I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
I finished Keats?s Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes & Hyperion, before breakfast. The three first disappointed me. The extracts I had seen of them, were undeniably the finest things in them. But there is some surprising poetry ? poetry of wonderful grandeur, in the Hyperion. The effect of the appearance of Hyperion, among the ruined Titans, is surpassingly fine. Poor poor Keats. His name shall be in my ?Poets Record.?
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
I finished the Endymion today. I do not admire it as a fine poem; but I do admire many passages of it, as being very fine poetry. As a whole, it is cumbrous & unwieldy. You don?t know where to put it. Your imagination is confused by it: & your feelings uninterested. And yet a poet wrote it. When I had done with Keats, I took up Theophrastus. Theophrastus has a great deal of vivacity, & power of portraiture about him; & uplifts that veil of distance ? veiling the old Greeks with such sublime mistiness; & shows you how they used to spit & take physic & wear nailed shoes tout comme un autre?Theophrastus does me no good just now: & as I can?t laugh with him, I shall be glad when I have done hearing him laugh.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Barrett Print: Book
'Garratt escaped [from factory life] to an evening course in English literature, where he felt "like a child that becomes ecstatic with a fireworks display". Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson "swamped the trivialities of life and gave my ego a fulness and strength in the lustre of which noble conceptions were born and flourished'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: V.W. Garratt Print: Book
'[Muir's] account of his reading material as a young man in Glasgow points to an involvement with poems of the Romantic and post-Romantic periods which were concerned both with visionary experience and with the need to transcend human suffering. He tells us: I was enchanted by The Solitary Reaper, the Ode to a Nightingale, the Ode to the West Wind, The Lotus Eaters, and the chorus from Atalanta in Calydon'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Unknown
[Alice Foley] read some Morris and less Marx, but for her a liberal education for the proletariat was not merely a means of achieving socialism: it was socialism in fact. At night school she staged a personal revolution by writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet and thriling to the "new romantic world" of Jane Eyre. She joined a Socialist Sunday School where 'Hiawatha' was recited for its "prophetic idealism", and a foundry hammerman intoned Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Foley Print: Book
[Alice Foley] read some Morris and less Marx, but for her a liberal education for the proletariat was not merely a means of achieving socialism: it was socialism in fact. At night school she staged a personal revolution by writing a paper on Romeo and Juliet and thriling to the "new romantic world" of Jane Eyre. She joined a Socialist Sunday School where 'Hiawatha' was recited for its "prophetic idealism", and a foundry hammerman intoned Keats's 'Eve of St Agnes and 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Foley Print: Book
'In 1898 Armstrong organised the Ashington Debating and Literary Improvement Society, and his reading broadened out to Shakespeare, Burns, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Scott, Robert Browning, Darwin and T.H. Huxley. Robertson Nicoll's British Weekly had introduced him to a more liberal Nonconformity that was hospitable to contemporary literature. The difficulty was that the traditional Nonconformist commitment to freedom of conscience was propelling him beyond the confines of Primitive Methodism, as far as Unitarianism, the Rationalist Press Association and the Independent Labour Party. His tastes in literature evolved apace: Ibsen, Zola. Meredith, and Wilde by the 1890s; then on to Shaw, Wells, and Bennett; and ultimately Marxist economics and Brave New World'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Chester Armstrong Print: Book
'Robert White... had somewhat more progressive tastes [than Robert Story], which extended to Shelley, Keats, Childe Harold, and The Lady of the Lake. But his reading stopped short at the Romantics. In 1873 he confessed that he could not stomach avant-garde poets like Tennyson. "As for our modern novel-writers - Dickens, Thackeray and others I do not care to read them, since Smollett, Fielding and Scott especially are all I desire".'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Robert White Print: Book
