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There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person. – G. K. Chesterton
I enjoyed reading your blog. You might also be interested in some of the posts on Didimi Communications blog. My partner, Eleni and I started an editing business together, so we are very interested in language, literature and writing. Would it be ok to reblog some of your posts?
Erin
Thanks for your comment, Erin! I’ll definitely check out your posts shortly – and yes, please reblog away! I’d appreciate it :) IL
Hey thanks for following me, I have to say I love your blog – such interesting articles! Makes for a unique blog (:
Hi, thanks for following my blog…I’m looking forward to settling down with a nice glass of vino later to browse through your posts.
Congratulations!
I have nominated your blog for the Very Inspiring Blogger Award.
The rules of this award are at: http://bellnight.wordpress.com/2013/02/18/the-very-inspiring-blogger-award-thanks-david-lee-summers/
Oliver:
Thanks for following my blog. Happy B’day. Ahh to be 30 again. Now that I think of it maybe I’ll stay as I am – old and wise enough to know how little I know. Great blog. Have a great day!!
Thank you, Bill! And yes, the more I know, the more I realise how little I know: the Socratic way is the only way to live, and here at Interesting Literature we rediscover that with every post. Thanks for reading – we really appreciate it.
Howdy, Dear Dr Tearle,
Thanks for Twitter support.
I love this list and have now bought two books from Abe, the B Ifor Evans and the Peter Quennell. For your ghosts etc book first need to check on the red wine cellar.
But no reading allowed until until I’ve finish book three in The Chronicles of Dekaydence – soon to be released as iBooks.
All good wishes,
Susie
Thanks for following my blog! I am following you now, and your site is awesome!
Thank you so much for following our blog! Yours is really cool.
~ Sage (and on behalf of Moss, too)
Hello Dr Tearle, thank you for following my blog, as an ex librarian I have always loved books and interesting facts about them. Your blog is fascinating.
Your e-mail addressm O.M.Tearle@lboro.ac.uk., is repeatedly rejected by Yahoo! and Gmail. Please send another to holufunwa@gmail.com. I would like to guest-blog for your blog.
Dear interesting literature.as a reader of mine, I’ve nominated you for a TRIO OF AWARDS. Check this out:
http://rich1698.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/i-have-been-nominated-for-a-trio-of-awards/
. Congratulations!Â
Dear Interesting Literature,
You recently followed by blog Gemini Kid. Thank you for your interest and I hope you found something to takeaway. Your blog looks great and very fully developed, which I will follow and keep an eye on.
Thanks a lot,
Matthew
Hello, I am new to the blogging world. I see that you have a good audience on your blog. I am an author and I just published my autobiography. I self published so I need to market it on my own. I want to raise awareness about my book so that it can reach and impact as many people as possible. If you can put this on your blog for your readers I would greatly appreciate it. I see that you have quote the following and it would really help if I had somebody with experience to help me promote my book. Thank you!! If you can even go to my blog and ‘reblog’ my post about my book that would be awesome thank you so much!!
http://www.createspace.com/4271634
Hello! Just wanted to let you know that I’ve nominated you for the “One Lovely Blog Award” – keep the good stuff coming!
http://pp1mt.com/2013/08/28/one-lovely-blog-award/
Thanx for following my blog. I appreciate that. As I begin my writers course I sure will keep on writing here and following yours to.
Hello, Interesting Literature,
I want to say thanks for following me at http://www.oldspouse.wordpress.com.
I have to throw in here that if you enjoy my “This Old Spouse” column, I think you’re gonna love this:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/354657
It’s a terrifying story called The Oklo Device.
At the bottom of the smashwords page you’ll see a link labeled “View” and other download options for mobile readers under reading formats. Take a look at the story; see if you get hooked. If you like the story, please share with others. This is the only way good things happen today–agents and publishers are of the dinosaur era. They’re slow; they’re frightened; and they’ll eat you if you’re not careful. We’re on our own. I truly believe in this book. If you do, too, share it with someone. Thank you!
And thank you so much, again, for being one of the faithful.
Best regards,
Roger White
“This Old Spouse”
This is a great blog. There’s so much to take in, that I haven’t got time right now, but in the word’s of Arnold Schwartzenegger, I’ll be back.
Thanks for the “like” on my blog Antiquity and The Senses. I’ll earmark your site for research, priceless!
Nice to have your personal pedigree to go along with the excellent posts!
Thanks for the like and the follow. Your blog is one the reasons I’m glad for WP! So much cool content. Thanks again.
