A Tapestry of Poetic Resilience

Tuesday 4 February 2025

Eskişehir, Türkiye

On this day, history whispers through words penned by poets, through voices that capture the beauty and ugliness of man’s common struggle against his own mortality.

The air of February 4 is thick with reflections — on fleeting existence, on love and laughter, on the grit of survival and the absurdity of life.

It is a day of resilience, of voices refusing to be silenced.

Today is World Cancer Day, a reminder of the silent battles fought in hospital rooms and within bodies betrayed by their own cells.

It is a day to honor the resilience of those who fight and those who have fought.

World Cancer Day is an international day marked on 4 February to raise awareness of cancer and to encourage its prevention, detection and treatment.

World Cancer Day is led by the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC) to support the goals of the World Cancer Declaration, written in 2008.

The primary goal of World Cancer Day is to significantly reduce illness and death caused by cancer and is an opportunity to rally the international community to end the injustice of preventable suffering from cancer. 

The day is observed by the United Nations.

Above: Flag of the United Nations

World Cancer Day targets misinformation, raises awareness, and reduces stigma. 

Multiple initiatives are run on World Cancer Day to show support for those affected by cancer.

Hundreds of events around the world also take place.

Cancer is a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth with the potential to invade or spread to other parts of the body.

These contrast with benign tumors, which do not spread.

Possible signs and symptoms include a lump, abnormal bleeding, prolonged cough, unexplained weight loss, and a change in bowel movements. 

While these symptoms may indicate cancer, they can also have other causes. 

Over 100 types of cancers affect humans.

Tobacco use is the cause of about 22% of cancer deaths.

Another 10% are due to obesity, poor diet, lack of physical activity or excessive alcohol consumption. 

Other factors include certain infections, exposure to ionizing radiation and environmental pollutants. 

Infection with specific viruses, bacteria and parasites is an environmental factor causing approximately 16% – 18% of cancers worldwide. 

These infectious agents include Helicobacter pylori, hepatitis B, hepatitis C, human papillomavirus infection, Epstein–Barr virus, Human T-lymphotropic virus 1, Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus and Merkel cell polyomavirus. 

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) does not directly cause cancer but it causes immune deficiency that can magnify the risk due to other infections, sometimes up to several thousandfold (in the case of Kaposi’s sarcoma).

Importantly, vaccination against hepatitis B and human papillomavirus have been shown to nearly eliminate risk of cancers caused by these viruses in persons successfully vaccinated prior to infection.

These environmental factors act, at least partly, by changing the genes of a cell. 

Typically, many genetic changes are required before cancer develops.

Approximately 5% – 10% of cancers are due to inherited genetic defects.

Cancer can be detected by certain signs and symptoms or screening tests. 

It is then typically further investigated by medical imaging and confirmed by biopsy.

The risk of developing certain cancers can be reduced by not smoking, maintaining a healthy weight, limiting alcohol intake, eating plenty of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains, vaccination against certain infectious diseases, limiting consumption of processed meat and red meat, and limiting exposure to direct sunlight.

Early detection through screening is useful for cervical and colorectal cancer. 

The benefits of screening for breast cancer are controversial. 

Cancer is often treated with some combination of radiation therapy, surgery, chemotherapy and targeted therapy. 

More personalized therapies that harness a patient’s immune system are emerging in the field of cancer immunotherapy. 

Pain and symptom management are an important part of care.

Palliative care is particularly important in people with advanced disease. 

The chance of survival depends on the type of cancer and extent of disease at the start of treatment. 

In children under 15 at diagnosis, the five-year survival rate in the developed world is on average 80%.

For cancer in the United States, the average five-year survival rate is 66% for all ages.

Above: Flag of the United States of America

In 2015, about 90.5 million people worldwide had cancer.

In 2019, annual cancer cases grew by 23.6 million people.

There were 10 million deaths worldwide, representing over the previous decade increases of 26% and 21%, respectively.

Above: Share of cancer deaths attributed to smoking

The most common types of cancer in males are lung cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer and stomach cancer. 

In females, the most common types are breast cancer, colorectal cancer, lung cancer, and cervical cancer. 

If skin cancer other than melanoma were included in total new cancer cases each year, it would account for around 40% of cases. 

In children, acute lymphoblastic leukemia and brain tumors are most common, except in Africa, where non-Hodgkin lymphoma occurs more often. 

In 2012, about 165,000 children under 15 years of age were diagnosed with cancer. 

The risk of cancer increases significantly with age, and many cancers occur more commonly in developed countries. 

Rates are increasing as more people live to an old age and as lifestyle changes occur in the developing world. 

The global total economic costs of cancer were estimated at US$1.16 trillion (equivalent to $1.62 trillion in 2023) per year as of 2010.

It is also the International Day of Human Fraternity, calling for unity in a fractured world, for the recognition that beyond faiths and borders, there is something deeply, irrevocably shared among us.

The International Day of Human Fraternity was established by the United Nations General Assembly on 21 December 2020, with resolution 75/200 as a way to promote greater cultural and religious tolerance. 

With this resolution, which was co-facilitated by Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations invited all its member states and other international organizations to observe the International Day of Human Fraternity annually on 4 February.

Celebrations of the International Day of Human Fraternity include events attended by UN member states, religious leaders and civil society representatives along with the Zayed Award for Human Fraternity, which recognizes individuals or entities anywhere in the world for their profound contributions to human fraternity.

Since it was celebrated for the first time on 4 February 2021, the International Day of Human Fraternity has received endorsements from different world leaders. 

Cancer has not yet laid its hand upon me, but it has shaped the very contours of my life.

It has stolen the breath from my mother, my foster parents, my friends.

One of my dearest, born just five days apart from me, now exists only in memory.

I know that life must end, but the acceptance of this reality daunts me.

The extreme pain, the specter of looming oblivion, the helplessness, the loss of dignity, the search for meaning — how does one capture these in words?

There is anger.

There is sorrow.

There is compassion.

There is fear.

There is a sense of rage against an undefinable injustice.

I wish Death were physical, that it could be wrestled like Jacob’s angel.

Above: Jacob wrestling with the angel, Gustav Doré (1855)

I seek calm where storms toss.

Is life’s meaning merely that it ends?

Are we merely born to die?

Above: Still Life with a Skull, Philippe de Champaigne (1671)

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Above: Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914 – 1953)

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross speaks of the stages of grief, that it will eventually cease.

According to the model of the five stages of grief, or the Kübler-Ross model, those experiencing sudden grief following an abrupt realization (shock) go through five emotions: 

• denial
• anger
• bargaining
• depression
• acceptance.

