Sappho and Phaon by Mary Robinson One of the first of the Romantics, and admired by Coleridge, she deserves to be more widely known Detail from Pompeiian fresco painting of Sappho holding a stylus. One of the first Romantic poets, a position she shares with William Blake, Mary Robinson (1757-1800) is probably more familiar to [...]
Archive for June, 2010
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 122 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 121 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins This time, Hopkins’s astonishing control of his wildly experimental form is as awe-inspiring as its subject matter A kestrel in flight. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote “The Windhover” in May, 1877. He had been a student at St Bueno’s Theological College for three years, and this was a productive period: [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Literature, tagged 120 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
School’s Out by WH Davies In holiday mood, a celebration of the timeless thrill of liberation The school holidays begin for the class of ’31. “School’s Out” may have been Alice Cooper’s first big hit single but did you know it’s also the title of a poem by a Welsh poet born in 1871? If [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 119 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
My Sweetest Lesbia by Thomas Campion A poem inspired by Catullus this week, but Thomas Campion’s version of Carmen V, My Sweetest Lesbia, is far more than a translation The lute on which passion plays … detail from The Lute Player by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. Thomas Campion belongs to that fascinating tradition of medically-trained [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 118 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Sir Patrick Spens This time, a potent ancient ballad with a strange modernity The Isle of Islay. It’s time for the redoubtable Anon to take the stage again, this time as a balladeer. The ballad is an evergreen form, originally sung, and, if the name is to be believed, accompanied by dancing. It twines its [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 117 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams This time, an unforgettable image that is also a manifesto for modern poetry William Carlos Williams at home. This week’s poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, was untitled when it first appeared as number xxi in his 1923 collection, Spring and All. Titled or untitled, it’s [...]
Poem of the week
Posted in Poetry, tagged 116 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Last Meeting by Gwen Harwood This time, a poem from a 20th century writer with a claim to be one of the great female Romantics Walking on the beach. Gwen Harwood was an astonishingly versatile poet, an ingenious formalist and a-formalist, variously witty, philosophical, feminist, romantic and ironic. She wrote under a variety of pseudonyms [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Literature, tagged 67 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Hay Festival The genre of ‘poems about literary festivals’ is a narrow one, so get writing – even a haiku about portable toilets will do Hay day … literature fans enjoying a rare moment of sunshine at the Guardian Hay festival 2010. My first real connection with the book-encumbered village of Hay-on-Wye was via [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Literature, tagged 66 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Ancestors Poetry loves to look backwards, so this month your subject is forebears – whether you are proud of their achievements or quick to disown their failings What are the ‘ancient forms’ that loom over your own poetic past? ___ Among other things, poetry is centrally concerned with ideas of tradition and inheritance; any poem [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Literature, tagged 65 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Dramatic monologues One of the better Victorian inventions, this form is ripe for 21st use – yours Detail from 1958 portrait of Robert Browning. The 19th century was a great age of invention; from the bicycle to flexible film photography the Victorian world was well accustomed to the shock of the new, and its novelties [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Literature, tagged 64 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Easter Whether Easter means rebirth, rebellion or just chocolate, this month’s challenge is to post your paschal poems ‘The eggs were / silly but the big lilies were wonderful’ … Easter eggs in the traditional Sorbian. ___ Easter is upon us. For Christians it’s the most significant religious festival of the year; for the rest [...]
Poster poems
Posted in Literature, tagged 63 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Dates Get your diaries out, as this month’s challenge is the peculiar sub-genre of specifically dated poems A British tank batters down a door in house-to-house searches during the Easter Rebellion of 1916. I was reading Yeats’s great poem “Easter, 1916” recently, when the thought occurred to me that, on top of all its other, [...]
Shirley Hughes’s top 10 picture book characters
Posted in Literature, tagged March 2 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
From Fungus the Bogeyman to Babar the Elephant, the creator of Dogger and Alfie looks at the compelling creations that turn small children into readers Shirley Hughes has written and illustrated more than 50 books, selling some 11.5m copies, and collected a string of awards for creating some of the most enduring characters in children’s [...]
Aifric Campbell’s top 10 jobs in fiction
Posted in Literature, tagged February 23 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
From selling houses with Richard Ford to ballet dancing with Colum McCann and spying with John Banville, the novelist lists her favourite portrayals of working life Aifric Campbell was born in Ireland. She moved to Sweden where she completed a linguistics degree and lectured in semantics. She spent 13 years as an investment banker in [...]
Ten of the best good doctors in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged June 19 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Lady Macbeth’s doctor Surprisingly enough, the staff at Dunsinane includes a wise physician who, though ignorant of his employers’ dark deeds, watches Lady Macbeth sleepwalking and knows she has done something bad. “Unnatural deeds / Do breed unnatural troubles”. The “good doctor”, as he is called, tells Macbeth he has no cure to offer. Allan [...]
