Tag Archives: William Wordsworth

On Revisiting Intense Experiences

By Robin Bates | Published: November 4, 2021

Returning to my alma mater reminds me of Wordsworth returning to the Wye River in “Tintern Abbey.” That he shares the experience with his sister makes it even more relevant.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Tortoise Shout", college reunions, D. H. Lawrence, Overstory, Richard Powers, Tintern Abbey | Comments closed

A Friendship Stronger Than Fear

By Robin Bates | Published: October 23, 2021

As I spent a night in an emergency room, I thought of my wife, my mother, and this Piercy Ruth and Naomi poem.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Ode to a Nightingale", "Book of Ruth and Naomi", "Strange Fits of Passion I Have Known", Book of Ruth, John Keats, Marge Piercy, mothers and daughters-in-law, widows | Comments closed

Summer’s Over, Back to School

By Robin Bates | Published: August 29, 2021

The end of the Pooh books mourns the end of summer and the return to school.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "End of Summer", "Tables Turned", A. A. Milne, back to school, House on Pooh Corner | Comments closed

Poetry Complements the Intellectual Life

By Robin Bates | Published: July 27, 2021

In the grip of an arid intellect resulting in depression, philosopher John Stuart Mill turned to poetry.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Depression, Intimations of Immortality, John Stuart Mill, Lord Gordon Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, utilitarianism | Comments closed

Imagination’s Transformative Power

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2021

The Romantics saw the literary imagination as a powerful transformational force.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged M.H. Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Romanticism, Tintern Abbey | Comments closed

Dreaming of Travel during Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2020

A very smart Covid poem circulating on social media at the moment references 11 poems, all about longing to travel.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "Lake Isle of Innisfree", "Sea Fever", "Green Eye of the Yellow God", "Mandalay", "Milford Haven", "Rolling English Road", "Skye Boat Song", "Upon First reading Chapman's Homer", A. E. Housman, COVID-19, Crown, G.K. Chesterton, J. Milton Hayes, John Keats, John Masefield, Kenneth Grahame, Loveliest of Trees, Michael Drayton, Midsummer Night's Dream, Outlanders, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Sir Henry Boulton, W. B. Yeats, William Shakespeare, wind in the willows | Comments closed

Was the Moon Landing Poetic? A Debate

By Robin Bates | Published: July 18, 2019

Friday As tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I went looking for literature that marked the occasion. A useful New York Times article, written 20 years after the event, surveyed the field and alerted me to the two poems that I share today. Interestingly, not much was written, leading to the […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "World is too much with us", "Moon Landing", "Voyage to the Moon", Archibald MacLeish, lunar landing, Neil Armstrong, Of a Fire on the Moon, W. H. Auden | Comments closed

Through Lit, We Learn Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2019

Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Prelude", Aeschylus, compassion, Eumenides, Euripides, Heracles, Homer, Iliad, Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia, Sophocles, Tintern Abbey | Comments closed

Returning to the Misty Past

By Robin Bates | Published: October 18, 2018

John Gatta’s “Spirits of Place” is helping me understand why I have chosen to retire in my home town. Wordsworth, Stowe, Homer, and Frost help out as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death of the Hired Man", "Pulley", George Herbert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, home, Homer, John Gatta, Odyssey, retirement, Robert Frost, Sewanee, Tintern Abbey, Uncle Tom's Cabin | Comments closed