To rhyme is not a crime

A while back, I mentioned that I really rated Fflur Dafydd's Twenty Thousand Saints, a radical novel set on Ynys Enlli, a prime site of Welsh religious and historical interest. I'm not the only one - she's just won the Oxfam Hay Prize. There's a little old colonialism bound up in the award though - she's an established novelist rather than a newcomer, but there's just a hint in this article that it's writing in English that matters. Even more patronisingly, the BBC story is headlined 'Singer-songwriter wins book prize'. I'm sure Dr. Dafydd will love that faintly dismissive tone…

Anyway, mention of her specialism (R. S. Thomas) reminded me that a comment on another post asked me to list and justify my favourite poets. So here we are:

R. S. Thomas. I met him a couple of times, and very unpleasant he was too. I don't agree with some of his attitudes, but I think that he's up there with the greatest poets of the twentieth century - hounded by his position as an anglicised Welsh nationalist, an agnostic vicar, a cold man with deep feelings, a radical conservative in many ways, everything is poured into poetry which is simultaneously calm and heartfelt. I have a CD of him reading many of the poems, and it's spine-chilling.

MacSpAunDay - I'm a 1930s specialist, the time when poets and artists were forced to take sides by history - often damaging their work in the process, but sometimes liberating them from the parlour games of older English literature. MacSpAunday was a sneering nickname for the leftwing, often homosexual, Oxford educated poets of the 30s: MacNeice, Spender, Auden and C. Day-Lewis.

Malory - I'm a sucker for medieval literature (and further back), especially the Arthurian romances that twist and embellish Celtic myths to deal with pressing current concerns.

Edna St. Vincent Millay: burst in on an all-male preserve, demonstrated that she could do all the strict-metre formal stuff, and turned the tables on all the poetry that objectified women as passive, sexless commodities. She's funny too.

Which leads me to Sappho - fragments of whose poetry survived because a parchment was wrapped round a mummified crocodile, 3000 years ago. Passionate, heartfelt, sometimes angry and sometimes loving and technically gifted, she really is out on her own.

She was paraphrased by Catullus - who could go from writing funny filth to passionate love in a heartbeat. I also rate Whitman, Donne, Duffy, Muldoon, and Simon Armitage, who always surprises me by conveying depths of emotion in the most ordinary of phrases, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg for their exuberance and surprising seriousness. Larkin I find interesting but can't warm to, if you see what I mean. Then there are lots of others I'm getting into slowly, like the Brownings (Robert and Elizabeth). I could go on for much longer but I have marking to do…