Society of Classical Poets logo
  • About Us
  • Join
  • Donate
  • Poetry
    Random
    • 'Winter Smoke' and Other Poetry by Mary Kay Simmons

      The Society
      October 10, 2015
      Beauty, Humor, Poetry
    Recent
    • ‘Childhood, 1919’ by David Whippman

      The Society
      January 19, 2021
      2
    • ‘Virtual Propitiation: Sacrifice of the Quarantined Caregiver’ by Bethany Mootsey

      The Society
      January 18, 2021
      2
    • ‘Meditation’ by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Translated by Joshua Mincio

      The Society
      January 18, 2021
      2
    • ‘Every Little Thing’ and Other Poetry by Daniel Kemper

      The Society
      January 18, 2021
      28
    • ‘For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2021’ by Susan Jarvis Bryant

      The Society
      January 18, 2021
      26
    • ‘Rosarium’: A Sestina and Other Poetry by Benjamin Thomas Cepican

      The Society
      January 17, 2021
      5
  • Submit
  • Contests
    Random
    • A Line of Shakespeare Poetry Contest

      The Society
      May 8, 2019
      Culture, For Educators, From the Society, Humor, Poetry, Poetry Contests
      148 Comments
    Recent
    • Turn a Joke into a Poem—Poetry Challenge

      The Society
      December 8, 2020
      69
    • Winners of the ‘Napa Valley Winery’ Ekphrastic Poetry Contest

      The Society
      November 15, 2020
      13
    • Ekphrastic Contest: Write a Poem on This Photograph

      The Society
      October 8, 2020
      148
    • The Society of Classical Poets 2021 Poetry Competition

      The Society
      September 1, 2020
      10
    • 2021 High School Poetry Competition

      The Society
      September 1, 2020
    • 2021 Poetry Translation Competition

      The Society
      September 1, 2020
      2
  • Journal
  • Essays
    Random
    • The Rise of Conservative Art and Poetry

      The Society
      August 10, 2018
      Art, Culture, Essays, News of Note, Poetry
      17 Comments
    Recent
    • The Singing Lines of Theresa Rodriguez: A Review of Sonnets

      The Society
      January 12, 2021
      13
    • Two Poems Making Use of ‘Conceits,’ by Joseph S. Salemi

      The Society
      January 9, 2021
      26
    • The Struggle for the Formalist Tradition: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

      The Society
      December 13, 2020
      58
    • Essay: ‘Portrait of a Millennial Art Student’ by Sally Cook

      The Society
      October 24, 2020
      22
    • A Review of Juvenalia by Reid McGrath

      The Society
      October 12, 2020
      12
    • On Troublemakers: Two Translations from Phaedrus, by Terry L. Norton

      The Society
      September 24, 2020
      9
  • Members
  • Poetry Contests
  • Donate
  • About Us
  • Submit

Essays

Home
Essays

The Singing Lines of Theresa Rodriguez: A Review of Sonnets

The Society
January 12, 2021
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
13 Comments
by Andrew Benson Brown Theresa Rodriguez, Sonnets. 2nd edition. Shanti Arts, 193 Hillside Road, Brunswick, ME, 04011, 2020. 75 pp. $12.95. In his literary criticism, William Empson showed a subtle...

Two Poems Making Use of ‘Conceits,’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
January 9, 2021
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
26 Comments
. The Death of Today’s Sequoia Flecte ramos, arbor alta, tensa laxa viscera: Et rigor lentescat ille, quem dedit nativitas, Ut superni membra regis miti tendas stipite. —Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530-609...

The Struggle for the Formalist Tradition: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
December 13, 2020
Deconstructing Communism, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
58 Comments
  Why are many young persons so bad at writing formal poetry? Why do they struggle and labor and twist and turn when trying to compose formal verse? OK, I’ll grant you this: every beginning poet has...

Essay: ‘Portrait of a Millennial Art Student’ by Sally Cook

The Society
October 24, 2020
Art, Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
22 Comments
  You’ve grown up in the public school system, and it shows. You are sensitive to the world around you, and in touch with your “feelings”—a perfect little guilt-ridden example of a...

A Review of Juvenalia by Reid McGrath

The Society
October 12, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
12 Comments
Juvenalia by Reid McGrath, Kelsay Books, 2019 by James Sale Regular readers of The Society of Classical Poets’ pages will be familiar with the name of Reid McGrath; he has been extensively published...

