Word: lesbia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Berryman is not the Catullus of the Lesbia poems. Most of all, he exhibits a distinct lack of tenderness, none of the possessive but touching love of a Catullus. His poems assert his genius, his talent, his machismo, nowhere celebrate the virtues of another. This is only fair, since Love and Fame is an autobiography. In it, Berryman traces his life from Columbia and Cambridge through an asylum to riches, reputation and religion. The book is in sections, each a stage of his life, and the poetry corresponds, starting brash and young, ending old and mellow...
Husk & Fangs. The two novels on display, Love's Cross Currents and Lesbia Brandon, both deal with the frustrated yearning of a young man for a close relative-a girl cousin in one case, a sister in the other. Swinburne, who alone of all Victorian writers belonged to the top aristocracy, has no trouble handling those extra comic confusions that come naturally in a society where everybody seems to be related to everybody else. When he is being funny-for example, minutely recording the malicious troublemaking of an old gorgon ("all husk and fangs") named Lady Midhurst-Swinburne...
...Freudian critic, delights in. Swinburne, clearly, is the original of the repulsed lover in each book. The girl is his real-life cousin Mary Gordon, whose rejection of the poet was one of the turning points of Swinburne's stunted emotional life. More horrifying is the explanation (in Lesbia Brandon) of the poet's lifelong fondness for being whipped. With subtle, sensual elegance, Swinburne records the slow, tragic perversion of a boy whose admiration for his severe tutor and love for his sister can be most suitably and directly expressed by learning to bear a birching without crying...
...book is fragmentary, largely because Friend and Guardian Watts-Dunton stole the most purple chapters from Swinburne and would not give them back. Wilson laments the loss, through Victorian prudery, of a potential English prose master who might have done great things if encouraged. Bits of Lesbia Brandon justify his claim...
...moderns trembling in the night, of war and love and the waiting grave. He tries his hand (not too happily) at a new translation of Catullus' famed lament for his dead brother, and does better with one of the Roman poet's many farewells to his tartish Lesbia. The final poem of the book, History, combines his sense of the past with the immediacy of the present, his feeling for place with his reverence for God. And the concluding lines, though aimed at all mankind, could serve to describe the poet himself...