Thanks for the follow interesting literature! Check out my link at: http://mcscriptor.wordpress.com/
I have nominated you for the ABC Award, to accept the nomination please see the details below:
http://theleatherlibrary.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=990&action=edit&message=6
Thank you for the follow — what a lovely blog you have. Have you seen A Reader’s Book of Days by Tom Nissley? Lovely, and right up the “alley” of your work here. Cheers!
Hello there! I just nominated you for the Liebster Award! You can check out my post here: http://tammore.wordpress.com/2014/02/10/a-liebster-award-nominee/
Keep up the good work! Tammy
Hi! I’ve been starting to read your blog and I must say that everything about it is really interesting. Literature is indeed an interesting field to study.
More power to you! And I hope that you could check our blog also. It’s mainly an information campaign on climate change. Thank you! http://iagreenblog.wordpress.com/
Hello! Thanks for following my blog!
Aloha!
T
thank you for following me. I’m so impressed and intimidated by your awesome blog. I can’t imagine how much time you spend on making it such a wealth of information. I just write little stories and poems. i hope to publish someday. i hope you enjoy them.
Hi
I was just looking at your page on Dickens and Catchphrases. I thought you might be interested in hearing that Sam Vale appears as a character in my forthcoming novel Death and Mr Pickwick, which explores the origins of The Pickwick Papers. Wellerisms (or Sam Valerisms) spread like wildfire in 1830s London – and, in the course of researching my novel, I even came across the case of a man who tried to become a professional writer of such phrases. Further information, if you are interested, can be found at: http://www.deathandmrpickwick.com
Best wishes
Stephen Jarvis
Really useful information that you publish, so beneficial to many people, and how do you think about my blog :)
Where are the x number of quotes about dogs? Good or bad.
On your post about Ian Fleming, there is more to the story behind “007.” Sir Francis Walsingham was Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster and he signed all of his notes to her as “007.”
Hello from Paint The World With Words! I’m Amreen Shaikh and I blog. Thank you following my blog! I must say, you have an amazing blog and great content! Good Work! I wished to contact you, but did not see an email ID! Can you please drop in your email ID on painttheworldwithwords@gmail.com?
I particularly enjoyed your entry on Guy Fawkes Night, which I came across at another site. You may be interested in my own blog, theoryofirony.com.
The email address given above is dead!
I love your posts, especially the ones about poetry. May I reblog some of them?
Thank you! And yes, by all means :)
Have just emailed you – very happy for you to reblog any of our posts using the WordPress feature with a link back to our site (as long as you don’t republish the full article on yours!).
how do i cite this?
Interesting list in November of war poets, and interesting blog overall, but why no Ivor Gurney amongst your wartime list?
To me he is one of the more interesting educated working class WW1 English poets who was not an officer and wrote some simple and effective war poems, especially contrasting the trenches with the natural world of his beloved peacetime Gloucestershire.
http://ivorgurney.org.uk/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivor_Gurney
Are there any opportunities to write for Interesting Literature? I would love to be able to contribute something. As per my blog, I specialise in war literature :)
I’ve been following the site via Twitter for years now and have discovered so many fascinating things!
Grace.
x
Hi Grace, thanks for getting in touch – and we’re happy to discuss possible contributions. Email us at interestinglit2@gmail.com – thanks! Oli
Great site! A refreshing oasis in the Ozymandian sands of the internet.
It’s refreshing to come across a site which champions, inter alia, ghostly and supernatural tales with an appreciation of the terrors lurking in the imagination, where gore and blunt force sit way back in the auditorium.
Hello-Can anyone help-I just heard a quote from a poem that shook me to the core-in the series my mother and other strangers.it related to don’t leave me for you are my soul and I cannot live without my soul.it says it is tennyson.can anyone tell where /which please.
Hi Anna, we’re not sure what poem that might be. There’s this one from Tennyson: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/50.html But we suspect it’s not the one that was quoted. Can you remember anything else about the wording?
Hi. I enjoyed your blog dated Sep 3 2015 on the origins of the phrase ‘Swings and Roundabouts’. Unfortunately, while the poem is great, I don’t think it can be the origin of the phrase if it was first published in 1912.
I’m in the middle of reading P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘Love Among the Chicken’s, which was published in 1906. In Chapter 16, when the protagonist, Jerry Garnet, realises that he’s probably done his dash with the object of his affections and he should get back to writing his novel, he remarks philosophically: ‘A man must go through the fire before he write his masterpiece. We learn in suffering what we teach in song. What we lose on the swings, we make up on the roundabouts’. This pre-dates the poem by 6 years.