Above: Swiss-born American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

But it seems just as sorrow subsides, the scythe knocks upon another door.

I do not weep, for I fear the torrent that may be released.

The ache remains.

Where is the logic of life when it is so callously stolen?

Why love when loss is inevitable?

Words are whispers, mere miserable monuments of musings inexpressible.

It is said that there is a God, and the heart yearns to believe, but the mind protests — the compassionate, deliberate tapestry of existence seems at odds with the random savagery of death.

Above: The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (1511)

I grieve and I know not how to stop.

I seek out joy and become joy itself, for joy in living is revenge against dying.

The Buddhists suggest we are all fools, believing that death will elude us for ages to come, only to cry out that we do not deserve destruction when merit has nothing to do with fate.

Above. The Kamakura Daibutsu, a 13th-century bronze statue of the Buddha Amitābha in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan

Oh, to be spared the longings of logic where randomness reigns!

Love is a fuzzy logic.

We love, knowing there will be loss.

We live and struggle for life, knowing we will fail and fall.

Such wonderful fools we mortals are!

If mankind would devote the fortunes it has spent on death and instead commit itself to the defiance of disease, humanity might be spared a modicum of sorrow.

What fools are they who drive men to their deaths for an acre of land and an increase of income.

Life is a riddle.

Above: The Thinker, Auguste Rodin (1904)

My only defense is gratitude for the moment.

Now is a gift.

That is why it is called the Present.

Each of these poets, born on this day, scattered across centuries and continents, bore witness to the human condition in their own way:

• Hans Assmann (1646), a baroque poet, weaved gallant and melancholic themes, reflecting the fleeting nature of life, the transience of beauty, and the inevitability of death.
  “Ach, wie nichtig, ach, wie flüchtig ist der Menschen Leben!“
  (“Oh, how futile, oh, how fleeting is human life!“)

Above: Family von Abschatz coat of arms

Hans Erasmus Aßmann, Freiherr von Abschatz (4 February 1646 – 22 April 1699) was a German statesman and poet.

Abschatz was born at Wierzbnica in Lower Silesia in the Bohemian crown lands of the Holy Roman Empire.

Above: Wierzbnica, Poland

Even though his parents died early, Abschatz attended college in Legnica.

Above: Legnica, Poland

He then studied law at the universities of Strasbourg and Leyden.

Above: Cathedral de Notre Dame, Strasbourg, France

Above: Leiden, Netherlands

This was followed by a three-year travel to Belgium, France and Italy.

Returning to Silesia at the age of 23, he assumed the administration of his estate and married Anna von Hund in 1669.

His financial condition was favorable and his private life fortunate, only disturbed by the death of few close relatives.

Above: Hans Erasmus Aßmann

With the death of the last Silesian Piast (Duke George William) and the annexation of Silesia to Austria, the talent he showed in the administration of his manors led Abschatz to enter political life.

Above: George William, Duke of Liegnitz (1660 – 1675)

Aßmann was twice a representative to the imperial court at Vienna:

• the first time as a syndic for the Duchy of Liegnitz
• the second time as a representative for all Silesian lands

Above: Wien (Vienna), Österreich (Austria)

Emperor Leopold I made him a Baron.

Above: Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (1640 – 1705)

In 1679, Abschatz was elected to be a permanent deputy of Legnica to the Diet of the Silesian sovereigns (the Fürstentage in Breslau).

Through his public service, he gained the respect of his fellow countrymen and acquired what he once claimed to be the highest tribute to a life’s work — an inscription on his tombstone saying he was an honest man in his fatherland.

Today, Abschatz is notable by the very fact that he — a nobleman — was interested in poetry at all.

Even as a high school student, Abschatz showed poetic talent in school performances.

In addition, he wrote love poems between 1664 and 1668, which were later published under the title “Anemons and Adonis Flowers“.

As a poet, Abschatz, who also wrote under the pseudonym Hans Erasmus Aßmann, was known only to a small circle of friends and colleagues.

At the time of his death in 1699, only a translation as a complete work had been printed.

His own poems had only appeared sporadically in the first volumes of the Neukirch collection (1695 – 1727).

Nevertheless, Abschatz’s poems, sometimes relatively simple and written in a popular tone, were highly valued.  

Christian Gryphius finally compiled the poems and published them together with a detailed foreword (Ehren-Gedächtniss).

This collection includes 59 religious poems under the heading Himmelschlüssel or Geistliche Gedichte.

Several of these poems, which are effective through “simple piety” were included in the hymn books, including the death hymns Now I have overcome and Lord, the hour has dawned.

Abschatz’ poem Reflection on a Fifty-Year Life can be considered an autobiography because of the realistic descriptions it contains.

“Above all, his contemporaries saw in the fact that a nobleman took such a position on poetry, a favorable change in literary conditions, through which Germany would now emulate foreign countries, especially France and England.

He himself also repeatedly indicated that he wanted to influence his peers in this sense:

The nobility without personal merit was an empty house built on someone else’s land.“

At that time, it was seen as a sign of change in the attitude towards literature and signaled that Germany could keep pace with the literary development of France and England.

He also alluded to his hopes in this direction.

He is quoted that:

Nobility without personal merit is nothing but an empty house on foreign grounds.

And while it is at first assigned with the governmental and military affairs, it is only the blossom of his mind which can grant to it the highest fame.“

• Carl Bellman (1740), Sweden’s troubadour, sang of taverns, love, and the human comedy, his verses flowing like the drinks he so often celebrated — finding joy in the ephemeral, music in the mundane.
  “Jo, jo, jag lever än, fast jorden snurrar.“
  (“Yes, yes, I still live, though the world spins.“)

Carl Michael Bellman (4 February 1740 – 11 February 1795) was a Swedish songwriter, composer, musician, poet, and entertainer.

He is a central figure in the Swedish song tradition and remains a powerful influence in Swedish music, as well as in Scandinavian literature, to this day.

He has been compared to Shakespeare, Beethoven, Mozart, and Hogarth, but his gift, using elegantly rococo classical references in comic contrast to sordid drinking and prostitution — at once regretted and celebrated in song — is unique.

Bellman is best known for two collections of poems set to music, Fredman’s epistles (Fredmans epistlar) and Fredman’s songs (Fredmans sånger).

Each consists of about 70 songs.

The general theme is drinking, but the songs “most ingeniously” combine words and music to express feelings and moods ranging from humorous to elegiac, romantic to satirical.

