"Audio discussion of several major poems"

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“The day of the sun is like the day of a king. It is a promenade in the morning, a sitting on the throne at noon, a pageant in the evening.”

“The paramount relation between poetry and painting today, between modern man and modern art, is simply this: that in an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent or, if not disbelief, indifference to questions of belief, poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince.”

“To have nothing to say and to say it in a tragic manner is not the same thing as having something to say.”

“If some really acute observer made as much of egotism as Freud has made of sex, people would forget a good deal about sex and find the explanation for everything in egotism.”

“We are the mimics. Clouds are pedagogues.”

“How full of trifles everything is! It is only one’s thoughts that fill a room with something more than furniture.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I’m surprised that multiple personalities are so much less common in reality than in fiction: what a little disorder it would take, a distraction, a sleep, for one of our minor characters to imagine h…"

— James Richardson

Politics1809–1851

#writing

"In June , a large mob of approximately 5,000 Muslim fundamentalists, "comprised mostly of Bangladeshi infiltrators", attacked a major religious gathering of Hindus at one of their holiest sites at one…"

— Richard Benkin

Journalism2000

#family

"Civilization slipped into its second dark age on an unsurprising track of blood, but with a speed that could not have been foreseen by even the most pessimistic futurist. It was as if it had been wait…"

— Stephen King

Literature1986

#history

"The people inhabiting it are predominantly Muslim Arabs, and they demand freedom and unity with their fellow-Arabs of Syria. But the British policy has created a special minority problem here – that o…"

— Jawaharlal Nehru

Politics1889–1964

#freedom