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Tag Archives: Thomas Carlyle
“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, Stevie Smith, T.S. Eliot, Thomas Carlyle, William Hazlitt, William Wordsworth
29 Comments
“These English songs gravel me to death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch.” — Robert Burns, “the Ploughman Poet” of Scotland
“For my own part I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart.” — Robert Burns … Continue reading
The Storming of the Bastille: “Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible!”
July 14, 1789 Thomas Carlyle, in his majestic, overwrought and intimidating The French Revolution, describes the Siege of the Bastille in frenzied and apocalyptic-doomsday prose. You can hear Carlyle’s primal fear of the Crowd. The Crowd is simultaneously abstract and … Continue reading
2013 Books Read
It’s been a hell of a year. Devastating as well as redemptive. I started it out in Memphis, and end it here in New Jersey. And now my new niece Pearl has arrived! It’s been both a busy year as … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged A.S. Byatt, Anne Fadiman, Annie Proulx, Arthur Koestler, Balkans, books read, Darkness at Noon, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Edvard Radzinsky, Elinor Lipman, England, friends, George Eliot, H.L. Mencken, Henry James, Herman Melville, Hungary, Ireland, J.D. Salinger, Jeanette Winterson, Joan Acocella, Joan Didion, John Banville, Joseph Heller, Joshua Ferris, Lester Bangs, Lorrie Moore, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, Russia, Sam Cooke, Shakespeare, Stalin, Tana French, The Netherlands, The Only Game In Town, Thomas Carlyle, Victor Serge, Yugoslavia
33 Comments
Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Carlyle
“It was good of God to let [Thomas] Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.” — Samuel Butler
“It is part of my creed that the only Poetry is History could we tell it right.”– Thomas Carlyle
Whether he got the French Revolution “right” is not only up for debate but irrelevant. After all, he wasn’t actually there. But Thomas Carlyle’s great (and difficult) and frenzied
Snapshots from the weekend
— Rented Zodiac. It’s fantastic – just as good as everyone says. See it. — Had another one of my 700 dollar hair cuts and colors on Saturday (only, you know, I got it for free, cause of the whole … Continue reading
Describing Thomas Carlyle
An amazing letter from Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson – where she describes Thomas Carlyle. I have been reading Carlyle’s incredible The French Revolution: A History , for, oh, 2 years now, off and on … I can only … Continue reading
Summer Reading Challenge
I have joined a Summer Reading Challenge – hosted by and set up by Amanda. BOOKS I WILL READ (AND POST ABOUT) THIS SUMMER oh, and naturally I reserve the right to change this list at any time. But for … Continue reading
Posted in Books
Tagged Billy Budd, Bleak House, Never Let Me Go, Thomas Carlyle, Veronica
12 Comments
Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle
It was good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four. — Samuel Butler on Thomas Carlyle