This summer marks the 200th anniversary of the appearance in print of William Wordsworth’s The White Doe of Rylstone; or, The Fate of the Nortons. Wordsworth wrote this long narrative poem during the winter of 1807-1808, inspired by a visit to Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire which he and his sister made the previous summer. The …
June 13 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). The selection for June’s Victorian Book of the Month is one of his most significant early poetry collections, The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). It includes such famous poems as “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” …
Special Collections’ current exhibit, The Great War: A Centennial Remembrance, features some of the novels and poetry produced during and after the First World War. This month marks the centennial of the war’s first famous collections of poetry, Rupert Brooke’s 1914 & Other Poems. Brooke wrote the sonnets of 1914 in December of that year …
Floriology, also called flower language or flower symbolism, was popular during the Victorian period. Sentiments were attached to specific varieties and colors of flowers, so that giving or wearing flowers was a way to send a symbolic message. A number of books on the flower language were published throughout the Victorian period. Some even included …
February’s Victorian Book of the Month is The Quiver of Love, published in 1876 by Marcus Ward & Co. Pictorial greeting cards for a variety of holidays came into fashion during the 1870s, and the Marcus Ward firm was one of the most prolific publishers of such cards in the British Isles. Kate Greenaway and …
In conjunction with the English Department symposium Illuminating the Word: the Devotional Tradition and the Future of Poetry, Special Collections is displaying the work of major poets working in the genre of religious poetry. Highlights include first editions of poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot, as well as rare editions of …
November’s Victorian Book of the Month is Samuel Collinson’s poetry collection Autumn Leaves (1869). Collinson was a minor 19th century poet who made his career as a chemist (or pharmacist) in the East Midlands city of Nottingham. Autumn Leaves and his other book of poetry, Richard’s Tower: an Idyll of Nottingham Castle (1876), were both …
Two hundred years ago, on Feb. 1, 1814, Lord Byron’s The Corsair was published. Byron was already a famous poet, and The Corsair built on the success of previously-published work like The Bride of Abydos and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. But one of the biggest selling points for The Corsair was Byron’s declaration in the preface …
Here are some of the newest additions of critical works to the Rowe Collection of William Wordsworth. And check out the new LibGuide for the Rowe Collection at http://guides.lib.byu.edu/speccoll/wordsworth. Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Laura Dabundo, The Marriage of Faith: Christianity in Jane Austen and William …
Giving the gift of books this Christmas? You’re a part of a centuries-long tradition. Publishers have been marketing books especially for Christmas shopping and giving for centuries – anthologies of poetry and short stories were especially popular gift books in the 18th and 19th centuries. One of Special Collections’ earliest examples of a Christmas gift …