sweet t:

I have just finished teach iambic pentameter to tired college students, and honestly, I feel as though I have scaled a mountain.  A really big mountain.  Everyone thinks writers must have been English majors, which isn’t true.  Writing = writing.  Literature = reading.  Of course, there’s overlap.  Of course.  Still, I have always felt sort of insecure about Shakespeare and Spenser, and don’t even get me started on Milton.  Or Dante.  So getting the iambs and meter and feet across felt fantastic, but my favorite part of the lesson was talking about that oh so famous stalker Petrarch and his love for the fair-footed Laura, the way he spied her at Mass, on Good Friday, then wrote her all those poems.  Who was she?  What moved him so?  And everyone knows (well Catholics do anyway..) that Good Friday Mass is the deadliest, so was poor Francesco just bored?  Or was she something special?  Either way, the man wrote 365 little songs (sonnets) to Laura.  And that is something I could talk about for hours.