A little less than a month ago, I posted Dana Gioia’s film about Weldon Kees. The morning I drove to sunny South Pasadena to shoot my cameo, Dana and I conducted a brief conversation about Kees, which he has now posted to his channel: I spoke about Kees, whom I’ve been reading since the age of […]
Weldon Kees and Zbigniew Herbert: A Conversation with Dana Gioia
Author: penwithlit
Freelance writer and radio presenter
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The Old Stoic – Emily Bronte
The Old StoicRiches I hold in light esteem,And Love I laugh to scorn;And lust of fame was but a dream,That vanished with the morn:And if I pray, the only prayerThat moves my lips for meIs, “Leave the heart that now I bear,And give me liberty!”Yes, as my swift days near their goal:’Tis all that I […]
The Old Stoic – Emily Bronte
The birth of Arthur Schopenhauer introduced a philosophical vocabulary that deepened literary English. His ideas on will, illusion, and suffering infused prose with intellectual gravity and introspective precision, enabling writers to articulate pessimism, psychological complexity, and metaphysical doubt with clarity, restraint, and conceptual authority.
Birth of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) – The Thinker Who Darkened and Deepened Literary English
Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Cranford” depicts life in a unique, female-dominated town, highlighting class snobbery through episodic narratives. Influenced by her hometown of Knutsford, Gaskell received encouragement from Dickens to expand her story.
Book Review : Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
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Wrapping Up
Born in 1907, W. H. Auden reshaped modern English poetry by blending intellectual rigor with lyrical music. His verse moves fluidly between philosophy, politics, and everyday speech, proving that poems can reason as they sing. Through flexible form and precise diction, he expanded English into a medium for thinking aloud.
Birth of W. H. Auden (1907–1973) – The Poet Who Tuned Modern English to Thought
Born in 1917, Carson McCullers transformed American prose through psychological stillness, restraint, and interior focus. Her fiction showed that silence, subtext, and muted longing could carry immense narrative weight, expanding English’s emotional vocabulary and shaping modern introspective storytelling that values understatement over spectacle and inner life over overt dramatic action.
Birth of Carson McCullers (1917–1967) – The Writer Who Turned Silence into Language
On February 17, 1673, Molière died after collapsing during a performance, sealing a life where theater and reality intertwined. His sharper legacy lies in language: he transformed satire into disciplined intelligence, shaping comic dialogue, social critique, and the evolution of modern dramatic prose across Europe, including English literature.
Death of Molière (1622–1673) – The Dramatist Who Taught Comedy to Think
I inaugurated my blog with a post about the relationship of two passages written by James Joyce, one from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the other from Ulysses, both revolving around the word ‘yes’ (which was used in drastically different ways in the two passages). I connected these passages to Nietzsche’s philosophy, […]
Joyce and Nietzsche, Take 2
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