Jane Austen: Love is her theme; love and money, and the chase.

Leo Tolstoy: No author ever made more realistic characters.

Dostoevsky: Nietzsche was his muse, and God.

Charles Dickens: Quirky, but not awful; verbose, but not philosophical.

T. S. Eliot: His poems are about a Sociopathic Professor; or rather, the model tenure of academia.

Bulfinch: The best way to know mythology, is to read it from him first.

Shakespeare: A man whose entire life is reflected in his plays.

C. S. Lewis: He was the greatest apologist.

Lewis Carroll: He wrote proper nonsense.

Grimm's Brothers: Fortune is their theme, and how to win or lose it.

Hans Christian Andersen: Life's absurdity and injustice marks his pages, how the good guy doesn't always win, but sometimes the bad guy does. A humble lesson.

Ray Bradbury: He wrote the addictive substance that gets someone onto reading.

Baron Byron: The bad boy of poetry, with a tender heart.

Keats: Wrote about bar maids and stable girls who he deflowered while drinking beer.

Earnest Hemingway: A true man.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: A dandy filled with love, but who knows for whom?

Frank Herbert: Wrote on Space Religions, and convincingly made a fable on why not to gain the world.

Isaac Asimov: Wrote on Space Empires and their Social Sciences convincingly.

John Bunyan: A man who lived a life as tumultuous as Christian's.

William Wordsworth: The great Philosopher.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Truly, his muse was always a menage a trois with his wife and paramour.

Mark Twain: He hated fiction, but wrote a whole lot of it.

George Orwell: Knew what he was talking about, and wrote extensively on what to look out for.

Aldous Huxley: Wrote what he thought was a Utopian Novel, but it shocked so many people, it was called a "Dystopia."

Ayn Rand: Knowledgeable about art, but her characters were sociopaths.

Emily Dickensen: The beautiful mind of a beautiful agnostic.

Harper Lee: A voice crying in the wilderness these days, and probably what kids need to hear.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Told us what Russia really was, but also didn't like America, either.

John Steinbeck: Wise, but boring; though still wise, and should absolutely be read.

Jules Verne: Just about the only thing I like from him, is his submarine.

Robert Frost: A man who didn't like to work, but also wrote a bunch about it.

Johnathan Swift: He spoke realpolitik, and only gets more interesting as he progresses.

G. K. Chesterton: A thinking man's Christian.

John Milton: Wrote the best proof of God's existence, but nobody reads that far.

Seamus Heaney: A true logo centric genius.

Karl Marx: Wrong about his solution, but right in his diagnosis.

Walt Whitman: Deceptively simple.

Aesop: Stories with big metaphors.

Eric Hoffer: A vaccine against social movements.

Montaigne: Wrote about everything, and we like to think he shows us people were immoral all along: but consider, that was as bad as society got back then.

Ovid: A Roman who indulged in his culture's licenses.

Horace: A Roman who documented the beginning of his country's fall.

Confucius: A wise sage.

Mencius: An even wiser sage.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Shows the dirty little secrets of back then, but also had a merry heart.

Sitting at the twin's birthday
You calculate the years instantly.
Listening to you was a charm.
You hated avocado, but were so enthused
By your wife's choice guacamole 
That I had thought you loved it...
But you don't. You just love her.
 

There is a war between Christendom
And Mundium. Such a war, that Pious
Christians walk with their masks
To show they're happy, or they're sad.
They walk with shallow affect,
And false piety. They are against Goethe
And against singing a vulgar Sea Shanty
And against Saint Nicolas.
For the Saint leaves a nugget of Gold
He is not real... so we do not venerate him.
Or the Sea Shanty is vulgar, and not praising God.
Or Goethe talks of witchcraft and one can't have that.
No, to win the war, one must sing only Gospel Hymns
And read only Matthew Henry's Commentary
And venerate no saint, and never laude anyone
Except the deeds of Paul.
That is how we win the war,
But before we went to battle
Zion's strongholds were broken.
That was not where the battle lines should have set.

I have noticed, one day, people are like birds
As they sing their songs to one another.
There is not much in what they say,
Beside the melodies of their say,
And I realized, not all conversation
Needs to be philosophy.
For in that peace, they spoke
Like a bird singing, all things
Spoken before, and again,
And a thousand million times
No new or original thought.
But, there was love.

