Although two very different sorts of writers, Jane Austen and her contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, enjoyed and admired each other’s stories, and exchanged plenty of positive literary feedback. Austen said of Waverly, with her characteristic wit: “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not …
like church coffee in a silver canister water dripping, filtering through grounds up through a thin pipe the mind liquid slips and seeps through grit and the cycle repeats cylindrical, like rain: evaporation, condensation– storm the air heavy as with the smell of rain earthy and rich and black like iowa dirt percolation the light turns on—story.
For Gabby So, friend, you are seventeen. Older by another year, and yet no taller. Seventeen is a suffocating age: It is hard to know yourself—To know your principles, your life plans, your inmost dreams and wishes. How can you be expected to know so much? Nobody knows anything at seventeen. A reminder for the coming …
Lyrics to a murder ballad I will never compose, inspired by Euripedes’ Medea. Like Babylon she rises with her dragons at her sideMedea, you have broken me and killed my blushing bride Her father lies beside her with his arms around his girl Your jealous rage has killed them both and …
The Consolation of Oranges by James Matthew Wilson As I sat quietly thinking about my death and venting my anguish in verse, I sensed a woman standing at my shoulder. Her brilliant appearance struck me with awe, her eyes burning with an unnatural heat. She was so ancient that I …
In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems”, T. S. Eliot argues that Hamlet is a dramatic failure, because Shakespeare fails to express clearly in “a set of objects, a situation, [or] a chain of events” (Eliot) the central emotion of the play. Eliot claims that the play’s central emotion is Hamlet’s feelings of betrayal …
I am too self-aware for self esteem. I know how cold and cramped my soul can be,Much worse to live with than it seems. I keep a record in my memory Of everything I’ve done that I regret. Those memories play back perpetually No matter how I try to wipe …
Does a tree know how to hold fastIf it’s been uprooted and transplanted countless times?Can it see its effect on the forest,Recognize how its own growth shapesThe tangled bramble and canopy of its surroundings? Will it dig its toes into the dirtDraw life into its barky torso And up its veins, Strengthening …
