John Milton

The many editions of CS 's sonnets attest to their popularity. In one she mentions having to get back from friends the original manuscripts of poems which she had not bothered to keep. Her sonnets...

Wordsworth chose Smith's sonnets, with Milton 's and his own, as domestic reading on Christmas Eve 1802. Thirty years later Coleridge spoke of the personal or egotistical elegiac form as standing at the heart of...

One month before writing this poem Elizabeth Smith met Mary Hunt , with whom she was soon maintaining a scholarly correspondence. In the earliest letter which Bowdler prints (written on 7 July 1792), Smith touches...

She then recorded how she look[ed] back on my past life with shame and confusion, when I recollect the many advantages I have had, and the bad use I have made of them. But...

SS wrote a few poems during her childhood: she began writing poetry again in about 1924. Her note on Satan Speaks, a pastiche of Milton , says it was written in 1925, though unpublished...

Nor was this AS 's only opportunity to marry. In 1742 she was approached with an ardent love-letter (likening her to Milton 's Eve as she first strikes love into the heart of Adam) by...

Her non-religious poems show her a confident, versatile, accomplished writer. She casts a net of allusion widely—Milton , Gray , Edward Young . She imitates Pope on solitude, writes first of James Hervey 's...

At home her mother had read to her daughters, while they sewed, Greek and Roman history, and writers like Pope , and Cowper . At four Anna could recite long passages from Milton 's L'Allegro...

Poetry was always important to her. She said that Dante 's Paradiso had changed her life. Her friend Rev P. H. Wicksteed reported that she found Milton 's Comus an intense and enduring delight.

In the society that Morgan depicts, the Irish Catholic gentry are mostly absent, scattered in European exile. The peasantry, dirt-poor but generous-hearted, include Tim O'Leary, schoolmaster of a hedge school, scholar and expert in Irish...

Volume three opens with a mock trial: the Crawleys hope to get innocent men (including the hero) condemned for insurrection; the English or Anglicised Irish aristocrats are flightily amused at performing a trial scene. The...

Her preface says she is not altogether unknown to the religious Public because of her periodical publications. The longest poem in the collection, Thoughts in Solitude is an ambitious undertaking, though ET expresses conventional...

Her first school, where she went at the age of six, was a little private establishment called Leopold House, which gave a grounding in English and maths and team games. When Betty was eleven...

In her pursuit of female independence, Taylor refutes Milton 's assertion in Paradise Lost (He for God only, and she for God in him), with the counter-assertion: It is not for God...

Whether or not TT 's education was Puritanical (most sources about her life have no higher status than gossip) she was well read in the emergent canon of English literature, from Shakespeare and Milton through...