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- “I am not descended from flesh. I am God.”: It’s Vaslav Nijinsky’s Birthday
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Tag Archives: Camille Paglia
“I love humanity but I hate people.” — poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay was born on this day in 1892 in Rockland, Maine. “Boys don’t like me anyway because I won’t let them kiss me. It’s just like this: let boys kiss you and they’ll like you but you … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Elizabeth Bishop, poetry
16 Comments
“Never write from your head; write from your cock.” — Wystan Hugh Auden
W.H. Auden was born on this day in York, England, 1907. I first encountered Auden in my “Humanities” class, senior year in high school. I got a lot out of that class, and I remember we analyzed Auden’s famous most-anthologized … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, Christopher Hitchens, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, England, George Orwell, Hamlet, Harold Bloom, Hugh MacDiarmid, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord Tennyson, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, Michael Schmidt, Philip Larkin, poetry, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare, Ted Hughes, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden
23 Comments
“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
“The realization of ignorance is the first act of knowing.” — Jean Toomer
Poet/novelist Jean Toomer was born on this day in 1894. He died in 1967. He saw some shit. Toomer’s family tree encompasses the diversity of pre-and-post-Civil War South: slaves, freemen, black, white. His father, Nathan Toomer, was born into slavery. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, fiction, Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, poetry
1 Comment
“Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.” — W.H. Auden on Jane Austen
“The little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush.” — Jane Austen on her writing In 2020 – which feels like it was 1,000 years ago, I reviewed the new film adaptation … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Camille Paglia, fiction, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Jane Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Truman Capote, W.H. Auden
6 Comments
“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