A.S. Byatt Quote
Ls the Conjugial Angel stoneThat here he stands with heavy headThe backward-looking pillared deadInert, moss-covered, aIl alone?The Holy Ghost trawls ln the Void,With fleshly Sophy on His HookThe Sons of God crowd round to lookAt plumpy limbs to be enjoyedThe Greater Man casts out the lineWith dangling Sophy as the lureWho howls around the Heavens' colureTo clasp the Human Form DivineRose-petals fall from fallen hairThat in the clay is redolentOf liquid oozings and the scentOf the dark Pit, the Beastly lairAnd is my Love become the beastThat was, and is not, and yet is,Who stretches scarlet holes to kissAnd clasps with claws the fleshly feastSweet Rosamund, adult'rous RoseMay lie inside her urn and stinkWhlle Alfred's tears tum into inkAnd drop into her quelque-choseThe Angel spreads his golden wingsAnd raises high his golden cockAnd man and wife together lockInto one corpse that moans and sings
Ls the Conjugial Angel stoneThat here he stands with heavy headThe backward-looking pillared deadInert, moss-covered, aIl alone?The Holy Ghost trawls ln the Void,With fleshly Sophy on His HookThe Sons of God crowd round to lookAt plumpy limbs to be enjoyedThe Greater Man casts out the lineWith dangling Sophy as the lureWho howls around the Heavens' colureTo clasp the Human Form DivineRose-petals fall from fallen hairThat in the clay is redolentOf liquid oozings and the scentOf the dark Pit, the Beastly lairAnd is my Love become the beastThat was, and is not, and yet is,Who stretches scarlet holes to kissAnd clasps with claws the fleshly feastSweet Rosamund, adult'rous RoseMay lie inside her urn and stinkWhlle Alfred's tears tum into inkAnd drop into her quelque-choseThe Angel spreads his golden wingsAnd raises high his golden cockAnd man and wife together lockInto one corpse that moans and sings
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About A.S. Byatt
After attending the University of Cambridge, she married in 1959 and moved to Durham. It was during Byatt's time at university that she began working on her first two novels, subsequently published by Chatto & Windus as Shadow of a Sun (1964; reprinted in 1991 with its originally intended title, The Shadow of the Sun) and The Game (1967). Byatt took a teaching job in 1972 to help pay for the education of her son. In the same week she accepted, a drunk driver killed her son as he walked home from school. He was 11 years of age. Byatt spent a symbolic 11 years teaching, then began full-time writing in 1983. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) was the first of The Quartet, a tetralogy of novels that continued with Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002).
Byatt's novel Possession: A Romance received the 1990 Booker Prize, while her short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994) received the 1995 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Her novel The Children's Book was shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize and won the 2010 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her critical work includes two studies of Dame Iris Murdoch (who was a friend and mentor), Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976). Her other critical studies include Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970) and Portraits in Fiction (2001).
Byatt was awarded the Shakespeare Prize in 2002, the Erasmus Prize in 2016, the Park Kyong-ni Prize in 2017 and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in 2018. She was mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.