The Work of Poetry

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature. -Jean Cocteau, author and painter (1889-1963)

A Lifetime of Reading

Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson
Homer's Illiad and Odyssey
Plato - selected works
Aristitle - Ethics & Politics
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Virgil - The Aeneid
St. Augustine - Confessions
Shakespeare - complete works
Henrik Ibsen - plays
George Bernard Shaw - plays
Daniel Defoe - Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens - too many to count
Aldous Huxley - essays & novels
Voltaire
Edgar Allen Poe
Mark Twain
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Crime and Punishment
Heorge Orwell - Animal Farm
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Alice walker - The color Purple
Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl
Miguel Cervantes - Don Quixote
Ernest Hemingway - The Old Man and the Sea
Ralph Ellison - Invisible Man
Ken Kesey - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
John Locke
David Hume
Thomas Hobbs
John Stuart Mill
Reinholdt Nietzsche
Nicolo Machiavelli
rene Descartes
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Jeanne Jacques rousseau
Blaise Pascal
Poets: Donne, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Eliot, Frost, Auden, Wilde, Whitman, Blake, Browning, Yeats