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'Why, look around you: blood is flowing in rivers, and in such a jolly way besides, like champagne.'

- Dostoevsky, 'Notes From underground'

Thanks for the help

Does anyone know where I can find "The Brothers Karamazov" on CD? The key is that I need the Pevear translation and I need it unabridged.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd...

"They say that people standing on an altitude somehow gravitate of their own accord downwards, into the abyss. I think that many suicides and murders have been committed simply because the revolver...

I've not yet read it, although it's been on my "to read" list for quite a while.

One of my favorite Johnson quotes comes (I believe) from Boswell's biography. When Johnson was working on his...

Psyche,
One of the best ways of determining the rhythm of a line of poetry is by looking at the polysyllabic words in the line (as bluevictim mentioned in his post.) Take this line of...

The Baltimore Ravens football team are named after Edgar Allen Poe's poem "The Raven".

"Poor Folk"; Dostoevsky's first story.

Exactly. Everyone knows him for his 'political' writing (Animal Farm, 1984, and certain essays), but his insights into writing itself and literature were amazing. His essays on Dickens, Kipling,...

A few others:


Robert Frost:

- Why poetry is in school more than it seems to be outside in the world, the children haven't been told. They must wonder.

- We write in school chiefly because...

Sorry, I also meant to include

Anthony Hecht's

"Naming The Animals"

Having commanded Adam to bestow
Names upon all the creatures, God withdrew
To empyrean palaces of blue
That warm and...

A few of my favorites that might help:

John Milton's

"When I Consider How My Light Is Spent"

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
...

Kate Vannah, an associate of E.A. Robinson, contrasting their writing styles:

"He says it takes him six weeks to write a sonnet. It takes me ten minutes. One of us is crazy."

I didn't see this come up after I posted it last time. I don't know if my computer's messing up, so sorry if this is posted twice.

Alienation, as others have mentioned above, would be a good place to start. That can actually be worked into two different themes; the main characters' alienation from God and alienation from their...

Crime And Punishment would be good, as you mentioned, but even better might be another book by Dostoevsky. You may want to try Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground". Very like "The Stranger", I...

It occured to me Jtolj, after my last post on this thread, that the reason for your opinion of poetry might be that you have in mind only free-verse poetry; in which case I agree with you, I don't...

A bit contradictory, it seems to me. If 9/10 of poetry is mediocre to bad, how exactly is it the easiest to write? Wouldn't the lack of good poetry (in your opinion) prove just the opposite; that...

I considered myself 'aesthetically challenged' as well, and was never interested in poetry throughout school. The guy who got me into poetry was Robert Frost. I always suggest him when people ask,...

When I said that it was the opposite of melodrama, I was thinking more of this definition, taken from dictionary.com:

melodrama

n : an extravagant comedy in which action is more salient than...

That's an insightful point about the narrator. Many critics claim that Dostoevsky really pioneered a new technique regarding 'point-of-view'. Mikhail Bakhtin, in a famous essay, called Dostoevsky's...

Mono, I'm not really familiar with Sandburg at all except for his poem "Grass", so I can't really compare (even though I'm from Chicago so I do know his 'Chicago' poem; "Hog Butcher for the...

Ah, the other members here are so on top of things that they've already posted a couple of the sonnets that I had in mind (namely "Ozymandias" and Keats' "When I Have Fears..."). A couple other...

My three favorite are Wordsworth (who I believe wrote more sonnets than any other poet), Frost, and E.A. Robinson. I don't really have time this second, but I could link to some of my favorites of...