Since I’m vacationing in Maine, I’m featuring a Maine poet in today’s post. My cousin Dan Bates, a lawyer who lives in Gardiner, is a passionate lover of Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poetry and has turned me on to him. (Robinson isn’t the only noteworthy poet from Gardiner: Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn […]
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Summer Reading in Maine
This post is coming to you from Maine, where we have arrived for the Bates family reunion that we hold every three years. Before turning to books and the special quality that reading acquires in the context of a summer vacation, however, I hope you will indulge me as I describe the Bates Family Cottage. […]
Prancing Poetry and a Child’s Imagination
Last week I gave a list of my favorite children’s books when I was young. My father, who is a poet along with being a French professor, read us poetry as well as fiction (each night, one story or chapter and one poem for each of my three brothers and me), so I thought I’d […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged A. A. Milne, Alfred E. Noyes, Alice in Wonderland, Cat in the Hat, Cautionary Tales for Children, children's poetry, Dr. Seuss, Edward Lear, Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, Goden Treasury of Poetry, Gunga Din, Highwayman, Hilaire Belloc, James Whitcomb Riley, Lewis Carroll, Little Orphant Annie, Louis Untemeyer, Mother Goose, Nonsense Verse, Now that I'm Six, Oliver Goldsmith, Rudyard Kipling, Song of Sherwood, The Listeners Tales for Children, The Raggedy Man, Walter De La Mare, When We Were Very Young Comments closed
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
I promised to post one of these days on Wind in the Willows, and all this talk of intimations of immortality has put me in mind of two remarkable chapters in that book. What does Wordsworth mean by our “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” of our feelings that we are “moving about […]
How Lost Innocence Can Breed Monsters
Continuing the theme of lost innocence leads me to a discussion of Stephen King, America’s master of horror. Whether you like him or not, King is the bestselling author in the world because he taps effectively into our collective nightmares. One of these nightmares is over losing touch with our childhood innocence, and there is […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Intimations of Immortality, It, lost innocence, Stephen King, William Wordsworth Comments closed
Coping with the Loss of Childhood
As I have been writing on dreams of lost innocence and the challenges of growing up, I thought I’d write on one of the great poems on the subject. In “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” Romantic poet William Wordsworth wrestles with his deep sense of loss. (You can read the entire poem […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Intimations of Immortality, loss of innocence, William Wordsworth Comments closed