Bellman’s patrons included King Gustav III of Sweden, who called him a master improviser.

Bellman’s songs continue to be performed and recorded by musicians from Scandinavia and in other languages, including English, French, German, Italian, and Russian. Several of his songs including Gubben Noak and Fjäriln vingad are known by heart by many Swedes. 

His legacy further includes a museum in Stockholm and a society that fosters interest in him and his work.

Above: Carl Michael Bellman

Carl Michael Bellman was born on 4 February 1740 in the Stora Daurerska house, which was one of the finest in the Södermalm district of Stockholm.

The house was the property of his maternal grandmother, Catharina von Santen, who had brought up his father, orphaned as a small child.

Carl Michael’s parents were Johan Arndt Bellman, a civil servant, and Catharina Hermonia, daughter of the priest of the local Maria parish.

Her family was wholly Swedish, whereas Johan’s family had German origins:

They had come from Bremen in about 1660.

Above: Bellman’s birthplace, Stora Daurerska house, Stockholm, Sweden

When Carl Michael was four the family moved to a smaller, single storey dwelling called the Lilla Daurerska house.

He briefly went to a local school, but was educated mainly by private tutors.

He was the eldest of 15 children who lived long enough for their births to be registered.

His parents had intended him to become a priest, but he fell ill with a fever, and on recovering found he could express any thought in rhyming verse.

His parents appointed a tutor called Ennes who Bellman called “a genius“.

Bellman was taught French, German, Italian, English and Latin.

He read Horace (65 – 8 BC) and Boileau.

Above: Bronze medallion depicting Horace

Above: French poet Nicholas Boileau-Despréaux (1636 – 1711)

Ennes taught him to write poetry and to translate French and German hymns.

He was familiar with stories from the Bible including the Apocrypha, many of which found their way into the songs he composed in later life.

However, expenses including the Swedish tradition of hospitality left the family with no money to start him off in life with a journey to the south of Europe, such as to Spain to visit his uncle, Jacob Martin Bellman, who was the Swedish Consul in Cádiz.

Above: Cádiz, España (Spain)

Deep in debt, at the end of 1757 the family sent Carl Michael to Sweden’s central bank Riksbanken as an unpaid trainee.

He had no aptitude for numbers, instead discovering the taverns and brothels which were to figure so largely in his songs.

As the banking career was not working out – and as trainees were (after a period with a relaxed regime) again required to sit an exam, for which Bellman was ill-equipped – he took a break in 1758, going to Uppsala University, where Linnaeus was professor of botany.

Above: Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus (aka Carl von Linné)(1707-78)

The idea of attending lectures was no more congenial than banking, and he stayed only one term.

One of his songs records that:

“He contemplated Uppsala — the beer stung his mouth — love distracted his wits.”

However, he met young men from wealthy and noble families, went drinking with them, and started to entertain them with his songs.

Bellman returned to the bank job, and seems quickly to have fallen into financial difficulty:

“A jungle of debts, sureties and bondsmen began to proliferate around him.”

The character of bailiff Blomberg appears in his songs, constantly trying to track down debtors and seize all their property.

The law allowed the bankrupt only one way to escape from debtors’ prison:

To leave Sweden.

Above: Images of Uppsala, Sverige (Sweden)

In 1763, Bellman ran away to Norway.

From the safety of Halden he writes to the Council applying first for a passport, and then for a safe-conduct, both of which were granted.

Above: Halden, Norway

Meanwhile, his father had first mortgaged the Lilla Daurerska house, and then sold it:

The family’s finances were no better than his own.

Even worse, by April 1764 the Bank had become tired of the riotous behaviour of its young men:

Its investigations showed that Bellman had been the ringleader, leading them (the Bank wrote) into “gambling, masquerades, picnics and suchlike“.

Bellman resigned, his safe banking career at an end.

Above: Riksbankshuset, Stockholm, Sweden

In 1765, Bellman’s parents died.

Deeply moved, he wrote a religious poem.

Then his fortunes improved:

Someone found him a job, first in the Office of Manufactures, then in the Customs, and he was able once again to live happily in Stockholm, observing the people of the city, with at least a modest salary. 

In 1768, his life’s work as we now know it got under way:

Bellman had begun to compose an entirely new sort of song.

A genre which ‘had no model and can have no successors‘ (Kellgren), these songs were to grow swiftly in number until they made up the great work on which Bellman’s reputation as a poet chiefly rests.

Above: The start of Fredman’s Epistle No. 23, “Alas, thou my mother“. To a graceful minuet tune, Fredman, lying drunk in the gutter outside the Crawl-in tavern, “a summer night in the year 1768″, blames his mother for his conception; but a morning visit to the tavern revives his spirits.

Bellman mostly played the cittern, becoming the most famous player of this instrument in Sweden.

His portrait by Per Krafft shows him playing an oval instrument with twelve strings, arranged as six pairs. 

Above: Carl Michael Bellman, Per Krafft the Elder (1778)

His first songs were “parody songs“, a common form of entertainment at the time.

Between 1769 and 1773, Bellman wrote 65 of 82 of his Epistles, as well as many poems.

He attempted to publish the poems in 1772, but was unable to obtain the permission of the King, Gustav III, as a political coup intervened.

Above: Swedish King Gustav III (1746 – 1792)

He finally managed to obtain the permission in 1774, but soon discovered that the cost of printing, especially as he was determined to publish the sheet music alongside the text, was prohibitive given his ruinous finances, and he was forced to put off his plans. 

Above: The Stockholm house where Bellman lived from 1770 to 1774

In 1776, the King gave him a sinecure job as secretary to the national lottery.

This supported him for the rest of his life.

On 19 December 1777, at the age of 37, he married the 22-year-old Lovisa Grönlund in Klara Church.

Above: Klara Kyrka, Stockholm, Sweden

They had four children, Gustav, Elis, Karl, and Adolf.

Elis died young. 

Throughout his life, but especially during the 1770s, Bellman also wrote religious poetry, seeing no conflict with his bacchanalian works.

He published collections of his religious poems in 1781 and 1787. 

He wrote some ten plays (none with particularly strong plots) as divertimentos, some of them later serving as entertainments at the royal court.

The plays fill Volume 6 of his collected works. 

In 1783, Bellman brought out The Temple of Bacchus (Bacchi Tempel), perhaps hoping to establish his reputation as a poet, rather than the merry entertainer that he was in fact known as at the time, but he always stood out in people’s minds as unique, a different kind of writer and performer.

