What Is Art?
This isn't an essay. But it isn't a manifesto either. A manifesto is something one writes before one has started. An essay is something...
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By John Martin
- Jan 6
- 1 min
Landing
As soft as snowdrops snowflakes settle; more soft than petals, gently fall… Less shy than snowdrops snow drops all its inhibitions… Cold...
By John Martin
- Dec 7, 2022
- 1 min
Nudism in England
The sun's a prude: it turns its eye away at night, and only looks on us by day to see if we are doing what we should. Yet how it blushes...
By John H. B. Martin
- Oct 13, 2022
- 8 min
Grace and Flavour: A Response to C.S. Lewis's "Christianity & Culture"
In a previous essay (De Gustibus (Et Pulchritudinis) I argued that Beauty is absolute and not relative, and is therefore not merely a...
John H. B. Martin
- Aug 17, 2022
- 25 min
The Politics of Intimacy
"So intimate this Chopin that I think his soul Should be resurrected only among friends Some two or three, who will not touch the bloom...
John H. B. Martin
- Jul 15, 2022
- 1 min
Song of the Somme
(1st July - 18th November, 1916) to commemorate an omniversary May Seamus Heaney drown in his own mud! His way of writing isn't what I...
John H. B. Martin
- Jun 2, 2022
- 1 min
Danaë
We have been promised gold like this before … But, now it glows on trees, we can't ignore it. One day we'll harvest it … Or mine it,...
By John H. B. Martin
- Apr 20, 2022
- 14 min
Beyond the Lines: Shakespeare's ''Phoenix and the Turtle''
This is a poem I have known and loved for as long as I can remember. It has exerted a charm and fascination for me simply by virtue of...
By John H. B. Martin
- Mar 23, 2022
- 2 min
An Artist & Other Poems
An Artist "That man's silences were marvellous to listen to." — Thomas Hardy "Under The Greenwood Tree." I "Out of pure moonshine have I...
By John H. B. Martin
- Feb 10, 2022
- 1 min
Les Sylphides & Other Poetry
from a Photograph Flesh longed, at last, to be so impregnated and so inseminated, like a flower is pollinated by the breeze … (Or bees)....
By John H. B. Martin
- Nov 6, 2021
- 26 min
De Gustibus (Et Pulchristudinis)
I remembers once leafing through a volume of Allen Ginsberg's poems and coming across one poem with the word “butterfly” in it and...
John H. B. Martin
- Jul 24, 2021
- 1 min
The Portrait & Other Poems
The Portrait Imitated from the late sixteenth century A presence is the absence of an absence and therefore is a kind of absence too; so,...
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