As the remarkable uprisings continue to erupt across the Middle East, I turn for a third time to the revolutionary poetry of Percy Shelley. When one looks at his time period, one finds a number of modern day parallels. Napoleon’s wars, although imperial, still carried the ideas of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” into the rest of […]
Tag Archives: politics
Song to the Men and Women of Bahrain
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Egypt’s Glorious Phantom Bursts Through
I’ve been looking for literature that can speak to the earth-shaking events going on in Egypt. Poetry seems almost unable to do justice to the joy that people are feeling as they revel in a vision of liberty. Maybe this sonnet by Percy Shelley gets at their breakthrough. On August 16, 1819, a large but […]
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Poetry Unleashed in the Streets of Cairo
The Daily Beast website has an article about poetry that is being chanted in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. (Thanks to the Daily Dish for alerting me to it.) It shows once again that language well used has the power to move mountains—or at any rate, to give historical players a firm place upon […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Will to Live", Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, Egypt, Revolution, Tunisia Comments closed
Strangelove Somewhat Dated (Thank God!)
Film Friday Recently, maybe on National Public Radio, I heard a story that struck me as marvelous: an American tourist was visiting underground Russian bomb shelters. What with improving relations, apparently the Russians no longer feel they need a place where their government officials can hide out for two weeks following a nuclear attack. The […]
Revolution in Tunisia–A Good Thing?
While I want to be optimistic about the recent Tunisian overthrow of its dictatorial ruling family, I also appreciate Anne Appelbaum’s pessimistic assessment in a Washington Post column. Her caution brings to mind one of my father’s witty animal fables entitled “The Revolutionary Mice.” You can read it below. Appelbaum succinctly expresses her concern thus: […]
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