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Tag Archives: Jonathan Swift
“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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“I have ever hated all nations, professions, and communities, and all my love is toward individuals.” — poet/writer/hater Jonathan Swift
“[He is] the most vigorous hater we’ve ever had in our literature.” — Edgell Rickword We’re not supposed to “hate”. “Hate” calls to mind tiki torches. Or “hate crimes.” But there is a productive kind of hate. A galvanizing hate. … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Alexander Pope, 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, Andrew Marvell, Anne Fadiman, Ben Jonson, Camille Paglia, 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, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth
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“That is no country for old men.”: Happy Birthday, 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
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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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Classics Challenge: Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels was the third book I read in my “classics challenge”. Here’s the main page of the challenge – it’s really fun to look through and see what everybody else is reading. Of course there is lots of overlap. … Continue reading
