Thanks for this excellent introduction and for your other flying poems, and thanks to the readers for theirs. I will add Larry Beckett's substantial narrative poem about Amelia Earhart, in his very grand collection of narrative poems, American Cycle (2021).
I really enjoyed this piece. Another poet with poems on flying is Enid Shomer, who has an excellent book called Stars At Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran. Cochran was a WWII pilot who was the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound and held or still holds many flying records. Shomer writes in form and all the poems are in the voice of the pilot.
I learned to fly in my sixties. I completed my solo cross counties talking to air traffic controllers and finding my way back home very much alone. I scared myself self once by making a foolish mistake and donated my accumulated gear to my flight school. Now I fly economy class and help the pilots up front mentally.
Excellent piece! Let’s not forget High Flight (John Gillespie Magee) - a bit hackneyed, but still good stuff! Second World War, though; I haven’t come across any other aviation war poetry from WW1, apart from the Irish Airman.
Magee's poem was in the list, but somehow got inadvertently left out when I pasted the text into Substack. Thanks for reminding me. I've added it back into the WWII list.
So far as I can tell, there's not a single poem about flying in the anthology of (mostly British) World War 1 poetry, "The Winter of the World," by Hibberd and Onions. This is quite surprising, but I never realized it till reading this essay.
Fascinating. I was going to say something about WWI flyers in fiction, but a quick search told me that the first of the Biggles stories of Capt. W.E. Johns, based on the author's experiences as a pilot in the First Wold War --- which was really what I was thinking of --- didn't appear until 1932. As novel as flight was in that war, you'd think there'd be more literary mention of it (and perhaps there is, but my experience gives out at the Biggles series, to which one of my sons was addicted as a very little boy).
Movies have frequently featured flying, of course. One of my favorites is "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth.
Thanks for this excellent introduction and for your other flying poems, and thanks to the readers for theirs. I will add Larry Beckett's substantial narrative poem about Amelia Earhart, in his very grand collection of narrative poems, American Cycle (2021).
I really enjoyed this piece. Another poet with poems on flying is Enid Shomer, who has an excellent book called Stars At Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran. Cochran was a WWII pilot who was the first woman to fly faster than the speed of sound and held or still holds many flying records. Shomer writes in form and all the poems are in the voice of the pilot.
I learned to fly in my sixties. I completed my solo cross counties talking to air traffic controllers and finding my way back home very much alone. I scared myself self once by making a foolish mistake and donated my accumulated gear to my flight school. Now I fly economy class and help the pilots up front mentally.
Two wonderful flight-related poems are C.Day Lewis's "Flight to Australia" and Ramon Guthrie's "Death With Pants On " Definitely worth a look.
Thanks for introducing me to this poem. The conjunction of transcendence and giddiness is novel for me.
Excellent piece! Let’s not forget High Flight (John Gillespie Magee) - a bit hackneyed, but still good stuff! Second World War, though; I haven’t come across any other aviation war poetry from WW1, apart from the Irish Airman.
This was the poem my daddy requested to be read at his funeral. He was a WWII pilot.
Magee's poem was in the list, but somehow got inadvertently left out when I pasted the text into Substack. Thanks for reminding me. I've added it back into the WWII list.
My mom put a print out of this in our childhood bathroom so I know High Flight well
Perhaps a poem by Yehuda Amichai--"A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention" (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58628/a-pity-we-were-such-a-good-invention)--would find a home in a study or anthology of airplane literature, perhaps in the appendix on airplane as metaphor:
"An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything."
So far as I can tell, there's not a single poem about flying in the anthology of (mostly British) World War 1 poetry, "The Winter of the World," by Hibberd and Onions. This is quite surprising, but I never realized it till reading this essay.
Fascinating. I was going to say something about WWI flyers in fiction, but a quick search told me that the first of the Biggles stories of Capt. W.E. Johns, based on the author's experiences as a pilot in the First Wold War --- which was really what I was thinking of --- didn't appear until 1932. As novel as flight was in that war, you'd think there'd be more literary mention of it (and perhaps there is, but my experience gives out at the Biggles series, to which one of my sons was addicted as a very little boy).
Movies have frequently featured flying, of course. One of my favorites is "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), directed by Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Rita Hayworth.