[due to the fact that books in working class communities were generally cheap out of copyright reprints, not new works] Welsh collier Joseph Keating was able to immerse himself in Swift, Pope, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Keats, Byron, Shelley, Dickens and Greek philosophy, as well as the John Dicks edition of Vanity Fair in weekly installments. The common denominator among these authors was that they were all dead. "Volumes by living authors were too high-priced for me", Keating explained. "Our schoolbooks never mentioned living writers; and the impression in my mind was that an author, to be a living author, must be dead and that his work was all the better if he died of neglect and starvation".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Keating Print: Book
'orphanage boy Thomas Burke... devoured books until "my mind became a lumber room". Inevitably, "criticism was beyond me; the hungry man has no time for the fastidiousness of the epicure. I was hypnotised by the word Poet. A poem by Keats (some trifle never meant for print) was a poem by Keats. Pope, Cowper and Kirke White and Mrs Hemans and Samuel Rogers were Poets. That was enough."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Thomas Burke Print: Unknown
'The son of a barely literate Derbyshire collier recalled a sister, a worker in a hosiery factory, who was steeped in the poetry of Byron, Shelley, Keats and D.H. Lawrence. Their mother's reading "would astonish the modern candidate for honours in English at any university", he claimed. "Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeniev, Dumas, Hugo, Thackeray, Meredith, Scott, Dickens, all the classics, poetry etc., all these gave her immense joy".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sutton Print: Book
' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Christiana Thompson Print: Book
' ... [Elizabeth and Alice Thompson] used to go for picnics at Porto Fino, loaded with books of verse, and Mrs Thompson and Mr [Alfred] Strettell would read aloud to them from Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Baker Strettell Print: Book
Alice Meynell recalls childhood reading: 'In quite early childhood I lived upon Wordsworth ... When I was about twelve I fell in love with Tennyson, and cared for nothing else until, at fifteen, I discovered Keats and then Shelley.'
Unknown
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alice Thompson
[analysis of a female respondent in Arnold Freeman's 1918 Sheffield Survey] 'Machinist in a shell factory, age twenty-four... Has read Shakespeare, Burns, Keats, Scott, Tennyson, Dickens, Vanity Fair, The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, biography and history'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: questionaire respondent Print: Book
'In 1955 Manny Shinwell - who read all of Palgrave's Golden Treasury to his children, and had consoled himself in prison with Keats and Tennyson - regretted that that poetic heritage had been surrendered to the cinema and radio: "In the early days of the [socialist] movement it was common practice of speakers to recite poetry...".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emmanuel (Manny) Shinwell Print: Book
" But I read with unchecked voracity, and in several curious directions...I made aquaintance with Keats, who entirely captivated me."
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Edmund Gosse Print: Book
'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Finn Print: Book
'As a collier [Joseph Keating]... heard a co-worker sigh, "Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate". Keating was stunned: "You are quoting Pope". "Ayh", replied his companion, "me and Pope do agree very well". Keating had himself been reading Pope, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith and Richardson in poorly printed paperbacks. Later he was reassigned to a less demanding job at a riverside colliery pumping station, which allowed him time to tackle Swift, Sheridan, Byron, Keats, Shelley and Thackeray'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Keating Print: Book
'No national commentator sympathised with working-class culture so well as Wilfred Pickles, BBC newsreader and stonemason's son. But even he admitted that the hours he spent in the public library, reading Shelley, Keats, Shaw and Galsworthy, represented a desperate breakout from the stultifying provincialism of his native Halifax.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Pickles Print: Book
Letter 202 to Ralph Hodges, Woodstock, N.Y., Aug 15 1939:
'I?ve done lots of work ? finished this small piece for Toronto I mentioned to you ? "Young Apollo" (after Keats), Fanfare for Piano, Solo String quartet, & string orchestra.'
