jaimelannister:

literature meme | prose (2/10): Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë, written between October 1845 and June 1846, and published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell.” It was her first and only published novel: she died aged 30 the following year.

Wuthering Heights is the eponymous farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors where the story unfolds. Its core theme is the enduring love between the heroine, Catherine Earnshaw, and her father’s adopted son, Heathcliff and how it eventually destroys their lives and the lives of those around them.

Although Wuthering Heights is now widely regarded as a classic of English literature, it received mixed reviews when first published, and was considered controversial because its depiction of mental and physical cruelty was so unusually stark.

incidentalcomics:

Day Jobs of the Poets

a few of my favorite poems:

• The Lady of Shalott by Lord Alfred Tennyson
• Bells Bells Bells by Edgar Allen Poe
• Fireflies in the Garden by Robert Frost
• The Lady’s Dressing Room by Jonathon Swift
• Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• How Soon Hath Time by John Milton
• The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
• Twenty Four Years by Dylan Thomas
• Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

wingedwolves:

inspiration for the lady of shalott

But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often thro' the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
	  And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
"I am half-sick of shadows," said
	  The Lady of Shalott.

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
	  She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
	  The Lady of Shalott.

And down the river's dim expanse--
Like some bold seër in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance--
With a glassy countenance
	  Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right--
The leaves upon her falling light--
Thro' the noises of the night
	  She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat-head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darken'd wholly,
	  Turn'd to tower'd Camelot;
For ere she reach'd upon the tide
The first house by the water-side,
Singing in her song she died,
	  The Lady of Shalott.

   - ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

explore-blog:

Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, adding to our ongoing archive of wisdom on writing.

heirmione:

10 heartbreaking quotes→ Last words spoken in A Tale of Two Cities

unhistorical:

March 18, 1893: Wilfred Owen is born.

Wilfred Owen was a British poet who wrote primarily during (and on) World War I. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army and left for the Western Front in early 1917, only to come face-to-face with the horrors of war and senseless slaughter that would become subjects for his most famous poems, including Dulce et Decorum est, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and Parable of the Old Man and the Young; these were poems that condemned the war and condemned the romanticized notions of war that misled so many of his generation to their deaths. A few months into his service, Owen was diagnosed with shell-shock after a shell exploded near him, and he was sent to a war hospital in Edinburgh, where he met another English war poet - Siegfried Sassoon. The two struck up a friendship that was ultimately very creatively beneficial for Owen; Sassoon both inspired Owen as a poet and helped publicize his works, which were unknown at the time of his early death. 

Owen’s short but important output of war poetry was primarily written within a span of a year and a few months; in August of 1918, he returned to the Western Front. He was killed in action in France on November 4, 1918, one week before the signing of the Armistice that ended military hostilities all across Europe.

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud  
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, 
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest  
To children ardent for some desperate glory, 
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est 
Pro patria mori.

the-library-and-step-on-it:

the-writers-ramblings:

literature series → byronic hero

he knew himself a villain—but he deem’d
the rest no better than the thing he seem’d;
and scorn’d the best as hypocrites who hid
those deeds the bolder spirit plainly did.
he knew himself detested, but he knew
the hearts that loath’d him, crouch’d and dreaded too.
lone, wild, and strange, he stood alike exempt
from all affection and from all contempt.

 

wellwornwornwell:

First page of an early draft of Blood Meridian, circa 1975.

englishistheartofbullshit:

90% of the discomfort that comes from reading Lolita is how absolutely breathtaking the writing is.

francis-abernathy:

I have read only a few of these, but I have 10 more years to read the rest. 

Also, they included The Secret History.