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Category Archives: writers
“You can understand a lot about yourself by working out which fairytale you use to present your world to yourself in.” — A.S. Byatt
I didn’t mark the passing of A.S. Byatt last year when it happened. I was overwhelmed with work at the time. But I did take a moment … a very still and silent moment … to reflect on her, on … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, fiction, George Eliot, nonfiction, Possession
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“Good friends, let’s to the fields.” — Edgar Lee Masters’ epitaph
Edgar Lee Masters (born on this day) was a lawyer (one of his law partners was Clarence Darrow!) and a poet. He published a couple of books and biographies (one of Walt Whitman, a poet he admired). He was no … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Edgar Lee Masters, Ezra Pound, poetry, Radu Jude
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“A ‘smartcracker’ they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy.” — Dorothy Parker
“Oh, good Lord, what’s the matter with women, anyway?” “Please don’t call me ‘women,’” she said. “I’m sorry, darling,” he said. “I didn’t mean to use bad words.” — Dorothy Parker, “Dusk Before Fireworks” It’s her birthday today. I cannot … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Dorothy Parker, E.M. Forster, Edna St. Vincent Millay, essays, fiction, Oscar Wilde, poetry
18 Comments
“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
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Seamus Heaney
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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
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Christopher Hitchens, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry
11 Comments
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
“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
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, Ellen Terry, England, Ezra Pound, George Orwell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Jeanette Winterson, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ralph Waldo Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden
11 Comments
“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
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, England, Ernest Hemingway, Gerard Manley Hopkins, H.L. Mencken, Harold Bloom, John Keats, Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams
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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
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

