Why Shakespeare loved iambic pentameter

Shakespeare sometimes gets a bad rap in high schools for his complex plots and antiquated language. But a quick peek into the rhythm of his words reveals a poet deeply rooted in the way people spoke in his time — and still speak today. Why do Shakespeare’s words have such staying power? David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor uncover the power of iambic pentameter.

Lesson by David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor, animation by Brad Purnell.

30 Days of “Quantum Poetry” Celebrating the Glory of Science

From black holes to DNA to butterfly metamorphosis, bewitching verses on the magic of nature.

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

 In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

 Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

The sorrow and defiance of Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

So begins one of Maya Angelou’s poems, written in 1978. One of her most famous, it unsurprisingly features in many of the obituaries and pieces that commemorate her life. It is used to demonstrate her individuality, her political voice, her strength.

The poem catches the tone, the pace and rhythm of all her writing, whatever its genre. There is the gritty, determined and defiant attitude, the sometimes literal refusal to take anything lying down. There is the simple energy and downright forthrightness of expression. There is the direct address. Sometimes that direct address is to the reader, establishing an almost unbelievable intimacy between the speaker and the spoken to, the “I” and the “you”; at other times it is to all those who would deny the humanity of Angelou – as an African American, as a woman, as one of those denied opportunity, choice and power.

Above all, there is the link with the whole tradition of African American music – spirituals, blues, gospels, jazz, rap – that uses insistent rhythms, hypnotic repetition, lines that swing, sway and curve their way into the mind and soul to make a point, to play on an idea, to strike an attitude and, more simply, to assert a belief and a presence, a being in the world.

New Sappho poems set classical world reeling

Not your average poet. Wikimedia Commons

It’s a kind of literary miracle. Fragments of two new poems by Ancient Greek poet Sappho have been discovered, making it possible for us to be among the first people to read these texts for more than 1,000 years.

To make matters still more wonderful, the discovery of these poems, first written in the seventh century BC, appears to have happened by pure chance. Apparently, the papyrus that preserved the poems belonged to an anonymous collector who had no idea what it contained, but (fortunately for the world) happened to take it to an expert, Dirk Obbink of Oxford University, who soon realised what he was looking at.

This is the sort of news classical scholars like me normally dream about. In fact, it is the realisation of a game that we spend a lot of time playing over glasses of wine at conference drinks parties: “If you could get back one lost text from any ancient author, which would it be?” And as often as not, Sappho will be the answer.

PEN American Center presents: A TRIBUTE TO C. P. CAVAFY

Theatrical Evening Commemorates the 150th Anniversary of the Influential Greek Poet’s Birth with Olympia Dukakis, Orhan Pamuk, Kathleen Turner, Michael Cunningham, Daniel Mendelsohn, and others .
Artwork by David Hockney Based On His 1961 Cavafy-Inspired Etchings

Constantine Cavafy

Constantine Cavafy (as he wanted the family name to be spelled in English) was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1863.

The “Alexandrian” (as he is known in Greece) is one of the greatest Greek poets. However, at first, his work didn’t receive the recognition one would expect, mainly because his style was so much different from the – then – mainstream Greek poetry.