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Canto III for the classroom
Dante’s Canto III of Inferno, which I will be teaching in the fall, poses unique challenges like most pre-modern literature beyond language and style. I wondered what to bring to 21st-century st… more →
Paisley and Plaid
Canto III for the classroom
paisleyandplaid wrote 6 months ago: Dante’s Canto III of Inferno, which I will be teaching in the fall, poses unique challenges li … more →
Post 100 -- a poem and a comment
paisleyandplaid wrote 7 months ago: Learning Curves Driving from the city through rural countryside to teach literature and composition … more →
What's your statue?
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paisleyandplaid wrote 8 months ago: Billy Collins writes about what his own and others’ memorial statues might look like. The spea … more →
"Passion" for Poetry in New York
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: New Yorkers love the arts. Don’t they? And this latest effort at promotion proves it. At vario … more →
Seems logical to me
paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: The caption epigraph beside my site photo is from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress, … more →
Identify yesterday's quotation
paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: It was my title for the little homage to men yesterday:”the spontaneous overflow of powerful f … more →
Deconstruction fun with "There was once"
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Margaret Atwood’s poetry and fiction are among the best. My first encounter was The Robber Br … more →
We'll miss you . . .
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: . . . when you’re dead. Of course we will. Rest assured. A. E. Housman’s poem “Is … more →
Why Prufrock?
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Sad, isn’t it? T.S. Eliot has J. … more →
How to read a poem
paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Here’s a method for reading a poem that I use. It works pretty well though poetry is “sl … more →
Why the sonnet?
paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: What do Keats, Shakespeare, Frost, Millay, Plath, Browning, Shelley, Wordsworth, Whitman, Poe, Emers … more →
Sonnet 130 and Shakespeare's Wit
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If … more →
How do I love thee? -- not like that!
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Elizabeth Barrett Browning was a talented poet (Sonnets from the Portuguese), but her best known poe … more →
Millay's Figs
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote two short poems, “First Fig” and “Second Fig,” … more →
Works every time
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Margaret Atwood’s “Siren Song” is a short poem that takes Homer’s original S … more →
Frost's ambiguity and the importance of titles
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Do they still make students memorize Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken?” If not, … more →
"Not with a bang . . ."
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: The epigraph for T.S. Eliot’s modernist poem “The Hollow Men” is a quotation from … more →
Yeats's "The Second Coming" and the new year
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paisleyandplaid wrote 1 year ago: Yeats’s “The Second Coming” affords a grim look into a future in which the cumulat … more →
T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" -- another Christmas poem
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paisleyandplaid wrote 2 years ago: One of Eliot’s post-conversion-to-Christianity poems, “Journey” is essentially a m … more →
