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First verse of bible translated incorrectly

First verse of bible translated incorrectly

According to Van Wolde the people who lived in the 7th and 8th century BC, when Genesis was created, did not believe that "in the beginning there was nothing". Genesis itself suggests that people at the time imagined primeval waters where sea monsters lived.
Book Review | In Such Hard Times

Book Review | In Such Hard Times

"For Wei, poetry was a habit, a mode of autobiography and being. He lived at a time and in a place when, whatever else was going on, educated people wrote poems the way we text or tweet. Wei somewhat dolefully observes his colleagues riding around with satchels full of poems."
Watchers of the Skies

Watchers of the Skies

"Early the next morning, he took less than four hours to set down his own famous poem, in which he compared his feelings with those of 'some watcher of the skies/When a new planet swims into his ken'."
Where Have All the Muses Gone?

Where Have All the Muses Gone?

"Poets stopped invoking the muse centuries ago -- eventually turning instead to caffeine, alcohol and amphetamines -- but painters, musicians, and even choreographers have celebrated their actual female inspirers..."
Ted Hughes - Poet and Eco Warrior

Ted Hughes - Poet and Eco Warrior

"Hughes was in the US when the naturalist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962. With its warnings of doom, it was a book that changed the attitudes of many, and it certainly struck a chord with Hughes."
The Other Side of a Mirror

The Other Side of a Mirror

"We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,/And the door stood open at our feast,/When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,/And a man with his back to the East."
Book Review | Tamalpais Walking

Book Review | Tamalpais Walking

"Snyder and Killion both know Tamalpais' rich history and eccentric characters, such as the 19th century German immigrants who once hiked the Alps, and wanted a California mountain to climb."
The Genius of the Canterbury Tales

The Genius of the Canterbury Tales

It is one of the greatest poems in all of English literature...It is also one of the most resourceful summaries of the sensibility of the Middle Ages, as rich and as complex as..."
'World's End' by Pablo Neruda

'World's End' by Pablo Neruda

"...weaves together the personal and the political, the public and the private, the domestic and the global. For Neruda, poetry meant much more than the expression of emotion and personality."
The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

The poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley

"Our perhaps forgivable tendency to group the Romantic tribe of early 19th-century poets under a single collective title is a disservice both to history and to literature..."
Ten of the best examples of moon poetry

Ten of the best examples of moon poetry

I watched the Moon around the House / Until upon a Pane – / She stopped – a Traveller's privilege – for Rest – / And there upon / I gazed – as at a stranger –
Mournful narratives

Mournful narratives

"Johnson knew that there were good reasons why 'a man writes much better than he lives'. In the Lives of the Poets he looks back down more than a century of English poetry, but he is also looking back through his own 'life of writing', ruefully cataloguing the occupational self-delusions of authors."
How modernist art and literature interacted

How modernist art and literature interacted

"The elderly Renoir lived nearby at Cagnes-sur-Mer, and most of modernist France soon followed: Bonnard bought a house at Le Cannet in 1926 and, in old age, Picasso, L้ger, Chagall lined up, each with a new young wife, in rival villas along the coast."
A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

A Music of Austerity: The Poetry of Wallace Stevens

"Stevens stands simultaneously among the most worldly and the most otherworldly of American poets, and it is paradoxically through his otherworldliness--through poems whose plain-spoken diction feels spooky--that his respect for the actual world is registered."
Yeats Trail traverses poet's `land of heart's desire'

Yeats Trail traverses poet's `land of heart's desire'

"Inscribed on a stone there are Yeats' lines: 'I the poet William Yeats/ With old mill boards and sea green slates,/ And smithy work from the Gort forge/ Restored this tower for my wife George.'"
The Literatures of the Two Easts

The Literatures of the Two Easts

“The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful.”
Writer, Poet Jim Harrison Is a Determined 'Outsider'

Writer, Poet Jim Harrison Is a Determined 'Outsider'

In the cabin behind his house, Harrison writes every day, longhand, no computer. He's always at work on a novel, which begins, for him, with a particular character whose story...
A Most Prolific Peasant Poet

A Most Prolific Peasant Poet

"He was born into a barely literate, impoverished peasant family of farm laborers in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire. His random schooling, interrupted at harvest times, fully ended at age 12."
Picasso and the Allure of Language

Picasso and the Allure of Language

"At the pinnacle of his profession, in 1935 when he was just 53, Pablo Picasso stopped painting. Instead, he wrote hundreds of poems in French and Spanish..."