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Students who like to complain about the complexities of the English language might enjoy this book about English. The review makes it sound interesting. It's going on my to-read list.

"A Muse of Fire" from the BBC/PBS documentary The Story of English examines the number of words coined by Shakespeare.

The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

We just don't have a good gender-neutral pronoun in English -- one of my frustrations with the language.

Orwell's advice to writers.

Very cool podcast with some useful stuff for English class, too.

This blog examines how Shakespeare's language permeates our own.

A lasting online resource and a companion project for Shakespeare in American Life, a radio documentary produced by Richard Paul and narrated by Sam Waterston, airing on Public Radio International (PRI) stations beginning in April 2007.

Paste compiles a list of some of literature's biggest jerks. You know you love to hate them.

Grand Theft Auto: The Emily Dickinson Edition. This cartoon from xkcd made me laugh. Enjoy!

Shakespeare meets Craigslist.

"Studio 360 explores F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and finds out how this compact novel became the great American story of our age. Novelist Jonathan Franzen tells Kurt Andersen why he still reads it every year or two, and writer Patricia Hampl explains why its lightness is deceptive. We'll drive around the tony Long Island suburbs where Gatsby was set, and we'll hear from Andrew Lauren about his film G, which sets Gatsby among the hip-hop moguls. And Azar Nafisi describes the power of teaching the book to university students in Tehran. Readings come courtesy of Scott Shepherd, an actor who sometimes performs the entire book from memory."

Great tutorial handouts from Bucks County Community College.

Anglo-Saxon poems translated and read out loud by folks like Seamus Heaney and Billy Collins.

E-Text of Coleridge's poem "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

For perusal later: looks interesting.

This Web site gives you a variety of ways to read Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," including e-text, a chapter a day, RSS, zip files of the whole book, and mp3's.

This Web site has some beautiful photographs, including aerial photos, of Tintern Abbey so you can visualize the poem's setting.

A Web site devoted to William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."