“Reduced to its simplest and most essential form, the poem is a song. Song is neither discourse nor explanation.”~Octavio Paz

The story is that Leigh Hunt had been ill. Upon his recovery, he made a visit to his friend, Thomas Carlyle, and Carlyle’s wife, Jenny, greeted Hunt with a kiss. Hunt was friends with almost all the great British literary figures of the nineteenth century. He introduced Keats and Shelley to one another. In 1828 he published a book called Lord Byron and some of his Contemporaries, a sort of expose of the “real Byron.” His friendship with Carlyle came a little later, in the 1830’s, after Keats and Shelley had died, and Byron and his friends scorned the poverty-stricken Hunt.

Kelly Fineman on Rondeau by James Henry Leigh Hunt.

” I know ever so many pieces of poetry off by heart—’The Battle of Hohenlinden’ and ‘dinburgh after Flodden,’ and ‘Bingen of the Rhine,’ and most of the ‘Lady of the Lake’ and most of ‘The Seasons’ by James Thompson. Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?”~Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Cindy at Ordo Amoris recommends The Art of Poetry by Christine Perrin and John Ciardi’s How Does a Poem Mean?, and I have yet to read either book in its entirety.

I did read enough of the Ciardi book to see that it would be a great text for a poetry class. If I ever manage to snag a job teaching such a class at our homeschool co-op, I will be sure to use one or both of these as a guide.

Here’s a sample poem by John Ciardi:

Before the children say goodnight,
Mother, Father, stop and think:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?
Have you washed their ears with ink?

Have you said and done and thought
All the earnest parents should?
Have you beaten them as you ought:
Have you begged them to be good?

And above all – when you start
Out the door and douse the light –
Think, be certain, search your heart:
Have you screwed their heads on tight?

If they sneeze when they’re asleep,
Will their little heads come off?
If they just breathe very deep?
If – especially – they cough?

Should – alas! – the little dears
Lose a little head or two,
Have you inked their little ears:
Girls’ ears pink and boys’ ears blue?

Children’s heads are very loose.
Mother, Father, screw them tight.
If you feel uncertain use
A monkey wrench, but do it right.

If a head should come unscrewed
You will know that you have failed.
Doubtful cases should be glued.
Stubborn cases should be nailed.

Then when all your darlings go
Sweetly screaming off to bed,
Mother, Father, you may know
Angels guard each little head.

Come the morning you will find
One by one each little head
Full of gentle thoughts and kind,
Sweetly screaming to be fed.

We use hands to tighten the head screws and no ink markings, and we haven’t lost a head yet.

“An essay is a glass of water. But if a few drops of that water fall on a hot frying pan and sizzle? Then you have a poem.”~The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

I could write an essay on the eagle, a textbook on the care and feeding of eagles, take a photograph of an eagle, write a novel about eagles and eagle-lovers, but would I really have said anything more worthy about The Eagle than this poem says? Tennyson called it a “a fragment” since he was used to writing much longer poems. It’s certainly a memorable fragment.

“I have lived all my chief joys, and indeed nearly all emotions that go warmly by that name and relate to myself personally, in poetry, and in poetry alone.”~Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How’s this for a “homeschooled prodigy”?(from Victorian Web)

“Elizabeth, an accomplished child, had read a number of Shakespearian plays, parts of Pope’s Homeric translations, passages from Paradise Lost, and the histories of England, Greece, and Rome before the age of ten. She was self-taught in almost every respect. During her teen years she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante’s Inferno–all texts in the original languages. Her voracious appetite for knowledge compelled her to learn enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. Her enjoyment of the works and subject matter of Paine, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft was later expressed by her concern for human rights in her own letters and poems. By the age of twelve she had written an “epic” poem about the Battle of Marathon, consisting of four books of rhyming couplets. Barrett later referred to her first literary attempt as, “Pope’s Homer done over again, or rather undone.”

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints!—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

More EBB trivia:
The Barretts had 12 children, and Mr. Barrett forbade all those who grew to adulthood to marry. Elizabeth had to elope to marry Robert Browning.
Elizabeth began taking opium for pain relief at age 15, and she remained addicted to it for the rest of her life.
Robert and Elizabeth Browning lived in Italy for most of their marriage–which was apparently very happy and mutually beneficial. They had one child, a son.
Romantically, Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Italy “in her husband’s arms.”