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When I enter the earth I take this sky with me
I am entertained by the Guardian's poem of the week: Nic Aubury, "Decline and Fall."
Trying to compile even a short list of poems about the classical world is fraught, because that way lies a truly endless chain of retellings. I have at least two anthologies that are nothing but reworkings of classical mythology: Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (ed. Deborah DeNicola, 1999) and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, 1996). I see more every month on the internet and many of them are amazing. I could start with Erik Amundsen's "Under the Asphodel" (Mythic Delirium #26, 2012) and come up for air days later without having gotten even so far as Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). So here is another totally incomplete list of poems I like, mostly trying to focus away from myth or at least the direct retelling of it. There will be inevitably a few.
All of H.D.'s collections from Sea Garden (1916) through Red Roses for Bronze (1932) are deeply classical, specifically Greek, a mode she returned to late in life with Helen in Egypt (1961) and Hermetic Definition (1972). New Directions' Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (1986) is a solid, comprehensive collection, including some very good uncollected and/or unpublished material like the cycle A Dead Priestess Speaks and her early war poems. Ignore the biographical essay unless it's been updated, because among other things it gets Bryher's name and most of H.D.'s relationships wrong. I didn't even know Vale Ave existed and I suspect I should find it now.
Christopher Logue's modernist retelling of the Iliad, incomplete at the time of his death—the published installments were War Music (1997), All Day Permanent Red (2004), and Cold Calls (2005)—was as monumental and idiosyncratic a project as it sounds. I find the earlier books more faithful and the later more fragmentary and impressionistic, but the whole thing is wildly anachronistic, densely poetic, neither a translation nor a version in the usual sense, and passages of it convey better than anything except Homeric Greek the strangeness of the world in which the epics are anchored, which was never as historical as the Bronze Age. His description of Thetis' appearance in Book 1 won me over to the original volume.
So many of C.P. Cavafy's poems are set in the varied classical past, I might as well point to his Ποιήματα entire. The first complete translation I read was by Stratis Haviaras, but Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard appear to be the choice of the Cavafy Archive.
Poems credited by either original publication or collection where they can most readily be found. A few more complete collections because they're just that good.
Bryher, Arrow Music (1922)
C.P. Cavafy, "Alexandrian Kings" (Ποιήματα 1897–1933, 1984)
C.P. Cavafy, "In the Month of Athyr" (Ποιήματα 1897–1933, 1984)
Tom Clark, "Baseball and Classicism" (Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1992)
Rosemary Dobson, "Greek Coins" (Over the Frontier, 1978)
Bernardine Evaristo, "Amo Amas Amat" (The Emperor's Babe, 2001)
Phyllis Gotlieb, "Retroactive" and "Kylix Krater Amphora" (Red Blood Black Ink White Paper: New and Selected Poems 1961-2001, 2002)
April Grant, "Roman Shade" (Strange Horizons, January 2014)
Robert Graves, "Instructions to the Orphic Adept" and "Darien" (The Poems of Robert Graves, Chosen by Himself, 1958)
H.D., "Eidolon" (Helen in Egypt, 1961)
H.D., "Helen" (Heliodora and Other Poems, 1924)
A.E. Housman, "The Oracles" (Last Poems, 1922)
Carolyn Kizer, "Semele Recycled" (Cool, Calm & Collected, 2002)
Rudyard Kipling, "Rimini" (Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906)
Rudyard Kipling, "The Roman Centurion's Song" (Three Poems, 1911)
Rika Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
Christopher Logue, "Cold Calls: War Music Continued" (Poetry Magazine, June 2004)
Khaled Mattawa, "East of Carthage: An Idyll" (Amorisco, 2008)
Alice Notley, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011)
Ron Smith, "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca" (Moon Road: Poems, 1986-2005, 2007)
A.E. Stallings, "An Ancient Dog Grave, Unearthed During Construction of the Athens Metro" (Hapax, 2006)
A.E. Stallings, "Implements from the 'Tomb of the Poet'" (Poetry Magzine, February 2001)
Liliana Ursu, "The Song of the Snake-Charmer," "Archeological Incursion," "I Laugh at the Immortals," "In the House Where the Hyacinth Blooms Twice," and "Song for the Spice Seller" (Piața Aurarilor, 1980; translated by Sean Cotter as Goldsmith Market, 2003)
Jo Walton, "The Assumption of St. Jerome" (2006)
Jo Walton, "An Oracle from Dionysos" (2011)
Jo Walton, "Sophoniba" (1997)
A handful. Carthage gets better representation, though.