Letter 227 to Wulff Scherchen,Amityville N.Y., December 8th 1939
'I?m playing my "Young Apollo? which I wrote for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. ? on Columbia on Dec. 20th, sometime in the middle of your night ? you know whom that?s written about ? founded on last lines of Keat?s "Hyperion?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Benjamin Britten Print: Book
'Masefield habitually purchased a book each Friday evening and read it over the weekend. Among the first purchases was a seventy-five cent copy of Chaucer; and that evening, as he recalled, "I stretched myself on my bed, and began to read 'The Parliament of Fowls'; and with the first lines entered into a world of poetry until then unknown to me". As a result, Masefield's study of poetry deepened, and Chaucer, John Milton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats became his mentors. Shelley converted the impressionable youth to vegetarianism....Unfortunately [he] overdid vegetarianism by abjuring milk; and, weak from lack of protein, he finally gave up the regimen'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Masefield Print: Book
'He was also interesting himself in poets such as Keats, Fitzgerald and Yeats'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'Then, when I was twelve we had a really good poetry book which contained extracts from "The Excursion", part of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage", "The Eve of Saint Agnes", "Adonais", "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", and Mathew Arnold's "Tristram and Iseult". We were given "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" and "The Pied Piper" to learn by heart in consecutive years. I never liked "The Pied Piper", which, being written consciously as a child's poem, made me feel conscious, and most of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" seemed unreal to me... The poems in the book which I liked best were "The Eve of Saint Agnes" and "Tristram and Iseult"...'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edwin Muir Print: Book
'Maybe to neutralise the Penny Dreadful, Cassells brought out the Penny Classics. These had a bluish-green cover and were world famous novels in abridged form, but sixty or seventy pages. And W.T. Stead brought out the Penny Poets. The covers of these were pimply surface-paper, a bright orange colour, and they contained selections from Longfellow, Tennyson, Keats, and many others. I first read "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline" in the Penny Poets and thought them marvellous; so marvellous that I began to write 'poetry' myself. Stead also brought out another penny book; this had a pink cover and contained selections from the ancient classics: stories from Homer, the writings of Pliny the younger, Aesop's "Fables". I took a strong fancy to Aesop, he was a Greek slave from Samos, in the sixth century BC, and workpeople were only just beginning to be called "wage slaves". I read all these; non-selective and Catholic my reading...'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Stamper Print: Book
'So that, whatever may have been its deeper cause, the love which filled my imagination was of a kind that seemed, to me, to have little to do with what I meant by sex. "Love" was something I had learned about from "David Copperfield" and "Under the Greenwood Tree" and from the stories in "The Woman's Weekly", which my mother occasionally bought. And of course, from the poetry I was beginning to enjoy. I was naively oblivious to the sexual innuendoes of Keats and Tennyson but their romantic raptures set me trembling like a tuning fork. "Come into the garden, Maud" roused nothing of the derision, or even downright ribaldry, that it would surely rouse in a boy of today.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'Our syllabus was large, covering at least twelve set books: two plays of Shakespeare's, two volumes of Milton and two of Keats; Chaucer, Sheridan, Lamb, Scott's "Old Mortality" and the first book of "The Golden Treasury", with its marvellous pickings of Coleridge, Shelly, Byron and, especially, Wordsworth, which excited me, at that age, more than any other poetry written.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Norman Nicholson Print: Book
'January 14. "To be happy with you seems such an impossibility! It requres a luckier star than mine! It will never be...The world is too brutal for me." [Keats to Fanny Brawne, August 1820]'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Mansfield Print: Book
'[Tuesday] Sept. 26th. [...] Read Keats' Endymion.
[...]
'Wednesday Sept. 27th. Do some Latin from Virgil [...] Finish Keats' Endymion.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Sunday October 15th. [...] Read the Isabella or Pot of Basil by Keats [quotes four lines from
stanza 10].'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Wednesday Nov. 8th. [...] Read Lamia by Keats.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'Friday Nov. 10th. [...] Read Hyperion of Keats.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'[Tuesday] Feb. 27th. [...] Read Hyperion of Keats.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Claire Clairmont Print: Book
'S. reads Hyperion aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Ride to Pisa - Keats' poems'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
'You must be tired of my ugly handwriting - yet your book is so suggestive that one wants to talk about it - the more I read the more I am enchanted by it. - I have been struck however by your mention of Dante - which seems founded entirely on the Inferno - a poem I can only read bits of - the subject being to me so antipatetica but the Purgatorio & Paradiso - the Poet revels in beauty & joy there to the full as much as the horrors below - and some of his verses & even whole Cantos lap one in a gentle sort of Elysium - or carry one into the skies - Can anything be so wondrously poetical as the approach of the boat with souls from earth to Purgatory - Shelley's most favourite passage - the Angels guarding Purgatory from infernal spirits - the whole tone of hope - & the calm enjoyment of Matilda is something quite unearthly in its sweetness - & then the glory of Paradise - I do not rely on my own taste but the following verses appear to me to belong to the highest class of imagination; they occur in the last Canto of the Pardiso after the vision he has of beatitude
-il mio veder fu maggio
Che'l parlar nostro, ch'a tal vista cede.
