Portal:Poetry

Fu (Chinese: 賦), variously translated as rhapsody or poetic exposition, is a form of Chinese rhymed prose that was the dominant literary form during the Han dynasty. Fu are poetic pieces in which an object, feeling, or subject is described and rhapsodized in exhaustive detail and from as many angles as possible. Classical fu composers attempted to use as wide a vocabulary as they could, and often included great numbers of rare and archaic terms in their compositions. Fu poems employ alternating rhyme and prose, varying line length, close alliteration, onomatopoeia, loose parallelism, and extensive cataloging of their topics.

Unlike the songs of the Classic of Poetry (Shijing) or the Verses of Chu (Chu ci), fu were meant to be recited aloud or chanted but not sung. The fu genre came into being around the 2nd and 3rd centuries BC and continued to be regularly used into the Song dynasty. Fu were used as grand praises for the imperial courts, palaces, and cities, but were also used to write "fu on things", in which any place, object, or feeling was rhapsodized in exhaustive detail. The largest collections of historical fu are the Selections of Refined Literature (Wen xuan), the Book of Han (Han shu), the New Songs from the Jade Terrace (Yutai xinyong), and official dynastic histories.

There is no counterpart or similar form to the fu genre in Western literature. During a large part of the twentieth century, fu poetry was harshly criticized by Chinese scholars as excessively ornate, lacking in real emotion, and ambiguous in its moral messages. Because of these historical associations, scholarship on fu poetry in China almost ceased entirely between 1949 and the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. Since then, study of fu has gradually returned to its previous level. (Full article...)

Wystan Hugh Auden (/ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973), who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, born in England, later an American citizen, and is regarded by many critics as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Auden grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional middle-class family and read English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. His early poems from the late 1920s and early 1930s, written in an intense and dramatic tone and in a style that alternated between telegraphic modern and fluent traditional, established his reputation as a left-wing political poet and prophet. In the late 1930s he became uncomfortable in this role and abandoned it after he moved to the United States in 1939, where in 1946 he became an American citizen. In his poems from the 1940s he explored religious and ethical themes in a less dramatic manner than in his earlier works, and combined traditional forms and styles with new, original forms. The focus of many of his poems from the 1950s and 1960s was on the ways in which words revealed and concealed emotions. He took a particular interest in writing opera librettos, a form ideally suited to direct expression of strong feelings.

He was also a prolific writer of prose essays and reviews on literary, political, psychological and religious subjects, and he worked at various times on documentary films, poetic plays and other forms of performance. Throughout his career he was both controversial and influential. After his death, some of his poems, notably "Funeral Blues" ("Stop all the clocks"), "Musée des Beaux Arts", "Refugee Blues", "The Unknown Citizen", and "September 1, 1939", became known to a much wider public than during his lifetime through films, broadcasts, and popular media. (Full article...)

• ... that Ida Ospelt-Amann led the revival of dialect poetry in Liechtenstein and was awarded the Golden Cross of Merit?
• ... that Canticle IV: The Journey of the Magi, a 1971 composition for three male solo voices and piano by Benjamin Britten, sets a T. S. Eliot poem to music?
• ... that Ludwig Ferdinand Huber wrote the text for a book with humorous illustrations by poet Friedrich Schiller?
• ... that one music critic said that despite being "noisy, banal, fundamentally insincere", Dmitri Shostakovich's symphonic poem October was nonetheless "enjoyable trash"?
• ... that the UK's former chief immigration adjudicator, Judge Hubert Dunn, published a book on the Irish poet Francis Ledwidge, including some previously unseen poems?
• ... that north London's Barnet Gate was called Grendel's Gate by the Anglo-Saxons, after the monster slain in the epic poem Beowulf?

Clair de lune by Paul Verlaine

Your soul is a lovely garden, and go There masque and bergamasque charmingly, Playing the lute and dancing and also Sad beneath their disguising fanchise. All are singing in a minor key Of conqueror love and life opportune, Yet seem to doubt their joyous revelry As their song melts in the light of the moon. In the calm moonlight, so lovely fair That makes the birds dream in the slender trees, While fountains dream among the statues there; Slim fountains sob in silver ecstasies. — (translation by William Faulkner)

Full set of selected poems

More about the author