The Daily Port of Call: February 5, 2014

Photo by Alexander Lvov/bigstockphoto.com

Photo by Alexander Lvov/bigstockphoto.com

In today's Daily Port of Call, you’ll find a newly discovered fragment of Jane Austen’s writing, life lessons everyone can learn from beloved children’s books, and the continuing importance of poetry.

Museum curators at Jane Austen’s House Museum at Chawton found a fragment of the author's handwriting in a book. "Men may get into a habit of repeating the words of our Prayers by rote, perhaps without thoroughly understanding—certainly without thoroughly feeling their full force & meaning."

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We can all learn from children's books. Here are life lessons that everyone can use. They include, everybody has bad hair days.

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U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey discusses the continuing importance of poetry. “I see now, in our contemporary moment, that it is more necessary than ever to receive the gifts that poetry offers. Each day we are faced with sound bites and catchphrases deadening and trivializing our language, the widening gulf of our ideological differences eroding civil discourse and our ability to truly communicate with each other, to hear each other. For all of that, poetry is the corrective, the sacred language that allows us to connect across time and space, across all the things in everyday life that separate us and would destroy us.”

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