Wordsworth described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” That phrase resonates with me because I think it holds true for all writers of fiction – poets, novelists, storytellers and everything in between.
When I’m writing a scene, I must channel emotions through memory and into my characters. And I do this in solitude. For poets, the process may be similar, but the outcome different. While novelists focus principally upon character and story, poets use words to distill experience into universal meaning. With its spareness and directness, poetry has the power to unite and uplift. As Amanda Gorman stated, “Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it’s always been the language of bridges.”
As a lifelong lover of poetry, I’m delighted that several authors have centered their stories around poets and poetry. In this post, I present ten novels inspired by real poets, some famous and some not as well known, but all united by a shared experience of “emotion recollected in tranquility.”
The Wasteland by Harper Jameson
This fictionalized glimpse into the conflicted mind of T. S. Eliot, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, tells the untold story of his secret struggle with being gay, the people left in the wake of his meteoric career trajectory and the madness that helped produce his greatest work.
Eliot is a hollow man trapped in a dreary world. Working at the bank, a slave to the clock, the same routine, day after day. While London’s elite enjoy a Great Gatsby lifestyle and poets like Robert Frost are rock stars, attracting thousands of fans to each reading, T.S. Eliot walks past life, peering at it through cracks or around corners. A world in color only in his stark imagination. Then one day he comes across Jack, an out and proud gay man, being badly beaten, and something compels him to intervene. Life will never be the same. Jack introduces Eliot to the gay underground of early 20th-century London and to feelings Eliot had suppressed and locked away. And with freedom comes poetry. Extraordinary poetry that takes London by storm. But as Eliot’s fame increases, pressure to conform does as well. Religious intolerance, fascism’s increasingly popular message of traditional values, and the allure of untold success present Eliot with a decision that could have devastating consequences.
“The Wasteland is a fictionalized glimpse into the conflicted mind of T. S. Eliot. There are no heroes here: every character flounders within the shifting tides of a country on the brink of war, and the wars within themselves.” — Danielle Ballantyne, ForeWord Magazine
The Great Lover by Jill Dawson
Poet Rupert Brooke takes center stage in this novel set in 1909. Seventeen-year-old Nell Golightly is the new maid at the Orchard Tea Gardens in Cambridgeshire when Rupert Brooke moves in as a lodger. Known for his looks and defiance of convention, the young poet captures the hearts of men and women alike, yet his own seems to stay intact. Even Nell, despite her good sense, starts to fall for him. What is his secret?
This captivating novel gives voice to Rupert Brooke in a story of mutual fascination and inner tumult, set at a time of social unrest. Revealing a man much more complex and radical than legend suggests, it robustly conveys the enticement – and curse – of charisma.
“Moving, intelligent, beautifully written and hugely enjoyable” — Sunday Times
The Tale of Murasaki by Liza Dalby
This is an elegant and brilliantly authentic historical novel about Murasaki Shikibu who, in the 11th century, wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, the most popular work in all of Japanese literature. In The Tale of Murasaki, Liza Dalby has created a breathtaking fictionalized narrative of the life of this timeless poet–a lonely girl who becomes so compelling a storyteller that she is invited to regale the empress with her tales. The Tale of Murasaki is the story of an enchanting time and an exotic place.
“Luscious, lush and languorously elegant…. You feel you are breathing the air of 11th-century Japan.” — USA TODAY
Sylvia and Ted by Emma Tennant
Sylvia and Ted is a fictional re-creation of the turbulent courtship, marriage, and separation of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.
In intense, dramatic prose, Emma Tennant unfolds a story of passion, conflict, and betrayal. Creating a series of unforgettable images she reconstructs the 20th century’s most famous literary love affair and the tempestuous triangle between Hughes, Plath, and Assia Wevill. Filled with mounting suspense and lurking danger, Sylvia and Ted is a tale that culminates in tragedy, leaving in its wake a hundred unanswered questions.
Tennant was drawn to the subject partly as a result of her past relationship with Hughes — and because of the legs that surround him and the two women who loved him. This novel vividly evokes the social and literary circles in which Plath and Hughes traveled.
“Steeped in Hughes’ and Plath’s resounding poetry and blessed with a dramatist’s sense of timing, Tennant has written an arresting and exquisitely mythopoeic tale of love, death, and immortality.” — Booklist
Gates of Paradise by Beryl Kingston
This historical novel centers around the life of poet William Blake. In 1852, Alexander, a young biographer seeking the truth about William Blake, has left his new bride and travelled to the village of Felpham. It was here that the scene of Blake’s darkest hour – the strange incident that saw him tried for sedition – occurred. But the villagers have little to say on the subject, and go strangely quiet at any mention of the trial.
In 1800, William Blake and his faithful wife, Catherine, have just moved to Felpham to take up the promise of work under a new patron, William Hayley Esquire. Before long, this relentless taskmaster gives Blake so much work that he neglects his own poetry. Trying to appease his patron and still make time for his masterpiece frays Blake’s nerves beyond endurance.
Witnessing this exchange are Betsy and Johnnie, two young lovers employed in service of Mr. Hayley. Awestruck by Blake’s beautiful engravings and gorgeous paintings, Betsy enlists Johnnie to teach her to read so that she too can experience Blake’s poetry. The happiness she finds in Blake’s words and Johnnie’s arms is short lived, because the terror of invasion by Napoleon is a unrelenting dark cloud on the horizon.
When invasion appears imminent, arrogant soldiers pour into the quiet town with their bright red uniforms and drunken behavior. Now the villagers must unite to defend William from horrific accusations that, if proved, will mean prison or worse. But will they find the courage? And will Alexander, fifty years on, discover what actually transpired at the trial?
