Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series / Little Poems

FOREWORD

Most of us experience literature for the first time in the form of a little poem. Long before we ve tasted our first solid food, we ve heard a soothing lullaby spoken or sung by a parent, and before we can walk, we have already begun to accumulate a storehouse of nursery rhymes. The sounds and rhythms of those little poems are embedded in memory, and we pass them down to the next next generation.

But little poems range far beyond the nursery.  Nearly all poets in all ages have written them.  Even John Milton, author of the epic-length Paradise Lost, wrote a poem ten lines long.  Milton s contemporary Robert Herrick, on the other hand, created many little poems, making them his signature genre.  The same holds true for poets across time: those who favored longer forms occasionally wrote brief songs.  And others ancient Greek epigram writers, Japanese haiku poets, and modern writers like William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Dorothy Parker often favored brevity.

What exactly qualifies as a little poem ?  There is no consensus, but the Italian word sonetto, source of the English word sonnet, means little song, suggesting that fourteen lines may be a rule of thumb.  But in this book, even a sonnet would be long.   All the poems I have included almost 300 of them, by 175 different authors are under fourteen lines.  Most range from two lines to twelve.  A few have thirteen lines just shy of a sonnet.  Poets have been writing such poems for thousands of years, starting in the ancient world and continuing to the present day.  The earliest work in this book is by the Greek poet Sappho, who lived in the seventh century BCE; the most recent is by poets still active in the 2020s, such as Carol Ann Duffy, Danez Smith, and Ocean Vuong.

What do little poems have in common besides their brevity?  Probably not a great deal except for their astonishing variety. Many are highly accessible

Foreword by Michael Hennessy
 
EARLY POETS OF GREECE, ROME, AND CHINA
SAPPHO Be Kind to Me
SAPPHO It s No Use
SAPPHO Tonight I ve Watched
SAPPHO You May Forget But
ANACREON Wreath
ANACREON On Drinking .
PRAXILLA Adonis in the Underworld
PRAXILLA Seek Love among the Brave
ANYTE The Cock Shall Crow No More
ANYTE Elm Tree
CATULLUS Poem 70
CATULLUS Poem 85
CATULLUS Poem 92
CATULLUS Poem 101
ANONYMOUS (CHINESE) Meeting in the Road
EMPEROR WUTI On the Death of Li Fuje¯n
MARTIAL Epigram 10.47
MARTIAL Epigram 10.61
MARTIAL Epigram 5.9
MARTIAL Epigram 9.33
MARTIAL Epigram 6.12
MARTIAL Epigram 6.57
PHILIP OF THESSALONICA A Gardener
ANONYMOUS (CHINESE) Plucking the Rushes
JULIAN THE EGYPTIAN Two Epigrams
LI BAI Thoughts in the Silent Night
LI BAI Taking Leave of a Friend
WANG WEI Deer Enclosure
WANG WEI Thinking of My Brothers
DU FU Travelling Northward
DU FU Sunset
BAI JUYI Spring Grasses
 
MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN POETS
ANONYMOUS From The Triads of Ireland
ANONYMOUS The Viking Terror
HANSHAN Two Songs of Cold Mountain
LU YOU Evening in the Village
ARNAUT DANIEL Alba
ANONYMOUS Cuckoo Song
RUMI Yesterday I Went to Him Full of Dismay
ANONYMOUS Fowls in the Frith
CHRISTINE DE PIZAN Rondeau
GEOFFREY CHAUCER Roundel: Welcome Summer
ANONYMOUS Thirty Days Has November
ANONYMOUS I Am of Ireland
ARAKIDA MORITAKE Fallen Flower
ARAKIDA MORITAKE Summer Night
PIERRE DE RONSARD A Shepherd Prays to the God Pan
ANONYMOUS Western Wind
ANONYMOUS Hey Nonny No
ANONYMOUS Two Madrigals
EDMUND SPENSER Shipwreck
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY A Ditty
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Ariel s Song
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Full Fathom Five
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE O Mistress Mine
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Tell Me Where is Fancy Bred
THOMAS DEKKER Golden Slumbers
 
SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETS
JOHN DONNE A Burnt Ship
JOHN DONNE No Man Is

MICHAEL HENNESSY is professor emeritus of English at Texas State University. He has read, studied, taught, and written about poetry for more than forty years. He lives in Chicago. 

"A lovely pocket-sized volume. . . . I read it cover to cover, speeding through the centuries." --Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times Book Review