Nicholson swapped his integrity for a bust, that meant fame, acceptance, compromise. Thomas May, ejected from Westminster Abbey, addresses Virgil and compares him to Lucan: "Thou gott'st Augustus' love, he Nero's hate: / But 'twas an act more great, and high to move / A Prince's envy, than a Prince's Love.". Shelley, who died in 1822, was refused a memorial "because of his atheism", and didn't qualify till 1946 – 124 years later. Tony Harrison, winner of the PEN/Pinter prize, on his literary heroes Tony Harrison. After Africa I spent a year and a half in Prague, and I got to know that wonderful poet and scientist Miroslav Holub whose signed books I also have. If the busts of Milton and the others urge me on, there is also watching me a bust of John Nicholson as a cautionary reminder of what happens to a poet who betrays his true voice for the praise of genteel admirers, money or fame. The monument has a bust of Sannazaro which, if the altar and front of the church were not there, would be directing its unswerving gaze at Vesuvius. For some the forgiveness takes a long time. He was in a way the first laureate poet in history, and his epic reeks of the compromises he made. As David Norbrook says in his book Writing the English Republic: "English literary culture has never entirely undone those expulsions.". I keep it for its unflinching, unswerving, even still almost hopeful gaze, staring from the earliest times to our own. There is also on my staircase a manuscript of Victor Hugo along with a pressed flower from his spectacular funeral at which, it was said, "the prostitutes of Paris, as a mark of respect, draped their pudenda in black crepe". Inspiration from your own locale but from the most fearful source.
I went to search for the monument of Thomas May, secretary to Cromwell's Parliament and the translator of the Roman republican poet Lucan, who committed suicide at 26 after being exposed as being part of a plot to remove the Emperor Nero, and whose epic, the Pharsalia, was regarded by Shelley as greater than the imperial laureate, Virgil.
Yiannis Ritsos, the great Greek poet whose books were burned before the temple of Zeus in Athens by the Greek colonels, has a poem about the eye of Geo Milev (1895–1925), the Bulgarian poet. Next to Virgil is Leopardi, Italy's greatest Romantic poet. Its defiance is its burning brightly, beautifully and conspicuously on the slopes of extinction. Our catalogue store includes many more recordings which you can download to your device. His remains were removed at the restoration in 1660 and flung in a pit and the monument reused. It had an inscription from the republican Lucan. But I had gone to the abbey on an entirely different quest. What will happen to Eliot when all his reputedly pornographic verses are published in the Complete Poems promised by Faber & Faber? V Lyrics. The first thing you see in my hallway is a large 18th-century bust of Milton, who stares at me as I watch TV and reminds me of the grave and committed role of the poet. I sincerely hope to be spared both. Tony Harrison. "Now that my play is a failure," he once said, "I find I love it all the more." He is one of Britain's foremost verse writers and many of his works have been performed at the Royal National Theatre. I have small busts of Homer, Dante, Byron and Strindberg, framed engravings of Molière, Shakespeare, Kipling, a photo and a manuscript of Yeats. It had been that to Thomas May. La ginestra (broom) is bright yellow, and Leopardi insists it doesn't grovel to any superior power, man or god.
Opposite this space where May once had his resting place and close to Gilbert Murray, and either insensitively placed or put there maliciously, is Murray's cruellest critic, TS Eliot. The official guidebook to Poets' Corner says: "Sometimes a poet's lifestyle or politics preclude him from being given a Poets' Corner honour (until a new generation has forgiven or forgotten)." It was completely burned and black except for the two eyes, which remained golden, so though destroyed it still shone with its first glorious visions for mankind. There are thousands of them, from all ages and in many languages. Statues are one of the ways I try to test the traditions of European culture against the most modern destructive forces. There is a monument to Heine in a park outside the Frankfurt Opera which is used by heroin addicts. . The free tracks you can enjoy in the Poetry Archive are a selection of a poet’s work. The film, Prometheus, ends with a conflagration that consumes the 20ft-tall golden statue except for the raised, chained though still defiant right hand, all its digits clenched.
And my house is full of more important monuments to poets: their books. Neither ever close. The abbey geography that has the Greek scholar and translator of Greek tragedy Murray set between the inspiring stained glass of his Aeschylus and his most vicious critic got me going on Fram, but it also made me look at the qualifications needed to enter that sacred and exclusive club. Partly because of him I spent four years in Nigeria. He has written for the National Theatre in London, the New York Metropolitan Opera and for the BBC and Channel 4 television.