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Tag Archives: Michael Schmidt
“Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius.” — poet/engraver/visionary William Blake
“I mean, don’t you think it’s a little bit excessive?” “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake.” Pause. “William Blake?” “William Blake!” “William Blake???” “William Blake!!!” — Bull Durham William Blake was a poet virtually … Continue reading
“Omissions are not accidents.” — poet Marianne Moore
“I disliked the term ‘poetry’ for any but Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s or Dante’s.” — Marianne Moore T.S. Eliot felt Moore’s poetry was probably the “most durable” of all the greats writing at the time. Sadly, I have no idea how … Continue reading
“I was never afraid of failure, for I would sooner fail than not to be among the greatest.” –John Keats
I was just beautifying him, don’t you know. A thing of beauty, don’t you know. Yeats says, or I mean, Keats says. – James Joyce, Ulysses Born in 1795 on this day, John Keats was orphaned at fifteen. Because his … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Anne Spencer, Camille Paglia, Countee Cullen, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, John Keats, Katherine Mansfield, L.M. Montgomery, Lord Byron, Louis MacNeice, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, Percy Bysshe Shelley, poetry, Robert Burns, Robert Graves, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Seamus Heaney, Six Centuries of Great Poetry, T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, William Faulkner
19 Comments
“Out of the inevitable conflict of images – … the womb of war – I try to make that momentary peace which is a poem.” — poet Dylan Thomas
“[My] poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn fool if they weren’t.” – Dylan Thomas, 1952 Dylan Thomas was born on this … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Wales
2 Comments
“My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, side, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.” — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
He looked at his own Soul with a telescope. What seemed all irregular, he saw and shewed to be beautiful Constellations: and he added to the Consciousness hidden worlds within worlds. –Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks It’s his birthday today. I’ll … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Anne Fadiman, Ben Jonson, Camille Paglia, Charles Lamb, Derek Mahon, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, England, Jane Langton, John Donne, John Dryden, John Keats, John Milton, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Rudyard Kipling, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stevie Smith, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth
29 Comments
“Name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events.” — Patrick Kavanagh
Patrick Kavanagh, titanically angry Irish poet, was born on this day in 1904. He came of age during the Celtic Renaissance and he thought it was all a bunch of bullshit. That is not a direct quote. He was much … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Austin Clarke, Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, Patrick Kavanagh, poetry, Seamus Heaney
5 Comments
“Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination…think twice before you think.” — E.E. Cummings
It’s his birthday today. I responded to E.E. Cummings in a visceral way when I first had to read his stuff in high school. I didn’t know what it was all about, but I loved the syntax, the unmistakable look … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Harriet Monroe, Michael Schmidt
9 Comments
“Sunlight on a broken column.” — T.S. Eliot
It’s T.S. Eliot’s birthday. Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot’s influence in order to be able to write. His voice, his way, became THE way. (Interestingly enough, … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, George Orwell, Harold Bloom, Harriet Monroe, Hart Crane, Henry James, Jeanette Winterson, John Dryden, John Milton, Lord Byron, Marianne Moore, Matthew Arnold, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, William Carlos Williams, William Shakespeare
23 Comments
“I couldn’t accept the possibility that the life of the woman would not, or could not, be named in the poetry of my own nation.” — Eavan Boland
“I began to know that I had to bring the poem I’d learned to write near to the life I was starting to live. And that if anything had to yield in that process, it was the poem not the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Eavan Boland, Ireland, Irish poetry, Michael Schmidt, poetry
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“I rather like the idea of death.” — poet Stevie Smith
Born on this day in 1902, in Hull, Yorkshire England, Stevie Smith was christened Florence Margaret, but was called “Stevie” by her friends. (She was very petite and “Stevie” was the name of a famous jockey of the time.) Her … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged England, Michael Schmidt, Norton Anthology of Poetry, poetry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Stevie Smith
3 Comments