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  1. #301
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    Essays, letters from abroad, translation and fragments
    by Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822; Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851

    Published 1840
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    v.1. A defense of poetry. Essay on the literature, arts, and manners of the Athenians. Preface to the Banquet of Plato. The banquet--translated from Plato. On love. The coliseum. The assasins. On the publishment of death. On life. On a future state. Speculations on metaphysics. Speculations on morals. Ion; or, Of the Iliad--translated from Plato. Menexenus,--or, The funeral oration. Fragments from the Republic of Plato. On a passage in Crito.--v. 2. Journal of a six week's tour. Letters from Geneva. Journal at Geneva: ghost stories. Journal: return to England. Letters from Italy


    Volume 1
    Publisher London : Edward Moxon
    Pages 362
    Possible copyright status NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT
    Language English
    Call number ucb_banc:GLAD-67128747
    Digitizing sponsor MSN
    Book contributor University of California Libraries
    Collection cdl; americana

    Full catalog record MARCXML

    [Open Library icon]This book has an editable web page on Open Library.

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    Excerpt
    ‘Mutability’ Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Insignificance of Humanity

    ‘ Mutability ’ employs traditional conventions of the Lyric poem as it is “brief and discontinuous, emphasising sound and pictorial imagery rather than narrative”, in order to present the concept of life as ephemeral.1 Shelley is a poet shaped by the sense “that there are narrow limits to what human beings can know with certainty.”2 ‘ Mutability ’ reflects this notion as Shelley undermines human importance within a world in which nothing is constant. In his ‘ A Defence of Poetry ’ he argues that for man to be “greatly good… the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own” and therefore this essay shall consider the way Shelley uses ‘ Mutability ’ in order to educate readers on humanities fleeting and irrelevant nature.3

    By definition ‘Mutable’ is the “disposition of change, variableness and inconsistency”.4

    Shelley explores this notion of ‘change’ as the only constant that individuals can rely upon, with the overarching message of the poem being: “Nought may endure but Mutability”.5 By capitalising ‘Mutability’ Shelley modifies the noun to become a proper noun thus causing it to become a focal point in the sentence. This final proclamation heightens the permanence of impermanence. Ironically, both structurally and visually Shelley presents a poem which is consistent. The interlocking rhyme, ABAB, is continual throughout producing a regular rhythm. The nature of the chain rhyme, in addition to the iambic pentameter of the poem it provides a steady progression with no indication of finalisation. The lack of a definitive ending creates a sense of movement that will seemingly continue through the end of the poem and therefore the consistency of the form contradicts the content. Shelley targets the concept of change, professing “Mans yesterday may ne’er be like his morrow” as the universe is fundamentally mutable and yet the form denotes constancy. This dichotomy between change and consistency represents Shelley’s thesis that mutability is the only thing that remains the same. Through this observation the reader can draw the conclusion that humanity is not an omnipotent or timeless species, rather it becomes a fleeting concept that falls subject to the ever changing universe. This is further identifiable in the visual aspect of the poem as whilst each stanza is 4 lines long and undeviating, lines 2 and 4 are indented causing a change in structure which is continued throughout the poem; change has become consistent.

    For Shelley, educating readers was crucial to poetry. He believed that verse had the ability to “lif[t] the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and mak[e] familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.”6 Arguably, ‘ Mutability ’ lifts the veil off human importance by demonstrating individual insignificance. Shelley initialises this thesis through his slight manipulation of the Lyric Poem. Traditionally the Lyric Poem focused on the “thoughts and attitudes… immediate to the dramatic speaker” yet ‘ Mutability ’ directly implicates the reader.7 The poem begins with the inclusive subject pronoun “we”, causing both the reader and Shelley to become the subject of the sentence.8 This adaptation of the traditional Lyric poem draws specific attention to Shelley’s desire to educate, or speak directly to his readers rather than an indulgent insight into the narrative voice. The line “Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away” embodies this as the embedded command within the line presents the reader with an alternative way to view humanity.9

    Shelley depicts human insignificance through his use of imagery. In the first Stanza, humanity is metaphorically compared to a ‘cloud’: “We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon”.10 Shelley places humanity within the realm of nature implying that both phenomenon’s co-exit. However, the metaphor develops as humanity is likened to “forgotten lyres” in the second stanza.11 The enjambment between the two stanzas creates a correlation between the two objects, suggesting humanity exists in both the natural and the materialistic world. Furthermore, humanity has been grouped together and standardised, diminishing human individuality as Shelley (using the simile of a lyre) suggests we “give various response[s] to each varying blast”, or in other words, humanity reacts to one another in an indistinguishable manner.12 To be the same is to be ultimately unidentifiable and thus insignificant, furthered by the fact the comparisons in which Shelley adopts to represent humanity fade into nothing. For example, the clouds are “lost for ever”, whilst the Lyre is “forgotten”.13

    Humans do not have control over their own fate in ‘ Mutability ’ . A cloud is a product of mother-nature and as the poem indicates it only serves to “veil” the moon, it does not protect it.14

    Similarly the lyre must be played in order to make music and fulfil its purpose; it is further weakened as a result of its “frail frame”.15 These comparisons serve to quell human importance as they demonstrate humanities interdependence on one another and nature. Shelley, heightens human dependency by augmenting the power of the mind. Within ‘ Mutability ’ “A dream has power” rather than the individual who is dreaming.16 Equivalently, “One wandering thought pollutes the day”, implying emotions have control over the individual.17 Shelley therefore gives agency to the mind over the physical body. This is reflected in the structure of the lines in stanza three:

    “We rest. - A dream has power to poison sleep We rise. - One wandering thought pollutes the day”18

    The abrupt full stop emphasises the physical act of the individual, causing the bodily action to become short and factual. The emotional consequence of these actions which implicate the mind, such as ‘thoughts’ and ‘dreams’ literally take up more space in the line, forcing the reader to indulge in the unconscious. Essentially, Shelley removes humanities control by placing power in the mind and in nature.

    [...]

    1 Patrick Colm Hogan, The Mind and its stories: Narratives Universals and Human emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge university of press, 2003), p.152.

    2 Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger, The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The romantic Period, volume D (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), p 750.

    3 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The Romantic Period, Volume D, ed. By Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), pp.856 - 869 (p.862).

    4 “Mutability, n.”, OED Online (Oxford University press, September 2014) <http://www.oed.com> [Accessed 18th November 2014].

    5 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature Ninth Edition: The Romantic Period, Volume D, ed. By Deidre Shauna Lynch and Jack Stillinger (London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012), pp.751 - 752 (p.752).

    6 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, p.862.

    7 W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, ‘The intentional Fallacy’, The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54 (1946), pp. 468-488 (p. 470).

    8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, p. 751.

    9 Ibid., p.752.

    10 Ibid., p.751.

    11 Ibid., p. 751.

    12 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Mutability’, p. 751.

    13 Ibid., p. 751.

    14 Ibid., p.751.

    15 Ibid., p.751.

    16 Ibid., p. 751.

    17 Ibid., p. 751.

    18 Ibid., p.751.
    ----------------------------------------------------------
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  2. #302
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    Shakespeare — The Sonnets and Their Literary History
    Written by: Sidney Lee
    VII—THE SONNETS AND THEIR LITERARY HISTORY
    The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet.
    It was doubtless to Shakespeare’s personal relations with men and women of the Court that his sonnets owed their existence. In Italy and France, the practice of writing and circulating series of sonnets inscribed to great men and women flourished continuously throughout the sixteenth century. In England, until the last decade of that century, the vogue was intermittent. Wyatt and Surrey inaugurated sonnetteering in the English language under Henry VIII, and Thomas Watson devoted much energy to the pursuit when Shakespeare was a boy. But it was not until 1591, when Sir Philip Sidney’s collection of sonnets entitled ‘Astrophel and Stella’ was first published, that the sonnet enjoyed in England any conspicuous or continuous favour. For the half-dozen years following the appearance of Sir Philip Sidney’s volume the writing of sonnets, both singly and in connected sequences, engaged more literary activity in this country than it engaged at any period here or elsewhere. Men and women of the cultivated Elizabethan nobility encouraged poets to celebrate in single sonnets their virtues and graces, and under the same patronage there were produced multitudes of sonnet-sequences which more or less fancifully narrated, after the manner of Petrarch and his successors, the pleasures and pains of love. Between 1591 and 1597 no aspirant to poetic fame in the country failed to seek a patron’s ears by a trial of skill on the popular poetic instrument, and Shakespeare, who habitually kept abreast of the currents of contemporary literary taste, applied himself to sonnetteering with all the force of his poetic genius when the fashion was at its height.
    Shakespeare’s first experiments.
    Shakespeare had lightly experimented with the sonnet from the outset of his literary career. Three well-turned examples figure in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost,’ probably his earliest play; two of the choruses in ‘Romeo and Juliet’ are couched in the sonnet form; and a letter of the heroine Helen, in ‘All’s Well that Ends Well,’ which bears traces of very early composition, takes the same shape. It has, too, been argued ingeniously, if not convincingly, that he was author of the somewhat clumsy sonnet, ‘Phaeton to his friend Florio,’ which prefaced in 1591 Florio’s ‘Second Frutes,’ a series of Italian-English dialogues for students.
    Majority of Shakespeare’s sonnets composed in 1594.
    p. 85But these were sporadic efforts. It was not till the spring of 1593, after Shakespeare had secured a nobleman’s patronage for his earliest publication, ‘Venus and Adonis,’ that he became a sonnetteer on an extended scale. Of the hundred and fifty-four sonnets that survive outside his plays, the greater number were in all likelihood composed between that date and the autumn of 1594, during his thirtieth and thirty-first years. His occasional reference in the sonnets to his growing age was a conventional device—traceable to Petrarch—of all sonnetteers of the day, and admits of p. 86no literal interpretation. In matter and in manner the bulk of the poems suggest that they came from the pen of a man not much more than thirty. Doubtless he renewed his sonnetteering efforts occasionally p. 87and at irregular intervals during the nine years which elapsed between 1594 and the accession of James I in 1603. But to very few of the extant examples can a date later than 1594 be allotted with confidence. Sonnet cvii., in which plain reference is made to Queen Elizabeth’s death, may be fairly regarded as a belated and a final act of homage on Shakespeare’s part to the importunate vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet. All the evidence, whether internal or external, points to the conclusion that the sonnet exhausted such fascination as it exerted on Shakespeare before his dramatic genius attained its full height.
    Their literary value.
    In literary value Shakespeare’s sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry. The best examples are charged with the mellowed sweetness of rhythm and metre, the depth of thought and feeling, the vividness of imagery and the stimulating fervour of expression which are the finest fruits of poetic power. On the other hand, many sink almost into inanity beneath the burden of quibbles and conceits. In both their excellences and their defects Shakespeare’s sonnets betray near kinship to his early dramatic work, in which passages of the highest poetic temper at times alternate with unimpressive displays of verbal jugglery. In phraseology the sonnets often closely resemble such early dramatic efforts as ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ There is far more concentration in the sonnets than in ‘Venus and Adonis’ or in ‘Lucrece,’ although p. 88occasional utterances of Shakespeare’s Roman heroine show traces of the intensity that characterises the best of them. The superior and more evenly sustained energy of the sonnets is to be attributed, not to the accession of power that comes with increase of years, but to the innate principles of the poetic form, and to metrical exigencies, which impelled the sonnetteer to aim at a uniform condensation of thought and language.
    Circulation in manuscript.
    In accordance with a custom that was not uncommon, Shakespeare did not publish his sonnets; he circulated them in manuscript. But their reputation grew, and public interest was aroused in them in spite of his p. 89unreadiness to give them publicity. A line from one of them:

    Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (xciv. 14),

    was quoted in the play of ‘Edward III,’ which was probably written before 1595. Meres, writing in 1598, enthusiastically commends Shakespeare’s ‘sugred sonnets among his private friends,’ and mentions them in close conjunction with his two narrative poems. William Jaggard piratically inserted in 1599 two of the most mature of the series (Nos. cxxxviii. and cxliv.) in his ‘Passionate Pilgrim.’
    Their piratical publication in 1609. ‘A Lover’s Complaint.’
    At length, in 1609, the sonnets were surreptitiously sent to press. Thomas Thorpe, the moving spirit in the design of their publication, was a camp-follower of the regular publishing army. He was professionally engaged in procuring for publication literary works which had been widely disseminated in written copies, and had thus passed beyond their authors’ control; for the law then recognised no natural right in an author to the creations of his brain, and the full owner of a manuscript copy of any literary composition was entitled to reproduce it, or to treat it as he pleased, without p. 90reference to the author’s wishes. Thorpe’s career as a procurer of neglected ‘copy’ had begun well. He made, in 1600, his earliest hit by bringing to light Marlowe’s translation of the ‘First Book of Lucan.’ On May 20, 1609, he obtained a license for the publication of ‘Shakespeares Sonnets,’ and this tradesman-like form of title figured not only on the ‘Stationers’ Company’s Registers,’ but on the title-page. Thorpe employed George Eld to print the manuscript, and two booksellers, William Aspley and John Wright, to distribute it to the public. On half the edition Aspley’s name figured as that of the seller, and on the other half that of Wright. The book was issued in June, and the owner of the ‘copy’ left the public under no misapprehension as to his share in the production by printing above his initials a dedicatory preface from his own pen. The appearance in a book of a dedication from the publisher’s (instead of from the author’s) pen was, unless the substitution was specifically accounted for on other grounds, an accepted sign that the author had no hand in the publication. Except in the case of his two narrative poems, which were published in 1593 and 1594 respectively, Shakespeare made no effort to publish any of his works, and uncomplainingly submitted to the wholesale piracies of his plays and the ascription to him of books by other hands. Such practices were encouraged by his passive indifference and the contemporary condition of the law of copyright. He p. 91cannot be credited with any responsibility for the publication of Thorpe’s collection of his sonnets in 1609. With characteristic insolence Thorpe took the added liberty of appending a previously unprinted poem of forty-nine seven-line stanzas (the metre of ‘Lucrece’) entitled ‘A Lover’s Complaint,’ in which a girl laments her betrayal by a deceitful youth. The poem, in a gentle Spenserian vein, has no connection with the ‘Sonnets.’ If, as is possible, it be by Shakespeare, it must have been written in very early days.
    Thomas Thorpe and ‘Mr. W. H.’
    A misunderstanding respecting Thorpe’s preface and his part in the publication has led many critics into a serious misinterpretation of Shakespeare’s poems. Thorpe’s dedication was couched in the bombastic language which was habitual to him. He advertised Shakespeare as ‘our ever-living poet.’ As the chief promoter of the undertaking, he called himself ‘the well-wishing adventurer in setting forth,’ and in resonant phrase designated as the patron of the venture p. 92a partner in the speculation, ‘Mr. W. H.’ In the conventional dedicatory formula of the day he wished ‘Mr. W. H.’ ‘all happiness’ and ‘eternity,’ such eternity as Shakespeare in the text of the sonnets conventionally foretold for his own verse. When Thorpe was organising the issue of Marlowe’s ‘First Book of Lucan’ in 1600, he sought the patronage of Edward Blount, a friend in the trade. ‘W. H.’ was doubtless in a like position. He is best identified with a stationer’s assistant, William Hall, who was professionally engaged, like Thorpe, in procuring ‘copy.’ In 1606 ‘W. H.’ won a conspicuous success in that direction, and conducted his operations under cover of the familiar initials. In that year ‘W. H.’ announced that he had procured a neglected manuscript poem—‘A Foure-fould Meditation’—by the Jesuit Robert Southwell who had been executed in 1595, and he published it with a dedication (signed ‘W. H.’) vaunting his good fortune in meeting with such treasure-trove. When Thorpe dubbed ‘Mr. W. H.,’ with characteristic magniloquence, ‘the onlie begetter [i.e. obtainer or procurer] of these ensuing sonnets,’ he merely indicated that that personage was the first of the pirate-publisher fraternity to procure a manuscript of Shakespeare’s sonnets and recommend its surreptitious issue. In accordance with custom, Thorpe gave Hall’s initials only, because he was an intimate associate who was known by those initials to their common circle of friends. Hall was not a man of sufficiently wide public reputation to render it probable that the p. 93printing of his full name would excite additional interest in the book or attract buyers.

