Among the many notices of Frank Kermode's passing, this from AKMA  along with this in the Telegraph and this in  S l ate  are memorable...

Classic Lit No Longer Makes The Grade Among Leaders NPR notes that world leaders no longer seem to immerse themselves in the classics - unl...

Mussy sends along this review by Robert Pinsky of The Book in the Renaissance. A snippet: For a time, civil and religious authorities cont...

Keeping to our summer schedule, our next two sessions, Aug. 18 and Sept. 1, will involve reading The Book of Job. It will be interesting to ...

Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages t...

For Robert Herrick, the samples include: Delight in Disorder To the Virgins That Make Much of Time Corinna's Going a-Maying U...

Thanks to my friend Kia Penso, an ardent admirer of 17th Century English lyrics, we now have a link to all of George Herbert's The Templ...

According to the Guardian , the new thing is slow reading: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had  slow food , then  slow travel . ...

As we noted last time, Donne's poems often take the form of arguments, playing upon wit, logic, and verbal fireworks to make a case to a...

For Wed., July 7, here are the Donne poems we'll be focusing on - you should be able to print these out if you wish.

Horace Odes I.10: Mercuri   facunde   nepos   Atlantis , qui   feros   cultus   hominum   recentum voce   formasti   catus   et   decorae ...

NPR had an interesting story recently about Botticelli's painting, Venus and Mars . Apparently no scholar had noticed until now that in...