The following, reprinted from the editorial page of the New York Sun, was written by the late Mr. Frank P. Church: We take pleasure in answering at once and thus…
Walt Whitman on Thanksgiving
A large family supper party, a night or two ago, with voices and laughter of the young, mellow faces of the old, and a by-and-by pause in the general joviality.
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Shakespeare Sucks! by Leo Tolstoy
(or Shakespeare not a Great Genius) I remember the astonishment I felt when I first read Shakespeare. I expected to receive a powerful esthetic pleasure, but having read, one after…
Walt Whitman on the Significance of Edgar Allan Poe
n diagnosing this disease called humanity—to assume for the nonce what seems a chief mood of the personality and writings of my subject
Interview with Mark Twain
This interview is from Hartford Daily Courant from May 30th 1888. Twain would have been 53 years old. He had just finished a new book. A reporter for THE COURANT…
Historic: My Interview With Mark Twain…
You are a contemptible lot, over yonder. Some of you are Commissioners, and some Lieutenant-Governors, and some have the V. C., and a few are privileged to walk about the Mall
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Evidence of Witches
For Halloween: The accounts and evidence against witches (those killed for being witches) are far more terrifying than the prospects of them being true witches.
Mark Twain Plagiarized Oliver Wendell Holmes
Once again we have found a quip from Twain that we feel needs to be highlighted in the pages of history. Twain is one of our favorite writers, especially when it comes to writing about writing.
Charlotee Bronte to William Wordsworth “Thanks A Lot”
So from time to time we love finding things like this. It's a little piece of history, and it makes us chuckle to think that context is everything. We think…
Of Ambition by Francis Bacon
by Francis Bacon AMBITION is like choler; which is an humor that maketh men active, earnest, full of alacrity, and stirring, if it be not stopped. But if it be…
OLD POETS by Walt Whitman
Poetry (I am clear) is eligible of something far more ripen'd and ample, our lands and pending days, than it has yet produced from any utterance old or new. Modern…
How Shakspere Came to Write the ‘Tempest’ by Rudyard Kipling
To the Editor of the Spectator. SIR:—Your article on ‘Landscape and Literature’ in the Spectator of June 18th has the following, among other suggestive passages:—“But whence came the vision of…
III. ON THE ART OF POETRY By Aristotle
A third difference in these arts is in the manner in which each kind of object is represented. Given both the same means and the same kind of object for…
INTELLECT By Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands below it. Water dissolves wood and iron and salt;…
The Story of a Speech by Mark Twain
An address delivered in 1877, and a review of it twenty-nine years later. The original speech was delivered at a dinner given by the publishers of The Atlantic Monthly…
The Poetry of Ezra Pound by T. S. Eliot
"All talk on modern poetry, by people who know," wrote Mr. Carl Sandburg in Poetry, "ends with dragging in Ezra Pound somewhere. He may be named only to be cursed…
Let’s Just Eat the Babies by Jonathan Swift
Dr. Jonathan Swift For preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick. 1729…
William Shakespeare’s Influence by William Dean Howells
by William Dean Howells The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been none before, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events so filling…
Mark Twain is a Slob by Willa Cather
by Willa Cather If there is anything which should make an American sick and disgusted at the literary taste of his country, and almost swerve his allegiance to his flag…