    The common assumption that Thorpe in this boastful preface was covertly addressing, under the initials ‘Mr. W. H.,’ a young nobleman, to whom the sonnets were originally addressed by Shakespeare, ignores the elementary principles of publishing transactions of the day, and especially of those of the type to which Thorpe’s efforts were confined. There was nothing mysterious or fantastic, although from a modern point of view there was much that lacked principle, in Thorpe’s methods of business. His choice of patron for this, like all his volumes, was dictated solely by his mercantile interests. He was under no inducement and in no position to take into consideration the affairs of Shakespeare’s private life. Shakespeare, through all but the earliest stages of his career, belonged socially to a world that was cut off by impassable barriers from that in which Thorpe pursued p. 94his calling. It was wholly outside Thorpe’s aims in life to seek to mystify his customers by investing a dedication with any cryptic significance.
    No peer of the day, moreover, bore a name which could be represented by the initials ‘Mr. W. H.’ Shakespeare was never on terms of intimacy (although the contrary has often been recklessly assumed) with William, third Earl of Pembroke, when a youth. But were complete proofs of the acquaintanceship forthcoming, they would throw no light on Thorpe’s ‘Mr. W. H.’ The Earl of Pembroke was, from his birth to the date of his succession to the earldom in 1601, known by the courtesy title of Lord Herbert and by no other name, and he could not have been designated at any period of his life by the symbols ‘Mr. W. H.’ In 1609 Pembroke was a high officer of state, and numerous books were dedicated to him in all the splendour of his many titles. Star-Chamber penalties would have been exacted of any publisher or author who denied him in print his titular distinctions. Thorpe had occasion to dedicate two books to the earl in later years, and he there showed not merely that he was fully acquainted with the compulsory etiquette, but that his sycophantic temperament rendered him only eager to improve on the conventional formulas of servility. Any further consideration of Thorpe’s address to ‘Mr. W. H.’ belongs to the p. 95biographies of Thorpe and his friend; it lies outside the scope of Shakespeare’s biography.
    The form of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
    Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnets’ ignore the somewhat complex scheme of rhyme adopted by Petrarch, whom the Elizabethan sonnetteers, like the French sonnetteers of the sixteenth century, recognised to be in most respects their master. Following the example originally set by Surrey and Wyatt, and generally pursued by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, his sonnets aim at far greater metrical simplicity than the Italian or the French. They consist of three decasyllabic quatrains with a concluding couplet, and the quatrains rhyme alternately. A single sonnet does not always form an independent poem. As in the French and Italian sonnets of the period, and in those of Spenser, Sidney, Daniel, and Drayton, the same train of thought is at times pursued continuously through two or more. The collection of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets thus presents the appearance of an extended series of independent poems, many in a varying number of fourteen-line stanzas. The longest sequence (i.-xvii.) numbers seventeen sonnets, and in Thorpe’s edition opens the volume.
    Want of continuity. The two ‘groups.’
    It is unlikely that the order in which the poems were printed follows the order in which they were written. Fantastic endeavours have been made to detect in the original arrangement of the poems a closely connected narrative, but the thread is on any showing constantly interrupted. It is usual to divide the sonnets into two groups, and to represent that all those numbered i.-cxxvi. by Thorpe were addressed to a young man, and all those numbered cxxvii.-cliv. were p. 97addressed to a woman. This division cannot be literally justified. In the first group some eighty of the sonnets can be proved to be addressed to a man by the use of the masculine pronoun or some other unequivocal sign; but among the remaining forty there is no clear indication of the kind. Many of these forty are meditative soliloquies which address no person at all (cf. cv. cxvi. cxix. cxxi.) A few invoke abstractions like Death (lxvi.) or Time (cxxiii.), or ‘benefit of ill’ (cxix.) The twelve-lined poem (cxxvi.), the last of the first ‘group,’ does little more than sound a variation on the conventional poetic invocations of Cupid or Love personified as a boy. And there is no valid objection to the assumption that the poet inscribed the rest of these forty sonnets to a woman (cf. xxi. xlvi. xlvii.) Similarly, the sonnets in the second ‘group’ (cxxvii.-cliv.) have no uniform superscription. Six invoke no person at all. No. cxxviii. is an overstrained compliment on a lady playing on the virginals. No. cxxix. is a metaphysical disquisition on lust. No. cxlv. is a playful lyric in p. 98octosyllabics, like Lyly’s song of ‘Cupid and Campaspe,’ and its tone has close affinity to that and other of Lyly’s songs. No. cxlvi. invokes the soul of man. Nos. cliii. and cliv. soliloquise on an ancient Greek apologue on the force of Cupid’s fire.
    Main topics of the first ‘group.’
    The choice and succession of topics in each ‘group’ give to neither genuine cohesion. In the first ‘group’ the long opening sequence (i.-xvii.) forms the poet’s appeal to a young man to marry so that his youth and beauty may survive in children. There is almost a contradiction in terms between the poet’s handling of that topic and his emphatic boast in the two following sonnets (xviii.-xix.) that his verse alone is fully equal to the task of immortalising his friend’s youth and accomplishments. The same asseveration is repeated in many later sonnets (cf. lv. lx. lxiii. lxxiv. lxxxi. ci. cvii.) These alternate with conventional adulation of the beauty of the object of the poet’s affections (cf. xxi. liii. lxviii.) and descriptions of the effects of absence in intensifying devotion (cf. xlviii. l. cxiii.) There are many reflections on the nocturnal torments of a lover (cf. xxvii. xxviii. xliii. lxi.) and on his blindness to the beauty of spring or summer when he is separated from his love (cf. xcvii. xcviii.) At times a youth is rebuked for sensual indulgences; he has sought and won the favour of the poet’s mistress in the poet’s absence, but the poet is forgiving (xxxii.-xxxv. xl.-xlii. lxix. xcv.-xcvi.) In Sonnet lxx. the young man whom p. 99the poet addresses is credited with a different disposition and experience:

    And thou present’st a pure unstained prime.
    Thou hast pass’d by the ambush of young days,
    Either not assail’d, or victor being charg’d!

    At times melancholy overwhelms the writer: he despairs of the corruptions of the age (lxvi.), reproaches himself with carnal sin (cxix.), declares himself weary of his profession of acting (cxi. cxii.), and foretells his approaching death (lxxi.-lxxiv.) Throughout are dispersed obsequious addresses to the youth in his capacity of sole patron of the poet’s verse (cf. xxiii. xxxvii. c. ci. ciii. civ.) But in one sequence the friend is sorrowfully reproved for bestowing his patronage on rival poets (lxxviii.-lxxxvi.) In three sonnets near the close of the first group in the original edition, the writer gives varied assurances of his constancy in love or friendship which apply indifferently to man or woman (cf. cxxii. cxxiv. cxxv.)
    Main topics of the second ‘group.’
    In two sonnets of the second ‘group’ (cxxvi.-clii.) the poet compliments his mistress on her black complexion and raven-black hair and eyes. In twelve sonnets he hotly denounces his ‘dark’ mistress for her proud disdain of his affection, and for her manifold infidelities with other men. Apparently continuing a theme of the first ‘group,’ the poet rebukes the woman, whom he addresses, for having beguiled his friend to yield himself to her seductions (cxxxiii.-cxxxvi.) Elsewhere he makes satiric reflections on the extravagant compliments paid to the fair sex by other sonnetteers (No. cxxx.) p. 100or lightly quibbles on his name of ‘Will’ (cxxx.-vi.) In tone and subject-matter numerous sonnets in the second as in the first ‘group’ lack visible sign of coherence with those they immediately precede or follow.
    It is not merely a close study of the text that confutes the theory, for which recent writers have fought hard, of a logical continuity in Thorpe’s arrangement of the poems in 1609. There remains the historic fact that readers and publishers of the seventeenth century acknowledged no sort of significance in the order in which the poems first saw the light. When the sonnets were printed for a second time in 1640—thirty-one years after their first appearance—they were presented in a completely different order. The short descriptive titles which were then supplied to single sonnets or to short sequences proved that the collection was regarded as a disconnected series of occasional poems in more or less amorous vein.
    Lack of genuine sentiment in Elizabethan sonnets. Their dependence on French and Italian models.
    In whatever order Shakespeare’s sonnets be studied, the claim that has been advanced in their behalf to rank as autobiographical documents can only be accepted with many qualifications. Elizabethan sonnets were commonly the artificial products of the poet’s fancy. A strain of personal emotion is occasionally discernible in a detached effort, and is vaguely traceable in a few sequences; but autobiographical confessions were very rarely the stuff of which the Elizabethan sonnet was made. The typical collection p. 101of Elizabethan sonnets was a mosaic of plagiarisms, a medley of imitative studies. Echoes of the French or of the Italian sonnetteers, with their Platonic idealism, are usually the dominant notes. The echoes often have a musical quality peculiar to themselves. Daniel’s fine sonnet (xlix.) on ‘Care-charmer, sleep,’ although directly inspired by the French, breathes a finer melody than the sonnet of Pierre de Brach apostrophising ‘le sommeil chasse-soin’ (in the collection entitled ‘Les Amours d’Aymée’), or the sonnet of Philippe Desportes invoking ‘Sommeil, paisible fils de la nuit solitaire’ (in the collection entitled ‘Amours d’Hippolyte’). But, throughout Elizabethan sonnet literature, the heavy debt to Italian and French effort is unmistakable. Spenser, in 1569, at the outset of his literary career, avowedly translated numerous sonnets from Du Bellay and from Petrarch, and his friend Gabriel Harvey bestowed on him the title of ‘an English Petrarch’—the highest praise that the critic conceived it possible to bestow on an English sonnetteer. Thomas Watson in 1582, in his p. 102collection of metrically irregular sonnets which he entitled ‘????????T??, or A Passionate Century of Love,’ prefaced each poem, which he termed a ‘passion,’ with a prose note of its origin and intention. Watson frankly informed his readers that one ‘passion’ was ‘wholly translated out of Petrarch;’ that in another passion ‘he did very busily imitate and augment a certain ode of Ronsard;’ while ‘the sense or matter of “a third” was taken out of Serafino in his “Strambotti.”’ In every case Watson gave the exact reference to his p. 103foreign original, and frequently appended a quotation. Drayton in 1594, in the dedicatory sonnet of his collection of sonnets entitled ‘Idea,’ declared that it was ‘a fault too common in this latter time’ ‘to filch from Desportes or from Petrarch’s pen.’ Lodge did not acknowledge his borrowings more specifically than his colleagues, but he made a plain profession of indebtedness to Desportes when he wrote: ‘Few men are able to second the sweet conceits of Philippe Desportes, whose poetical writings are ordinarily in everybody’s hand.’ Giles Fletcher, who in his collection of sonnets called ‘Licia’ (1593) simulated the varying p. 104moods of a lover under the sway of a great passion as successfully as most of his rivals, stated on his title-page that his poems were all written in ‘imitation of the best Latin poets and others.’ Very many of the love-sonnets in the series of sixty-eight penned ten years later by William Drummond of Hawthornden have been traced to their sources in the Italian sonnets not merely of Petrarch, but of the sixteenth-century poets Guarini, Bembo, Giovanni Battista Marino, Tasso, and Sannazzaro. The Elizabethans usually gave the fictitious mistresses after whom their volumes of sonnets were called the names that had recently served the like purpose in France. Daniel followed Maurice Sève in christening his collection ‘Delia;’ Constable followed Desportes in christening his collection ‘Diana;’ while Drayton not only applied to his sonnets on his title-page in 1594 the French term ‘amours,’ but bestowed on his imaginary heroine the title of Idea, which seems to have been the invention of Claude de Pontoux, although it was employed by other French contemporaries.
    Sonnetteers’ admission of insincerity.
    With good reason Sir Philip Sidney warned the public that ‘no inward touch’ was to be expected from sonnetteers of his day, whom he describes as

    ‘[Men] that do dictionary’s method bring
    Into their rhymes running in rattling rows;
    [Men] that poor Petrarch’s long deceasèd woes
    With newborn sighs and denizened wit do sing.’

    Sidney unconvincingly claimed greater sincerity for his own experiments. But ‘even amorous sonnets in the gallantest and sweetest civil vein,’ wrote Gabriel Harvey in ‘Pierces Supererogation’ in 1593, ‘are but dainties of a pleasurable wit.’ Drayton’s sonnets more nearly approached Shakespeare’s in quality than those of any contemporary. Yet Drayton told the readers of his collection entitled ‘Idea’ (after the French) that if any sought genuine passion in them, they had better go elsewhere. ‘In all humours sportively he ranged,’ he declared. Giles Fletcher, in 1593, introduced his collection of imitative sonnets entitled ‘Licia, or Poems of Love,’ with the warning, ‘Now in that I have written love sonnets, if any man measure my affection by my style, let him say I am in love. . . . Here, take this by the way . . . a man may write of love and not be in love, as well as of p. 106husbandry and not go to the plough, or of witches and be none, or of holiness and be profane.’
    Contemporary censure of sonnetteers’ false sentiment. ‘Gulling Sonnets.’
    The dissemination of false sentiment by the sonnetteers, and their monotonous and mechanical treatment of ‘the pangs of despised love’ or the joys of requited affection, did not escape the censure of contemporary criticism. The air soon rang with sarcastic protests from the most respected writers of the day. In early life Gabriel Harvey wittily parodied the mingling of adulation and vituperation in the conventional sonnet-sequence in his ‘Amorous Odious Sonnet intituled The Student’s Loove or Hatrid.’ Chapman in 1595, in a series of sonnets entitled ‘A Coronet for his mistress Philosophy,’ appealed to his literary comrades to abandon ‘the painted cabinet’ of the love-sonnet for a coffer of genuine worth. But the most resolute of the censors of the sonnetteering vogue was the poet and lawyer, Sir John Davies. In a sonnet addressed about 1596 to his friend, Sir Anthony Cooke (the patron of Drayton’s ‘Idea’), he inveighed against the ‘bastard sonnets’ which ‘base rhymers’ ‘daily’ begot ‘to their own shames and poetry’s disgrace.’ In his anxiety to stamp out the folly he wrote and circulated in manuscript a specimen series of nine ‘gulling sonnets’ p. 107or parodies of the conventional efforts. Even Shakespeare does not seem to have escaped Davies’s condemnation. Sir John is especially severe on the sonnetteers who handled conceits based on legal technicalities, and his eighth ‘gulling sonnet,’ in which he ridicules the application of law terms to affairs of the heart, may well have been suggested by Shakespeare’s legal phraseology in his Sonnets lxxxvii. and cxxiv.; while Davies’s Sonnet ix., beginning:

    ‘To love, my lord, I do knight’s service owe’
    must have parodied Shakespeare’s Sonnet xxvi., beginning:
    ‘Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage,’ etc.
    Shakespeare’s scornful allusion to sonnets in his plays.
    Echoes of the critical hostility are heard, it is curious to note, in nearly all the references that Shakespeare himself makes to sonnetteering in his plays. ‘Tush, none but minstrels like of sonnetting,’ exclaims Biron in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ (IV. iii. 158). In the ‘Two Gentlemen of Verona’ (III. ii. 68 seq.) there is a satiric touch in the recipe for the conventional love-sonnet which Proteus offers the amorous Duke:

    You must lay lime to tangle her desires
    By wailful sonnets whose composèd rime
    p. 108Should be full fraught with serviceable vows . . .
    Say that upon the altar of her beauty
    You sacrifice your sighs, your tears, your heart.

    Mercutio treats Elizabethan sonnetteers even less respectfully when alluding to them in his flouts at Romeo: ‘Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura, to his lady, was but a kitchen-wench. Marry, she had a better love to be-rhyme her.’ In later plays Shakespeare’s disdain of the sonnet is still more pronounced. In ‘Henry V’ (III. vii. 33 et seq.) the Dauphin, after bestowing ridiculously magniloquent commendation on his charger, remarks, ‘I once writ a sonnet in his praise, and begun thus: “Wonder of nature!”’ The Duke of Orleans retorts: ‘I have heard a sonnet begin so to one’s mistress.’ The Dauphin replies: ‘Then did they imitate that which I composed to my courser; for my horse is my mistress.’ In ‘Much Ado about Nothing’ (V. ii. 4-7) Margaret, Hero’s waiting-woman, mockingly asks Benedick to ‘write her a sonnet in praise of her beauty.’ Benedick jestingly promises one so ‘in high a style that no man living shall come over it.’ Subsequently (V. iv. 87) Benedick is convicted, to the amusement of his friends, of penning ‘a halting sonnet of his own pure brain’ in praise of Beatrice.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    words: An endangered species

    written by: Emily schaffer


    words are beautiful. It is a simple fact. Long before poems and songs were written down on paper or computers, the beauty of poetry was shared orally. Mankind put so much time and effort into recording and finding ways to record words. Our society could not function without them. Too many take simple words for granted as if they were oxygen, always available to them. As new generations appear and the old fade away so do traditions, writings, and even language. Could all our words really be forgotten?
    Slowly, one by one, our words are being replaced. Definitions are changing. In some cases, whole words that have vanished from the memory of mankind. William shakespeare wrote in the late 16th century and the early 17th century. He wrote for the uneducated, those some might describe as simple minded, yet literary minds today struggle to understand his work. Books as common as the king james bible use words few americans would recognize. Words such as shod and wiles are no longer taught or used. "progress" is what it is named, but is not advancement typically involved in progression?
    Words, just as endangered species, need to be remembered and protected. Throughout the world, there are over 7 thousand known languages, and it is believed by the end of this century only close to 10% will remain. When did words, even languages become trivial? Why does the removal, misuse, and ruination of words not embroil the literary world? Will the restructuring of the world, the integration of nations cause the extinction of not only languages but entire cultures? With the digression of the world's education comes the loss of habitat for words.
    I agree with much of this article but I do doubt that 90% will be lost in the coming 83 years.
    Even if that massive number were ever reached, it would take far more time, perhaps two centuries methinks.-tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-02-2017 at 09:38 AM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Ebenezer Elliott, English Poet
    Written by: PoetrySoup

    Ebenezer Elliott, English poet, known as the 'Corn-law Rhymer', was born in 1781 near Rotherham, Yorkshire, and died in 1849. At the age of seventeen he published his first poem, The Vernal Walk, which was soon followed by others. In 1829 The Village Patriarch, the best of Elliott's longer pieces, was published.

    From 1831 to 1837 he carried on business as an iron merchant in Sheffield. His Corn-law Rhymes, periodically contributed to a local paper devoted to the repeal of these laws, attracted attention, and were afterwards collected and published with a longer poem entitled The Ranter. Commercial losses compelled him in 1837 to contract his business, and in 1841 he retired from it altogether. In 1850 two posthumous volumes appeared, entitled More Prose and Verse by the Corn-law Rhymer.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    the hypertexts

    at a reading of poems of a poet's agonies
    by x. J. Kennedy

    we sit and listen, writhing in our chairs,
    pierced by a pain far worse than what he shares.

    First published in trinacria #5 (spring 2011)

    pain, product, and poetry

    by joseph s. Salemi

    i went to my first opera when i was six years old. My mother took me to the world premiere of gian carlo menotti’s the saint of bleecker street, on the condition that i be a good boy and behave. It was some time in december of 1954, and my aunt (the soprano elizabeth carron) was singing. I was much more interested in seeing my aunt lee—that’s what we called her—on stage than anything else. My mother hoped that the evening would be the start of some musical interest in me. Alas, that never happened. Despite sitting through dozens of operas over the next decade, my enthusiasms were doggedly literary and not musical.

    Opening night at the opera always brought out celebrities back then. My mother pointed out to me the film actor franchot tone, and the singer william warfield. She also said "see that man on crutches? That’s the famous cole porter." i remember a cadaverous figure whose face was a mask of pain, with eyes blackened by his suffering, hobbling along slowly on spindly wooden crutches. I didn’t understand how he could possibly be interested in hearing an opera.

    Following the performance we went back stage to see aunt lee. I was bursting with childish enthusiasm after sitting for three hours, but my mom warned me to be silent. She said to me "do you see that thin woman over there?" i looked and saw a striking lady in brown taffeta. My mother intoned "that’s the great marlene dietrich. Don’t you dare make noise!" i was suitably cowed.

    Marlene, however, did make some noise. It happened to be a mild december in new york that year, and i recall miss dietrich saying, in her low husky voice, "it’s like spring outside! Spring!" in any case, i liked my mother’s evening dress of black taffeta with tiny rosebuds much better than dietrich’s ensemble.

    But most of all i remember cole porter, and that terrible burden of pain etched into his visage. He had been in a horrendous riding accident in 1937, and the doctors had advised a double amputation of his hopelessly smashed legs. He refused, and instead endured over thirty futile operations over the following fifteen years, with most of that time spent in chronic agony.

    Nevertheless, in the twenty years between the accident and his final retirement, porter produced some of his most memorable work, such as the immortal songs from dubarry was a lady, mexican hayride, kiss me kate, and can-can. How strange to think of all those lighthearted and breezily perfect lyrics coming from the pen of a man whose limbs were racked with pain.

