CHAPTER SIX
Make It New
Ezra Pound and the Lost Generation
London, 1908 — The American Arrives
In February 1908, a twenty-two-year-old from Idaho arrived in Europe with light luggage, a manuscript of poems that had been rejected...
CHAPTER FIVE
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran
Bsharri
He was born on 6 January 1883, in the village of Bsharri, high in the mountains of what is now Lebanon — then part of the Ottoman Empire's Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate,...
CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet Who Learned to See
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that...
CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
RODIN And His Poets
CHAPTER ONE - The Man Who Made Stone Breathe
Auguste Rodin
Paris, 1840
He was born into a Paris that still smelled of coal smoke and river mud, in a city that had...
The Art of Camembert
“Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!”
Michael Leunig
It was over half a century ago, 1966...