In Greek mythology, Maenads were the female followers of Dionysus, the god of winemaking and ecstasy. Dowson cultivated the ecstasy of alcohol, while his love life was split between a platonic devotion for little girls and purely sensual affairs with adult women, often prostitutes met in bars. In this poem, he contrasts the pleasures of wine and women with the virginal beauty of young girls. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
From Asylum Poems, another treasure of sensuality by John Clare. The girl whom he loves dazzles him in all possible ways: the sound of her voice, the glance of her eyes, the colour of her cheeks, the shape of her body, the way she walks, but foremost her faithful love. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Hégésippe Moreau (Pierre-Jacques Roulliot) est un écrivain, poète et journaliste français. Né le 8 avril 1810 à Paris, il exerça plusieurs métiers, dont correcteur d’imprimerie, et se lança dans le journalisme et la poésie. Comme ses deux parents, il fut fauché par la tuberculose, et il mourut à Paris le 20 décembre 1838. Il reste un poète méconnu, mort trop jeune.
Dans ce poème, le maître tente de discipliner une jeune fille rétive aux études. Elle préfère user de séduction, par des sourires, un bras dénudé et des baisers, plutôt que de s’appliquer. Ici Lhomond est un pédagogue français du 18e siècle, auteur du célèbre manuel pour latinistes De viris illustribus urbis Romæ. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Ernest Dowson’s collection of poems Decorations: in Verse and Prose, published in 1899, ends with 5 poems in prose. The first is The Fortunate Islands. Then three of them are included in a selection by The New Formalist: Markets (after an old Nursery Rhyme), Absinthia Taetra and The Visit; note that in the latter, the sentence “I have wanted you all my life” has been changed into “I have waited for you all my life.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Voici un deuxième poème du recueil Chansons, une joyeuse évocation des jeux d’amour à l’occasion de la collecte des fleurs et des fruits. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
The above picture shows a girl looking terrified as she is locked inside a goods wagon in a train bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. She wears a headscarf made from a torn sheet, because the Nazis shaved her head under the pretext of preventing lice. It was taken from a film shot on May 19, 1944 in the Westerbork transit camp (The Netherlands) by a Jewish prisoner, Rudolf Werner Breslauer, on the orders of the commander of the camp, Albert Konrad Gemmeker. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Joseph Aude (dit le Chevalier) est un poète et auteur dramatique français, né le 10 décembre 1755 à Apt et mort le 5 octobre 1841 à Paris. Familier de Buffon, il a écrit la biographie de celui-ci. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Here is another charming love poem by John Clare, full of freshness, from his beautiful collection Asylum Poems. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Le chansonnier Jean-Baptiste Clément, né à Boulogne-sur-Seine (Boulogne-Billancourt) le 31 mai 1836 et mort à Paris le 23 février 1903, est connu pour ses chansons « Le Temps des cerises » et « La Semaine sanglante ». Militant ouvrier, il participa à la Commune de Paris, et beaucoup de ses chansons denoncent la misère des prolétaires ainsi que l’avidité et la cruauté des classes possédantes. D’autres, plus joyeuses, exaltent l’amour, la nature et les plaisirs de la vie. La musique de nombre de ses chansons a été composée par Darcier. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Dowson’s collection of poems Decorations (1899) contained verses, which were reproduced in The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, With a Memoir by Arthur Symons (1905), available as Project Gutenberg Ebook, and in modern Internet collections such as The Poems of Ernest Dowsont on ELCore.Net, the website of E. L. Core. It is not well-known that the collection ended with five poems in prose. They seem to have been written in June 1899, while Dowson was giving the last touch to the publication; indeed he mentions them in two letters to his publisher Leonard Smithers dated that month (see The Letters of Ernest Dowson, no. 397 and 398, pages 414–415). These five short texts are full of sadness and pessimism. Indeed, Dowson was deeply disappointed with his family because of disputes over the inheritance from his deceased parents, his heart was broken as his beloved Adelaide had married another man, and he was sick with tuberculosis, which would kill him a few months later. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