    Is suffering a prerequisite for the making of great art? No, of course not. There are many perfectly content persons who have produced masterworks of creativity. What suffering might well do, however, is add urgency to one’s labors. Because suffering is merely the anteroom to death, its presence focuses our awareness on the third of what the church calls the four last things: Heaven, hell, death, and final judgment. Suffering cuts through the silly hubris of imagining that one has unlimited time.

    Suffering can’t make you an artist. Your artistic skill comes from study, training, development, practice, and innate gifts. If it were otherwise, we could simply torture budding poets and musicians until they did good work. But no one can escape trouble and tribulation totally, and the best of us use it as a spur to our labors.

    I recall the retirement several years ago of one of the heads of our state poetry societies (you know them—the organizations run by what dana gioia calls "the trinominate blue-haired ladies"). At her somewhat syrupy retirement speech, the lady said that poetry had only three valid subjects: Love, suffering, and death.

    Can you imagine the utter limitation of such an aesthetic? A poetry with no comedy, no satire, no argument, no rodomontade, no wit, no intellectuality, no myth, no politics? But that is what happens to poetry when you think that only intense emotion is allowable in it. It becomes walled in, like fortunato, behind the bricks of three boring commonplaces. Love, suffering, and death the only subjects? Great—let’s all talk about our most recent amour, our arthritic limbs, and how we are dreading the grave. That kind of constricting stupidity is what makes a lot of contemporary poetry unreadable drivel.

    What lies behind this nonsense is the unspoken puritan assumption that a poem ought to be a reflection of what you are actually feeling and experiencing, and if it isn’t the poem is somehow "dishonest" or "inauthentic" or—to use one of the most idiotic terms in contemporary literary criticism—"unearned." yes, there are some dorks in english departments who call the effects of some poems "unearned," as if they were discussing income from bonds. If there is no genuine feeling behind a poem, they say, then any literary effect it may have on readers is illegal or at least unfair.

    Imagine if cole porter wrote about his "feelings" during the time when he was in great pain. Imagine if all he could commit to paper was how he "dealt with suffering." suppose he had turned—god help us—to one of those fatuous "self-help and self-awareness" texts that pollute the shelves of our bookstores. Suppose he could only bloviate pompously on the serious aspects of love, suffering, and death. Would a single lyric of his be remembered?

    But he didn’t do that, thank god. He didn’t focus on himself and his perceptions, the way too many of the arrested adolescents writing poetry today do. He knew that the important thing was not himself, nor his pain, nor the process by which he managed to create, but only the product that he would wrench out of nothingness and leave behind. Poetry is product—nothing else.

    This is a truth that it takes many poets years to assimilate, and the longer it takes the more time they have wasted. No one cares about your pain. All they care about is what you make of it, poetically.

    If you read poetry because you want to hear about the trials, tribulations, joys, sorrows, and emotional vicissitudes of a particular poet, then you are not a serious reader of poetry. You should become a counselor or a social worker, and listen as losers tell you their hard-luck stories. Poetry isn’t about that at all. Poetry is about what a human mind can make out of the whole cloth of language, plus whatever input a poet might require from his personal knowledge or experiences. Remember cole porter on those crutches.

    First published in the pennsylvania review (february 2009), and in trinacria #5 (spring 2011)
    all rights reserved

    the hypertexts



    can you imagine the utter limitation of such an aesthetic? A poetry with no comedy, no satire, no argument, no rodomontade, no wit, no intellectuality, no myth, no politics? But that is what happens to poetry when you think that only intense emotion is allowable in it. It becomes walled in, like fortunato, behind the bricks of three boring commonplaces. Love, suffering, and death the only subjects? Great—let’s all talk about our most recent amour, our arthritic limbs, and how we are dreading the grave. that kind of constricting stupidity is what makes a lot of contemporary poetry unreadable drivel..
    ^^^^^ My feelings exactly.. IF SUCH IS PRESENTED WITHOUT A MESSAGE, A MORAILITY AND A DESIRE TO EDUCATE OTHERS.-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 07-25-2017 at 10:35 PM.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The New Yorker

    May 2, 2016 Issue
    Insurance Man
    The life and art of Wallace Stevens.

    By Peter Schjeldahl

    Stevens, in 1954: the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century.
    Illustration by John Gall; Source: Bettmann Archive / Getty (Photograph)

    Paul Mariani’s excellent new book, “The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” (Simon & Schuster), is a thrilling story of a mind, which emerges from a dispiriting story of a man. It’s hard to think of a more vivid illustration of T. S. Eliot’s principle of the separation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” For most of his life, Stevens was an elaborately defended introvert in a three-piece suit, working as a Hartford insurance executive. He came slowly to a mastery of language, form, and style that revealed a mind like a solar system, with abstract ideas orbiting a radiant lyricism. Mariani persuasively numbers Stevens among the twentieth-century poets who are both most powerful and most refined in their eloquence, along with Rilke, Yeats, and Neruda. He is certainly the quintessential American poet of the twentieth century, a doubting idealist who invested slight subjects (the weather, often) with oracular gravitas, and grand ones (death, frequently) with capering humor.

    Stevens’s first book, the ravishing “Harmonium,” which contains “Sunday Morning,” “The Snow Man,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “Anecdote of the Jar,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” and most of the rest of his poems that people still read—if they read any of them—came out in 1923, when he was forty-four. His next book, “Ideas of Order,” published thirteen years later, features what may be the finest American modern poem: “The Idea of Order at Key West.” (It gets my vote, with perfectly paced beauty that routinely squeezes tears from me.) His subsequent work, which abounded until his death, in 1955, is less familiar, because most of it is gruellingly difficult; the great mind finally spiralled in on itself, like a ruminative Narcissus. It takes heroic stamina to get through “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and other of the late long poems, which American literary culture coped with at the time by loading Stevens with every possible prize, honor, and encomium. Since then, his reputation has stood as a windswept monument, tended by professors.

    Mariani, an accomplished New England poet himself, with an unstressed Catholic bent, has written well-received biographies of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He has a prehensile feel for the roots and branches of literary modernism, exemplary taste in what he chooses to quote, and a real gift for exegesis, unpacking poems in language that is nearly as eloquent as the poet’s, and as clear as faithfulness allows.

    Something like a flame comes off the page (page 71, to be exact) of “The Whole Harmonium” when Mariani quotes lines from Stevens’s first published mature poetry, a waltz-timed passage that begins, “An odor from a star.” It appeared in 1914, when Stevens was thirty-four. Up to that point in the story, we have attended the growth of a restless child into a skittish adult. Thereafter, the book switches back and forth between Stevens’s seraphic art and his plodding life. But they merge as sides of a coin: philosophical, in his continual grappling with implications of the death of God—a loss that he tried to remedy by making poetry stand in for religion—and psychological, in his constant compulsion to cheer himself up.

    The key sentence in the biography, for me, tells that Stevens, who was prone to being depressed, “hated depression—hated it.” So do a lot of people, but few fight it as tenaciously as Stevens did. He relied, for stability, on the routine demands of his office job. (Whenever free of them, he commonly drank to excess.) He projected his struggles as abstract patterns of human—and, beyond human, of natural and metaphysical—existence. One late poem hints at a nagging anguish that poetry relieved for him: “It is a child that sings itself to sleep, / The mind.”

    Stevens was born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, the second of five children. His father, from humble beginnings, was a successful lawyer, his mother a former schoolteacher. Each night, she read a chapter of the Bible to the children, who attended schools attached to both Presbyterian and Lutheran churches, where the music left an indelible impression on Stevens. Both sides of the family were Pennsylvania Dutch, an identity that meant little to him when he was young but a great deal later on, perhaps to shore up a precarious sense of identity. (He became obsessed with tracing his family genealogies, poring over thousands of documents, and was “deeply disappointed,” Mariani writes, at being denied membership in the Holland Society of New York when, in the poet’s words, “some bastard from Danzig” popped up to spoil the requisite ancestral purity.) His father, a stern man, urged upon him a regimen of “work and study, study and work,” toward a professional career. Stevens was often ill, to the extent that he had to repeat a year of high school, and a bout of malaria—as improbable as that sounds, in Pennsylvania—permanently impaired his hearing. But he played football, consorted with the town’s bad boys, and cultivated a blustery front.

    He also had a hunger for erudition, expressed in precocious poems, essays, and orations. In 1897, he enrolled at Harvard, where he studied closely with the humanist philosopher George Santayana, debating matters of belief (Stevens was afire with skepticism, against Santayana’s more nuanced views) and even exchanging sonnets on the subject. He became the editor of the Harvard Advocate, read widely and deeply, and mastered French on the way to commanding a fabulous vocabulary, choreographing such tangos of words regular and rare as “The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,” in “The Connoisseur of Chaos.” On graduation, in 1900, he moved to New York and wrote for newspapers. For one, he covered the second Presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan, whom he hopped home to Reading to vote for. In his third book, “Owl’s Clover,” issued by a leftist publisher, in 1936, Stevens made haplessly clumsy allusions to social and political tensions of the time, though he was “a Hoover Republican,” Mariani writes, and also an admirer of Mussolini for rather longer than is comfortably excused as a common myopia of the time. He was no better than most white men of his class in point of casual racism and anti-Semitism, though fewer such toxins leak into his poetry than into that of Eliot or Pound. In verse, Stevens transcended anything mean or petty in himself, but for art’s sake; he wasn’t much given to moral scruple.

    For the New York Tribune, in 1900, Stevens covered the funeral of Stephen Crane, whom he admired but whose mourners he found “wretched, rag, tag, and bobtail.” He thrilled to a performance, in French, by Sarah Bernhardt, as Hamlet, for what he later recalled as her “intricate metamorphosis of thoughts”—quite the keynote of his own developing sensibility. He was bemused by the “quick, unaccountable” life of the city, and took to sitting for spells of restorative peace in St. Patrick’s Cathedral—unbelieving, but savoring the aura of sanctity. Tiring of journalism and seeing no path to a life in literature, he succumbed to pressure from his father and enrolled in the New York Law School. He passed the bar in 1904 and worked at various law and insurance firms.

    Also in that year, Stevens fell wildly in love with Elsie Kachel, a Reading girl from a family who lived on “the wrong side of the tracks,” Mariani writes—a cliché now that was at the time a grinding social fate in railway-divided American towns. When his father vehemently opposed the match, Stevens stormed out of the house and never spoke to him again. (He generally avoided all his relatives except, by way of genealogical research, those who were dead.) Elsie was beautiful. In 1916, her profile, sculpted by an artist who was a chance acquaintance, is said to have become the face of the dime, reigning there until she was replaced by F.D.R., in 1946. (Mariani believes the oft-told story, though the artist’s son denied it.) She was also prim, humorless, and, having left school in the ninth grade, intellectually defensive and incurious—traits overlooked by the smitten Stevens through the years of their courtship, while he accrued enough income, by his conventional lights, to justify marriage. The couple wed in 1909 and moved into an apartment on West Twenty-first Street.

    The next few years, spent on a small but seething scene of budding modernists, were golden for Stevens’s formation as a poet. At the salon of Walter Arensberg, a wealthy doyen of the new, Stevens met Marcel Duchamp—one of their conversations, in French, suggested to Stevens “sparrows around a pool of water”—and the New Jersey pediatrician and brilliantly innovative poet William Carlos Williams, his peer and cordial rival, who once called him “a troubled man who sings well, somewhat covertly, somewhat overfussily at times, a little stiffly but well.” Williams’s vernacular free verse and Stevens’s sumptuous blank verse long remained magnetic poles of American poetic form. They more or less merged in the work of Marianne Moore, whom both men esteemed.

    Mariani’s chapters on these years sparkle with personalities, anecdotes, and ideas. There’s Carl Van Vechten, calling Stevens “a dainty rogue in porcelain” who was “big, blond, and burly”—he stood six feet two—but possessed of “a tiny reserved spirituality.” Arensberg promptly revised the description to “that rogue elephant in porcelain,” in view of Stevens’s social ineptitude. (The patron’s stated formula for a successful poets’ salon was to convene “five or six men who live in the same town and hate each other.”) One gathering was so much fun that Stevens sent a telegram to Elsie, not daring to phone, to say that he would be home late. He admitted to his companions that he dreaded what awaited him at home.

    Mariani gives a fascinating account of a poet, previously unknown to me, who strongly influenced Stevens in those days: Donald Evans, a free spirit with a bejewelled, determinedly decadent poetic style, who most probably committed suicide, in 1921. “With their silk-swathed ankles softly kissing,” a typical line reads. Something of Evans—French elegance crossed with American vigor—informs Stevens’s early “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” which weaves theories of music and beauty into a comic version of the story, in the Apocrypha, of Susanna’s harassment by lusting elders: “She turned— / A cymbal crashed, / And roaring horns.” And: “Beauty is momentary in the mind— / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal.”
    “It was the cheapest way for us to cover the potholes.”

    Some of Stevens’s breakthrough works amount to literary equivalents of the formally audacious still-lifes and interiors of advanced French painting. The masterpiece “Sunday Morning,” from 1915, is an argument for spirituality without God, interlaced with a woman’s parlor daydream. It begins with “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair”; ranges “Over the seas, to silent Palestine”; decides that “Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams / And our desires”; and concludes with a breathtaking image of “casual flocks of pigeons” that, at evening, “make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink, / Downward to darkness, on extended wings.” It was the first poem to appear under Stevens’s name in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, which had recently started publication in Chicago. (He had shyly used a pseudonym, Peter Parasol, when submitting earlier poems, two of which were accepted.)

    The editor, Harriet Monroe, cut some stanzas and rearranged others, and Stevens agreed to it, though he restored the original in “Harmonium.” A certain reciprocal high-handedness among poets and editors—as if the modern in aesthetics required a team effort—marked the time. (Think of Pound’s retooling of “The Waste Land.”) Williams advised Stevens to delete, from a poem, two lines that struck him as sentimental. “For Christ’s sake yield to me and become great and famous,” he hectored. Stevens obeyed.

    Then, in 1916, perhaps, in part, to secure a suitable life with Elsie, who disliked New York, Stevens took a position with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he worked for the rest of his life. After the move to Connecticut, he retreated from collegial enterprise—“a frightened man drawing back,” in Williams’s view—and conducted his art as a sideline to his humdrum life. It took him seven years to complete and perfect “Harmonium,” leaving out as many poems as he included. Except for Marianne Moore, who called the poems “sharp, solemn, rhapsodic,” reviewers of the book were bewildered. One condemned Stevens for having created a “fictitious reality,” which might seem a positive achievement. Another praised him as America’s first true dandy, thereby missing the sincerity of his ambition.

    For several years after the birth of his only child, Holly, in 1924, Stevens wrote little. (In a letter to Monroe, he called parenthood a “terrible blow to poor literature.”) When he resumed, it was in less sprightly veins, as his idealist’s temperament groped, through thickets of qualification, toward a never quite attained ideal. But flares of comedy recurred. The painting-like “So and So Reclining on Her Couch” begins, “On her side, reclining on her elbow, / This mechanism, this apparition, / Suppose we call it Projection A.” It ends, “Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.”

    Stevens took to composing poems on slips of paper in the morning while walking to his office, where his secretary typed them up. The results made him a regular and imposing presence in literary journals, starting in the nineteen-thirties, and his poems from “Harmonium,” especially, which were frequently anthologized, fascinated a growing popular audience. After work, at home, he closed himself off, with a sense, he told a friend in a letter, of “shutting out something crude and lacking in all feeling and delicacy.” His marriage had foundered—Elsie had banished him from her bed after Holly’s birth—although he seems never to have considered ending it. When they moved to a new house, in 1932, Stevens occupied the master bedroom and Elsie a former servant’s quarters. A full-time housekeeper tended to Holly. There’s no hint in the book of any other romantic attachment, except for a chaste crush on a young teacher whom he met in the summer after his first year in law school—memories of which haunted him with visions of a flawless woman, forever lost.

    His public manner became aloof and stony, but the bravado of his boyhood resurfaced when he drank too much, as he did with zestful abandon on annual, usually solo vacations to the Florida Keys. Mariani tells us that at a party in Key West, in 1935—the year after Stevens became his firm’s vice-president in charge of surety and fidelity claims—he drunkenly insulted Robert Frost, disparaging his poetry. He wrote Frost a not quite penitent but mollifying letter, to which Frost replied gracefully, “If I’m somewhat academic (I’m more agricultural) and you are somewhat executive, so much the better: it is so we are saved from being literary and deployers of words derived from
    Peter Schjeldahl has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998 and is the magazine’s art critic. He is the author of “The Hydrogen Jukebox.”
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    The HyperTexts

    Bede's Death Song: a Modern English Translation, Summary and Analysis of the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) Poem

    Bede's "Death Song" is one of the best early poems of the fledgling English language now known as Old English or Anglo-Saxon English. Written circa 735 AD, the poem may have been composed by Bede on his death-bed. It is the most-copied Old English poem, with 45 extant versions.

    Was the celebrated scholar known and revered as the Venerable Bede also one of the earliest Anglo-Saxon poets? The answer appears to be "yes," since Bede was doctus in nostris carminibus ("learned in our song") according to his most famous disciple, Saint Cuthbert. Cuthbert's letter on Bede's death, the Epistola Cuthberti de obitu Bedae, is commonly taken by modern scholars to indicate that Bede composed the five-line vernacular Anglo-Saxon poem known as "Bede’s Death Song" (my modern English translation appears below). However, there is no way to be absolutely certain that Bede was the poem's original author.

    Bede's Death Song

    a modern English translation by Michael R. Burch

    Facing Death, that inescapable journey,
    who can be wiser than he
    who reflects, while breath yet remains,
    on whether his life brought others happiness, or pains,
    since his soul may yet win delight's or night's way
    after his death-day.

    The original Anglo-Saxon (Old English) text:

    Fore ðæm nedfere nænig wiorðe
    ðonc snottora ðon him ðearf siæ
    to ymbhycgenne ær his hinionge
    hwæt his gastæ godes oððe yfles
    æfter deað dæge doemed wiorðe.

