Judi’s Reviews > Poem for the Day One > Status Update

Code Poem for the French Resistance

Leo Marks
(September 24th 1920 — January 15th 2001)

She was executed in Ravensbrück camp. Her story features in the film Carve Her Name With Pride. Leo Marks' exploits in the code war are recounted in his memoirs, Between Silk and Cyanide (HarperCollins, 1998).

Poet and novelist Marcel Proust, author of A la recherché du temps perdu, born in Autreil, Paris, July 10th 1871.

John Heath-Stubbs, editor, critic and poet, was born in Oxford July 9th 1918.

Oxymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley
(August 4th 1792 — July 9th 1822)

1. Shelley and Edward Williams had been keen to get home to their wives — Mary Shelley was still very weak at their boathouse in Lyric from a miscarriage on June 16th (Shelley had prevented his wife from haemorrhaging to death by placing her in a bath of icy water)j.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, a leading poet of the Russian Revolution, was born on July 7th (old style — July 19th new style) 1983 in Georgia

From song of Myself (in Leaves of Grass)

Walt Whitman
(May 31st 1819 — March 26th 1892)

Whitman was renowned as a 'loafer'. "What was Adam, I should like to know, but a loafer?" he asked. "Of all human beings, none equals your genuine, inbred unvarying loafer." He finished the first edition of his Leaves of Grass at the age of 36.

Jean Cocteau, French poet, film director, playwright and opium eater, born July 5th 1889.

Rendezvous

Alan Seeger
(June 22nd 1888 — July 4th 1916)

... In World War I he enlisted in the French Foreign Legion. On this day in 1916, his company went into attack near Belloy-en-Santerre, and, though wounded, he continued urging his men on. His body was found in a shell hole the next day. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre posthumously.

Absence

Elizabeth Jennings
(July 18th 1926 )

...Elizabeth Jennings writes: "When I re-read my past work I can see a development; to such an effect, indeed, that some of them no longer seem to be any part of me. But of course, once a poem is published it ceases to have much to do with oneself. Art is not self-expression while, for me, "confessional poetry' is almost a contradiction in terms."

my love

e.e. cummings
(October 14th 1894 — September 3rd 1962)

On this day in 1917, Cummings wrote to his mother that Paris had "the finest girls God ever allowed to pasture in this fresh earth". A virgin at 22, he became attached to Marie Louise Lallemand, a Parisian whore, who is thought to be associated with his poem 'goodby Betty, don't remember me".