Category: Literature

Note: Andy Newman will be teaching Creative Writing: Awakening Wonder with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Bradbury this summer for Kepler. Class begins June 29. This essay first appeared June 23, 2006, at National Review Online. Every summer I never fail to take my paperback copy of Dandelion Wine down from the shelf. I say this not to brag, not to be that front-row kid who dashed through the school’s approved summer reading list in the first weeks …

Note: Andy Newman will be teaching Creative Writing: Awakening Wonder with Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Bradbury this summer for Kepler. Class begins June 29. “Read William Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ for tomorrow,” many a teacher in many a classroom has said over the years, though, if reports from the front-lines with incoming college freshmen are to believed, “many” is quickly becoming “a handful.” [1] Although numerous reasons could be cited for this decline in …

There is a certain pleasure that is derived from reading the classics that cannot be experienced by reading contemporary literature. That is not to assert a kind of chronological snobbery that says older literature is automatically better literature. There is plenty of older literature that has been forgotten or ignored because it lacked the peculiar qualities inherent in a classic. In the same way, it is also true there is some promising contemporary literature possessing …