Three Lives by Gertrude Stein- this is my second attempt to read it and I'm finding it amazing!!! It's written in three sections, each is a portrait of the ordinary life of three different women: two German immigrants- the good Anna and kind Lena, and an African American- Melanctha. It isn't the nar...

The rules are not very rigid here. Our panel of judges tries allow for creativity since this is, after all, a poetry thing. Cool, thanks DWill. Yes, I love William Blake, as you wrote there is a mixture of innocence and experience in his poems. Even in the poems that have absolutely no dark imagery...

I love that Herbert poem Saffron, thank you, especially the first two lines: "Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, -Guilty of dust and sin." The poem seems to be about communication between different parts of the self: the soul which holds memories of sin, and the new emotion not y...

Rosie, that poem illustrates how different the experiences of the genders are. I generalize, but a father's feelings can't be anything like that. I know mine weren't. Well, women are lucky in that regard. But still men wouldn't be offering to change places! DWill Hmm, fatherhood poems DWill? Little...

Saffron, you married a poet!('')

Is he really 'Virginia Woolf'? Did she herself think she'd lived for 400 years? This is an interesting idea WildCity Woman. I think he's a sort of weird Vita/ Virginia composite (combining fabulous pins with a gift for metaphor). Through Orlando's elaborate metaphors and similes (e.g. Fame is like ...

I skimmed the introduction to the internet copy of Orlando, and it said something like Orlando's life is a combination of Vita Sackville West's and her ancestors (it's Vita in the photographs posing as Orlando through the different ages). Vita came from an aristocratic family, one of her ancestors w...

I watched the film a few years ago for high school. It's so different from the book, Tilda Swinton plays Orlando as very passive, he/ she gets swept along and experiences all these extremely different time periods of English history and doesn't blink an eyelid at them. I know that Woolf's Orlando al...

All that Bloomsbury group talk sounds so ominous, I've got a different (less sinister) problem with Orlando . So, before joining this discussion properly, I've got to have a rant on my opinion of Virginia Woolf (sorry, this is might not be so rational). Firstly, I've read two other of her novels- To...

I can never get enough of EE poems, Saffron. On "if i love you": I like this one too (but more hesitantly), I think it'll take me a while to make sense of those metaphors. I guess he's trying to get across the idea of a new love affair, thus the sweet hesitancy and the interruption of hims...