Johnson on Pope
—from The Lives of the Poets
He was protuberant behind, before;Born beautiful, he had grown up a spider;Stature so low, he could not sit at tableLike taller men; in middle life so feebleHe could not dress himself, nor stand uprightWithout a canvas bodice; in the long nightMade servants peevish with his demands for coffee;Trying to make his spider’s legs less skinny,He wore three pair of stockings, which a maidHad to draw on and off; one side was contracted.But his face was not displeasing, his eyes were vivid.He found it very difficult to be cleanOf unappeasable malignity;But in his eyes the shapeless vicious sceneComposed itself; of folly he made beauty.
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- August 26, 2024
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- What Sparks Poetry
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“Johnson on Pope,” from OF NO COUNTRY I KNOW: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS AND TRANSLATIONS by David Ferry.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press.
© 1999 by the University of Chicago.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
David Ferry (1924-2023) was born in Orange, New Jersey. He completed his education at Amherst College and Harvard University and served as a Sergeant in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946 and a professor at Wellesley College for more than thirty-five years.
His books of poetry and translation include Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 2012);The Georgics of Virgil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); His Epistles of Horace: A Translation (2001); Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press, 1999); The Eclogues of Virgil (1999); The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998); Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993); Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992); Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983); On the Way to the Island (1960); and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth’s Major Poems (1959).
Ferry was the recipient of the 2012 National Book Award for Bewilderment. Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award.
Ferry’s other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award, and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. In 1998 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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