First Known When Lost

I confess that I cannot make head or tail out of Heraclitus.  The best that I can come up with is that his pronouncements -- "you canno...

My previous post included this painting by John Nash (1893-1977): It is titled "A Gloucestershire Landscape."  Nash painted it i...

In this visit to the land of "wherever you go, there you are," R. S. Thomas offers a possible solution to the problem of not being...

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden met just after the end of the First World War.  Their friendship lasted nearly 50 years -- until Sassoo...

The following poem is by John Drinkwater (1882-1937).                 Politics You say a thousand things, Persuasively, And with stran...

Pleasant discoveries await you if you wander the byways of Victorian poetry.  Yes, you will come upon poems that seem to fit what may be cal...

I enjoy the ambition and literary flair of the great British historians of the 19th and early-20th centuries.  I am speaking of the authors ...

Philip Larkin's "Money" begins with a sardonic (surprise!) reflection by Larkin about how money could allegedly make him happy...

I greatly admire Ulysses S. Grant.  Why?  A first-hand observer of Grant answers that question much more eloquently than I can.  Theodore Ly...

Life in a day.       -- Louis MacNeice, "Les Sylphides" Days are where we live.      -- Philip Larkin, "Days" We t...