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

Czeslaw Milosz confronted the horrors of war and genocide in Nazi occupied Warsaw where he wrote for underground publications. Significantly he translated The Waste Land, a haunted poem for a haunted world, which yet does not endorse alienation. The dehumanisation which Theodor Adorno also witnessed led him to say there could be no more lyric poetry after the holocaust. Poetry bears and reflects the scars of dark times but it has also continued to celebrate and to be amazed by life and renewal. Milosz never forgets suffering but is also alive to joy and shows "how things that seem feeble or useless can be transfigured into lifelines for the spirit".

Rainer Maria Rilke, is probably the best known German lyric poet in
the English speaking world. He died in 1926 having completed his major work, the Sonnets of Orpheus and the Duino Elegies which he had started in 1912 and which took ten years to write. Essentially Rilke wrote of the emptiness of peoples' inner lives and the despair and hunger for another reality which often seems to escape them. It is as if he saw the world in a disinterested but intense way. He came to believe that his task as a poet was to see and celebrate the world. The first six elegies begin with a cry of despair that he would not be heard and express intense grief and the loneliness of the creative artist unable to achieve his ambition. He argues that the shallow lives many people lead and their inner emptiness are not acceptable and he wants to find ways of transforming this emptiness into something constructive. In the seventh elegy he tries to resolve the sadness
and disharmony of the earlier elegies by transforming the earth and
nature into art which will endure:

Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within.
Life passes in transformation. And, ever diminishing,
outwardness dwindles. Where once was a permanent house,
up starts some invented structure across our vision, as fully
at home among concepts as though it still stood in a brain.

In the eighth elegy he despairs because the artist is mortal but in the
ninth he writes joyfully of happiness and the possibility of change:

Earth, is it not this that you want: to arise
invisibly in us? Is not your dream
to be one day invisible? Earth! invisible!
What is your urgent command, if not transformation?
Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need
no more of your spring-times to win me over:
         a single one,
ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure.
Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages.

He resolves the human conflict and sadness of the earlier elegies. The earth and human artefacts are transformed into invisible internal realities in life and in death. The tenth elegy is an allegorical poem about the journey into death through a mythical landscape. It concludes:

And yet, were they waking a symbol within us, the
         endlessly dead,
look, they'd be pointing, perhaps, to the catkins, hanging
from empty hazels, or else
to the rain downfalling on dark soil-bed in early Spring. -
And we, who think of ascending
happiness, then would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.

There are many magnificent metaphors and images and the verse is
consistently sublime. Rilke's personal belief in transformation (which he refers to as transfiguration or resurrection) enables him to write of the individual's striving against transcience.

In 1964 Theodore Roethke wrote In a Dark Time:

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood -
A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

In this poem Roethke contemplates the natural world in an intensely
negative, personal way. In the last stanza he emerges into an almost ecstatic mystical vision:

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

In his symbolism "wind" is synonymous with "spirit". His emphasis is
on the symbolic aspects of the natural world and he has been seen as a twentieth century transcendentalist who finds spiritual correspondences in physical things. His poetry is consistently romantic and contains many moments of heightened awareness. Denise Levertov's poetry uses symbols in a similar way.

          Her poem Living is about the mystery of the natural world:

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

The poem is about the mystery of life which ultimately resists attempts at explanation by human beings. The fire which is so green and the leaves shivering in the sun are elusive and not captured by time. Although she can catch the salamander she has to let him go. He is beyond her but she too is out of time. But at every moment something new is waiting to be born. Life is constantly surfacing from the unseen and unknown into the visible and conscious. She says that however much we try to come to terms with and understand life an impenetrable mystery remains. She has a sense of awe in facing the mystery of nature, at what is beyond and other than herself. In this and other poems she enables us to recognize the magnificence and beauty of the world; Levertov and others communicate a kind of amazement about how extraordinary it is and how we can feel wonder and find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Edwin Muir wrote:

That was the real world: I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always.

          In his poem Emerging, R.S.Thomas wrote:

We are beginning to see
now it is matter is the scaffolding
of spirit; that the poet emerges
from morphemes and phonemes: that
as form in sculpture is the prisoner
of the hard rock, so in everyday life
it is the plain facts and natural happenings
that conceal God and reveal him to us
little by little under the mind’s tooling.

Kathleen Raine , who died in 2003, is known as an interpreter of Blake and Yeats, and poets like Vernon Watkins and David Jones. In her own work expressed her insights through vivid natural images. For example in Vegetation she writes:

O never harm the dreaming world,
the world of green, the world of leaves,
but let its million palms unfold
the adoration of the trees.

The turning spindles of the cells
weave a slow forest over space,
the dance of love, creation,
out of time moves not a leaf,
and out of summer, not a shade.

Her poetry has a limpid, suggestive clarity but her writing is often shot through with emotional pain and reflects feelings of rejection experienced in her personal life and as a writer. She felt she should have been more prolific; her work received a more enthusiastic reception in the U.S.A., France and India earlier than in Britain. She found secular, materialistic ideas unacceptable and the cleverness, nihilism and atheism of her time as alien. She saw people as increasingly disconnected from their inner worlds, their imaginations starved and spirituality denied; in losing their true identity they are vulnerable in a soulless technocracy. She witnessed to spiritual values which were rejected by the majority but believed in her calling as a poet sharing Blake’s belief that “one power alone makes a poet — imagination, the divine vision”. She was influenced by Jungian psychology and symbols common to all people and times.

These poets believe that we are able to transcend ourselves (to rise
above or go outside ourselves) as we relate to others through our physical bodies but also because we have spiritual qualities such as creativity, courage and the capacity for unselfish love. Writing of the mysterious, Kathleen Raine asked... “how shall we name/A spirit clothed in world, a world made man?” If it is true that God must be found in the world then the link we know in ourselves between matter and spirit is true of all creation. In his poem Growing, Flying, Happening Alastair Reid writes:

The point is seeing — the grace
beyond recognition, the ways
of the bird rising, unnamed, unknown,
beyond the range of language, beyond its noun.
Eyes open on growing, flying, happening,
and go on opening....
Amazement is the thing.
Not love, but the astonishment of loving.

What does it mean to talk of mystery, amazement, the sublime? The
mystery is the world and life itself. However much poets and creative
artists try to explore the mystery of existence impenetrable areas remain. That individuals are able to rise above or go outside themselves, to feel a sense of wonder, enables them to recognise beauty and truth. This is the sense of the sublime, experienced in poetry, a kind of amazement, the realization that the ordinary is far more extraordinary than we imagine and, as Peter Russell said, poetry in its sublimest conception, is the language of the spirit.