Because the charming secretary of my primary physician is called Althea, I read her the last stanza of Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison." I quoted from the old Everyman Library's Minor Poets of the Seventeenth Century, though I could have from several other of my anthologies. It contains, after all, the famous lines, "Stone walls do not a prison make,/ Nor iron bars a cage," and what gloriously follows. But…
SOURCE: John Simon at 04:28PM on January 25, 2011