E cede la memoria al tanto oltraggio
Quale e colui ch soguando vede,
E dopo 'l sogno la passione impressa
Rimane, e l'altro alla menta non riede
Cotal son io, che quassi tutta cessa
Mia visione, e ancor mi distila
Nel cuor lo dolce, che nacque da essa.
Cosi la neve al sole disigilla
Cosi al vento nele foglie lievi
Si perdea la sentenzia di Sibilla -
Will you think me hypercritical about a most beautiful stanza of Keats - It was the sky lark not the nightingale that Ruth heard "amid the alien corn" - the sky lark soars and sings above the shearers perpetually - The nightingale sings at night - in shady places - & never so late in the season - May is her month -
Excuse all this'
[letter to Leigh Hunt]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Shelley Print: Book
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906:
'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse,
1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] Also I am reading my
dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your
Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy,
and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It
is a beautiful edition.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, ?30 December 1906:
'I have been reading Keats most of the day. I think he is about the greatest of all [...] I like
cool Greek Gods, and amber skies, and shadow like running water, and all his great palpable
words -- symbols for immaterial things.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
[Helen Roothman] 'brought Edith new poetry too - the French symbolists, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire - to enlarge her own rapt readings of Swinburne, William Morris, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Yeats'.
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell Print: Book
'[included in diary entry] [italics] Keats [end italics] (Letter to Geo and Thos Keats Dec 28 1817)
"negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".
this quality goes to make "a man of achievement, especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously".
I do not think I have any 'creative' genius. What I have, if I have anything, is the capacity to [italics] recgnise [end italics] things.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'I rarely take a book about with me now and Keats' letters have lasted me nearly two months'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'[Basil Nicholson] loves Marvell's poems and Durer's drawings. He has a great admiration for Keats but won't read the letters "because he feels they will probably annoy him".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Basil Nicholson Print: Book
'I read the Keats letters coming up in a belated and dawdling train. His letter to [Charles Armitage] Brown from Naples is one of the most terrifying things that I have ever read.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Harold Nicolson Print: Book
'Although Larkin had first read them [Auden and Isherwood] at KHS [his school], it wasn't until he reached Oxford that he began fully to appreciate their irony and ebullient detachment (he described Isherwood's first novel, "All the Conspirators", as being like "life photographed"). Eventually Larkin would praise Auden as "the first 'modern' poet, in that he could employ modern properties unselfconsciously". Reading him in St John's during his first term he felt:
"Auden rose like a sun. It is impossibly to convey the intensity of the delight felt by a ... mind reared on 'Drake's Drum', 'Westminster Bridge' and 'Ode to a Nightingale, when a poet is found speaking a language thrilling and beautiful, and describing things so near to everyday life that their once-removedness strikes like a strange cymbal. We entered the land, books in hand, like travellers with a guidebook... 'Poems', 'The Orators' and 'Look, Stranger!' seemed three fragments of revealed truth... To read 'The Journal of an Airman' was like being allowed half an hour's phone conversation with God".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
'The "faithful Fitz" [Edward Fitzgerald] writes that as early as 1835, when he met my father in the Lake Country, at the Speddings' (Mirehouse, by Bassenthwaite Lake) he saw what was to be part of this 1842 volume [of Tennyson's poetry], the "Morte d'Arthur," "The Day-Dream," "The Lord of Burleigh," "Dora," and "The Gardener's Daughter." They were read out of an MS. "in a little red book to him and Spedding of a night, when all the house was mute [...] My father read them a great deal of Wordsworth, "the dear old fellow," as he called him [...] Fitzgerald notes again:
'"I could remember A. T. saying he remembered the time when he could see nothing in 'Michael' which he now read us in admiration [...]"