Bellman’s main works are the 82 Fredman’s epistles (Fredmans epistlar, 1790) and the 65 Fredman’s songs (Fredmans sånger, 1791).

Their themes include the pleasures of drunkenness and sex.

Against this backdrop, Bellman deals with themes of love, death, and the transitoriness of life.

The settings of his songs reflect life in 18th-century Stockholm, but often refer to Greek and Roman mythological characters such as the goddess of love, Venus (or her Swedish equivalent, Fröja), Neptune and his retinue of water-nymphs, the love-god Cupid, the ferryman Charon and Bacchus, the god of wine and pleasure.

Above: Venus statue, Capitoline, Roma (Rome), Italia (Italy)

Above: Triumph of Neptune standing on a chariot pulled by two sea horses

Above: Cupid statue, Capitoline Museum, Rome

Above: Charon prepares to receive the shade of a youth into his skiff. The ferryman leans on his pole and is surrounded by the reeds of the river Acheron (one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld).

Above: Bacchus extending a drinking cup

Many of Fredman’s Epistles are peopled by a cast which includes the clockmaker Jean Fredman, the prostitute or “nymph” Ulla Winblad, the alcoholic ex-soldier Movitz, and Father Berg, a virtuoso on several instruments.

Some of these were based on living models, others probably not.

Ulla Winblad was widely believed to have been closely based on Maria Kristina Kiellström, though the real woman, a silk worker once arrested for alleged prostitution, was not the ideal romantic figure of Bellman’s songs. 

Fredman’s songs also include Old Testament figures such as Noah and Judith.

Above: Mosaic of Noah

Above: Judith with the Head of Holophernes, by Cristofano Allori (1613) – Judith, a Jewish widow uses her beauty and charm to kill an Assyrian general who has besieged her city.

Bellman achieved his effects of rococo elegance and humour through precisely organised incongruity.

For example, Epistle 25, “Blåsen nu alla!” (All blow now!), begins with Venus crossing the water, as in François Boucher’s Triumph of Venus, but when she disembarks, Bellman transforms her into a lustful Ulla Winblad.

Above: The Triumph of Venus, François Boucher (1740)

Similarly, the ornate and civilized minuet melody of “Ack du min Moder” (Alas, thou my mother) contrasts with the text:

Fredman is lying with a hangover in the gutter outside a tavern, complaining bitterly about life. 

Ulla Winblad (“vineleaf“) recurs through the Epistles.

Britten Austin comments that:

Ulla is at once a nymph of the taverns and a goddess of a rococo universe of graceful and hot imaginings.

The songs are “most ingeniously” set to music, the melodies accentuated by the bold construction of music, word pictures and choice of words, while the music brings out a hidden dimension not seen if the words are simply read as verse. 

The poems themselves, far from being the brilliant improvisations that they appear, are striking in their “formal virtuosity“.

They may be drinking songs in name, but in structure they are tightly woven into a precise metre, situating the “frenzied bacchanalia within a strict and decorous rococo frame.” 

Above: Start of Fredman’s Song 21, “Så lunka vi så småningom” (So we gradually amble). March 1791. The song refers to “Bacchus’s tumult“. The gravediggers discuss whether the grave is too deep, taking swigs from a bottle of brännvin.

The musicologist James Massengale writes that the technique of reusing tunes in musical parody had already been overused and had fallen into disrepute by Bellman’s time, just as his subject matter was initially looked down on.

Despite this, Massengale argues:

“Bellman chose to perfect his musical-poetic vehicle. He refers to the result … not as ‘parody’ but as ‘den muçiska Poesien‘, [musical poetry] …

Bellman’s exceptional case, then, is that of a poetic genius who worked with an art form which in the hands of others was usually insignificant.“

Massengale observes that Bellman was “fully aware of the complexity of the musical-poetic problem; his poems were not simply talented improvisations” and points out that Bellman was “also interested in concealing this complexity“, with the discrepancies between the music and the poetry “apparently resolved“.

Bellman was a gifted entertainer and mimic.

He was able to:

Go into a room apart and behind a half-open door mimic twenty or thirty people at the same time, a crowd pushing its way on to one of the Djurgården ferries, perhaps, or the uproarious atmosphere of a seaman’s tavern.”

Above: Djurgarden Island, Stockholm, Sweden

The illusion was so startling, his listeners could have sworn a mob of ‘shoe-polishers, customs spies, seamen, coalmen, washerwomen, herring packers, tailors and bird-catchers’ had burst into the next room.“

Above: Statue of Carl Bellman

In 1790, the Swedish Academy awarded Bellman its annual Lundblad prize of 50 Riksdaler for the most interesting piece of literature of the year.

Although Fredman’s Epistles was neither exactly literature as understood by the academy, nor meeting the standards of elegant taste, the poet and critic Johan Henric Kellgren and the King ensured that Bellman won the prize.

Above: Logo of the Swedish Academy

After the assassination of the King at the Stockholm Opera in 1792, support for the liberal arts was withdrawn.

Above: The Royal Swedish Opera House, Stockholm, Sweden

Bellman, already in poor health from alcoholism, went into decline, drinking increasingly heavily.

His drinking very likely contributed to his gout, which troubled him badly in 1790.

He also caught tuberculosis:

The disease had already killed his mother, and by the winter of 1792, he was seriously ill.

As well as being ill, he was imprisoned — after struggling with debts and haunted by the threat of ruin and imprisonment all his life — “for a wretchedly small debt of 150 Rdr“.

The rumour was that a former Customs colleague, E. G. Nobelius, had had his advances to Louise Bellman rejected, and in revenge had sued Bellman for the debt, knowing he was penniless:

He owed a total of almost 4,000 Riksdaler.

On 11 February 1795, he died in his sleep in his house in Gamla Kungsholmsbrogatan.

He was buried in Klara churchyard with no gravestone, its location now unknown.

The Swedish Academy belatedly placed a memorial in the churchyard in 1851, complete with a bronze medallion by Johan Tobias Sergel.

Above: Bellman bronze medallion

Swedish schoolchildren tell Bellman jokes about a person named Bellman, an antihero or modern-day trickster with little or no connection to the poet.

The first known Bellman joke is in a book from 1835, which quoted a letter written in 1808 by a contemporary of Bellman.

Bellman rarely owned more than one coat.

Once when King Gustav met him in the street he was wearing no more than a nightdress, at which the King said:

“But my dear Bellman, you look so ill-clad“, to which he bowed and replied:

“I humbly assure your Majesty that I have the whole of my wardrobe on me.“

19th-century Bellman jokes were told by adults and focused on Bellman’s life at court.

