By Raegan Densmore
As you may know, April is poetry month. This month, we celebrate poetry, its history, and the wonderful poets who have existed throughout it. I wanted to take this time to write about a couple of my favourite poets. These include William Blake and Emily Dickinson.
Unrecognized throughout his life, William Blake later became a seminal figure in the Romantic Age. Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. I believe I was first introduced to William Blake from his paintings. Then, from a romantic poetry book I have yet to return to my former English teacher, I was introduced to his poetry. One of my favourite pieces by him is “The Human Abstract” from his collection Songs of Experience. The words are bold and intriguing. This poem criticizes certain morals, virtues, and human reason. It implies things such as pity could not exist without poverty, mercy could not exist if everyone was happy, and pain and fear comes before peace. These virtues come from sins and tragedy. Humanity is taught that suffering is normal and these false values grow and spread in the human brain like aspects of nature. Certain god’s tales are used to describe this; Mystery, as in the tree of Mystery the god Odin hung himself upon, and his emblem, the raven, is mentioned as well. Another example is, “The Gods of the earth and sea, Sought thro’ Nature to find this Tree”. Every line in this poem has its own story behind it and it's incredibly fascinating. William Blake has beautifully crafted poems and truly has made his mark in poetic history.
Another marker in poetic history is Emily Dickinson. A widely known American poet who was quite reclusive and considered strange by the community she lived in, Amherst, Massachusetts. She wrote about things that intrigued her such as feminism, society, death and immortality, art, nature and religion. The way she wrote is highly interesting, as she wrote in ballad stanza, used dashes to show breath pauses, and incomplete and inverted syntax. One poem of hers I enjoy is #478, “I Had No Time to Hate”. This poem talks about the brevity of life and how short it is to have such strong feelings. The mind of the speaker views both love and hatred at equal degrees, and avoids them. However, the speaker then mentions “the little toil of love” which is a shift in the poem. This speaker is curious, exploring the complexity of life and emotions, then comes to accept the significance of love and simplicity of affection. Emily Dickinson’s writings are powerful, unique, and memorable, making her one of the most well known American poets in history.
William Blake and Emily Dickinson are only two of the poets that I enjoy, there are many other poets that I love such as Christina Rossetti, Margaret Atwood, William Shakespeare, Michelangelo and more. I would love to keep rambling on about poetry, however, maybe this will happen some other time. This month, I will take the time to read many poems, and I hope you all do too!
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