Monthly Archives: July 2009

Miniver Cheevy, Child of Scorn

By Robin Bates | Published: July 20, 2009

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 […]

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Summer Reading in Maine

By Robin Bates | Published: July 17, 2009

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. […]

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Prancing Poetry and a Child’s Imagination

By Robin Bates | Published: July 16, 2009

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 […]

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Literary Salons with One Who Is Dying

By Robin Bates | Published: July 15, 2009

I have written about my close friend and colleague Alan Paskow, whose lungs (although he does not smoke) have been attacked by an aggressive cancer.  One response of the community has been to gather for literary salons every two or three weeks.  Anywhere from 15-20 people attend each one, despite busy schedules.  In attendance are […]

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The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

By Robin Bates | Published: July 14, 2009

  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 […]

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How Lost Innocence Can Breed Monsters

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2009

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 […]

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Coping with the Loss of Childhood

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2009

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 […]

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Michael Jackson and Peter Pan

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2009

  “I am Peter Pan,” Michael Jackson reportedly once said, and of course he chose to name his ranch Neverland. In this second of my two posts marking Jackson’s death, I thought I would reflect upon why J. M. Barrie’s fictional creation meant so much to him. Peter Pan: The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up […]

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Poetry for Mourning Michael Jackson

By Robin Bates | Published: July 8, 2009

I am one of those strange people who has lived much of his life without a television, so I was unaware of the phenomenon of Michael Jackson for much of my life. But my family acquired a television in 1991, and even though Jackson was no longer in his glory years, his music videos still […]

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