Literature
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Altogether, auteur theory sounds fascinating and, no doubt, develops excellent skills of analysis for students of film, as they dissect and discuss this or that auteur director’s body of work. But what is it doing in an English course, in high school, in Year 10?
August 29, 2024
15 mins
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Today, a muse is defined as a person or other influence in an artist’s life that gives rise to inspiration. The symbolic has been replaced with the scientific. In other words, a muse visits just as two neuron synapses clap together like flint on steel causing sparks
July 14, 2024
10 mins
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In October 1976 I made my way to Golders Green in north London to call on Sir Charles Tennyson, grandson of the famous poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign.
May 28, 2024
8 mins
The latest
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Once it was an esteemed element of myths and in moral education, but today in schools pupils are taught the eleventh commandment, “Thou shalt not bully”, while emphasis falls on the benign effects of inclusiveness and equality.
May 28, 2024
17 mins
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In his own lifetime, Shakespeare had been considered just one of a bevy of capable and successful wordsmiths. How was it then that, in the eighteenth century, the flow of tourist traffic to Stratford reached such annoying volumes that a fed-up local vicar felled 'the Shakespeare tree' in a bid to get some peace and quiet?
May 18, 2024
15 mins
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The early seventeenth century was English poetry's golden age for the poetry of meditation, a more specialised and concentrated process than contemplation. Meditation seeks unity with the Godhead, and it is this particular genre which has given us some of the greatest poems in the language.
May 2, 2024
14 mins
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Brian Kiernan, who died on March 1, was a major […]
April 29, 2024
7 mins
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The name Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa is not well known […]
April 29, 2024
9 mins
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The ancient Greeks believed in nine goddesses of inspiration known […]
April 29, 2024
10 mins
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Upon the death of her father in 1904, a despairing Virginia threw herself from a window too low to do any real harm. Recovering, she insisted Edward VII was lurking and cursing in the shrubbery while birds spoke to her in Greek. Just 22 at the time, madness and maladies would be frequent companions until her suicide in1942
April 29, 2024
14 mins
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The Philistines remain with us as a permanent fixture of our culture and have always been a conspicuous element in society. For this reason, and bearing in mind the extraordinary and lamentable meltdown of our education systems, it is against considerable odds that poetry-writing continues to flourish in Australia.
April 7, 2024
17 mins