Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

Who was May Herschel Clarke?

It started with a tweet from yesterday morning: So off to google where I found the same inaccurate one-line biography pretty much everywhere, including Wikipedia.  May Herschel-Clarke (1850–1950) was an English poet. She is chiefly known today for her Anti-War poems Nothing to Report and The Mother, the latter of which was published in 1917 as a direct response to Rupert Brooke‘s famous poem The Soldier.…

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Art, Poetry, RattleBag and Rhubarb, WW1

Marching Men

Literary reputations come and go, rise and fall like food fads and fashion. Marjorie Pickthall – once so highly regarded that she was considered the best Canadian poet of her generation – is now mostly forgotten. Pickthall was something of a child prodigy. At 15, she sold her short story “Two-Ears” – about an Iroquois boy who wants to prove himself a…

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