Categories
Archives
-

-
Recent Posts
- February 2026 Snapshots
- “I’ve never thought of my characters as being sad. On the contrary, they are full of life. They didn’t choose tragedy. Tragedy chose them.” — Juliette Binoche
- Happy Birthday, “Mr. Personality” Lloyd Price
- For International Women’s Day: Ladies I Love
- “Have you ever noticed how a cat stretches after a nap? We can learn from watching animals.” — Cyd Charisse
- Review: Pompei: Below the Clouds (2026)
- “Since when was genius found respectable?” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Happy Birthday, Dean Stockwell
- “Character roles definitely age better than your ingenues. You don’t get to keep doing that.” — Catherine O’Hara
- “Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet.” — Ryszard Kapuściński
Recent Comments
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 8: “Crossroad Blues”
- Michael James Cobb on “The hope is that in rediscovering Chicago, audiences will rediscover what theater was. It was sophisticated, complicated, adult.” — Ann Reinking
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 7: “The Usual Suspects”
- mutecypher on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 6: “No Exit”
- dres on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- mutecypher on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 5: “Simon Said”
- dres on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- Lyrie on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- Lyrie on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 1: “In My Time of Dying”
- Jessie on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- dres on Supernatural: Season 2, Episode 4: “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things”
- Jessie on Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
- sheila on “I just love telling stories. That’s what we do and it’s a good business to be in, especially if you know you have talent.” –Jensen Ackles
- sheila on Review: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2026)
-
Tag Archives: Algernon Charles Swinburne
“I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. Books think for me.” — Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb was friends with everyone. He knew Coleridge from childhood, Wordsworth, William Hazlitt (great writer and portrait painter – Hazlitt did the painting above), Lamb met Keats, he was inner circle with these guys. He was different, though. He … Continue reading
“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
“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
“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
“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, Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, William Blake, William Carlos Williams
23 Comments
“That is no country for old men.” — William Butler Yeats
“I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose.” — W.B. Yeats William Butler … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Camille Paglia, Edmund Spenser, Elizabeth Bishop, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jeanette Winterson, John Millington Synge, Jonathan Swift, Louis MacNeice, Maud Gonne, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Rebecca West, Richard Ellmann, Seamus Heaney, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Ulysses, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden
15 Comments
“Language most shows a man. Speak that I may see thee.” — Ben Jonson
“O rare Benn Johnson.” — Jonson’s incorrectly-spelled epitaph in Westminster Abbey It’s his birthday today. Ben Jonson did everything. Plays, poems, satires, elegies, epigrams. His talent was wide and flexible. Everything he wrote feels inevitable. However, as Michael Schmidt writes … Continue reading
“[My ambition is to] give something to our literature which will be our own.” — Walt Whitman
“I like to think that eventually he will shame us into becoming Americans again.” — Guy Davenport on Walt Whitman Whitman is the organizing principle behind my review of Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Bob Dylan quotes Whitman all the … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Algernon Charles Swinburne, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Camille Paglia, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Harold Bloom, Hart Crane, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Baldwin, Michael Schmidt, Oscar Wilde, poetry, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams
5 Comments

