Six poems that tell stories about monsters and monstrosity

By Jon Stone, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Anglia Ruskin University

Poetry isn’t a medium typically associated with towering beasts. Lyric poems tend to be short, tender and concerned with minor everyday incidents. That, or abstract concepts like love and death. Poems also tend to be thought of, wrongly or not, as true accounts – the inverse of creature feature films with preposterous special effects.

But poets, like everyone else, live in a world of disastrous events bigger than themselves. And the monster – particularly the giant monster – is an archetype that goes right back to ancient myth.

Talos, the bronze guardian of Crete, and Humbaba,…

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