weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
"We translate more easily than we know our gratitude to God into our admiration of ourselves." Hugh Walpole’s 1922 novel The Cathedral is one of the best works of this, now sadly and unjustly neglected, author. Regular readers of the Grammaticus blog hopefully haven’t missed the December 2022 release of his short ghost story The …
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Originally published in 1846, Life is a three-stanza poem by the eldest of the famous Brontë sisters, Charlotte. It appeared in their first, self-published, collection of works which—unpromisingly—sold only two copies. However, only a year later Charlotte managed to get her novel Jane Eyre published, and the rest is history, as they say. Charlotte Brontë …
John Henry Newman was one of the intellectual giants of the Victorian era. Born in London in 1801, he led a long life filled with intellectual curiosity and deep concern with matters of faith. Originally an Anglican priest and theologian based in Oxford, he famously converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845, continuing his ministry as a …
Continue reading "Book review: “Loss and Gain” by John Henry Newman"
The Grammaticus blog is no stranger to the works of Sarah Orne Jewett. Her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs is one of my favourite books, and I wrote about it in the review accessible here. In this post we’ll read one of her winter-themed children’s poems: A Country Boy in Winter, first published …
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We’ve encountered Walt Whitman’s poetry on this blog before: in a longish post where I offered some advice on how to interpret poems, I presented his poem To a Stranger. And now I would like to share with you another poem of his, on a similar theme of the need for love and companionship. Walt …
Nikolaus Lenau was the nom de plume of Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von Strehlenau, a poet who is now considered one the most important voices of Late-Romantic literature in German. A portrait of Lenau by Matevž Langus Born in Csatád in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lenauheim in the Banat region of western Romania) in 1802, …
Alice Cary was a 19th century American poet. Born in 1820, she grew up in rural Ohio, on a family farm run by her father William. Although living far from any schools and lacking formal education, Alice was an avid reader with a thirst for knowledge. She and her sister Phoebe started writing poetry in …
As the summer slowly draws to a close, I return to the book I love to re-read this time of year. Sarah Orne Jewett’s 1896 novella The Country of the Pointed Firs is a gentle and relaxing, almost meditative account of an idyllic summer spent in a small fishing village on the coast of Maine. …
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