If you’re remotely interested in haiku, you should sign up to receive a daily poem by the haiku master Issa, via e-mail. (You can also pick them up on Twitter, by following @issa_haiku. And there’s an enormous searchable archive of Issa haiku on the site.) What better way to start the day than by reading […]
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The Smiths — ‘I Want the One I Can’t Have’
And if you ever need self-validation just meet me in the alley by the railway station The greatest rhyme in English — surely?
T.S. Eliot Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
Reporter: Mr Eliot, for which of your works were you awarded the Nobel Prize? Eliot: I assume it was for the entire corpus. Reporter: When did you publish that? Priceless. (Via the wonderful Ackroyd biography.)
T.S. Eliot and the Business of Poetry
I’ve just written a piece for Lateral Action, one of my other blogs, about T.S. Eliot’s route to fame, inspired by the excellent Ackroyd biography. The T.S. Eliot Guide to Success If you like that, you might like this piece about the other great poet-businessman of the English language: The Shakespearean Guide to Entrepreneurship
Philip Larkin — ‘A Study of Reading Habits’
Following on from Auden’s American accent, I’ve discovered the reverse phenomenon in Larkin’s Sunday Sessions. In ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ he uses the American word ‘dude’ — which, in the recorded version, he pronounces ‘dyood’ (instead of the usual ‘dood’) in a very arch Received Pronunciation. It’s very funny. And I’m guessing deliberately conservative, […]