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I don't understand the need for "cover art" here. Especially when it looks like it has been made in MS Paint and uses the painting in which Vercingetorix is surrendering to Julius Caesar - an event that happened centuries after the ones Macaulay deals with in his lays. It's a book, not an album. And even if it has been recorded somehow the cover art should be such that it doesn't mislead the reader by using paintings fully out of context. Horatius' Rome was not Caesar's Rome which was not Trajan's Rome...etc.
Yes, "generic" "cover art". What a concept.
I hadn't noticed it was Vercingetorix, as noted above. I was merely struck by the clash between a romanticized 19th century image and a modern inappropriate font.
It is not a pleasant image, and it is irrelevant in content.
I propose that it be deleted. The article already has an authentic book cover.
Varlaam (
talk) 15:44, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
"Once famous"? I would argue it's still quite famous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.68.15 ( talk) 02:28, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
Totally revised this article yesterday. I kept what seemed relevant and useful from the previous version, but there seemed to have been numerous attempts to belittle or dismiss the significance of the work (such as the "once-famous" remark mentioned above), and to argue that the events were mythical rather than historical. That's beside the point; the events were treated as history by the ancient historians, and they certainly took place in a historical context; i.e. the founding of Rome, Porsena's invasion, the Battle of Lake Regillus, the reign of the Decemvirs. Arguments that the persons or their legendary deeds aren't provably historical belong in the articles about those events, not in an article about Victorian poetry inspired by accounts of those events in ancient historians. Seemed to be a lot of negative POV-pushing about this book, which I attempted to remove.
Fixed a number of uncontroversial errors in spelling and grammar, including several run-on sentences. Added links to some relevant articles, such as Longman's publishing house, and John of Gaunt, and tried to explain the historical significance of Ivry and The Armada, although I didn't discuss the specific contents of the poems. Replaced a few links to former articles, and checked the chronology of Henry IV of France against his entry here.
Someone recently added the rather trivial use of the Lays in a current film to the lead paragraph, prefacing this with the extremely dismissive "[U]ntil 2013, over 99% of the American population had never heard of the collection, but in that year, the book became a MacGuffin in the science fiction movie, Oblivion." Obviously there's no source for the statistic, which was made up on the spot by the person who added it, probably in order to make a film he liked sound more literary. Assuming that the book is a "MacGuffin" in the film, I placed that much at the end in a new section devoted to the use of the Lays in popular culture; it seemed worth at least a mention, although certainly not in the lead paragraph. This section might need to be retitled, though. Since I didn't want it to be a trivia section with one item in it, I summarized the cultural significance of the work as best I could, without repeating the Churchill anecdote and Victorian recitation parts. I thought it might be worth mentioning that it was illustrated by a famous artist in the 1881 edition. "Cultural significance" might seem a bit overblown as a heading, though. P Aculeius ( talk) 13:37, 27 April 2013 (UTC)
![]() | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
I don't understand the need for "cover art" here. Especially when it looks like it has been made in MS Paint and uses the painting in which Vercingetorix is surrendering to Julius Caesar - an event that happened centuries after the ones Macaulay deals with in his lays. It's a book, not an album. And even if it has been recorded somehow the cover art should be such that it doesn't mislead the reader by using paintings fully out of context. Horatius' Rome was not Caesar's Rome which was not Trajan's Rome...etc.
Yes, "generic" "cover art". What a concept.
I hadn't noticed it was Vercingetorix, as noted above. I was merely struck by the clash between a romanticized 19th century image and a modern inappropriate font.
It is not a pleasant image, and it is irrelevant in content.
I propose that it be deleted. The article already has an authentic book cover.
Varlaam (
talk) 15:44, 3 August 2010 (UTC)
"Once famous"? I would argue it's still quite famous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.68.15 ( talk) 02:28, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
Totally revised this article yesterday. I kept what seemed relevant and useful from the previous version, but there seemed to have been numerous attempts to belittle or dismiss the significance of the work (such as the "once-famous" remark mentioned above), and to argue that the events were mythical rather than historical. That's beside the point; the events were treated as history by the ancient historians, and they certainly took place in a historical context; i.e. the founding of Rome, Porsena's invasion, the Battle of Lake Regillus, the reign of the Decemvirs. Arguments that the persons or their legendary deeds aren't provably historical belong in the articles about those events, not in an article about Victorian poetry inspired by accounts of those events in ancient historians. Seemed to be a lot of negative POV-pushing about this book, which I attempted to remove.
Fixed a number of uncontroversial errors in spelling and grammar, including several run-on sentences. Added links to some relevant articles, such as Longman's publishing house, and John of Gaunt, and tried to explain the historical significance of Ivry and The Armada, although I didn't discuss the specific contents of the poems. Replaced a few links to former articles, and checked the chronology of Henry IV of France against his entry here.
Someone recently added the rather trivial use of the Lays in a current film to the lead paragraph, prefacing this with the extremely dismissive "[U]ntil 2013, over 99% of the American population had never heard of the collection, but in that year, the book became a MacGuffin in the science fiction movie, Oblivion." Obviously there's no source for the statistic, which was made up on the spot by the person who added it, probably in order to make a film he liked sound more literary. Assuming that the book is a "MacGuffin" in the film, I placed that much at the end in a new section devoted to the use of the Lays in popular culture; it seemed worth at least a mention, although certainly not in the lead paragraph. This section might need to be retitled, though. Since I didn't want it to be a trivia section with one item in it, I summarized the cultural significance of the work as best I could, without repeating the Churchill anecdote and Victorian recitation parts. I thought it might be worth mentioning that it was illustrated by a famous artist in the 1881 edition. "Cultural significance" might seem a bit overblown as a heading, though. P Aculeius ( talk) 13:37, 27 April 2013 (UTC)