How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, the wisdom and the humour that is the gift of the greatest poets of our human civilization? From the genius of the Greeks and Romans to love and metaphysics of the Middle Ages, to the concrete wonder of New York and the Beat Poets of San Francisco, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age, and what their extraordinary lives can teach us about how to see the world.
More than any other genre, poetry represents the art of thinking. Writing about the 17th-century English poet John Donne, T.S. Eliot summed up how vital thinking is to the whole poetic enterprise. ‘A thought to Donne was an experience,’ he wrote; ‘it modified his sensibility.’ Where most people experience a thought and quickly move on to the next, for the poet a thought is something that needs to be savoured, articulated and preserved. It’s an emotional experience, not just an intellectual one – a sensation that builds up in the mind and body and has to be committed to the page.
In showing how the great poets of human history lived and worked — and illuminating the gifts of the written word they left us — the poet and poetry teacher Dai George provides a readable and entertaining introduction to how to think like a poet, and how we can weave that thinking into our everyday lives. He addresses questions the great poets have grappled with: What is it to describe the world? How can we express love, grief, or friendship? And how can we rise above the misery of the world and see the beauty in the everyday?
This book paints vivid portraits of a global assortment of great poets throughout history: from Sappho, Juvenal and LiXu, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, to Frank O Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George also seeks to re-examine the canon – which has been overwhelmingly Western, white and male – who have long been held up as pillars of the art, and bring to light major figures from other, no less important cultures and communities – including major poets from China, pre-colonial America and Japan. He also engages with the extraordinary boom in poetry on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok – all signs of what every poet knows – we need poetry in order to live better, more fulfilling lives.
In each brief chapter, George brings to life these often prescient, always compelling poetical thinkers, showing how their way of writing about and understanding the world grew out of their own lives and times and how we can use their insights today.
