“…no matter how bad and bloody things got on the streets of Blackhill, it was pretty much on par with the rest of Scottish history…
I still remember the blood-spattered walls of the house where several dozen [wedding] guests fought, and the verse that sprung to my mind from The Hunting of the Cheviot,
when Earls Percy and Douglas got into a ding-dong battle around 1424.
They closed full fast on every side,
No slackness there was found.
And many a gallant gentleman,
Lay gasping on the ground…”
John Nolan, a Scotsman now living in Farmington, NH, recently finished his series on “Poets Who Matter” with praise of Anonymous.
Nolan’s ostensible subject is the ongoing search of Rochester, NH for a local Poet Laureate. Between the lines, he recalls how poetry helped him make sense of life as a young Glasgow policeman. Nolan treats both Glasgow and Rochester with humanity and humor,
Recently, the Perseus Project compared our blogworld to an iceberg, with most of its bulk invisible to outsiders. Under the mass of almost-invisible bloggers, I think there’s a much larger group of bloggers-to-be. John Nolan–and I blogged about this before–ought to be up here blogging with the rest of us.
Read the whole series, and see if you don’t agree.
- Poets Who Matter: 1. Omar Khayyam
- Poets Who Matter: 2. John Clare
- Poets Who Matter: 3. John Keats
- Poets Who Matter: 4. Robert Garioch
- Poets Who Matter: 5. Walt Whitman
- Poets Who Matter: 6. Anonymous
1 response so far ↓
1 marcum // Oct 27, 2003 at 3:29 pm
Betsy,
Number six matters more than you imply with the URL. After all, “Anonymous” is responsible for more poetry than any single poet. Classic poems written by “Anonymous” include these witty limericks. Anonymous also holds the record for longevity among poets.