#library of alexander

[skiddly-bop]

I have something I really want to get off my chest/talk to my partner about but I just don’t know how to broach the topic. Also I will definitely start sobbing and that feels like it’ll be hella manipulative

[shisasan]

June 1909 Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), Selected Poems

[artemisosaurus-rex]

His what

[shiraishi--kanade]

[shisasan]

June 1909 Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), Selected Poems

[shisasan]

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), Selected Poems

[burningvelvet]

Lord Byron writing about book-burning, queer representation, and the value of poetry . . . in 1821:

“Let us hear no more of this trash about ‘licentiousness.’ Is not ‘Anacreon’ taught in our schools? translated, praised, and edited? Are not his Odes the amatory praises of a boy? Is not Sappho's Ode on a girl? Is not this sublime and (according to Longinus) fierce love for one of her own sex? And is not Phillips's translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all this? When you have thrown the ancients into the fire it will be time to denounce the moderns. ‘Licentiousness!’ — there is more real mischief and sapping licentiousness in a single French prose novel, in a Moravian hymn, or a German comedy, than in all the actual poetry that ever was penned, or poured forth, since the rhapsodies of Orpheus. The sentimental anatomy of Rousseau and Madame de Staël are far more formidable than any quantity of verse. They are so, because they sap the principles, by reasoning upon the passions; whereas poetry is in itself passion, and does not systematise. It assails, but does not argue; it may be wrong, but it does not assume pretensions to Optimism.”

Context: this letter was written during the Bowles-Pope Controversy, a seven-year long public debate in the English literary scene primarily between the priest, poet, and critic William Lisle Bowles and the poet, peer, and politician Lord Byron. The debate began in 1807 when Bowles published an edition of the famous writer Alexander Pope’s work which included an essay he wrote criticizing the writer’s character, morals, and how he should be remembered. Today, we would say that Bowles tried to “cancel” Alexander Pope, who had affairs without marrying, and whose works had sexual themes. Lord Byron defended Pope, who was one of his all-time favorite writers. Pope had been dead since 1744, so he was not personally involved. This debate shows that while moral standards have changed throughout the centuries, the ways people have debated about morality have remained similar.

Source of the excerpt: — Moore’s Life of Byron in one volume, 1873, p. 708 - https://books.google.com/books?id=Q3zPkPC8ECEC&pg=PA708&lpg=PA708&dq=%22Are+not+his+Odes+the+amatory+praises

Sources on the Bowles-Pope Controversy: — Chandler, James. “The Pope Controversy: Romantic Poetics and the English Canon.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 3, 1984, pp. 481–509. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343304. — https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pope-Bowles-controversy — Bowles, Byron and the Pope-controversy by Jacob Johan van Rennes, Ardent Media, 1927.

[chauves0uris]

this is very important to me: what do yall think is kevin's favourite historical period/favourite event/historical whatever? i need to talk abt this more

[shisasan]

Aleksandr Blok (1880-1921), Selected Poems

[uispeccoll]

Happy #MiniatureMonday!

In 1983, Roger Middleton and the London Midsummer Press published Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh’s poem, “Wishes of an Elderly Man at a Garden Party, June 1914” for the first time in miniature book format. Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh was an English scholar, poet, author and Cambridge Apostle, best known for his position as Oxford’s first professor of English literature and many scholarly essays. 

The poem reads in full:

I WISH I loved the Human Race;

I wish I loved its silly face;

I wish I loved the way it walks;

I wish I loved the way it talks;

And when I'm introduced to one

I wish I thought What Jolly Fun!

Smith Miniatures Collection   PN1435 .W81 1983

--M Clark, Instruction Graduate Assistant