They often related to sex.

In the 20th century, the ‘Bellman‘ character became generic, the jokes were told by schoolchildren, and often related to bodily functions.

The jokes have been studied by anthropologists and psychologists since the 1950s.

Above: Sketch of Carl Michael Bellman

Stora Henriksvik, also called the Bellman Museum (Bellmanmuseet) for its small permanent Bellman exhibition, celebrates his life and work with paintings, replica objects and a beachside café in a 17th-century Stockholm house.

The place, beside the beach at Långholm, was in Bellman’s time called Lilla Sjötullen (the small lake customs house) where farmers from Lake Mälaren had to pay a toll on the goods they were taking to market in Stockholm’s Gamla stan.

The place is mentioned in Epistle No. 48, Solen glimmar blank och trind.

Above: Bellmanmuseet, Långholm, Sweden

E. J. Pratt (1892), a Canadian giant, captured the grandeur of nature and the grit of human struggle, his modern epics chronicling the battles against forces greater than oneself.
“Give me the life of the mind that dreads
No storm of the senses, no babel of words.“
— from The Titanic, reflecting on human defiance in the face of overwhelming forces.

Above: E. J. Pratt

Edwin John Dove Pratt (February 4, 1882 – April 26, 1964), who published as E. J. Pratt, was a Canadian poet. 

Originally from Newfoundland, Pratt lived most of his life in Toronto, Ontario.

A three-time winner of the country’s Governor General’s Award for poetry, he has been called “the foremost Canadian poet of the first half of the century.”

Above: Flag of Canada

EJ Pratt was born Edwin John Dove Pratt in Western Bay, Newfoundland, on February 4, 1882.

He was brought up in a variety of Newfoundland communities as his father John Pratt was posted around the colony as a Methodist minister.

Above: Western Bay Lighthouse

John Pratt was originally a lead miner from Old Gang mines in Gunnerside – a village in North Yorkshire, England.

Above: Gunnerside, England

In the 1850s he became a Methodist pastor and immigrated to Newfoundland and settled down with Fanny Knight, a daughter of Capt. William Chancey Knight.

EJ Pratt and his seven siblings were under strict control of their father, who had high expectations of all of them.

While John was a strict and stern father, who had firm authority with which he ruled his family, Edwin and his siblings got a bit of a break when his father was gone on pastoral rounds, since their mother was very different in temperament from her husband.

“Fanny Pratt was easy-going where John was careful and exacting, lenient and forbearing where he was strict and inflexible, soft hearted where he was hard-headed – she inevitably had a closer, more comradely relationship with the children.

Raised in a less rigoristic household than he, she was prepared to take her children for what they were, make allowances for their fallen natures, and generally overlook their innocent iniquities” 

E.J. Pratt graduated from Newfoundland’s Methodist College in St. John’s in 1901. 

Like his father he became a candidate for the Methodist ministry, in 1904.

Above: Images of St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada

He served a three-year probation before entering Victoria College of the University of Toronto.

He studied psychology and theology, receiving his BA in 1911 and his Bachelor of Divinity in 1913.

Above: Logo of Victoria College, University of Toronto, Canada

Pratt married fellow Victoria College student Viola Whitney, herself a writer, in 1918.

They had one daughter, Claire Pratt, who also became a writer and poet.

Above: Claire Pratt (1921 – 1995)

Pratt was ordained as a minister, in 1913, and served as an Assistant Minister in Streetsville, Ontario, until 1920.

Above: Streetsville, Ontario, Canada

Also in 1913, he joined the University of Toronto as a lecturer in psychology.

As well, he continued to take classes, receiving his PhD in 1917.

Pratt was invited by Pelham Edgar in 1920 to switch to the University’s faculty of English, where he became a professor in 1930 and a Senior Professor in 1938.

He taught English literature at Victoria College until his retirement in 1953.

Above: Logo of the University of Toronto

Pratt’s first published poem was “A Poem on the May examinations“, printed in Acta Victoriana in 1909 when he was a student.

Above: Logo of Acta Victoriana

In 1917 he privately published a long poem, Rachel: A Sea Story of Newfoundland. 

He then spent two years working on a verse drama, Clay, which he ended by burning (except for one copy which Mrs. Pratt managed to save).

It was only in 1923 that Pratt’s first commercial poetry collection, Newfoundland Verse, was released. 

It contains “A Fragment of a Story“, the only piece of Clay that Pratt ever published, and the conclusion to Rachel. 

Newfoundland Verse (1923), is frequently archaic in diction, and reflects a pietistic and sometimes preciously lyrical sensibility of late-Romantic derivation, characteristics that may account for Pratt’s reprinting less than half these poems in his Collected Poems (1958).

The most genuine feeling is expressed in humorous and sympathetic portraits of Newfoundland characters, and in the creation of an elegiac mood in poems concerning sea tragedies or Great War losses.

The sea, which on the one hand provides ‘the bread of life’ and on the other represents ‘the waters of death’, is a central element as setting, subject, and creator of mood.

With illustrations by Group of Seven member Frederick Varley, Newfoundland Verse proved to be Pratt’s “breakthrough collection“.

He would publish 18 more books of poetry in his lifetime. 

Recognition came with the narrative poems The Witches’ Brew (1925), Titans (1926), and The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), and though he published a substantial body of lyric verse, it is as a narrative poet that Pratt is remembered.

“Pratt’s poetry frequently reflects his Newfoundland background, though specific references to it appear in relatively few poems, mostly in Newfoundland Verse,” says The Canadian Encyclopedia.

“But the sea and maritime life are central to many of his poems, both short and long, such as “The Cachalot” (1926), (describing duels between a whale and its foes, a giant squid and a whaling ship and crew), The Roosevelt and the Antinoe (1930), (recounting the heroic rescue of the crew of a sinking freighter in a winter hurricane), The Titanic (1935), (an ironic retelling of a well-known marine tragedy) and Behind the Log (1947), (the dramatic story of the North Atlantic convoys during World War II.“

Another constant motif in Pratt’s writing was evolution.

“Pratt’s work is filled with images of primitive nature and evolutionary history,” wrote literary critic Peter Buitenhuis.

“It seemed instinctive to him to write of molluscs, of cetacean and cephalopod, of Java and Piltdown Man.

The evolutionary process early became and always remained the central metaphor of Pratt’s work.” 

He added that evolution provided Pratt “the solid framework within which he could achieve an epic style” and also “gave him the themes for his best lyrics“.

