Caryl Churchill

Caryl Churchill's latest, "Love and Information," in New York. Churchill's career in brief.

Reviews for Far Away from the Guardian, from the Village Voice, and the New York Times.

Also from the Guardian, a photo essay celebrating Churchill's 70th birthday in 2008.

Stills from productions: at Austin Community College (act II); at Dartmouth College (act I); in Australia, from the Black Swan Theatre Company in Perth (follow internal link for a slideshow).

A series of stills from the production at the Univ. of Iowa. Hat specialists work on a production in Seattle.

Making hats at the Old Vic in Bristol, England. Domestic comfort in act one, at the Royal Court Theatre production. Several stills from the fortyfivedownstairs (Melbourne) production.

Act III: the eye of an enemy. An enemy. Another enemy. A very dangerous enemy.

Heaney and Muldoon

The Poetry@Harvard site, now live.

Horace, Odes I:34 (the basis for Heaney's "Anything Can Happen") in Latin and in an 1882 English translation.

A map of Northern Ireland.

Heaney's 1995 Nobel Lecture.

Heaney at the London-based Poetry Archive, with audio.

Heaney reading "The Tollund Man," with audio and an image, from PBS.

From the Lannan Foundation, a long interview between Heaney and Dennis O'Driscoll, with Heaney reading his own work.

Photographs of the bog corpses described in P. V. Glob's book.

A mural in Derry remembering Bloody Sunday.

Muldoon's 1980 poem "Cuba."

Muldoon's own site. Muldoon's rock band, Wayside Shrines.

Audio that works: Muldoon reads his own poems. Muldoon reads "Meeting the British."

Muldoon at the Poetry Foundation, with a couple of poems.

All the books by Paul Muldoon (with photo).

A few of Heaney's poems at the Poetry Foundation, including the whole sequence "Glanmore Sonnets."

All the books by Heaney, with recent photo.

Helen Vendler's eulogy for Heaney.

Modern English poets: Auden, Larkin, Hill, Agbabi, Riviere

Visual early Auden: a Pennine valley, and a worked-out mine.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558?).

Auden's "Lullaby" (from the Academy of American Poets).

More of Auden's poems (from the Academy, with some audio). Auden reading his poems in New York City in 1972, from the New York Times. The Auden society.

The Philip Larkin society (weird-looking site design alludes to Larkin's poem "Toads"; some links don't work). Unglamorous Hull city centre, today; a road by Pearson Park, where Larkin lived, and a tiny image of Larkin's own flat. And Byrnmor Jones Library, Univ. of Hull.

Larkin's "High Windows." More Larkin poems in reliable versions online, from the Poetry Foundation.

Also from the Foundation, Geoffrey Hill; some segments from Mercian Hymns.

The Kings of Mercia.

The main page for Sam Riviere.

Riviere's Tweets.

Riviere's selected shorter works. People interview Riviere.

Patience Agbabi's performance of the works on our syllabus. Her source in Chaucer.

Agbabi's Tweets. Her brief prose autobiography. Her sporadic blog.

Yeats

From the National Library of Ireland, an online exhibit for Yeats' manuscripts, with portraits and other materials as well (some navigation required).

Under Ben Bulben in present-day Sligo.

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," an early "hit."

An accurate (but ugly) text for "Who Goes with Fergus?"

The final (1925) version of "The Sorrow of Love."

Reading more of Yeats's rough drafts.

The original Abbey Theatre in Dublin.

"The Fascination of What's Difficult."

18th-century Dublin houses. The Easter Rising proclamation; the Dublin General Post Office after the Easter Rising.

"Easter 1916."

Another reliable text for "Easter 1916," with links to contemporary American poets reading parts of that poem.

Part of an important letter Yeats wrote about "Easter 1916."

Yeats's Tower. Another view.

Lissadell. At Lissadell, more images of W. B. Yeats, young and old.

John Rickard's photographs of Coole Park and Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats spent part of each year from 1918 to the late 1920s.

