Scholars and sippers of poetry can find most any literary verse, ode, or rune with a click or two to marvelous online collections. None of these surpasses the work of Anniina Jokinen at her “labor of love” Luminarium: Anthology of English Literature. Click the image above to read John Donne’s The Triple Fool while enjoying an image from Vermeer to suggest its origin. You can hear the poem read by opening the audio clip.

The Luminarium has been a major resource for scholars and lovers of English literature since 1996. It is not a product of academia or educational publishers. With a few ads, a knowledgeable store, and a few friends for support, Luminarium is the creation of an individual 21st century literary devotee.

This learn node points to the archeology of Troy, the Trojan War memorialized in Homer’s epics, and the century-long story of the rediscovery of the famed ancient city. Troy has not only emerged from thousands of years of burial in the dirt of Anatolia. Troy has come alive out of older printed sources, leaving dusty book shelves to become a shining city in the new virtual world online.

At an educational website sponsored by the Troia Project and the University of Cincinnati, follow an animated timeline, investigate 3-D reconstructions, and explore legends and facts. A Dartmouth University classics lesson provides Troy facts and theories concerning the historicity of the Trojan War. You can visit a work in progress by scholars cataloging Greek, Roman and Byzantine Pottery at Ilion (Troia). The Homer’s Trojan Theater project, hosted at the University of Virginia, provides a look into the mind’s eye of the great classic bard Homer, with battlefield animations in a timeline of The Iliad.

Each of these online projects use digitally-based methods to move far beyond what can be conveyed in print. They are all available globally. The future of learning is emerging through learn nodes like these.

For a node to learn about the Anglo-Saxon impact that remains up to our times turn to a Modern Poetry lecture from Open Yale courses. These people of long ago echo to us in Ezra Pound: Here is an expatriate poet writing in the voice of the Anglo-Saxon wanderer, a figure deprived of his kinsmen, who is out in the elements, far from land, far from his nation and home.

For much more from the Anglo-Saxons, browse at Georgetown the Labyrinth Old English resources. Western Michigan University’s Medieval Institute has an excellent introduction to The Anglo-Saxons and Their Language and a page at the University of Pittsburgh diagrams Anglo-Saxon church structures.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s podcast program, this learn node begins with a link to an RSS distributed podcast of a classic fable recorded for a family audience. The story on the podcast is The Lion and the Mouse, which can also be found in the Aesop’s Fables collection at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The Amherst collection has been built by students since 1994 and now includes some of the famed fables told with animations and interactivity. The Prelinger Archives offers a 1947 state-of-the-then art version (a frame captured above) of Aesop’s fable of The Hare and the Tortoise.

The greatest poet of Italy, generally acclaimed with Shakespeare and Goethe as one of the three universal geniuses of western European literature, Dante Alighieri was also a prose writer, rhetorician, theorist of his own Italian vernacular literature, moral philosopher, and political thinker, with an immense variety of literary output.

Truly a wondrous labyrinth, Dante open Internet resources are formed by the rich interlinking of ideas and information among the major sources mentioned above, and to myriad more facts and facets of that can be connected, like this one from a Yale University open course on Modern Poetry transcript:

And the endnotes we have here are worth contemplating. In a sense, Eliot’s notes are a kind of extension of the poem, part of the poem. These lines bear the note “four”:

“And below I heard them nailing shut the door / of the horrible tower.” [The speaker of those lines that Eliot is alluding to, half-quoting, is Dante's Count Ugolino in the thirty-third canto of The Inferno.] The traitor Ugolino tells Dante that his enemies imprisoned him and his children in a tower to die of starvation.

More learn nodes at: learnodes.com

This learn node from American history begins where the Smithsonian American Art Museum hosts the website where you can:

“Take a virtual journey to meet American Indians of the 1830s with artist, ethnologist, and showman George Catlin. This site compiles paintings, historical documents, and commentary from contemporary experts so you can explore the intersections of two cultures, both in Catlin’s time and today.”

The museum also welcomes visitors to a George Catlin Indian Gallery where 34 of his paintings can be studied individually. As an example of following history and art through the fenceless trail of the open Internet:

- Catlin’s painting of Pipestone Quarry leads us to locate a National Parks Website about that famous Minnesota location.
- The Pipestone County Museum provides very local and detailed memory of the area’s history.
- And the famed poem The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow echoes in our thoughts:

On the Mountains of the Prairie,
On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry,
Gitche Manito, the mighty,
He the Master of Life, descending,
On the red crags of the quarry
Stood erect, and called the nations,
Called the tribes of men together.

More learn nodes at: learnodes.com