'My father also read Keats and Milton'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'He marked personal details in Colvin's biography of Keats, particularly when they seemed to coincide with his own, noticing that Keats's mind was "naturally unapt for dogma", that Keats and Hunt were given to "luxuriating" over "deliciousness", and that Reynolds came from Shrewsbury and "lacked health and energy". He involved himself similarly in the poems. "Endymion" and 'Lamia' kept his pencil especially busy as he underlined rich vocabulary and marked lush descriptions, including that of the sleeping Adonis. A bookmarker in "Endymion", embroidered with the text "create in me a clean heart O God", seems to have prayed in vain among sensuous passages in which he evidently delighted, but perhaps guilt overcame him after reading 'Lamia', because four pages of erotic description have been carefully stuck together'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen Print: Book
'He marked personal details in Colvin's biography of Keats, particularly when they seemed to coincide with his own, noticing that Keats's mind was "naturally unapt for dogma", that Keats and Hunt were given to "luxuriating" over "deliciousness", and that Reynolds came from Shrewsbury and "lacked health and energy". He involved himself similarly in the poems. "Endymion" and 'Lamia' kept his pencil especially busy as he underlined rich vocabulary and marked lush descriptions, including that of the sleeping Adonis. A bookmarker in "Endymion", embroidered with the text "create in me a clean heart O God", seems to have prayed in vain among sensuous passages in which he evidently delighted, but perhaps guilt overcame him after reading 'Lamia', because four pages of erotic description have been carefully stuck together'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen Print: Book
'Owen turned to his third main interest, the earth sciences, doing his earnest but unscholarly best to tackle the Victorian debate between science and religion. He was soon "reading analysing, collecting, sifting and classifying Evidence" and "grappling as I never did before with the problem of Evolution". He read a statement of the Christian answer to Darwinism but contemptuously wrote "Shallow!" against its discussion of art. His conclusion was probably summed up in a comment he had marked in Keats's letters, "Nothing in this world is proveable"; when he met these words again in W.M. Rossetti's life of Keats, he added, "at least [italics] proved [end italics] W.O.".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Wilfred Owen Print: Book
'the two poets [Owen and Sassoon] probably talked more about literature than anything else. Owen found that they had been "following parallel trenches all our lives" and "had more friends in common, authors I mean, than most people can boast of in a lifetime". By chance, Sassoon was reading a small volume of Keats which Lady Ottoline [Morrel] had sent him. He shared Owen's interest in the late-Victorian poets, including Housman, whose influence is often apparent in his war poems, but Owen was surprised to discover that he admired Hardy "more than anybody living". No doubt Sassoon persuaded him to start reading Hardy's poems. In return, Owen showed him Tailhade's book'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Siegfried Sassoon Print: Book
From Hallam Tennyson's account of 'My Father's Illness [1888]':
'He read or had read to him at this time the following books or essays: Leaf's edition of the Iliad; the Iphigenia of Aulis, expressing "wonder at its modernness"; Matthew Arnold on Tolstoi; Fiske's Destiny of Man; Gibbon's History, especially praising the Fall of Constantinople; Keats [sic] poems; Wordsworth's "Recluse." Of this last he said: "I like the passages which have been published before, such as that about the dance of a flock of birds, driven by a thoughtless impulse [...]"
