Birthdays
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and
printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a
seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic
Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to
its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language". His
visual artistry has led one contemporary art critic to proclaim him "far
and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".
Source of information - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blake
Nancy Freeman-Mitford, (1904–1973), an English novelist and biographer, one of
the Bright Young People on the London social scene in the inter-war years. She
is best remembered for her series of novels about upper-class life in England
and France, particularly the four published after 1945; but she also wrote four
well-received, well-researched popular biographies. She was one of the noted Mitford
sisters and the first to publicise the extraordinary family life of her very
English and very eccentric family, giving rise to a "Mitford
industry" which continues.
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ReplyDeleteNancy Freeman Mitford was an essayist in Noblesse Oblige (1956), which helped to popularise the "U", or upper-class, and "non-U" classification of linguistic usage and behaviour — although this is something she saw as a tease and she certainly never took seriously.
ReplyDeleteHer best known novels are:
Highland Fling (1931)
Christmas Pudding (1932)
Love in a Cold Climate (1949)
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/w/william_blake.html
ReplyDeleteit’s very interesting site which contains a lot of different Black's quotes...Some of them are funny, some of them are philosophical ones... Anyway they are worth reading:))
William Blake was born in London. I found one poem in which he described his native town.
ReplyDeleteLondon
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.
How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning church appals;
And the hapless soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down palace walls.
But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
As a writer and thinker Blake espoused the value of humanity and played a crucial role in developing our understanding of the 'sixth sense' of imagination. "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite", he said in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, influencing the writer Aldous Huxley and a certain LA rock band called The Doors among others.
ReplyDeleteHis image as a wild man of art, an outsider and dissenter, has boosted his appeal over the years, as have the facts of his birth and upbringing: the son of a hosier, who came from the wrong class to be an artist and trained instead as a humble engraver.
Superficially, London has changed a great deal since his day. But to his admirers, Blake's spirit still hovers in the streets and alleys and in the air. A guided walk regularly visits his haunts in central London, while a two-year project in Lambeth has created a series of Blake-inspired mosaics in a tunnel near the poet's former home in Hercules Road SE1.
John Bunyan (28 November 1628 – 31 August 1688) was an English Christian writer and preacher, who is well known for his book The Pilgrim's Progress. Though he became a non-conformist and member of an Independent church, and although he has been described both as a Baptist and as a Congregationalist, he himself preferred to be described simply as a Christian. He is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on August 30, and on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (US) on August 29. Some other Churches of the Anglican Communion, such as the Anglican Church of Australia, honour him on the day of his death (August 31) together with St Aidan of Lindisfarne.
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