Poems for my family 004 – Durrell
Listening time: under 5 minutes.
Durrell has long been a favourite writer and poet. When I first read his Alexandria...
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...
Publishers, monkeys, monkeys, publishers
I love the way Captain Flint sees his mission to find a monkey for the children as a refreshing change...
What is peace?
This is Saint-Exupéry's definition of peace, in which everything is in its place and friends can be reached, particularly striking...
Moss-eyed rascal
You can't but help like such a maverick, something in the moss-coloured eyes, and the difference between him and the...
The age of iron
The Four Ages described in Ted Hughes' muscular re-telling of Ovid's tales, begins with the Golden Age...
Poems for my family 008 – Drayton
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael...
The first golden age
Continuing his retelling of the myth of Creation, Ted Hughes reminds us of a first golden age...
A quotation is a cicada
Having built this ever expanding website partly as a way to share the thousands of quotations captured over decades of...
Of sisters dissimilar
Dante meets the two sisters in Purgatory, and Leah describes, with Dantesque pithiness, the difference between them.
For other quotations...
What is war?
Saint-Exupery wrote a slim, subtle stream-of-consciousness account of a futile aerial reconnaissance flight over enemy occupied territory which he had...
Scum-skinned tide
Something alarmingly contemporary about this polluted surface in Dante's Inferno, especially when he discerns, through the miasma, dead souls fleeing.
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