Paulus Torchus

 “The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be m...

In Shelley's Preface, he references a painting of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni.  He notes the sorrow in her face, the puffiness around...

"Goldsmith shares with Sheridan the honor of being the only dramatist of his century whose plays are both read and acted to-day. ...

This volume may well have been the most enjoyable for me thus far.  It has also been the quickest read in quite some time (I find that pla...

As I may have mentioned before, I have creative written my way through the Handbook of Poetic Forms once before in my early 20s.  I am not ...

"Be juster, Heaven; such virtue punished thus, will make us think that chance rules all above, and shuffles, with a random hand, the...

I have a friend who has contended for some years that it is unfair to attempt to psychoanalyze dead people, specifically those who died be...

So often I have heard people harken back to earlier times, wishing they could be transported to them or that the people of the present wou...

Well, this was, without a doubt, the easiest read in the series!  It was 45 pages of paragraph-long stories about animals.  It almost seem...

It seems clear to me that these stories were not all written by the same person.  In the final four stories in this collection two are at ...

This section contained two stories that I was entirely unfamiliar with, one which I enjoyed, the other in which I had moments of enjoy...

I have two additional items to add to my wish list as I've just discovered the Oxford Classics website.  The first is the major works of...

I thought I might post a Christmas wish list as "shopping season" is around the corner and "avoiding the crowds shopping seas...

The cento comes from the Latin word for "patchwork."  As you may well guess from this bit of trivia, the cento is a poetic form in...

I remember as a boy reading Frankenstein for the first time and marveling at the story within a story with, at some points, other storie...

But he won't.

I took the photograph above when I was in London studying theater in 1999.  It is St. Paul's Cathedral.  The whole time in England I...

The Canzone is the first form covered in Ron Padgett's book which left me with some questions as to how I would actually write one of th...