Poetry

Articles in this section

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

  4 August 2021 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

  24 June 2021 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 (...)

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

  1 June 2020 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 2020 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 Lyrical Ballads (1798) version of Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" – the original and arguably most authentic text

  19 February 2020 by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  “Lyrical Ballads”, no doubt 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 (...)