On Troublemakers: Two Translations from Phaedrus, by Terry L. Norton

The Society
September 24, 2020
Children's, Culture, Essays, Poetry, Translation
9 Comments
On Troublemakers: Two Translations* from the Latin Poet Phaedrus, Freedman of Augustus (first century A.D.) Translator’s Prologue These little tales from ancient Rome Concern those who would foment...

Ekphrastic Economy: A Review of Memoirs of a Witness Tree, by Randal A. Burd, Jr.

The Society
September 20, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
6 Comments
Memoirs of a Witness Tree, by Randal A. Burd, Jr. Kelsay Books, 2020 by Andrew Benson Brown Reading Aristotle’s Poetics is in some ways a curious experience for the practitioner of poetry. In this...

The Rebirth of Epic: A Review of James Sale’s HellWard

The Society
August 22, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry, Reviews
31 Comments
by Andrew Benson Brown James Sale’s HellWard is the first volume of a planned trilogy entitled The English Cantos. If the quality of the current volume is any indication of the two forthcoming ones, then...

Understanding Bad Poetry: The Verse of William Topaz McGonagall

The Society
August 16, 2020
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
20 Comments
by Joseph S. Salemi The poetic effusions of some people are so incompetent that they cross the line into unexpected humor, and thereby become valuable. Such is the case with the work of William Topaz...

The Spice of Life: Metric Variation in Formal Verse (An Essay)

The Society
July 13, 2020
Culture, Essays, Poetry, Poetry Forms
14 Comments
by Adam Sedia John Dryden In 1688, John Dryden, England’s first official poet laureate, was deprived of that title for remaining Catholic and replaced with the laughably inferior Thomas Shadwell....

An Analysis of ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ by Rudyard Kipling

The Society
June 9, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
9 Comments
  The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through...

A Smorgasbord of Craziness: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
June 8, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
15 Comments
I recently discarded some unnecessary texts, and among them were two past editions (the 17th and the 20th) of Len Fulton’s Directory of Poetry Publishers. This venerable publication, from Dustbooks in...

Philip Larkin: A Very English Bleakness (An Essay)

The Society
May 26, 2020
Essays, Poetry
20 Comments
by David Whippman In 1984, Philip Larkin was asked to become the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. This position is, in principle, the most prestigious that any British poet can attain: in effect, court...
John Keats

Keats in the Time of Coronavirus: An Essay

The Society
May 20, 2020
Beauty, Coronavirus, Culture, Essays, Poetry
34 Comments
by Sultana Raza In April 1820, Keats was already aware that he had tuberculosis, and in spring of that year, he was experiencing fever, a bad chest, and lots of anxiety, specially about not being able to...

William Butler Yeats and the Occult: An Essay by Adam Sedia

The Society
May 19, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
27 Comments
Clarity and Obscurity Part III Read Part I: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared Read Part II: "Concrete" Poetry and the Fall of Metaphor by Adam Sedia Modernism produces obscure poetry...

Ten Great Spenserian or Scottish Sonnets

The Society
May 15, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Love Poems, Poetry
19 Comments
Edmund Spenser by Margaret Coats Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) wrote 121 sonnets of rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee, including 87 in his love sequence Amoretti. The Spenserian sonnet differs from the...

Review: ‘The Stargazers,’ A First Book of Poems by James McKee

The Society
April 9, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
by T.M. Moore James McKee, The Stargazers (Atmosphere Press, 2020), $17.99 James McKee’s inaugural foray into verse publishing offers a panoply of poetic forms, themes, images, and delights. The Stargazers...

‘Briefs’: A New Poetry Form

The Society
March 23, 2020
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry, Poetry Contests, Poetry Forms
20 Comments
by James A. Tweedie The form of the “brief” ordinarily consists of a couplet of anapestic tetrameter with the first soft beat of each line clipped off (x / xx / xx / xx /). The anapest, which functions...

‘If a Contemporary Free-Verse Poet Wrote a Sonnet’: A Poem and Brief Essay

The Society
March 23, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
17 Comments
by James A. Tweedie   If a Contemporary Free-Verse Poet Wrote a Sonnet Today, because I’m early for Pilates, __I stop at Starbucks for a cappuccino, __But change my mind because the mocha...