    Bede (673–735) is known today as Saint Bede, Good Bede and Venerable Bede (Latin: Beda Venerabilis). One may thus conclude that he was held in extremely high regard by his peers. The name Bede may be related to the Anglo-Saxon word for prayer, bēd. Bede was a English Benedictine monk of the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth and of its companion monastery Saint Paul's in Wearmouth-Jarrow. Both monasteries were at the time part of the Kingdom of Northumbria. Bede, a distinguished scholar, had access to a library which included works by Eusebius and Orosius, among others. His most famous work, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), has resulted in Bede being called "the Father of English History." Bede has also been called the "Father of the footnote" because he was "the first author in any language to rigorously trace his sources, and as a result he set a precedent of scholarly accuracy for writers across the range of disciplines." He was also a skilled linguist and translator whose Latin and Greek writings contributed significantly to early English Christianity.

    Bede is now revered as a saint in certain circles:

    "Because, saith he,
    thou art a saint, Good Bede,
    pray for me ..."

    Bede was declared Venerable in 836 and was canonized (declared a saint) in 1899. He was named a "Doctor of the Church" by Pope Leo XIII because of his work and piety. Bede is considered to be the patron saint of scholars and historians.

    Bede died on Thursday, 26 May 735 (Ascension Day) and was buried at Jarrow. Cuthbert described Bede's death as follows: "Being well-versed in our native songs, he described to us the dread departure of the soul from the body by a verse in our own tongue, which translated means: 'Before setting forth on that inevitable journey, none is wiser than the man who considers—before his soul departs hence—what good or evil he has done, and what judgement his soul will receive after its passing.'" (A History of the English Church and People, translated by Leo Shirley-Price, Penguin Books, 1955)

    Bede also helped establish the foundations of medieval astronomy and chronology; he is primarily responsible for popularizing the western BC/AD dating system. George Sarton called the eighth century "The Age of Bede" because Bede was such an important scientific figure. He wrote major scientific works such as On the Nature of Things, On Time (which provided an introduction to the principles of calendars) and On the Reckoning of Time (which "became the cornerstone of clerical scientific education during the ninth century"). He also wrote a treatise on grammar and figures of speech.

    "Caedmon's Hymn," the oldest complete poem in the English language, was recorded by Bede in a Latin translation. You can read the original poem, its history and a modern English translation by clicking here: Caedmon's Hymn.

    If you want to learn more about the origins of English poetry, please feel free to investigate English Poetic Roots: A Brief History of Rhyme.

    The following are links to other translations by Michael R. Burch. "Wulf and Eadwacer" may be the oldest extant poem in the English language written by a female poet. "Sweet Rose of Virtue" is a modern translation of a truly great poem by the early Scottish master William Dunbar. "How Long the Night" is one of the very best Anglo Saxon lyric poems.

    Wulf and Eadwacer
    Sweet Rose of Virtue
    How Long the Night
    Caedmon's Hymn
    Bede's Death Song
    The Wife's Lament
    Deor's Lament
    Lament for the Makaris
    Ancient Greek Epigrams and Epitaphs
    Basho
    Oriental Masters/Haiku
    Sappho
    Miklós Radnóti
    Rainer Maria Rilke
    Renée Vivien
    Ono no Komachi
    Allama Iqbal
    Bertolt Brecht
    Ber Horvitz
    Paul Celan
    Primo Levi
    Tegner's Drapa
    Robert Burns
    Ahmad Faraz
    Sandor Marai
    Wladyslaw Szlengel

    The HyperTexts
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Note- Although this touches on being political, I post it primarily to note another example of the power of poetry in our culture...
    If desiring to comment, then please do so in regards to aspects of the poem, its virtues and the author's body of work and great poetic talents.
    All comments regarding politics , will be deleted.
    Thank you.. -Tyr



    Poetry News
    Emma Lazarus's 'The New Colossus' Causes Rift Between White House Aide & CNN Anchor
    By Harriet Staff

    Emma Lazarus

    Headlines making waves: On Wednesday, CNN reporter Jim Acosta quoted the most famous couplet from Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem "The New Colossus" in a public disagreement with White House senior aide Stephen Miller. Newsweek reports on the story:

    Acosta questioned whether the new green card system being proposed was in keeping with U.S. history and invoked Lazarus’s poem to make his point.

    “What you’re proposing, or what the President is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with American tradition when it comes to immigration. The Statue of Liberty says, 'Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.' It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer," Acosta said.

    “Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country if you’re telling them you have to speak English?” he asked.

    The new immigration bill in question, endorsed by Donald Trump, seeks to cut immigration in half. "The legislation would [also] award points based on education, ability to speak English, high-paying job offers, age, record of achievement and entrepreneurial initiative," as reported in the New York Times. As for the controversy over the poem:

    Miller in his rebuttal questioned whether [the] poem was really representative of U.S. values on the basis it had been added to the statue after it was conceived as a symbol of American liberty. “The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty,” he said.

    In a later back and forth, Miller referred to the “Statue of Liberty law of the land” asking the CNN journalist in what decade and which number of people entering the country each year he approved of U.S. immigration policy.

    According to the National Park’s service, the Statue of Liberty’s official name is Liberty Enlightening the world. Lazarus's famous sonnet depicts the Statue as the "Mother of Exiles:" a symbol of immigration and opportunity - symbols associated with the Statue of Liberty today. One of Lazarus’s friends began a campaign promoting her work after her death in 1887 and in 1903 the words of the poem were inscribed on a plaque and placed on the inner wall of the pedestal of the statue.

    Find the whole story at Newsweek.
    Originally Published: August 3rd, 2017
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Minor Poets of the South


    Written by: F.V.N. Painter

    The first poetic writer of this country had his home at Jamestown. He was GEORGE SANDYS who came to Virginia in 1621, and succeeded his brother as treasurer of the newly established colony. Amid the hardships of pioneer colonial life, in which he proved himself a leading spirit, he had the literary zeal to complete his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, which he had begun in England. After the toilsome day, spent in introducing iron works or in encouraging shipbuilding, he sat down at night, within the shadow of surrounding forests, to construct his careful, rhymed pentameters. The conditions under which he wrote were very far removed from the Golden Age which he described,—

    "Which uncompelled
    And without rule, in faith and truth, excelled."

    The promise of this bright, heroic beginning in poetry was not realized; and scarcely another voice was heard in verse in the South before the Revolution. The type of civilization developed in the South prior to the Civil War, admirable as it was in many other particulars, was hardly favorable to literature. The energies of the most intelligent portion of the population were directed to agriculture or to politics; and many of the foremost statesmen of our country—men like Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Calhoun, Benton—were from the Southern states. The system of slavery, while building up baronial homes of wealth, culture, and boundless hospitality, checked manufacture, retarded the growth of cities, and turned the tide of immigration westward. Without a vigorous public school system, a considerable part of the non-slaveholding class remained without literary taste or culture.

    The South has been chiefly an agricultural region, and has adhered to conservative habits of thought. While various movements in theology, philosophy, and literature were stirring New England, the South pursued the even tenor of its way. Of all parts of our country, it has been most tenacious of old customs and beliefs. Before the Civil War the cultivated classes of the Southern states found their intellectual nourishment in the older English classics, and Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare formed a part of every gentleman's library. There were no great publishing houses to stimulate literary production; and to this day Southern writers are dependent chiefly on Northern publishers to give their works to the public. Literature was hardly taken seriously; it was rather regarded, to use the words of Paul Hamilton Hayne, "as the choice recreation of gentlemen, as something fair and good, to be courted in a dainty, amateur fashion, and illustrated by aproposquotations from Lucretius, Virgil, or Horace." Thus it happened that before the Civil War literature in the South, whether prose or poetry, had a less vigorous development than in the Middle States and New England.

    Yet it has been common to undervalue the literary work of the South. While literature was not generally encouraged there before the Civil War,—a fact lamented by gifted, representative writers,—there were at least two literary centers that exerted a notable influence. The first was Richmond, the home of Poe during his earlier years, and of the Southern Literary Messenger, in its day the most influential magazine south of the Potomac. It was founded, as set forth in its first issue, in 1834, to encourage literature in Virginia and the other states of the South; and during its career of twenty-eight years it stimulated literary activity in a remarkable degree. Among its contributors we find Poe, Simms, Hayne, Timrod, John Esten Cooke, John R. Thompson, and others—a galaxy of the best-known names in Southern literature.

    The other principal literary center of the South was Charleston. "Legaré's wit and scholarship," to adopt the words of Mrs. Margaret J. Preston, "brightened its social circle; Calhoun's deep shadow loomed over it from his plantation at Fort Hill; Gilmore Simms's genial culture broadened its sympathies. The latter was the Maecenas to a band of brilliant youths who used to meet for literary suppers at his beautiful home." Among these brilliant youths were Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, two of the best poets the South has produced. The Southern Literary Gazette, founded by Simms, and Russell's Magazine, edited by Hayne, were published at Charleston. Louisville and New Orleans were likewise literary centers of more or less influence.

    Yet it is a notable fact that none of these literary centers gave rise to a distinctive group or school of writers. The influence of these centers did not consist in one great dominating principle, but in a general stimulus to literary effort. In this respect it may be fairly claimed that the South was more cosmopolitan than the North. In New England, theology and transcendentalism in turn dominated literature; and not a few of the group of writers who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly were profoundly influenced by the anti-slavery agitation. They struggled up Parnassus, to use the words of Lowell,—

    "With a whole bale of isms tied together with rime."

    But the leading writers of the South, as will be seen later, have been exempt, in large measure, from the narrowing influence of one-sided theological or philosophical tenets. They have not aspired to the rôle of social reformers; and in their loyalty to art, they have abstained from fanatical energy and extravagance.

    The major poets of the South stand out in strong, isolated individuality. They were not bound together by any sympathy other than that of a common interest in art and in their Southern home. Their genius was nourished on the choicest literary productions of England and of classic antiquity; and looking, with this Old World culture, upon Southern landscape and Southern character, they pictured or interpreted them in the language of poetry.

    The three leading poets of the Civil War period—Hayne, Timrod, and Ryan —keenly felt the issues involved in that great struggle. All three of them were connected, for a time at least, with the Confederate army. In the earlier stages of the conflict, the intensity of their Southern feeling flamed out in thrilling lyrics. Timrod's martial songs throb with the energy of deep emotion. But all three poets lived to accept the results of the war, and to sing a new loyalty to our great Republic.

    The South has not been as unfruitful in literature as is often supposed. While there have been very few to make literature a vocation, a surprisingly large number have made it an avocation. Law and literature, as we shall have occasion to note, have frequently gone hand in hand. A recent work on Southern literature[*] enumerates more than twelve hundred writers, most of whom have published one or more volumes. There are more than two hundred poets who have been thought worthy of mention. More than fifty poets have been credited to Virginia alone; and an examination of their works reveals, among a good deal that is commonplace and imitative, many a little gem that ought to be preserved. Apart from the five major poets of the South—Poe, Hayne, Timrod, Lanier, and Ryan—who are reserved for special study, we shall now consider a few of the minor poets who have produced verse of excellent quality. [Footnote *: Manly'sSouthern Literature.]

    FRANCIS SCOTT KEY (1780-1843) is known throughout the land as the author of The Star-spangled Banner, the noblest, perhaps, of our patriotic hymns. He was born in Frederick County, Maryland, and was educated at St. John's College, Annapolis. He studied law, and after practicing with success in Frederick City, he removed to Washington, where he became district attorney.

    During the bombardment of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812, he was detained on board a British vessel, whither he had gone to secure the release of a friend. All night long he watched the bombardment with the keenest anxiety. In the morning, when the dawn disclosed the star- spangled banner still proudly waving over the fort, he conceived the stirring song, which at once became popular and was sung all over the country. Though a volume of his poems, with a sketch by Chief-Justice Taney, was published in 1857, it is to The Star-spangled Banner that he owes his literary fame.

    "O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
    What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,
    Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
    O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

    "And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
    Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
    O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
    O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"

    Few poems written in the South have been more popular than My Life is like the Summer Rose. It has the distinction of having been praised by Byron. Its author, RICHARD HENRY WILDE (1789-1847), was born in Dublin, Ireland, but brought up and educated in Augusta, Georgia. He studied law, became attorney general of his adopted state, and later entered Congress, where he served for several terms. He was a man of scholarly tastes and poetic gifts. He spent five years abroad, chiefly in Italy, where his studies in Italian literature afterwards led to a work on Torquato Tasso. It was on the occasion of this trip abroad that he wrote A Farewell to America, which breathes a noble spirit of patriotism:—

    "Farewell, my more than fatherland!
    Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
    Lingering beside some foreign strand,
    How oft shall I remember you!
    How often, o'er the waters blue,
    Send back a sigh to those I leave,
    The loving and beloved few,
    Who grieve for me,—for whom I grieve!"

    On his return to America, he settled in New Orleans, where he became a professor of law in the University of Louisiana. Though the author of a volume of poems of more than usual excellence, it is the melancholy lyric, My Life is like the Summer Rose, that, more than all the rest, has given him a niche in the temple of literary fame. Is it necessary to quote a stanza of a poem so well known?

    "My life is like the summer rose,
    That opens to the morning sky,
    But, ere the shades of evening close,
    Is scattered on the ground—to die!
    Yet on the rose's humble bed
    The sweetest dews of night are shed,
    As if she wept the waste to see—
    But none shall weep a tear for me!"

    GEORGE D. PRENTICE (1802-1870) was a native of Connecticut. He was educated at Brown University, and studied law; but he soon gave up his profession for the more congenial pursuit of literature. In 1828 he established at Hartford the New England Weekly Review, in which a number of his poems, serious and sentimental, appeared. Two years later, at the age of twenty-eight, he turned over his paper to Whittier and removed to Louisville, where he became editor of the Journal.

    He was a man of brilliant intellect, and soon made his paper a power in education, society, and politics. Apart from his own vigorous contributions, he made his paper useful to Southern letters by encouraging literary activity in others. It was chiefly through his influence that Louisville became one of the literary centers of the South. He was a stout opponent of secession; and when the Civil War came his paper, like his adopted state, suffered severely.

    Among his writings is a Life of Henry Clay. A collection of his witty and pungent paragraphs has also been published under the title of Prenticeana. His poems, by which he will be longest remembered, were collected after his death. His best-known poem is The Closing Year. Though its vividness and eloquence are quite remarkable, its style is, perhaps, too declamatory for the taste of the present generation. The following lines, which express the poet's bright hopes for the political future of the world, are taken from The Flight of Years:—

    "Weep not, that Time
    Is passing on—it will ere long reveal
    A brighter era to the nations. Hark!
    Along the vales and mountains of the earth
    There is a deep, portentous murmuring
    Like the swift rush of subterranean streams,
    Or like the mingled sounds of earth and air,
    When the fierce Tempest, with sonorous wing,
    Heaves his deep folds upon the rushing winds,
    And hurries onward with his night of clouds
    Against the eternal mountains. 'Tis the voice
    Of infant Freedom—and her stirring call
    Is heard and answered in a thousand tones
    From every hilltop of her western home——
    And lo—it breaks across old Ocean's flood——
    And Freedom, Freedom! is the answering shout
    Of nations starting from the spell of years.
    The dayspring!—see—'tis brightening in the heavens!
    The watchmen of the night have caught the sign——
    From tower to tower the signal fires flash free——
    And the deep watchword, like the rush of seas
    That heralds the volcano's bursting flame,
    Is sounding o'er the earth. Bright years of hope
    And life are on the wing.—Yon glorious bow
    Of Freedom, bended by the hand of God,
    Is spanning Time's dark surges. Its high arch,
    A type of love and mercy on the cloud,
    Tells that the many storms of human life
    Will pass in silence, and the sinking waves,
    Gathering the forms of glory and of peace,
    Reflect the undimmed brightness of the Heaven."

    WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS (1806-1870), a native of Charleston, was a man of remarkable versatility. He made up for his lack of collegiate training by private study and wide experience. He early gave up law for literature, and during his long and tireless literary career was editor, poet, dramatist, historian, and novelist. He had something of the wideness of range of Sir Walter Scott; and one can not but think that, had he lived north of Mason and Dixon's line, he might occupy a more prominent place in the literary annals of our country. He has been styled the "Cooper of the South"; but it is hardly too much to say that in versatility, culture, and literary productiveness he surpassed his great Northern contemporary.

    Simms was a poet before he became a novelist. The poetic impulse manifested itself early; and before he was twenty-five he had published three or more volumes of verse. In 1832 his imaginative poem, Atalantis, a Story of the Sea, was brought out by the Harpers; and it introduced him at once to the favorable notice of what Poe called the "Literati" of New York. His subsequent volumes of poetry were devoted chiefly to a description of Southern scenes and incidents.

    As will be seen in our studies of Hayne and Timrod, Simms was an important figure in the literary circles of Charleston. His large, vigorous nature seemed incapable of jealousy, and he took delight in lending encouragement to young men of literary taste and aspiration. He was a laborious and prolific writer, the number of his various works— poetry, drama, history, fiction—reaching nearly a hundred. Had he written less rapidly, his work might have gained, perhaps, in artistic quality.

    Among the best of Simms's novels is a series devoted to the Revolution. The characters and incidents of that conflict in South Carolina are graphically portrayed. The Partisan, the first of this historic series, was published in 1835. The Yemassee is an Indian story, in which the character of the red man is less idealized than in Cooper's Leather- stocking Tales. In The Damsel of Darien, the hero is Balboa, the discoverer of the Pacific.

    The verse of Simms is characterized by facile vigor rather than by fine poetic quality. The following lines, which represent his style at its best, bear a lesson for the American people to-day:—

    "This the true sign of ruin to a race—
    It undertakes no march, and day by day
    Drowses in camp, or, with the laggard's pace,
    Walks sentry o'er possessions that decay;
    Destined, with sensible waste, to fleet away;—
    For the first secret of continued power
    Is the continued conquest;—all our sway
    Hath surety in the uses of the hour;
    If that we waste, in vain walled town and lofty tower!"

    EDWARD COATE PINKNEY (1802-1828) died before his poetic gifts had reached their full maturity. He was the son of the eminent lawyer and diplomatist, William Pinkney, and was born in London, while his father was American minister at the court of St. James. At the age of nine he was brought home to America, and educated at Baltimore. He spent eight years in the United States navy, during which period he visited the classic shores of the Mediterranean. He was impressed particularly with the beauty of Italy, and in one of his poems he says:—

    "It looks a dimple on the face of earth,
    The seal of beauty, and the shrine of mirth;
    Nature is delicate and graceful there,
    The place's genius feminine and fair:
    The winds are awed, nor dare to breathe aloud;
    The air seems never to have borne a cloud,
    Save where volcanoes send to heaven their curled
    And solemn smokes, like altars of the world."