'He often looked at his Virgil, more than ever delighting in what he called "that splendid end of the second Georgic."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Tennyson Print: Book
'I wrote endless imitations, though I never thought them to be imitations but, rather wonderfully original things, like eggs laid by tigers. They were imitations of anything I happened to be reading at the time: Sir Thomas Brown, de Quincey, Henry Newbolt, the Ballads, Blake, Baroness Orczy, Marlowe, Chums, the Imagists, the Bible, Poe, Keats, Lawrence, Anon., and Shakespeare. A mixed lot as you see, and randomly remembered'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Dylan Thomas Print: Book
Books read by Oscar Wilde in Reading Gaol, July 1896-December 1896, taken from his list of books requested and then sent by his friends. Source text author notes that Wilde read and re-read everything available to him in prison. 'Greek Testament, Milman's History of the Jews; Farrar's St Paul, Tennyson's Poems (complete in one volume), Percy's Reliques (the collection of old ballads), Christopher Marlowe's Works, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and Life of Frederick the Great, A prose translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, Keats's Poems, Chaucer's Poems, Spenser's Poems, Renan's Vie de Jesus and The Apostles, Ranke's History of the Popes, Critical and Historical Essays by Cardinal Newman, Emerson's Essays (If possible in one volume), Cheap edition of Dickens's Works.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Print: Book
'I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding. [I have] grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Manuscript: Sheet
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Helen Rawlings Print: Book
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis Print: Book
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Howard R. Smith Print: Book
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Blanche Ridges Print: Book
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Edminson Print: Book
'Mrs Smith then read an interesting biography of Keats which was followed by a reading of "I stood tiptoe upon a little hill" by Helen Rawlings. Howard R. Smith read from Endymion & Mrs Ridges the Ode to a Nightingale. Alfred Rawlings read a paper upon the poetry of Keats & Mrs Edminson some of the sonnets & H.M. Wallis a portion of "Isabella".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Alfred Rawlings Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Elizabeth Marriage Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Katherine Evans Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Robson Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Stansfield Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Charles Evans Print: Book
'The subject of the evening's programme was John Keats. R.H. Robson read an essay dealing with his life. The main influences & friendships of his short life were well brought out. H.M. Wallis folowed with an appreciation written in the delightful style of which our Friend is so great a master & a reading of the Grecian Urn ode by Miss Marriage completed the first part of the programme. On our return from physical refreshment Charles I. Evans described the Poems of 1820 and some readings were given by Mrs Evans, Mrs Robson & C.E. Stansfield.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Henry Marriage Wallis Print: Book
[between journal entries for 26 January and 29 September 1881]
'When Parliament adjourned for a recess in April Charles Schreiber [M.P.] was obliged to go to Liverpool to look after a nephew and niece there: Lady Charlotte accompanied him [...] In an entry in her journal during this visit she says that she has seen enough of it [Liverpool] and never wishes to revisit it [...] A few days laterr she records that she was reading Endymion with much interest, none the less for all the anxiety she felt about Lord Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli]'s health, which was causing great anxiety at the time. He died on April 19.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
'What you have given me is more golden than gold, more precious than any treasure this great country could yield me, though the land be a network of railways, and each city a harbour for the galleys of the world.
It is a sonnet I have loved always, and indeed who but the supreme and perfect artist could have got from a mere colour a motive so full of marvel: and now I am half enamoured of the paper that touched his hand, and the ink that did his bidding, grown fond of the sweet comeliness of his charactery [...] Again I thank you for this dear memory of the man I love, and thank you also for the sweet and gracious words in which you give it to me: it were strange in truth if one in whose veins flows the same blood as quickened into song that young prince of beauty, were not with me in this great renaissance of art which Keats indeed would have so much loved, and of which he, above all others, is the seed.
Let me send you my sonnet on Keats's grave, which you quote with such courteous compliments in you note, and if you would let it lie near his own papers it may keep some green of youth caught from those withered leaves in whose faded lines eternal summer dwells.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Oscar Wilde Manuscript: Sheet
'Each night I hurried into my best second-hand suit of clothes, hurried down my tea and then hurried off to evening class to learn English grammar and literature. And what a revelation it was ... The study of style and the composition of poetry were especially fascinating, and I used to go to bed with Addison or Macaulay flashing in my mind and with my emotions stirred by the Ode to the Nightingale.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'With Shelley I shared the sadness of human frailty. Except for some of his shorter poems, Browning was too involved for me, while I restricted my reading of Shakespeare to his Sonnets. But the most ravishing of all was Keats. While others gave stimulus to mind and emotion, Keats was like champagne to the senses and kept the joyous bubbles winking at the brim.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vero Walter Garratt Print: Book
'Meeting held at Hilliers, Northcourt Avenue. 26. ii. 40Meeting held at Hilliers,
Northcourt Avenue. 26. ii. 40.
