Categories
Archives
-
-
-
Recent Posts
- Review: Being Maria (2025)
- “Every choice I’ve ever made has been dictated by a formless hunch rather than by strict logic.” — Peter Brook
- March 2025 Supernatural Viewing Diary Season 11, working backwards
- “Reality is always extraordinary.” — Mary Ellen Mark
- “I think my cinema is minimalist because so is my gaze: I’m very interested in people.” — Joanna Hogg
- “I got my first guitar at age of 7 and never laid it down. Momma taught me G, C, and D. I was off to the races son!” — Jerry Reed
- “Can’t no man play like me.” — Sister Rosetta Tharpe
- “The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority.” — Henrik Ibsen
- Happy Birthday, Rhode Island’s first poet laureate, Michael Harper
- “If it hadn’t been for the videocassette, I may not have had a career at all.” — Kurt Russell
Recent Comments
- Lyrie on Don’t you DARE take Elvis away from me.
- sheila on “Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much.” — Oscar Wilde
- sheila on “I think my cinema is minimalist because so is my gaze: I’m very interested in people.” — Joanna Hogg
- sheila on Review: Being Maria (2025)
- Kristen on Review: Being Maria (2025)
- Lee on “Tennyson’s rank is too well fixed and we love him too much.” — Oscar Wilde
- Maddy on “I think my cinema is minimalist because so is my gaze: I’m very interested in people.” — Joanna Hogg
- Michael James Cobb on The Books: “Master & Commander” (Patrick O’Brian)
- sheila on The Books: “Master & Commander” (Patrick O’Brian)
- sheila on The Books: “Master & Commander” (Patrick O’Brian)
- sheila on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- nighthawk bastard on The Books: “Master & Commander” (Patrick O’Brian)
- sheila on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- Lyrie on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- Lyrie on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- sheila on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- sheila on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- sheila on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- Lyrie on February 2025 Viewing Diary
- Lyrie on February 2025 Viewing Diary
-
Tag Archives: Seamus Heaney
“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
“Since we do float on an unknown sea I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way very carefully.” — poet Elizabeth Bishop
“All the intellectuals were communist except me. I’m always very perverse so I went in for T.S. Eliot and Anglo-Catholicism.”– Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop, born on this day, is one of my favorite poets. She didn’t write all that many … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Elizabeth Bishop, Harriet Monroe, Joseph Cornell, Marianne Moore, Michael Schmidt, poetry, Seamus Heaney
13 Comments
“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
“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
“What’s the difference between an exile and an expatriate? It seems to me that an Englishman in France is an expat, but an Irishman is an exile.” — Derek Mahon
“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, writers
Tagged Belfast, Derek Mahon, Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Seamus Heaney
5 Comments
“Something is gone and that’s why you write.” — Eamon Grennan
“I have a double sense of things, but I tend to write about what’s under my nose. I write about here when I’m here and when I go back to Ireland I write about what’s there. I regard myself not … Continue reading
Posted in Books, James Joyce, On This Day, writers
Tagged Ireland, Irish poetry, poetry, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Seamus Heaney
4 Comments
“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
“When the words do come, I pick them so thoroughly of their live associations that only the death in the word remains.” — 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
“A man innocently dabbles in words and rhymes, and finds that it is his life.” — 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
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.” — Oscar Wilde
It’s his birthday today. One of my heroes. His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka “Speranza”) was an incredible woman – also in the canon of Irish literary history certainly, not to mention its politics and social … Continue reading
Posted in Books, On This Day, Theatre, writers
Tagged Ireland, Irish poetry, Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellmann, Seamus Heaney
22 Comments