Compared to your country
Our country looks like paradise.
Thirty years ago, our country was,
But it slowly became more like yours.
To which, you cannot recognize it,
But I can. Please understand.
Read the Curse in Deuteronomy
It will become clear what is happening
To my once Great Nation.

The villager took the tiger's tooth
Which he slew in mortal combat.
Wore around his neck, he showed
That he had taken his tribe's life
Into his own hands, and slew
The tiger. With spear and stone knife
The tiger eyed him raw, upon the weeds
And came out, with claws wide
And fierce, so they flew down, 
As the tiger's rage leapt for the neck.
The villager shafted his spear
At the boney chest of the Tiger
And the cat juked back. Another slash
The tiger lunged forward, caught
The man on the cheek, ripping a gash
That fissured and gushed in three dimensional
Flesh. But he was quick, and took his blade
Made of flint, and dug it into the tiger's
Loins, cutting guts out with a quick strike.
Both were wounded upon the sand
With the vines and trees grown around.
The man took his spear, with blood rushing
Down his serrated face, hanging limp in bloody flesh.
He struck the tiger in the neck, for it was wounded
Fatally and slew the beast. There the tiger lay
And he ripped out its canine tooth.

Later, the man looked upon the tiger's tooth
His face balmed with aloe and salt.
It took a few months to heal,
But he wore that tiger's tooth around his neck.

There came into his village a man
White as a ghost, and with a musket.
He looked at the fangs, and there were those eyes.
Lustful, he maligned all the women
And made bastard children.
He did not respect whether they had married or were virgins.
No, he took them, lustfully, and ate lots of food.
For his science, he was greater,
With musket... He was superior in every way.
His muscles bulged from food,
His brain swelled from nutrition,
His armor was light, but unable to be pierced.
He was more intelligent than the villager
More savage with his nobility.
More screwed with his lust which he satiated
On the beautiful women of his tribe;
Without respect to marriage, without respect to virginity.
He taught them his religion of science and materialism
And the women began to despise marriage
And divorce men. The villager had no science
But the man did, with his thundering musket
And his iron scales. And he taught them their ways
Of adultery, how pleasure was more important than love.

The villager played with his tiger tooth,
And finally went to arms against the newcomer,
Whom he saw his predatory canines
And reptilian affect.
The battle was swift.

Out came the white man's sabre,
Unlike anything he had seen before
And his flint knife and spear was broken
By the metal armor, and cut down upon his shoulder
He was wounded, so his face hung
His cheekbones shattered.
He was dead.

An apology I make for my science
Of art and letter, called Poesy keen:
When I read the Eastern Sages
I see great discourse, and encouragement
To learn. When I see Pythagoras, 
I see also, a meeting of the minds.
When I see Christ, I see a premier philosopher.
When I read Keats talking of the billow
Of a foam on his beer, in Spencer's Dedication
I understand it to be light praise, not high.
Thus, I have light praise for you.

It is true, capricious scholars, with doubtful ability
Do glean from knowledge tares instead of wheat.
But, it is doubly so, that Arts and Sciences
Are what make our world good.
For, you said, "There can be no luxury without them."
Yes... indeed... I want luxury, but also work.
Man is more than sinew and flesh for working in a Potter's Field.
I want morality and art and sciences;---
Who could imagine such a thing?
Well I can, and that is why there ought to be poetry.
For the worker, coming home from the field
Then sits in his study, and reads a line or two
Or watches a program, or listens to a score
Or gazes upon a beautiful painting and muses on the artist's intent.
This is a good life, which only the vilest fool would be against.

Is it desire? Is desire what makes purpose?
Is it knowledge? Does the ability to know, make it?
Is it love, joy, peace, flourishing, health, wealth, friendship?
Is it to see and know God?
Is it to obtain eternal life in a world where suffering does not exist?
Is it a wife, kids, husband, and filial honor?
Is it survival?
Is it pleasure?
Is it faith?
Is it reason?

I listened to the note, so holy and pure
And then I had the intrusive knowledge
Of what an Atheist feels when they hear it.
Deafly does the music rise, and all is empty.
Then, I felt my own feeling, so full and pure.
I realized why religion is good, and why more
Is needed. For if deafly do our prayers go up
The soul of man is burdened with nothing.
No hope, not in life, nor hereafter.
The emptiness I felt, was truly empty.
And feeling the melody with faith, it was truly full.