REELY'S POETRY BLOG

We added two Lord Byron favorites, as promised:

She Walks in Beauty and When We Two Parted.

Other new additions this month:

The Eavesdropper by Carman Bliss. Spooky little poem.

T. S. Eliot – The Love Affair of J. Alfred Prufrock. How to categorize Eliot — is he an English poet or an American poet? Ah, well, never one to wrestle on the horns, I just put him in both and on the new life span index, I put him in both countries too.

And, speaking of The Life Span Index, that is a new page that shows almost all the poets on Reely’s Poetry Pages by decade. Eventually hope to have all of them on there, but filling in some gaps first.

Also, on each poem page, where space permitted, there are links to 3 or 4 contemporaries of the poet.

We’ve also got a new page entitled Perseverance Poems, which contains two remarkably similar poems, See It Through by Edgar Guest, and Keep A-Goin’! by Frank Lebby Stanton. I really don’t know which poem was published first, but if I was going to formulate a theory about it (and then try to prove or disprove it later, as we sometimes like to do), I’d guess that Keep A-Goin’! came first, basing that on the fact that Frank Lebby Stanton was roughly 25 years older than Edgar Guest. So I figure Guest likely read Stanton’s works in the Atlanta Constitution and was inspired to write a similar poem for his northern audience.

In any event, it is interesting that both men served as their state’s poet laureate.

Frank L. Stanton also wrote Mighty Lak A Rose also known as “Sweetest Little Feller.” My mother used to sing this song, only when she’d sing to the girls, she’d say “Sweetest little flower.”

Hope you like these new additions and improvements.

Reely