Ann Radcliffe “Osbert, for greater security, was conveyed from the tower into a more centrical part of the castle, to an apartment spacious but gloomy, whose gothic windows partly excluding light, threw a solemnity around, which chilled the heart almost to horror. He heeded not this; his heart was occupied with horrors of its own. […]
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Petronius wrote The Satyricon in Latin during the first century A.D., and it is one of only two surviving examples of what literary scholars call the roman novel. This “roman novel” form is not exactly the same thing as a modern novel, as it combined both poetic and prose writing to tell a story. Continuity was not as important,
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Defoe, Daniel. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). A novel disguised as an account of a public health scare that happened sixty years before the book was published. I would expect a book on this subject to be full of emotional appeals and specific fleshed- out characters suffering and being generally emotional. First, because we have gotten
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This past week the Scripps National Spelling Bee featured 275 spellers from age 8 to 15, spelling words most of us cannot even begin to imagine. The winner was Sukanya Roy of Scranton, PA who correctly spelled cymotrichous. The final nine words in the competition are listed below, with their meanings and correct spellings. (Even the
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The Bay Psalm Book was the first book printed in the New World, in 1640. Its working of the Psalms into English metrical form, while not exactly praised by poets and critics today, shows something interesting about poetics in English, and the great potential for English poetics in terms of syntax. I also find that
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While Americans observe Memorial Day today, a holiday commemorating U.S. men and women who died while in military service, I thought I would share eight of my favorite poems on the subject of war and loss. The Links on the poem titles will open a new window with the text of the poem. 8. “Soldier,
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Ralph Waldo Emerson “A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams.” “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “I trust a good deal
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Celestine Sibley “When I saw him heading for my office, looking a little like a dressed-up poodle dog in his white tie and tails, I knew what he was looking for. And I was dimly conscious of the fact that Johnny had flicked on the light in the little cubicle where, under Paula’s ladylike lash,
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” At forty I’m beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain– how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant.” Virginia Woolf Developing and maintaining a writing habit is very much like exercise. You think about
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Mailer, Norris C. (2010). A Ticket to the Circus. New York: Random House. ISBN: 978-1-4000-6794-7 I love reading life stories of any kind, especially those by or about writers. So when I heard Norris Church Mailer had written a memoir, I immediately raced out and got, read it, and savored it. Then I mentioned it to
A Ticket to the Circus: a late 20th century woman Read More »
