Posts Tagged ‘John Keats’
On this day (April 23, 1564) was born the greatest poet the world has ever known. The following is a repost from an excellent question I once received: Dear Ray Harvey: Is Shakespeare all that? — Slo Readuh Dear Slo Readuh: No, he’s not all that. He’s all that and more. It’s impossible to overstate […]
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Did you know that John Keats pronounced his own name with such a thick Cockney accent that his friend Leigh Hunt nicknamed him “Junkets” — “Junkets” evidently being the way “John Keats” sounded coming out of Keats’s own mouth. On December 30th, 1816, Leigh Hunt challenged his twenty-one-year-old friend Junkets to a sonnet-writing contest. The […]
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It’s been said that a true artist doesn’t ever lose sight of reality: she stylizes it. It’s been also noted that a good painting often looks more real than reality itself. The reason both of these things are true is that art — which includes literature — is selectivity. Selectivity is the process of choosing […]
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Charles Baudelaire spent two hours a day getting dressed. When Edgar Allen Poe married his cousin Virginia, he was twenty-seven, and she was thirteen. And consumptive. The genius poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins wanted to change his name to Pook Tunks. Robert Frost had only five poems accepted in his first seventeen years of writing and […]
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The fact is, I did not eat every day during that period of my life. Said the surrealist Andre Breton, explaining the possible provenance of some of his strange and early literature. They rowed her in across the rolling foam — The cruel, crawling foam — to her grave beside the sea. Wrote the English […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011