Category: English

After Plotinus, by Fabian Strachan Woodley

Augustus Edwin Mulready - A street flower seller
Augustus Edwin Mulready – A street flower seller (1882) – from Wikimedia Commons

Fabian Strachan Woodley (b. 19 July 1888, d. 8 August 1957) was a British poet who published only one book of verses, A Crown of Friendship (1921). He was a late representative of the ‘Uranian’ school of male poets who exalted the love of boys. As writes a website devoted to Woodley, “Like the other ‘Uranian’ poets, he declared that Boyhood was the only ideal worth following.” Indeed, many of his poems deal with boys he loved. According to the above-mentioned site, Woodley said: “I was a Poet and Dreamer and Lover and Boy with them.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Dreaming in Hilda Conkling’s early poetry

Henry Ryland - Two classical figures reclining
Henry Ryland – Two classical figures reclining (c.1890) – from All Paintings via Wikimedia Commons

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…

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Nathalia Crane, love and poetry at nine

Nathalia Crane
Nathalia Crane (1924) – from The Janitor’s Boy, and Other Poems, via Wikimedia Commons

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…

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William Carlos Williams: The Ogre

Morton Bartlett
Morton Bartlett

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…

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