Selected by Dr Oliver Tearle

Flight is a common trope and topic in poetry, whether information technology'southward the flight of birds or the flying of humans (from Icarus' doomed flight to the invention of aeroplanes in the early twentieth century). In this mail, nosotros gather together some of the finest poems most flying and flight, taking in everything from aeroplanes to hawks to kestrels to nightingales to … poets themselves, attempting to fly free from the premises and restrictions of the Earth. If you lot have your wings set, let's dive in.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'To a Skylark'.

The pale majestic fifty-fifty
Melts around thy flying;
Like a star of Heaven,
In the broad day-light
Thou fine art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight …

Shelley (1792-1822) completed this, i of his almost famous poems, in June 1820. The inspiration for the poem was an evening walk Shelley took with his wife, Mary (writer of Frankenstein, of course), in Livorno, in north-west Italy. Mary later described the circumstances that gave rising to the poem: 'It was on a cute summertime evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.' The opening line of the poem gave Noel Coward the championship for his play Blithe Spirit.

John Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'.

Away! away! for I will wing to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy …

John Keats (1795-1821) wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale', one of his most celebrated poems, in Hampstead in 1819 – sitting under a plum tree, according to i account. (In the same account, he wrote the entire thing in ane forenoon!) Keats uses the nightingale as a fashion of talking most death, annihilation, immortality, and, indeed, his own feelings nigh these subjects – the nightingale being a common symbol for the poet. As the excerpt from the verse form quoted to a higher place makes articulate, flying, for Keats, is as much an act of the human being imagination (through poetry) as it is a physical act the bird can perform.

Emily Dickinson, 'Delight Is As the Flight'.

Delight is as the flying—
Or in the Ratio of it,
As the Schools would say—
The Rainbow's way—
A Skein
Flung colored, afterwards Pelting,
Would suit equally bright,
Except that flight
Were Aliment …

So begins this poem nearly flight from 1 of the nineteenth century's nigh distinctive poets, which uses flight as a metaphor for life: how loftier exercise y'all soar, how long practise you remain in the air?

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 'The Windhover'. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) thought 'The Windhover' the best thing he ever wrote. He wrote information technology in 1877, during a gilded era of inventiveness for the poet, while he was living in Wales. The comparison between the kestrel or 'windhover' and Christ arises out of Hopkins's securely felt Christianity (he was a Jesuit), and the poet'southward breathless exhilaration at sighting the bird is brilliantly captured by Hopkins's distinctive 'sprung rhythm'. The windhover (better known equally the kestrel) rides the wind similar a horseman or chevalier, and in plow becomes Jesus, the 'knight' who came to save homo…

Robert Graves, 'Flight Kleptomaniacal'. Taking the species of butterfly known every bit the 'cabbage white' as its subject, this poem past Robert Graves (1895-1985) is really an extended metaphor for man activity: just because the cabbage white cannot fly directly, unlike the more graceful swift, this doesn't make the lowly butterfly 'wrong' or imperfect. There's something to be said for 'flying kleptomaniacal', for being dissimilar…

John Gillespie Magee, 'High Flight'.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
Loftier in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting current of air along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air . . .

Magee (1922-41) fought and died in the 2d World State of war; he was one-half-American, born in Communist china, and served in the Purple Canadian Air Force. Magee (1922-41) wrote 'High Flight', a sonnet, nearly the exhilarating experience of flying through the air in a fighter-plane, putting out his mitt to 'touch the face of God'. Magee was killed in an adventitious mid-air collision over England in 1941; his poem gained a new charter of life when President Ronald Reagan quoted from it following the Challenger disaster in 1986.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 'History of the Airplane'. Taking in everything from the Wright Brothers' powered flight in 1903 to Hiroshima to ix/11, this poem in expansive free verse ponders whether the invention of the aeroplane really did bring 'peace on earth', or whether it just gave war the leg-up information technology wanted.

Anne Sexton, 'A Story For Rose On The Midnight Flight To Boston'. Although not as well-known equally her virtually-contemporary Sylvia Plath, Sexton was a fellow Confessional poet – although this verse form is less 'confessional' and less taboo-breaking than many of her poems, which have on hard, 'unpoetic' themes. Simply the rhythms of Sexton's masterly verse hither perfectly capture the way travel tin stir upward memories in u.s. equally we return home: 'I am almost someone going home.' Wonderful.

Ted Hughes, 'The Militarist in the Pelting'. We could have chosen whatsoever number of Ted Hughes poems here, but we've opted for this early on poem from the mid-1950s, which gave its name to the championship of Hughes' first collection (named past Sylvia Plath, who had just begun a relationship with Hughes). 'Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air': this is how Hughes describes the hovering of the fearsome militarist in this powerful early on poem.

Margaret Atwood, 'Flying Inside Your Own Body'. Although far better-known at present as a novelist, Atwood is likewise an accomplished poet, and 'Flying Inside Your Own Trunk' is a gorgeous paean to freedom – embodied by the 'wings' in this poem – even so its celebratory qualities are tempered past the acknowledgment that this sort of boundless flight tin happen 'only in dreams'.

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Groovy State of war, The Waste matter Land and the Modernist Long Poem.