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 […]
Tag Archives: William Wordsworth
Was the Moon Landing Poetic? A Debate
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
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
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
The Declining English Major
An English prof, sensing obsolescence, turns to “In Memoriam” (also Fowles, Wordsworth & Arnold).
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Dover Beach", Alan Bennett, Alfred Lord Tennyson, English major, French Lieutenant's Woman, History Boys, Humanities, In Memoriam, Intimations of Immortality, John Fowles, Matthew Arnold Comments closed
My Three Book Projects
In which I share my first three sabbatical–I mean retirement–book projects.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Sir Gawai, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, William Shakespeare, Writing Comments closed
Wordsworth Changed How We See Nature
Writer Margaret Drabble explains how Wordsworth changed the way we see the world.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud", "Prelude", Nature Comments closed
