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reading

Something Borrowed: A Passage from Charles Williams

I’ve decided that my “something borrowed”-week can be something borrowed from a non-poetry genre as well as something borrowed from a friend. This takes the pressure off my friends, and also allows me a bit of non-poetry blogging, though this week there is a connection of a sort. I’ve blogged a fair bit about Christian […]

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reading

I just read a $1 Dover Thrift Edition of some of Shelley’s poetry (a lot of good writing for not very much!) and concluded that sometimes I’m in the mood for Shelley and sometimes I’m not. His language often, not always, feels diffuse by today’s standards—more redundancy or empty or lazy words like “sweet.”  I […]

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reading writing

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Complete

I just finished reading C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. I’m exhausted, and not (overall) excited. This is not Lewis’s fault. He has to cover so much material, so much of which bores and annoys him, that—even though he expresses his boredom and annoyance with a great deal of wit—I too […]

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reading

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Week One

Of the three books I mentioned last week I was thinking of reading next (C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Greer Gilman’s Moonwise and Cloud and Ashes, and Stephanie Burt’s The Poem Is You), I’ve selected English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and I’m more than a third of the way through (I think I’ll try to be done by next week, […]