My hero / Homer by Madeline Miller

Homer
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

My hero: 

Homer

by Madeline Miller Salmond

'From the very first sentence - "Sing, O goddess, the destructive rage of Achilles" - I fell completely in love'

Madeline Miller
Friday 1 June 2012 22.55 BST

I

first encountered Homer when I was five years old and my mother would read the Iliad and the Greek myths to me as bedtime stories. From the very first sentence – "Sing, O goddess, the destructive rage of Achilles …" – I fell completely in love. I was enthralled by the larger-than-life gods, the epic adventures and most of all by the noble and deeply flawed heroes.

When I got to high school, I was fortunate enough to have a Latin teacher who offered to teach me ancient Greek. Being able to read Homer's words in the original was a life-changing experience. I had always loved his stories and characters, but in the original I was struck by the beauty of his language. It was so poetic and powerful and expansive. No matter how many times I studied it, I was always surprised and delighted by something new.

I continued to study classics through college, and came to realise that I wanted to participate in the stories not just as a reader but as a teller. I returned to the same characters that had always fascinated me – Achilles and his beloved, Patroclus. And once again Homer inspired and surprised me. His rich and fully imagined world generously gave me the scope for my own.

We still don't know if Homer was one person or many people, whether he was truly the blind bard of legend or someone more prosaic. What we do know is that when these poems were written they were intended not just for an elite audience, but for everyone. Homer's eye is all-encompassing; every facet of human life is welcome. His insight into human nature, into such universal experiences as love, loss and war, remain relevant today. Whoever created these gorgeous poems, I owe them a huge debt of gratitude. Almost 3,000 years later they are as fresh as they ever were.

•
 The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury), Madeline Miller's first novel, has been awarded the 2012 Orange prize.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Robert Burns by Alex Salmond

 

Robert Burns

My hero: 

Robert Burns

by Alex Salmond

Scotland's first minister pays tribute to the national bard

Alex Salmond
Friday 29 August 2014

Robert Burns is a cultural and literary icon, whose poetry transcends culture, creed and era. Whether in traditional publications or online, his work continues to thrive. This year, I delivered the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns address at the Dunblane Youth Burns Club and it was fantastic to see younger generations fully appreciate the global contribution of Scotland's national bard.

Thousands of Burns celebrations take place across the world, from Boston to Beijing, every year. Bob Dylan named Burns as his greatest inspiration and there are more Burns monuments than any other figure of modern times – in the US, there are more statues of him than of any American writer.

The statue of Robert Burns in Stirling

Some of the best romantic poetry ever written is by Burns. My admiration for him lies in the descriptive, artistic phrasing that encapsulates Scottish identity – our creativity, pride and confidence – but also in his portrayal of love and a true humanitarian ethos. "Common weal" is an interesting auld Scots term meaning the wellbeing of all, with relevance to the core theme of Burns's work: The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor; Is king o' men for a' that.

Were he around today he would be tweeting and blogging his ideas to mass approval. Burns admirers keep his work and beliefs alive.

Robert Burns

"A Man's a Man for A' That" was recited at the opening of the Scottish parliament in 1999, its verse resonating around the debating chamber as MSPs took their seats for the first time in Scotland's reconvened legislature:

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Maya Angelou by her publisher Lennie Goodings

 

My hero: 

Maya Angelou

by her publisher Lennie Goodings

The late author's UK editor remembers a funny, gracious, kind, demanding, delightful and wise human being – and writer of one of the world's great autobiographies

BIOGRAPHY

Thursday 29 May 2014

Maya Angelou was one of the world's most important writers and activists. She lived and chronicled an extraordinary life: rising from poverty, violence and racism, she became a renowned author, poet, playwright, civil rights' activist – working with Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – and memoirist. She wrote and performed a poem, "On the Pulse of Morning", for President Clinton on his inauguration; she was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama and was honoured by more than 70 universities throughout the world.

Maya Angelou and Lennie Goodings at Maya's 70th birthday party

I last saw her at the beginning of this month in her home in Winston Salem, North Carolina, and though she obviously wasn't entirely well, she was very much her larger-than-life self: funny, gracious, kind, demanding, delightful and wise. Our conversation ranged over Michelle and Barack Obama, for whom she held huge respect; her "daughter" Oprah; her son and grandchildren, and my family. She talked about James Baldwin and Malcolm X, and we ate pancakes and then, later, wonderful spare ribs. We laughed and we drank. At the time I thought how blessed I am, and now I know I was.

Her first book, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Almost like a novel, it takes the reader into a time and place – 1930s Stamps, Arkansas, the segregated southern US town where her grandmother ran the general store – that is never to be forgotten. It was first published in America by Random House in 1969. Angelou said that Bob Loomis (who was her editor in America for 40 years) asked her many times to write her life story – she was convinced he was put up to it by "Jimmy" Baldwin – and she demurred until finally he said: "Well, it's hard to write a good autobiography." "I will start tomorrow," came her answer.