Trying to compile even a short list of poems about the classical world is fraught, because that way lies a truly endless chain of retellings. I have at least two anthologies that are nothing but reworkings of classical mythology: Orpheus & Company: Contemporary Poems on Greek Mythology (ed. Deborah DeNicola, 1999) and After Ovid: New Metamorphoses (ed. Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, 1996). I see more every month on the internet and many of them are amazing. I could start with Erik Amundsen's "Under the Asphodel" (Mythic Delirium #26, 2012) and come up for air days later without having gotten even so far as Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). So here is another totally incomplete list of poems I like, mostly trying to focus away from myth or at least the direct retelling of it. There will be inevitably a few.
All of H.D.'s collections from Sea Garden (1916) through Red Roses for Bronze (1932) are deeply classical, specifically Greek, a mode she returned to late in life with Helen in Egypt (1961) and Hermetic Definition (1972). New Directions' Collected Poems: 1912–1944 (1986) is a solid, comprehensive collection, including some very good uncollected and/or unpublished material like the cycle A Dead Priestess Speaks and her early war poems. Ignore the biographical essay unless it's been updated, because among other things it gets Bryher's name and most of H.D.'s relationships wrong. I didn't even know Vale Ave existed and I suspect I should find it now.
Christopher Logue's modernist retelling of the Iliad, incomplete at the time of his death—the published installments were War Music (1997), All Day Permanent Red (2004), and Cold Calls (2005)—was as monumental and idiosyncratic a project as it sounds. I find the earlier books more faithful and the later more fragmentary and impressionistic, but the whole thing is wildly anachronistic, densely poetic, neither a translation nor a version in the usual sense, and passages of it convey better than anything except Homeric Greek the strangeness of the world in which the epics are anchored, which was never as historical as the Bronze Age. His description of Thetis' appearance in Book 1 won me over to the original volume.
So many of C.P. Cavafy's poems are set in the varied classical past, I might as well point to his Ποιήματα entire. The first complete translation I read was by Stratis Haviaras, but Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard appear to be the choice of the Cavafy Archive.
Poems credited by either original publication or collection where they can most readily be found. A few more complete collections because they're just that good.
Bryher, Arrow Music (1922)
C.P. Cavafy, "Alexandrian Kings" (Ποιήματα 1897–1933, 1984)
C.P. Cavafy, "In the Month of Athyr" (Ποιήματα 1897–1933, 1984)
Tom Clark, "Baseball and Classicism" (Sleepwalker's Fate: New and Selected Poems, 1992)
Rosemary Dobson, "Greek Coins" (Over the Frontier, 1978)
Bernardine Evaristo, "Amo Amas Amat" (The Emperor's Babe, 2001)
Phyllis Gotlieb, "Retroactive" and "Kylix Krater Amphora" (Red Blood Black Ink White Paper: New and Selected Poems 1961-2001, 2002)
April Grant, "Roman Shade" (Strange Horizons, January 2014)
Robert Graves, "Instructions to the Orphic Adept" and "Darien" (The Poems of Robert Graves, Chosen by Himself, 1958)
H.D., "Eidolon" (Helen in Egypt, 1961)
H.D., "Helen" (Heliodora and Other Poems, 1924)
A.E. Housman, "The Oracles" (Last Poems, 1922)
Carolyn Kizer, "Semele Recycled" (Cool, Calm & Collected, 2002)
Rudyard Kipling, "Rimini" (Puck of Pook's Hill, 1906)
Rudyard Kipling, "The Roman Centurion's Song" (Three Poems, 1911)
Rika Lesser, Etruscan Things (1983)
Christopher Logue, "Cold Calls: War Music Continued" (Poetry Magazine, June 2004)
Khaled Mattawa, "East of Carthage: An Idyll" (Amorisco, 2008)
Alice Notley, Songs and Stories of the Ghouls (2011)
Ron Smith, "Via Appia" and "To Ithaca" (Moon Road: Poems, 1986-2005, 2007)
A.E. Stallings, "An Ancient Dog Grave, Unearthed During Construction of the Athens Metro" (Hapax, 2006)
A.E. Stallings, "Implements from the 'Tomb of the Poet'" (Poetry Magzine, February 2001)
Liliana Ursu, "The Song of the Snake-Charmer," "Archeological Incursion," "I Laugh at the Immortals," "In the House Where the Hyacinth Blooms Twice," and "Song for the Spice Seller" (Piața Aurarilor, 1980; translated by Sean Cotter as Goldsmith Market, 2003)
Jo Walton, "The Assumption of St. Jerome" (2006)
Jo Walton, "An Oracle from Dionysos" (2011)
Jo Walton, "Sophoniba" (1997)
A handful. Carthage gets better representation, though.