Christina Rosetti

Christina Rosetti is an awesome and influential Victorian poet. She was born in 1830 and died December 29th 1894.

Remember
Remember me when I am gone away,
         Gone far away into the silent land;
         When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
         You tell me of our future that you plann’d:
         Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
         And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
         For if the darkness and corruption leave
         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
         Than that you should remember and be sad.

Find out more about her and read some of her poems at Poetry Foundation. Hear some of her poetry in the 1950’s noir, Kiss Me Deadly.

 

 

 

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir was a French feminist writer and existentialist philosopher who was born in 1908 and died in 1986.

“The point is not for women simply to take power out of men’s hands, since that wouldn’t change anything about the world. It’s a question precisely of destroying that notion of power.”

Check out this interview with her from the Paris Review. Read The Second Sex at libcom.

 

 

John Polidori

John Polidori, the author of The Vampyre (1819), was born in 1795 and died in 1821. He was a physician and a writer.

“In many parts of Greece it is considered as a sort of punishment after death, for some heinous crime committed whilst in existence, that the deceased is not only doomed to vampyrise, but compelled to confine his infernal visitations solely to those beings he loved most while upon earth—those to whom he was bound by ties of kindred and affection.—A supposition alluded to in the “Giaour.”

Read The Vampyre here and listen here.