Calm Your Beans

On the face of things, the career of John Donne had two distinct faces: the sensual, celebratory, downright odd poems of his youth, and the pensive, angry and eloquent missives of his old age.

Okay, so poetry has been happening for quite some time, you guys. Like longer than the internet. Gaius Valerius Catullus lived from around 84-54 BC, growing up in Cisalpine Gaul, and spending most of his adult life in Rome. Let’s take a look at his work.

On the 4th of November 1918, Wilfred Owen was killed by a shot to the head near the village of Joncourt in Picardy, northern France. Today we remember him with his poem Strange Meeting.

The life of Baudelaire is a pretty decent playing-out of the fantasy life many folks imagine poets enjoy. His work inspired many of the great poets at the turn of the 20th century.

Percy Bysshe Shelley is a man whose personal life is probably better known than his work as an writer and political agitator. But we have a poem so you should totally read it.

Walt Whitman is often cited as one of the parents of American poetry, and the original edition of Leaves of Grass sounds as fresh today as it ever has.

WB Yeats is the most important poet of the twentieth century. Today, on National Poetry Day we share some of his finest words.

William Wordsworth has had a pretty rocky time of it in the past century or so. He’s become synonymous with the Nice Poems About Flowers school of poetry that fills the Classic FM yearly anthologies, and not entirely without due cause.

This week poem of the we look at John Keats “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Keats wrote it during the summer/autumn of 1819, a period of furious activity during which he wrote several of the poems for which he is most commonly remembered.