Plus ca change

 Whereas so much of the terminology of medieval history and criticism is the invention of the eighteenth century, the terminology of troubadour poetry is wholly contemporary. The worldly, witty, and self-conscious verse was discussed and evaluated by its practitioners and their circles. Poets wrote verses criticizing and satirizing each other and theorizing about their own poetry. Literary controversy developed, with songs exchanged like challenges. Should poetry be clear and accessible, easy to understand, and social in nature (trobar leu), as in the verses of Bernart de Ventadorn and Raimon de Miraval, or should it be personal, allusive, and difficult, making use of colored words with overtones and nuances, like the poetry of Arnaut Daniel (trobar clus)? Macabru boasted that he had written poems he himself could not understand.

- from The Knight in History, 56. 

Name Ideas

Rhinelander Waldo, NYC Police Commissioner in 1911

Chidiock Tichborne, Elizabethan Poet

Barnabe Googe, another Elizabethan Poet

Mountstuart Elphingstone, Victorian colonial viceroy

Tenche Coxe, American colonial writer

Elmo Zumwalt, American admiral 

Hate-Evil Hall, early American quaker

Pringle Stokes, 19th-century British naval officer

America

 America is not a lie; it is a disappointment.

- Samuel Huntington

Before pleasure has a chance

Analysis and understanding heighten appreciation. Sometimes, however, they obtrude: trying to force knowledge before pleasure has a chance. Pointing this out is not sentimental or anti-intellectual; on the contrary, the goal should be to encourage intellectual precision by putting it in a stringent, fitting relation to the actual experience of the poem. Well-meaning teaching can muddle that process by leaving out the experience. 

- Robert Pinsky, from Essential Pleasures, 4.