What is Cold Pastoral?
Cold Pastoral is a “read along” newsletter, meaning each week we discuss a section of a book (as well as a poem), and invite you to read along. Think of it as a “book club outside of time” that examines works from the past and that you may access at any point in the future.
Through this newsletter, we have examined the following works:
“The Robbers” a play by Friedrich Schiller.
An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Volume II, by William Godwin.
“The Book of Job” by God (allegedly)
The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner
“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” by an unknown poet.
"The Ideal and Life" by Friedrich Schiller
“Use and Abuse of History for Life” by Friedrich Nietzsche
Heaven & Hell by Emmanuel Swedenborg
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
"The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" by William Blake
Life of a Good-for-nothing by Joseph Von Eichendorff
Additionally, we have contemplated the following poems:
“Ode to a Grecian Urn” by John Keats (after which this newsletter is named)
“To the Nightingale” by Anne Finch
“A Supper of Madame de Brinvilliers” by Elizabeth Letitia Landon
“The Laboratory” by Robert Browning
“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Gill Scott-Heron
“Lainyappe” by Lola Ridge
“Hope is the thing with feathers…” by Emily Dickinson
“Ode to a Nightingale” by John Keats
“To the Fringed Gentian” by William Cullen Bryant
“The Atheist Dreams of Heaven” by Frank Huyler
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot
“Vanitas, vanitatum vanitas” by Goethe
“Cuchulain Comforted” by W.B. Yeats
“His House” by Robert Lowell
“At My Best” by John Rodriguez
“Fringed Gentian” by Emily Dickinson
“Same, Difference” by Robert Crawford
“Solitary Tree” by Selin Mutlucan
“Oh, come to me in dreams, my love!” by Mary Shelley
“Blue Moon” by Minnie Bruce Pratt
“Cupid and Psyche” by Letitia Elizabeth Landon
“King’s Valley” by Devon Walker-Figueroa
“Cold Blooded Creatures” by Elinor Wylie
“Angel” by Angela Jackson
“Death of a Naturalist” by Seamus Heany
“Late Ripeness” by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass (translator)
“Oedipus at Colonus” by W.B. Yeats (translator)
“Long, too long America” by Walt Whitman
“First Dream” by C.S. Giscombe
“Hymn of Pan” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
“The Abyss” by Charles Baudelaire
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