"All poetry starts with geography"

June 26, 2024 12:59 AM

Maybe you want to know where William Duffy's Farm is? Or the Indian River? Or perhaps Xanadu? Or where The Garden lies? Or MANAHATTA? No matter what poetic place you're seeking, The Poetry Atlas knows the way.

Organized by
Poet, Poems by title, or Poems by first line, or search for a location.

[Unfortunately, the full text of the poems is usually not available right there on the site; most can be found at the Poetry Foundation or Poets.org]

Here are the poems mention above:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Indian River
Kubla Khan
A Bird, came down the walk
MANNAHATTA

posted by chavenet (12 comments total)

Poems about paradise
Location Unknown

PARADISE LOST
A
POEM
Written in
TEN BOOKS
by John Milton
[gutenberg]
.
posted by HearHere at 2:02 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

This is tremendous. Thank you.
posted by From Bklyn at 3:39 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

Wonderful; a work in progress. Glad to have Frost's Mending Wall tracked down to Derry NH. But "somebody" needs to start populating Co Derry N.I. with Seamus Heaney locations.

Also people need to know where Coleridge was disturbed by the man from Porlock from getting Xanadu down on the page.
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:40 AM on June 26 [4 favorites]

From paradise, to...
posted by protorp at 4:45 AM on June 26 [2 favorites]

(searches for the whole white world, discovers it's too large for the atlas)
posted by mittens at 4:54 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

Or perhaps Xanadu?
It just arrived in Bushwick.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 5:23 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

It's not surprising the Poetry Atlas would omit this kind of thing, but there's an argument that the description of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" took some inspiration from a description of North Florida in Bartram's Travels. It's beautiful and by coincidence only about 200 miles from the Indian River, also mentioned here.
posted by Wobbuffet at 5:59 AM on June 26 [2 favorites]

Very cool. My initial impulse was to bookmark this for whenever I need to add local color to a presentation or workshop I'm providing hither and yon, and in so doing appear learned and wise beyond my years. But thankfully self-awareness (and self-preservation) kicks in and I have saved future audiences of that pretension. So will instead bookmark it for travel reference, to read up on before visiting a place, and in so doing maybe help develop that learned and wise demeanor for real instead.
posted by St. Oops at 6:55 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

This is a really neat idea!

Too bad I didn't find Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo" in the list, and still don't know where in Brazil they set off those illegal paper lanterns.
posted by of strange foe at 8:38 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

Where in Brazil they set off those illegal paper lanterns

They do that in Oporto for S. João's day (which was last Monday)...
posted by chavenet at 9:01 AM on June 26 [2 favorites]

there's an argument that the description of Xanadu in Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" took some inspiration from a description of North Florida in Bartram's Travels.

I was all set to be Mr Skeptical, but now I'm pretty convinced that the person who wrote

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean

had to have Bartram open on his desk.

...I seated myself upon a swelling green knoll, at the head of the crystal bason. Near me, on the left, was a point or projection of an entire grove of the aromatic Illicium Floridanum; on my right, and all around behind me, was a fruitful Orange grove, with Palms and Magnolias interspersed; in front, just under my feet, was the inchanting and amazing crystal fountain, which incessantly threw up, from dark, rocky caverns below, tons of water every minute, forming a bason, capacious enough for large shallops to ride in, and a creek of four or five feet depth of water, and near twenty yards over, which meanders six miles through green meadows, pouring its limpid waters into the great Lake George, where they seem to remain pure and unmixed. About twenty yards from the upper edge of the bason, and directly opposite to the mouth or outlet to the creek, is a continual and amazing ebullition, where the waters are thrown up in such abundance and amazing force, as to jet and swell up two or three feet above the common surface: white sand and small particles of shells are thrown up with the waters...

posted by pracowity at 9:02 AM on June 26 [4 favorites]

This site reminds of 'The Oxford illustrated literary guide to Great Britain and Ireland.'
posted by clavdivs at 9:52 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]