Novelish poets and poetic novelists

[steepholm]

I just posted this query on FB, but on reflection maybe this is a better place....

Good/important poets who were or are also good/important (though not necessarily prolific) novelists? My small-hours list was a very short one for the adult canon: Sir Walter Scott, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin at a pinch.

Within children's literature one could add RLS, Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, C. Day Lewis, A. A. Milne, Ted Hughes.

I'm sure I've missed out many obvious names. Whom can we add to both lists? (No peeking at reference books or Google-goggling, mind!)

ETA: Suggestions I feel foolish for not putting in the original list: Kipling, Graves, Wilde, Peake, HD, Bryer.

Oh, and Sir Philip Sidney, if Arcadia counts as a novel.

Comments

[mrwaggish.livejournal.com]

Is this English only? I'm surprised not to have run into Rilke and Goethe.

In English: Edgar Allen Poe, Samuel Beckett, Djuna Barnes, Weldon Kees, Chinua Achebe, Jean Toomer, Thomas Disch. And David Jones if he counts.

And if Sidney counts, surely Robert Burton does too, and maybe even Coleridge.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

No, it's not English only. Rilke and Goethe have shown up at my FB (as has Disch) - but not Poe or Djuna Barnes, both of whom I should certainly have thought of: thank you. I hadn't realized Beckett or Achebe were poets, or that David Jones was a novelist. Kees and Toomer I'm afraid I've not come across except as names.

I don't think either Burton or Coleridge wrote novels, though Burton was certainly an important prose writer. (Having slogged my way through Biographia Literaria as an undergraduate I'm not convinced the same can be said for STC.)

[mrwaggish.livejournal.com]

I'm a fan of Biographia Literaria, but I know it's not for all tastes. Also: Aphra Behn!

Non-English writers: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ingeborg Bachmann, Georg Buchner, Robert Walser, Cesare Pavese, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, Fernando Pessoa, Vladimir Nabokov, Pushkin, Andre Breton, Gerard de Nerval, Jose Lezama Lima, Julio Cortazar, Alejo Carpentier, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Roubaud, Marguerite Yourcenar, Roberto Bolano,Dezső Kosztolányi, Bohumil Hrabal, Stanislaw Witkiewicz,

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a splendid list!

[mrwaggish.livejournal.com]

I think In Parenthesis qualifies as a novel, certainly as much as Jean Toomer's Cane is. It's more prose than verse, meets novelistic requirements. The Anethamata was described by Jones as "a heap," which sounds more like a novel than a poem, though I see it as a poem.

Beckett's early poetry collection Echo's Bones is well worth reading, while his late poetry doesn't strike me as much. He won his first prize in 1930 for "Whoroscope," narrated by Descartes, still one of his best: http://lazenby.tumblr.com/post/3374062767/samuel-becketts-first-book-whoroscope-1930

What’s that?
An egg?
By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot.

Galileo how are you
and his consecutive thirds!
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!
We’re moving he said we’re off—Porca Madonna!
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey charging Pretender.
That’s not moving, that’s moving.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's not how I imagine Descartes talking, but it sounds like a great Beckett-Moliere crossover!