What Happened to Narrative Poetry?—An Opinion Piece by James A. Tweedie

The Society
March 5, 2020
Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry, Short Stories
24 Comments
This isn’t so much an essay as it is an opinion piece where I shoot off a few words in praise of narrative poetry or, in other words, poetry that tells a story. From Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to...

Essay: ‘Moralistic Authenticity’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
March 3, 2020
Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
41 Comments
  A not infrequent problem that a poetry editor must face is a contributor’s intransigence. Sometimes this resistance is on metrical issues or diction, but there are a few poets who dig in their...

Line, Stanza & Form: An Introduction to Poetry

The Society
February 12, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry, Poetry Forms
3 Comments
by Michael Curtis | excerpted from Occasional Poetry Tradition grows from wisdom, from the accumulated experience of millennia; in poetic practice, our classic tradition grows from the craft of Ages. Change...

Review: Poetry by Theresa Rodriguez

The Society
November 26, 2019
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
7 Comments
by James Sale Sonnets, 2nd edition. Shanti Arts, 2020 Jesus and Eros, Bardsinger Books, 2014 Theresa Rodriguez is a relatively new and exciting poet on the pages of The Society of Classical Poets. As a...

‘Black Cat’: Derived from ‘Schwarze Katze’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Society
November 6, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry, Translation
7 Comments
Black Cat a poem derived from "Schwarze Katze" by Rainer Maria Rilke, as translated by Martin Hill Ortiz A crash! I spot a ghost that bumps Eliciting my startled stare. A shadow shifts; a black pelt...

Lord Byron’s Darkest Secrets and Greatest Poetry

The Society
October 19, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
12 Comments
This piece is sponsored by KidSecured by Evan Mantyk and Kathy Brellan Lord Byron was born George Gordon Byron in London on January 22, 1788 and died just 36 years later in 1824. Yet, despite his short...

Essay: Richard Wilbur, C.S. Lewis, and the Imaginative Power of Poetry

The Society
October 15, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
7 Comments
by T.M. Moore   Our Image-hungry Age Increasingly, our postmodern generation prefers its communications to be in as few words and as many images as possible. Hence, the curious success of...

Essay: ‘A Breeze Came Out of the North…’

The Society
September 29, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
6 Comments
A breeze came out of the North one day, and cried, "September's begun!" A breeze came out of the North one day, declared, "The Summer is done!" by Jack Ahlers You know the fall air—it is somehow...

Essay: On Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’ and the Power of Poetry

The Society
September 11, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
45 Comments
by T.M. Moore I had just finished teaching one of the adult classes at our church on the meaning of Christmas, using John Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity as my text. We examined many...

Poetry, Beauty and the Modern Era: Essay by James Sale

The Society
August 12, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry
20 Comments
  One interesting question is ‘why poetry, specifically?’ I am currently writing an ‘epic’ called The English Cantos, and I have chosen to write my epic in terza rima. There are many forms of...

A Straight Shooter: Interview with C.B. Anderson

The Society
July 31, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Interviews, News of Note, Poetry
2 Comments
Roots in the Sky, Boots on the Ground: Metaphysical Poems C.B. Anderson, Kelsay Books, 107 pages paperback, ISBN-10: 1949229688 2019, $17.00 by Carol Smallwood Smallwood: Joseph S. Salemi commented on...

Rediscovering the Sonnet: An Interview with Poet Theresa Rodriguez by Carol Smallwood

The Society
July 10, 2019
Essays, Interviews, Poetry, Poetry Forms
7 Comments
  This interview was conducted by Carol Smallwood with poet Theresa Rodriguez following the release of the first edition of Sonnets by Rodriguez; the second edition is published by Shanti Arts, 2020;...

The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held

The Society
June 28, 2019
Essays, From the Society, News of Note, Poetry, Symposium
21 Comments
The Society of Classical Poets successfully holds its first symposium in New York City (Press Release)   NEW YORK—A growing movement is calling for the return of meter and rhyme in poetry in a bid...

‘A Poet’s Lament’ and Poetry by Joe Tessitore

The Society
May 17, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
19 Comments
A Poet’s Lament - for Charles Southerland, whose brilliant prose style I so painfully tried to imitate and incorporate Nobody cried when poetry died a long, slow death - a final breath, maybe even a last...

