97 books like The Prelude

While writing a paper about Douglass in graduate school in the 1990s, I learned that he had to overcome two obstacles to establishing an authentic voice in his own book.

First, abolitionists argued against slavery by claiming it dehumanized the slave. While that could be true, this theory could not account for charismatic Black writers like Douglass who were anything but dehumanized. Second, slave narratives in the antebellum era often followed a certain formula that limited the narrator’s originality.

In one striking passage in the Narrative, Douglass overcomes both restrictions by evoking an image of his body that offers visual testimony to creatively push back on these limiting conventions: “My feet have been so cracked with the frost [felt during cold nights during enslavement], that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes.”

Discovering Joyce in my youth was a revelation. In this fictionalised autobiography, Joyce rejects Yeats’s Irish folk models, seeking to emancipate the individual from the nets of family, religion, and nationality.

Whereas the early Yeats romanticises the idea of blood sacrifice for Mother Ireland, Joyce has his hero, Stephen Dedalus, declare Ireland is the old sow that devours her own farrow. Stephen flees Dublin for Europe, choosing the vocation of the cosmopolitan artist who, from exile, will liberate his benighted nation.

Like Yeats, Joyce remains obsessed with Ireland and the tension between the national and the universal. 

I read Dickinson in high school and college. Her poetry impressed me with its unique ability to create powerful images and ideas with just a few words:

Our lives are Swiss—
So still—so Cool—
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!

Her power of imagination was astounding. For somebody who had lived most of her life in a very circumscribed context of the city limits of Amherst, Massachusetts, her poetry was expansive. She achieved amazing heights of artistry even though she was barely recognized during her time. Her poems are a monument to her belief in herself, which is the foundation of creating a compelling and persuasive voice in writing. 

This writing instruction book came to my aid as I began to teach writing at Harvard University in the late 1990s, when I was trying to help college students cultivate their own voice as writers.

The title was brilliant, surprising the reader that the subject was revision and not writing, per se. This focused on a fundamental truth, which is that good writing – whether it be fiction or non-fiction, artistic or professional – almost always goes through several revisions. Students often recoil at the idea of revisions because they threaten to burden them with more work.

What Murray underlined (and a point I’ve reiterated) is that revisions provide the opportunity to improve your work. The more that writers are comfortable with making revisions, the easier it will be to cultivate and improve their voices in their written work.

Why did Wordsworth and Coleridge decide to produce this book, together? Well, basically, it was because they regarded themselves as having something to say, something to contribute that went way beyond the sphere of pleasing or thought-provoking in a purely literary sense.

The form of the poetry was very shocking at the time and they were also bringing a new point to poetry. And that point is what really brings this very close to eco-philosophy. What they tried to do in the Lyrical Ballads was to produce a sort of poetic manifesto for thinking about nature in a different way, in a more serious way, than was customary at the time.

Here we are taken into the world of Dorothy Wordsworth, considered to be the creative collaborator of her brother William Wordsworth, in this highly original re-imagining of her life. Although as an adult she lived with her brother, she remained in the shadows while he mined her writing for phrases he might use in his own poetry. Her unconventional life is portrayed here through the eyes of others, including a hired hand, James Dixon, whose reverence for her helps shape the story, and the curious but effective use of an old tree, named Sycamore, who provides insightful meditations on her character. I was taken with how intimately we entered Dorothy’s world who, though frail in body, was strong in mind. The internal workings and close observations are what make the novel fascinating, a historical portrait of both woman and artist. An original and thought-provoking work.

I was surprised at the beginning because I thought Vico would be a main character, but he ended up being the monster’s victim in the first few pages. A very chilling scene. The author was great at describing Puerto Rico to the point I could picture the setting vividly without ever visiting Puerto Rico in real life. All the scenes were interesting and moved the plot forward. I really liked how the teenagers teamed up to try and solve the mystery of the monster. They each had a past they regretted. My favorite line in the book, "You’ve been watching too many movies. Things just aren’t that interesting in real life.”

I cherish this book and always take it on holiday with me. "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" is probably the best romantic nature poem ever written. The image of how the senses are responsive to, and creative of, the inner life of nature is sublime ("of eye, and ear, - both what they half create, And what perceive”). This poem encapsulates for me the whole nebulous but immeasurably important job of writing poetry, as well as shining a light on what it means to be a human being.

While, yes, this is not a novel, there is a true character journey in reading the complete works of Ms. Sexton in sequence; a sort of poetic analysis the likes of which I have not read to such a soul-baring degree, as she depicts her thoughts and struggles with marriage, relationships, motherhood, her own parents and various other facets of her life. To me, Ms. Sexton is very much the symbol of what became the confessional poetry movement. The eloquence and depth of her writing, especially in poems like " The Double Image", "Flee on Your Donkey" and " For My Lover Returning to His Wife", are remarkable.

This is a fantastic recent book that offers a walk-off-the-page sense of its large cast of characters—Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, William Cowper, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and many others.

They were all regular guests at the dinner table of the London publisher, and bookseller Joseph Johnson, where he sat back and listened to his talented collection of authors talk about the issues of the day.

It’s both a great way into the world of publishing and selling books and a wonderful introduction to lots of famous writers of the period from a fresh new angle.