Starry Solitudes, a collection of inspiring and thought-provoking poetry

By Dianne L. Durante

For five years, I've been sending out a Sunday email with brief comments on art that's inspiring, thought-provoking, skillfully executed, and/or beautiful. Ayn Rand described art as emotional fuel. My goal-and my selfish pleasure! -is to help you find more of that fuel and use it more efficiently. How? By showing you wonderful art and provoking

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dianne L. Durante
• Release date: Jun 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088028827

Dianne L. Durante

At age five, I won my first writing award: a three-foot-long fire truck with an ear-splitting siren. I've been addicted to writing ever since. Today I'm an independent researcher, freelance writer, and lecturer. The challenge of figuring out how ideas and facts fit together, and then sharing what I know with others, clearly and concisely - that's what makes me leap out of bed in the morning. Janson's *History of Art*, lent to me by a high-school art teacher, was my first clue that art was more than the rock-star posters and garden gnomes that I saw in Catawissa, Pennsylvania, and that history wasn't just a series of names, dates, and statistics. Soon afterwards I read Ayn Rand's fiction and nonfiction works, and discovered that art and history - as well as politics, ethics, science, and all fields of human knowledge - are integrated by philosophy. My approach to studying art is based on Rand's *The Romantic Manifesto*. (See my review of it on Amazon.) As an art historian I'm a passionate amateur, and I write for other passionate amateurs. I love looking at art, and thinking about art, and helping other people have a blast looking at it, too. *Outdoor Monuments of Manhattan: A Historical Guide* (New York University Press, 2007), which includes 54 sculptures, was described by Sam Roberts in the *New York Times* as "a perfect walking-tour accompaniment to help New Yorkers and visitors find, identify and better appreciate statues famous and obscure" (1/28/2007). Every week I issue four art-related recommendations to my supporters, which have been collected in *Starry Solitudes* (poetry) and *Sunny Sundays* (painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and more). For more of my works, see https://diannedurantewriter.com/books-essays .

Book preview

Introduction

Why another poetry anthology?

For five years, I’ve been sending out Sunday emails with brief comments on art that’s inspiring, thought-provoking, skillfully executed, and/or beautiful. Ayn Rand described art as emotional fuel. My goal—and my selfish pleasure!—is to help you find more of that fuel and use it more efficiently. How? By showing you wonderful art and provoking you to think about why you enjoy a particular piece ... or don’t.

The thousand or so artworks I’ve recommended include paintings, sculptures, novels, dramas, short stories, architecture, music, dance, film, decorative arts, and more than a hundred poems. Because of my particular goal in writing the Sunday Recommendations, this is a very idiosyncratic collection—not one you’d find in any other anthology. I’ve had very positive reactions to my poetry recommendations, so I’m making ninety-eight of the poems easily available in Starry Solitudes.

The subjects and moods of the poems vary widely, depending on my context and mood when I select material for a particular week. On Valentine’s Day, I look for love poems. When the seasons change, I look for nature-related works. Undertaking a new major project makes me look for work-related poems ... or poems about relaxation, depending on how the project is going. I’ve included a poem that I recited to my daughter for several years when she was young ("Tell Me One Good Thing), and a poem I recite to myself when I need to be reminded that the results of the most recent election are not necessarily the end of the world (Say not the struggle nought availeth"). The poems are divided into sections based on such broad topics, although many of the poems could have fit into two or more sections.

Illustrations

For me, the interaction of literature and visual arts enhances both. Some of the fifty-six illustrations in this volume come from the Sunday Recommendations. Some are from my study of art history, others from my years photographing New York City sculpture and architecture. A few were the result of free association on Google Images. Like the poems, the illustrations are very idiosyncratic choices. They range from Peter Paul Rubens and N.C. Wyeth to Ignaz Gaugengigl and an 1815 cartoon of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Why Starry Solitudes?

Many of us remember poetry only as one of our more boring high-school assignments. The title for this volume is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s "The Land of Story-Books". It’s meant to suggest that reading poetry can be an adventure and a delight.

There, in the night, where none can spy,

All in my hunter’s camp I lie,

And play at books that I have read

Till it is time to go to bed.

These are the hills, these are the woods,

These are my starry solitudes;

And there the river by whose brink

The roaring lions come to drink.

Finding more poetry to love

If you like any poem in this collection, look on the Net for other poems by the author. PoetryFoundation.org is a great place to start if you want to read the most famous works of a particular poet. If their works were published in 1926 or earlier, check for digitized versions on Hathitrust, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg.

If you’re interested in browsing other anthologies after Starry Solitudes, here are my personal favorites.