Most links to poems here come from the Yeats page at the Poetry Foundation, likely the only online source for reliable texts to many of these poems; Yeats' later poems are still under copyright, though these are in the public domain in the United States.

Ezra Pound's review of Yeats's Responsibilities (1914).

Some audio files: "It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get them into verse"; the Lake Isle.

From the Academy of American Poets, a reliable text for Sailing to Byzantium."

From the Academy, "A Prayer for My Daughter."

Byzantine art in Ravenna: mosaic of Justinian; a detail with a head.

The Stone Cottage where Yeats lived with Pound as his assistant for parts of 1913-16.

On the first appearance of "Who Goes with Fergus?" (as quoted by M. L. Rosenthal).

Some diagrams and excerpts from Yeats' A Vision. Neil Mann's elaborate explication of A Vision, with more diagrams.

Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, poets of the Great War (World War I)

From, of course, Toronto: Kipling's "Recessional," written for the Diamond Jubilee, and before the Boer War.

Toronto's selection of poems from Thomas Hardy.

The Boer War: Magersfontein, and soldiers in the field at Rosmead (Daskoppies).

From the Victorian Web, a reliable text (you'd be surprised how many bad ones are out there) of Hardy's "Drummer Hodge."

From Toronto, Hardy's "The Convergence of the Twain." The subject of that poem, in harbor. The other subject of the "consummation" in Hardy's poem.

Many, many more images and photographs relevant to the life and works of Thomas Hardy.

The current American poet Philip Levine praises "During Wind and Rain"; scroll down a bit for an accurate version of the poem.

The Great War starts.

The Toronto selection from Edward Thomas. An articulate if limited resource center for Thomas and the other Dymock Poets.

From Toronto, Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est."

A First World War internet archive, and a related archive devoted to poetry. Another multimedia First World War archive. From that archive, a primer on poison gas.

Soldiers putting on gas masks.Soldiers digging a trench.

The considerable English critic, scholar and poet Tim Kendall has a war poetry blog, with its own useful links

Earnest

Oscar Wilde, photogenic aesthete, and an 1881 parody of his early public image. Max Beerbohm's caricature of Wilde on his successful American tour.

The full text of Wilde's essay in dialogue form, "The Decay of Lying."

More full text of Wilde's works online, inelegantly, from the Victorian Web, and very elegantly at a nonacademic site.

One of Beardsley's famous illustrations for Wilde's Salome (English tr. by Douglas pub. 1894); another one of Beardsley's illustrations, and another.

More Beardsley and Decadence: A Suggested Reform for... Ballet" (1895); another title page; a collection of Beardsley's art for the Yellow Book, which contrary to reputation never published Wilde.

Wilde's image and identity sell things.

Some of the most important things in life.

Stills from a few recent productions of Earnest: Seattle's Village Theatre (what is Lady Bracknell wearing?). Algernon and Jack, from the Village Theatre again.

An all-male, perhaps too modern Earnest.

Another recent Earnest from the National Theater School of Canada.

Hopkins and Pater, and a few more Pre-Raphaelites

More Pre-Raphaelites: Holman Hunt's "The Hireling Shepherd" (1851) and J. W. Waterhouse's Lady of Shalott (1888) and another image of Waterhouse's Lady (illustrating Tennyson's poem).

Journalism: a header from an 1844 Illustrated London News, and a front page.

Your excerpt from Pater's Renaissance has, as visual example, only the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda); Pater's book also devotes chapters to Giorgione, Michelangelo (as poet), Della Robbia, and Botticelli. Here's Giorgone's Tempest (1508), Luca Della Robbia's Virgin and Child, and Botticelli's Madonna of the Pomegranate (1490s).

From Toronto again, Walter Pater on Coleridge, and on Wordsworth, and on style: "Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature -- this transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied forms."

The Victorian Web people go to work on Hopkins and on Pater.

