Life Saving

'Her early poetry did not come easily to Plath, who during their marriage, Ted Hughes said, "composed very slowly, consulting her Thesaurus and dictionary for almost every word, putting a slow strong line of ink under each word that attracted her." ... She had a "vision" of the kind of poems she would like to write but "[I] do not. When will they come?" They were waiting.'
Josephine Hart, 2012, Life Saving: Why we need poetry, Virago Press, UK.

W. H. Auden

'When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.'

De Profundis

'FedericoGarciaLorcaDeProfundisLeidenWallPoem' by David Eppstein - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:FedericoGarciaLorcaDeProfundisLeidenWallPoem.jpg#mediaviewer/File:FedericoGarciaLorcaDeProfundisLeidenWallPoem.jpg

Those hundred lovers
are asleep forever
beneath the dry earth.
Andalusia has
long, red-colored roads.
Córdoba, green olive trees
for placing a hundred crosses
to remember them.

Translation by Tom Clark

reality

Photo by Karl-Ludwig Poggemann, Flickr creative commons. Manuscipt, James Douglas Morrison