Having picked up Pride and Prejudice to look up Bingley’s comments on accomplishments the other day, I decided to re-read the whole book.
Along with Kipling’s Kim, it’s one of my ‘comfort books’; this time, however, I wasn’t reading it while ill in bed, so perhaps I was more critical. Certainly it struck me that it would be hard to cite Austen as a role model for good writing.
Continue reading “quibbles & niggles”
I have finally had time to read the copy of the TLS that I bought over a month ago. There’s a piece entitled The brick-wall moment – What is poetry about? And other puzzles, which appears in a section labelled ‘Commentary’.
I’m not sure I’d have read it with quite the same attitude if I’d realised it was an edited extract from a book, but it was a lot more interesting than the formal review in the Independent of Who is Ozymandias? And other puzzles in poetry by John Fuller.
Continue reading “a ‘fuller’ understanding”
For reasons that will be more immediately obvious to some readers than to others, I was startled to see this subject line in my mailbox (from the digital version of Metro UK):
But seriously… “Gwyneth’s marriage ‘not perfect'”. What marriage ever has been?
Continue reading “great expectations”
The survey I mentioned yesterday also had a question that asked “What is most likely to motivate you to READ a poem?” It gave the following list of possible reasons, from which you were allowed to choose up to three:
Continue reading “motivation II”
Yesterday I said that one of my school teachers seemed to believe that pleasure taken in the sound and general impression of poetry was more important than the ability to understand and explain the details of each word and image. Forty years later, I am very glad that was her attitude.
Another memory from that time at school was the context – or, more accurately, lack of context – for the poetry we were studying.
Continue reading “more school memories”
don't confuse the narrator 