Category Archives: Books

“I like myself poems that are gentle rather than arrogant intellectually. Where language fades into cries or whispers.” — Medbh McGuckian

“Hate those two words together, they are so unwomanly and unpoetic together they cancel each other out. ‘Poet’ I don’t like or ‘woman’ or ‘man’ none of these words although I have had to use them. ‘Female’ not much better. … Continue reading

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“One day I hope I can write happier poems, but most of the things I think about aren’t very cheerful.” — poet Philip Larkin

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, one doesn’t STUDY poets! You READ them and think, That’s marvelous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn. At the end of it you can’t say, That’s Yeats, that’s Auden, … Continue reading

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On This Day: August 7, 1934: “It must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring.”

On December 6, 1933, the US Court of Appeals (Judge John Woolsey) judged Ulysses by James Joyce to be NOT obscene and declared that the book could be admitted into the United States. There were then appeals to this decision. … Continue reading

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“I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields after dark.” — Alfred, Lord Tennyson

He was not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets. – T.S. Eliot It’s Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s birthday, born on August 6, 1809. … Continue reading

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“Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to … Continue reading

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“He who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains.” — Herman Melville

“Old nineteenth-century New England must have been fearful–in what other country would Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson have been so overlooked?” — Robert Lowell, letter to Elizabeth Bishop, December 12, 1958 Herman Melville was born on this day in 1819. … Continue reading

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Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë: “a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove”

“My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; — out of a sullen hollow in a livid hill-side, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the … Continue reading

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“I do not write for the public.” — poet Gerard Manley Hopkins

“I shall shortly have some sonnets to send you, five or more. Four of these came like inspirations unbidden and against my will. And in the life I lead now, which is one of a continually jaded and harassed mind, … Continue reading

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“I would insist that poetry is a normal human activity and its proper concern all the things that happen to people.” — Michael Longley

“I write out of a jumble of emotions and vague notions and scraps of knowledge. At some stage a form or, rather, a shape mysteriously emerges.” — Michael Longley Poet Michael Longley was born on this day in Belfast in … Continue reading

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“The rhythm is jazz.” — Hart Crane

“What I want to get is … an ‘interior’ form, a form that is so thorough and intense as to dye the words themselves with a pecularity of meaning, slightly different maybe from the ordinary definition of them separate from … Continue reading

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