Snapshots from "A Poet's Sourcebook" (1)

I thought I'd offer you a glimpse of what I've included in A Poet's Sourcebook: Writings about Poetry, from the Ancient World to the Present. Here's how the anthology opens, and over the next few days I'll gradually work my way through the rest of the book.

From the epigraph

It was one of the great merits of [science pioneers Humphry] Davy and [Michael] Faraday that they were prepared to read and listen to the poets.

--Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830

From the secondary table of contents, organized by theme and author

POETRY AND PROTEST

Bei Dao
John Berger
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Hayden Carruth
David Crantz
Frederick Douglass
Johann Peter Eckermann
Czeslaw Milosz
John Milton
Mthabisi Phili
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Gary Snyder
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz
Mike Walker
Sam Watson
Jack Wiler
Baron Wormser

From the introduction

Why do we hover between reading a poet and reading about a poet? How does poetry come from where we live and work? And how does poetry reach beyond itself, into the broader purviews of art, science, politics, economics, and other human endeavors, while also drawing on those disciplines as its own creative source?

--Dawn Potter

From Homer

I will begin with the Muses and Apollo and Zeus.

From Lao Tzu

All these people are making their mark in the world,
While I, pig-headed, awkward,
Different from the rest,
Am only a glorious infant still nursing at the breast.

From the Book of Genesis

And Jacob went on his way, and the angels of God met him.

From Sappho, translated by Sir Philip Sidney

My head doth ake, my life faints
My sowle begins to take leave

From Plato

We know that poetry is not truth and that a man should be careful how he introduces her to that state or constitution which he himself is; for there is a mighty issue at stake--no less than the good or evil of a human soul.