A Brief History…

I like poetry and will list some favorites here.

Kipling Ballad of the King’s Jest

Kipling The gods of the copybook headings.

DH Lawrence The Snake

Robert Frost The Road Not Taken
On Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Browning My Last Duchess

Edgar Allen Poe The Raven

Keats was an Apothecary who wrote all his poetry in nine months, an unbelievable fact.

In 1816, he and his friend Leigh Hunt contrived a sonnet contest.

On the Grasshopper and Cricket”
by John Keats (1795-1821)

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper’s-he takes the lead
In summer luxury,-he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.

Leigh Hunt was a well known poet at the time. Compare the two.