Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

My article on Dickens the Poet, in the March 2012 edition of The Cannon’s Mouth, brought two responses. One, I’m gratified to say, was a request for a copy for the archives of the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford. The other, from an esteemed Cannon Poet, was a little more disparaging: to the effect of ‘jumping on the bandwagon’ with a major prose writer who was clearly not a very good poet. So be it. However, I am pleased to record here that 1812 brought forth at least two poets, in an unlikely pairing, who made memorable but very different contributions to English poetry.

As it happens, I am writing this article on May 7, the very birth date, in 1812, of Robert Browning. If, for our editor’s sake, I have finished it by May 12, I shall be in time to honour the birth of Edward Lear – I did warn the reader they were an odd couple. Yet, not entirely: both were born in London and, for important parts of their lives, resided in and were influenced by the culture of Italy.

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell and largely educated in his father’s 6,000 volume library. His career began inauspiciously when he burned his first poems after rejection by several publishers. However, he was only 12. Later, he was to discover rejection for real when the hostile reception of Sordello (1840) led to an eclipse of his reputation that was to last over twenty years. In that time he married Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose poetic reputation once rivalled that of Wordsworth, and began the long sojourn in Italy that was to influence much of his later work. After Elizabeth’s death he returned to England and entered the most significant part of his life with major works such as Men and Women and The Ring and the Book, collections which established him as a master of the dramatic monologue. My Last Duchess and Fra Lippo Lippi are good examples.

Browning never attained the popular acclaim of his contemporary Tennyson but his reputation has grown with time and he is seen as significant in the evolution of poetry (Sordello was to find a late champion in Ezra Pound). Coincidence it may be, but Browning became the first known poet ever to make a recording: he may be heard reciting How They Brought the Good News (and touchingly apologising for forgetting the words) in the Poetry Archive: www.poetryarchive.org. He died in Venice in 1889 and is buried alongside Tennyson in Westminster Abbey.

Edward Lear spent even more time in Italy, his real home for most of his life. The 21st child of his family, he was later to become a lonely figure, subject to epilepsy and, frequently, to depression. As a young man he trained as a zoological draughtsman, a skill that took him as far afield as Albania, Egypt and India. In recent years, exhibitions of his drawings and watercolours have been widely acclaimed, including a fine collection at Sandringham.

It was while engaged by the Earl of Derby to illustrate his collection of rare birds that he found pleasure in entertaining the Earl’s grandchildren. Their particular favourites were his nonsense poems and the comic verses we know as Limericks (a term he never used) which have possibly made him the most copied poet ever – though their choices of subject are often far from those of a reclusive Victorian gentleman. His anonymous publication of these was well-received and led to further books which offered an antidote to his solitary existence. Ironically, some people thought ‘Edward Lear’ was a pseudonym for the real author, Edward, Earl of Derby (shades of Shakespeare and Southampton), ‘Lear’ being an anagram for ‘Earl’. He died in Sanremo in 1888.