Metrical Martin Luther.
Upbuilding Discourses
“Purity of heart is to blog one thing.” -E.J. Hutchinson
Allusion without End (2)
Vergil (and Ovid?) in Longfellow.
Tennyson’s Ulysses as Shakespeare’s Hamlet? (Edited)
The sources for Tennyson's great poem Ulysses are almost as, shall we say, polytropic as Homer's Odysseus. But one of them, I am convinced, is Hamlet's soliloquy in Hamlet 4.4, just after he has encountered the army of Fortinbras. In self-reproach at his lack of...
“Beyond the Sea”: Darin and Stevens in Key West
On Bob Dylan, Bobby Darin, and Wallace Stevens.
Allusion without End
Political Vergil in domestic Ovid.
The Classical Dylan, Again
In "Narrow Way," on the 2012 album Tempest, Bob Dylan sings: You got too many lovers waiting at the wallIf I had a thousand tongues I couldn’t count them allYesterday I could have thrown them all in the seaToday, even one may be too much for me The bolded line...
“Thunder on the Mountain”: An Addendum on “Tombstone”
An allusion to “Tombstone” in “Thunder on the Mountain”?
“Let Me Die, Lest I Die”: Martial in St. Augustine?
On a peculiar phrase in St. Augustine’s Confessions.
Rilke and Kafka in Zoshchenko’s “Apollo and Tamara”
On Mikhail Zoshchenko, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka.
“Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust”
The afterlife of a phrase about death.