A Treasury of the World’s Best Loved Poems. Starting small: this 177-page collection ranges from Psalms to Poe and Kipling. (http://amzn.to/2nfiBwA)

A Treasury of the Familiar, ed. Ralph L. Woods. More than 700 pages of prose and poetry, including excerpts from Lincoln, the Bible, Aesop, Tennyson, Sandburg, Yeats, and many, many more. My copy was signed by my mother before she was married, and when I flip it open to p. 382, I can hear my father’s voice reading Abdul A-Bul-Bul A-Mir. Poetry sticks with you. (http://amzn.to/2nNBByl)

The Golden Books Family Treasury of Poetry, ed. Louis Untermeyer. This wonderful illustrated collection includes almost 400 poems by authors ranging from Robert Louis Stevenson, William Blake, and Robert Browning to Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and Ogden Nash. It’s particularly strong on story-poems such as The Highwayman and The Pied Piper of Hamelin. You can find most of the poems for free on the Net, but the illustrations and Untermeyer’s commentary (for example, connecting Tennyson’s Lady Clare with W.S. Gilbert) are worth the price of the book. (http://amzn.to/2oECJIX)

Random House Book of Children’s Poetry, ed. Jack Prelutsky and Arnold Lobel. Another wonderful volume if you love poems that tell a story. (http://amzn.to/2oM6G6y)

If you’re interested in thinking more about a particular poem, I recommend Camille Paglia’s Break Blow Burn (2007). Background: When I was a senior in college, majoring in Classics (Greek and Latin), my advisor strongly suggested I take a 300-level French course in explication de texte. Each week, we were assigned a poem to analyze in detail to the class: word choice, sounds, rhymes, structure, denotations, connotations, and more, wrapping up with a big-picture overview. That course taught me a great deal about approaching poetry in particular and art in general. As a methodology geek, I was fascinated. On the other hand, because my spoken French wasn’t very good, the course dragged my GPA down so that I graduated magna rather than summa cum laude. Guess what? It’s been decades since I cared which cum laude I graduated with, but I use the techniques I learned in that course constantly.

Paglia’s book is as close to a primer in explication de texte as I’ve ever seen in English, and it’s written for laymen, not academics. She chose forty-three poems to discuss in detail, ranging from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. Although I sometimes disliked a particular poem, I always found myself looping back to the beginning of the chapter to reread it with far more interest after finishing Paglia’s comments. Even if you absolutely can’t tolerate modern poets such as Sylvia Plath, chapters 1-20 make reading the book worthwhile. And the final chapter, on Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, is a great ending. The book is about poetry, not politics, but if you’ve read Paglia’s political commentary, you’ll probably recognize some of her ideas. (https://amzn.to/2wqQQmL)

All the poems in Starry Solitudes are worth reading more than once.Think about the content. Read them aloud for the sound. Consider at what stage of the poet’s life they were written and what was happening in the world at the time: then read the poem again with those in mind.

I recommend collecting the poems you most enjoy (from this volume or elsewhere) into a looseleaf binder or a document on your computer, so you can easily find them and reread them. My document, accumulated over twenty-five years or so, runs to two hundred pages! In rereading it, I realized it includes many favorite poems that I haven’t yet used for Sunday Recommendations ... so in a year or two, you can expect a second volume of this collection.

Permissions

I am grateful to authors who granted permission to use their copyrighted works: Quent Cordair, Samantha Reynolds, and Richard Thompson. Including works by a handful of other modern authors seemed likely to require a prohibitive amount of paperwork and permission fees. Therefore, with regret, I haven’t included poems by Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Rosemary Dobson. Translations of works by Victor Hugo and C.P. Cavafy are copyright © 2021 Dianne L. Durante.

Many of the poems included in this anthology are in the public domain, having been published in 1926 or earlier. A few poems published later frequently appear without copyright notices on reputable sites such as PoetryFoundation.org. I’ve assumed those poems are out of copyright. If you know otherwise, please email me.

Dianne L. Durante

January 2022

[e-mail]

PART 1: Aspiration

Be Like the Bird (Soyez comme l’oiseau)

Victor Hugo (1802-1885); this poem 1836

Be like the bird, who

Pausing in his flight

On limb too slight

Feels it give way beneath him

Yet sings

Knowing he has wings.

Soyez comme l’oiseau, posé pour un instant

Sur des rameaux trop frêles,

Qui sent ployer la branche et qui chante pourtant,

Sachant qu’il a des ailes!

––––––––

This is the end of a long poem by Hugo, Dans l’eglise de ***, first published in Les chants du crepuscule, 1836. I first heard this English version (which seems to be anonymous) in Lisa Van Damme’s The Joys of Reading: A Proper Reading Program, Capitalism Magazine (www.capmag.com).

Utagawa Hiroshige, Swallow and Wisteria, mid-1840s. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: MetMuseum.org

Success

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882)

We have not wings, we cannot soar;

But we have feet to scale and climb

By slow degrees, and more and more,

The cloudy summits of our time.

The mighty pyramids of stone

That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,

When nearer seen, and better known,

Are but gigantic flights of stairs.

The distant mountains, that uprear

Their solid bastions to the skies,

Are crossed by pathways, that appear

As we to higher levels rise.

The heights by great men reached and kept

Were not attained by sudden flight,

But they, while their companions slept,

Were toiling upward in the night.

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1818. Hamburger Kunsthalle. Image: Wikipedia

To Your You Being You

Quent Cordair; this poem 2019

To the best that’s within you,

To your lift and your try,

To your will to see dawn,

To your laugh while you cry,

To your hope through the sorrow,

To your float over pain,

To your push through the dark,

To your dance in the rain,

To your rise from the ash,

To your straightening the bend,

To your fire to the lie,

To