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Poetry Urban Legends History

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Here are quick descriptions of each of the previous editions of Poetry Urban Legends Revealed.

To see if they are true or false, you have to click on the link!

1. Oliver St. John Gogarty wrote a poem dedicated to the returning Irish soldiers from the Boer War that contained a hidden, less celebratory, meaning within.

2. The first winner of an Olympic Gold medal for Literature went to a poem written by the creator of the modern Olympics.

3. The famed poet T.S. Eliot came up with the name for Djuna Barnes’ classic novel, Nightwood.

4. Marianne Moore was asked to come up with a name for the brand of car that eventually became known as the Edsel.

5. Some of Shel Silverstein’s poems for Where the Sidewalk Ends and A Light in the Attic originally appeared in the pages of Playboy.

6. Poet Wallace Stevens converted to Catholicism before he died.

7. Thomas Bowdler “bowdlerized” Longfellow’s “Wreck of the Hesperus” by editing “bull” to “gentleman cow.”

8. Dorothy Parker’s ashes sat in a filing cabinet for nearly two decades.

9. Robert Lowell famously responded literally to a joking suggestion by famed poetry professor Allen Tate that Lowell could live in a tent on Tate’s yard.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 19th, 2009 at 2:52 am and is filed under Archives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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