    In 1824 he resigned his place in the navy to take up the practice of law in Baltimore. His health was not good; and he seems to have occupied a part of his abundant leisure (for he was not successful in his profession) in writing poetry. A thin volume of poems was published in 1825, in which he displays, especially in his shorter pieces, an excellent lyrical gift. The following stanzas are from A Health:—

    "I fill this cup to one made up
    Of loveliness alone,
    A woman, of her gentle sex
    The seeming paragon;
    To whom the better elements
    And kindly stars have given
    A form so fair, that, like the air,
    'Tis less of earth than heaven.

    "Her every tone is music's own,
    Like those of morning birds,
    And something more than melody
    Dwells ever in her words;
    The coinage of her heart are they,
    And from her lips each flows
    As one may see the burdened bee
    Forth issue from the rose."

    PHILIP PENDLETON COOKE (1816-1850), like most Southern writers before the Civil War, mingled literature with the practice of law. He was born at Martinsburg, Virginia, and educated at Princeton. He early manifested a literary bent, and wrote for the Knickerbocker Magazine, the oldest of our literary monthlies, before he was out of his teens. He was noted for his love of outdoor life, and became a thorough sportsman. In 1847 he published a volume entitled Froissart Ballads and Other Poems. The origin of the ballad portion of the volume, as explained in the preface, is found in the lines of an old Roman poet:—

    "A certain freak has got into my head,
    Which I can't conquer for the life of me,
    Of taking up some history, little read,
    Or known, and writing it in poetry."

    The best known of his lyrics is Florence Vane which has the sincerity and pathos of a real experience:—

    "I loved thee long and dearly,
    Florence Vane;
    My life's bright dream, and early,
    Hath come again;
    I renew, in my fond vision,
    My heart's dear pain,
    My hope, and thy derision,
    Florence Vane.

    "The ruin lone and hoary,
    The ruin old,
    Where thou didst hark my story,
    At even told,—
    That spot—the hues Elysian
    Of sky and plain—
    I treasure in my vision,
    Florence Vane.

    "Thou wast lovelier than the roses
    In their prime;
    Thy voice excelled the closes
    Of sweetest rhyme;
    Thy heart was as a river
    Without a main.
    Would I had loved thee never,
    Florence Vane!"

    THEODORE O'HARA (1820-1867) is chiefly remembered for a single poem that has touched the national heart. He was born in Danville, Kentucky. After taking a course in law, he accepted a clerkship in the Treasury Department at Washington. On the outbreak of the Mexican War he enlisted as a private soldier, and by his gallant service rose to the rank of captain and major. After the close of the war he returned to Washington and engaged for a time in the practice of his profession. Later he became editor of the Mobile Register, and Frankfort Yeoman in Kentucky. In the Civil War he served as colonel in the Confederate army.

    The poem on which his fame largely rests is The Bivouac of the Dead. It was written to commemorate the Kentuckians who fell in the battle of Buena Vista. Its well-known lines have furnished an apt inscription for several military cemeteries:—

    "The muffled drum's sad roll has beat
    The soldier's last tattoo;
    No more on Life's parade shall meet
    That brave and fallen few.

    "On Fame's eternal camping-ground
    Their silent tents are spread,
    And Glory guards, with solemn round,
    The bivouac of the dead."

    O'Hara died in Alabama in 1867. The legislature of Kentucky paid him a fitting tribute in having his body removed to Frankfort and placed by the side of the heroes whom he so worthily commemorated in his famous poem.

    FRANCIS ORRERY TICKNOR (1822-1874) was a physician living near Columbus, Georgia. He led a busy, useful, humble life, and his merits as a poet have not been fully recognized. In the opinion of Paul Hamilton Hayne, who edited a volume of Ticknor's poems, he was "one of the truest and sweetest lyric poets this country has yet produced." The Virginians of the Valley was written after the soldiers of the Old Dominion, many of whom bore the names of the knights of the "Golden Horseshoe," had obtained a temporary advantage over the invading forces of the North:—

    "We thought they slept!—the sons who kept
    The names of noble sires,
    And slumbered while the darkness crept
    Around their vigil fires;
    But aye the 'Golden Horseshoe' knights
    Their Old Dominion keep,
    Whose foes have found enchanted ground,
    But not a knight asleep."

    But a martial lyric of greater force is Little Giffen, written in honor of a blue-eyed lad of East Tennessee. He was terribly wounded in some engagement, and after being taken to the hospital at Columbus, Georgia, was finally nursed back to life in the home of Dr. Ticknor. Beneath the thin, insignificant exterior of the lad, the poet discerned the incarnate courage of the hero:—

    "Out of the focal and foremost fire,
    Out of the hospital walls as dire;
    Smitten of grape-shot and gangrene,
    (Eighteenth battle and he sixteen!)
    Specter! such as you seldom see,
    Little Giffen of Tennessee!

    * * * * *

    "Word of gloom from the war, one day;
    Johnson pressed at the front, they say.
    Little Giffen was up and away;
    A tear—his first—as he bade good-by,
    Dimmed the glint of his steel-blue eye.
    'I'll write, if spared!' There was news of the fight;
    But none of Giffen.—He did not write."

    But Ticknor did not confine himself to war themes. He was a lover of Nature; and its forms, and colors, and sounds—as seen in April Morning, Twilight, The Hills, Among the Birds—appealed to his sensitive nature. Shut out from literary centers and literary companionship, he sang, like Burns, from the strong impulse awakened by the presence of the heroic and the beautiful.

    JOHN R. THOMPSON (1823-1873) has deserved well of the South both as editor and author. He was born in Richmond, and educated at the University of Virginia, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1845. Two years later he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger; and during the twelve years of his editorial management, he not only maintained a high degree of literary excellence, but took pains to lend encouragement to Southern letters. It is a misfortune to our literature that his writings, particularly his poetry, have never been collected.

    The incidents of the Civil War called forth many a stirring lyric, the best of which is his well-known Music in Camp:—

    "Two armies covered hill and plain,
    Where Rappahannock's waters
    Ran deeply crimsoned with the stain
    Of battle's recent slaughters."

    The band had played "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," which in turn had been greeted with shouts by "Rebels" and "Yanks."

    "And yet once more the bugles sang
    Above the stormy riot;
    No shout upon the evening rang—
    There reigned a holy quiet.

    "The sad, slow stream its noiseless flood
    Poured o'er the glistening pebbles;
    All silent now the Yankees stood,
    And silent stood the Rebels.

    "No unresponsive soul had heard
    That plaintive note's appealing,
    So deeply 'Home, Sweet Home' had stirred
    The hidden founts of feeling.

    "Or Blue or Gray, the soldier sees,
    As by the wand of fairy,
    The cottage 'neath the live-oak trees,
    The cabin by the prairie."

    On account of failing health, Thompson made a visit to Europe, where he spent several years, contributing from time to time to Blackwood's Magazine and other English periodicals. On his return to America, he was engaged on the editorial staff of the New York Evening Post, with which he was connected till his death, in 1873. He is buried in Hollywood cemetery at Richmond.

    "The city's hum drifts o'er his grave,
    And green above the hollies wave
    Their jagged leaves, as when a boy,
    On blissful summer afternoons,
    He came to sing the birds his runes,
    And tell the river of his joy."

    The verse of Mrs. MARGARET J. PRESTON (1820-1897) rises above the commonplace both in sentiment and craftsmanship. She belongs, as some critic has said, to the school of Mrs. Browning; and in range of subject and purity of sentiment she is scarcely inferior to her great English contemporary. She was the daughter of the Rev. George Junkin, D.D., the founder of Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, and for many years president of Washington College at Lexington, Virginia. In 1857 she married Colonel J. T. L. Preston of the Virginia Military Institute.

    For many years she was a contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, in which her earlier poems first made their appearance. Though a native of Philadelphia, she was loyal to the South during the Civil War, and found inspiration in its deeds of heroism. Beechenbrook is a rhyme of the war; and though well-nigh forgotten now, it was read, on its publication in 1865, from the Potomac to the Gulf. Among her other writings are Old Songs and New and Cartoons. Her poetry is pervaded by a deeply religious spirit, and she repeatedly urges the lesson of supreme resignation and trust, as in the following lines:—

    "What will it matter by-and-by
    Whether my path below was bright,
    Whether it wound through dark or light,
    Under a gray or golden sky,
    When I look back on it, by-and-by?

    "What will it matter by-and-by
    Whether, unhelped, I toiled alone,
    Dashing my foot against a stone,
    Missing the charge of the angel nigh,
    Bidding me think of the by-and-by?

    * * * * *

    "What will it matter? Naught, if I
    Only am sure the way I've trod,
    Gloomy or gladdened, leads to God,
    Questioning not of the how, the why,
    If I but reach Him by-and-by.

    "What will I care for the unshared sigh,
    If in my fear of lapse or fall,
    Close I have clung to Christ through all,
    Mindless how rough the road might lie,
    Sure He will smoothen it by-and-by.

    "What will it matter by-and-by?
    Nothing but this: that Joy or Pain
    Lifted me skyward,—helped me to gain,
    Whether through rack, or smile, or sigh,
    Heaven, home, all in all, by-and-by."

    In this rapid sketch of the minor singers of the South, it has been necessary to omit many names worthy of mention. It is beyond our scope to speak of the newer race of poets. Here and there delicate notes are heard, but there is no evidence that a great singer is present among us. Yet there is no ground for discouragement; the changed conditions and the new spirit that has come upon our people may reasonably be expected to lead to higher poetic achievement.

    In some respects the South affords a more promising field for literature than any other part of our country. There is evident decadence in New England. But the climate and scenery, the history and traditions, and the chivalrous spirit and unexhausted intellectual energies of the South contain the promise of an Augustan age in literature. In no insignificant degree its rich-ored veins have been worked in prose. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS has successfully wrought in the mine of negro folk-lore; GEORGE W. CABLE has portrayed the Creole life of Louisiana; CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK has pictured the types of character found among the Tennessee mountains; THOMAS NELSON PAGE has shown us the trials and triumphs of Reconstruction days; and Miss MARY JOHNSTON has revived the picturesque scenes of colonial times. There has been an obvious literary awakening in the South; and sooner or later it will find utterance, let us hope, in some strong-voiced, great-souled singer.

    It is true that there are obstacles to be overcome. There are no literary magazines in the South to encourage and develop our native talent as in the days of the Southern Literary Messenger. Southern writers are still dependent upon Northern periodicals, in which they can hardly be said to find a cordial welcome. It seems that the South in a measure suffers the obloquy that rested of old upon Nazareth, from which the Pharisees of the metropolis maintained that no good thing could come.

    But the most serious drawback of all is the disfavor into which poetry has fallen, or rather which it has brought upon itself. In the remoteness of its themes and sentiments, in its over-anxiety for a faultless or striking technique, it has erected a barrier between itself and the sanity of a practical, truth-loving people. Let us hope that this aberration is not permanent. When poetry returns to simplicity, sincerity, and truth; when it shall voice, as in the great English singers, Tennyson and Browning, the deepest thought and aspirations of our race; when once more, as in the prophetic days of old, it shall resume its lofty, seer-like office,—then will it be restored to its place of honor by a delighted and grateful people.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Ten Treasures I Found in Poetry

    Written by: Micheal Ace

    Note: Some deliberate patterns are employed independently by the writer for the purpose of easy comprehension. I was just this frustrated kid who wanted to echo the giggles of life made mockingly over him, I began music and raps; I wanted to make a difference but my desires could not climb the gates of success right when it was locked. Then, I began writing. In no time, poetry started; a dream come true. “The sky’s won’t be the limit when there are footprints on the moon”, so I became zealous and consistent but guess what.
    Over time, I have found ten treasures in poetry. -Poetry is a talking drum: Being an African-born writer has opportuned me to know more about how drums are used to relay messages with effect of sounds. But the significant similarity it shares with poetry is; Only the wise and the patient understands. Unlike prose, poetry provides us means to write in codes with use of several poetics. -Every poet is a servant: One thousand poets can scribble on the same theme with different imageries, dictions, depths and rhythms and which does not make any of them better than the others. We write according to the ‘much’ we are given as servant to words. No poet owns it all, there is chance for everybody to become a poetic elephant, we are all servants to word.
    - Poetry is a living organism: I have done dining with elders and they often tell me; Micheal Ace, don’t ever let poetry outgrow you. The only characteristic poetry doesn’t have as a living thing is ‘Death’, There will always be themes unwritten and poetics unused, remember even the likes of Shakespeare did not write it all, they couldn’t and we will not either. No, no one can end poetry. -Sovereignty. Otherwise called ‘Poetic license’, most poets understand this concept except for the misusers. However, poets are free to utilize any imaginable character in relaying their thoughts. -Cowards don’t write poetry: It takes courage and determination to pick a pen and write even when you are not sure someone will read them. I have seen poets battle with the question; ‘Who cares to read my poems’. But when ‘Wole Soyinka’ began poetry, I know he never knew people like me will read him. The writer being dead or alive, his poems live immortally. -Poetry is a father of three; Proverb, Parable and Idiom: Proverbs for the elders, parables for God, Idioms for the sages. Poetry encompass them all. In fact, even God is a poet. -Every poet is a prophet: As a poet, I see the predictions of the end from every beginning, not with my eyes but my instincts. Poets see silver linings on the cloud and dark spots of the sun.
    -No poet is ugly: I have seen thousands of pengicians, all with beautiful faces, handsome grins, gorgeous looks. Poets are flawless beings. -Writing poetry is lifetime service to humanity: Whenever I see poets quit, I feel the pest inside of me. I wish they know they don’t write for themselves, they write for an audience whom they might not even know. No poet has the right to quit.
    Lastly, -Poets are the treasure of poetry: What else would poetry ever wish for than the magical pen of you and I? Poets are treasures of poetry for every poetics exist in the narrow path of their veins, poets are gods and I’m proud being one. Conclusively, 'Marie beynon Ray' said and I quote that; "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late" The tickles of time say in their everyday murmur "Do it", try something, be creative. You have your stories to tell, someone somewhere wants to hear. Remember, we are treasures of poetry!

    Written by Micheal Ace
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Gwendolyn Over Everything: Specificity, Humanity, and Class in ‘Beverly Hills, Chicago’

    I like my poetry 
like I like my politics, 
local. For all the grandeur of the poem 
that attempts to speak in the broadest, most universal strokes, I prefer my verse at street level. Perhaps no other poet in the American tradition does this like Gwendolyn Brooks.

    Brooks was born in 1917 and moved to Chicago soon after. She would become a lifelong Chicagoan and one of the city’s most revered writers. In 2017, her centennial is being celebrated nationwide and particularly in Chicago through an outpouring of public events, dedications, and recent publications inspired by her life and work.

    In 1950, Brooks famously became the first black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize for her book, Annie Allen (Harper & Brothers, 1949). Throughout her long, illustrious career, her poetic voice developed and shifted tremendously, but her poetry mostly focused on illustrating the textures and complexities of black life in Chicago. She always remained interested in articulating the lives of the people in her community.

    The first poem I encountered by Brooks that made me feel the full weight of this was “Beverly 

Hills, Chicago” from Annie Allen. I grew up in 
West Pullman, a neighborhood on the far South Side of Chicago, just southeast of the more affluent neighborhood of “the Beverly,” also called Beverly Hills, which Brooks documents in the poem. Many of my friends from the magnet school I attended lived in Beverly Hills. I passed through it every day on the bus to elementary school. Until I read “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” I had never seen a poem—or any piece of art—mention a place that was a part of my daily world.

    In Brooks’s poem, the speaker drives through Beverly Hills, describing the neighborhood and imagining what its residents do with their day (go to tea, as one line suggests) and the ease with which their lives unfurl. This poem showcases the way Brooks handles class in her work. Rather than paint a picture of singular communities that feels monolithic, she takes on a wide-lens view, depicting a blackness that includes both the college-bound girl and the unwed mother (“Sadie and Maud”), the civil rights martyr (“Medgar Evers”) and the notorious street gang (“The Blackstone Rangers”).

    The speaker in “Beverly Hills, Chicago” addresses the relative nature of class and social competition with a line like “But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough,” the “we” speaking for those who do not have access to the privileges living in Beverly Hills affords. The sense of longing, perhaps a kind of collective jealousy of the well-off, moves throughout this poem and propels it forward. Brooks masterfully articulates the shame of not-having, something I’ve felt countless times riding through Longwood Drive in Beverly Hills. It’s a feeling that people from my neighborhood feel instinctively, knowing that just west from us, across the tracks, there is so much we can’t touch. Brooks writes in a way that makes the gulf between these two worlds palpable.

    The poem, though, has no clear hero. Part of the genius of Brooks’s work is her commitment to a certain democracy of morality. In her world, the poor have no monopoly on criminality just as the rich have no monopoly on virtue. She does the difficult work of considering each player in her poems as fully human and capable of all that being human entails. In this poem (and others) she resists the temptation to stereotype the wealthy (or any other group). The speaker in the poem continually sees and expresses the ways in which the people in Beverly Hills may be the same as the people in the car. By drawing those similarities we are able to feel the disparity in wealth in an even stronger way. Even the most universal moments of our lives, like death, can be altered by money: “They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers....”

    I will never forget the jolt I felt the first time I read “Beverly Hills, Chicago.” This poem told the story not of that iconic, glamorous Beverly Hills but, instead, of Chicago’s Beverly Hills, the neighborhood I knew, of St. Patrick’s Day parades and wide lawns. For all of Brooks’s awareness and deft depictions of class, her ability to use small details to paint a full picture of a community is her most powerful skill. Her vision allows us to feel like we are along for an intimate ride with both the comfortable folks in the big houses and the plainer folks passing through in their car. Never does Brooks demonize or laud people because of what they have or don’t. She asks us, on her own streets and on her own terms, to consider what inequity might feel like. Like a rapper using neighborhood slang, she doesn’t translate her feelings into a place or a scenario that might be more palatable. She just writes what is, and we are able to experience it.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Ten Treasures I Found in Poetry
    Written by: Micheal Ace

    Note: Some deliberate patterns are employed independently by the writer for the purpose of easy comprehension. I was just this frustrated kid who wanted to echo the giggles of life made mockingly over him, I began music and raps; I wanted to make a difference but my desires could not climb the gates of success right when it was locked. Then, I began writing. In no time, poetry started; a dream come true. “The sky’s won’t be the limit when there are footprints on the moon”, so I became zealous and consistent but guess what. Over time, I have found ten treasures in poetry. -Poetry is a talking drum: Being an African-born writer has opportuned me to know more about how drums are used to relay messages with effect of sounds. But the significant similarity it shares with poetry is; Only the wise and the patient understands.

