Poems That Make Grown Men Cry: 100 Men on the Words That Move Them
By Anthony Holden and Ben Holden
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About this ebook
Grown men aren’t supposed to cry…Yet in this fascinating anthology, one hundred men—distinguished in literature and film, science and architecture, theater and human rights—confess to being moved to tears by poems that continue to haunt them. Although the majority are public figures not prone to crying, here they admit to breaking down, often in words as powerful as the poems themselves.
Their selections include classics by visionaries, such as Walt Whitman, W.H. Auden, and Philip Larkin, as well as modern works by masters, including Billy Collins, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and poets who span the globe from Pablo Neruda to Rabindranath Tagore. The poems chosen range from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first, with more than a dozen by women, including Mary Oliver, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Their themes range from love in its many guises, through mortality and loss, to the beauty and variety of nature. All are moved to tears by the exquisite way a poet captures, in Alexander Pope’s famous phrase, “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.”
From J.J. Abrams to John le Carré, Salman Rushdie to Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Radcliffe to Nick Cave to Stephen Fry, Stanley Tucci to Colin Firth to the late Christopher Hitchens, this collection delivers private insight into the souls of men whose writing, acting, and thinking are admired around the world. “Everyone who reads this collection will be roused: disturbed by the pain, exalted in the zest for joy given by poets” (Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature).
Anthony Holden
Anthony Holden is an award-winning journalist who has published more than thirty books, including He Played For His Wife…And Other Stories and biographies of Laurence Olivier, Tchaikovsky, and Shakespeare. He has published translations of opera, ancient Greek plays, and poetry. He was director of European Film and Television at Exclusive Media, where he helped relaunch Britain’s most famous film production label, Hammer. Anthony Holden lives in London.
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Reviews for Poems That Make Grown Men Cry
13 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Review #10 - Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony and Ben Holden (2014)Poetry cannot be rushed. Picking up "Poems That Make Grown Men Cry" is guaranteed an emotional rollercoaster. Reading through this anthology in which 100 prominent authors, reveal the lines that make them cry you find yourself reading, re-reading, and reading again. Now try doing that without choking up.Included with every poem is an essay explaining why the poem moves that author. Though you are quickly left dismayed, and wished that the editors had decided that the poem preceded the essay, so that you could read the poem without the author affecting your interpretation of the work. So a word for caution: read the poem before reading the essay. And you ask which is my favourite poem? Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen."Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" is a line from the Roman lyrical poet Horace's Odes (III.2.13)First edition published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. - IRONJAW'S BOOK REVIEW, Review #10. October 17, 2015
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The author's narrative was good, but actual poetry, written in the nomenclature of the time a challenge to read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is a very enjoyable collection of poems, many of the British and most of them written since 1900, each of which has been selected by a particular author, artist, or other notable person. As the title suggests, they have been selected for emotional impact, and I did indeed find many of them very moving. I read the book shortly after the death of a dear friend, and it really was cathartic -- I cried a fair bit, and I felt the better for it. Now, I am not a man, so the fact that I cried is not a statistically significant test of the title. I shall, however, give it to my husband for Christmas, and see how it works on him. I thought about giving it four stars instead of five, since writers from this side of the pond seem to me somewhat underrepresented, and women writers more than somewhat underrepresented. Those are stock objections, however, and shouldn't put the interested reader off this valuable book. Anything that makes people feel that poetry is something to read for emotion and connection and enjoyment, not for academic credit, is all to the good. So I compromised on 4.5.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This book contains some really great poems and, to make things more interesting, each poem was selected by a prominent individual and contains an essay on why the poem moves the person. Some of the contributors are individuals who regularly read poetry or literature and some aren't. Regardless, this is a nice selection of pieces. My only negative comment is that sometimes I wished that the poem preceded the essay describing why it moved the reader so that I could read the poem without the individual's filter coloring my interpretation of the work. So, in a sense, what made the book interesting is also what got in the way of my enjoyment of it at times!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The editors of this nice volume of poetry asked a hundred notable men to submit poems that move, inspire or influence them, sometimes to tears. The resulting collection is a set of wonderful, sometimes well-known, sometimes obscure poetry that gives insight into the minds and feelings of the people who submitted them and also stir and release feelings within the reader.
