Most ancient Greeks believed that there was a poet called Homer who wrote down his poems.
He called his poems psalms and sonnets, though he never consciously wrote in either form.
ECONOMIST: Samuel Menashe, a New York poet, died on August 22nd, aged 85
There are strong and readily identifiable links between his stories and his poems.
In 2003 one of his poems was read at the memorial service of Anna Lindh, the murdered Swedish foreign minister.
Yet he has kept on writing with an optimistic edge to his realism, and has seen his poems achieve international fame.
His poems - described by Publishers Weekly as "mystical, versatile and sad" - have been translated into more than 50 languages.
But his poems decry the horror of war, and they are devastating.
WSJ: The Sounds of Sacrifice | Benjamin Britten | War Requiem | Masterpiece by Stuart Isacoff
Walking out to till the fields with his fellow prisoners, many of them poets too, he would recite his poems to them and they would respond with theirs.
Reconciling that tidy statement with practically any of his poems is hard work but, as Mr Moody shows over and over again, hard work that offers huge rewards.
His poems dealt with metaphysics, immortality, love, memory and beauty.
Dating from 1974, it features a live parrot in a cage, surrounded by two tiny palm trees and a cassette recording of the artist reading one of his poems.
Born in 1931 and brought up by his mother in Stockholm, he learned piano as a boy, and his poems match the virtues of music to the virtues of psychological analysis.
However, when a succession of his poems turn out to be adaptations or loose translations of Petronius, Sappho, Pliny the Elder and Boethius, you may find yourself hankering after an original voice even one as extravagant as Whitman's.
He wrote satirical left-wing ballads for the Establishment Club, mixed with Ken Tynan and Lindsay Anderson on the edge of London's shocking 1960s theatre scene, set his poems to jazz, uncovered pseuds and bizarre news stories for Private Eye.
ECONOMIST: Christopher Logue, poet, died on December 2nd, aged 85
The HLF said Yr Ysgwrn had become a place of pilgrimage for visitors from Wales and around the world who want to see the poet's Black Chair, while experiencing the dramatic landscape which inspired so many of his poems.
When Spender himself published earlier editions of his collected poems, he was careful to edit out his immature work, and even to re-write pieces that his maturer self frowned upon.
In the late 1990s he released a CD on which he read his own poems.
Schoolchildren love his wry poems about spelling, learning by rote and other hardships of education.
Mr Tudor, the Greater Romania leader, is fond of presenting visiting journalists with a chunky hardback volume of his own poems - in eight languages.
But he continued to write and his novels, poems and essays and in his later years he was an outspoken critic of the Nigerian government.
After this meeting he wrote his best known poems including Dulce et Decorum Est and Anthem For Doomed Youth.
After his father published poems critical of apartheid, the Hope family left South Africa when Daniel was just an infant.
He therefore memorised in the night quiet each one of his hundreds of poems, carefully revised it for several days, and mentally filed it away.
The sheer power of these accumulated forces can shake a listener to the core. (Two conductors are needed for the premiere, Meredith Davies conducted the main orchestra and choir, while Britten conducted the chamber orchestra and the tenor and baritone soloists.) Britten selected for his text nine poems by Lt.
WSJ: The Sounds of Sacrifice | Benjamin Britten | War Requiem | Masterpiece by Stuart Isacoff
One day, I found myself sitting in the bar in the Hotel Claridge with a little old man called Juan Carlos Borges, who was astonished at my interest in his work and at its success in Brazil, given that it had been years since he had published one of his brief botanical poems.
This new edition of his work reprints the seven books of poems that Spender published during his lifetime, and adds some unpublished work for good measure.
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