    Unlike prose, poetry provides us means to write in codes with use of several poetics. -Every poet is a servant: One thousand poets can scribble on the same theme with different imageries, dictions, depths and rhythms and which does not make any of them better than the others. We write according to the ‘much’ we are given as servant to words. No poet owns it all, there is chance for everybody to become a poetic elephant, we are all servants to word. - Poetry is a living organism: I have done dining with elders and they often tell me; Micheal Ace, don’t ever let poetry outgrow you. The only characteristic poetry doesn’t have as a living thing is ‘Death’, There will always be themes unwritten and poetics unused, remember even the likes of Shakespeare did not write it all, they couldn’t and we will not either. No, no one can end poetry. -Sovereignty. Otherwise called ‘Poetic license’, most poets understand this concept except for the misusers. However, poets are free to utilize any imaginable character in relaying their thoughts. -Cowards don’t write poetry: It takes courage and determination to pick a pen and write even when you are not sure someone will read them. I have seen poets battle with the question; ‘Who cares to read my poems’. But when ‘Wole Soyinka’ began poetry, I know he never knew people like me will read him. The writer being dead or alive, his poems live immortally.

    -Poetry is a father of three; Proverb, Parable and Idiom: Proverbs for the elders, parables for God, Idioms for the sages. Poetry encompass them all. In fact, even God is a poet. -Every poet is a prophet: As a poet, I see the predictions of the end from every beginning, not with my eyes but my instincts. Poets see silver linings on the cloud and dark spots of the sun. -No poet is ugly: I have seen thousands of pengicians, all with beautiful faces, handsome grins, gorgeous looks. Poets are flawless beings.

    -Writing poetry is lifetime service to humanity: Whenever I see poets quit, I feel the pest inside of me. I wish they know they don’t write for themselves, they write for an audience whom they might not even know. No poet has the right to quit. Lastly, -Poets are the treasure of poetry: What else would poetry ever wish for than the magical pen of you and I? Poets are treasures of poetry for every poetics exist in the narrow path of their veins, poets are gods and I’m proud being one. Conclusively, 'Marie beynon Ray' said and I quote that; "Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake. Let us use it before it is too late" The tickles of time say in their everyday murmur "Do it", try something, be creative. You have your stories to tell, someone somewhere wants to hear. Remember, we are treasures of poetry!
    _Micheal Ace Written by Micheal Ace
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Christina Rossetti

    1830–1894


    Of all Victorian women poets, posterity has been kindest to Christina Rossetti. Her poetry has never disappeared from view, and her reputation, though it suffered a decline in the first half of the twentieth century, has always been preserved to some degree. Critical interest in Rossetti’s poetry swelled in the final decades of the twentieth century, a resurgence largely impelled by the emergence of feminist criticism; much of this commentary focuses on gender issues in her poetry and on Rossetti as a woman poet. In Rossetti’s lifetime opinion was divided over whether she or Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the greatest female poet of the era; in any case, after Browning’s death in 1861 readers and critics saw Rossetti as the older poet’s rightful successor. The two poets achieved different kinds of excellence, as is evident in Dante Gabriel Rossetti‘s comment on his sister, quoted by William Sharp in The Atlantic Monthly (June 1895): “She is the finest woman-poet since Mrs. Browning, by a long way; and in artless art, if not in intellectual impulse, is greatly Mrs. Browning’s superior.” Readers have generally considered Rossetti’s poetry less intellectual, less political, and less varied than Browning’s; conversely, they have acknowledged Rossetti as having the greater lyric gift, with her poetry displaying a perfection of diction, tone, and form under the guise of utter simplicity.

    Rossetti was the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father, the Italian poet and political exile Gabriele Rossetti, immigrated to England in 1824 and established a career as a Dante scholar and teacher of Italian in London. He married the half-English, half-Italian Frances Polidori in 1826, and they had four children in quick succession: Maria Francesca in 1827, Gabriel Charles Dante (famous under the name Dante Gabriel but always called Gabriel by family members) in 1828, William Michael in 1829, and Christina Georgina on 5 December 1830. In 1831 Gabriele Rossetti was appointed to the chair of Italian at the newly opened King’s College. The children received their earliest education, and Maria and Christina all of theirs, from their mother, who had been trained as a governess and was committed to cultivating intellectual excellence in her family. Certainly this ambition was satisfied: in addition to Christina’s becoming one of the Victorian age’s finest poets, Maria was the author of a respected study of Dante, as well as books on religious instruction and Italian grammar and translation; Dante Gabriel distinguished himself as one of the foremost poets and painters of his era; and William was a prolific art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

    Rossetti’s childhood was exceptionally happy, characterized by affectionate parental care and the creative companionship of older siblings. In temperament she was most like her brother Dante Gabriel: their father called the pair the “two storms” of the family in comparison to the “two calms,” Maria and William. Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behavior, and she fought hard to subdue this passionate temper. Years later, counseling a niece subject to similar outbursts, the mature Christina looked back on the fire now stifled: “You must not imagine, my dear girl, that your Aunt was always the calm and sedate person you now behold. I, too, had a very passionate temper; but I learnt to control it. On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath. I have learnt since to control my feelings—and no doubt you will!” Self-control was, indeed, achieved—perhaps too much so. In his posthumous memoir of his sister that prefaces The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904) William laments the thwarting of her high spirits: “In innate character she was vivacious, and open to pleasurable impressions; and, during her girlhood, one might readily have supposed that she would develop into a woman of expansive heart, fond of society and diversions, and taking a part in them of more than average brilliancy. What came to pass was of course quite the contrary.” As an adult Christina Rossetti was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.

    Frances Rossetti read to her children, favoring religious texts such as the Bible, John Bunyan‘s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), and the writings of St. Augustine, or moralistic tales such as those by Maria Edgeworth. When the children began reading for themselves, however, they generally shunned their mother’s edifying selections in favor of the imaginative delights of The Arabian Nights or Thomas Keightley’s Fairy Mythology (1828); later favorites included Sir Walter Scott, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory “Monk” Lewis. Until 1836, when the boys began attending day school, the four children were offered similar instruction by their mother; thereafter, only Dante Gabriel and William were formally instructed in classics, mathematics, and sciences. Asked to describe her poetic influences, Rossetti speculated in a 26 March 1884 letter to Edmund Gosse: “If any one thing schooled me in the direction of poetry, it was perhaps the delightful idle liberty to prowl all alone about my grandfather’s cottage-grounds some thirty miles from London.” At Gaetano Polidori’s cottage at Holmer Green she fostered the attention to the minute in nature that marks her poetry; there she also observed the corruptibility and mortality that became keynotes in her work. Her reminiscences in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) include reflections on childhood adventures at the cottage: her patient attendance on a strawberry, only to find it blighted before it has fully ripened, and her burial of a dead mouse and later observation of its decay. The visits to Holmer Green ended in 1839 when her grandfather sold the house and moved to London. A great lover of nature, Rossetti nevertheless spent most of her life in the city.

    In his memoir William notes that Christina composed her first verse, “Cecilia never went to school / Without her gladiator,” before she was old enough to write. Her next attempt was an aborted tale, modeled on The Arabian Nights, about a dervish named Hassan; and she wrote her first poem, “To my Mother on her Birthday,” when she was eleven. The children produced a family newspaper, “The Hodge-Podge or Weekly Efforts,” the first issue of which was dated 20 May 1843, and later a periodical titled “The Illustrated Scrapbook.” Christina’s early poetic efforts included experiments in lyric, devotional, pastoral, ballad, and fantasy forms.

    Caught up in the Tractarian or Oxford Movement when it reached London in the 1840s, the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation, and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina Rossetti’s poetry. She was also influenced by the poetics of the Oxford Movement, as is documented in the annotations and illustrations she added to her copy of John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) and in her reading of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For more than twenty years, beginning in 1843, she worshiped at Christ Church, Albany Street, where services were influenced by the innovations emanating from Oxford. The Reverend William Dodsworth, the priest there until his conversion to Catholicism in 1850, assumed a leading role as the Oxford Movement spread to London. In addition to coming under the religious influence of prominent Tractarians such as Dodsworth, W. J. E. Bennett, Henry W. Burrows, and E. B. Pusey, Rossetti had close personal ties with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church theologian who became her spiritual adviser. The importance of Rossetti’s faith for her life and art can hardly be overstated. More than half of her poetic output is devotional, and the works of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. The inconstancy of human love, the vanity of earthly pleasures, renunciation, individual unworthiness, and the perfection of divine love are recurring themes in her poetry.

    Gabriele Rossetti’s health collapsed in 1843, leaving him virtually blind and unable to teach. Frances Rossetti returned to her former employment as a daily governess. Maria and William also took employment, Maria as a nursery governess and William in the civil service. Dante Gabriel continued his art studies, while Christina remained at home as a companion to their ailing father. In 1845 she, too, suffered a collapse in health. The breakdown has mystified biographers, some of whom have surmised that the physical symptoms were psychosomatic and rescued Rossetti from having to make a financial contribution to the family by working as a governess like her mother and sister. She was diagnosed as having a heart condition, but another doctor speculated that she was mentally ill, suffering from a kind of religious mania. Her biographer Jan Marsh conjectures that there may have been an attempt at paternal incest: the father’s breakdown and the resultant changes in family fortunes leaving a needy patriarch in the daily care of his pubescent daughter, Christina’s recurring bouts of depression, her lifelong sense of sinfulness, nightmarish poems about a crocodile devouring his kin, a poetic image of a “clammy fin” repulsively reaching out to her, and the recurring motif of an unnameable secret, Marsh suggests, could be indications of suppressed sexual trauma. Rossetti had bouts of serious illness throughout her life; William insists in his memoir that one cannot understand his sister unless one recognizes that she “was an almost constant and often a sadly-smitten invalid.” The morbidity that readers have so often noted in her poetry, William suggests, was attributable to Christina’s ill health and the ever-present prospect of early death rather than any innate disposition.”

    By her sixteenth birthday Christina, who was regarded as the poet in the family, had written more than fifty poems that were transcribed into a notebook by her sister. In 1847 a collection of her poems, titled Verses, was privately printed by her grandfather Polidori. As Marsh points out, this private publication, dedicated to her mother, decorously avoided anything resembling public display, but at the same time it constituted a juvenile literary debut in the tradition of other women poets such as Browning and Felicia Hemans. It was circulated among family and friends and was well received. The thirty-nine poems are notably literary in their inspiration, which is traceable to the Gothic writers Radcliffe, Lewis, and Charles Maturin; the English poets George Herbert, George Crabbe, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred Tennyson; and the Italian poets Dante, Torquato Tasso, and Pietro Metastasio. The first and most striking poem in the collection is “The Dead City,” an ambitious 275-line dream vision of a magnificent city, succulent banquet, and voluptuous revelers all turned to stone, the evocative descriptions of which anticipate the Pre-Raphaelite style. Here, as in Rossetti’s most famous poem, “Goblin Market“ (1862), lusciously described fruits represent the temptations of self-indulgence and pleasure. This genre—a narrative that combines fantasy with moral allegory—was an important one for Rossetti, and she employed it in more-accomplished poems such as “Goblin Market,” “From House to Home,” “The Prince’s Progress,” and “A Ballad of Boding,” as well as in her tales “Nick,” “Hero,” and Speaking Likenesses, with Pictures thereof by Arthur Hughes (1874). A morbid strain can be seen in many of the poems in the collection: themes of mortality, inconstancy, and corruptibility figure prominently. Although Rossetti’s mature style is not fully realized at this point, Verses is important as a tangible sign of her commitment to poetry and of her family’s recognition of her vocation.”

    Later in 1847 Dante Gabriel, William, and Christina began a tradition of playing bouts rimés, a game in which two of them would race to compose a sonnet conforming to a set of line endings provided by the third. Christina excelled at the exercise, composing sonnets in a matter of minutes. In 1848 she had her first taste of fame when, at Dante Gabriel’s instigation, she submitted two of her poems, “Death’s Chill Between” and “Heart’s Chill Between,” to the prestigious literary periodical The Athenaeum; their acceptance made her a nationally published poet at seventeen. During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group; she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings, on the grounds that such display was unseemly. Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. Later in her career a reviewer in the Catholic World (October 1876) called her the “queen of the Preraphaelite school”; but more-recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of proper notice of the Tractarian influences. Certainly, Rossetti was involved in the early days of Pre-Raphaelitism. She sat as Mary for Dante Gabriel’s paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1848-1849) and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850), and her pensive Italianate countenance was a familiar image in the first phase of the movement. The art and poetry of the brotherhood has a strong sacramental element, and Rossetti had more in common with this early manifestation of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic than she did with its later developments.”

    Late in 1849 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood initiated a periodical, The Germ, as a vehicle for the members’ innovative views on art. Its four issues—dated January to April 1850—provided a venue for seven of Rossetti’s poems: “Dreamland,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth” ), “A Pause of Thought,” “A Testimony,” “Repining,” and “Sweet Death.” These publications, which were anonymous in the first issue and pseudonymous thereafter, found an appreciative, though small, audience. The poems, and others composed at this time but not published until later, show that Rossetti had by then attained her mature poetic style, in which pain, loss, and resignation are expressed in diction and images that strike the reader as simple, perfect, and effortless.”

    One of the Pre-Raphaelite brethren, James Collinson, proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848. She refused the offer, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism as the reason. Collinson promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted. Collinson has struck biographers as an unlikely suitor (anecdotes generally portray him as a lackluster sleepyhead), and opinion is mixed as to whether Rossetti was ever in love with him. The engagement ended in the spring of 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism.”

    In 1850 Rossetti wrote Maude: A Story for Girls (1897), a novella that was not published until after her death. The title character’s appearance and personality bear many similarities to accounts of the author, and this work, with its exploration of the tensions among the sometimes incompatible categories of female, poet, and Anglo-Catholic, is usually considered a semi-autobiographical portrait of the adolescent Rossetti. Fifteen-year-old Maude Foster is a poet whose “broken-hearted” verse dwells on themes of suffering, world-weariness, resignation, and religious devotion. Some of Rossetti’s important early poems, later published under the titles “Song“ (“She sat and sang alway”), “Three Nuns,” and “Symbols,” are included as Maude’s productions, and a bouts rimés contest also appears in the narrative. Rossetti returned to this mixing of genres—prose punctuated with poetry—in her devotional works Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881), Time Flies, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). Religious issues play a central role in the story when Maude suffers a spiritual crisis, and Anglo-Catholic practices are described as she discusses with her cousins the heavily symbolic lectern cover they are embroidering, the question of a vocation as a nun, and the Eucharist. The main conflict in the narrative revolves around Maude’s experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behavior and poetic achievement. Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride. The heroine’s overactive conscience and endless self-recriminations provide considerable insight into Rossetti’s own overscrupulous nature.”

    The family’s financial crisis continued, and in 1851 the Rossettis moved from Charlotte Street to Camden Town, where Christina and her mother briefly ran a small day school. A second attempt at establishing a school, this time in Frome, lasted from March 1853 to February 1854, the only period in Rossetti’s life when she made her home outside London. When she returned to the city, the family moved to Albany Street. At this point Christina and her mother permanently gave up teaching, and the family lived on William’s and Mary’s earnings and Frances’s modest inherited income. Gabriele Rossetti died on 26 April 1854. For most of her adulthood Christina was financially supported primarily by William, a debt that she made provisions in her will to repay.”

    Throughout her twenties Rossetti continued to write poetry and prose. Her Italian heritage is apparent in the Italian poems “Versi” and “L’Incognita” and an unfinished epistolary novel, “Corrispondenza [sic] Famigliare,” which were published in a privately printed periodical, The Bouquet from Marylebone Gardens during 1851 and 1852. Attempts at publication in prestigious periodicals such as Blackwood’s and Fraser’s in 1854 failed. In a letter of 1 August 1854 to William Edmonstoune Aytoun of Blackwood’s Rossetti declared: “poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality; and . . . I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that which is true and right.”

    Rossetti has often been depicted as shrinking from worldly concerns, but, in fact, she did engage in humanitarian work. In 1854, during the Crimean War, she volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down. Her aunt Eliza Polidori did join Nightingale in Scutari, and Rossetti temporarily took over some of Polidori’s district visiting, providing assistance to the sick and poor of the parish. In early 1859 Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, a charitable institution for the reclamation of “fallen“ women. As an “associate” at Highgate, Rossetti was known as “Sister Christina” and wore a habitlike black uniform with a veil. When she was on duty she resided at the penitentiary, probably for a fortnight at a time. By the summer of 1859 Rossetti was devoting a good deal of time to her work at Highgate, and its influence can be seen in her poems about illicit love, betrayal, and illegitimacy, such as “Cousin Kate,” “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,’“ and “From Sunset to Star Rise,” though poems composed before the period of her work at Highgate— “An Apple-Gathering,” “The Convent Threshold,” and “Maude Clare” for instance—demonstrate her prior interest in the fallen woman. “Goblin Market,” with its theme of a fallen woman being saved by a “sister,” can also be seen as informed by Rossetti’s experiences at the St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. Her interest in this topic reflects the Victorian concern about prostitution as a social evil; other Pre-Raphaelite treatments of the subject include Dante Gabriel’s poem “Jenny,” begun in 1847 and revised in 1858-1859 and again in 1870; his unfinished painting Found (1854-1881); and William Holman Hunt’s The Awakened Conscience (1853).”

    In the 1850s a few of Rossetti’s poems were published in anthologies; “Maude Clare” appeared in Once a Week (5 November 1859) and the short stories “The Lost Titian” (The Crayon, 1856) and “Nick” (National Magazine, October 1857). In 1861 she submitted poems to Macmillan’s Magazine, and Dante Gabriel sent “Goblin Market“ to the art critic John Ruskin in the hope that he would recommend it to William Makepeace Thackeray, editor of The Cornhill. Ruskin’s criticism of Rossetti’s masterpiece is infamous. In his letter of 24 January 1861 to Dante Gabriel, Ruskin singled out for criticism the original meter that is now so often praised: he acknowledged the poem’s “beauty and power” but asserted that it was unpublishable because it was “so full of quaintnesses and offences,” adding, “Irregular measure . . . is the chief calamity of modern poetry . . . your sister should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like.” Almost simultaneously, Rossetti’s poem “Up-hill” was accepted enthusiastically for Macmillan’s (February 1861), and Alexander Macmillan expressed an interest in seeing more of her work. During 1861 Macmillan’s published two more of Rossetti’s poems: “A Birthday“ (April 1861) and “An Apple-Gathering” (August 1861). In June of that year Rossetti took a short vacation in France.”

