What’s Yours is Mine By Michael Symmons Roberts ‘Doors which yield to a touch of the hand… permit anyone to enter.’ Thomas More, Utopia It was our game, to drive at night into their city, scan the streets, choose a house at random and stroll in mid-evening as the householders were finishing, say, a…
Tag: poetry
Intertextuality and the poetry of John Heath-Stubbs
In this essay I explore the implications of T. S. Eliot’s statement in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ that ‘[n]o poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’. Eliot imagines the entire collection of literary works as ‘an ideal order’ of ‘existing monuments’ (1920). Every new work is a product of that…
Reading Challenge 2016: A Book Published Before You Were Born
Barbara Comyns Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (The 2016 Reading Challenge: A Book Published Before You Were Born. Our Spoons Came From Woolworths was first published in 1950 and I was definitely born after that.) I found a copy of Comyns’ novel in a charity shop, and bought it for its attention-grabbing title and beautiful…
Transitivity patterns in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116: ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds’
What follows is my answer to an exercise on transitivity patterns for the MA Literary Linguistics programme on which I’m enrolled. This post is probably not going to be particularly readable unless you’re familiar with transitivity patterns – however, I’ve uploaded a pdf of a mindmap I made which may help. You might have to zoom…
Who’s pulling the strings?
At the beginning of Muriel Spark’s Loitering With Intent, Fleur Talbot sits in a graveyard writing a poem. Critics have leapt on this with glee, crying out that that’s probably what Muriel Spark herself did! Well, possibly. Big deal. I mean, who hasn’t sat in a graveyard writing a tortured poem? That’s just what every…
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