Now the wise men of sport have become half poets, half anthropologists, neither one too thoroughly.
"Luba Kaftanikoff was a round little spinster, half-poet, half-white witch, who had known Yeats.
Brooke is a half-remembered poet of Englishness, but not just that – because he was at least as interested in politics as he was in poetry.
The 1945 prize was awarded to the Chilean "half-Indian" poet Gabriela Mistral, the first writer from Latin America to be chosen (and the fifth woman).
The oldest surviving painting of the half-divine poet — best known for his journey to Hades to rescue his snakebitten bride, Eurydice — dates from the sixth century B.C. Since then, Wroe writes, "he has never left men's consciousness".
"Watch me be an artist who was born ready-made," Lemon Andersen, a thirty-four-year-old half-Latino poet, performer, and actor, raps in his one-man show "County of Kings: The Beautiful Struggle" (at the Public, developed and directed by Elise Thoron).
He invited a half-dozen poets from several generations, and several wars.
There were some generous reviews, Kingsley Amis calling him "one of the best half-dozen poets now writing in English," and, by the time Selected Poems appeared 20 years later, an anonymous reviewer in the TLS was starting to use words like "major poetry".
Physically awkward, with one shorter arm, Stalin, once a published poet, was half murderous tyrant, half intellectual, always reading.
Half of the poets inside it were new to me.