    In 1862 the Macmillan firm brought out Rossetti’s first commercially published volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. Although some of the poems had been published in Macmillan’s, Once a Week, and The Germ, and others were included in the manuscript for Maude, most were taken from the notebooks in which Rossetti had been writing since the private printing of Verses in 1847. Comparisons of the manuscript and printed versions of the poems show that most were not substantially revised. Usually the earliest extant version of a given poem is the fair copy transcribed into the notebook; if Rossetti reworked it in the act of composition, such drafts no longer exist. She often changed a word or two in preparation for publication; where major revisions occurred, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes reducing a poem by more than half its original length: such is the case with “Maude Clare,” “Echo,” and “Bitter for Sweet.” This tendency to reduce is part of the economy of expression that is a Rossetti trademark, and the result is poetry in which meaning is suggestive rather than explicit. Looking back on her career, Rossetti wrote in an 1888 letter to an unknown clergyman that “Perhaps the nearest approach to a method I can lay claim to was a distinct aim at conciseness; after a while I received a hint from my sister that my love of conciseness tended to make my writing obscure, and I then endeavoured to avoid obscurity as well as diffuseness. In poetics, my elder brother was my acute and most helpful critic.” Throughout her career Dante Gabriel not only critiqued her work but also negotiated with publishers, assisted with book design, corrected proofs, and provided illustrations for her publications. As Goblin Market and Other Poems was being prepared for the press, he advised on the selection of poems, suggested dividing them into secular and devotional sections, and proposed new titles for some—including the title poem, which was originally called “A Peep at the Goblins.” He also provided frontispiece and title-page designs drawn from that poem.”

    Goblin Market and Other Poems was a critical success, with favorable notices in many periodicals, including The London Review (12 April 1862), The Spectator (12 April 1862), The Athenaeum (26 April 1862), The Saturday Review (24 May 1862), The Eclectic Review (June 1862), and The British Quarterly Review (July 1862). Critics welcomed a fresh and original poetic voice: The Eclectic Review hailed “a true and most genuine poet,” while The Athenaeum remarked that “To read these poems after the laboured and skilful but not original verse which has been issued of late, is like passing from a picture gallery, with its well-feigned semblances of nature, to the real nature out-of-doors which greets us with the waving grass and the pleasant shock of the breeze.” “Goblin Market,” “Up-hill,” “An Apple-Gathering,” and “Advent” were frequently singled out for praise.”

    Today “Goblin Market“ remains Rossetti’s most discussed poem. Critics have dismissed her protest that she intended no allegorical meaning and have interpreted in various ways her fairy tale of two sisters’ responses to the temptation of goblin fruit. Lizzie rejects the luscious fruit as “evil,” but Laura purchases it with a lock of her hair and indulges. Afterward she wastes away, pining for more fruit. The goblins refuse to allow Lizzie to purchase fruit to save her sister, try to persuade her to eat with them, then attempt to force the fruit into her mouth. Lizzie escapes and runs home to Laura, who is cured by tasting the juices smeared on her sister’s face. The poem ends years later with Laura telling the story to the sisters’ offspring; she concludes by saying:

    For there is no friend like a sister
    In calm or stormy weather;
    To cheer one on the tedious way,
    To fetch one if one goes astray,
    To lift one if one totters down,
    To strengthen whilst one stands.

    The suggestiveness of the narrative runs in many directions, and this multivalency is perhaps the most striking quality of the poem. It can be read as a straightforward moral allegory of temptation, indulgence, sacrifice, and redemption. It has also been interpreted as a specifically Christian allegory, with a reenactment of the temptation in the Garden of Eden and a Christ-like offer of redemption through sacrifice—a reading that is encouraged by the Eucharistic diction of Lizzie’s greeting, “‘Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me.’“ Significantly, this Christ is a female one, and feminist readings of “Goblin Market“ have often focused on its positive image of sisterhood. Psychoanalytic interpretations have regarded the sisters as two aspects of one psyche and have emphasized the sexuality of the poem, noting both its orality and its lesbian dynamics. Marxist critics have pointed to the poem’s separation of the domestic and commercial spheres and to Lizzie and Laura’s attempts to do business in a marketplace designed to make women into goods to be exchanged rather than agents in their own right. Critics of many orientations have noted that the sensuality of the fruit, its prohibition to maidens, and its association with nuptial pleasures suggest that Laura’s transgression is a sexual one. In this interpretation, Lizzie’s climactic redemption of Laura can be seen as a critique of the Victorian cultural understanding of the fallen woman, for here she is not forever lost but is saved by a sister’s intervention.”

    In “Goblin Market“ the sisters are endangered by male goblins, and Laura is redeemed through the strength of sisterhood; elsewhere in Goblin Market and Other Poems, however, the danger that men pose as sexual predators is not offset by female solidarity. Throughout the volume Rossetti presents a bleak appraisal of gender relations. The flimsiness and inconstancy of romantic love is a recurring theme, as is the treachery of sister against sister in a ruthlessly competitive marriage market. In “Cousin Kate” the unnamed speaker has been seduced by a nobleman and has borne him a son; now she finds herself a discarded “plaything,” supplanted by her fair and pure cousin Kate, whom the lord has taken not as a mistress but as his wife. The women in this ballad do not live up to the code of sisterly conduct with which “Goblin Market“ concludes. Kate usurps her cousin’s position and ensures the latter’s status as “an outcast thing”; the speaker accuses Kate of betrayal of female loyalty, but her own moral integrity comes under question in the final stanza when she gloats that while she has borne her former lover a son, her cousin remains barren.”

    Adversarial women are also depicted in “Noble Sisters,” a deftly ambiguous dialogue in which the reader must evaluate the reliability of two speakers with opposed moral viewpoints. Similarly, in “Sister Maude” the reader is asked to consider whose sin is greater: the woman who has taken a lover or her sister, who exposes the illicit union. Other pieces in Goblin Market and Other Poems that depict the failure or betrayal of human (as opposed to divine) love and explore women’s sexual and economic vulnerability include “At Home,” “A Triad,” “After Death,” “The Hour and the Ghost,” “An Apple-Gathering,” “Maude Clare,” and “The Convent Threshold.” These works serve to reinforce the devotional poems’ theme of looking to the next life for reward, happiness, and fulfillment. Indeed, with the exception of “A Birthday“ and its ecstatic declaration that “the birthday of my life / Is come, my love is come to me,” little evidence exists anywhere in the volume that human love is satisfied or satisfying.”

    The theme of the inconstancy and insufficiency of any love except God’s pervades the devotional section. Deferral of satisfaction is constantly advocated, as in “The Convent Threshold,” in which the speaker urges her lover to join her in repentance for their “pleasant sin.” The speaker’s motives are complex, however, for her purpose seems to be the prospect of resuming their “old familiar love” in heaven. Consistently in Rossetti’s poetry the concerns of this world are regarded as inconsequential in comparison to the promise of salvation. Throughout her canon, but especially in the devotional poems, biblical image and idiom merge with Rossetti’s own voice. Revelation and Ecclesiastes are favorite sources, and the “vanity of vanity” refrain is a recurring motif.”

    Other pieces reveal some of Rossetti’s poetical range: the political subject matter of “In the Round Tower at Jhansi, June 8, 1857”; the social critique of “A Triad”; the banter of “No, Thank You, John” ; the whimsical, teasing mystery of “Winter: My Secret” ; and the darker, suggestive mystery of poems with enigmatic and unnamed significances, such as “My Dream,” “May,” and “A Pause of Thought.” In a style that has affinities with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but that she made distinctively her own, Rossetti’s precisely drawn natural details assume the weight of suggestive symbolism. For example, in “An Apple-Gathering,” in which the speaker finds herself abandoned by Willie and replaced by “Plump Gertrude,” the speaker’s ill-considered plucking of apple blossoms and the concomitant forfeit of a rich harvest resonates on many levels. Similarly, “Up-hill” and “Symbols” effortlessly evoke profound meaning from the simplest details: an uphill journey toward a place of rest, a flower that blooms and fades, and eggs that fail to hatch. Many poems in Goblin Market and Other Poems continue the morbid strain that was so prominent in Verses. “Dream-land,” “At Home,” “Remember,” “After Death,” “An End,” “Song“ (“Oh roses for the flush of youth”), “Echo,” “A Peal of Bells,” “May,” “A Pause of Thought,” “Shut Out,” “Song” (“When I am dead, my dearest“), “Dead Before Death,” “Bitter for Sweet,” and “Rest” strike the signature Rossetti notes of longing, loss, resignation, and death. In the final two poems in the volume, “Old and New Year Ditties” and “Amen,” this loss is met with the promise of fulfillment, expressed in the biblical figures of marriage and the fruitful garden. Critics have noted that Rossetti’s volumes are carefully arranged into meaningful sequences, and Goblin Market and Other Poems includes many examples of significant continuities among the poems and correlations between the nondevotional and devotional sections.”

    During the early 1860s Rossetti was often in contact with female artists—including the members of the Portfolio Society, an informal group organized by Barbara Bodichon—and female poets, such as Jean Ingelow and Dora Greenwell. She published poems in the feminist periodicals The English Woman’s Journal and Victoria Magazine and in various anthologies, in addition to making regular appearances in Macmillan’s. A respiratory complaint led her to spend the winter of 1864-1865 in Hastings, where she began work on her next poetry volume, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866).”

    That Dante Gabriel played a large role in the preparation of the book is evident from the almost daily correspondence between brother and sister, which provides valuable insight into Rossetti’s methods and includes some spirited rebuttals to Dante Gabriel’s criticisms. Rossetti’s letters make it clear that she tried to write to order for the book, which was not her preferred method of composition. In later years she acknowledged in a 20 May 1885 letter to W. Garrett Horder that “Just because poetry is a gift . . . I am not surprised to find myself unable to summon it at will and use it according to my choice.” According to William Michael Rossetti in Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870 (1903), the title poem originated in a suggestion from Dante Gabriel that she “turn a brief dirge-song . . . into that longish narrative, as pièce de résistance for a new volume.” The Prince’s sojourn with the Alchemist gave Rossetti some difficulties, as she explained in a 16 January 1865 letter to Dante Gabriel: “the Alchemist makes himself scarce, and I must bide his time.” Rossetti was not given to rewriting, and once written, the Alchemist remained unchanged: “He’s not precisely the Alchemist I prefigured, but thus he came,” she wrote to Dante Gabriel on 30 January, “& thus he must stay: you know my system of work.”

    In a letter of 10 February she rejected Dante Gabriel’s suggestion that she try to write an episode in which the Prince would fight in a tournament, pleading inability, lack of inspiration, and the formidable precedent of Tennyson’s two tournaments in Idylls of the King (1859). Publication of the volume was delayed for a year, while Rossetti waited for Dante Gabriel’s promised illustrations. In May 1865 she, William, and their mother traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy. That same year she met Robert Browning, who visited her in London and told her about his work in progress, The Ring and the Book (1868-1869).”

    The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was met with mildly favorable reviews. The critic for The Saturday Review (23 June 1866) thought that the title poem lacked “subtle suggestion,” while the reviewer for The Reader (30 June 1866) pronounced it “too long to suit Christina Rossetti’s genius for short lyrical thoughts.” In a letter of 6 March 1865 to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti agreed that “The Prince’s Progress” lacked “the special felicity (!) of my Goblins.” “The Prince’s Progress” has never attracted the same intensity of critical scrutiny as “Goblin Market“ and typically suffers in comparisons with that masterpiece. As the reviewer for the 23 June 1866 issue of The Athenaeum observed, the two title poems are similar in that both are allegories of temptation; in “Goblin Market,” however, temptation is overcome, while in “The Prince’s Progress” it wins out. The Prince procrastinates at great length before setting out to claim his waiting bride. He does not, however, remain true to his purpose, and on his journey he is sidetracked and delayed first by a milkmaid, then by an alchemist, and finally by a circle of ministering females who save him from drowning. When he arrives at his bride’s palace, she is dead. The element of spiritual allegory is evident in “The Prince’s Progress”; even the title echoes Bunyan’s allegorical The Pilgrim’s Progress, a literary influence from Rossetti’s earliest childhood. The pilgrimage of Bunyan’s Christian through an emblematic landscape is a topos that Rossetti must have absorbed into her own consciousness, for her poems often depict journeys in which topographical details, such as paths that go uphill or downhill, are morally and spiritually significant. For instance, the easy downhill path of “Amor Mundi“ is clearly the way to damnation, while the upward climbs of “Up-hill” and “The Convent Threshold” are made by those who aspire to salvation.”

    While biblical language and image are pervasive in “The Prince’s Progress,” the poem also has a fairy-tale quality; the unhappy ending, however, serves to critique the gender roles typical of that genre. Relegated to a passive role, the waiting bride dies because of the Prince’s failure to complete his quest in a timely fashion; her fate underlines the dangerous predicament of women waiting to be rescued. Elsewhere in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, however, women engage in lives of active service, deferring satisfaction in this life in favor of the reward promised in the next. In “A Portrait” the sacrifice of “youth,” “hope and joy and pleasant ways” for the sake of serving the “poor and stricken” earns the heroine union with the Bridegroom Christ in Paradise. In “A Royal Princess,” which originally appeared in Poems: An Offering to Lancashire (1863), an anthology published in support of Lancashire textile workers, the title figure realizes that her wealth and privilege are based on the enslavement of others: “Once it came into my heart and whelmed me like a flood, / That these too are men and women, human flesh and blood.” The poem ends with the princess’s rebellion against the insulation from social concerns to which she has been subject because of her class and gender; echoing the biblical Esther, she risks all in offering herself and her wealth to an angry, hungry mob.”

    Dante Gabriel was highly critical of a long poem that his sister included in The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems, “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“ Responding in a letter of 13 March 1865, Rossetti vigorously defended the woman poet’s right to explore indelicate issues such as illegitimacy: “whilst I endorse your opinion of the unavoidable and indeed much-to-be-desired unreality of women’s work on many social matters, I yet incline to include within female range such an attempt as this: where the certainly possible circumstances are merely indicated as it were in skeleton, where the subordinate characters perform (and no more) their accessory parts, where the field is occupied by a single female figure whose internal portrait is set forth in her own words. . . . and whilst it may truly be urged that unless white could be black and Heaven Hell my experience (thank God) precludes me from hers, I yet don’t see why ‘the Poet mind’ should be less able to construct her from its own inner consciousness than a hundred other unknown quantities.” The speaker of “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children’“ lives as a servant in the household of her mother, who so fears social condemnation that she does not acknowledge her illegitimate daughter. Mother and daughter suffer the lifelong consequences of illegitimacy, while the seducer father is absent from the poem and, presumably, free of social stigma. The poem shows the injustice of conventional morality in a patriarchal society and offers the equality of the grave as the only solution.”

    Typically, Rossetti’s poems evince a concern with individual salvation rather than social reform. Writing to Dante Gabriel in April 1870, she declared, “It is not in me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I, and having said my say may well sit silent.” The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems lays great emphasis on the transitoriness of this life, a recurring theme in the Rossetti canon. The lesson to be learned from poems such as “On the Wing,” “Beauty is Vain,” “The Bourne,” “Vanity of Vanities,” “Grown and Flown,” “A Farm Walk,” and “Gone for Ever” is that all earthly things are unreliable, illusory, and passing. Implicitly contrasted with the fleeting quality of this life is the permanence of God and the heavenly reward. With its comparison of human and divine love, “Twice” is a characteristic statement of this theme. The speaker first offers her heart to her lover, who, with a “friendly smile” and “critical eye,” sets it aside as “unripe.” The speaker then offers the broken heart to God, with the entreaty “Refine with fire its gold, / Purge Thou its dross away.” The failure of human love is a keynote in the volume, beginning with the title poem and appearing again in “Jessie Cameron,” “The Poor Ghost,” “Songs in a Cornfield,” “One Day,” “A Bird’s-Eye View,” “Light Love,” “On the Wing,” “Maggie a Lady,” “The Ghost’s Petition,” “Grown and Flown,” and “‘The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children.’“

    In the autumn of 1866 Rossetti declined an offer of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had begun studying Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis’ enthusiasm for Dante and endearing himself to them with his attentive visits during their father’s final illness. A hesitant romance probably began to develop between Rossetti and the awkward, absentminded scholar around 1862. Rossetti’s reasons for rejecting his proposal can only be surmised. In a note in his edition of The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908) William says that she turned Cayley down “on grounds of religious faith.” At the time, William thought that there might be financial obstacles to the union and offered the couple a place in his household; his sister responded on 11 September 1866: “As to money I might be selfish enough to wish that were the only bar, but you see from my point of view it is not.— Now I am at least unselfish enough altogether to deprecate seeing C.B.C. continually (with nothing but mere feeling to offer) to his hamper & discomfort: but, if he likes to see me, God knows I like to see him, & any kindness you will show him will only be additional kindness loaded on me.” Much is unknown about the relationship between Cayley and Rossetti. In his memoir William notes that “Christina was extremely reticent in all matters in which her affections were deeply engaged” and that “it would have been both indelicate and futile to press her with inquiries, and of several details in the second case [Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley]— though important to a close understanding of it—I never was cognizant.” Cayley and Rossetti remained close until his death in 1883, and Rossetti served as his literary executor. She declined to have a large packet of her letters to him returned to her, asking that they be destroyed. After Rossetti’s death, William found in her desk a series of twenty-one highly personal poems written in Italian. Composed between 1862 and 1868 and titled “Il Rosseggiar dell’Oriente” (The Reddening Dawn), the sequence is generally understood to be addressed to Cayley; it was first published in Rossetti’s New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected (1896).”

    In 1867 Rossetti published in The Churchman’s Shilling Magazine three religious and moralistic stories: “The Waves of this Troublesome World: A Tale of Hastings Ten Years Ago” (April and May 1867), “Some Pros and Cons about Pews” (July 1867), and “A Safe Investment” (November 1867); all were republished in Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870). For this volume Rossetti was persuaded by Dante Gabriel to defect from Macmillan to his publisher, F. S. Ellis. Commonplace and Other Short Stories was a commercial failure, though reviewers singled out “The Lost Titian” and the title story, with its Jane Austen-like social comment, for praise.”

    From 1870 to 1872 Rossetti was dangerously ill, at times apparently near death, with a condition characterized by fever, exhaustion, heart palpitations, stifling sensations, occasional loss of consciousness, violent headaches, palsied hands, and swelling in the neck that made swallowing difficult. Her hair fell out, her skin became discolored, her eyes began to protrude, and her voice changed. After some months her doctors diagnosed a rare thyroid condition, exophthalmic bronchocele, more commonly known as Graves’ disease. Although Rossetti recovered, the threat of a relapse always remained. Moreover, the crisis left her appearance permanently altered and her heart weakened.”