On Wendy Cope’s Wasteland Limericks (Essay)

The Society
May 15, 2019
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry, Reviews
5 Comments
by Lew Icarus Bede The way I dealt with T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland was to write a poem, equally desperate, in that same allusive style—with notes. That unpublished poem Cicadas' Voices, written in the...

Remembering John Whitworth (1945–April 22, 2019)

The Society
April 30, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Humor, News of Note, Poetry
5 Comments
Read the poetry of the recently departed John Whitworth at Trinacria or The Poetry Archive. by Sally Cook Any ordinary poet composing a landscape piece might easily imagine a dull blue sky, one small white...

Review: “Profane and Sacred Love” by William Ruleman

The Society
March 14, 2019
Beauty, Essays, Poetry, Reviews
2 Comments
William Ruleman: Profane and Sacred Love, Feather Books, 2002 and reprint 2014 by James Sale Having read some excellent poetry by William Ruleman on the pages of the SCP I determined to buy a collection so...

Two Videos on the Reading of Poetry Out Loud

The Society
March 11, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry, Readings, Video
5 Comments
The Bad The first video of Hannah Silva instructs us on the abyss that poetry reading has found itself in today. The irrationality and baseness of slam poetry has given way to experimental poetry that doesn't...

Who Killed Poetry? A Critique of Modernism and Post-Modernism (Part I)

The Society
March 3, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
62 Comments
by Edward C. "Ted" Hayes   A Prefatory Poem (or a Gaggle of Goosefeathers) Some will judge this essai the exact thing it’s not – Distilled, unvarnished, contemned tommyrot For asserting mod...

Trump’s Border Wall Revives Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’ (and a Poet’s Response)

The Society
February 22, 2019
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
12 Comments
by Evan Mantyk As the border wall with Mexico that President Trump is building gains greater and greater attention, so too has the early 20th century poem, “Mending Wall,” by American poet Robert Frost....

God Rest We Merry Gentlemen (An Essay)

The Society
February 2, 2019
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
2 Comments
by Gregory Spicer “Death and taxes” bemoan us now, as ever. Yet as I bask in the fading embers of Christendom's most sentimental season, my mind freshly equips itself for the new year by conjoining...
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4




Trending Poems

  • A Poem on the Revealing of Election Fraud: ‘Epiphany’ by Susan Jarvis Bryant
  • A Poem on the Covid-19 Vaccine: ‘Needled’ by Susan Jarvis Bryant
  • A ‘New Year’s Revolution’ and Other Poetry by Susan Jarvis Bryant
  • Two Poems of the Sea, by Susan Jarvis Bryant
  • ‘A Wretch Like Me’ by Joe Tessitore
  • Poetry on the Planned Illegitimate Election of Joe Biden as U.S. President
  • ‘Amen and Awoman’ and Other Poetry on the State of the U.S.
  • ‘Ode on ​Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Ganymede and the Eagle’ and Other Poetry by Talbot Hook...
  • ‘A Warning from the Red-Light Zone’ by Jeff Eardley
  • ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—a Sonnet’ and Other Poetry by Paul A. Freeman
  • ‘The Victory of Donald J. Trump in the 2020 U.S. Election’ and Other Poetry by Bruce Dal...
  • Two Poems Making Use of ‘Conceits,’ by Joseph S. Salemi
  • ‘For Martin Luther King Jr. Day, 2021’ by Susan Jarvis Bryant
  • ‘Christmas Present’ by Joe Tessitore
  • Two Poems on Benvenuto Cellini, by Joseph S. Salemi

Resources

       1. How to Write a Sonnet

       2. How to Write a Haiku

       3. Poetry Lesson Plan

       4. A Timeline of English Poetry

       5. Poems by High School Students

       6. What Is Poetry?

       7. Ten Great Class Novels

  • Poetry Resources
  • High School Poetry
  • Translation
  • Poetry Contests
  • Poetry Forms
  • From the Society
  • Poetry Archive
  • For Educators
  • Humor
  • News of Note
  • Reviews
  • About Us
  • Symposium
  • The Raven
  • Riddles
  • Journal
  • Members
  • Terms of Use
  • The Society of Classical Poets © 2020