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| Displaying Poems Anecdotes: 53 Found |
Poetic Justice
In December 2002, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Michael Eakin delivered a c...
Foot Note (long)
A lifetime spent as a customs officer is arguably not the most salutary training...
Maud
Tennyson's poem "Maud" - which dealt with love, murder, suicide, madness, and hy...
Swift Wedding
Caught in a heavy thunderstorm one day, Jonathan Swift took shelter under a larg...
Thomas Bowdler: Wreck of th...
Victorian to the core, the English editor Thomas Bowdler earned a measure of fam...
Beneath the Stars
"[The humorous magazine] Punch discovered a misprint in one of my peace p...
Chaucer of Cheese
In 1841, Scotland's James McIntyre (aka "the Chaucer of cheese") emigrated to Ca...
When We Were Very Sore
Dorothy Parker was dismayed to learn one day that, in a bid to promote her lates...
Analytical Engine
The English mathematician Charles Babbage, famed for his invention of an early m...
Sordello
Though ostensibly the story of an unknown heir to a dukedom in thirteenth-centur...
Dorothy Parker: Razors Pain...
Throughout her life, Dorothy Parker struggled with heroinism and depression. Amo...
Porno Mission
In December 2000, a Texan prisoner sued Penthouse magazine for $500,000 f...
Blurb
As a standard response to the numerous requests which she received to favorably ...
Poet Laureate? (long)
"At the end of the nineteenth century Joseph Gwyer set himself up as the unoffic...
Bahh!
In 2002, British writer Valerie Laws received a £2,000 grant to explore the rela...
Ben Taylor
"I've really never heard a song with good lyrics that I didn't like."
Ben Taylo...
Little Breeches
Though its author was in fact John Hay, Bret Harte was often given credit for th...
Bourgeois Entertainment?
Dorothy Parker and Somerset Maugham attended a party one evening at which guests...
Parenthetical Joke
Ralph Fiennes was once asked to share his favorite joke. "Noel Coward dies and g...
Anne Boleyn: Sweet Duckies
Henry VIII took six years to seduce Anne Boleyn. What won her over, according to...
Synged
John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World was not universally well-re...
Baron de Coubertin: O Fecun...
"Between 1906-1948, an artistic competition ran alongside the Olympic Games. In ...
E Pluribus Unum
The Latin phrase 'E pluribus unum' (one from many), adopted by Benjamin Franklin...
Who Converses With Fools?
Someone conversing with Dr. Johnson once chanced to recite a line from Henry Bro...
Pub Poet
The work of Craig Charles, a self-proclaimed 'pub poet' who often read his poetr...
Wanton Plagiarism?
Few Beatles fans, a reader wrote to the Globe and Mail in 2003, "wouldn't...
World's Worst Poem?
While attending a soiree organized by Dante Gabriel Rossetti one evening, the pr...
Kubla Khan (long)
"In the summer of 1797, the author [Samuel Taylor Coleridge], then in ill health...
Flat Verse
"When I was in Ireland, I received a letter from Alfred Austin, the Poet Laureat...
Kenneth Branagh: Sheer Maud...
Never one to back down from a challenge, Kenneth Branagh once accepted a dare to...
Darwinian Poetry
In 2003, David Rea unveiled a novel computer program which allowed poems to evol...
World's Worst Poet?
"Having exhausted the possibilities of the novel, Amanda McKittrick Ros turned h...
Falsetto
Despite his considerable bulk, G. K. Chesterton had a surprisingly mild falsetto...
Picasso, Poet?
"Gertrude Stein had just been reading some poetry by Pablo Picasso. 'I read his ...
Emily Dickinson
The famously reclusive Emily Dickinson did not share her work with anyone and in...
Jewel: Love Poems
A fan once asked Jewel to recommend a love poem which she could read at her brot...
Edmund Spenser & the Queen
Queen Elizabeth, having been presented by Edmund Spenser with some of his verses...
Pauper Poet
"The great curse of John Clare's life was poverty. He is the poorest major write...
Oscar Wilde & Alexander Pope
Oscar Wilde was no great fan of Alexander Pope. "There are two ways of disliking...
Who Knew Baraka Was a Moron?
Shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, New Jersey poet laure...
Offering of Swans
"In January 1923 during the Irish civil war, [the poet Oliver Gogarty], who had ...
Memory
Professor Francis Edgeworth, a Fellow of All Souls College Cambridge, had a rema...
Fog
Emily Dickinson once composed a verse ("XV") which reads as follows: ...
Garden Fete
"One summer afternoon Acton, then a celebrated undergraduate poet at Oxford, was...
Grand Coincidence (long)
After meeting the famed poet Stanley Kunitz in 1985 (when the city of Worcester,...
Vergil's Aeneid
Vergil, generally considered the greatest of the Roman poets, died while complet...
Young Margaret Laurence
While browsing through Margaret Laurence's library one day, a visitor
happened ...
Disconsolate Bibliophile
"Thomas Gray once attended a sale of books with a friend. One lot particularly a...
Dante's Inferno
"In a famous anecdote Boccaccio tells, Dante overheard two women in Verona who s...
Shrewsbury Lad?
In november 2003, Shrewsbury MP Paul Marsden posted an online love poem which he...
Humble Poet
William Cullen Bryant was so inspired by the work of William Wordsworth that he ...
DeWolf Hopper
During his career as an actor and light-opera singer, DeWolf Hopper recited "Cas...
Philip Larkin: Scrupulous Poet
After a "graphomaniacal" boyhood, the English poet Philip Larkin became a scrupu...
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