Roden Noel: When…we attribute to nature a sympathy with our moods, whether of joy or sorrow, we are not under an amiable delusion; the intuition is true, although the shape it assumes may not always be scientifically correct. Nature, like man, has her bright, rich, joyous, and her desolate, decaying phases; in joy we feel the former most, in sorrow we feel and discern more especially the latter. We may indulge these feelings to a morbid degree and see things too brightly or too gloomily; but the sense of a sympathy in nature has its basis in fact.
Alan Wall: Rid language of metaphor and it falls apart. In fact, it is impossible to speak without metaphor. Even if we trained ourselves to avoid figures of speech altogether, catachresis inhabits the lexicon: our etymologies constitute a riot of metaphoric transfer.
Saturday, 25 February 2012
Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Alan Wall: The collection exists in order to hold ruin at bay, so there is an acute poignancy to the ruin of any collection. Particle meets anti-particle; annihilation ensues. Alfred Russel Wallace spent years putting together his collection of animals and plants from the Amazon. The brig on to which they were loaded for return to England caught fire, and almost everything was destroyed.
Wednesday, 21 December 2011
John Ferriar: Proudly he shews, with many a smile elate,
The scrambling subjects of the private plate;
While Time their actions and their names bereaves,
They grin forever in the guarded leaves.
Percy Fitzgerald: There is one view of Dickens which has scarcely been sufficiently dealt with, namely, his relations with his literary brethren and friends, as editor and otherwise. These exhibit him in a most engaging light, and will perhaps be a surprise even to those abundantly familiar with his amiable and gracious ways.
Thursday, 24 November 2011
THE BUSINESS OF LIVING early and working late seems like a New England virtue. Certainly, it is one that Ruth Stone, a Yankee poet, mastered perfectly. It’s not surprising that for a poet whose work – and not her celebrity – makes her “major”, it took most of us a lifetime to catch up to [...]
Saturday, 29 October 2011
Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.
Anthony Howell: With Quietism, form fits content as water fits a jug: it’s an abstract fusion that appeals to creative people who value the plastic properties of their medium. In poetry, its focus on familiar experiences or tasks that usually go unremarked, such as breaking eggs, is equivalent to a painter’s preoccupation with still-life. Significance is downplayed, but something is ‘brought to life.’
Tuesday, 27 September 2011
This is the dark side of those progressive Victorians we all know about, with their trains and telegraphs, their technological advances and their scientific discoveries, their liberal politics and their enlightened scepticism.
Sunday, 18 September 2011
Lucy Sheehan: Even as Trollope’s maps produce a comforting image of self-contained local communities, they also expertly trace lines of power, grafting social networks onto spatial locations to provide a cartography of social and political influence.
Sunday, 11 September 2011
“I asked him to name two actors that from his viewpoint represented the two towers,” said Toth. “One of the names he gave me was Gary Cooper. I was dancing around the Internet and somehow came upon Cary Grant. It all just fit together and answered itself and gave a little bit of a human persona to it.”
The judges noted that Lucy Sheehan’s essay successfully “enters the current critical conversation about the nature and effects of space and place in Victorian literary texts, especially how portrayals of space represent or embody ethical positions,” and praised it as a “well-researched, readable, and insightful” text.
Alan Wall: The Janus Face of Metaphor. | Clues and Labyrinths. | Ruin, the collector and sad mortality.
Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’.
Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.