All Questions

In Ted Hughes' "A Kill" (A Crow poem. See the full poem here), Crow's concieveing and its coming into life is described with opposite terms related to death. Specifically, the creation of ...

"Wink" is a Tibetan short story by Pema Bhum, translated to English by Tenzin Dickie and freely available to read online from Words Without Borders at the above link. It's set in (presumably)...

I'm curious about the role authorial authority has played in the past, especially what the authors themselves believed it to be. Therefore I'm looking for earlier examples of works meeting the ...

According to this article by Alf Hiltebeitel, the Mahabharata has "three interwoven frame stories" (page 4). What he calls the "outermost" frame is Vyasa's recounting of the story ...

The famous sentence "There are three sorts of people: those who are alive, those who are dead, and those who are at sea" is often attributed to Aristotle. However, I was unable to find an ...

The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton has an interesting dedicatory poem: "To Edmund Clerihew Bentley ". The author seems to be describing a period of doubt and spiritual bleakness he ...

I just heard that Alfred the Great, the famous 9th-century king of Wessex who is sometimes said to be the first founder of "England" as a country, was also a translator of literature. ...

I have this vague recollection about Hemingway writing, in one of his novel, about intentional contagion of infection; it seems to me there is a character, near a trench, offering a cigarette pack ...

Recently I was reading the book "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" by Mitch Albom and I came across this quote: It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that ...

In Book XIV of The Iliad, when Poseidon is encouraging the Greeks while the Trojans are attacking their ships, he says this to Agamemnon while disguised: But the famous Earthshaker kept no blind man'...

Sidney Porter (O. Henry) was a contemporary of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain). They died the same year; Porter attended Clemens' funeral a few months before his own death. Was Porter referring to Twain's ...

In recent news, the publisher Houyhnhnm Press released a limited edition copy of Finnegans Wake based on 30 years of work by scholars to refine and revise the text. There are apparently some 9000 ...

This question seeks an analysis of John P. Portelli's very short poem "Nog la 'L Fuq" / "Upwards I Surge" (1977), originally written in Maltese and included with an English ...

I read this book about 10 years ago in elementary. It was the first book in a series. It starts off with kids playing by a tree and then one of them goes down a well to find a money printer. He also ...

This phrase is used at least twice in the Decameron: In Day 2 Story 9, when the merchants at the beginning of the story are boasting of their infidelity to their wives and justifying themselves by ...

The Wikipedia article on Japanese literature opens with the following sentences about the influence of other cultures and bodies of literature on the (nascent?) Japanese literature: Early works of ...

In the Kazuo Ishiguro 2021 novel Klara and the Sun the main character is an "artificial friend", i.e., a construction intended to be a child's companion. The idea of a child's robot ...

I feel like this must be a character archetype or mythological figure, but can't find any references to it. In my mind, it's something like Cassandra knowing the future but not being believed; this ...

In the Decameron Day 2 Story 7, the protagonist is a princess of "Babylon" who has numerous sexual misadventures after getting shipwrecked on the way to be married. She is, I believe, ...

I was reading George Orwell's essay "Raffles and Mrs Blandish" and came across this quotation, "Some of the early detective stories do not even contain a murder. The Sherlock Holmes ...

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." John von Neumann Why can't someone think that both math and life are ...

This passage from R. A. Lafferty's short story "Dream World" (freely available to read online) puzzles me: "What is the lamp-post jag, Bascomb?" asked Officer Mossback McCarty. &...

R. A. Lafferty's short story "Dream World" (freely available to read online) starts off with a man (whose name we later learn is Bascombe Swicegood) eating a large breakfast and overhearing ...

The opening lines of Robert Frost's 'After Apple Picking' read: My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there ...

In the the novel 'Gulliver's Travels', there is a passage in Part II Chapter 3 where the narrator "quarrels with the Queen's Dwarf". In that passage, Gulliver makes the aside that princes '...

One of John P. Portelli's Maltese poems is entitled "To Fr. Lawrence Bonavia" ("Lil Fr. Lawrence Bonavia" in Maltese): it's number 52 in his poetry book available from his website (...