“Beryl Kingston writes with such a lovely light-handed touch it is impossible not to warm to her novels. There are some great character studies, whether of the more eccentric or the more conventional locals, and a terrific mix of mystery and romance.” — Historical Novels Review
Song of a Captive Bird by Jasmin Darznik
Song of a Captive Bird is Inspired by the verse, letters, films, and interviews of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad and employs the lens of fiction to capture the grip, spirit, and conflicting desires of a courageous woman who embodies the birth of feminism in Iran and who continues to inspire generations of women worldwide.
Throughout her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is taught that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She learns only to obey, yet she always finds ways to rebel—gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother’s garden, venturing to the forbidden rooftop to play with her brothers, writing poems to please her strict, disapproving father, and stealing away to flirt with a teenage paramour over café glacé. During the summer of 1950, Forugh’s passion for poetry grows wings—and tradition seeks to clip them.
Forced into a stifling marriage, Forugh runs away and has an affair that stokes her desire to write and to gain freedom and independence. Forugh’s poems are thought to be both scandalous and brilliant; she is acclaimed by some as a national treasure, hated by others as a demon influenced by the West. She is undaunted, finding love with a notorious filmmaker and living by her own rules—at a huge cost. But the strength of her writing grows ever stronger amid the upheaval of the Iranian revolution.
“A complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people, a reminder of the power and purpose of art, and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out. — The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
More Miracle Than Bird by Alice Miller
Alice Miller’s sweeping debut novel follows the love story of two of literature’s most fascinating characters: Georgie Hyde-Lees and her husband, W. B. Yeats.
London: On the eve of World War I, twenty-one-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees—on her own for the first time—is introduced to the famed poet W. B. Yeats at a soirée. Although Yeats, famously eccentric, is 27 years her senior, Georgie is attracted to him, and when he extends a puzzling invitation to a secret society, her life is forever changed.
A shadow falls over London as zeppelins prowl overhead and bombs flare against the skyline. Amidst the pandemonium, Georgie tends to injured soldiers in a makeshift hospital, befriending the wounded and heartbroken Lieutenant Pike, who might require more from her than she can give. At night, she escapes with Yeats into a murkier world, becoming immersed in the Order, a secret society where ritual, magic, and the conjuring of spirits is practiced and pursued. As forces—of this world and the next—pull Yeats and Georgie closer and then apart, Georgie reveals a secret that threatens to undo it all.
More Miracle than Bird was a New York Times Book Review Summer Reading Selection.
Dark Lady by Charlene Ball
This is the story of Shakespeare’s mistress Emilia Bassano Lanyer, a poet in her own right. Emilia has four strikes against her: she is poor, beautiful, female, and intelligent in Elizabethan England. To make matters worse, she comes from a family of secret Jews. When she is raped as a teenager, she realizes she probably will not be able to make a good marriage, so she becomes the mistress of a much older nobleman. During this time she falls in love with poet/player William Shakespeare, and they have a brief, passionate affair—but when the plague comes to England, the nobleman abandons her, leaving her pregnant and without financial security.
In the years that follow, Emilia must make difficult decisions in order to survive, not all of which turn out well for her. But ultimately, despite the disadvantaged position she was born to, she succeeds in becoming a writer—and even publishes a book of poetry in 1611 that makes a surprisingly modern argument for women’s equality.
“Emilia Bassano Lanyer emerges in this sweeping historical novel as more than the elusive Dark Lady of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. She is an artist in her own right, mysterious indeed but also strong, resourceful, and intelligent enough to maneuver her way through a turbulent, dangerous world. Politics and poetry collide in this suspenseful tale of love, lust, and literature in Elizabethan England.” — Sarah Kennedy, author of The Altarpiece
The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn
Opening in 1848 when Emily is a student at Mount Holyoke, with its mournful headmistress and strict, strict rules, The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson is inspired by her Dickinson’s letters and poetry. It captures the occasionally comic, always fevered, and ultimately tragic story of her life-from defiant Holyoke seminarian to dying recluse.
Channeling the devilish rhythms and ghosts of a seemingly buried literary past, Charyn lifts the mysterious veils that have long enshrouded Dickinson, revealing her passions, personal turmoil, and powerful sexuality.
“In this brilliant and hilarious jailbreak of a novel, Charyn channels the genius poet and her great leaps of the imagination.” — Booklist, starred review
Your Story, My Story by Connie Palmen
The lives of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes continue to fascinate. In 1963, Sylvia Plath took her own life in her London flat. Her death was the culmination of a brief, brilliant life lived in the shadow of clinical depression—a condition made worse by her tempestuous relationship with mercurial poet Ted Hughes. The following years saw Plath elevated to martyr status while Hughes was cast as the cause of her suicide, his infidelity at the heart of her demise.
For decades, Hughes never bore witness to the truth of their marriage—one buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, gossip, sensationalism, and myth. Until now.
Your Story, My Story tells Hughes’s side of the story in Ted Hughes’s own uncompromising voice. A brutal and lyrical confessional, Your Story, My Story paints an indelible picture of a seven-year relationship—the soaring highs and deep lows of star-crossed soul mates bedeviled by their personal demons.
“Brilliantly gives voice to Ted Hughes…Palmen brings incredible emotion and life to these two renowned poets and embodies Hughes fully. This confessional will challenge readers to see Ted Hughes and his story in a different light.” — Booklist
Compiled by Carol M. Cram for Art In Fiction
