Having recently finished reading all 822 poems in The Oxford Book of English my appetite for great poems has not diminished. So I am reading through Paradise Lost, an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John… Read More ›
Poem
After reading all 822 poems in The Oxford Book of English – mission accomplished!
The prestigious anthology of English poems The Oxford Book of English Verse contains 822 poems from the 13th century “Sumer is icumen in” through to Seamus Heaney’s “The Pitchfork” in the late 20th century. The greatest wordsmiths in the English… Read More ›
Epitaph on a Tyrant
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable… Read More ›
What is the Caledonian Antisyzygy?
Having just read the poem The Caledonian Antisyzygy by Hugh MacDiarmid I needed to find out what is this ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’? And how on earth does one pronounce it?
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot |read by Jeremy Irons|
This is one of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets. It inaugurated a new movement in poetry. I like this particular reading for its slow, meditative style.
Thought
Thought, I love thought. But not the juggling and twisting of already existent ideas I despise that self-important game. Thought is the welling up of unknown life into consciousness, Thought is the testing of statements on the touchstone of consciousness,… Read More ›
The British Journalist by Humbert Wolfe
You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.
‘This is the greatest thing on YouTube’
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” documentary (1987) The Waste Land
Pied Beauty
“Pied Beauty” is a curtal sonnet by the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). It was written in 1877, but not published until 1918, when it was included as part of the collection Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. In the poem, the narrator praises God for… Read More ›
Rant against vegetarianism
A witty rant against the heresy of vegetarianism