I particularly liked the introduction to each poem. In these, the men submitting the poems explained how they selected them or why they found them so meaningful.
The entire collection is a "good read," but I found few offerings that had anywhere near the impact on me that they apparently had on those who submitted them. But, of course, art is like that--some people are moved by it, others are not. I am just glad to have had the chance to read this volume and realize that I am not the only man who likes a good, moving and inspirational poem.
Book preview
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry - Anthony Holden
Contents
Preface by Anthony Holden and Ben Holden
Elegy
by Chidiock Tichborne
DAVID MCVICAR
Sonnet XXX by William Shakespeare
MELVYN BRAGG
On My First Son
by Ben Jonson
JOHN CAREY
Amor constante más allá de la muerte
by Francisco de Quevedo
ARIEL DORFMAN AND JAVIER MARÍAS
Hokku
by Fukuda Chiyo-ni
BORIS AKUNIN
Wandrers Nachtlied II
by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
JOHN LE CARRÉ
Frost at Midnight
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Character of the Happy Warrior
by William Wordsworth
HAROLD EVANS
Surprised by Joy
by William Wordsworth
HOWARD JACOBSON
Last Sonnet
by John Keats
KENNETH LONERGAN
Extract from The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley
DAVID EDGAR
I Am
by John Clare
KEN LOACH
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
by Walt Whitman
STEPHEN FRY
Remember
by Christina Rossetti
ROBERT FISK AND JULIAN FELLOWES
After Great Pain
by Emily Dickinson
DOUGLAS KENNEDY
Extract from Peer Gynt by Henrik Ibsen
KENNETH BRANAGH
Requiem
by Robert Louis Stevenson
CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY
The Remorseful Day
by A. E. Housman
JOE KLEIN
The Wind, One Brilliant Day
by Antonio Machado
ROBERT BLY
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
by Rainer Maria Rilke
COLM TÓIBÍN
Ithaka
by Constantine P. Cavafy
WALTER SALLES
At Castle Boterel
by Thomas Hardy
ALAN HOLLINGHURST
The Voice
by Thomas Hardy
SEAMUS HEANEY
Adlestrop
by Edward Thomas
SIMON WINCHESTER
The Soldier
by Rupert Brooke
HUGH BONNEVILLE
During Wind and Rain
by Thomas Hardy
KEN FOLLETT
Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
God’s World
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
PATRICK STEWART
Everyone Sang
by Siegfried Sassoon
BARRY HUMPHRIES
Last Poems: XL
by A. E. Housman
ANDREW MOTION AND RICHARD DAWKINS
God Wills It
by Gabriela Mistral
JEREMY IRONS
Out of Work
by Kenneth H. Ashley
FELIX DENNIS
All the Pretty Horses
by Anonymous
CARL BERNSTEIN
The Cool Web
by Robert Graves
JOHN SUTHERLAND
The Broken Tower
by Hart Crane
HAROLD BLOOM
Bavarian Gentians
by D. H. Lawrence
SIMON ARMITAGE
A Summer Night
by W. H. Auden
WILLIAM BOYD
Those Who Are Near Me Do Not Know
by Rabindranath Tagore
CHRIS COOPER
Let My Country Awake
by Rabindranath Tagore
SALIL SHETTY AND DAVID PUTTNAM
Extract from Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
JAMES MCMANUS
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
by W. H. Auden
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Lullaby
by W. H. Auden
SIMON SCHAMA AND SIMON CALLOW
If I Could Tell You
by W. H. Auden
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
Canoe
by Keith Douglas
CLIVE JAMES
My Papa’s Waltz
by Theodore Roethke
STANLEY TUCCI
The Book Burnings
by Bertolt Brecht
JACK MAPANJE
