign up for our newsletter, by clicking here.
These are so fantastic!
Welcoming and informative.
Related, there’s this post you might find intereseting, on why the “long poem” matters: https://psyche.co/ideas/the-long-poem-is-just-right-for-our-confounding-fractured-age
On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 12:04 AM Human Voices Wake Us: A Podcast of