pointed my way
with a radish.
Landor's poem comes from a different tradition, as practiced by the poets of antiquity. When I was first beginning to love poetry, a book I treasured -- along with the City Lights Howl and Other Poems and my Yeats -- was the little New Directions Poems from the Greek Anthology, in brilliant, Poundian translations by Dudley Fitts. These are among the oldest known Western poems (some as old as 700 B.C.). Part of the thrill was their brevity: many two or three lines long, none more than 12. Some of the poems amazed me that anything so ancient could also be so wicked as Ammianus's "Epitaph of Nearchos":
Rest lightly O Earth upon this wretched Nearchos
That the dogs may have no trouble in dragging him out.
-- or so candidly lovesick as Meleagros's poem on Heliodora's fingernail:
O Fingernail of Heliodora,
Surely Love sharpened you, surely Love made you grow:
Does not your lightest touch transfix my heart?
The epigram, in the tradition of the Roman poet Martial, often lives on terseness and a show-off polish -- as when John Donne memorializes Hero and Leander by invoking the four elements, a form of compression quite unlike haiku:
Both rob'd of aire, we both lye in one ground,
Both whom one fire had burnt, one water drownd.
The 20th-century poet J. V. Cunningham writes mordantly:
The dry soul rages. The unfeeling feel
