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It seems that THE BATTLE OF HELL has sorta gone to hell. :D

And it seems that His Blindness the Puritan loses. The prize goes to Dante.

Unfortunately, Dante wasn't available for comment.
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I don't want to step on any toes, but frankly I think that when I am ancient and 90 years old the postmoderns will not have made it into the canon, English or otherwise. 1980 through the early 2000s...

Thanks for mentioning this, because I'm a big fan both of Elliot and Bloom (though I disagree with both on many things). I hadn't heard Bloom's opinion of Elliot before and it's interesting that he...

Didn't know that! It's quite amazing that all that coffee did nothing to brighten his outlook on life!

I read Candide when I was going through a really hard time. I knew that it was supposed to be...

But then there's Emily Dickinson, who wrote solely for herself. This indicates that at least some artists create for non-egotistical reasons.

Good points. James Joyce' ego was infamous ("It will take the scholars centuries to figure out what I meant," to paraphrase). I love the story about how when someone remarked to Joyce' wife that she...

See, it is things like that which lead me to believe that truly great genius requires a strong sense of inferiority. Only a powerful insecurity and sense of some lack can provide the drive to do...

In a recent thread, JCamilo pointed out that T.S. Elliot considered himself perhaps lower in poetic stature than W.B. Yeats. This shocked me. And it raised, in my mind, interesting questions about...

JCamilo has a point, and it is this--Elliot is part of the English canon only, whereas Dante is considered part of the world literature canon. Elliot, as utterly brilliant as he is, is almost never...

As has been noted above, The Great Gatsby is very sad. A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court is also extremely sad/depressing. Bleak House is probably the saddest Dickens novel, as far as I...

If you want something dark, modernistic, and extremely well-written, try Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. It's a novella, and I'm not sure if that qualifies as a short-story, but whatever.
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If by "environment" you mean "cultural environment," the word you may be looking for is deconstructionism. Related key words are "Derrida" and "postmodernism."

No one is a bigger Elliot fanatic than I; he's my favorite English language poet of all time. However, with all due respect, the Wasteland is a drop in the bucket, in terms of complexity, compared to...

Agreed.

And, not to get off-topic, but most of the humor of Disney's Hercules lies in deliberate comic anachronism. So, yeah: the muses are African-American and sing in the style of a spiritual....

It was an oversight, an fit of absence of mind. The Aeneid should totally be in that battle!

I love the idea of regional battles between American authors. The battle of the south could be fun:...

I think this is a great way to have lots of fun, vigorous discussion.

As far as themes, I dunno. Here are some ideas.

THE NON-SHAKESPEARE ELIZABETHANS: WYATT vs SIDNEY vs SPENSER

THE...

Love both. But, having said that, this is easy: Dante. Period.

Milton was an extraordinary poetic craftsman. His language tends to be magnificent and far beyond what any of us could ever dream of...

I was just joking, but my comment was stupid. I didn't mean to associate your work with odious things. Sorry.:)

Thanks for reading!

Obviously this isn't meant to be serious, earth-shattering poetry. Just fun.

The danger in writing a monstrosity like this is that some might have even the faintest thought...

"The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of...

Well, the Nazis were like wolves, so I guess it's serendipity.

Actually, I take that back: wolves are much more humane.

Great poem though! A wonderful snapshot of nature. :)

I also was wondering about the title. Before Wagner it was a relatively innocuous term referring to a group of people. But Wagner used it in the hyper-nationalistic way that would later be made...

Lovely poem! The steppe wears the virgin gown of winter — this is a marvelously paradoxical and unexpected metaphor, connecting bridal imagery (usually and stereotypically associated with spring)...

Actually, in my opinion it is the very fact that the blood-letting is supposed to be "hilairious" that makes it so disturbing.

In Catch-22 there is a description of a soldier with his chest blown...

Fair enough.