In the Spoon River country where I was raised there is an element of unremitting hardness. It was more prominent in my father’s people than in my mother’s. She was German, a hard enough race, to be sure, but he was Scandinavian, and their hardness is obdurate to the point of pathology: their calvinistic religion [...]
Archive for the ‘gothic’ Category
. 6. Shadows across the Spoon: midwestern gothic
Posted in gothic, naturalism, shadows, Spoon River, tagged graveyards, sonnet, Spoon River, symbolism on May 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
12. Submerged in the waters of Lethe
Posted in absinthe, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Art Institute of Chicago, beauty, Catherine, Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddal, Emily Bronte, gothic, graveyards, Heathcliff, John Keats, Lethe, love lost, moor, oblivion, opiates, poppies, poverty, Pre-Raphaelites, shadows, symbolism, Victorians, Virginia DeCourcey, tagged graveyards, Heathcliff, symbolism, Virginia DeCourcy on May 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Sleep, dream, opiates, oblivion. Years in which I read Keats above all others, culminating finally in a visit to his home on the edge of Hampstead Heath. A life surrounded by dark colors, drawn curtains, bottles of cabernet and candlelight. Solitary hours in a moonlit garden, midnight excursions to graveyards, daylong pilgrimages to the Symbolist [...]
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