Walter Savage Landor, b.1775.
“I strove with none; for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.”
Ann Taylor (b. 1782) who along with her sister Jane published several books of poems for children. Among the poems she and sister Jane wrote was the well-known Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. I found an online copy of a book of the sisters’ poems entitled Little Ann. Most of the poems in the collection sound quaintly didactic to modern ears, but I rather enjoyed reading them. This one, unlike most of the others, is just for fun:
DANCE, little baby, dance up high:
Never mind, baby, mother is by;
Crow and caper, caper and crow,
There, little baby, there you go;
Up to the ceiling, down to the ground,
Backwards and forwards, round and round:
Then dance, little baby, and mother shall sing,
While the gay merry coral goes ding-a-ding, ding.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, b. 1882.
Angela Margaret Thirkell, b. 1890. Read a short piece on Ms. Thirkell’s book, Private Enterprise or County Chronicle by the same author. I need to read some more books by Ms. Thirkell.
Barbara Tuchman, b. 1912. I am very fond of Tuchman’s book, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, a history of France during the high Middle Ages. However, I must enjoy reading about the Middle Ages more than I like reading about WW I because I have yet to finish The Guns of August, the book that won Tuchman her first Pulitzer Prize in 1963. She also won a 1972 Pulitzer for Stillwell and the American Experience in China.
Lloyd Alexander, b.1924. Everyone is, or should be, familiar with Mr. Alexander excellent Prydain Chronicles. The five books in this series rank only just after Tolkien’s and C.S. Lewis’s fantasy series in my list of fantasy fiction. Taran, the assistant pig-keeper, Eilonwy, the princess who has a way of asking inconvenient questions, Fflewddur Fflam, the would-be bard whose truth-telling harp boasts a number of broken strings, and Gurgi, the rhyming creature of indeterminate origins, are all memorable characters and endearing ones.
However, I must mention that Mr. Alexander also wrote other books, some that I’ve read and appreciated and others that I have yet to enjoy. His Westmark Trilogy consists of Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen. The series features a protagonist named Theo who finds himself on both sides at various times of a simmering revolution against the monarchy of the country of Westmark. The themes of the trilogy center around the difficulties of making moral choices and the ethical implications of war and violence. I thought the books were wonderful when I first read them, and I’d like to go back and read them again sometime.
In addition to writing children’s literature, Lloyd Alexander produced the first English translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s La nausee. Mr. Alexander died May 17, 2007.
Richard Bruce “Dick” Cheney, b.1941. “Four years ago, some said the world had grown calm, and many assumed that the United States was invulnerable to danger. That thought might have been comforting; it was also false. Like other generations of Americans, we soon discovered that history had great and unexpected duties in store for us.”
