Authors Electric

 An Introduction to Romantic Poetry This month I was completely out of ideas but then I remembered Elizabeth Kay's excellent piece about poetry on AuthorsElectric last month. I looked back on the subject in my files and there I found A n Introduction to Romantic Poetry, relating to a course I taught in Northampton not so very long ago. I was also reminded of a fantastic group of poetry students, some of whom I still meet up with on Zoom. We read through this introduction together at the beginning of the course, breaking off to discuss various points, such as my visit to Christchurch Priory below in 1970, so here goes... Christchurch Priory   ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’, so wrote Wordsworth in his 13 book poem,  The Prelude , which was subtitled,  Growth of a Poet’s   Mind , and which wasn’t published in its entirety until after his death in 1850. The lines are about the French Revolution and in 1791 Wordswor...

There’s something about people all around me forgoing delicious things  –  like chocolate and wine  –  that has me thinking of food like never before. (I gave up giving anything up for New Year/Lent a long time ago. Life in winter is miserable enough.) How apt then, that Laura Freeman’s publishers, W & N, should have chosen mid-February to launch her memoir, The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite , in which she describes how the mouth-watering descriptions of food in the great classics saved her from the worst ravages of anorexia.   Siegfried Sassoon fortifying himself with boiled eggs and cocoa before a dawn hunt ( Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man ); Mrs Cratchit’ s plum pudding – ‘a speckled cannon ball…blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy’ ( A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens) – these glorious images tempted her back to the warmth, nourishment and companionship of good things. For most of us, books are food for the soul;...