‘Now Is the Month of Maying’ by Thomas Morley

In this post weโ€™ll travel to the time of the English Renaissance, with a jolly little music piece written by Thomas Morley. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, Morley (1557โ€“1602) was a true Renaissance figure: a composer, organist, music theoristโ€ฆ It was largely thanks to him that the Italian madrigals  became so popular in England, adding …

Book review: ‘The Cathedral’ by Hugh Walpole

"We translate more easily than we know our gratitude to God into our admiration of ourselves." Hugh Walpoleโ€™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 havenโ€™t missed the December 2022 release of his short ghost story The …

‘Spring Storm’ by William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams (1883โ€“1963) was one of the most important American poets of the 20th century: a modernist of the imagist kind, he was known for using simple and colloquial language to express his ideasโ€”a feature many critics now consider typical of modern American poetry. This can be contrasted with the modernists such as T. …

‘So sweet love seemed that April morn’ by Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges was a British poet and the Poet Laureate of the UK from 1913 to 1930. Originally a doctor, he had to abandon his medical practice due to poor health. He spent most of his life in rural Berkshire near Oxford, dedicated to writing and literary studies. Robert S. Bridges (1844โ€“1930) The poem …