Hunter Wallace is an atavism, an Edwardian Renaissance Man in the 21st Century. Ivy Leaguer, MBA. Poet, musician, philosopher, photographer, painter, writer. He does not exist.
HW is devoted to reviving the Anglo-American poetic and writing heritage of the 17th-19th century, especially the Victorian and Edwardian traditions of verse. He is also for restoring the Stuarts to their rightful place as the kings and queens of Great Britain, amongst other quixotic causes.
In reality, HW is the direct descendant of Robert I, King of Scotland, and supports a free and independent Scotland and Wales.
Many of HW's ancestors have roles in the historic plays of Shakespeare. He is a direct descendant of Geoffrey Chaucer and the first Edwardian kings, and blood relative to many of the greatest Anglo-American authors and poets, including John Milton (first cousin, twelve times removed), Percy Bysshe Shelley, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ray Bradbury, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Locke, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Matthew Barrie (author of 'Peter Pan'), Jack London, Rudyard Kipling, and Aldous Huxley. Poetry and words are in his blood, and he has been writing both since a child, learning how to read from the Brownings, Kipling, Sir Walter Scott, and Cervantes. He is also related to Cary Grant.
Hunter Wallace loves extemporaneous verse, and tries (half-heartedly) to stick to the iambic, but free verse (no, not the Skynyrd song) always gets in the way. He is a true romantic and, to paraphrase Sir Paul McCartney, is not afraid of writing "Silly Love Poems" when the mood strikes, finding verse much more interesting than prose in connecting with the world.
On Gather, I'm Looking For ...:
Ongoing reminders of the beauty of poetry and the nobility of the Poet
You might check out Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being by George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez, Basic Books, November 2000. It´s the abstract math inflection of Lakoff and Johnson´s followup to On Metaphor, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought, also published by Basic Books.
Also check out the debate evoked by my poem ANIMAL CONVICTIONS (http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976903188&nav=Namespace) that framed the metaphysical lyric form with a series of embedded cliches, in order to reconstitute George´s cognitive linguistic approach (I did do a lot of explaining beforehand of what I was up to, and why I was disinterring tired idioms as a tour de force beau geste, but this being Gather, less than half a dozen readers figured out my game; the rest just wowed or were cowed, and of course I received a couple of ´1´s from the chatterers who´d rather flame than think.
Lakoff is a good buddy of my mentor Jay D. Atlas, the co-founder of Pomona College´s Department of Cog Sci and Linguistics. Jay is halfway between George and Noam Chomsky when it comes to his view of pragmatics in language, though he doesn´t dismiss the seriousness of Lakoff and Johnson´s metaphor first, language second approach.
And write me a villanelle, pretty please with battery acid included? I´ve enjoyed your use of the lyric forms today with such hellenic glee, I can scarcely wait to see you go villon-esque on the medieval period in full on chivalric mode.