Liberté
by Paul Éluard
JOE WRIGHT
Extract from The Pisan Cantos
by Ezra Pound
CRAIG RAINE
I see a girl dragged by the wrists
by Philip Larkin
SIMON RUSSELL BEALE
The Mother
by Gwendolyn Brooks
TERRANCE HAYES
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
by Randall Jarrell
PAUL MULDOON
War Has Been Brought into Disrepute
by Bertolt Brecht
DAVID HARE
Le Message
by Jacques Prévert
PETER SÍS
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
by Dylan Thomas
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Unfinished Poem
by Philip Larkin
FRANK KERMODE
Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
by Elizabeth Bishop
JOHN ASHBERY
End of Summer
by Stanley Kunitz
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Horses
by Edwin Muir
ALEXEI SAYLE
Friday’s Child
by W. H. Auden
ROWAN WILLIAMS
Long Distance I and II
by Tony Harrison
DANIEL RADCLIFFE
The Widower in the Country
by Les Murray
NICK CAVE
A Blessing
by James Arlington Wright
RICHARD FORD
Injustice
by Pablo Neruda
CARLOS REYES-MANZO
The Meaning of Africa
by Abioseh Nicol
JAMES EARL JONES
Elegy for Alto
by Christopher Okigbo
BEN OKRI
Requiem for the Croppies
by Seamus Heaney
TERRY GEORGE
Gone Ladies
by Christopher Logue
BRIAN PATTEN
Dream Song 90: Op. posth. no. 13
by John Berryman
AL ALVAREZ
Essay
by Hayden Carruth
JONATHAN FRANZEN
An Exequy
by Peter Porter
IAN MCEWAN
Crusoe in England
by Elizabeth Bishop
ANDREW SOLOMON
For Julia, in the Deep Water
by John N. Morris
TOBIAS WOLFF
Aubade
by Philip Larkin
WILLIAM SIEGHART
Dear Bryan Wynter
by W. S. Graham
NICK LAIRD
A Meeting
by Wendell Berry
COLUM MCCANN
eulogy to a hell of a dame—
by Charles Bukowski
MIKE LEIGH
Midsummer: Sonnet XLIII
by Derek Walcott
MARK HADDON
In Blackwater Woods
by Mary Oliver
MARC FORSTER
Love After Love
by Derek Walcott
TOM HIDDLESTON
Extract from and our faces, my heart, brief as photos by John Berger
SIMON MCBURNEY
Sandra’s Mobile
by Douglas Dunn
RICHARD EYRE
Brindis con el Viejo
by Mauricio Rosencof
JUAN MÉNDEZ
An End or a Beginning
by Bei Dao
WUER KAIXI
A Call
by Seamus Heaney
RICHARD CURTIS
Extract from Eastern War Time
by Adrienne Rich
ANISH KAPOOR
It Is Here (for A)
by Harold Pinter
NEIL LABUTE
For Andrew Wood
by James Fenton
DAVID REMNICK
Not Cancelled Yet
by John Updike
JOSEPH O’NEILL
Armada
by Brian Patten
PAUL BETTANY
A Poetry Reading at West Point
by William Matthews
TOM MCCARTHY
Bedecked
by Victoria Redel
BILLY COLLINS
The Lanyard
by Billy Collins
J. J. ABRAMS
Regarding the home of one’s childhood, one could:
by Emily Zinnemann
COLIN FIRTH
For Ruthie Rogers in Venice
by Craig Raine
RICHARD ROGERS
Keys to the Doors
by Robin Robertson
MOHSIN HAMID
Afterword by Nadine Gordimer
Acknowledgments
Amnesty International
About Anthony Holden and Ben Holden
Index of Contributors and Poets
Index of Titles of Poems
Index of First Lines
Credits, Copyrights, and Permissions
Preface
ANTHONY HOLDEN
Late one afternoon in the mid-1990s a close friend of long standing called to tell me of a sudden domestic crisis. My wife and I went straight round to join him for the evening, during which he began to quote a Thomas Hardy poem, The Darkling Thrush.
Upon reaching what might be called the punch line—Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware
—our friend choked up, unable to get the words out. This was understandable; he was still upset by the day’s events. We ourselves were much moved.
