Literary Birthday - 7 May

Happy Birthday, Robert Browning, born 7 May 1812, died 12 December 1889

Seven Quotes

1. Grow old with me! The best is yet to be.
2. Love, hope, fear, faith—these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character.
3. Ignorance is not innocence but sin.
4. I was made and meant to look for you and wait for you and become yours forever.
5. A man’s reach must exceed his grasp; Or what’s a Heaven for?
6. Love is the energy of life.
7. A minute’s success pays the failure of years.

Browning was one of the most famous and respected Victorian poets. He married the poet, Elizabeth Barrett.

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 27 April

Happy Birthday, Cecil Day Lewis, born 27 April 1904, died 22 May 1972

Quotes

1. First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it.
2. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
3. There’s a kind of release And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.

Cecil Day Lewis was an Anglo-Irish poet and the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 until his death in 1972. He also wrote mystery stories under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, journalist Tamasin Day-Lewis, and writer Sean Day-Lewis. In his autobiography The Buried Day, he wrote, ‘As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname – a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results…’

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 7 April

Happy Birthday, William Wordsworth, born 7 April 1770, died 23 April 1850

Quotes

1. Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
2. The mind that is wise mourns less for what age takes away; than what it leaves behind.
3. The human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this.
4. Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop than when we soar.
5. The best portion of a good man’s life: his little, nameless unremembered acts of kindness and love.
6. Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.
7. Come grow old with me. The best is yet to be.
8. The good die first, and they whose hearts are dry as summer dust, burn to the socket.
9. Though nothing will bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; we will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
10. To begin, begin.

Wordsworth was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850. He was a major English Romantic poet who helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature. Wordsworth’s magnum opus is considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem ‘to Coleridge’.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 20 March

Happy Birthday, Henrik Ibsen, born 20 March 1828, died 23 May 1906

Five Ibsen Quotes

1. If I cannot be myself in what I write, then the whole is nothing but lies and humbug.
2. The worst that a man can do to himself is to do injustice to others.
3. Writing has … been to me like a bath from which I have risen feeling cleaner, healthier, and freer.
4. Before I write down one word, I have to have the character in my mind through and through. I must penetrate into the last wrinkle of his soul.
5. To live is to war with trolls.

Ibsen was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as “the father of realism” and is one of the founders of Modernism in the theatre

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by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Literary Birthday - 18 March

Happy Birthday, Wilfred Owen, born 18 March 1893, died 4 November 1918

Three Quotes on Poetry

1. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.
2. I find purer philosophy in a Poem than in a Conclusion of Geometry, a chemical analysis, or a physical law.
3. I was a boy when I first realized that the fullest life liveable was a Poet’s.

Owen was an English poet and soldier. He is considered to be the leading poet of the First World War. His realistic poetry on the horrors of trench and gas warfare was in stark contrast to public perception and the patriotic tone of earlier war poets like Rupert Brooke. He was shot and killed in France on 4 November 1918. The news of his death reached his parents as Armistice bells rang on 11 November 1918.

by Amanda Patterson for Writers Write

Influential Beards & Moustaches in History From inkspillsinc

Literary Birthday - 22 February

Happy Birthday, Edna St. Vincent Millay, born 22 February 1892, died 19 October 1950

Quotes

1. Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.
2. You see, I am a poet, and not quite right in the head, darling. It’s only that.
3. I know I am but summer to your heart, and not the full four seasons of the year.
4. Beauty is whatever gives joy. 
5. A person who publishes a book wilfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him. 

Poetry - Time Does Not Bring Relief

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide!

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim!
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, ‘There is no memory of him here!’
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!

Millay was an American lyrical poet, playwright, and feminist. She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry, and was also known for her activism and her many love affairs. She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work. 

This book, when I am dead, will be
A little faint perfume of me.
People who knew me well will say,
She really used to think that way.

by Amanda Patterson from Writers Write