Ten of the best bad doctors
Posted in Literature, tagged June 12 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Chaucer’s Doctor of Physic “He was a verray parfit praktisour,” says the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. It means that this doctor is fluent with horoscopes and has a remunerative deal with his cronies, the apothecaries, for prescribing expensive drugs. “For gold in phisick is a cordial, / Therefore he loved gold in special.” [...]
Ten of the best examples of rowing in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged June 5 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Odyssey, by Homer Odysseus and his crew have sails on their boat, but the heroes also need to man their oars. In many of their most testing ordeals they are rowing. Thus Circe’s advice about how to deal with the Sirens: “Plug your comrades’ ears with softened beeswax lest they listen, and row swiftly [...]
Ten of the best riots in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged May 29 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Coriolanus by William Shakespeare “Enter a company of mutinous Citizens with staves, clubs, and other weapons”. Coriolanus opens with the plebs rioting because of lack of food. Menenius disarms them with some choice rhetoric, before Coriolanus stokes them up again with his eloquent insults. “He that depends / Upon your favors swims with fins of [...]
Ten of the best towers in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged May 22 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Genesis The Old Testament describes the Tower of Babel, symbol of human presumption. In the days when all men still spoke the same language, “they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad [...]
Ten of the best visits to the cinema in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged May 15 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann In this 1924 novel, Hans Castorp watches a silent film. He is amazed by “life chopped into small sections . . . a restless, jerky fluctuation of appearing and disappearing . . . which set its tempo to the phantasmagoria of the past, and with the narrowest of means [...]
Ten of the best elections in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged May 8 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Coriolanus, by William Shakespeare War hero Coriolanus is to be made a consul by Rome’s grateful Senate, but has to plead for the votes of the plebs. His enemies find it easy to get the voters to change their minds. Coriolanus decides that elections are stupid and tells the voters so, whereupon he is expelled [...]
Ten of the best visions of Heaven in literature
Posted in Literature on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Aeneid by Virgil We think of Heaven as up above, but, for the Greeks and Romans, only the gods preside on high. The best that humans can hope for is Elysium, the nicest section of the Underworld. Here Aeneas finds that the heroic dead have a grassy gymnasium: some “compete in sports and wrestle on [...]
Ten of the best breakfasts in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged April 17 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Waverley, by Sir Walter Scott At the home of Baron Bradwardine, Waverley enjoys a true Scottish breakfast: “The table loaded with warm bread, both of flour, oatmeal, and barleymeal, in the shape of loaves, cakes, biscuits, and other varieties, together with eggs, reindeer ham, mutton and beef ditto, smoked salmon, and marmalade.” There’s porridge with [...]
Ten of the best women writing as men
Posted in Literature, tagged March 20 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
The Professor by Charlotte Brontë Brontë may be known as a great recorder of female experience, but her first completed novel (published posthumously) is narrated by a man. William Crimsworth is a northern lad who becomes a teacher in a girls’ school in Brussels. Before he finds love with a pupil-teacher at the school, he [...]
Ten of the best visions of hell in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged April 24 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Aeneid by Virgil Aeneas travels to the Underworld, guided by the Sybil. The hellish bit is Tartarus. “From hence are heard the groans of ghosts, the pains / Of sounding lashes and of dragging chains.” The unrepenting are made to confess their crimes, and sent down into a pit, guarded by the Hydra, where the [...]
Ten of the best trips to Canterbury
Posted in Literature, tagged April 3 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Murder in the Cathedral by TS Eliot Eliot’s verse drama depicts the event that made Canterbury the most famous centre of pilgrimage in Britain: the murder of Thomas à Becket in the cathedral in 1170. Incantatory rather than dramatic, as much a religious ritual as a play, it was first performed in the cathedral’s chapter [...]
Ten of the best priests in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged March 27 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Villette by Charlotte Brontë Working as a teacher in Villette (Brussels), Lucy Snowe is revolted but fascinated by all the trappings of Catholicism. Père Silas, a clever, threatening local priest, rescues her when she collapses in the street, but when she resists his religious blandishments he begins plotting against her. A Simple Story by Elizabeth [...]
Ten of the best men writing as women in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged March 13 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Daniel Defoe Defoe had already impersonated one indomitable woman, Moll Flanders, when he produced The Fortunate Mistress, a novel often called after its anti-heroine, Roxana, who tells the story of her life as a Restoration courtesan. She offloads any children, but is punished when she finds herself pursued by her own daughter. Samuel Richardson Richardson [...]
Ten of the best lotharios in literature
Posted in Literature, tagged April 10 2010 on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Dom Juan Molière’s ladies’ man, based on the legendary figure of Don Juan, scorns religion and morality and celebrates only “variety” in the pursuit of love. In the company of his often appalled valet, Sganarelle, he ruthlessly follows his desires, often getting his girls with mock marriages. As in Mozart’s later version, Hell awaits him. [...]
Ten of the best: fogs
Posted in Literature, tagged February 27 2010. on June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Bleak House by Charles Dickens Dickens’s opening is the foggiest in all fiction and, before we meet any characters, we follow the fog through London. “Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging [...]
