Category Archive: Poetry
Piercing the Arras of Canonical Poetry
Poetry is the line of guys doing a Mexican wave in school; the lady laughing in church; the breeze in the trees and your hair on a still day. First lines in poems are for indices only: here, TVC gives you some random, stellar lines from virtuoso poems. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing under the arch of a railway: ‘love has no ending’ (W. H. Auden, As I walked Out One Evening) I do not stir. The frost makes a flower, the dew makes a star, the dead bell, the dead bell. (Sylvia Plath…
Continue Reading →The Aeneid
Virgil - A Roman Representation.
(by Virgil) Iliad begat Aenid begat Commedia…Virgil links two classic works 2,000 years apart with a masterpiece of his own, wherein Aeneas goes to Rome and wreaks Trojan revenge on the successors of Attic Greece, with everyone satisfyingly getting what’s coming to them. Full of images and phrases resplendent either in English or in dodgy Latin. Thus Walter Pater (in Appreciations) “I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one’s head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are…
Continue Reading →Lord Berners
(by Mark Amory) It’s not possible to know what made Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners tick, but everyone seemed to like him and his eccentric acts were mostly harmless; dyeing animals, driving around in grotesque masks, hiding under a bearskin rug to ‘fool’ tedious guests. A soft spoken flower with a small but keen talent justifies this very readable and accomplished bio. And remember, ‘Red roses blow but thrice a year, in June, July and May. But those who have red noses can blow them every day.’
Continue Reading →Annabel Lee, Miranda & Stevie
Annabel Lee, Miranda, Stevie, and Lesley (image by Stephen Reid)
Greetings and a warm welcome to Lesley’s blog, the part of The Varnished Culture which is girly, crafty and sort of ethereal. Our muses are Stevie Nicks, Joyce Carol Oates and Lily Cole. Our poem is “Annabel Lee” – a poem by Edgar Allen Poe – Stevie does an otherwordly,
Continue Reading →The Cantos
(by Ezra Pound) The commonplace book of a madman, lines of breathtaking beauty (e.g. Canto IV, LXXIV, the closing fragments) jostle with crude, didactic ravings against usury and Jews. A pox on he who gave Pound an economics book! Or convinced him to attempt a poetic epic without structure, a theme or any cohesive idea at all. Still, it’s a lunatic mess well worth skimming.
Continue Reading →