"The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock. Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun. Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire. I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley. He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died. It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley. Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of
All right, I have given in to the Dark Side and am going to blog about books I read. I'm always wanting to join reading challenges, and you're supposed to have a blog, so here I am. Ta-da! The actual challenges will follow...
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum It's such a long time since I read this story, but I remember all the illustrations so well! I must have read it many times as a kid. I think we all know the story, so I won't repeat it, except to point out that there is about three times as much material in the book as there is in the movie. I'm not a huge fan of the movie -- I didn't grow up on it like so many people did -- so I won't say a lot about it either. But Baum puts in a whole lot of hazards and side-trips that couldn't fit in the film version! L. Frank Baum was wanting to write an imaginative, fairy-tale type of story for the new America. Forget all those princes and princesses, and especially all the violence, death, and heavy-duty moralizing of 19th-century children's literature! This was going to be a fun, quirky story for a vigorous, expanding America, and it was going to star some familiar sights for an American child, like scarecrows, far
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