Tagged: Homer

Bob Dylan

Books and Reading / Music

Bob Dylan Cites The Odyssey, Moby Dick, and All Quiet on the Western Front in Noble Prize Lecture

Bob Dylan’s Nobel Lecture is a meditation on the relationship between literature and lyrics. It’s a powerful witness to the lifelong influence great literature can have on a person’s life. Dylan explains that the books he read in grammar school have had a profound influence on his life and on his songwriting: Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of Two Cities, but most especially Moby-Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. He says the books he read in grammar school gave you...

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Books and Reading / Poetry

A Thing of Beauty Is a Joy Forever

Today is the anniversary of the death of John Keats, one of the major poets of the Romantic era. He died of tuberculosis on this day in 1821 at the age of 25. In his brief life he wrote several poems that are considered major works in English literature such as “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Psyche,” and “Endymion.” Here is one of my favorites: On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer Much have I travel’d in the realms of gold, And...