E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died 150 years ago today.  At the time of her death she was the most famous woman poet in the English language, and perhaps the most popular, period.  It might be instructive to all of us, today, Picador poets on down to the smallest of small presses, to keep that in mind, because in 150 years - in 2161, the middle of the 22nd century - how shall our reputations fare?  Bluntly, no one really reads even Mrs. Browning anymore, in any depth, except for students of her work, academics, and the readers who come across her most famous sonnets, in mass market anthologies.  There is hardly a craze.  Christina Rossetti and Dickinson have fared better.  And yet, her legend, and her name, have endured.  In today's Evening Standard  Michael Meredith  defends her husband from slurs he killed her (and does so handily).  How does time render us humble?  Let me count the ways.

The media is anniversary mad, as we know.  This is the 5th anniversary of Eyewear .  2010 is also the 50th anniversary of 1960 - so get ready for a half-century reappraisal, this decade, of everything Sixties related. In terms of literature, here are some classics (well, they are now if we are still talking about them and reading them) whose 50th anniversary 2010 is: Green Eggs and Ham; The Violent Bear It Away; The Country Girls; To Kill A Mockingbird; A Canticle for Leibowitz ; and my favourite children's book, after The Wind in the Willows , The Weirdstone of Brisingamen , a work of genius.  It is also the 50th anniversary of the death of Camus . In terms of poetry, it is now 50 years since some of these major publications: Curnow 's The Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse ; AJM Smith 's Oxford Book of Canadian Verse ; The New American Poetry 1945-1960 edited by Donald M Allen (perhaps the most influential anthology of the last half-century); Shapiro 's In Defen...