Lives of the Poets by Louis Simpson
I read this one in 180 More and I kind of love it.
Lives of the Poets
By Louis Simpson
Dickinson had a cockatoo
she called Sémiramis
and loved dearly.
Whitman was a trencherman,
his favorite dish
a mulligan stew.
Frost went for long walks,
Eliot played croquet,
Pound took fencing lessons.
There is a snapshot of Yeats
in a garden with a woman
naked to the waist and smiling.
Auden when he was old
counted the sheets of toilet paper
that a visitor used.
