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20th century poems, ee cummings, emily dickinson, famous poets, georgia johnson, love poems, love poetry, pablo neruda, poetry, robert bridges
During the years I have been part of this world, there is one thing that hasn’t changed in my life: sleeping with my teddy bears and a book of poetry in my hug. Poetry for me isn’t just a ritual, a habit or what I like to do in my free time. It’s a way of life, a life philosophy, the life itself, my oxygen, the blood that runs through my veins, what keeps me alive in this crude world. It’s a rainbow in the storm of life, like Lord Byron says.
What fires my imagination and interests me more is love poetry. I love reading love poems of authors who have written golden chapters in the history of literature. I love observing the use of verbs, nouns, adjectives, the creation of places, events, situations and characters and how the incorporation of nature are all embedded in poems. Sometimes I feel like I am becoming one with a poem like, while I’m reading my heart beats the same way the author’s heart was beating while he/she was writing this poem.
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) writing.
It’s so hard to discern favorite poems and poets, but I will share with you today just a few poems around the 20th century which make me feel this feeling of completion.
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)
An introvert like me, Emily defied the traditional poetry norms and experimented with new ways of expression. Although she was considered unconventional for her period, the poet spent her years in reclusion with few exceptions. She wrote nearly 1,800 poems, with my favorite ones being A Bird Came Down the Walk – it was in one poetry collection my mom gave me for my birthday in my teens and I instantly fell in love with it! (Mayakovsky was in there too!!) – How far is it to Heaven?, A Light Exists in Spring – it reminds me of the Prince of my heart, who I also call him❤Sweetest Spring❤!! And…
If You Were Coming in the Fall (1860), because she describes perfectly this yearning to see your loved one and I feel like that too sometimes, when I have to stay apart from my Sweetest Spring…
If you were coming in the fall,
I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.
Persuasion by Leonard Campbell (1914).
If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.
If only centuries delayed,
I’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.
If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.
But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.
Robert Bridges
(1844-1930)
Robert, who was not a very famous poet for his time, keeps the old English language in his poems, so it was hard for me to examine him further. I had a lot of hard time reading Shakespeare in his original form too, so I need to go back again and again and with the help of the internet to understand the meaning as well as the importance of these poems. His major work is considered The Testament of Beauty (1929) for which he rose to prominence after his death.
Nonetheless, My Delight And Thy Delight (1890) was relatively easier to understand and, although not par excellence a love poet in my opinion, this is my favorite Bridges love poem:
My delight and thy delight
Walking, like two angels white,
In the gardens of the night:
My desire and thy desire
Twinning to a tongue of fire,
Magic by Lajos Gulacsy (1907).
Leaping live, and laughing higher;
Thro’ the everlasting strife
In the mystery of life.
Love, from whom the world begun,
Hath the secret of the sun.
Love can tell and love alone,
Whence the million stars are strewn,
Why each atom knows its own,
How, in spite of woe and death,
Gay is life, and sweet is breath:
This he taught us, this we knew,
Happy in his science true,
Hand in hand as we stood
‘Neath the shadows of the wood,
Heart to heart as we lay
In the dawning of the day.
Georgia Douglas Johnson
(1880-1966)
Georgia was one of the best (and earliest) African-American woman poet of her time. I discovered her somewhere as a reference while I was reading an article about Maya Angelou, another great poet. I identified a big part of myself in The Heart of a Woman (1918) which Georgia dedicated to her husband who criticized her as a writer. Don’t you ladies feel like that sometimes??
I Want You to Die While You Love Me (1922), a short and powerful love poem everyone wishes to happen for their other half… (But sometimes life has other plans…)
I want to die while you love me,
While yet you hold me fair,
While laughter lies upon my lips
And lights are in my hair.
I want to die while you love me,
Embracing Couple, Emil Bisttram (1931).
And bear to that still bed,
Your kisses turbulent, unspent
To warm me when I’m dead.
I want to die while you love me
Oh, who would care to live
Till love has nothing more to ask
And nothing more to give!
I want to die while you love me
And never, never see
The glory of this perfect day
Grow dim or cease to be.
E.E. Cummings
(1894-1962)
One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, if I had to save one thing from a fire, that would be Cumming’s books (and the rest of my library of course!!). He translates love into poetry in a manner I cannot even explain with words. Like, love finds its ideal form in Cumming’s poems. Among notable modernists, like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Cummings writes about the miracle of being alive, love, springtime even contemplates topics of “low quality” like gangsters and prostitutes. Which love poem shall I choose? I Carry Your Heart With Me? Love Is More Thicket Than Forget? I Have Found What You Are Like? Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond? And the rest of his 2,900 poem titles I will break WordPress if I write them all?? 😀
Well, here is I Love You Much (Most Beautiful Darling), because I can’t really choose one, since I love ALL poems by Cummings and they all speak to my heart ❤
i love you much(most beautiful darling)
more than anyone on the earth and i
In The Zenith by Maximilian Pirner.
like you better than everything in the sky
-sunlight and singing welcome your coming
although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess
(except my life)the true time of year-
and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone’s heart at your each
nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love.
Pablo Neruda
(1904-1973)
Along with Federico García Lorca, he is my most beloved Latin American poet. He is very passionate when it comes reading his poems and even the act of making love is treated to its majesty; with respect, love making is an act of spiritual unity and not only physical, sensual pleasure. Ultimate love is sealed when doing this very act. I feel like in his poems, the woman is adored in all her beauty. Pablo’s collection Twenty Poems and a Song of Despair {Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada} (1924) demonstrates true love. Gabriel García Márquez said about Pablo in the book The Fragrance of Guava (1983) that “(Neruda) is the greatest poet of the 20th century in any language.”
The Infinite One (La Infinita) is more than glorious:
Do you see these hands? They have measured
Earth, they have separated mineral
from mineral, cereal from cereal,
They have made war and made peace,
They have conquered the distances
Of all seas and all rivers
And still,
When they roam
Over you, little one,
you grain of corn, lark,
In Bed: The Kiss by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec (1892).
They are incapable of containing you,
They embrace until exhaustion
The twin doves
That rest or fly upon your breast,
They travel the distance of your legs,
Curl up in the light of your waist.
To me you are a treasure, greater
And more costly than the sea and its clusters
And you are white and blue and vast
As Earth at Harvest Time.
In this area,
From your feet to your forehead,
I want to spend life,
Wandering, always wandering.
SIGH. If only I had this talent too, to turn into words such powerful emotions, which I often find impossible to describe and each word seems very little to the actual meaning I want to convey.
Any favorite poems of any period? Or love poems? Do you often feel this integration to a poem when you read it? Which poems make you feel completed? Leave me a comment 🙂
