In each issue of Mythic Passages, Michael Karlin points you to some of his favorite poems published on the World Wide Web.

We'd like to hear from you, and we'd like to publish some of your comments. Please share thoughts on the poems with michael@mythicjourneys.org.

Sometimes a Man Stands Up During Dinner

By Ranier Maria Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

Ranier Maria Rilke was born in Prague, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), on Dec. 4, 1875.   His first major work, 'The Book of Hours', published in 1905, was written as a reaction to his first trips to Russia. After leaving Russia he stayed briefly in the artists' colony of Worpswede, Germany, and then moved to Paris, where he was commissioned to write a book on Auguste Rodin.

In Paris, Rilke developed the Ding-Gedicht, or "object poem," in which he attempted to capture the essence of a physical object. This style was the basis for his 'New Poems' (1907-08). Other poems include 'Das Marienleben' (1913) and 'Sonnets to Orpheus' (1922). The culmination of Rilke's poetic development was 'Duino Elegies' (1922). In these poems the fears that had been a large part of his life were resolved in his personal aesthetics and statement of the justification of life.

Rilke continued to travel after the publication of these poems, mostly within Switzerland. He died of leukemia on Dec. 29, 1926, in Valmont, Switzerland.

Robert Bly has been called the father of the "men's expressive movement". He authored Iron John, as well as eleven groundbreaking books of poetry, essays, and translations celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling.

The Excitement
By Mark Jarman

Mark Jarman was born June 5, 1952, in Mount Sterling, Kentucky. He earned a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1974 and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1976. He is the author of numerous collections of poetry: Unholy Sonnets (Story Line Press, 2000); Questions for Ecclesiastes , which won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Black Riviera (1990), which won the 1991 Poets' Prize; Far and Away (1985); The Rote Walker (1981); and North Sea (1978). In 1992 he published Iris, a book-length poem.

His awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He is a professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, the soprano Amy Jarman, and their daughters, Claire and Zoë.

Boy at the Window
By Richard Wilbur

Richard Wilbur was born in New York City on March 1, 1921. He graduated with a B.A. from Amherst, where he was editor of the college newspaper, in 1942. Youthful engagements with leftist causes caught the attention of federal investigators when he was in training as a U.S. Army cryptographer, and he was demoted to a front-line infantry position where he saw action in the field in Italy, France and Germany. (When the cryptographer in Wilbur's unit was killed, Wilbur also took over that function.) After demobilization, he continued his studies at Harvard where he obtained an M.A. in 1947, the year his first book was published. He was a member of the prestigious Harvard Fellows and taught there until 1954, when he moved to Wellesley and then to Wesleyan University. At Wesleyan he was instrumental in the founding of the acclaimed Wesleyan University Press poetry series that, from 1959 onward, featured new work by such important young poets as Robert Bly, James Wright, James Dickey, and Richard Howard, as well as such already-established writers as Louis Simpson and Barbara Howes. From Wesleyan he went to Smith as writer-in-residence. In 1987 he was named the second Poet Laureate of the U.S., following Robert Penn Warren.

His first and second books, The Beautiful Changes (1947) and Ceremony (1950), were influential volumes, and Wilbur was widely regarded in the 1950s as a poet no less important than Robert Lowell. His third collection, Things of This World (1956), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Advice to a Prophet (1961) was followed by Walking to Sleep (1969), which was awarded the Bollingen Prize. The Mind-Reader was published in 1976, and a New and Collected Poems in 1987 (with twenty-four new poems).