Haydn In Plain Style: An Interview With Dick Davis

Topics discussed in this episode include:

E.M. Forster

“The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” by Edward Fitzgerald

Thomas Hardy

W.H. Auden

“Troilus and Criseyde” by Geoffrey Chaucer

“Vis and Ramin” by Gorgani

“Wisdom and Wilderness” by Dick Davis

Thom Gunn

Yvor Winters

Fulke Greville

Edgar Bowers

Mozart vs. Haydn

“The Creation” by Joseph Haydn

“Requiem” by W.A. Mozart

“Symphony 9” by Franz Schubert

“Requiem” by Michael Haydn

The Creative and the Erotic

The Spirituality of Old Age

William Wordsworth

“The Poetry of Sturge Moore” by Edgar Bowers (thanks Shane!)

Atheism and Morality

Embracing Nothingness

“A Personal Sonnet” by Dick Davis

Text of poem:

A Personal Sonnet

How strange this life is mine, and not another, this jigsaw... each irrevocable piece. That bad, unfinished business of my brother, dead at nineteen; my gadding years in Greece and Italy; life lived, not understood; a sunset in Kerala, when it seemed the sun had risen on my life for good. All this was real, but seems now as if dreamed.

The presences I've loved, and poetry-- faces I cannot parse or paraphrase whose mystery is all that they reveal; the Persian poets who laid hands on me and whispered that all poetry is praise: these are the dreams that turned out to be real.

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My favorite poetry podcasts for: Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /) Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u) Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /) Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u) Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u) Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /) Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u) Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)