Tag Archives: Lewis Carroll

Memorizing Poetry Is Good for You

By Robin Bates | Published: August 28, 2017

Memorizing poetry is a powerful way to understand it. Unfortunately, the practice of doing so has fallen out of favor in schools.

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School under the Sea: Reeling, Writhing…

By Robin Bates | Published: August 9, 2017

To welcome teachers and students back to school, here’s a description of education under the sea, as experienced by Lewis Carroll’s Gryphon and Mock Turtle.

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Crashing against the Debt Ceiling

By Robin Bates | Published: August 8, 2017

If the GOP Congress members don’t soon come to their senses, we will have a debt ceiling crisis. For a visual image, picture a giant Alice in the White Rabbit’s small house.

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Lucille Clifton’s Cancer Poems

By Robin Bates | Published: July 4, 2017

In her 1980s cancer poems, Lucille Clifton captures a range of feelings, ranging from confusion to anger to acceptance.

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Trump’s Latest Queen of Hearts Beheading

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2017

Donald Trump is starting to resemble the Queen of Hearts with all the figures that he has fired, most recently FBI director James Comey. We must stand up to the Queen as Alice does.

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Curling Up with a Good Book

By Robin Bates | Published: February 4, 2017

This Scott Bates is a testimony to the solitary joy of reading.

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Is Trump Running a Red Queen Race?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 2, 2016

Turning to Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” political scientist Jonathan Bernstein says that Donald Trump is in a “Red Queen Race,” forced to be ever more outrageous just to keep the spotlight on himself.

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Christie as Prufrock & Other Lit Allusions

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2016

Political pundits have been turning to literature to talk about the GOP primaries. This past week saw citations of Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, and Richard Adams (“Watership Down”).

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Speaker Paul Ryan in Literature

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2015

I’ve written a lot about Paul Ryan and his aspiration to be a John Galt figure. Now that he is Speaker of the House, I review other literary parallels I’ve drawn over the years.

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