Meeting Benches World art in all forms

“Valeria Victrix“, it was the name of the Roman legion XX, the one that was headquartered on the right bank of the River Dee (south of Liverpool). But if you want to observe the Roman foundations of the ancient fortified place, this is not possible, because the walls that still surround Chester were made on precisely those ancient foundations. Visiting …

A DAUGHTER OF EVE – A fool I was to sleep at noon, and wake when night is chilly beneath the comfortless cold moon. A fool to pluck my rose too soon, a fool to snap my lily. My garden-plot I have not kept. Faded and all-forsaken, I weep as I have never wept: Oh it was summer when I …

You’ll have to travel 30 km to the northeast, leaving Stratford-on-Avon behind you, to get to Winchcombe and its sixteenth century castle.  That architectural marvel, it houses the memory of a famous woman, Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII. To know where that woman from 1548 rests, you will need to enter the chapel of the castle, where she …

ANDRE KOHN 1/3 – He was born in Stalingrad, raised by an artistically gifted family (his mother was a symphony violinist and his father a noted linguist, writer and sculptor), near the Caspian Sea in southern Russia. In Moscow, at age 15, he began studying fine arts (as a trainee) at the famous Impressionist artists studios. That experience has been …

At the age of 46 – in 1974 – she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Anne Gray Harvey was born in Massachusetts and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1954 she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, and in 1955 (on her birthday), she attempted suicide, but was encouraged by her doctor to pursue an interest. Writing poetry. Reading, …

She is best known as a key figure in feminist poetry. For she, transformation goes beyond the act of writing, and Adrienne Rich (1929/2012) delineated her poetics relatively early in her career in a 1971 essay. The form of her poems, also you can discover that has evolved with her content, moving from tight formalist lyrics to experimental poems, also …

He was born in Illinois, and is an American novelist and essayist. He graduated from Swarthmore College in 1981 and studied thereafter at the Freie Universität in Berlin on a Fulbright scholarship. His debut novel was The Twenty-seventh City. His second novel was Strong Motion. Winner of the National Book Award for The Corrections (2001), Jonathan Franzen‘s recent novels have …

TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROAD > Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River. Life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze. Country roads, take me home to the place I belong. West Virginia, mountain mamma, take me home, country roads. All my memories gather round her, miner’s lady, stranger to …

Love poems and descriptive nature poems, would always be his favoured forms. Edward Estlin Cummings (1894/1962), he was born in Massachusetts, to indulgent parents who encouraged him to develop his creative gifts. In 1917 he volunteered to serve in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance group in France. At the end of the First World War, he went to Paris to study art. …

JOHN SINGER SARGENT 1/3 – American origins, but Italian election, John Singer Sargent remained throughout his life tied to Italy, where he returned often and always symbolized for him a source of inspiration for his pictorial fantasies. In a time when the art world focused, in turn, on Impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism, Sargent practiced his own form of Realism. To …

On the West Hills of Long Island (New York), he was born 1819, on May day. His father was a carpenter and his mother barely literate that gave him unconditional love. At the age of eleven Walt Whitman was withdrawn from public school, to help support his family. At the age of twelve he fell in love with the written …

As a result of life of solitude, she was able to focus on her world more sharply than other authors of her time. She (the second daughter of Edward and Emily Norcross Dickinson), was born on December 10, 1830 in Massachusetts, into the quiet community of Amherst. Emily and her sisters nurtured in a quiet family, when always her mother …

He wrote poems whose philosophical dimensions transcend any region. Although his verse forms are traditional, he was a pioneer in the interplay of rhythm and meter. Robert Frost, born San Francisco (Mar. 26, 1874), and dead Boston (Jan. 29, 1963). At the age of 38, he sold the farm moving with his family to England, where he could devote himself …