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Tag Archives: Jonathan Swift
“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
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“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
“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
“When I aim at praise, they say I bite.” — Alexander Pope
How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! -— Alexander Pope, from “Eloisa to Abelard” Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was so huge … Continue reading
Posted in On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia, Christopher Smart, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Eminem, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, H.L. Mencken, Jonathan Swift, Lord Byron, Oscar Wilde, poetry, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Jefferson, William Blake, William Wordsworth
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Books Within Books: Gulliver’s Travels in Jane Eyre
I love it when books show up in books, when books play a huge part in a character’s life. Kind of like movies-in-movies. In keeping with the Iranian theme here from last week here’s a post I wrote I about … Continue reading
The Books: Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats: Jonathan Swift
Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry Six Centuries of Great Poetry: A Stunning Collection of Classic British Poems from Chaucer to Yeats, edited by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine “[He is] the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.” … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Gulliver's Travels, Ireland, Irish poetry, Jonathan Swift, poetry, politics, Six Centuries of Great Poetry
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The Books: “Gulliver’s Travels” (Jonathan Swift)
Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction: Gulliver’s Travels (Penguin Classics), by Jonathan Swift Edgell Rickword said, of Jonathan Swift: “[He is] the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.” He said those words in the 20th century and I … Continue reading
“in the cause of Virtue”
For writing in the cause of Virtue, and against the fashionable vices, I am lookt upon at present as the most obnoxious person almost in England. — John Gay to Jonathan Swift, 1728 – after “Beggar’s Opera” opened
The Country of the Houyhnhnms
Check this out: a really cool map!! I just finished Gulliver’s Travels – and it is the kind of book where you make maps in your head, to try to get the lay of the land.
Posted in Art/Photography
Tagged Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
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