Poetry


Articles in this section

  • "Tobacco Shop (Tabacaria)" by Fernando Pessoa (1928)

    by Fernando Pessoa

    Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was one of the most outstanding Portuguese poets of his time and of all time, and this celebrated poem Tabacaria, a complex, melancholic and inspired meditation, is one of his most renowned works, without a doubt one of the most memorable poetic texts of the 20th (...)

  • "Waiting for the Barbarians" (1904) by Constantin Cavafy

    by Constantin Cavafy

    Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) , who lived all his life in the ancient Greek community in Alexandria, Egypt, was one of the most important poets of modern times.
    His legacy has been celebrated by writers and poets around the world, notably by Laurence Durell in his monumental Alexandria Quartet (...)

  • "Twas the night before Christmas" (1823) by Clement Moore

    by Clement Moore

    This charming poem, generally attributed to the New York theologian Clement Moore (1779-1863), was first published (anonymously) in an upstate New York newspaper, the Troy Sentinel, on December 23, 1823, with the title "A Visit from St. Nicolas".
    It rapidly gained acclaim and widespread (...)

  • An anthology of famous French poems, with their English translations

    by Ray

    There is surely a consensus among cognoscenti that famous texts such as François Villon’s La ballade des pendus, (“Song of the Hanged Men”), Lamartine’s Le lac, (“The Lake”), Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre (‘The Drunken Boat”) and Apollinaire’s Le pont Mirabeau (“The Mirabeau Bridge") are all among the (...)

  • A selection of Tang Dynasty poems

    by Ray

    The Tang dynasty (618-907 AD) was a period of extraordinary flourishing of the Chinese civilisation in all domains, notably art and literature.
    No other civilisation has ever placed poetry on such an elevated pedestal in its scale of values: everyone with an education wrote poetry from the (...)