Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Happy Birthdays

I remember figuring out in college that October, not April, is the true month of poetry. Today, Halloween, is the birthday of John Keats, born Oct. 31, 1795. Here are some others:

Wallace Stevens: Oct. 2, 1879
Flann O’Brien: Oct. 5, 1911
James Whitcomb Riley: Oct. 7, 1853
Marina Tsvetaeva: Oct. 9, 1892
Eugenio Montale: Oct. 12, 1896
E.E. Cummings: Oct. 14, 1894
Publius Vergilius Maro: Oct. 15, 70 BCE
Mikhail Lermontov: Oct. 15, 1814
Oscar Wilde: Oct. 16, 1854
Les Murray: Oct. 17, 1938
Arthur Rimbaud: Oct. 20, 1854
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Oct. 21, 1772
John Berryman, Oct. 25, 1914
Andrew Motion: Oct. 26, 1952
Dylan Thomas: Oct. 27, 1914
Sylvia Plath: Oct. 27, 1932
Zbigniew Herbert: Oct. 29, 1924
Paul Valery: Oct. 30, 1871
Ezra Pound: Oct. 30, 1885

I could have stretched the category “poet” and included Groucho Marx, Art Tatum, Sir Thomas Browne and Evelyn Waugh, but I figured I had already stretched it enough by including Riley, Thomas and Plath.

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