Hopkins at Toronto: "The Wreck of the Deutschland." "The Windhover." Also "As kingfishers..." and two of the so-called "terrible sonnets," "No worst, there is none" and "Thou art indeed just, Lord."

Hopkins's source for "Thou art indeed just": Jeremiah 12, in the King James version, and (if you read Latin) in a nonacademic online edition of the Vulgate, what Hopkins himself would have read and reread.

Some pages from Hopkins' journals (note the interpenetration of words and sketches).

A British kingfisher. Another British kingfisher: see how the feathers across the bird's back "catch fire."

A windhover, or British kestrel, in characteristic "hovering" form.

Swinburne and the Rossettis

Christina Rossetti's "Up-Hill." George Herbert's "Love (III)" and Herbert's other poems at Toronto's site.

Christina Rossetti's set of poems at Toronto's site.

D. G. Rossetti, "Dante's Dream" (1856) at the Tate. D.G.Rossetti, "Dantis Amor" ("Dante's Vision of Love," 1860), a panel. DGR's "Blessed Damozel" (1875-78), at the Fogg.

One of DGR's engraved illustrations for "Goblin Market" (1862).

Victorian Web's Christina Rossetti page.

Christina Rossetti and her mother.

Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine." More Swinburne from Toronto.

The Louvre hermaphrodite. A closer view.

A fully searchable online Swinburne from Indiana University.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting "Proserpine" (1874) at the Tate.

Robert Browning

From Toronto, poems by Robert Browning, among them "Andrea del Sarto" and "Fra Lippo Lippi."

A map of Florence in 1493. Modern Florence, a tourist view.

Find paintings at ArtStor (Harvard login required); for Fra Lippo Lippi (Fillippino or Fillippo Lippi), search only for "Lippi."

Giotto's Presentation of the Virgin (1305); Giotto's Deposition; Fra Angelico's Annunciation (1430?).

Fra Lippi's Madonna and Child (1445; in Florence, where Robert Browning would likely have seen it). Lippi's Disputation, in Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.

Lippi's Coronation (described in the poem).

The Victorian Web collective annotates "Fra Lippo Lippi."

Paintings by Andrea del Sarto (Andrea d'Agnolo) via ArtStor (Harvard login required).

The central figure from Andrea's Madonna of the Harpies (1517). The Madonna of the Harpies seen entire.

Andrea's Holy Family. An Annunciation (1528). Andrea's Madonna della Scala now in the Prado.

All of Vasari's Lives, trans. Gaston DeVere. Vasari's Life of Andrea del Sarto and his Life of Lippi and Botticelli(translator uncredited, but it's DeVere).

Ruskin and Tennyson and other Victorians

A mirror and a lamp.

Another similar pair, with a simple diagram.

A cornucopia of pictures and excerpts w/r/t Ruskin and the visual arts. (h/t Victorian Web)

Lots of Tennyson at the Toronto site, including "Locksley Hall," the sequel to "Locksley Hall" (in the same remarkable meter), "Ulysses," and "Tithonus."

Also from Toronto: the entirety of In Memoriam.

From Britain's National Portrait Gallery, F. L. Chantrey's sketch of A. H. Hallam.

From the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum-- a great place to look for almost anything about the applied and decorative arts in Britain, in any period-- Victorian mourning fabric.

From Victorian Web: the Tennyson home page, and the Arnold page, and the E. B. Browning page, and the recently revised Emily Brontë page.

One of many photographs of Tennyson.

Emily Brontë's "No coward soul" in the Toronto version (with punctuation made regular, as she might have done had she prepared it for printing; Norton gives exactly what she wrote). And "Remembrance."

Arnold's "To Marguerite, Continued," and its less than subtle prequel (note the last lines). Arnold's "Dover Beach."

Looking at Dover: the famous cliffs; the tumultuous sea and shore.

Mill's "What Is Poetry?" a.k.a. "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties" (1833) in an awkward but well-edited version and in another.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese, in electronic full text (requires Harvard login).

