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Emily Dickinson, on her birthday December 10  2025 revision

     Death and the immortality of the spirit, untitled poems with short telegraphic lines and obscure rhyme, unconventional punctuation and other personalizations of grammar; Emily Dickinson made her own rules.      A scholar with wide ranging interests, her poetry is shaped by the influences of Wordsworth and Emerson, Keats, Whitman, the Brownings, Shakespeare, the Bible, … Continue reading Emily Dickinson, on her birthday December 10  2025 revision

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John Milton, on his birthday December 9  2025 revision

A gorgeous synthesis of classical paganism and Puritan Christianity, John Milton’s epic poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, reimaginations of the Old and New Testaments respectively, form an extended meditation on the implications of free will, and an exposition of the paradoxes of Christian theology and its social and political consequences. Hubris and sin are … Continue reading John Milton, on his birthday December 9  2025 revision

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December 9 Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin, on his birthday

     I first read Kropotkin and other revolutionaries in the slums of Brazil, nearly fifty years ago now at the age of fourteen during the weeks of fighting between the police bounty hunters and death squads and the Matadors, criminals and revolutionaries founded by the magnificent and terrible avenger Pedro Rodrigues Filho, who had rescued … Continue reading December 9 Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin, on his birthday

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Rainier Maria Rilke, on his birthday December 4  2025 revision

     Alienation, loneliness, anxiety, and the search for a god who has abandoned us; the existential themes of Rainier Maria Rilke find an echo in those of Sartre. His poetics of disconnectedness and the lamentation of modernity act as a gateway or interface between the past and the future, in which the possibilities of being … Continue reading Rainier Maria Rilke, on his birthday December 4  2025 revision

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Joseph Conrad, on his birthday December 3  2025 revision

     Allegories of conflict and the journey to wholeness, meditations on sin, guilt, and the nature of evil referencing Freud, Marx, and Catholic theology as a harnessed team of ideological sources, commentaries on Rousseau and the natural man, Dostoevsky and the teleological argument for doing good, satires of liberalism and the Anarchist philosophers Kropotkin and … Continue reading Joseph Conrad, on his birthday December 3  2025 revision

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Jonathan Swift, on his birthday November 30 2025 revision

    Satires full of wit and humor, ribald Chaucerian puns, Dantesque parodies and characterizations of his contemporaries and historical figures, subversive fables which echo those of Cervantes; Jonathan Swift unified the methods of his sources and became the primary example of satire at its best. He deployed his literary tools like pieces in a game … Continue reading Jonathan Swift, on his birthday November 30 2025 revision

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 William Blake, on his birthday November 28 2025 revision

     “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.” William Blake       Satires of both Church and State authority, radical freedom and a revolutionary engagement with aristocratic tyranny and the English monarchy,  a visionary theology which privileges direct personal insight and relationship with the Infinite without a filtering system of priests or … Continue reading  William Blake, on his birthday November 28 2025 revision

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Eugene Ionesco, on his birthday November 26 2025 revision

     Dreams, visions, and the upending of conventions, an art of interrogation by the shifting of contexts, paradoxes and koan-like performances constructed as riddle-tests of initiation; Eugene Ionesco pursued a theatre of radical freedom which challenges us to live meaningfully.      Sartrean authenicity is among his major themes; the falsification of identity by multiplication, mass … Continue reading Eugene Ionesco, on his birthday November 26 2025 revision

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Margaret Atwood, on her birthday November 18  2022 revision

      Primal fairytales and narratives of revolutionary intent; Margaret Atwood is a goddess of Liberty who comes bearing ax and torch to free us from our cages. While teaching her books I always referred to her as the greatest writer of the 20th century because her novels recapitulate and transform the whole history of civilization, … Continue reading Margaret Atwood, on her birthday November 18  2022 revision

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Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his birthday November 11  2025 revision

        In works which explore madness, faith, values, identity, history, the necessity of freedom and the limits of action, and all of this in the shadow of an Authority which rules the material world like a warden devil and must be resisted, Fyodor Dostoevsky has given us a key to balancing conservative and revolutionary forces … Continue reading Fyodor Dostoevsky, on his birthday November 11  2025 revision