Poetry Letters
For almost ten years I have been sending out letters on poets and their poems. This website is linked to all those letters…
Huck Gutman
For 8 weeks in Fall-Winter 2023-24, Huck taught courses on poets for UVM’s lifelong learning institute
Poets covered include:
Gwendolyn Brooks
Robert Frost
Wallace Stevens
Walt Whitman
William Carlos Williams
A.R. Ammons
Emily Dickinson
C. K. Williams on Antisemitism
Percy Byshhe Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind”
Greg Delanty, “Attachment”
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
Miklós Radnóti
Wallace Stevens: The Fierceness of Desire
The Folly of Violence: Yehuda Amichai
Melville and Modern War
Gertrude Stein: An Astonishing Poetry
William Butler Yeats: The Rage Against Time
Yeats: A ‘Perfect’ Poem
Frank O’Hara: Poet of the Present
Mark Doty, “Atlantis: Part I, Faith”
Two Poems by Sappho
Robert Lowell, "Epilogue"
Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and what it teaches us about war
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Simonides, An Inscription
William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book One
Ukraine and Poetry
Robert Desnos, "The Night Watchman of Pont-au-Change"
John Keats - "To Autumn"
Ishmael Reed, "dragon's blood"
Edgar Allan Poe, “Sonnet—To Science” and “To Helen”
Friedrich Rückert and Robert Schumann, “Widmung“
Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz,” “I Knew a Woman,” “They Sing, They Sing”
Major Jackson, "Mighty Pawns"
Emily Dickinson, "The Last Night That She Lived" - For Carol Cosman
Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems (IV)
John Burnside "Scotlandwell"
Sylvia Plath, "Tulips"
Jericho Brown, "Say Thank You Say I'm Sorry"
John Keats, “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” about which the commentator reverses himself
W. H. Auden, “Two of the China Sonnets”
Stevie Smith, “Not Waving but Drowning”
Mallarme and Yeats, “La Chair est triste” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”
William Bolcom “Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise:”
Du Bellay and Baudelaire, “Heureux qui” and “Le Voyage”
William Carlos Williams, “Calypsos II,” a very short poem
Paul Zimmer, “A Romance for the Wild Turkey”
Wallace Stevens, “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself”
Rainer Rilke, “On Music”
Robert Frost, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
![Spring: Dickinson and Mandelstam “I dreaded that first robin so” and “And I was Alive” plus briefly Wilbur [Seed-leaves] and Ammons](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e8d04101be2c236f9d21bed/1591587434413-6R7VFBVVW1IOKKKSX5CX/38.png)
Spring: Dickinson and Mandelstam “I dreaded that first robin so” and “And I was Alive” plus briefly Wilbur [Seed-leaves] and Ammons
Richard Wilbur, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World”
Paul Celan, “Once” and also “The Trumpet-Part”
Bertolt Brecht, “When Evil-Doing Comes Like Falling Rain”
Arthur Rimbaud, “The Sleeper in the Valley” and “At the Cabaret Vert”
A lighthearted interlude: Rossini
Guillaume Apollinaire “The Little Car”
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “No Worst, there is none”
On the Limits of the Imagination
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
Philip Larkin, Three Poems: “This Be the Verse,” “Mower,” and “Aubade”
Rilke, “Ninth Duino Elegy”
Zbigniew Herbert: The Utility of Poems, “Mr Cogito Reads the Newspaper”
Maxine Kumin, “How It Is”
James Dickey, “The Bee”
Dickinson and Wordsworth: Spring Poems: “I dreaded that first robin so” and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”
Vladimir Mayakovsky, “At the Top of My Voice”
Charles Baudelaire, “A Rotting Corpse”
Seamus Heaney, “Singing School: 4. Summer 1969”
Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool” and “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”
Charles Ives, “The Things Our Fathers Loved”
Zbigniew Herbert, “The Envoi of Mr. Cogito”
A.E. Housman, “Terence, This is Stupid Stuff”
A.R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet”
William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us”
Constantine Cavafy, “Comes to Rest”
Emily Dickinson, “As Imperceptibly as Grief”
Music and Transcendence: Beethoven, Mahler, Schonberg – and Rilke
Walt Whitman, "The Wound-Dresser"
Anne Carson, "Essay on What I Think About Most"
Robert Hayden, "Frederick Douglass"
Elizabeth Bishop, "In the Waiting Room"
An Extraordinary Adventure Which Befell Vladimir Mayakovsky In a Summer Cottage
Elizabeth Bishop, "Sandpiper"
Pablo Neruda, "Ode to Tomatoes"
Robert Frost, "Oven Bird"
William Carlos Williams, "To A Poor Old Woman"
William Wordsworth, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal"
Eugenio Montale, "Perhaps One Morning"
Zbigniew Herbert, "Five Men"
First Mailing: A brief introduction to these letters, referring to Whitman and William Carlos Williams…
On reading these pages – a short note
Introduction: A History of How These Letters on Poetry Came into Existence – from the U.S. Senate and Bernie Sanders, to the University of Vermont, to today