Tag Archive for ‘Don’t Know Much About Literature’
Poetry Pop Quiz #2
In honor of National Poetry Month in April, I posted a quiz on poetic first lines earlier this month. Here is another. (If you’ve been following my Poem of the Day posts all month on my Facebook page or on Twitter, you should recognize several of these. All are worth reading. Or rereading!) “Gather ye [...]
Don’t Know Much About® Poetic First Lines
“April,” as T.S. Eliot told us, “is the cruellest month.” It is also National Poetry Month. That idea was inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. So to test your poetic wits, a quick Pop Quiz on some famous first poetic lines… Then go read the whole poems. “Let us go then, you [...]
Don’t Know Much About® “Lewis Carroll”
“O frabjous day” Hard to believe, but the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland had a reputation for being dull and uninspiring at his day job: Mathematics Lecturer at Oxford University. But when Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born on January 27, 1832, mathematician, took on the pen name “Lewis Carroll,” he dreamed up fantastical stories that [...]
Don’t Know Much About® Poe
On the anniversary of his birth in 1809, a quick quiz in honor Edgar Allen Poe. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote some of the darkest, strangest poems and stories in the English language. His narrators, who generally speak in the first person, have led many readers to confuse Poe with his deeply disturbed characters: opium [...]
The N-word is for “Nonsense”
A work that aspires, however, humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. The great novelist Joseph Conrad wrote those words in a literary manifesto called “A Preface to the Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ ” Oops, I mean “Slave of the Narcissus.” Or should it be “The Children of the [...]
TODAY IN HISTORY: The “Negro Riots” in Watts
It started with a “DWB”– “driving while black.” On August 11, 1965, an all-too-frequent stop of a young black man exploded into one of the worst urban riots in American history. Where: Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing [...]
TODAY IN HISTORY: Don’t Know Much About® Tocqueville in America
Happy Birthday, Monsieur Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805; died April 16, 1859) Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote, “In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final [...]
Don’t Know Much About® “Papa”
Ernest Hemingway, the larger-than-life American novelist, was born on July 21 in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. They called him “Papa.” One of America’s most successful and admired novelists, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) once compared his bare-bones style to an iceberg: “There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows.” Beneath Hemingway’s famously [...]
Happy Bloomsday 2011!
“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan. . .” With those words, James Joyce (February 2, 1882-January 13, 1941) opened Ulysses, chosen in 1999 as the greatest novel of the 20th century by the Modern Library. The novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus on their wanderings through Dublin on a single day –June 16 1904. That makes [...]
Happy “Frost Day”
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874. Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost [...]
