Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes. Enjoy!
Chatteration
'Again there was a sudden chatteration of gulls.' A fine description of the confabulations of sea-gulls when they get...
A poet’s eye view of the poet
I always liked Ezra Pound's definition of the poet as being the 'antenna of the race'. Here Wallace Stevens enlarges...
Frost-riven rubble
Rubble bespeaks a building site in a busy, messy, or war-torn city. The idea of its being splintered by frost...
Death and funerals
Thoreau's tricky relationship with the Church is neatly and humorously summed up here.
'If it were not for death and...
A rolling boulder
Nanny Slagg meets an old man of the Dwellers, the humble people who live limpet-like on the outer walls of...
Letters kept, letters destroyed
Given the fragility of letters, it’s astounding how many have survived centuries and even millennia. Added to which it seems...
As timid as…
A memorable and graphic (if unsympathetic) way to convey timidity and fearfulness. You can see a cowering dog, skitting about...
Ribambelle
A ringing sound to this French word. A flock, a swarm, a string, a torrent. My Harrap's tells me of...
Waiting for the pub to open
Puffins are curious and unafraid of humans, and very sociable among themselves. I loved this image of their crowding around...
Cloud-born apotheoses
The triologism caught my eye, but I like even more the play of light bouncing from a Venetian canal up...
Tweed-coloured coast
An aptly named colour for a Scottish coast, and why wouldn't the tweed-weavers take their palettes from the landscapes around...
Previously-unsoiled lintel
A horribly vengeful way to clean an allegedly soiled lintel, from Kazantzakis' lively version of Christ's life.
'Herod ... had...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder.
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
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