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- 2026 Shakespeare Reading Project: Much Ado About Nothing
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Tag Archives: Michael Schmidt
“Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully.” — poet Elizabeth Bishop
“All the intellectuals were communist except me. I’m always very perverse so I went in for T.S. Eliot and Anglo-Catholicism.”– Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop, born on this day, is one of my favorite poets. She didn’t write all that many … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Elizabeth Bishop, Harriet Monroe, Joseph Cornell, Marianne Moore, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Seamus Heaney
13 Comments
“For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth…” — Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine
Maybe this is him. I’m armed with more than complete steel, The justice of my quarrel. — Christopher Marlowe, Lust’s Dominion. Act iii. Sc. 4. Playwright, poet, prodigy, agent in Her Majesty’s secret service: the incomparable Christopher Marlowe was born … Continue reading
“The mood of the Blues is almost always despondency, but when they are sung people laugh.” — Langston Hughes
The Blues always impressed me as being very sad, sadder even than the Spirituals, because their sadness is not softened with tears, but hardened with laughter … of a sadness where there is no god to appeal to. — Langston … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Countee Cullen, Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Melvin B. Tolson, Michael Schmidt, poetry
5 Comments
“I doubt sometimes whether a quiet and unagitated life would have suited me–yet I sometimes long for it.” — Lord Byron
— And who is the best poet, Heron? asked Boland. — Lord Tennyson, of course, answered Heron. — O, yes, Lord Tennyson, said Nash. We have all his poetry at home in a book. At this Stephen forgot the silent … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Elvis Presley, England, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Jane Austen, Jeanette Winterson, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Byron, Lord Tennyson, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Six Centuries of Great Poetry, Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Walter Savage Landor, war, William Hazlitt
10 Comments
“The fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse.” — John Donne
“So difficult and opaque it is, I am not certain what it is I print.” — first publisher of the work of John Donne It’s his birthday today. John Donne (1572-1631) was a poet and an Anglican priest (born a … Continue reading
“It is a pity that the poet should be compelled to impart interest and force to his subject, instead of receiving them from it.” — poet and critic Matthew Arnold
“My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and … Continue reading
“Every day life feels mightier, and what we have the power to be, more stupendous.” — Emily Dickinson
“If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know … Continue reading
“I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.” — John Milton
Milton was born on this day in 1608. Although he left Oxford without completing his degree, he remained a thinker, a propagandist/pamphleteer, a scholar till the end of his days. The isolated poet, focused on self and personal emotion, would … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Camille Paglia, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, John Aubrey, John Dryden, John Milton, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Robert Burns, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.H. Auden, Walter Savage Landor, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth
12 Comments
“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — Jonathan Swift
“When a man of true Genius appears in the World, you may know him by this infallible Sign, that all the Dunces are in Conspiracy against him.” — Jonathan Swift I don’t have much time to read for pleasure these … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Charles Lamb, Charlotte Bronte, Dr. Samuel Johnson, fiction, Gulliver's Travels, H.L. Mencken, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jane Eyre, Jonathan Swift, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats
12 Comments
“Look in thy heart and write.” — Sir Philip Sidney
“[The poet] doth grow in effect another nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclopes, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely, ranging only … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, England, Harold Bloom, John Aubrey, Michael Schmidt, poetry, William Shakespeare
2 Comments