It was hugely acclaimed in America, but when it was shown to British publishers in the 1970s, according to Maya, they said that British people wouldn't care about a young black girl growing up in the American south in the 1930s. So no British edition appeared. In the mid 1980s Ursula Owen, then editorial director of Virago, visited Random House US, where the rights director suggested she have a look. Owen knew immediately it was for us.

I was the publicity director at the time and, soon after, a seriously crazily typed letter from Jessica Mitford arrived for me. She was going to make it her business to tell the world about her great friend and this book! We wondered how these two women had become friends – and we later discovered that they were devoted to each other. Jessica, claimed Maya, came once to her rescue to face down the Ku Klux Klan, saying she was Maya's mother. I copied parts of her letter to send to all the press and the response was immediate.

Then Maya came to London. Well, that is just too tame a description. In our tiny office, 6ft Maya sang and danced and laughed her way into our lives. She recited her poem "Phenomenal Woman" in our office. We were astonished and thrilled – and very much awed.

So it was that 15 years after the first US publication, we published I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in a Virago paperback. Maya appeared on Afternoon Plus. It was a heartfelt, bold interview, and Maya talked about the part in her book where she is raped at eight and how she became mute until literature coaxed her back into speaking. The TV switchboards were jammed; the reviews and features that followed were stunning. Maya beamed straight into British hearts. 

I don't think we quite knew what we had. Our first print run was around 8,000 paperbacks and was sold out before publication. We printed another cautious 8,000. Today, the Virago edition of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has sold more than 600,000 copies, and it's still selling year on year, month on month. It's on courses, reading lists and remains, to my mind, one of the world's great autobiographies. We went on to publish all Maya's works: six more volumes of autobiography, her poetry, essays and cookbooks.

She brought us bestsellers but, more than that, she brought us a reminder that the human need for dignity and recognition is a gift easily given to one another, but frighteningly easy to withhold. Maya's fierce belief was that each of us has a deep worth – a simple yet profound fact. She was an indomitable force, famed for her spirit and style, courage and laughter. 

In 2009 she wrote: "My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things …" She was a wonderful teacher: "You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them … Do not complain. Make every effort to change things you do not like … Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity."

She did that, many times over.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / My English Teacher by Andrew Motion

Peter Way at school 1941. Photograph courtesy Radleian Society

My hero: 

My English Teacher by Andrew Motion

In his introduction and previously unpublished poem, the former poet laureate recalls how Peter Way, who died last month, nurtured his love of literature

Andrew Motion

Saturday 9 April 2016

I’ve yet to meet the writer who didn’t have an inspirational English teacher. Mine was Peter Way: Mr Way for five school years, then Peter for the next 40-odd. Our classroom paths first crossed when he began teaching me English at A-level in 1967. At that stage I had no great interest in literature (no one in my family had much time for books), and no expectation of going to university (no one in my father’s family had ever been); two years later, reading was at the centre of my life. This was his gift to me – and he gave it without ostentation, always speaking modestly and carefully, in such a way as to make poetry (in particular) seem an endlessly ingenious thing, but also as natural to the species as breathing. He lent me books from his own library, encouraged me to write my first poems, helped me to prepare for my university entrance and afterwards managed the transition from teacher/pupil to close friend/close friend. It’s no exaggeration to say that in certain ways he gave me my life – as I’ve also said in the poem that follows, which I wrote the day after his death on 30 March.

In Memory of Peter Way

My teacher, who reached down inside my head
and turned the first lights on. Who gave me Keats
to read, which turned on more. Who made me
read. Who made me write. Who made me argue
for the truth in things themselves. Who told me
manners maketh man. Who let me question
even the things he said himself were true.
Who gave my life to me, by which I mean
the things I chose and not inheritance.
Who showed a quiet voice can carry far.
Who took the gratitude I owed to him
and changed it into friendship. Who was kind.
My teacher, who died yesterday at peace –
his hardest lesson and the last of these.

THE GUARDIAN

Tomas Transtrômer

Tomas Tranströmer – My Nobel prize-winning hero

The literature prize means the world of poetry can finally raise a glass to salute this humble man

Robin Robertson
Friday 7 October 2011 13.28 BST

E

very October, for decades, a group of reporters and photographers have gathered in the stairwell of an apartment block in a quiet district of Stockholm, waiting to hear if the poet upstairs has finally won the Nobel prize for literature. The poet's wife, Monica, would bring them tea and biscuits while they stood around – but they would always leave, around lunchtime, as the news came in that the prize had gone to someone else. Annually, the name of Tomas Tranströmer comes up, and with every year one felt a growing sense that he would never receive this highest literary honour from his own country. The vigil is over now, with Thursday's wonderful news.