Pratt founded Canadian Poetry Magazine in 1935, and served as its first editor until 1943. 

He published 10 poems in the 1936 “milestone selection of modernist verse,” New Provinces.

In 1937, with war on the horizon, Pratt wrote an anti-war poem, “The Fable of the Goats“, which became the title poem of his next volume. The Fable of the Goats and Other Poems, which included his classic free-verse poem “Silences” won him his first Governor General’s Award.

Pratt returned to Canadian history in 1940 to write Brébeuf and his Brethren, a blank-verse epic on the mission of Jean de Brébeuf and his seven fellow Jesuits, the North American Martyrs, to the Hurons in the 17th century, their founding of Sainte-Marie-among-the-Hurons and their eventual martyrdom by the Iroquois.

Above: The North American Martyrs – René Goupil (1608 – 1642), Isaac Jogues (1607 – 1646), Jean de Lalande (d. 1646), Antoine Daniel (1601 – 1648), Jean de Brébeuf, Gabriel Lalemant (1610 – 1649), Charles Garnier (1606 – 1649) and Noël Chabanel (1613 – 1649)

The Canadian Martyrs (Martyrs canadiens), also known as the North American Martyrs (Saints martyrs canadiens), were eight Jesuit missionaries from Sainte-Marie among the Hurons.

They were ritually tortured and killed on various dates in the mid-17th century, during the warfare between the Iroquioan tribes the Mohawk and the Huron.

They have subsequently been canonized and venerated as martyrs by the Catholic Church.

Above: Saint Marie among the Hurons, Midland, Ontario, Canada

“Pratt’s research-oriented methodology is made clear in the precise diction and detailed, documentary-style recounting of events and observation in this, his first attempt to write a national epic, but in his ethnocentrism Pratt presents the Jesuit priests as an enclave of civilization beleaguered by savages.” 

Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye has said that Brébeuf expresses “the central tragic theme of the Canadian imagination“.

Above: French Jesuit missionary Jean de Brébeuf (1593 – 1649)

Expounding on that theme in 1943, in a review essay of A.J.M. Smith’s anthology The Book of Canadian Poetry, Frye stated that, in Canadian poetry:

“The unconscious horror of nature and the subconscious horrors of the mind thus coincide:

This amalgamation is the basis of symbolism on which nearly all Pratt’s poetry is founded.

The fumbling and clumsy monsters of his “Pliocene Armageddon“, who are simply incarnate wills to mutual destruction, are the same monsters that beget Nazism and inspire “The Fable of the Goats“.

Civilized life is seen geologically as merely one clock-tick in eons of ferocity.

The waste of life in the death of the Cachalot and the waste of courage and sanctity in the killing of the Jesuit missionaries are tragedies of a unique kind in modern poetry:

Like the tragedy of Job, they seem to move upward to a vision of a monstrous Leviathan, a power of chaotic nihilism which is “king over all the children of pride“.

By the time Brébeuf was published the war had begun.

“In his next four volumes, Pratt returned to themes of patriotism and violence.

Sea poetry merges with war poetry in Dunkirk (1941), which recounts the epic rescue of British forces while also emphasizing its democratic nature.

Language plays a pivotal role as Churchill’s call inspires the miraculous deliverance.

The title poem in Still Life and Other Verse (1943) satirizes poets who ignore the destruction, the still life, all about them in wartime.

Other poems include ‘The Radio in the Ivory Tower‘, which shows isolation from world events to be impossible,’The Submarine,’ which highlights the atavism of modern warfare by treating the submarine as a shark, and ‘Come Away, Death,’ which personifies death to show its new horrors in modern times.“

Still Life and Other Verse included another poem, “The Truant” which Frye later called “the greatest poem in Canadian literature“. 

In “The Truant“, a “somewhat comic deity, who speaks in evolutionary terms and metaphors, has man hauled before him to be punished for messing up the grand evolving scheme of things. Cheeky genus homo, instead of being duly cowed by the Great Panjandrum, points out that He is largely man’s invention in any case.”

Says Buitenhuis:

“The poem is too simplistic to be convincing, but is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand Pratt’s thought.”

Pratt’s next book, They are Returning (1945) celebrates the anticipated end of the war, but also introduces one of the first treatments in literature of the concentration camps.

And retrospectively, Behind the Log (1947) commemorates the wartime role of the Royal Canadian Navy and the merchant marine.

In 1952, Pratt published Towards the Last Spike, his final epic, on the building of Canada’s first transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific Railway.

“Presenting an Anglo/central-Canadian perspective, the poem interweaves the political battles between Sir John A. Macdonald and Edward Blake with the labourers’ physical battles against mountains, mud, and the Laurentian Shield.

In a metaphorical method typical of his style, Pratt characterizes the Shield as a prehistoric lizard rudely aroused from its sleep by the railroad builders’ dynamite.”

Pratt’s reputation as a major poet rests on his longer narrative poems, many of which show him as a mythologizer of the Canadian male experience, but a number of shorter philosophical works also command recognition.

‘From stone to steel‘ asserts the necessity for redemptive suffering arising from the failure of humanity’s spiritual evolution to keep pace without physical evolution and cultural achievements.

‘Come away, death’ is a complexly allusive account of the way the once-articulate and ceremonial human response to death was rendered inarticulate by the primitive violence of a sophisticated bomb.

‘The truant‘ dramatically presents a confrontation in a thoroughly patriarchal cosmos between the fiercely independent ‘little genus homo’ and a totalitarian mechanistic power, ‘the great Panjandrum’.

Pratt’s choices of forms and metrics were conservative for his time, but his diction was experimental, reflecting in its specificity and its frequent technicality both his belief in the poetic power of the accurate and concrete that led him into assiduous research processes, and his view that one of the poet’s tasks is to bridge the gap between the two branches of human pursuit: the scientific and artistic.

The Canadian Encyclopedia adds of Pratt:

“A major poet, he is, nevertheless, an isolated figure, belonging to no school or movement and directly influencing few other poets of his time.“

• Jacques Prévert (1900), the voice of Paris, wove everyday life into poetry, making the ordinary sublime, love tangible, and defiance lyrical.
  “Paris at night
  Three matches one by one struck in the night
  The first to see your face in its entirety
  The second to see your eyes
  The last to see your mouth
  And the darkness all around to remind me of all these things
  As I hold you in my arms.“
  — from Paris at Night, transforming simple moments into eternity, embodying love’s defiance against time.

Above: Jacques Prévert

Jacques Prévert (4 February 1900 – 11 April 1977) was a French poet and screenwriter.

