Raphael Falco: How Bob Dylan used the ancient practice of ‘imitatio’ to craft some of the most original songs of his time
Bob Dylan is both a modern voice entirely unique and, at the same time, the product of ancient, time-honored ways of practicing and thinking about creativity.
John Clare: The Instinct of Hope
Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Video: Poetry and Immortality in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale | Belinda Jack
John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” — a lecture by Oxford Professor Belinda Jack
William Wordsworth: Lines Written in Early Spring
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?
Leigh Hunt: Jenny Kiss'd Me
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
John Clare: The Thunder Mutters
The thunder mutters louder & more loud
With quicker motion hay folks ply the rake
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Frost at Midnight
Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch…
John Clare: Summer
I’ll lean upon her breast and I’ll whisper in her ear
That I cannot get a wink o’sleep for thinking of my dear;
I hunger at my meat and I daily fade away
Like the hedge rose that is broken in the heat of the day.
John Clare: The Badger
The badger grunting on his woodland track
With shaggy hide and sharp nose scrowed with black
Roots in the bushes and the woods, and makes
A great high burrow in the ferns and brakes.
William Wordsworth: Tintern Abbey
Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 . Five years have past; five summers, with the … Continue reading
Dorothy Wordsworth: The moon had the old moon in her arms
The columbine … is a graceful slender creature, a female seeking retirement, and growing freest and most graceful where it is most alone. I observed that the more shaded plants … Continue reading
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: What If You Slept
What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower … Continue reading
John Keats: This Living Hand
. This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill … Continue reading
Lord Byron (George Gordon): Darkness
. I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and … Continue reading
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