• Soldier-Poets of the Great War

    Ok, so National Poetry day… Adela has given us her offering with Robert Frost. Nice, but doesn’t swing it completely for me. Obviously with my love of all things war…. it has to be the Soldier-Poets of the Great War. John McCrae, ‘In Flanders’ Fields’, Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’, Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Killed in Action’ all extremely poignant, and more important in their own way tell of the horrors of war. But my favourite has to be Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. I will follow up in the near future with a little more about this topic, but for now, I want to concentrate on this poem. To me, nothing…

  • Robert Frost

    “Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf, So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day Nothing gold can stay.” I was introduced to Frost at a young age and the above poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is the earliest poem that I remember learning in school. It’s one of the only poems I can still recite word for word. I figured since today is National Poetry Day I would post about one of my favorite poets. Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California, to journalist William Prescott Frost,…

  • Edgar Allan Poe: A Mystery Even in Death

    One of the largest misconceptions about Edgar Allan Poe is that he was a supposed drug addict and alcoholic which led to his untimely and mysterious death. On a chilly October afternoon in Baltimore, Poe was seen spending time in a bar room before being found in a delirious state wearing ragged clothes – that were not his mind you – that led to a one-way trip to the hospital. While this has lead to many theories about what happened to Poe that afternoon, and in the following days, it has always been assumed that Poe was drunk and died of alcohol poisoning. Even though this has been popular theory…

  • HERODOTUS

    Look, let us be straight with each other: History, as it is taught in the United States (I cannot speak for other countries) is dry as toast and boring as hell. And to be perfectly honest, most history is not taught as a means of reflecting on the past, but as a method to teach other concepts, such as how to write a paper, how to create a bibliography, how to cite your sources, etc. (I cringed when one student referred to the Celts as the SELTS, soft “C” sound. I blame basketball!) It is because of this that I didn’t really get into history until later in life when…

  • Anne Bronte

    Anne Bronte was the youngest of six children born to Maria Branwell and Patrick Bronte, on January 17th 1820 in the village of Thornton in Yorkshire. When Anne was a few months old, Patrick, a clergyman, was given the post of perpetual curate of the Church of Haworth a few miles away. The family moved into the parsonage in April. Less than a year later Maria fell ill, and her sister Elizabeth Branwell moved in to nurse her. Maria died in September 1821, quite possibly from uterine cancer. Anecdotal recollections by members of the Bronte circle have stated that Maria’s main concerns knowing her condition was terminal were for her…