Many thanks for this, Ross – that’s very interesting. I’ll update that post with your new information – if you’d like your (full) name credited, do feel free to leave it here and I’ll add it :)
Thanks. Of course, I meant to write ‘Love Among the Chickens’ (not ‘Love Among the Chicken’s). :)
The way he uses it rather implies that it’s a well-known phrase already, too.
Hi Ross, I think I have that Wodehouse story somewhere, so I’ll have to dig it out! Thank you, I’ll credit you with providing that info – much appreciated :)
Love this site, which I just discovered via Ben Yagoda’s “Not One-Off Britishisms.” Is there a way to subscribe to posts by email, please, for those of us who don’t use Facebook? Thanks.
Thank you! We did have a ‘follow posts via email’ function but it seems to have disappeared! I’ll add it back on right away – it’ll be on the right-hand side of the main page. Thanks :)
Hi,
I just wished to let you know that my recent blog post is about poet Anne Locke. Thanks to the info on your website, I discovered her while researching sonnets by women poets. I cite Interesting Literature twice in my blogpost at http://www.yreidbooks.blogpost.com. Thank you!
Cordially,
Yolanda
Thank you! We’ll read your post with interest x
The webaddress for the Anne Locke post is https://www.yreidbooks.blogspot.com. Blogspot, not blogpost. Let me know what you think.
Informative blog … you may be interested in this recent title; Shakespeare’s Global Philosophy by Roger Peters….which uncovers Shakespeare’s profound nature-based philosophy evidenced in the 1609 published Sonnets.
Just finished reading the analysis of Ezra Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro”. I found the analysis intriguing but could not help but notice one glaring error. The poem is actually a three line poem with the title forming the first line. Further, the poem is a variation of the Haiku format. Haiku first became popular in 13th Century as a “Renga” or beginning phrase to a much longer poem (ode) and did not necessarily have any syllable constrictions. In the 16th century the 3/4/5 syllable format became popular which eventually morphed into the 5/7/5 format we see today. Ezra Pound took a liberal interpretation of the Haiku and used it most effectively to produce one of the most significant poems of the 20th century.
Thanks for your time.
Sincerely,
Gerald Mulligan
Thanks for your comment, Gerald. I don’t think you can call what you highlight here an ‘error’, since our analysis does acknowledge Pound’s debt to the haiku. It’s true we don’t discuss the idea that the poem should be read as a three-line piece and I think you’re right, we should! But I (Oliver Tearle) do acknowledge this elsewhere in a discussion of the poem in T. E. Hulme and Modernism: ‘Indeed, like a haiku, “In a Station of the Metro” is really a three-line poem.’ For the reasons you (excellently) outline here :)
Wonderful site, and useful in my writing work. But the link to the post about Bishop Berkeley – who has several pages in my biography of George R. Stewart – goes to a “404 page not found” site. Just JYI. Thanks, Donald M. Scott
Thanks, and sorry about that – the Berkeley post was published a little prematurely, but we want to do a bit more research into it before we (re)publish it. We hope to do so not too long in the future! :)
any list of best children’s books is incomplete without Norman Lindsay’s “the Magic Pudding”
(but,of course,it is from the colonies!)
In your blog on “Anecdote of the Jar”, one aspect that hadn’t been mentioned, but struck me strongly, was the tradition in parts of the South placing jars on gravesite. This tradition is complex, itself, and lends to at least as many interpretations as the poem does.
I was reading your article on Larkin’s “Going, Going”. The text of the poem that you link to has initial caps and strikethrough. Can you instead link to the first page in the series https://www.staff.city.ac.uk/~neilt/design/design/going1.html. However I noticed a typo in this (“Their kids aree screaming for more”) so you might be better off linking to this text instead:
https://www.poeticous.com/philip-larkin/going-going
Thanks for pointing this out, Chris – we’ll correct the link right away! :)
Re 10 Vict. Novels everyone should read.Suggestio ns/there should B AT Least 1_bk. By
R .l.Stevenson and A.C.Doyle on there..and..maybe Lady And let’s secret?
Isa (my name is)hhh
I enjoyed your post on Sylvia Plath’s poetry. I regularly discuss poetry in a colloquial way on my site creative choice; for example here about Plath’s ‘morning song’: http://kamiel.creativechoice.org/2018/02/19/reading-morning-song-by-sylvia-plath/
Let’s celebrate our shared love for language