I don't know if many of you know the recordings of Ezra Pound reading his own verse, in a very high-flown rhetorical manner (as different from Eliot's bank manager style as could be imagined)? One friend could do a hilarious impersonation of this - we had great fun when I got him to read some poems of Larkin in the voice of Pound.

 

Thanks,Ian and others re recordings  of poets.

I remember a 'Monitor' film where Pound was interviewed.He was a truly extraordinary man in so many ways. I wonder of a psychiatrist has ever attempted to work out how he came to be like that.


I have heard the Tennyson and Browning cylinders,and the odd thing is how Scottish they sound! I've even wondered if what we think of as a Scots accent(say educated Edimnburgh) is really the old 19th century educated English voice before we started  to 'tork lake thet'.

I listened to Eliot reading 'The Waste Land 'last might and I was interested to see that he doesn't try to sing his Wagner quotes to Wagner's tunes!

And the translation was completed in 1610 when that certain writer would have been aged........46

It wasn't considered kosher, Richard.

Thank you, Parsifal.  Dryden and Browning are two poets which are in all the text books as Important Poets (in the case of Dryden, the greatest of his age) but neither have much of popular reputation now.

I always think Browning is a bit too clever by half, and I have never bothered readings him since I took my degree.

Dryden's versification is so much like Pope, but without the malice and the sensuousness.  That is why I just prefer Pope, I'm afraid.  I haven't read Absalom for ages, but I remember the opening well:

In pious times, e'er priestcraft did begin,
Before polygamy was made sin...

Not a work I would expect a lover of Wagner to appreciate.  In one sense Dryden is a deeply unromantic poet: pretty well every work (apart from The Hind and the Panther) was for a specific occasion.

Marina Tsvetaeva 
Much like me, you make your way forward,         
     Walking with downturned eyes.
     Well, I too kept mine lowered.
     Passer-by, stop here, please.

     Read, when you've picked your nosegay
     Of henbane and poppy flowers,
     That I was once called Marina,
     And discover how old I was.

     Don't think that there's any grave here,
     Or that I'll come and throw you out ...
     I myself was too much given
     To laughing when one ought not.

     The blood hurtled to my complexion,
     My curls wound in flourishes ...
     I was, passer-by, I existed!
     Passer-by, stop here, please.

     And take, pluck a stem of wildness,
     The fruit that comes with its fall --
     It's true that graveyard strawberries
     Are the biggest and sweetest of all.

     All I care is that you don't stand there,
     Dolefully hanging your head.
     Easily about me remember,
     Easily about me forget.

     How rays of pure light suffuse you!
     A golden dust wraps you round ...
     And don't let it confuse you,
     My voice from under the ground.

      Koktebel, 3 May 1913
                Translated by David McDuff, 1987

Mr Grew selection of poems by Bourdillon is very beautiful and melodious. Russian poetry was influenced by English poets (Byron influenced Pushkin) and French poets. I don't know French poets much and I am a little better in my knowledge of English poets. I read Blake and Byron among others. I love this thread.

Tsvetaeva, Marina had a tragic life. She was born in 1892 in Moscow.

    What shall I do, singer and first-born, in a
    world where the deepest black is grey,
    and inspiration is kept in a thermos?
    with all this immensity
    in a measured world?
    (from 'The Poet', trans. by Elaine Feinstein)

 Her father, Ivan Tsvetayev, was a professor of art history and the founder of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her mother Mariya, née Meyn, was a talented concert pianist. The family travelled a great deal and Tsvetaeva attended schools in Switzerland, Germany, and at the Sorbonne, Paris.

After a good start in life she was caught up in upheaval of Revolution. Her husband was on the side of Whites (against Bolsheviks), he participated in fighting agains the revolution and left Russia. She had two daughters by this time. She lost one of them due to hunger in Moscow during and after Revolution. She joined her husband in the West. They lived in many countries and ended in France. Her husband decided to come back to Russia, was arrested right away and killed (nobody saw him again and they don't really know what happend to him). He daughter was also arrested, but survived her inprisonment. She had a young son by the time the family came back to Russia. They were evacuated from Moscow when the WWII started. She had no means of supporting herself and her son and she killed herself in 1941.
It was such a tragic life. But her talent was amazing. I love her much more than Achmatova (another great Russian woman-poet). Achmatova was married to Gumilev who was another poet symbolist. They had a son together, but they separated. Gumilev was arrested and killed.