His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools.

Prévert was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine. 

Above: Town hall, Neuilly sur Seine, France

Prévert grew up in Paris.

After receiving his Certificat d’études upon completing his primary education, he quit school and went to work in Le Bon Marché, a major department store in Paris.

In 1918, he was called up for military service in the First World War.

After this, he was sent to the Near East to defend French interests there.

Prévert’s poems were collected and published in his books: 

• Paroles (Words) (1946)

• Spectacle (1951)

• La Pluie et le beau temps (Rain and Good Weather) (1955)

• Histoires (Stories) (1963)

• Fatras (1971)

• Choses et autres (Things and Others) (1973)

His poems are often about life in Paris and life after the Second World War.

They are widely taught in schools in France, and frequently appear in French language textbooks published worldwide.

Some, such as “Déjeuner du Matin“, are also often taught in American upper-level French classes, for the students to learn basics.

Some of Prévert’s poems, such as “Les feuilles mortes” (“Autumn Leaves“), “L’Addition“, “La grasse matinée” (“Sleeping in“), “Les bruits de la nuit” (“The sounds of the night“) and “Chasse à l’enfant” (“The hunt for the child“) were set to music.

They have been sung by prominent French vocalists, as well as by later American singers.

Prévert’s poems are translated into many languages worldwide.

Above: Flag of France

In 1961, French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg paid tribute to “Les feuilles mortes” in his own song “La chanson de Prévert“.

Above: French musician Serge Gainsbourg (1928 – 1991)

Prévert wrote a number of screenplays.

Among them were the scripts for: 

• Drôle de drame (Bizarre, Bizarre, 1937)

• Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938)

• Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939)

• Les Visiteurs du soir (The Night Visitors, 1942)

• Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis, 1945)

The last of these regularly gains a high placing in lists of best films ever and earned him an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.

His poems were the basis for a film by the director and documentarian Joris Ivens, The Seine Meets Paris (La Seine a rencontré Paris, 1957), about the River Seine.

In 2007, a filmed adaptation of Prévert’s poem “To Paint the Portrait of a Bird” was directed by Seamus McNally.

Prévert had a long working relationship with Paul Grimault.

Above: French animator Paul Grimault (1905 – 1994)

Together they wrote the screenplays of a number of animated movies, starting with the short “The Little Soldier” (“Le Petit Soldat“, 1947).

They worked together until his death in 1977, when he was finishing The King and the Mocking Bird (Le Roi et l’Oiseau).

Prévert adapted several Hans Christian Andersen tales into animated or mixed live-action/animated movies, often in versions loosely connected to the original.

Above: Danish author Hans Christian Andersen (1805 – 1875)

Prévert died of lung cancer in Omonville-la-Petite, on 11 April 1977.

He had been working on the last scene of the animated movie Le Roi et l’Oiseau.

When the film was released in 1980, it was dedicated to Prévert’s memory.

On opening night, Grimault kept the seat next to him empty.

His dog Auto was given to a family friend after his death.

Above: Jacques Prévert

• Russell Hoban (1925), though best known for his novels, played with language and the absurdity of human experience, questioning existence and its arbitrary constraints.
  “In the end, every moment is all we have.“
  — A recurring theme in his work, embracing the absurdity and fragility of existence.

Russell Conwell Hoban (February 4, 1925 – December 13, 2011) was an American writer.

His works span many genres, including fantasy, science fiction, mainstream fiction, magical realism, poetry and children’s books.

He lived in London from 1969 until his death.

Hoban died on 13 December 2011.

He had once ruefully observed that death would be a good career move:

“People will say,

‘Yes, Hoban, he seems an interesting writer, let’s look at him again‘.“

Above: Russell Hoban

Hoban’s novel Kleinzeit is a story detailing the eponymous title character’s brush with illness and creativity.

When Kleinzeit is fired from his job as an advertising copy-writer, he ends up in hospital with a ‘skewed hypotenuse’, being tended by the healthy and desirable Sister.

Together, they embark on a strange adventure, in which Kleinzeit struggles to get better, attempts to master his creative urges, and holds conversations with a variety of abstract concepts.

The central character shares many traits with Hoban himself, and the author has commented:

‘I think there’s most of me in Kleinzeit’.

Kleinzeit’s physical illness and his creative urges are linked in the novel, an identification strengthened by the fact that all the diseases suffered by patients on Kleinzeit’s ward (ward A4, like the paper) are literary, geometric or musical terms:

He himself has a painful hypotenuse and diapason and develops a faulty stretto, while other patients suffer from hendiadys or ‘imbricated noumena’.

The terror and allure of creativity are symbolized by the mysterious yellow paper, which Redbeard passes on to Kleinzeit.

Kleinzeit’s relationship with a blank piece of paper is depicted as a sexual romance, with the writing process seen as a consummation, albeit that Kleinzeit is cuckolded by the personification of Word.

Many abstract concepts are similarly personified, including Death, Hospital, the (London) Underground (which is associated with the myth of Orpheus), Action and God.

In Turtle Diary (1975), William G. is a divorced book seller who is estranged from his two daughters.

Wandering into the London Zoo aquarium he is drawn to a set of green turtles and begins to learn about them.

At the same time, popular children’s author Neara H. is similarly drawn to the green turtles.

Independently each befriends the turtle keeper, George Fairburn, and asks about freeing the turtles.

Surprisingly Fairburn is amenable to the idea.

William and Neara meet when Neara goes to William’s bookshop.

Each recognizes in the other a kindred spirit and though neither is seeking to make a connection they reluctantly decide to collaborate to help Fairburn free the turtles.

On the appointed day, William and Neara rent a truck and travel to Polperro where Neara had suggested launching the turtles, unaware that the town is the one William was born in.

Their mission is a success and they are both briefly elated, though returning to London both drop their connection.

Each feels that despite their initial euphoria the turtles have not changed them in any substantial way.

However Neara begins a relationship with George while William ends one he had with his coworker, Harriet, and physically fights Sandor, one of the fellow boarders at his rooming house.

Roughly two thousand years after a nuclear war has devastated civilization, Riddley Walker, the young narrator, stumbles upon efforts to recreate a weapon of the ancient world.

The novel’s characters live a harsh life in a small area which is presently the English county of Kent, and know little of the world outside of “Inland” (England).

Their level of civilization is similar to England’s prehistoric Iron Age, although they do not produce their own iron but salvage it from ancient machinery.