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, volume 2 includes the following letter from Darwin to W. Ogle, written with regard to Dr. Ogle's translation of Kerner's book, 'Flowers and their Unbidden Guests': ...

I was told in my class that "They flee from me" is written in iambic pentameter, except for line number 6 in the second stanza in iambic tetrameter. However, some lines in my textbook have ...

In chapter 3, section 6 of Nabokov's Pnin, the main character is carrying a reference work "mainly devoted to Tolstoyana" across the Waindell campus when he drops it by accident: Pnin, on ...

Mester de Juglaría was a genre of Spanish literature from the 12th-13th centuries, which was transmitted orally by travelling entertainers (juglares). It was later surpassed by the Mester de Clerecía, ...

Day 2, Story 6 of the Decameron is set against a political backdrop of 13th-century Sicily: it begins with the defeat of King Manfred at Benevento by the new king Charles, and the main characters are ...

In the book of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar by Roald Dahl, Henry Sugar was a rich man, whose wealth was inherited from his dad. He never worked, nor did his wealthy friends. There is a piece of ...

Orientalism (1978) is a book by Edward Said that established the concept of "orientalism", which refers to the Western depiction of aspects in the Eastern world. Is there an equivalent to ...

I've just read R. A. Lafferty's short story "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", published in If magazine and freely available to read online. The story starts with the following line: Ceran ...

The prologue to Romeo and Juliet is a sonnet. Are there other moments, sections within the plays that are sonnets? I'd like a list of Shakespearean sonnets which appear in his plays (not in the 154 ...

I remember reading a tale (likely part of another novel) of a young man who wanted to marry or propose to a wealthier girl. The young man need some important position to be able to do that but couldn'...

In "The Six Fingers of Time", by R. A. Lafferty, available for free here on Project Gutenberg, there is a claim that having an extra finger or toe is associated with genius. The text gives ...

One of the poems in John P. Portelli's poetry collection "In Between: Malta and Canada" (freely available online from the author's website, page 91) is the short poem "The Past and the ...

I have often heard that William Blake’s The Tyger is supposed to resemble a nursery rhyme. For example, in analysis I found on “Mercs Poetry Blog”: This poem, despite its mature themes and ...

I'm looking for two poems by Rimbaud and Verlaine. They escape to Belgium together, went to a town party, and both wrote a poem about the event. Verlaine was really straightforward, and classical. ...

Gormenghast, the vast rambling castle-state that forms the setting for (the first two books of) Mervyn Peake's eponymous trilogy, is BIG. But how big? Based on the evidence scattered here and there ...

Outlier Analysis by Charu C. Aggarwal contains the following Max Lucado quote: To lead the orchestra, you have to turn your back to the crowd. Why does he quote this particular author? Are there any ...

The character Sweeney Todd, the “demon barber of Fleet Street”, appeared in the “penny dreadful” serial The String of Pearls (1846–1847). The Wikipedia article on the serial says: Sweeney Todd’s ...

Day 2 Story 5 of the Decameron is set partly in a district of Naples with (at least in the English translation) a striking name that sounds comical and exaggerated. Here follows the translation I'm ...

The protagonist of R.A. Lafferty's short story "All the People" (available to read online from Project Gutenberg) is a "restricted person" working at the "filter center". ...

From "An Ode to America" (The Atlantic's Jan/Feb 2022 issue): “Pretty good nose you got there! You do much fighting with that nose?” New Orleans, 1989. I’m standing on a balcony south of ...

According to Britannica Online Encyclopedia, Dun Karm is considered the national poet of Malta: Dun Karm, pseudonym of Carmelo Psaila, (born Oct. 18, 1871, Zebbug, Gozo, Malta—died Oct. 13, 1961, ...

Anyone know the name of this series? Back in the late 80's or early 90's I read a series about a galactic empire that used ground based portals to travel between planets. There was some issue and all ...

The 15th-century Maltese poem "Il-Kantilena" is said to have been "found" in the 1960s by two Maltese historians, but the above-linked Wikipedia page, and other sources I've found ...

The poem is fairly self explanatory, but I can not place the "grey" hanging off of "This is the Throne of Mammon": I rose up at the dawn of day— 'Get thee away! get thee away! ...