POETRY

Articles in this section

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

  1 June 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

  25 May 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 (...)

• The original Lyrical Ballads (1798) version of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

  19 February by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “Lyrical Ballads”, perhaps the most famous book of poetry in the English language, was jointly published in 1798 by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).
  This book, generally considered to have ushered in the age of romanticism in English literature, contained (...)

• "Sonnets From the Prison of Moabit" (1944-45) by Albrecht Haushofer - a modern triumph of the human spirit

  13 April 2019 by Albrecht Haushofer

  Albrecht Haushofer, a Professor of Political Geography specialising in oriental culture at the University of Berlin, was arrested for complicity in the failed coup of July 20, 1944 and interned in the central Berlin prison of Moabit that had been taken over by the Gestapo for the internment, (...)

• "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" (1859), translated by Edward Fitzgerald

  7 March 2018 by Omar Khayyam and Edward Fitzgerald

  In early 1859 the English erudite Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), a retired Cambridge graduate with independent means, published anonymously his translation of selected stanzas of the 12-Century Persian poem “The Rubaiyat” by Omar Khayyam, who ”was born at Naishapur in Khorassan in the latter half (...)