Audre Lorde captures the utter waste when we descend into violence, a good message for the race hatred we are witnessing around the country.
Lewis’s “It Can’t Happen Here” and Roth’s “Plot against America” do a very good job of predicting a Donald Trump.
In an age when we are exhausted by apocalyptic rhetoric, Richard Wilbur provides a poem that remind us of how much we owe to natural beauty.
Dryden’s “beware the fury of a patient man” applies to the speech that Obama gave last week at the Democratic National Convention.
As controversies swirl around the postal service, Pynchon’s “Crying of Lot 49” seems relevant. So does Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”
Posted in Austen (Jane), Pynchon (Thomas), Welty (Eudora) | Tagged Crying of Lot 49, Donald Trump, Emma, Eudora Welty, Jane Austen, Louis DeJoy, mail sabotage, Thomas Pynchon, U.S. Postal Service, Why I Live at the P.O. | Dante’s beautifully tragic account of Paolo and Francesca captures–as many great works do–the dangers of total absorption in a relationship.
Posted in Bronte (Charlotte), Dante, Flaubert (Gustave), Goethe, Johnson (Samuel), Marlowe (Christopher), Meyer (Stephanie), Shakespeare (William), Tolstoy (Leo) | Tagged Adultery, Charlotte Bronte, Christopher Marlowe, Dante, Doctor Faustus, Goethe, Inferno, Jane Eyre, Paolo and Francesca, passionate love, Romeo and Juliet, Samuel Johnson, Sorrows of Young Werther, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, William Shakespeare | This playful poem by my father about a rebellious letter C makes me wish he had been able to share his poetry with my grandson.
I describe here the remote poetry instruction I have been conducting with my 8-year-old grandson for the past four months.
An Anne Bradstreet poem captures some of the spirit of the funeral for a close friend.
