For social and political barometers, try Heaney for optimism, Yeats for pessimism.
Monthly Archives: December 2020
Yeats, Not Heaney, for Dark Times
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Cure of Troy", "The House of the Stare", Donald Trump, Election 2020, GOP, Joe Biden, Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats Comments closed
Mountains Loom and I Won’t Stop Now
Naomi Long Madget has just died at 97. Her poem “Midway” continues to inspire.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Midway", Black Lives Matter, Civil Rights Movement, Naomi Madgett Long Comments closed
Lit for Understanding the Biden Voter
To understand “the Joe Biden” voter, start with August Wilson’s “Fences.”
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "I Too Sing America", 2020 election, August Wilson, black voters, Donald Trump, fences, Joe Biden, Langston Hughes Comments closed
A Wretch Concentered All in Self
Look to Sir Walter Scott, not to Shakespeare, to sum up Donald Trump’s exit.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "My Native Land", 2020 election, Donald Trump, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Richard III, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Tolkien’s Key to Entering the Internet
A Stanford computer science student writes in to apply a “Lord of the Rings” passage to a vexed internet question.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Internet, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, Mines of Moria, youtube Comments closed
A Mother’s Smile Prevails over Doubt
e.e. cummings’s Christmas poem “from spiraling ecstatically this” disrupts normal patterns to reveal the elusive nature of the divine.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "from spiraling ecstatically this", Christmas, e. e. cummings, incarnation Comments closed
Citizen Kane and Trump’s Psychology
Scott Bates’s poem about Citizen Kane provides deep insight into autocrats like Donald Trump.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Citizen Cain", Citizen Kane, Donald Trump, immigrant child separations, Orson Welles, Scott Bates Comments closed
Peeped Most Piteously for Pain of the Cold
With our first snowfall, birds are swarming our feeders, bringing to mind a passage from “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and an Oliver Herford lyric.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "I Heard a Bird Sing", Birds, December, Oliver Herford, Pearl Poet, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain poet, Winter Comments closed
In “Crown,” Philip Gets Auden, Not Keats
“The Crown” makes productive use of poetry to move the action. In three Season #3 episodes, we encounter Kipling, Shakespeare, Keats & Auden.
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged "Mandalay", "Moon Landing", British royal family, Crown, Endymion, John Keats, Richard II, Rudyard Kipling, W.H. Auden, William Shakespeare Comments closed
