Chesterton the Prophet
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
I have reposted this piece from four years ago and made it free to everyone at the request of a friend who is now reading The Napoleon of Notting Hill.
Thomas Hardy, though best known for his novels, was a poet who exercised significant influence on the next generation.
I’ve just finished reading what is sometimes called Shakespeare’s Ovid because the playwright borrowed from it extensively. The passage below comes in the twelfth of the poem’s fifteen books.
I am going to start this post as a sort of thread, introducing some themes and eliciting comments and questions. My first question is: Who is Mrs. Samille, and is her name of any significance? NOTE: THIS HAS BEEN ADDED TO.
These are really crucial chapters in the novel, as we begin to understand the principal characters.
In most novels, this suicide would be the end of an uninteresting and unnamed character, but here it is just the beginning, as he continues to wander about, more lost than ever before.
No, the title of this brief announcement does refer to the birth of a baby, trailing clouds of glory, into the abyss of human life in the New America. It is the title of a Charles Williams novel that has been termed a “theological thriller.”
Some time ago, I abandoned the regular discussion of selected books. The reason should have been obvious. The cause has disappeared, and we can resume. Working on the second volume of Properties of Blood, I need to rewrite the chapters on revenge. This is a good occasion for looking at the classic work of the English stage, The Avenger’s Tragedy….
Chatterton, a late 18th century poet, is more famous as a legend–the teenage poet who died at 17–than as a writer. The Romantics, French as well as English, lionized him. His best known poems are the medievalizing verses he attributed to a 15th century poet, but his talent for painting satiric portraits is evident in “Apostate Will”–a fine sketch of the clergy on the make,
As I sat at the café, I said to myself,
They may talk as they please about what they call pelf,