The strange polygamous fantasy of a girl aged about ten, imagining all the boys she has loved in her life who march in a row, while she silently listens to their praise for her, counts them, then selects the best one among them. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Poems by a Little Girl contains verses recited by Hilda Conkling to her mother when she was aged between four and nine. They remarkably combine the spontaneity and unfettered imagination of childhood with a mastery of poetic language rarely seen at that young age. Several of them deal with dreaming and dreams, and then she seizes this as an opportunity for speaking freely of anything in her mind. This theme of dreams sometimes mingles with that of fairies and the “little people” of forests. Indeed, Hilda often walked in her garden or on hills and in forests near her home, where her imagination could flow freely, so dreams and the marvellous will generally blend with nature. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
In this beautiful short piece from The Janitor’s boy, and Other Poems, little Nathalia tells how she and her friend fell a sudden romantic attraction for a handsome ice-cream seller. Very sensuously, she called him “very scrumptious,” as if he was himself an ice-cream. Here Flatbush is a neighbourhood of Brooklyn in New York City. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
I present here a second poem from the collection Al Que Quiere! by William Carlos Williams, published in 1917. It has been transcribed on Wikisource and PoetryNook. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
I will present here another girl poet who, like her contemporaries Hilda Conkling and Sabine Sicaud and the next generation’s Minou Drouet, started writing poetry at a very young age. But unlike Hilda Conkling and Minou Drouet, she did not give up poetry in her teenage years, and unlike Sabine Sicaud who died from a horrible disease at age 15, she lived for 85 years, writing poems and novels, also working as a professor of English at San Diego State University. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
The Puerto Rican-American physician William Carlos Williams (1883–1963), while practising both paediatrics and general medicine in a hospital, had at the same time a full literary career, writing short stories, poems, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He is remembered mostly for his poetry, whose style evolved from imagism to modernism. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Jay Edson, who apparently also writes under the name James Hunter, is a heretic essayist and blogger. His site Unthinkable Thoughts collects numerous challenging articles on controversial subjects, a few short stories, and also a bit of poetry, including some of his own. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
The English writer Thomas Penson De Quincey (b. August 15, 1785; d. December 8, 1859) knew fame with his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published anonymously in two parts in the September and October 1821 issues of the London Magazine, then released in book form in 1822. In 1845, De Quincey published Suspiria de Profundis, advertised as being a sequel to the Confessions. Then in 1856 he revised his Confessions, which became much longer. Since then, the two are usually published together, their complete titles being Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar, and Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Before being devoted to the labour movement, May Day was an old Celtic celebration of spring and fertility, Beltane; throughout the centuries it evolved, with the maypole dancing by girls and the election of the May Queen, but it kept its hidden symbolism of youthful love. Crowley’s poem gives it back its ancient pagan meaning. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
Hilda Conkling (October 8, 1910 — June 26, 1986) was an American poetess, who composed all her poetry between the ages of four and fourteen. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…
