LAS LENGUAS INGLESA Y ESPAÑOLA de Delfín Carbonell

Unwittingly, a kind Instagram fellow-user has reminded me of my youth and my studies in English Lit, and the poetry I used to memorize. Those who learn poetry by heart belong to bygone times, to "days that are no more", but I am a pigheaded, stubborn old teacher, and insist on recommending language students to commit poetry to memory. Sooner than later this habit will stand them in good stead. William Wordsworth has a poem I have known by heart for over a century. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud : I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance. The waves beside them danced; but they Out-did the sparkling waves in glee: A p...

May I introduce you to "Roll the Dice", a poem by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)? You can both Google him and this poem, and apply what he expresses there to your language studies, and to your life in general.  If you are going to try, go all the way, go all the way, go all the way...    

Jorie Graham, a trilingual American poet, says that the English language is better for poetry than the Romance Languages. (watch her video on YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5zEuks2DmI .) She is trilingual, having been brought up in Italian, then in French and finally came to the US, and writes her poetry in English. Joseph Conrad said that he wrote in English because "it is so plastic." He spoke with a thick Polish accent but of all languages he spoke he preferred English. Vladimir Nabokov , the Russian novelist, attained his success with Lolita, the novel he wrote in English. Read it and you will detect the artful arrangement of words he mastered in his English prose. I cannot judge his Russian. Arthur Koestler spoke Hungarian, Russian, French, Spanish, German and English, the language he ended up using in his later writings. And so many others. This is a fascinating subject and I have no answer as to why so many good writers chose English as the language t...