Wuthering
Expectations

Swinburne is giving his publisher instructions for publicizing his new book, Tristram of Lyonesse (1882): If you print among the advertisem...

Let’s check in with Algernon Swinburne, the fourth of six volumes of his Letters (1960, ed. Cecil Lang), covering 1877 through 1882.  I hav...

Grazia Deledda’s After the Divorce (1902) has a minor character , a priest, named Elias Portolu.  Her next novel is set in the same Sardin...

Writing about Hardy’s theodicy poems I included a couple that were also ecological poems, or something close to it.  Proto-ecological.  “By ...

Every Thomas Hardy post could be about what I didn’t know.  Did I know that his first books of poems, Wessex Poems (1898), included his own...

Looking at the twenty pages of Hardy poems in my Norton Anthology of English Literature , 5th edition, I almost feel bad about my superficia...

I read Thomas Hardy’s first three collections of poetry.  Now I will rummage around in them.  They are: Wessex Poems and Other Verses (18...

Robert Bridges had a scholar’s mastery of poetic form and a fine aesthetic sense.  He did not have a strong voice of his own – he barely had...

Robert Bridges is the poet I have at hand.  He had a long career, with his first book published in 1873 and his last in 1929.  He was close ...

I’ll expand on Hardy’s paganism.  Or that of the narrator of Far from the Madding Crowd , easily the most important character in the book.  ...

In a recent interview , Tim Parks said that he reads “[f]or the intensity of engagement with someone else’s view of life.”  He is referring ...

Thomas Hardy owed George Eliot quite a debt.  He borrows her parties , her choruses of rustics – even Daniel Deronda had a chorus of rustic...

Some examples of Hardy “attempting to convey the intangibilities of his feeling in the coarse meshes of language” and succeeding (Ch. 3).  T...

The first thing to say, as I launch into Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), Thomas Hardy’s novel of loyal shepherds, lady farmers, and the...

I am not yet done with minor, or even major, poets of or around the 1890s. A bit of Robert Bridges is in progress, Thomas Hardy is next, I t...

I have another minor poet of the 1890s to write up, Ernest Dowson.  I have to write about these poets if I want to keep them straight.  Aest...

Sometimes I need to read a book of criticism that is full of ideas, just to loosen up the drier parts of the brain.  The subject of the book...

To prepare for a big novel about fairies I thought I would read an earlier books about fairies, Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906...

John Crowley’s Little, Big (1981) will be my readalong book of the month – please see Dolce Bellezza for details .   Quite a few book blogg...

Cavafy’s “beautiful young men” theme frequently crosses with his other great concern, Greek history.  “In an Old Book” is about the discover...