WORK IN PROGRESS – as you can see…

From the University of Virginia Department of English, this is an online tutorial for exploring the use of meter in poetry. Be sure to read the instructions first!

The John Milton Reading Room Paradise Lost and other works by Milton can be quite daunting to tackle, but here footnotes are just a click away. The site is collaborative project between a Dartmouth professor and his students. In his words: “The site now contains all of Milton’s poetry in English, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and selections of his prose. Almost all of the works presented here have been fully annotated; most have solid introductions as well.”  

If you’re looking for highbrow discussion of subjects normally completely ignored by the media (history, philosophy, poetry, etc.), this is a great place to visit. Since the History Channel has been hijacked by ancient aliens, it’s refreshing to be immersed in an unabashedly intellectual atmosphere for a change, even if the mumbling, interruptive host is a bit wearisome.   Here are some of the poets / poetry topics they’ve covered: The Aeneid The Charge of the Light Brigade Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Dante’s Inferno Greek and Roman Love Poetry Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth and Coleridge) The Metaphysical Poets Milton The Odyssey Pastoral Literature The Prelude Pope The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Yeats and Irish Politics Yeats and Mysticism

“Tom O’Bedlam” does a fantastic job of selecting, reading, and adding text and images to all sorts of poems. His SpokenVerse channel is a gem in the YouTube landfill. My only quibble is that his delivery is confined to a sorrowful tone that can seem comically lugubrious after a while. But make no mistake — he’s great at what he does!

I scoured NPR looking for links to stories of interest regarding poets and poetry.  Of course, these selections reflect my bias and taste. I don’t care about the latest poet laureate, tweeted haikus, slam poetry, etc. — I also don’t have a fetishistic need to celebrate multicultural diversity the way NPR does. (They try way too hard.) Here are some selections. Biography Speculates Emily Dickinson had Epilepsy Promoting the Memorization of Poetry Campion’s “Bright”, Poetic Romance (A positive review of a movie about John Keats and his romance with Fanny Brawne)  The W.B. Yeats Poetry Hour