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It was a Blakean slip.

Ah, I see, Milton's satan I meant, smartarse!

Eh?

Who wrote this? The second conclusion is Tennyson's Ulysses, which apparently he took from Dante, and references Satan's Milton. He can't go back to a 'normal' life after all he's been through.

Some classic fruity 'oh!'s for @luka in these.

Gongora is arguably the most difficult poet of all time, the height of baroque literature, and amazing but it took me weeks of reading with a dictionary and making notes to get through about half of his masterpiece Soledades. Super Advanced Level, not for casual reading. Quevedo not much easier...

That's your 17th century Golden Age Spanish religious and mystical poetic tradition right there in those 4 poems, never been surpassed. If you get into them and are feeling confident, you could go back a bit further and try Manrique's Coplas por la muerte de su padre, which is amazing, but...

San Juan de la Cruz - Llama de Amor Viva ¡Oh llama de amor viva, que tiernamente hieres de mi alma en el más profundo centro! Pues ya no eres esquiva, acaba ya, si quieres; ¡rompe la tela de este dulce encuentro! Oh regalada llaga! ¡Oh mano blanda! ¡Oh toque delicado, que a vida eterna sabe, y...

San Juan de la Cruz - Noche oscura del alma En una noche oscura, con ansias en amores inflamada ¡oh dichosa ventura! salí sin ser notada, estando ya mi casa sosegada. A oscuras y segura, por la secreta escala, disfrazada, ¡oh dichosa ventura! a oscuras y en celada, estando ya mi casa sosegada...

Santa Teresa- Vivo sin vivir en mí Vivo sin vivir en mí, y de tal manera espero, que muero porque no muero. Vivo ya fuera de mí después que muero de amor; porque vivo en el Señor, que me quiso para sí; cuando el corazón le di puse en él este letrero: que muero porque no muero. Esta divina...

@sus Fray Luis de León: Canción de la vida solitaria ¡Qué descansada vida la del que huye el mundanal ruïdo, y sigue la escondida senda, por donde han ido los pocos sabios que en el mundo han sido! Que no le enturbia el pecho de los soberbios grandes el estado, ni del dorado techo se admira...

Fuck off Luka

The fact there are two Spanish verbs for 'to be' - 'ser' and 'estar' - is fascinating to me (I still occasionally get them mixed up after all these years), and Jorge Guillen plays with it a lot in his poems, following pholosopher José Ortega y Gasset's formulation: Ser - being Estar - being...

Yeah of course, that's a list of books that I read last year. I love him, he's the first Spanish poet I started reading, after Lorca, and I keep coming back to the Rimas - that's a perfect book, the absolute foundation of modern Spanish poetry. Everyone who came after him owes him something...

Yeah, I enjoyed that. Never heard of him before.

Make your choice, adventurous stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had.

I'm told you'd probably need to go to Jerez to see an authentic Flamenco session nowadays, (at least of the cante jondo type, the deepest form) - they barely exist even in Sevilla. Most of the shows everywhere else are for tourists. The saeta that they sing in the semana santa processions is a...

Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.

This was about 30 minutes walk from where I live on Thursday night/Friday morning - the "madrugada". I was sat on my balcony drinking wine but I could smell the incense from there. It is amazing, but seeing it once is enough for me.

I've just been enjoying how quiet it is in the barrio this week cos everyone's in the town centre watching the pasos. The scale of it in Sevilla is insane, a thousand times bigger and more grand than anywhere else in Spain, but I can't handle being in those crowds anymore, it's too much.