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Jul. 18th, 2003 09:42 amI don't like to reread things and have undergone some pretty thorough changes of mindset in the last few years, but these are the works that I loved best as I read them:
Shelley's poems, of which the best are the verse play Prometheus Unbound, the middle-length constellation of The Triumph of Life, Adonais, The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion, and a horde of lyrics: Ode to the West Wind, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, The Cloud, The Two Spirits etc.; if I had to single out two, not necessarily as best but as favorites, I'd pick The Witch of Atlas and The Cloud. Parts of his epic Laon and Cythna AKA The Revolt of Islam are amazing. There's some essays like A Defense of Poetry and On a Future State that match his best verse.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's short stories and novellas, especially the Childhood trilogy, A Snowstorm, The Cossacks, The Kreutzer Sonata, Family Happiness.
Ibsen's plays, especially Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, Love's Comedy, Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, When We Dead Awaken.
Those three are my favorites and I recommend every word they ever wrote. The next three:
Remembrance of Things Past AKA In Search of Lost Time, by Proust.
The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser. Also his Epithalamion, Muioptomos, Prothalamion, some of his Amoretti sonnets.
Goethe's Faust, the Wilhelm Meister books, plays, poetry etc. Another author you read as an author and not a selection of masterpieces though.
Other works have meant a lot to me at the time but who knows if they would now? I pick things up again sometimes and they're just ash. But maybe that's just in my eye or in the day. Some:
The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, various novellas and stories by D.H. Lawrence. Kafka. Robert Browning's poems. Middlemarch. Bleak House. Some obscure Germans writing across genres: Eduard Morike, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Holderlin, Georg Buchner. Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann. Borges. Turgenev I loved early, it was he that removed my reservations about literature.
Tons of poetry, of course: I started with Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, with Pushkin and Byron, with the English Renaissance poets and dramatists; moved on through the Romantic and Victorian poets, who as a group I still prefer (especially the better poems of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Algernon Charles Swinburne); through translated verse from Europe and elsewhere -- liking particularly Luis Cernuda, Antonio Machado, Michelangelo (in the right translations), Anna Akhmatova, Victor Hugo. Most recently have been obsessively reading the better American poets, especially Dickinson, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop... some Edwin Arlington Robinson, Emerson, Stevens, Melville. Went through a World War I British poets kick, liking Owen best, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke also.
Some books affect me powerfully but make me uneasy. But anything that can get to you through reservations is especially impressive. Dante, Leopardi, Kleist's Prince of Homburg. Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which hurt)... I get this especially with the better early 20th Century poets: Rilke, Lorca, Neruda, Montale, Yeats. This is something of my attitude to Blake... I actually like him a lot but he's too much work to wrestle with. Milton also absorbs your whole being for a couple weeks while reading him, but is very much worth it.
Strindberg and Dostoevsky are painfully, amusingly, brilliantly insane.
I've been on lots of kicks of course, whole months where I could only read one author. As a teenager I had a Camus phase, a Hemingway phase.
What's left? The only Metaphysical poet I can stand is Marvell, and he only shines bright in a couple poems. My especial dislikes are Chaucer, Hopkins, Samuel Beckett and Hardy (these two more for outlook than subject matter or manner) and most of the Bible. I have a moderate aversion to anything Medieval and a mild one to the 18th century.
There's a lot of books I can't seem to get through despite multiple sustained attempts, notably The Iliad, Don Quixote, The Republic, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake, Moby-Dick. I like all of them, have read other works by their authors, mean to finish them.
I'm not as knowedgable about philosophy, I mostly read -about- the famous philosophers. Exceptions are Plato and Bertrand Russell. Nietzsche is fun to read around in, though often another "Strindoevsky." Among essayists I like what I've read of Montaigne and Emerson.
I'm widest-read in the dramatic classics. My favorite Shakespeare plays are Love's Labor's Lost, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale; though this list shifts a lot. I like French drama but to me it feels like light reading: Moliere, Racine, Marivaux, Musset. I worshipped Shaw once and still like him. The British comedy tradition in general is superb. My favorite Greek is of course Sophocles. When it isn't Aeschylus.
I love Keats while reading him but hate him for eclipsing Shelley in reputation. Shelley just -eats- Keats whenever he wanders into Keatsian subject matter. Tolstoy seems to have similar invasive abilities: 90% of Flaubert, 50% of Stendhal, 50% of George Eliot, stray chunks of Balzac and Hugo, almost all of Turgenev, all are digested and effortlessly transcended in Anna Karenina.
Enough dizzying lists for now. I'll check back over this sometime, I must be forgetting a hundred things.
