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anyone can rhyme- writing a memorable line of poetry that is free verse or sticks to some meter that doesn't rhyme is harder and in my opinion more satisfying to read.

i did mean epic poem when i...

I picked up a copy of Seamus Heaney's "Beowulf" translation the other day, and it got me thinking about what my favorite epic of all time is. While its tempting to say Beowulf, I think I'd have to go...

i found ulysses to be one of those books where there's so much going on that it helps to have some context for a few of the more difficult chapters. don't worry about getting it all right away, just...

you could try anything by dickens...i'm not a huge fan myself, but then again i haven't read a whole lot by him; hard times was all right. don't read paradise lost until you have to, because while i...

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and...

it sounds odd, but avoiding sounding too "poetic" is key- if you start writing like a neo-classicist or a cavalier poet (ugh), you'll have a hard time sounding modern. restrict yourself to common...

pride and prejudice. i read it in high school and detested it, but then again, high school wasn't so great on explaining literature that well. i had to read sense and sensibility for a british lit...

that's not always true, though. while it can contextualize certain matters, to say that you can cull nothing from the text without the author's intent closes a lot of doors. part of what makes...

Lattimore's translation is the best I've read, hands down. You can't go wrong with it.

Fact is, without symbols and interpretation you don't really have "literature" on your hands. If you read any further into a story than you do a news article (which one reads for information, as a...

"Ashes and Diamonds" by Jerzy Andrzejewski was very good and is worth the read. It was written pretty shortly after the war (1948), attributing to the very real sense the imagery in this book gives.

Best...

Short story: "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not sure why, it just sticks out in my mind.
Poem: "Tintern Abbey" by William Wordsworth. My favorite poem...

wait, i figured it out (you think i would have mentioned him in my favorite poems post, but i had so many others in mind). i've gotta go with w.h. auden. this guy was a master of forms and blended...

I saw the massive list of favorite poets and I couldn't choose one, so I went for poems that stuck out in my mind. In no particular order:

-"Tintern Abbey" by Wordsworth. "These beauteous forms, /...

they're not really fairy tales, but gregory maguire's two books (i'm not sure if there are more yet) "Wicked," about the wicked witch of the west in Wizard of Oz, and "Confessions of an Ugly...

I picked up a copy of this book pretty soon after it came out in hardback..being a fan of Eugenides' "Virgin Suicides" I thought I'd give it a go, and for the most part I was pretty satisfied.

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