I have finished with C.S. Lewis!

"Thank goodness" I hear. One of you even said Lewis's verse is "banal".

But what is "GREAT Poetry"?

It means different things to different people - but this comment on the internet may be helpful:

Just as there is no DNA test for poetry, there is none for deciding what is ‘great’.

Good is easier. Good poetry is like anything good; it's moving, exciting, funny, memorable, intriguing, shocking, persistent in its effect on the mind.

It seems new, even if it's ancient, doesn't repeat the obvious, makes us want more, opens us up to another way of understanding the world or confirms (in a way we hadn't exactly thought of) something we've known for a long time.

It's simultaneously familiar and strange. It gives courage. It dares to find truths, obliquely or head on.

There's plenty of good poetry, but ‘great’, what is great?

I think this is only decided by poetry lovers over time — perhaps decades or centuries. It's what the world community of poetry lovers treasures and wants to preserve and sometimes (just sometimes) this filters into a national popular consciousness.

This, for what it's worth, is ‘greatness’, and it's somewhat out of the hands of the poet.

So I have been searching and I have found several websites which claim to list 'great' poetry.

I shall post some of the poems here over the next couple of weeks.

Let me know what you think of them.

I am beginning with this by Conrad Aiken.

sweet music

MUSIC I HEARD

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, beloved,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart that you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always, -
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

In the noisy street,
Where the sifted sunlight yellows the pallid faces,
Sudden I close my eyes, and on my eyelids
Feel from the far-off sea a cool faint spray,—

A breath on my cheek,
From the tumbling breakers and foam, the hard sand shattered,
Gulls in the high wind whistling, flashing waters,
Smoke from the flashing waters blown on rocks;

—And I know once more,
O dearly belovèd! that all these seas are between us,
Tumult and madness, desolate save for the sea-gulls,
You on the farther shore, and I in this street.

Conrad Aiken

A sad biographical note:

Conrad Potter Aiken (1889 – 1973) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and poet, born in Savannah, Georgia, whose work includes poetry, short stories, novels, and an autobiography.

When he was 11 years of age, his physician father killed his mother, then himself.

According to his own writings, Aiken found the bodies of his parents.