Tag Archives: Samuel Johnson

Politics Got You Down? Read Rasselas

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2024

Feel depressed about Election 2024? Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas” has some good advice.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Election 2024, Rasselas | Comments closed

Bloom: The Bard Invented the Human

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2023

I examine how Harold Bloom believes that Shakespeare changed history.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Defence of Poetry, Harold Bloom, Merchant of Venice, Percy Shelley, Prefact to Shakespeare, Shakespeare The Invention of the Human, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Homer, Virgil, Dante and the Afterlife

By Robin Bates | Published: November 1, 2023

Literary afterlives, such as we encounter in Homer, Virgil, and Dante, are as much about this world as the next.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Aeneid, Afterlife, Dante, death, Divine Comedy, Homer, Inferno, inner doubts, midlife crisis, Odyssey, Paradiso, Virgil | Comments closed

The Vanity of Human Wishes

By Robin Bates | Published: July 30, 2022

To mark today’s reading (from Ecclesiastes) about human vanity, I turn to Samuel Johnson’s great poem about the subject.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Vanity of Human Wishes", Ecclesiastes, vanity | Comments closed

Johnson: Read the Bard, Not Tom Jones

By Robin Bates | Published: May 3, 2021

I share the Samuel Johnson chapter from my book-in-progress.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Aristotle, Clarissa, Henry Fielding, Horace, Plato, Republic, Samuel Richardson, Tom Jones, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

Does Lit Lead to Illicit Sex?

By Robin Bates | Published: August 25, 2020

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 Uncategorized | Also tagged Adultery, Charlotte Bronte, Christopher Marlowe, Dante, Doctor Faustus, Goethe, Inferno, Jane Eyre, Paolo and Francesca, passionate love, Romeo and Juliet, Sorrows of Young Werther, Stephenie Meyer, Twilight, William Shakespeare | Comments closed

On Rereading During a Pandemic

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2020

In three articles on rereading great literature during difficult times, two discuss how it reassures them and the third that literature isn’t meant to reassure.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged As I Lay Dying, COVID-19, David Ulin, Larry McMurtry, Natalie Jenner, pandemics, Rasselas, Rereading, William Faulkner | Comments closed

Knives Out and the American Dream

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2020

The movie “Knives Out” is satisfying but leaves unquestioned the American Dream.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Vanity of Human Wishes", American Dream, Anne Sexton, Cinderella, Henry Fielding, Knives Out, Tom Jones | Comments closed

Is Old Age Becoming Overrated?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2019

A “New Yorker” article on aging turns to literature to debunk the notion that aging is a good thing.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Vanity of Human Wishes", "Sailing to Byzantium", "Tithonous", Aging, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Aristotle, As You Like It, Ecclesiastes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, King Lear, Merchant's Tale, old age, Plato, Rasselas, Ulysses, William Butler Yeats, William Shakespeare | Comments closed