How to Think Like a Poet : The Poets That Made Our World and Why We Need Them

An entertaining guide to history’s most influential and inspiring poets – from Homer to Sappho, and Shakespeare to Frank O’Hara.

How did the greatest poets in history make the world anew? And what can we learn from the magic, the wisdom and the humour of their poetry? From the genius of the Greeks and Romans to the love and metaphysics of the Middle Ages, to the concrete wonder of New York and the Beat Poets of San Francisco, this is the ultimate guide to the greatest writers of the human age, and what they can teach us about how to see the world.

In showing how the great poets lived and worked — and illuminating the gifts of the written word they left us — the poet and poetry teacher Dai George provides an entertaining introduction to how to think like a poet, and how we can weave that thinking into our everyday lives. He addresses questions the great poets have grappled with: What is it to describe the world? How can we express love, grief, or friendship? And how can we rise above the misery of the world and see the beauty in the everyday?

This book paints vivid portraits of a global assortment of great poets throughout history: from Sappho, Juvenal and LiXu, to William Shakespeare and John Donne, to Frank O Hara, Pablo Neruda and Sylvia Plath. George also seeks to re-examine the canon – which has been overwhelmingly Western, white and male – who have long been held up as pillars of the art, and bring to light major figures from other important cultures and communities – including major poets from China, pre-colonial America and Japan.