“Great Expectations” is a perfect novel to teach high school students.
“I do believe her, though I know she lies,” wrote Shakespeare about the dark lady. It could also be said by some Republican voters about Mitt Romney.
The Folger’s revival of Susanne Centlivre’s 1705 comedy about unruly women playing cards has coincided well with battles in Congress over who has the right to control women’s bodies.
Herbert paradoxically describes Lent as a “dear Feast” in which we can revel.
The conflict between the Super Bowl and “Downton Abbey” is anticipated in Tom Robbins’s comic novel “Skinny Legs and All,” only with a dancer rather than a television series.
A. S. Byatt describes narrative as “one of the best intoxicants or tranquilizers.”
Which literary character is Mitt Romney? Possibilities include Faustus, Chauncey Gardener, the Hollow Men, Richard Cory, Tom Buchanan, and Joseph Conrad’s Station Manager.
See explosive Knicks point guard Jeremy Lin appear from nowhere brings to mind the Keats poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”
Pundits debates whether Obama has been naive in his dealings with opponents. The same question can be asked of Queen Wealtheow in “Beowulf.”
In Kathy Coffey’s poem, a mountain hike reveals a sudden glimpse into the sublime that brings Jesus’s transfiguration to mind.
“The Artist” is a feast of allusions for those who know and love Hollywood’s golden age.
The Faustus story can aid one in an existential search for meaning.
In my Theories of the Reader course, we have been taking note of different analogies that theorists apply to reading literature. French phenomenologist George Poulet (“Criticism and the Experience of interiority”) describes reading as a forceful intrusion by the book: As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a [...]
Memorizing poetry used to be standard classroom practice and poetry was widely popular before the snobs came in.
Posted in Coleridge (Samuel Taylor), Keats (John), Kilmer (Joyce), Kipling (Rudyard), Riley (James Whitcomb), Shelley (Percy), Tennyson (Alfred Lord), Wordsworth (William) | Tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "Ozymandias", "Trees", Alfred Lord Tennyson, Cleanth Brooks, Gunga Din, Joyce Kilmer, Memorizing poetry, Percy Shelley, Robert Penn Warren, Rudyard Kipling, Ulysses, William Wordsworth |
Candidate for the GOP presidential nominee Rick Santorum opposes birth control on the basis of natural law. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath would take his head off.
In her poem about a gray October day, Denise Levertov senses “the invisible sun burning beyond.”
Clint Eastwood’s Super Bowl ad has stirred up a political storm but it reminds me of Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”
Charles Dickens was especially severe on lawyers, who show up in 11 of his 15 novels.
Last week’s death of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, 1996 Nobel prize winner, gives me the occasion to share a wonderful poem about the mystery of what others think of us and why they behave as they do.
My new grandson had the birth experience denied Tristram Shandy: one where a midwife was in charge.
Rumi’s poem “The Lame Goat” has offered solace to those suffering from physical and emotional setbacks.
“Troubled Water,” a 2008 Norwegian film about a horrendous crime, brings out the depth and humanity of everyone involved.
The possibility that poetry can have a deleterious effect on one (the poetry of Scott and Byron anyway) is a possibility that Austen brings up in “Persuasion.”
“As the robin singeth after rain,” so are we all singing after the birth of my first grandchild.