Rosamund Walis in the Chair
1. Minutes of last read + approved
2. Minute 7 of 19th Dec. – relating to the accounts – was continued
[...]
5. The subject of letters was introduced by Roger Moore, and led to a desultory but
amusing discussion ranging from the Pastons to modern family letters and
scurrilous blackmailing letters.
[...]
7. Margaret Dilkes read from Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son.
8. Ethel Stevens read letters which she had cut out of the papers from time to
time, notably one from a child of thirteen to John Ruskin.
9. H. R. Smith read some four or five short letters from E. V. Lucas, “The Second
Post.”
10. Mary Pollard read Pliny’s account of the Eruption of Vesuvius.
11. Roger Moore read some of Keats’s letters which were much enjoyed, and a
Keats evening was suggested for some future meeting.
[signed as a true record:] S A Reynolds
18/3/40'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Roger Moore Print: Book
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
5. Mary S. W. Pollard read “Ode to Autumn”. Rosamund Wallis read “Ode to a
Nightingale” these served as an introduction to a talk by F. E. Pollard on Keats’
Poetry. He described his lack of interest in the affairs of the world. Contrasted
Keats’ attitude to Nature with those of Wordsworth & Shelley – told how he lived
essentially in the present and expressed this in his writings rather than regrets for
the past or hopes for the future. Keats, he thought was influenced chiefly by
Shakespeare, Spencer and perhaps Milton, while among his immediate friends the
influence of Leigh Hunt was a regrettable one. Keats in his turn had a very great
influence on most of the Poets of the 19th. Century. Finally Mr. Pollard quoted
from the Ode on a Grecian Urn:
‘Beauty is Truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”.
adding with great temerity that he doubted the truth of this famous statement.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Pollard
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
5. Mary S. W. Pollard read “Ode to Autumn”. Rosamund Wallis read “Ode to a
Nightingale” these served as an introduction to a talk by F. E. Pollard on Keats’
Poetry. He described his lack of interest in the affairs of the world. Contrasted
Keats’ attitude to Nature with those of Wordsworth & Shelley – told how he lived
essentially in the present and expressed this in his writings rather than regrets for
the past or hopes for the future. Keats, he thought was influenced chiefly by
Shakespeare, Spencer and perhaps Milton, while among his immediate friends the
influence of Leigh Hunt was a regrettable one. Keats in his turn had a very great
influence on most of the Poets of the 19th. Century. Finally Mr. Pollard quoted
from the Ode on a Grecian Urn:
‘Beauty is Truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”.
adding with great temerity that he doubted the truth of this famous statement.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Rosamund Wallis
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
5. Mary S. W. Pollard read “Ode to Autumn”. Rosamund Wallis read “Ode to a
Nightingale” these served as an introduction to a talk by F. E. Pollard on Keats’
Poetry. He described his lack of interest in the affairs of the world. Contrasted
Keats’ attitude to Nature with those of Wordsworth & Shelley – told how he lived
essentially in the present and expressed this in his writings rather than regrets for
the past or hopes for the future. Keats, he thought was influenced chiefly by
Shakespeare, Spencer and perhaps Milton, while among his immediate friends the
influence of Leigh Hunt was a regrettable one. Keats in his turn had a very great
influence on most of the Poets of the 19th. Century. Finally Mr. Pollard quoted
from the Ode on a Grecian Urn:
‘Beauty is Truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”.
