“Nine-tenths of English poetic literature is the result of ... a poet trying to keep his hand in.”
Writing about reading Wednesday -- it happens sometimes.
Finished:
The Englishman in Italy, ed. George Wollaston, which I enjoyed to the end. One surprise: there's only a couple works from The Byron in here, including a single extract from Childe Harold -- possibly because the editor frowned on excerpts? (There’s only one other, from The Prelude.) Dunno. There’s far more Shelley and R. Browning, regardless, not to mention Symonds.
Sandry’s Book, Tris’s Book, Daja’s Book, Briar’s Book, & Magic Steps, Tamora Pierce, by way of comfort reading while sick. Still comforting.
From The Earthly Paradise, a handful of stories including “Ogier the Dane,” (this just might be the best single story, if only for the portrait of the protagonist's confusions as his life gets erased multiple times), “The Golden Apples,” (with a Laboring Herc who is both charismatic and introspective), and “The Fostering of Aslaug” (with a Ragnar who is most definitely not the Ragnar of The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok (let alone The Vikings), but then, this isn't the Aslaug of that saga, either, despite that being the primary source). One thing I'm specifically reading for, this time through, is the in-story audience reactions, and how those change over the year as both the stories and the seasons progress. (Later, I'll take on the frame-narrator's reactions -- there are too many layers of arcing for me to keep it all straight at once, especially when I'm reading piecemeal.) The Earthly Paradise really is IMNSHO one of the most overlooked Victorian long poems; I would love to see what happened in a class that tackled just it and The Ring and the Book for a semester. Morris's tools are very different from Browning's, as is his mythic-regenerative central theme, but they are both working towards similar explorations of fragmentary experiences.
In progress:
Italy, Samuel Rogers, who was an interesting figure: the wealthy scion of a banking family, he was a patron of the arts and second-tier poet in his own right -- one of the few The Byron actively admired, now mostly forgotten. He started out as a late-Augustan poet (he made his name with The Pleasures of Memory, a Popean verse essay in balanced couplets) but updated his style to become successively a Romantic and then late-Romantic poet, eventually outliving Wordsworth. Italy, his last major work, was initially not a success, but he reissued it with illustrations commissioned from Turner and other major artists, and so engineered a best-seller. It is a travelogue poem of a fictionalized journey (material mashed up from two separate trips) from Geneva to Amalfi, filled out with stories, variously romantic and/or tragic, of places visited. I first met it via generous extracts in Poems of Places, which focused on the descriptive passages -- which is I wanted more of -- but I suspect contemporary interest was more in the stories. I note that there's little of the personal aspects of the journey, aside from friendships made and remembered (including a surprisingly balanced elegy for The Byron). The poetry is professional-grade blank verse, polished to be smoothly readable without turning monotonous, but also rarely ringing off a striking phrase. At ¾ through, I'm enjoying reading it, but I suspect ultimately it's too impersonal to become a favorite.
Provenance, Ann Leckie -- am a couple chapters in and having trouble engaging, to my surprise. Will try to finish before the library starts clearing its collective throat at me.
World of Cultivation, Fan Xiang, my current go-to for brainless adventure fluff. (I want to get back to Way of Choices, but I'm stuck in the middle of a long, less-interesting digression away from the protagonist, who remains currently frozen mid-climax of a battle.) Up to chapter 465, or just over halfway through.
Now to read some more …
---L.
Subject quote from Robert Graves, quoted in The Observer (London, November 11, 1962).
Finished:
The Englishman in Italy, ed. George Wollaston, which I enjoyed to the end. One surprise: there's only a couple works from The Byron in here, including a single extract from Childe Harold -- possibly because the editor frowned on excerpts? (There’s only one other, from The Prelude.) Dunno. There’s far more Shelley and R. Browning, regardless, not to mention Symonds.
Sandry’s Book, Tris’s Book, Daja’s Book, Briar’s Book, & Magic Steps, Tamora Pierce, by way of comfort reading while sick. Still comforting.
From The Earthly Paradise, a handful of stories including “Ogier the Dane,” (this just might be the best single story, if only for the portrait of the protagonist's confusions as his life gets erased multiple times), “The Golden Apples,” (with a Laboring Herc who is both charismatic and introspective), and “The Fostering of Aslaug” (with a Ragnar who is most definitely not the Ragnar of The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok (let alone The Vikings), but then, this isn't the Aslaug of that saga, either, despite that being the primary source). One thing I'm specifically reading for, this time through, is the in-story audience reactions, and how those change over the year as both the stories and the seasons progress. (Later, I'll take on the frame-narrator's reactions -- there are too many layers of arcing for me to keep it all straight at once, especially when I'm reading piecemeal.) The Earthly Paradise really is IMNSHO one of the most overlooked Victorian long poems; I would love to see what happened in a class that tackled just it and The Ring and the Book for a semester. Morris's tools are very different from Browning's, as is his mythic-regenerative central theme, but they are both working towards similar explorations of fragmentary experiences.
In progress:
Italy, Samuel Rogers, who was an interesting figure: the wealthy scion of a banking family, he was a patron of the arts and second-tier poet in his own right -- one of the few The Byron actively admired, now mostly forgotten. He started out as a late-Augustan poet (he made his name with The Pleasures of Memory, a Popean verse essay in balanced couplets) but updated his style to become successively a Romantic and then late-Romantic poet, eventually outliving Wordsworth. Italy, his last major work, was initially not a success, but he reissued it with illustrations commissioned from Turner and other major artists, and so engineered a best-seller. It is a travelogue poem of a fictionalized journey (material mashed up from two separate trips) from Geneva to Amalfi, filled out with stories, variously romantic and/or tragic, of places visited. I first met it via generous extracts in Poems of Places, which focused on the descriptive passages -- which is I wanted more of -- but I suspect contemporary interest was more in the stories. I note that there's little of the personal aspects of the journey, aside from friendships made and remembered (including a surprisingly balanced elegy for The Byron). The poetry is professional-grade blank verse, polished to be smoothly readable without turning monotonous, but also rarely ringing off a striking phrase. At ¾ through, I'm enjoying reading it, but I suspect ultimately it's too impersonal to become a favorite.
Provenance, Ann Leckie -- am a couple chapters in and having trouble engaging, to my surprise. Will try to finish before the library starts clearing its collective throat at me.
World of Cultivation, Fan Xiang, my current go-to for brainless adventure fluff. (I want to get back to Way of Choices, but I'm stuck in the middle of a long, less-interesting digression away from the protagonist, who remains currently frozen mid-climax of a battle.) Up to chapter 465, or just over halfway through.
Now to read some more …
---L.
Subject quote from Robert Graves, quoted in The Observer (London, November 11, 1962).