Two fine blogs: First Known When Lost and The Lectern

I was out looking for information about John Cowper Powys and came across two websites that I thought were worth sharing.

One of them, First Known When Lost, is a wonderful hybrid put together by Stephen Pentz, apparently a retired attorney. Each post contains a poem, either famous or obscure, along with a painting or a photograph, and finally a few of Pentz's thoughts.

The site has a casual, friendly feel, but there is an enormous amount of knowledge, lightly-worn, in each post, particularly about Larkin and the other English poets of the first half of the 20th century.

I can't imagine this sort of work existing without the Internet, so it's nice to see the medium starting to produce its own worthwhile forms. For the curious, this is the Powys post that I first came across. I didn't even know he wrote poetry before.

The next site is The Lectern, which contains an essay about The Brazen Head, one of Powys's little read (and apparently even weirder than usual) late novels. Whoever writes The Lectern is a Dostoevsky obsessive, so many of the posts relate to him, but the author also produces fine essays and appreciations of other writers along the way, while gathering together some fascinating quotes. Much worth reading.