From C to Shining c ...

(I've decided I like posting "top of ...". But, that could change ... .)

Here's a potential vade mecum you might want to consider, from a poet you might want to avoid. Admirer of Swinburne, Ezra Pound played the pundit, edited "The Waste Land" (his blue-pencils are still controversial), and wrote a lot of confusing academic verse in something he called Cantos. An early poem of his was a sonnet ("Portrait d'une Femme"*) that conformed to his critical standards and wowed me as an undergraduate. I was a Poundian for my whole four years. Ah, college ... . It's a blessing those years don't last!

Anyway, toward the end of his checkered (stained, really) career and life, he edited (with Marcella Spann) a compendium of useful verse called Confucius to cummings: A Poetry Anthology. Handy and fun to read (I think you can safely ignore his notes, except for one), it gives you in one place whole batches of traditional verse outside the academic "canon" that are very helpful to study.

The only note of Pound's worth reading is an appendix (I think -- I don't have the book to hand) on Thomas Hardy. That's right, the novelist who quit mid-career to write poetry. Pound includes a Hardy poem or two in the Browning mode for the anthology proper, but he later lists a whole bunch (yeah, "bunch," as in flowers) of his theme-related verse re: a mid-life love affair. It's eye-opening and candid (Hardy's love-affair stuff, not Uncle Ez -- please!), and it's worth getting Hardy's Complete out of the public library to find 'em from Pound's list.

As far as versification goes, Hardy did some very interesting things in those poems. (I'll let you figure just what those things are for yourself now, but I may post on that someday.)

Anyway, why not thumb through C to c at your local bookseller sometime, and see what you think? I don't believe you will waste your time.

P.S.: For St Paddy's Day, there's one in the Pound book you can Google today that will be worth your while: "I Shall Not Die for Thee" by Padraic Colum. The page I found links to his Gaelic versions as well.

*Editor's Note: No. It was "A Virginal." Do you see why the confusion occurred?