That weekend we happened to be visiting the scholar and critic Frank Kermode. Frank knew the friend involved, and was also touched by his Hardy moment. "Is there any poem you can’t recite without choking up? I asked him. Never an emotionally demonstrative man, Frank said immediately:
Go and get the Larkin."
In front of his half-dozen guests he then began to read aloud Unfinished Poem,
about death treading its remorseless way up the stairs, only to turn out to be a pretty young girl with bare feet, moving the stunned narrator to exclaim: What summer have you broken from?
It was this startling last line that rendered Frank speechless; with a forlorn waft of the hand, he held the book out for someone else to finish the poem.
Also there that day was another professor of English, Tony Tanner, so it was not surprising that this topic of conversation lasted all afternoon, ranging far and wide, not just over other candidates for this distinct brand of poetic immortality but the power of poetry over prose to move, the difference between true sentiment and mere mawkishness, and, of course, the pros and cons of men weeping, whether in private or in public.
For the next few weeks I asked every male literary friend I saw to name a poem he couldn’t read or recite without breaking up. It was amazing how many immediately said yes, this one, and embarked on its first few lines. With Frank’s encouragement, I began to contemplate an anthology called Poems that Make Strong Men Cry.
Then I remembered I had another book to finish, and set the project aside. But it remained a topic of paradoxically happy conversation between Frank and myself until his death in the summer of 2010, at the age of ninety. I duly steeled myself to reading Unfinished Poem
at his funeral service and managed it—just—without choking up.
In 2007, reviewing A. E. Housman’s letters for the London Review of Books, Kermode had discussed the controversy caused in Cambridge in 1933 by a Housman lecture entitled On the Name and Nature of Poetry.
After recalling the brouhaha provoked at the time by Housman’s emphasis on the emotional power of poetry, with F. R. Leavis saying it would take years to remedy the damage the lecture must have inflicted on his students,
Frank continued—with, he told me, our recurrently lachrymose conversation very much in mind:
What everybody remembers best are the passages about the emotional aspects of poetry. Housman included a number of surprisingly personal comments on this topic. Milton’s Nymphs and shepherds, dance no more,
he said, can draw tears . . . to the eyes of more readers than one.
And tears are only one symptom. A line of poetry can make his beard bristle as he shaves, or cause a shiver down his spine, or a constriction of the throat
as well as a precipitation of water to the eyes.
For so reticent a man it was a surprising performance. It possibly upset his health, and he came to regard the date of the lecture, May 1933, as an ominous moment in his life.
Housman and Hardy have emerged as two of the most tear-provoking poets in this collection—to which I was urged to return, in the wake of Frank’s death, by my son Ben (if with a somewhat less macho title). With three entries each, they are equaled by Philip Larkin and bested only by W. H. Auden, with five. So four of us supposedly buttoned-up Brits top the charts of almost one hundred poems from eighteen countries, a dozen of them written by women, chosen by men of more than twenty nationalities ranging in age from early twenties to late eighties. Five pairs of contributors happen to have chosen the same poem, for intriguingly different reasons.
Larkin himself could have proved a prototype contributor. Wordsworth was nearly the price of me once,
he told the [London] Observer in 1979. I was driving down the M1 on a Saturday morning: they had this poetry slot on the radio . . . and someone suddenly started reading the Immortality Ode, and I couldn’t see for tears. And when you’re driving down the middle lane at seventy miles an hour . . .
Early in our task, we were encouraged by a note from Professor John Carey, with whom I discussed our work-in-progress over a dinner at Merton College, Oxford, where Ben and I both studied English thirty years apart: It will bring some good poems to public notice, and it will stimulate debate about the emotional power of art and how it affects different people.
Thanks to our partnership with Amnesty International, we can add such cross-border issues as freedom of speech and thought, as in the contribution from one of the leaders of the 1989 human rights protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
After deciding to arrange the poems in chronological order, we calculated that some 75 percent of them were written in the twentieth century—inevitable, perhaps, so early in the twenty-first. The most common themes, apart from intimations of mortality, range from pain and loss via social and political ideals to the beauty and variety of Nature—as well as love, in all its many guises. Three of our contributors have suffered the ultimate pain of losing a child; others are moved to tears by the sheer beauty of the way a poet captures, in Alexander Pope’s famous phrase, what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.
