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Hello, I'm Jack Wilson. Welcome to the History of Literature.

Okay, here we go. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. I'm glad you've joined me today.

And what can I say? People sometimes I hit a wall and there's nothing to do, but just keep going and break through that wall.

Ideally, it's one of those fake walls that actors get to charge through and sometimes it's not. It's solid brick.

And you come through it, but only at a great expense.

Dizzy from bashing your skull again, something that did not move.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, as the poet said, although the poet didn't actually say that.

As a rabbi Burns, our old Scottish friend who was speaking in his particular language and he said the best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft ugly.

I'm okay with the updated version, which gets at the meaning and is a nifty little phrase, what are these best plans of mine?

Best laid plans of mine that have gone awry, my schedule, my scheduled episodes, I was hit by some kind of heaviness.

Recently, my brick wall that I had to push through call it a post pandemic pushing through, although we're still in the pandemic globally.

But we've gotten out of the house now here where I am and I'm easing back to life to work, to life to all that and some of it is wonderful and the bigger part of it fills me with dread.

And so I turn to a poet, one of my old standbys, Mr. William Wordsworth, to help me make sense of it and I'm going to postpone our look at Tristram Shandy and Lauren Stern and the shot out poor mishado.

He always gets postponed, but we have the conversation all ready to go.

We just need to put a little context around it and then we'll get that episode out to all of you.

I know our Brazilian friends are eagerly waiting.

First, we need to dig into this poem of Wordsworth's which I needed and I'm glad to share.

The world is too much with us. Maybe you're familiar with it. It's often anthologized, often listed among Wordsworth's best, best poems in English.

In fact, a much loved poem. It's all about this feeling.

Ah, this feeling I have now. I read a lot of poems, actually, and I read a lot looking for help.

I went to Haiku. I went to Elizabeth Bishop. I went all over the place searching and seeking, trying to find something that would calm me down and ease my troubled waters.

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