The landscape of Tranströmer's poetry – the jagged coastland of his native Sweden, with its dark spruce and pine forests, sudden light and sudden storm, restless seas and endless winters – is mirrored by his direct, plain-speaking style and arresting, unforgettable images. The master-poet of anxiety, of stress, he explores the vulnerability of the human in the face of the irrational – intrigued by polarities and how we respond to finding ourselves amid epiphanies, at pivotal points, at the fulcrum of a moment: "The sun is scorching. The plane comes in low, / throwing a shadow in the shape of a giant cross, rushing over the ground. / A man crouches over something in the field. / The shadow reaches him. / For a split-second he is in the middle of the cross. // I have seen the cross that hangs from cool church arches. / Sometimes it seems like a snapshot / of frenzy." ("Out in the Open")

Tranströmer is not only Scandinavia's greatest living poet, he is a writer of world stature. It is an honour to know this man, and to have translated some of his work – and a huge happiness to me that this work will now reach so many new readers. The world of poetry can finally raise a glass to salute this humble man, this magnificent poet.

The Deleted World by Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Robertson, is published by Enitharmon.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero: Charles Baudelaire by Roberto Calasso

'Even when he is most harrowing, he gives pleasure'

Friday 7 December 2012

W

hen you feel exhausted and rather gloomy, the best thing to do is to lie down and open a book, just to make your mind wander somewhere else. In that moment, you discover that not all writers – not even some of the greatest – may be of help. But Baudelaire, yes; at least for me.

Not so much the often marvellous poems of the Fleurs du mal., but the prose: everywhere, in his Salons, when he talks of forgotten painters of his time; in his reviews, in his notebooks, in his essays, in his letters, in his outrageous remarks about the Belgians.

In a strange way, even at his most harrowing, he gives pleasure. One feels the vibration of a nervous system to which we cannot help but feel akin, unless we are total brutes. To resist Baudelaire is a bit like resisting Chopin: you can do it, of course, but it's so much the worse for you.

Besides, there are so many other motives for being devoted to Baudelaire, not only in literary but also psychological terms. He is one of the very few writers (Emily Dickinson may be another example) who never tried to promote himself socially. (By the way, promoting himself would have been rather easy if only he had hated his stepfather, General Aupick – a pompous ass if ever there was one – just a bit less.)

And another of his admirable and rare qualities was that he would not hear of a Baudelaire school, although among his followers one might notice young people named Mallarmé or Verlaine. But he preferred to be alone, as he had always been. Last but not least, something that should be seriously considered by the UN: Baudelaire wanted to add to the list of human rights: le droit de s'en aller, "the right to go away".

• Roberto Calasso's La Folie Baudelaire is published by Allen Lane.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Elizabeth Barrett Browning by Sara Paretsky

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

My hero: 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

by Sara Paretsky

Sara Paretsky

Saturday 10 April 2010

T

he Angel in the House, which has flapped its pernicious wings over far too many women's lives, hovered over the Kansas farmhouse where I grew up. When I was eight, my parents turned childcare and housework over to me: I was a girl; that was what I was born to do. The Angel was the evil creation of the Victorian writer Coventry Patmore, who invoked immolation of all ambition and desire as the feminine ideal. It was a heavy burden for women, and many rebelled against its strictures. American farm women were driven into psychosis by their isolation and heavy domestic burden; in the 1870s and 80s there was an epidemic of midwestern women burning down their homes, killing themselves and their families in the process.

Victorian writers tackled the Angel more creatively. A number, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Isabella Bird, took to their beds, but it was Barrett Browning who also first confronted the Angel head on in her 1856 poem, Aurora Leigh. Women may be educated, Aurora scornfully says, "As long as they keep quiet by the fire /. . . their angelic reach / Of virtue, chiefly used to sit and darn".

A few cantos later, her cousin proposes marriage, telling her to give up her dreams of poetry and support him in his work. Aurora turns him down. Like Aurora, Barrett Browning dedicated her life to her art, but she also had a passion for social justice. When Robert Browning convinced her of his love, she finally rose from her sickbed and ran off with him to Italy, where she devoted the remaining 12 years of her life to her art, to writing and working on behalf of Italian independence and an end to slavery in America — and to her lover.

Perhaps if I'd known of Barrett Browning's life and work when I was young, I might have pushed aside the Angel's wings more easily. Like her, I've been fortunate in love, but in her courage, her poetry and her dedication to social justice, she sets the bar for me.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / John Keats by Helen Dunmore

 

My hero: 

John Keats

by Helen Dunmore

 

Helen Dunmore
Saturday 27 March 2010

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy – all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."

