Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
WE ALL have our own landmarks, stand-out passages in the varied terrain of scripture — places that seem set aside or lifted up for us to get our bearings, to be reoriented, blazes marked out on the sometimes mazy trail…
Tag: Poets
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
I WRITE this from small-town America, specifically a place called Rock Hill, in South Carolina, the home town of the artist who is illustrating my Arthurian poems. After spending some time in his studio, we wandered downtown…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
ONCE more, I find myself giving in to the temptation to doom-scroll: to check the news websites too frequently, to listen to the newscasts obsessively, and to oscillate unhealthily between over-stimulated anxiety and a kind…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
RATTY’s famous remark, in The Wind in the Willows, that there is nothing half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats has been something of a watchword for me. It holds true even for what some might consider the…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
March month of “many weathers” wildly comes In hail and snow and rain and threatning hums And floods. . . JOHN CLARE, that close observer and celebrant of the seasons, is, as always, right. The past week or two have, indeed,…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
HOW hard it is, as one wearily enters one’s umpteenth Lent as an adult Christian, to make it real again, to make it new and fresh. And yet Lent itself is precisely about renewal, about rediscovering the deepest roots of one’s…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
I WRITE this in Nashville, towards the end of an American lecture tour, but my thoughts are already straining and yearning towards England, not least because I am, at the time of writing, preparing for a singular event at the…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
THE Peter Jackson films of The Lord of the Rings were so successful, both artistically and commercially, that they have become almost as famous as the books, and people quote lines from the films which are not in the book,…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
A PHRASE of Eliot’s that always haunts me is “distracted from distraction by distraction”, perhaps because, having something of a grasshopper mind, I am constantly distracted. The phrase comes in “Burnt Norton”, the first of…
Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner
AT SOME point in their lives, perhaps in some stark, lightless January of their middle years, the question must occur to every poet: Why am I doing this? What is the point? Certainly, some of the best poets — Milton and…
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