He has labelled it as a satirical epic.

It’s a poem in the vein of The Iliad or The Divine Comedy which describes love and loss, as well as the war between good and evil. Although the word satire conjures up images of comedy it doesn’t make light of what individuals had to go through. Instead, it’s a frantic summary of a confused emotional response to the past year and a half. It also expresses his fury and confusion about his leaders’ disastrous handling of the pandemic’s first eight months.

He’d already been writing poetry in private for a while or at least verses that followed a strict rhyme pattern. Sometimes they were just doodles with sentences, while other times they were full-fledged poems. It was a private and therapeutic means of digging into words and language, as well as condensing feelings.

Writing a poem was the closest he could get to something like performing music or painting.

He started writing the poem Pandemonium shortly after being placed in lockdown. It was an attempt to make sense of his astonishment and amazement at what was happening. It seemed natural to compare these people with authority over us to the gods of Greek myth to see how they compared.

The pandemic is still going strong. In the United Kingdom, more than a hundred individuals die every day. The majority of the planet is still unvaccinated and w e won’t be able to really examine and respond to what’s going on for many years. Iannucci didn’t intend his poem to be a formal summary; rather, a picture of what has happened so far. Ultimately he just hopes it resonates with his readers hoping, like him, to make sense of it all.

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There are many tragic stories about gambling addiction. There have been people who have gambled away their entire fortune and ended up in poverty. At the other extreme, there have been reports of people winning large sums of money through gambling. Here are a few poems that deal with the often dramatic stories that accompany experiences of gambling.

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A poem about Roulette

Not all poems about gambling have a sad ending. Robert William Service, a British-Canadian poet, wrote a poem about gambling called Roulette. Initially, the poem depicts a fairly bleak situation; the heroine of the story is anxious because she is afraid of losing everything.

She decides to stake all of her ten thousand francs and hopes for the best. She makes up her mind that if she loses she will commit suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. It takes the intervention of compassionate people around her to bring her to her senses.

They tell her that betting on red may be a risk as it has already appeared ten times. She decides that enough is enough and she will never take such risks ever again.

A poem about Casinos

Joyce Sutphen wrote a metaphorical poem about the cut and thrust of gambling called, simply, Casino. While not referencing anything you would recognise in any casino you might visit it describes the excitement of taking a risk. It talks of bearded men, of cats, of workhorses and trees blowing in the wind. Conjuring up the feelings she experiences in her mind as she asks the dealer to deal the cards.

Kenny Rogers – The Gambler

Perhaps the most famous prose about gambling and casinos is not a poem but a song.

Don Schlitz, who was 23 at the time, penned this song in August 1976. Bobby Bare included the song on his album Bare two years later. It failed to chart and was never launched as a single so Schlitz recorded it himself. This didn’t have any success either, however. Other artists saw its potential however and did their own covers. Among those was Johnny Cash, who included it on his album Gone Girl.

Kenny Rogers, on the other hand, achieved huge success with his rendition of it. It was a country number one hit and even made the pop charts. This was at a time when country music rarely achieved this level of popularity.

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The 18th of William Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets was chosen by 18% of those polled as their favorite literary work. It beat other works by other perennial artists such as William Wordsworth and John Keats.

The sonnets in the “Fair Youth” sequence are said to be intended for a handsome young man who may have been of romantic interest. The poem appears to be a conventional poem celebrating beauty, like the other sonnets. However, it ends with a couplet asserting that only his verse can immortalize the youth.

The sonnet won out over Wordsworth’s rhapsodic nature poetry I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, also known as Daffodils. This is another fantastic poem which conjures up the grandeur of the Lake District and was chosen by 10% of those polled.

In a study conducted by research firm Perspectus Global, 9% of respondents chose Edgar Allen Poe’s gothic classic The Raven. The same figure also chose Rudyard Kipling’s somber poem, If.

Other traditional English poets are represented in the top 20 list. Included are poems by William Blake, Lord Byron and Wilfred Owen.

However, more current poetry is included on the list. It features Benjamin Zephaniah’s Dis Poetry and I Still Rise by Maya Angelou. Also included is Carol Ann Duffy’s The Way My Mother Speaks. Other contemporary compositions like George the Poet’s song Cat D feature on the list. Shakespeare’s 17th-century sonnet still takes the prime position in the poll though. Despite the fact that a love poem came in first and several romantic pieces are among the top 20, the survey found that just one in ten adults in the UK could recite romantic verse online.

The list of best poems ever written

1. Sonnet 18: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day – William Shakespeare 18%
2. Daffodils – William Wordsworth 10%
3. The Raven – Edgar Allen Poe 9%
4. If – Rudyard Kipling 9%
5. Jabberwocky – Lewis Carroll 8%
6. Still, I Rise – Maya Angelou 7%
7. How Do I Love Thee – Elizabeth Barrett Browning 7%
8. She Walks in Beauty – Lord Byron 6%
9. Ode to a Nightingale – John Keats 6%
10. Under Milk Wood – Dylan Thomas 6%
11. The Highwayman – Alfred Noyes 6%
12. Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley 6%
13. Dulce et Decorum est – Wilfred Owen 6%
14. The Tyger – William Blake 6%
15. Paradise Lost – John Milton 6%
16. Remember – Christina Rossetti 5%
17. Dis Poetry – Benjamin Zephaniah 5%
18. The Lady of Shalott – Lord Tennyson 5%
19. For Women Who Are Difficult to Love – Warsan Shire 5%
20. Yes, I’ll Marry You – Pam Ayres 5%
21. The Way My Mother Speaks – Carol Ann Duffy 5%
22. The Point – Kae Tempest 5%
23. (I Married a) Monster from Outer Space – John Cooper Clarke 5%
24. Cat D – George the Poet 4%
25. Cocoon – Holly Poetry 4%

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