The same might be said of our contributors’ candid explanations of their choices, many of which rival the poems themselves in stirring the reader’s emotions.
Some of those who declined to take part did so for almost poetic reasons. Wrote the pianist Alfred Brendel: I easily shed tears when I listen to music, experience a Shakespeare play, or encounter a great performance. Literature doesn’t have the same effect on me, so it seems. I cannot tell you why, as reading has been an important part of my life.
Said the actor-magician Ricky Jay: "Right now, I find it hard to think of a poem that doesn’t make me cry. I’m the kinda guy that weeps at reruns of Happy Days. And the playwright Patrick Marber:
You bet I’ve got one, but I’m not going to share it with anyone else!"
A sudden shock of emotion naturally overcomes different people in different ways. Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the proper reader responds to a poem not with his brain or his heart, but with his back, waiting for the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades.
To our contributors, a moist eye seems the natural if involuntary response to a particular phrase or line, thought or image; the vast majority are public figures not prone to tears, as is supposedly the manly way, but here prepared to admit to caving in when ambushed by great art.
The youngest of my three sons, now himself a father, Ben is a grown man to whom tears do not come readily; I myself, as he has enjoyed telling all inquirers, am prone to weep all too easily, at prose as much as poetry, movies as much as music. We’ve had a great deal of fun, and not a few vigorous disagreements, while compiling this anthology together.
It was only after intense negotiation, for instance, that we agreed to stretch most definitions of poetry by including an extract from a verse play, and another from a prose-poem
of a novel, then another, while drawing the line at song lyrics—some of which are fine poetry, for sure, but (in my view) indistinguishable in their power to move from the music to which they are set. We agreed to admit one traditional lullaby; but this policy otherwise cost us, alas, a distinguished writer intent on a touching French chanson, and an astronaut who wanted the lyrics of a song from a Broadway musical.
On which note, I am pleased to hand over to Ben for an expert explanation of the physical mechanics of tears, especially male tears, and to distill perfectly on both our behalves the purpose, as we see it, of this book.
BEN HOLDEN
Cecil Day-Lewis once said that he did not write poetry to be understood, but to understand. This quest, to understand, takes many routes but is common to us all. Tears also unite us as humans: we are the only species that cries. Charles Darwin himself was at a loss to explain this uniquely human trait, describing it as that special expression of man’s.
One scientific explanation is that the act of crying is evolution’s mechanism for draining excess chemicals released into the blood when we experience extreme stress or high emotion: the chin’s mentalis muscle wobbles; a lump rises in our throat, as the autonomic nervous system expands the glottis to aid our oxygen intake; the lachrymal glands flood the fornix conjunctiva of the upper eyelid; and, as teardrops break their ducts and run down our cheeks, our blood is cleansed of the secreted prolactin and adrenocorticotropic hormones.
Put another way: we have a good cry
and feel better.
An alternative theory is that crying is an advancement of a mammalian distress signal. After all, tears provide a clear and immediate cry for help that is tricky to fake. And just as it is tough to counterfeit, crying can also be catching, like yawning. One person’s tears often set off another’s.
In these ways, weeping betrays not only vulnerability but also an openness that is contagious. Yet so often we try to hide our tears when caught out or in public, as if it is embarrassing to be around such raw tenderness. This is perhaps especially true for those of us who are men.
Despite the male tear duct being larger than the female, studies have consistently shown that from around the age of ten a divergence occurs and thereafter boys cry far less than girls. Whether that is down to cultural or biological reasons (or, as is likely the case, both), the sad truth is that the male of our species has not always been allowed to cry. Tears may have been venerated in European cultures during the nineteenth century as a sign of high moral character but, these days, they are all too hastily wiped away.
We want to put paid to that with this anthology. We hope that readers may set each other off as they read these verses aloud to one another. Let’s celebrate high emotion! Together let’s express our shared humanity, whatever your gender, background, or circumstances. However grievous at