Troilus And Criseyde – Geoffrey Chaucer, c. 1382-1387 [Translation by Nevill Coghill, 1971] ★★★★½

Love's Misfortune, Straddling Time

It’s a case of being almost too enjoyable to read without drawing some guilt. This is Chaucer, yet a boldly modern translation. It lays out medieval thinking and customs in a smooth way while delivering a crackling good story. If only it felt less easy going down.

Nevill Coghill’s translation leans into the modern idiom, recasting the 14^th century narrative poem with some 20^th century expressions like “Nuts” and “that makes them tick.” At the same time, the poem’s rhythms and expressive discourse are recognizably direct from Chaucer, here coming into full form as the premier English writer of his time.

The bones of the poem remain: In ancient Troy a hero named Troilus and a widow maiden named Criseyde fall in love while their city is besieged by angry Greeks. After a period of pursuit and apparent despair by Troilus, the two achieve a blissfully erotic union only to find their romance becoming another victim of war.

Paradise Regained – John Milton, 1671 ★★½

Satan Strikes Out

There are a lot of challenges in reading 17^th-century literature; add to Paradise Regained a basic question as to what exactly is being read. Is this a stand-alone pocket epic or intended follow-up to another epic?

Yes to both is the best answer I can offer. Whether you read it for the history, the religion, or the craft itself, John Milton serves up a challenging, engaging, if unfulfilling treatment of New Testament themes, modelled on how he did the Old Testament in Paradise Lost.

Paradise Lost – John Milton, 1667-1674 ★★★★

Eve of Destruction

Literature is a subjective medium, so defining greatness in it is tricky. Time makes this trickier; one generation’s masterpiece might just leave their descendants dazed and confused. Scholars are Beowulf’s main audience now; does anyone still read Pilgrim’s Progress?

Paradise Lost had a time capsule feel not long after its creation. Religiously, John Milton’s Puritan form of Christianity had already fallen out of favor in his homeland by the time of its publication; stylistically, its use of blank verse was even more out-of-step.

Why then, has it mattered as long and as deeply as it does?

A Pocket Book Of Robert Frost's Poems – Robert Frost [Edited by Louis Untermeyer], 1961 ★★★

Pondering Seasons and Reasons

Once upon a time, Robert Frost seemed the most important poet in the world, America’s answer to Shakespeare, standing over us Mount Rushmore-like with his thick shock of snowy white hair, his quotations decorating every classroom door at my Connecticut boarding school.

Then I grew up, and just like that, Frost’s stature seemed to dip. Like the Eagles or Judy Blume, his outsized success became the very reason not to take him seriously. Since I’m not a poetry lover, I have no idea how prevailing a view this might be; I just sense his stock is not what it was.

Wordsworth – Selected by W. E. Williams, 1950 ★★

Biting Off More than I Can Chew

Reading William Wordsworth became a most challenging reading assignment. If enjoyment was my objective, I failed miserably.

He’s technically brilliant and his words are full of joy. His lyricism, his rhyme schemes, his ability to effortlessly conjure up scenes of awesome beauty – he had talent and vision to spare. His short poems feel weirdly effortless in their genius, their Poe-like flow, and simple eloquence.

The Selected Poetry Of Keats – Edited by Paul de Man, 1966 ★★★★

The Long and Short of John Keats

Near his end, John Keats took a line from his hero Shakespeare: “Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.”

         

Just as he was winding down one of literature’s greatest too-brief careers, Keats put pen to paper and wrote a poem about exactly that, not in anger or grief but rapt serenity. Considered one of the greatest poems in English, “To Autumn” is impossible to top as a swan-song:

Selected Poems And Two Plays – William Butler Yeats, 1962 ★★★★

Perning in the Gyres with W. B.

I have always loved reading. I have never cared for poetry. It is like spinach or broccoli on my reading plate, except I actually love spinach and broccoli. May I add I’m not keen on metaphors, either?

With poetry, it comes down to being a born skimmer. I find myself reading at angles, grasping at words like Tarzan swinging from vines, never working line-by-line and seldom methodically. Scansion might as well be a Swedish engineering firm for all I care. For reader as well as composer, poetry demands fine concentration. Ruined perhaps by decades of television, I find such concentration unpleasant.

The Canterbury Tales – Translation by David Wright, c. 1387 ★★★★

Game Suspended on Account of Death

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is a lot of things; one it is less credited for is being the longest-suspended marquee competition in English literature.

A tavern owner announces a challenge to tell the finest story, “of best sentence and most solas,” as he puts it, whereupon seven-innings-worth of batters step up to the plate.

Generations have been able to judge the results for themselves, but Chaucer himself didn’t live long enough to declare a winner. In limbo, his characters wait.