adding with great temerity that he doubted the truth of this famous statement.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Francis E. Pollard
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
6. Isabel Taylor read from “The Eve of St. Agnes”. S. A. Reynolds read some of
Keats’ Sonnets including “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” and others
written to or about various members of the Reynolds family and their cat. Violet
Clough read some more sonnets and a discussion followed on the great Sonnet
writers of the English language of whom Keats had certainly been one. Among the
others mentioned was Matthew Arnold and it was suggested that he would make
an excellent subject for a future meeting.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Isabel Taylor
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
6. Isabel Taylor read from “The Eve of St. Agnes”. S. A. Reynolds read some of
Keats’ Sonnets including “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” and others
written to or about various members of the Reynolds family and their cat. Violet
Clough read some more sonnets and a discussion followed on the great Sonnet
writers of the English language of whom Keats had certainly been one. Among the
others mentioned was Matthew Arnold and it was suggested that he would make
an excellent subject for a future meeting.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sylvanus A. Reynolds
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
6. Isabel Taylor read from “The Eve of St. Agnes”. S. A. Reynolds read some of
Keats’ Sonnets including “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” and others
written to or about various members of the Reynolds family and their cat. Violet
Clough read some more sonnets and a discussion followed on the great Sonnet
writers of the English language of whom Keats had certainly been one. Among the
others mentioned was Matthew Arnold and it was suggested that he would make
an excellent subject for a future meeting.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Sylvanus A. Reynolds
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
6. Isabel Taylor read from “The Eve of St. Agnes”. S. A. Reynolds read some of
Keats’ Sonnets including “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer” and others
written to or about various members of the Reynolds family and their cat. Violet
Clough read some more sonnets and a discussion followed on the great Sonnet
writers of the English language of whom Keats had certainly been one. Among the
others mentioned was Matthew Arnold and it was suggested that he would make
an excellent subject for a future meeting.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Violet Clough
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
7. Isabel Talor read “La Belle dame sans merci”[.] Some discussion followed in
which what Knox Taylor described as the “sensuous melancholy” of Keats was
contrasted unfavourably with the keen virility of Shelley. But warmed by some
excellent coffee, from the depths of a luxurious settee, some members were
heard to murmur that there was a lot to be said for the things of the senses____
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Isabel Taylor
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
4. Roger Moore gave us a biographical sketch of John Keats chiefly as revealed
through his letters. To him Keats was memorable as much for the man he was as
for what he wrote. We heard of Keats’ ideals, his religion as revealed in his letters
in spite of his professed unbelief, of his family and circle of close friends and of
his tragic & untimely death. In conclusion Roger Moore asked whether anyone
could set his mind at rest with regard to Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. His
knowledge of the Scriptures led him to suppose that Ruth was extremely happy in
her exile, in which case Keats himself would have been the first to admit that an
idea lacking truth could not be beautiful. This led to some discussion on Ruth and
exiles in general and Howard Smith suggested that it was strange that Keats had
selected Ruth when there had been so many famous exiles through whose
really sad hearts the self-same song might have found a path. He
thought Iphigenia would have been a better choice, but it was generally felt that
the sadness of her exile was somewhat outweighed by the length of her name.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Roger Moore Print: Book
'Meeting held at “Hilliers”, Northcourt Avenue. 18.XI.40
Rosamund Wallis in the chair.
[...]
4. Roger Moore gave us a biographical sketch of John Keats chiefly as revealed
through his letters. To him Keats was memorable as much for the man he was as
for what he wrote. We heard of Keats’ ideals, his religion as revealed in his letters
in spite of his professed unbelief, of his family and circle of close friends and of
his tragic & untimely death. In conclusion Roger Moore asked whether anyone
could set his mind at rest with regard to Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. His
knowledge of the Scriptures led him to suppose that Ruth was extremely happy in
her exile, in which case Keats himself would have been the first to admit that an
idea lacking truth could not be beautiful. This led to some discussion on Ruth and
exiles in general and Howard Smith suggested that it was strange that Keats had
selected Ruth when there had been so many famous exiles through whose
really sad hearts the self-same song might have found a path. He
thought Iphigenia would have been a better choice, but it was generally felt that
the sadness of her exile was somewhat outweighed by the length of her name.
[...]
[signed] Howard R. Smith
13/12/40'
Unknown
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Roger Moore
'Do you take Chambers's Journal? The opening article I like very much, on that beautiful line from
Keats, 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'; another of the leading articles pleased me greatly, as it
so precisely coincides with my view of the question; it is on Female Education, and is really
excellent and full of truth.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Eliza Ellis Print: Serial / periodical