Church and state have combined into one secretive institution, whose mythology, based on misinterpreted stories of the war and an old Catholic saint (Eustace), is enacted in puppet shows.

Narrated by the disembodied spirit or consciousness of Pilgermann, a European Jew, the novel opens with the newly castrated Pilgermann having a vision of Christ after sleeping with a merchant’s wife and subsequently being mutilated by a gentile mob.

Christ tells Pilgermann that he must make his way to Jerusalem where he will meet with Sophia, so Pilgermann sets off.

As Pilgermann travels across Europe he is joined by other characters, including his own Death which walks alongside him.

Life in Europe is seen through a series of grotesque, Brueghel- and Bosch-like images of horror, violence, degradation, and death. Nevertheless, Pilgermann continues.

Halfway across the Mediterranean, Pilgermann’s boat is ambushed by pirates who sell him to a Muslim grandee named Bembel Redzuk, in the city of Antioch in ancient Syria.

Pilgermann and Bembel become friends, although never social equals (as a Jew, Pilgermann can only ever be a dhimmi in Muslim society).

Pilgermann ideates, designs, and builds a Kabbalistic courtyard and tower with a patterned design on the floor for Bembel.

This rapidly takes on numinous power among the community, attracting the displeasure of the Islamic authorities.

Things come to a head when Frankish Crusaders besiege Antioch.

As it becomes increasingly clear that the city will fall, the Islamic authorities become more and more suspicious of non-Muslims, and Pilgermann’s life becomes increasingly threatened.

Finally, the city falls and Bembel and Pilgermann are killed fighting a crusader, but not before Pilgermann has a vision of Jerusalem – which he is never destined to get to – and sees Sophia, dying among a pile of corpses after a crusader massacre.

In The Medusa Frequency (1987), narrator Herman Orff is a London-based freelance writer of comics and an unsuccessful novelist.

He is preoccupied by Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, an ex-girlfriend called Luise von Himmelbett, and characters from mythology including the Kraken.

His own name is a reference to Hermes and Orpheus.

Lacking inspiration to write his third novel, he responds to a leaflet put through his letterbox advertising a treatment for blocked artists.

The procedure turns out to be the invention of an old friend who was once also Luise’s lover.

Following the treatment, Orff periodically hallucinates, finding that spherical found objects (a stone on the banks of the River Thames, a football, a cabbage) appear to him as the dismembered head of Orpheus.

Through a series of surreal scenes, the head tells Orff its “story“, namely how he started playing the lyre, met Eurydice and lost her.

In Hoban’s retelling, Eurydice was not bitten by a snake and did not descend to the Underworld, but rather Orpheus was unfaithful to her and she left him for Aristaeus.

This reflects Orff’s own experience of being unfaithful to Luise.

The scenes retelling the Orpheus myth are interspersed with Orff’s daily life as he finds a new girlfriend, is hospitalised after suffering an attack of angina, bumps repeatedly into a character referred to as “Gom Yawncher” who turns up in various guises throughout London, and travels to The Hague to see the Vermeer painting in the Mauritshuis.

When he gets to The Hague, he finds the painting is on loan to the US, and meets a man in the gallery who claims to be another of Luise’s ex-lovers.

On returning to his hotel he unexpectedly bumps into Luise herself, who he finds is happily married.

On Orff’s return to London, his new girlfriend breaks up with him.

Orff turns down lucrative offers of work adapting the Orpheus myth into a tacky cartoon strip and a pretentious film, and instead develops his own original science fiction comic strip.

The Orpheus hallucinations come to an end and the slim memoir of this strange story effectively becomes the third novel he has been trying to write.

In Amarylis Night and Day (2001), Peter Diggs has a vivid dream in which he meets a woman called Amaryllis.

When he later encounters the same woman in real life, he discovers that the two of them have the ability to enter each other’s dreams.

A cautious relationship is begun, half in the real world and half in dreams, in which both parties struggle to overcome the emotional effects of previous failed romances.

The novel is by turns romantic, philosophical, funny, sexy, and frightening, as the characters explore the different possibilities offered by their unique talent.

Both Peter and Amaryllis have been involved in failed relationships before – exactly how many and how disastrously we only find out gradually – and they are haunted by the danger of repeating their past mistakes.

Peter is a painter and Amaryllis a musician.

There is a lot of reflection in the book about art’s ability to reflect and enrich a person’s emotional life.

A great many other artists are referenced during the book.

Early in the novel, Peter mentions a review of his paintings which comments on the ‘odd empty spaces’ in his work.

Peter muses:

But that’s life, isn’t it?

And those of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write books, or compose music.

There are many talented people who never will become painters, writers, or composers.

The talent is in them but not the empty spaces where art happens.”

Beyond abstract musings, some poets and writers have faced cancer directly, shaping their words into testaments of resilience and reckoning.

• Jane Kenyon (1947 – 1995), diagnosed with leukemia, captured the ache of fragile beauty in Otherwise:
  “I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been otherwise.“

Above: Jane Kenyon

• Ursula K. Le Guin (1929 – 2018), in her final essays, reflected on the uncertainty of illness:
  “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.“

Above: Ursula K. Le Guin

• Christian Wiman (b. 1966), a poet diagnosed with cancer in his late 30s, explored suffering and faith in My Bright Abyss:
  “What you must realize is that the suffering is not the meaning. The meaning is in what follows.“

Above: Christian Wiman

• Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019), witnessing a loved one’s decline, addressed cancer as an intimate adversary in The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac:
  “Why should I have been surprised? / Hunters walk the forest without a sound.“

Above: Mary Oliver

• Clive James (1939 – 2019), in his final poems written while dying of cancer, embraced sorrow and gratitude:
  “I would not wish away the pain. / It made me raise my game.“

Above: Clive James

Each of them, in their own way, gave shape to the ineffable, made sense of chaos, or simply reveled in the beauty of existence.

Their words form a tapestry that symbolizes the resilience of those who battle cancer, of those who fight against the inevitable, of those who cling to life even as it slips through their fingers.

In their verses, we see a shared struggle — a human fraternity bound not by creed or country, but by the fleeting absurdity of being alive.

What, then, does February 4 whisper to us?

It tells us of those who wrote, of those who fought with words, with silence, with courage.

It reminds us that poetry, in its most essential form, is an act of defiance against oblivion.

So today, let us listen — to poetry, to the voices that shaped us.

And let us, in turn, find our own place in this great, unfolding story.

We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.

We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.

And the human race is filled with passion.

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

John Keating (Robin Williams), Dead Poets Society

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,

To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.”

(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)