Shelley's poems, of which the best are the verse play Prometheus Unbound, the middle-length constellation of The Triumph of Life, Adonais, The Witch of Atlas and Epipsychidion, and a horde of lyrics: Ode to the West Wind, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, The Cloud, The Two Spirits etc.; if I had to single out two, not necessarily as best but as favorites, I'd pick The Witch of Atlas and The Cloud. Parts of his epic Laon and Cythna AKA The Revolt of Islam are amazing. There's some essays like A Defense of Poetry and On a Future State that match his best verse.
War and Peace, Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's short stories and novellas, especially the Childhood trilogy, A Snowstorm, The Cossacks, The Kreutzer Sonata, Family Happiness.
Ibsen's plays, especially Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, Love's Comedy, Lady from the Sea, Hedda Gabler, When We Dead Awaken.
Those three are my favorites and I recommend every word they ever wrote. The next three:
Remembrance of Things Past AKA In Search of Lost Time, by Proust.
The Faerie Queene, by Edmund Spenser. Also his Epithalamion, Muioptomos, Prothalamion, some of his Amoretti sonnets.
Goethe's Faust, the Wilhelm Meister books, plays, poetry etc. Another author you read as an author and not a selection of masterpieces though.
Other works have meant a lot to me at the time but who knows if they would now? I pick things up again sometimes and they're just ash. But maybe that's just in my eye or in the day. Some:
The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal. Women in Love, Sons and Lovers, various novellas and stories by D.H. Lawrence. Kafka. Robert Browning's poems. Middlemarch. Bleak House. Some obscure Germans writing across genres: Eduard Morike, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Friedrich Holderlin, Georg Buchner. Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann. Borges. Turgenev I loved early, it was he that removed my reservations about literature.
Tons of poetry, of course: I started with Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat, with Pushkin and Byron, with the English Renaissance poets and dramatists; moved on through the Romantic and Victorian poets, who as a group I still prefer (especially the better poems of Wordsworth and Tennyson, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Algernon Charles Swinburne); through translated verse from Europe and elsewhere -- liking particularly Luis Cernuda, Antonio Machado, Michelangelo (in the right translations), Anna Akhmatova, Victor Hugo. Most recently have been obsessively reading the better American poets, especially Dickinson, Frost, Elizabeth Bishop... some Edwin Arlington Robinson, Emerson, Stevens, Melville. Went through a World War I British poets kick, liking Owen best, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke also.
Some books affect me powerfully but make me uneasy. But anything that can get to you through reservations is especially impressive. Dante, Leopardi, Kleist's Prince of Homburg. Flaubert's Sentimental Education (which hurt)... I get this especially with the better early 20th Century poets: Rilke, Lorca, Neruda, Montale, Yeats. This is something of my attitude to Blake... I actually like him a lot but he's too much work to wrestle with. Milton also absorbs your whole being for a couple weeks while reading him, but is very much worth it.
Strindberg and Dostoevsky are painfully, amusingly, brilliantly insane.
I've been on lots of kicks of course, whole months where I could only read one author. As a teenager I had a Camus phase, a Hemingway phase.
What's left? The only Metaphysical poet I can stand is Marvell, and he only shines bright in a couple poems. My especial dislikes are Chaucer, Hopkins, Samuel Beckett and Hardy (these two more for outlook than subject matter or manner) and most of the Bible. I have a moderate aversion to anything Medieval and a mild one to the 18th century.
There's a lot of books I can't seem to get through despite multiple sustained attempts, notably The Iliad, Don Quixote, The Republic, Ulysses & Finnegans Wake, Moby-Dick. I like all of them, have read other works by their authors, mean to finish them.
I'm not as knowedgable about philosophy, I mostly read -about- the famous philosophers. Exceptions are Plato and Bertrand Russell. Nietzsche is fun to read around in, though often another "Strindoevsky." Among essayists I like what I've read of Montaigne and Emerson.
I'm widest-read in the dramatic classics. My favorite Shakespeare plays are Love's Labor's Lost, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, A Winter's Tale; though this list shifts a lot. I like French drama but to me it feels like light reading: Moliere, Racine, Marivaux, Musset. I worshipped Shaw once and still like him. The British comedy tradition in general is superb. My favorite Greek is of course Sophocles. When it isn't Aeschylus.
I love Keats while reading him but hate him for eclipsing Shelley in reputation. Shelley just -eats- Keats whenever he wanders into Keatsian subject matter. Tolstoy seems to have similar invasive abilities: 90% of Flaubert, 50% of Stendhal, 50% of George Eliot, stray chunks of Balzac and Hugo, almost all of Turgenev, all are digested and effortlessly transcended in Anna Karenina.
Enough dizzying lists for now. I'll check back over this sometime, I must be forgetting a hundred things.