Turner's slave ship, at the MFA, and Turner's Burning of the Houses of Parliament (one of two paintings by that title.

One of the versions of Fitzgerald's Rubaiyyat in a complete (if unattractive) online text from Cornell.

A fun, multilingual, and informative, though very much nonacademic, Omar Khayyam fan site, with comparisons between the Persian (in Persian script) of Omar, literal translations into English and other European languages, and FitzGerald's adaptations.

Keats and Austen

From Toronto: all the Keats poems; the sonnet on the Elgin Marbles; the Urn; the sonnet on the four seasons; the ode called "To Autumn."

The British Museum's public information on the Elgin Marbles and the broader set of pieces from the Parthenon.

A few of those pieces: a sacrificial procession (with cow); horsemen.

Two sonnets by John Milton important to Keats' thinking about the sonnet as a form and about his own poetic career.

A meaning Keats could not have intended in "To Autumn," and yet an analogy for one of his lyric goals.

The only certainly authenticated sketch of Jane Austen, by Cassandra Austen (1810).

A nonacademic but comprehensive e-resource center for the study of Austen, including a quick biography.

The Cobb at Lyme, in a modern photograph. The stairs from which Louisa jumps.

An oddly placemat-like annotated map of Jane Austen's Bath. A proper map of Bath in her time (sans annotations).

The Jane Austen Society of North America, a helpful but nonacademic resource, and the Jane Austen Society of the UK, likewise.

Wordsworth and Coleridge (2)

Wordsworth's two voices, and J. K. Stephen's 1891 parody.

Wordsworth and the Visible Man.

Once again, what Wordsworth would have seen "a few miles above Tintern Abbey," thanks to D. S. Miall: a modern-day view and the relevant plate from Samuel Ireland's Picturesque Views on the River Wye (1797), which describes Wordsworth's path. The Wye with sycamores (picture by Miall).

A very Wordsworthian picture (with two senses of "nature," if not many more).

Wordsworth's Immortality Ode.

An albatross.

Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode."

The new moon with the old moon in her arms. John Constable's 1816 painting "Weymouth Bay."

All about the ballad "Sir Patrick Spens." Ewan MacColl's a cappella version; a well-known folk-rock version.

A modern copy of a 17th-c. Aeolian harp. Another Aeolian harp, by the modern Canadian instrument maker David Johnson, but not far from early 19th-c designs. The "Aeolian lyre" in Thomas Gray.

Wordsworth and Coleridge (1)

The Wordsworth Centre.

A guide to the sprawling current standard academic edition of Wordsworth's poems, with brief descriptions of the major works.

One analogy, from another art form, for the effect of Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth as elderly sage, also as sage, and a pen-and-ink drawing of the poet young and worried.

Many images of Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley from the Romantic period. Seen from across the River Wye right now.

But the poem takes place, the title says, "a few miles above" (i.e. upstream from) Tintern Abbey-- probably about here, according to David S. Miall's arresting scholarly argument about what Wordsworth actually describes. A relevant plate from Samuel Ireland's Picturesque Views on the River Wye (1797), which describes Wordsworth's path. The Wye with sycamores (picture by Miall).

Some of Wordsworth's manuscripts in electronic facsimile.

The Toronto online versions of some Wordsworth poems, including "Simon Lee" and the poem commonly known as "Tintern Abbey" and the Immortality Ode and the entirety of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads and the disturbing "Ode to Duty."

Dove Cottage and Rydal Mount. One tourist's view from Rydal Mount.

From UCSB, important events for the study of Romanticism, year by year.

From the University of Alberta, a set of resources for studying Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight": multiple online texts, with an earlier version, biographical and critical background, and the makings of an essay about Coleridge, childhood grief, and attachment theory.

Johnson and Blake

Jack Lynch's guide to online resources for Johnson.

The Plan (i.e. proposal) for Johnson's Dictionary.