Whereas Byron drank soda water to preserve his figure and Shelley wrote a treatise on the natural diet, Keats ate his nectarine, and we taste it 200 years later. Keats was always the man for me. I read his letters in my mid-teens, before I knew much of his poetry. He was warm, earthy, self-mocking, funny and endlessly interested in gossip, weaving a brilliant weft under and over the letters' darker warp of sickness, death and mental anguish.

In the Keats-Shelley house in Rome, you can stand in Keats's bedroom and see the flowers on the ceiling that he saw when he lay dying. All the furniture was burned, as it had to be by law, because he had died of tuberculosis. He'd foreseen the whole ugly business from the first moment that he coughed up arterial blood, because his medical training forbade self-deception as much as his nature forbade self-pity. "I cannot be deceived in that colour; – that drop of blood is my death-warrant; – I must die."

The words reveal an essential toughness. Keats sees things as they are, with all their contradictions. He moves within a few lines from a joke about Winchester's fresh-flannelled doorsteps to the news that he has been writing the "Ode to Autumn". He remarks ironically, in one of his most agonised letters: "The knowledge of contrast, feeling for light and shade, all that information (primitive sense) necessary for a poem, are great enemies to the recovery of the stomach."

When I first read these words I barely understood them, but all the same there was a shock of recognition. At school, poems were all about meaning, and that didn't correspond to what I experienced when I tried to write them. Keats knew that you could write with a nectarine in one hand, and the juice would run into a poem.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Ted Hughes by Michael Morpurgo

Ted Hughes

My hero Ted Hughes

Michael Morpurgo

Saturday 31 Octuber 2009

I

first met Ted Hughes down by the River Torridge in Devon where he was fishing. He was already by this time a huge literary hero of mine. As a teacher in junior schools I had listened to his Poetry in the Making with many classes of children, and been inspired with them to turn my hand to writing. There is no better invitation to write than this book. He simply says: we can all do this. We are all storytellers, all poets, it is a question of keeping your eyes and ears open, and your heart too. And listening hard to the music of the words we use.

That meeting down by the river was to change my life profoundly. He was a near neighbour, a great friend, and a huge supporter of Farms for City Children, the educational charity Clare, my wife, and I began over 30 years ago. He believed, as we did, that for a city child the experience of living and working in the countryside could be as life-changing as a great book or a great poem.

We collaborated on a book about the farm, All Around the Year, and from then on regularly showed each other work in progress. Can you imagine how encouraging that was for a young writer still finding his voice? When my children's novel War Horse failed to win the Whitbread prize, he took me out for the day, not to console me, but to tell me that I had written a fine book, and that I would write a finer one.

Shortly before his early death, he and I worked together to create the post of children's laureate, because he believed, as I did, that someone should be out banging the drum and blowing the trumpet for the best of children's literature.

He may be gone, but he and his work remain unforgettable.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban

Robert Lowell

My hero 

Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban

'In his greatest poems he brilliantly fused the most intimate details of his own life with the public turmoil of his century'

Saturday 3 July 2010
Jonathan Raban

I

was his fishing friend. In 1971, when Lowell was 54 and I was 28, he sent me a generous postcard after I'd talked on Radio 3 about Notebook, his epic sonnet sequence. We met for lunch at a crappy French restaurant on Old Brompton Road, near the house where he lived with Caroline Blackwood. We began with talk of poetry, then moved to fishing and the day-ticket trout streams in Kent and Hampshire where I was a frequent visitor. Four hours later we left the restaurant, having made a fishing date for the weekend.

From then until his sudden death in 1977, I was an immensely lucky recipient of Lowell's gift for friendship. I see him now, his grizzled hair, home-cut in the wild style of the later Beethoven; eyes enlarged by thick, black-framed glasses; cigarette never far from his lips; that Bostonian voice, tinged with the vowel-stretching accent of the old South. He was the most companionable man I've ever met, the most avid in his inexhaustible appetite for history, literature, politics, people, gossip, and one of the most funny. Conversation was for him a continuous experiment, in which he'd playfully draft phrases, similes and metaphors to fit the experience in hand, as if everything that happened might be a potential poem in the making. In his greatest poems, such as "Waking Early Sunday Morning", he brilliantly fused the most intimate details of his own life with the public turmoil of his century.

He was an afflicted hero. One month in every 12, he'd be cruelly humbled by a bout of mania, an event harrowing to witness as Lowell's furies took possession of him. I remember a visit to the hospital, the day after the people in white coats had come for him. Drugged, gentle, wanly smiling, Lowell introduced me to his fellow patients: "You see, I'm a freshman here." Wherever he was, whether sectioned in the madhouse, or home, sprawled on his red-velvet chaise longue, amid a blizzard of books, ash and paper, he was one of life's great learners, a modest student of the world he wrote about with such exhilarating power.

THE GUARDIAN