Today, 10 December 2024, on the 200th anniversary of George MacDonald’s birth, a favorite author of mine who is considered one of the founders of modern fantasy literature, I am honored to announce that my poem “The Faery Wood” has won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for this year’s Brian Nisbet Poetry Award.

Today is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death.  On 19 April 1824, while fighting in support of the Greek War of Independence in Missolonghi, Byron died from a fever at the age of 36.  His death came before entering the fray, but he gave his life, and much of his wealth, to the Greek cause.

I am truly honored to have an essay about my poem “A Ride Through Faerie” published in Gramarye, the journal of the Chichester Centre for Fairy Tales, Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from the University of Chichester.

On 16 August 1822, two hundred years ago today, the funeral of Percy Bysshe Shelley was held upon “a magnificent extent” of sea-shore on the “blue and windless Mediterranean” near Viareggio, Italy.

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit’s bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar…

—Percy Bysshe Shelley, from the last stanza of Adonais (1821), his elegy on the death of John Keats

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood,
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d. See, here it is—
I hold it towards you.

—John Keats

I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave—thank God for the quiet grave—O! I can feel the cold earth upon me—the daisies growing over me—O for this quiet—it will be my first.

—John Keats, February 1821

I wish you could invent some means to make me at all happy without you. Every hour I am more and more concentrated in you…the fact is I cannot leave you, and shall never taste one minute’s content until it pleases chance to let me live with you for good…

—John Keats, August 1820

How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing, Love…Let me have another opportunity of years before me and I will not die without being remember’d.

—John Keats, March 1820

My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again—my Life seems to stop there—I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.

—John Keats, 13 October 1819

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.

—John Keats, 25 July 1819

But if you will fully love me, though there may be some fire, 'twill not be more than we can bear when moistened and bedewed with Pleasures.

—John Keats, 8 July 1819

I almost wish we were butterflies and liv’d but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.

—John Keats, 1 July 1819

Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,—that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live.

—Percy Bysshe Shelley

How horrid was the chance of slipping into the ground instead of into your arms—the difference is amazing, Love.

—John Keats