Johnson's poem "On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet."

The Blake Archive.

The Blake Society.



A title page for Innocence and Experience (copy L).

A title page for Songs of Innocence.

A title page from another copy of Songs of Innocence.

One version of "The Little Black Boy"; page two from the same copy; page two from another copy (note the boys' colors in each).

One version of "The Lamb"; another version.

One version of "The Tyger"; another version.

"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell": one of many title pages.

Blake's works at Britain's Tate Gallery.

A beautiful (but amateur) online display of all the plates from one copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. One plate from the Proverbs of Hell.

The Beggar's Opera

Full text of the play (1728), and an articulate introduction, from the University of Oregon.

The popular musical rewriting by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, another adaptation by former Czech president Vaclav Havel.

Three songs from the opera (music by Pepusch): "Through all the employments"; "In the days of my youth"; and the climactic number (tune from "Greensleeves"): "Since laws were made."

William Hogarth at the Tate Gallery; Hogarth's depiction of Beggar's Opera Act III, scene 11, as it may have looked in its first production on the London stage.

A recent (2011) production of Handel and Gay's Acis and Galatea.

John Gay gives a lady lampreys.

Prime Minister Robert Walpole.

The public hanging of Jack Sheppard.

Jonathan Wild, thief-taker, "great man," notorious criminal, on his way to the gallows.

The story of Sheppard, from The Complete Newgate Calendar (online at the Univ. of Texas).

"But gold from law can take out the sting..."

Rochester, Dryden and Swift

A symbol for much Restoration and Augustan literature generally.

The BBC's British history timeline, from the Neolithic to last week, and the segment that includes the Restoration (when Rochester wrote).

Fair copy of a Restoration satire manuscript.

Founding the Royal Society. Research in mathematics and natural history.

A famous portrait of Lord Rochester.

Rochester's verse satire against King Charles II.

Rochester's poem "The Disabled Debauchee."

Rochester's poem in tercets "Upon Nothing."

One nothing. Another nothing. And another; and another?

Not this guy.

St Patrick's Cathedral, in Dublin.

A Jonathan Swift timeline.

First edition Gulliver.

An adult Houyhnhnm.

A sort of Yahoo.

Another sort of Yahoo.

Swift in a lady's dressing room. Lady Montagu responds.

John Dryden's selected works from the University of Toronto site; Dryden's elegy to John Oldham. Dryden's St. Cecilia (1687).

Dryden's monument in Westminster Abbey.

St. Cecilia with Two Angels, by A. Gramatica (1620).

A Baroque violin.

G. F. Handel's music (1739) for Dryden's ode.

On the tradition of St. Cecilia's Day odes in London

W. H. Auden's St. Cecilia poem (1940s) (nonacademic site, but the text is accurate).

Cecilia's particular instrument.

Montagu's desirable lover.

first lecture: Let's Go British and Irish Literature

Britain.

Writing it down.

A lot of authors: Pope and Austen and Hopkins and future cops and an Oscar.

Johnny Depp as Lord Rochester.

More to see.

Poetry can be like this and like this and like this and like this and also this and like this and like this and like this, even.

Let's. No, Let's.

We may not get to read her.

We could go here.

Sam Riviere tweets.

Daljit Nagra writes and translates.

We'll meet him. And possibly hear her. And see scary hats.

You can also write about him, or her, or him.

UCL.

Hogarth's painting of a scene from The Beggar's Opera.

William Blake's title page for Songs of Innocence and Experience.

A beautiful lake in Wordworth's Lake District.

The astonishingly useful Victorian Web, and the Crystal Palace interior.

The young Auden.

Poems:

Matthew Prior, "A Simile."
William Cowper (pronounced "Cooper"), "The Castaway."
Stevie Smith, "Not Waving But Drowning."
Charlotte Mew, "Fin de Fête," and Mew, "From a Window."
Denise Riley, "Not What You Think."
Jen Hadfield, "Aa"