From the introduction-in-progress to my book-in-progress A Thing of Beauty: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. All photos by me. – A glittering blue day at the top of the world: Montenvers in the Alps above Chamonix, France. January 15, 2020. Elevation 6276 feet. Everything here is ice and rock and sky. Look […]
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Here’s a lovely account by fellow writer Martyn Crucefix of my workshop “Looking Like Keats: Observation and Inspiration for Your Writing” at the Keats House in Hampstead on May 25. Brother John, as we affectionately called him, was looking down on us from this portrait, hanging in the Chester Room, the whole time – and […]
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“[We] never turn sentimental about something of real value — wilderness, wild animals, small towns, baseball, mountain music, our privacy — until the way we live and do business has pressed it to the edge of extinction. Then we administer affectionate last rites to everything we failed to love enough.” – Hal Crowther My boxing […]
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At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
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Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
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I couldn’t be happier that my essay “Gain Experience!: Literature, Travel, and Life” (echoing Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous advice) is forthcoming in Engaging the Age of Jane Austen, edited by Bridget Draxler and Danielle Spratt (University of Iowa Press, 2019). I’m so grateful to Bridget and Danielle for this opportunity. In the essay, I share particular […]
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Cross-posted from Luther’s “Ideas and Creations” community blog. Main 218 is my favorite classroom for several reasons: like my campus office and my dining room at home, it has red walls. I’ve added some National Poetry Month posters to the walls over time, so the décor feels a little personalized. But most of all, it’s […]
Read moreIn one of his famously long, thinking-out-loud journal letters to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, finished and sent in January 1819, John Keats talks about cats: There is another thing I must mention of the momentous kind;– but I must mind my periods in it—Mrs. Dilke has two Cats – a Mother and a […]
Read more“Experience enlarges the space for the self to swim in.” – George Eliot, from a manuscript in “Writing Britain” at the British Library. A month of travel has left me with more than I can say, and more than I can put into words, even to myself, even as I’m settling into a fall sabbatical […]
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