'Some Day I Shall Think This Is a Happy Day'

The true Poetry Month, of course, is October, not the imposter April, as dedicated readers already know. It’s a pleasure to read the honor roll of poets born this month:

Wallace Stevens: Oct. 2, 1879

Fulke Greville: Oct. 3, 1554

Flann O’Brien: Oct. 5, 1911

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

P.G. Wodehouse: Oct. 15, 1881

Oscar Wilde: Oct. 16, 1854

Les Murray: Oct. 17, 1938

Yvor Winters: Oct. 17, 1900

A.J. Liebling: Oct. 18, 1904

Sir Thomas Browne: Oct. 19, 1605

Arthur Rimbaud: Oct. 20, 1854

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Oct. 21, 1772

Alphonse De Lamartine: Oct. 21, 1790

Robert Bridges: Oct. 23, 1844

John Berryman, Oct. 25, 1914

Andrew Motion: Oct. 26, 1952

Ivan Turgenev: Oct. 28, 1818

Evelyn Waugh: Oct. 28, 1903

James Boswell: Oct. 29, 1740

Henry Green: Oct. 29, 1905

Zbigniew Herbert: Oct. 29, 1924

Paul Valéry: Oct. 30, 1871

Ezra Pound: Oct. 30, 1885

John Keats: Oct. 31, 1795

Pedants will object: Wodehouse, Liebling and Waugh, among others on the list, wrote prose, not verse. A small-minded quibble. First-rate prose has more in common with good poetry than with most of the free verse published today. The absence of James Whitcomb Riley, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath is not an oversight. Andrew Motion is not on the list because he’s a good poet, which he isn’t, but because he and I were born on the same day in 1952 and I’m a sentimentalist.  

Chaucer died on Oct. 25, 1400 and was the first poet buried in Westminster Abbey. Swift died on Oct. 19, 1745. When Tennyson died on Oct. 6, 1892, 11,000 people applied for tickets to attend his funeral in Westminster Abbey. Ten-thousand were turned down. Kingsley Amis died Oct. 22, 1995, and Anthony Hecht on Oct. 20, 2004. Richard Wilbur died last Oct. 14 at age ninety-six. Edward Thomas, who was born in March and killed in April, wrote “October” in October 1915. It concludes:

“But if this be not happiness, -- who knows?

Some day I shall think this a happy day,

And this mood by the name of melancholy

Shall no more blackened and obscured be.”