John Donne Last December, in writing on Margaret Edson’s play W;t, I noted that I didn’t think John Donne’s famous sonnet “Death Be Not Proud” would be very useful in helping someone handle death. (The dying Donne scholar in W;t doesn’t turn to it.) Since then, a friend pointed out that John Gunther’s 1949 book […]
Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday. As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors. At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]
Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled. Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]
The new semester begins today. Margaret Edson’s play W;t is a useful reminder of where I should put my priorities as I begin teaching. When my career started out, I had a number of things in common with Vivian Bearing, the English professor and Donne scholar in W;t. I too reveled in the complexity of texts, […]
I talked yesterday about the poet being like one blundering around in the dark, making utterances that some, in their suffering, find consoling. The poet doesn’t know which poems will reach which readers. To make another analogy, he or she is like Queequeg, carefully constructing a coffin that then, after he is dead and in […]
Margaret Edson In Margaret Edson’s W;t there is a doctor, Jason, who has taken her 17th century poetry class as a challenge. As he puts it, You can’t get into medical school unless you’re well-rounded. And I made a bet with myself that I could get an A in the three hardest courses on campus. […]
Will John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” help one handle the fact that one has cancer? It is significant that the cancer victim and Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t is rejecting her poet by the end of the play. I’m actually not sure whether this particular poem would help any cancer patient. There’s a […]
John Donne Cancer has gone from being a word to being a reality for me as two close friends have been struck. Alan Paskow, whose progress I’ve been reporting on, had an operation before Christmas that removed three tumors from his right lung (one the size of a grapefruit). And Beth Reynolds had a tumor […]
I am writing to you from the home of my parents in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I figure I have spent around 48 of my 58 Christmases. In this I differ from the Tennyson in the third Christmas passage of In Memoriam. For the first time since Hallam’s death, he is not celebrating the season in […]
