I just spent a week getting reacquainted with Byron—George Gordon, Lord Byron–and the magic wasn’t happening. When I was in college, he was my favorite of all the romantic poets because he was easiest to understand and he was funny. This mid-life trek through the Norton anthology is highlighting how much I have changed: my  Read the Rest…

Thanks to a chilly morning which got my annual yard sale off to a slow start, I had the leisure to power through the Norton Anthology’s selection of Romantic period essayists, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas De Quincey.  They were all fond of laudanum (opium dissolved in alcohol) which led the Norton editors to  Read the Rest…

In which I find in Samuel Taylor Coleridge a kindred soul. It might be his struggle with depression.  It might be his experience—so common to women—of feeling that nothing he does is respected as much as something a(nother) man does, in this case Wordsworth.  The two of them conceived of a book they called Lyrical  Read the Rest…

A week ago I would have told you that I loved William Wordsworth. After reading the selections in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, I have concluded that it’s only a few of his poems that I love, and a few lines from here and there. I was all excited to read The Prelude because  Read the Rest…

Who couldn’t like Robbie Burns? Well, the British, I suppose.  And he didn’t wear well with the Edinburgh Scots.  When I turned the page from William Blake in my trek through The Norton Anthology of English Literature, there was Robert Burns with all his apostrophes.  After I got used to the a’s, the whas and  Read the Rest…

It hit me the other day what I wanted to do for a summer reading project: read The Norton Anthology of English Literature Vol. I and II.  Collective gasp all around.  This venerable collection has been around a long time but I don’t believe anyone has actually read it—certainly not the college students for which  Read the Rest…