Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
News Article Tape: ( ragline )___ BU Today: Icons Among Us: Room 222 ___( ragline )___ The New York Times: For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For ___( ragline )___ The New York Times: Celebrating Poe ___( ragline )___ The Nation: Angels to Radios: On Rainer Maria Rilke ___( ragline )___ The Philadelphia Inquirer: Via simplicity, a poet attains the universal ___( ragline )___ The Catholic Herald:...
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
as sincere Protestant poet and the later construction of him as imperial Protestant poet have obscured a deeper truth. For Burns was culturally ecumenical. As a product of the Enlightenment, he was the first lowland Scottish writer to have much of a good word for the highlander. The great 15th-century poet William Dunbar, for instance, said that there was no music in Hell . . . except for the bagpipes....
Poetry & Poets in Rags (Free subscription) | 11/04/2009
includes the lines: "As melteth snow upon the mossie Mountaines. So melts, so vanisheth, so fades, so withers, The Rose, the shine, the bubble and the snow..." The Augustan Digression in "Tam O' Shanter" [by Robert Burns] includes the lines: "You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed; Or like the snow falls in the river, A moment white-then melts for ever..." Wilson, the...
Monica Fairview (Free subscription) | 10/31/2009
Well, it's Hallowe'en, and apart from the spooky stuff, this is also the night when the barrier between the future and the present is at its thinnest, and you can try and divine who your future life partner will be. At the turn of the 19th century, there were many different traditions to determine this. Here's one of them, from Robert Burns' 1786 poem, Halloween . Jane Austen may well have read this...
Strong Verse (Free subscription) | 10/05/2009
I suppose this list says a lot more about me than poetry. "Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath "She Walks in Beauty" by George Gordon, Lord Byron "Red Red Rose" by Robert Burns "Since Feeling is First" by e.e. cummings "Tame Cat" by Ezra Pound "Sonnet 130" by William Shakespeare "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed" by Edna St. Vincent Millay...
The Truth About Lies (Free subscription) | 09/10/2009
According to Google Analytics the average time someone spends on my site is about 48 seconds. So, let's cut to the chase. If you're a writer – I don't care if you're a poet, a playwright or a novelist – have a think about this: if you were invited to submit an entry for the next Dictionary of 21 st Century Quotations what would it be? Hold that thought. First let's go back a few years....
WELCOME TO JENRAY'S TIME OF LIFE (Free subscription) | 09/02/2009
Hi to everybody...like this idea so have borrowed it from QueeneMab... You are creating a dinner party for eight. Your party is six guests, yourself and your escort for the night. Your six guests can be from the past, for instance Robert Burns the poet, or from the present, they can be famous for anything, you are allowed to have non famous people i.e. your best friend, but you have to have at least...
I am not who I think I am or is I whom? (Free subscription) | 08/12/2009
+------------- Bizarre Famous People's Pets --------------+ Lord Baden-Powell kept a hyrax (a small nocturnal mammal) called Hyrie. Charles Baudelaire kept a bat in a cage on his desk. Robert Burns was fond of his pet ewe called Poor Mailie. He even wrote two poems about her. Lord Byron's pet was a bear. He kept one at Cambridge University because dogs weren't allowed. Henrik Ibsen kept a pet scorpion...
Book Calendar (Free subscription) | 08/12/2009
Dunfermline Carnegie Library, May Gate, Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland (This is the town where Andrew Carnegie was born). The picture is attributed to: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Kilnburn Daily Thoughts 8/12/2009 I rather like the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie so far. The book can be read for free online at http://www.wordowner.com/carnegie/ . I am hoping that I can learn something useful...
composite drawlings (Free subscription) | 07/21/2009
Go away. What are you doing still here? Why won't you go? What is it about my presence which has you rooted to the spot? Certainly it can't be my sultry good looks and sense of style. So, why are you here, again? Oh, right. Ask the medium. You wanted a reading. And, if I give you one, you will leave, no? Glorious! Permit me. Here you are: You are caught up in being an intellectual, and like to assume...
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