    The reception of Rossetti’s collection of stories left Ellis disinclined to publish her next work, a collection of poems for children. Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book was published by Routledge in 1872 and was favorably received; the public was particularly pleased by the illustrations by Arthur Hughes. Some of the poems are primarily edifying, promoting, for instance, patience or good manners; others are memory aids for learning about numbers, time, money, months, and colors. The sound and meter of these little rhymes delight the ear, and Rossetti’s wit is evident in the playfulness of lines such as “A hill has no leg, but has a foot; / A wine-glass a stem, but not a root.” Again nature presents an emblematic aspect, and the phenomena of wind, rain, growth, and death and the alternation of night and day suggest a larger order. Most of the poems are evocative of the security of an ideal childhood, but others modulate into more-serious subject matter in simple and moving explorations of death and loss. Some critics have questioned the appropriateness of these darker themes for the intended audience.”

    Dante Gabriel had been prone to insomnia for some time and had become dependent on alcohol and chloral in his attempts to sleep. By June 1872 his paranoid belief that there was a conspiracy led by Robert Buchanan, author of “The Fleshly School of Poetry” (1871), to ruin his reputation had become clearly delusional, and he was raving and hearing voices. William concluded that his brother was insane and put him under the care of Dante Gabriel’s friend Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, in whose home he took a large dose of laudanum in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Cared for by friends, Dante Gabriel made a partial recovery, though he continued his use of alcohol and chloral.”

    In 1873 Maria Rossetti joined the All Saints’ Sisterhood. In March 1874 William married Lucy Brown, daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown. The combined household of the newly married couple and William’s mother, sister, and aunts Charlotte and Eliza Polidori was not a harmonious one.”

    Following her recovery from Graves’ disease Rossetti published the first of her six volumes of devotional prose, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874). In these devotional writings readers can find explicit statements of themes treated in the poetry of previous decades, and in many instances Rossetti discusses natural and biblical images, virtually glossing favorite poetic symbols. More generally, the devotional prose provides insight into Rossetti’s symbolic method, for she repeatedly indicates that this world is to be read as “typical,” “suggestive,” “emblematical,” and “symbolical.” Annus Domini consists of 366 meditations, each of which includes a passage from scripture followed by a collect beginning with an invocation to Christ. The texts are arranged in the order of their appearance in the Bible, and prayers throughout are intensely Christ-centered; even Old Testament passages prompt an address to Christ.”

    Rossetti returned to Macmillan for the publication of Speaking Likenesses in 1874. The book consists of three tales framed by the dialogue among a storytelling aunt and her nieces. Many readers have noted the sexual implications of the monstrous children in the first tale—boys bristling with hooks, quills, and angles; girls exuding sticky and slimy fluids—and that the predatory games they play amount to a figurative rape. While terror predominates in the first tale, in the second a young child’s desire to have a gypsy tea ends in frustration and despair as she fails to master the tasks of lighting a fire and boiling a kettle. The final tale, in which danger and temptation are overcome, rounds out the volume with a happy ending. The influence of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872) is evident, and Rossetti herself described the work to Dante Gabriel in a letter of 4 May 1874 as “a Christmas trifle, would-be in the Alice style, with an eye to the market.” The title, Rossetti explained to Macmillan on 27 July 1874, refers to the way the heroines “perpetually encounter ‘speaking (literally speaking) likenesses’ or embodiments or caricatures of themselves or their faults.” Ruskin lamented in a 21 January 1875 letter to the publisher Ellis that Speaking Likenesses was the worst of the children’s books from the previous Christmas season: “How could she or Arthur Hughes sink so low after their pretty nursery rhymes?”

    In 1874 Macmillan offered to bring out a new edition of Rossetti’s complete poems and inquired after new compositions. On 4 February Rossetti responded, “the possibility of your thinking proper some day to reprint my two volumes, is really gratifying to me as you may suppose; but as to the additional matter, I fear there will be little indeed to offer you. The fire has died out, it seems; and I know of no bellows potent to revive dead coals. I wish I did.” In 1875 the idea of a new edition of Goblin Market and Other Poems and Prince’s Progress and Other Poems was taken up again. In a 30 January letter to Macmillan, Rossetti said that she would try to gather new pieces as well as “waifs and strays,” poems that had appeared in magazines but had not been published in her collections. In Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1875) pieces from the previous volumes and thirty-seven new ones are intermingled into a single poetic sequence. Rossetti omitted some poems from the new collection, most notably “A Triad,” “Cousin Kate,” and “Sister Maude,” all of which explore sexual issues. Evidently she did not work under her brother’s guidance in preparing the volume, for Dante Gabriel’s 3 December 1875 letter addressed the book as a fait accompli. While he conceded that “A Royal Princess” is “too good to omit,” he thought it bore the taint of “modern vicious style,” a kind of “falsetto muscularity” in part traceable to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s influence. He also perceived this taint in “No, Thank You, John” and, more prominently, in “The Lowest Room,” and he lectured his sister that “everything in which this tone appears is utterly foreign to your primary impulses” and warned that she should “rigidly keep guard” against it. Although “The Lowest Room” had been published in Macmillan’s Magazine in March 1864, Dante Gabriel had prevailed in keeping it out of The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. In this extended dialogue between two sisters the younger asks, “Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic strength?”—a question at the heart of the poem’s engagement with Homeric epic and with women’s search for fulfilment in the modern Christian age. The tensions between the sisters, between aspiration and opportunity, and between ambition and resignation are highly charged and never fully resolved. One speaker’s hard-won submission—”Not to be first: how hard to learn / That lifelong lesson of the past; / Line graven on line and stroke on stroke; / But, thank God, learned at last”—and acceptance of the “lowest place” are undermined in the final stanza by her anticipation of an inversion of this hierarchy in the heavenly order, where “many last be first.” This inversion of earthly and heavenly status appears again in “The Lowest Place,” the final poem in the collection. The richness of this well-known lyric comes largely from its curious blend of timidity and temerity, for self-abnegation promises to be rewarded with exaltation, and thus the speaker’s humble request is also an audacious one.”

    In 1876 Rossetti, her mother, and her aunts left William’s Euston Square home and moved to Torrington Square, Bloomsbury. In November, Maria died of cancer; Christina’s reminiscence in Time Flies portrays her death as an example of spiritual confidence and anticipation of salvation. Biographers have often commented on its contrast to Christina’s deathbed anguish.”

    Rossetti’s next book, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite (1879), was published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), which published the rest of her devotional prose works as well as Verses (1893), her collection of devotional poems. Seek and Find consists of two series of studies on the Benedicite, a long poem praising a catalogue of God’s works that is included in the Book of Common Prayer as an apocryphal addition to the Book of Daniel. The first series of studies in Seek and Find, “Creation,” contemplates each item in the Benedicite—heavens, waters, the sun, birds, other animals, and human beings—in the context of its creation by providing and discussing scriptural passages that are generally, though not exclusively, from the Old Testament. The second series, “Redemption,” considers the same items in relation to Christ and cites mainly New Testament passages.”

    Like many of Rossetti’s poems, her devotional works are double-edged swords of submission and assertion: while they urge obedience to divine will, they also encroach into the traditionally male territories of theological study, biblical exegesis, and spiritual guidance. Similarly, Rossetti’s views on gender issues combine the conservative with the radical. Citing biblical teaching on woman’s subordination to man, Rossetti had written to the poet Augusta Webster in 1878 that because she believed that “the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes,” she could not sign a petition for women’s suffrage. She went on, however, to suggest that suffrage is not enough to protect women’s interests and that female representation in Parliament would be more consistent with the aims of the women’s movement. She also argued for the heroic possibilities of maternal love and its potential to sweep away “the barrier of sex.” It is not uncommon to find such traces of subversiveness in Rossetti’s apparently conservative statements on gender roles. An extended discussion of the subject in Seek and Find begins with a quite traditional discussion of woman as a lesser light—a moon to man’s sun. But Rossetti then moves from a statement about the feminine lot being one of obedience to a paragraph-long comparison between the feminine role and the position that Christ voluntarily assumed on earth, and she ends with a leveling of gender hierarchies: “one final consolation yet remains to careful and troubled hearts: in Christ there is neither male nor female, for we are all one (Gal.iii.28).”

    Biographers have painted an overly simplistic portrait of the middle-aged Rossetti as narrowly conservative, reclusive, and overly pious. Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism certainly intensified, and it took some odd forms, such as her habit of stooping to pick up stray pieces of paper on the street lest they have the Lord’s name printed on them. From 1876, when she moved to Torrington Square, until her final illness Rossetti worshiped at Christ Church, Woburn Square. Mackenzie Bell relates the impression that she made on a fellow member of the congregation: “A friend informs me that towards the close of her life Christina always sat in the very front pew in church. She remained until the very last before leaving the building, and it was evident from her demeanour that even then she strove to avoid ordinary conversation, evidently feeling that it would disturb her mood of mind.” Never comfortable socially, by this time she was reluctant to venture beyond her intimate circle of family and friends: she was aware that she possessed a degree of fame, and she felt self-conscious in conversations that bore the aspect of an interview. She also dreaded receiving unsolicited poems from aspiring writers, because she was torn between kindness and honesty regarding the merit of the work. Though increasingly reclusive, however, Rossetti was more politically outspoken in these later years. Critical of slavery, imperialism, and military aggression, she was most passionately committed to the antivivisection movement, at one point breaking with the S.P.C.K. over its publication of a work condoning animal experimentation. She also petitioned for legislation to protect children from prostitution and sexual exploitation by raising the age of consent.”

    Rossetti’s next work, Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, published in 1881, had been completed by 1876; Macmillan had turned it down under its previous title, “Young Plants and Polished Corners.” A devotional accompaniment for the red-letter saints’ days, Called to Be Saints provides for each day an account of the saint’s life, a prayer, an intricate “memorial” in two columns linking the saint’s life with biblical texts, and descriptions of the emblem, precious stone, and flower associated with the saint and discussions of their appropriateness. Although biographers have tended to emphasize the narrowing of Rossetti’s interests in her later life in that she then wrote in an exclusively devotional vein, one might note that she dealt with a wide array of topics within this framework. In Called to Be Saints she ranges from the biblical and hagiographical to the botanical and petrographical.”

    As her poetic creativity decreased, Rossetti cultivated a modest scholarly impulse. Earlier instances of her scholarly writing include her entries on Italian writers and other celebrities in the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-1863); in her article on Petrarch she claims to be a descendant of Laura. In 1867 she had published the first of two articles on Dante, a commendatory piece written in support of Cayley’s terza rima translation of The Divine Comedy (1851-1855). After attending lectures on The Divine Comedy at University College, London, from 1878 to 1880 she wrote a more ambitious article, “Dante: The Poet Illustrated out of the Poem” (1884). In 1882 she considered undertaking literary biographies of Adelaide Proctor and Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and she took a commission and began to research a life of Ann Radcliffe, but a lack of materials prevented her from completing it. She agreed to trace allusions to Dante, Petrarch, and Giovanni Boccaccio for Alexander Balloch Grosart’s scholarly edition of The Faerie Queene in The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Edmund Spenser (1882-1884), a project from which she withdrew because of ill health. She spent many afternoons at the British Museum and was a tireless reader of periodicals, including The Athenaeum, Macmillan’s Magazine, The Saturday Review, Blackwood’s, and The Edinburgh Review.”

    Rossetti’s research on Petrarch and Dante informs one of the most important poems of her maturity, “Monna Innominata,” which appeared in her third commercially published poetry collection, A Pageant and Other Poems (1880). A sequence of fourteen sonnets— thus subtitled “A Sonnet of Sonnets”—”Monna Innominata” draws attention to its links to the medieval amatory tradition both in its prose preface and in the epigraphs from Dante and Petrarch that introduce each sonnet. In his notes in The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti William Michael Rossetti attested that the introductory prose note was “a blind interposed to draw off attention from the writer in her proper person” and that the sonnet sequence was an “intensely personal” utterance. The subject matter of love deeply felt, reciprocated, and yet unfulfilled is generally taken to refer to Rossetti’s relationship with Cayley, but its import is not limited to this context. Recent criticism of “Monna Innominata” has explored its complex intertextual operations, particularly its revisionary treatment of the sonnet form, whose gender roles Rossetti deliberately and self-consciously reverses by having the unnamed lady, traditionally the silent object of the male sonneteer’s desire, express her love. In doing so, Rossetti is emulating the gender subversion of Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, to whom she refers in her preface as “the Great Poetess of our day and nation.”

    Although it is not the title poem, “Monna Innominata,” with its valedictory mode, its questioning of the very possibility of fulfilled desire, and its reappraisal of the sonnet form, sets the tone for A Pageant and Other Poems. Rossetti opens the volume with a dedicatory sonnet addressed to her mother, drawing attention both to the expectations raised by the tradition of the genre— “Sonnets are full of love”—and to the preponderance of sonnets in her collection: “and this my tome / Has many sonnets.” But in the sonnet sequences that follow— “Monna Innominata,” “Later Life,” “‘If thou sayest, behold, we knew it not,’“ “The Thread of Life,” and “‘Behold a Shaking’“ — Rossetti veers away from the amatory tradition by dwelling on the love of and aspiration for union with God. These sonnet sequences are complemented by the abundance of multipart poems in the volume, such as “The Months: A Pageant,” “Mirrors of Life and Death,” and “‘All thy works praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation,” as well as smaller poetic sequences, such as the seasonal sequence “An October Garden,” “‘Summer is Ended,’“ and “Passing and Glassing” and the three Easter poems, “The Descent from the Cross,” “‘It is finished,’“ and “An Easter Carol.”

    Anticipating the final farewell to youth, beauty, and song in “Monna Innominata,” in “The Key-note” Rossetti laments “the Winter of my year” and the silencing of “the songs I used to know.” Similarly, desire is relinquished in “Till Tomorrow”:”

    Long have I longed, till I am tired
    Of longing and desire;
    Farewell my points in vain desired,
    My dying fire;
    Farewell all things that die and fail and tire.

    By reiteration and accretion the passing months, the progression of seasons, and blooming and fading flowers become poignant and nostalgic symbols of the process of aging. Some poems provide consolation, as when the robin in “The Key-note” “sings thro’ Winter’s rest” or in the title poem, “The Months: A Pageant,” a performance piece consisting of a procession of personifications of the twelve months, where “October” offers comfort: “Nay, cheer up sister. Life is not quite over, / Even if the year has done with corn and clover.” But the real movement of the volume is toward relinquishment of love, beauty, Italy, hope, and life itself. The final poems of the non-devotional section return to the seasonal, vegetative cycle. “An October Garden” begins, “In my Autumn garden I was fain / To mourn among my scattered roses,” while the next poem, “‘Summer is Ended,’“ asks if bliss will inevitably end as the rose does, a “Scentless, colourless, . . . meaningless thing.” The following poem, “Passing and Glassing,” confirms the human analogy readable from “withered roses . . . the fallen peach,” and “summer joy that was,” saying that “All things that pass / Are woman’s looking glass; / They show her how her bloom must fade.”

    Familiar Rossetti themes are in evidence in the devotional pieces: renounced desire, weariness with this life, the “vanity of vanities” refrain, and God’s love for the unworthy supplicant. Rossetti’s youthful verses had been called morbid, and death remains a central theme in A Pageant and Other Poems but with an altered emphasis. While in earlier verses death was presented in its more-sentimental aspect, often intruding into the frailty of romantic love, in A Pageant and Other Poems it is contemplated in a subdued and personal way, as a foreseeable and inevitable event. In the sonnet sequence “Later Life: a Double Sonnet of Sonnets” Rossetti writes, “I have dreamed of Death:—what will it be to die / Not in a dream, but in the literal truth / With all Death’s adjuncts ghastly and uncouth.” Always doubting her worthiness of salvation, Rossetti imagines her deathbed and acknowledges the possibility that she “May miss the goal at last, may miss a crown.” In “The Thread of Life,” a sequence of three sonnets, the speaker contemplates the essential and solitary self, aloof from external objects and bound by “inner solitude,” and realizes that “I am not what I have nor what I do; / But what I was I am, I am even I.” This self, her “sole possession,” she offers to God. The relation of the self to the external world is again contemplated in “An Old-World Thicket,” which begins with an epigraph from Dante and is obviously engaged with the legacy of Romanticism.

    In “‘All Thy Works Praise Thee, O Lord.’ A Processional of Creation” all aspects of the created world declare God’s glory, each according to its nature. In “Spring and Autumn” the two seasons declare, respectively, “I hope,— / And I remember,” and these vernal and autumnal attitudes resonate through the volume. In “Later Life” the speaker is “glancing back” on “Lost hopes that leave our hearts upon the rack, / Hopes that were never ours yet seemed to be.” The devotional poems trace the yielding of unfulfilled earthly hopes in exchange for the heavenly reward. This life is full of “promise unfulfilled, of everything, / That is puffed vanity and empty talk.” Paradoxes abound in “Later Life” as Rossetti writes, “This Life we live is dead for all its breath,” “Its very Spring is not indeed like Spring,” and she looks for rebirth through “Death who art not Death.” The conundrum/insight is reiterated in the pair of sonnets titled “‘Behold a Shaking’“: “Here life is the beginning of our death, / And death the starting-point whence life ensues; / Surely our life is death, our death is life.” The final poems bring a satisfying closure to the volume, looking past the end of this life and ending with a divine embrace in “‘Love is as strong as death.’“ Though sales were sluggish, A Pageant and Other Poems was a critical success: the sonnet sequences, in particular, were praised by reviewers, and “Monna Innominata” was compared favorably with Sonnets from the Portuguese.

    Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in Birchington on Easter Sunday 1882. Christina’s commemorative poem, “Birchington Churchyard,” was published in The Athenaeum (25 April 1882). The following winter she composed her fourth book of devotional prose, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments (1883), in which she considers the Ten Commandments in terms of Christ’s two great commandments, to love thy God and thy neighbor. “A Harmony on First Corinthians XIII,” first published in the January 1879 issue of New and Old, a church magazine, was revised and included as an appendix.

    Rossetti’s next book, Time Flies: A Reading Diary, published in 1885, is both the most readable and the most autobiographical of her devotional works. As the subtitle suggests, the book is diarylike in structure, with daily entries consisting of meditations on religious feast days and saints’ days, poetic compositions, or personal reflections and reminiscences. The most often quoted passages are those in which Rossetti describes her experiences of nature and elaborates on the moral and symbolic meaning suggested by them. She regards a spider attempting to escape its own shadow as “a figure of each obstinate impenitent sinner, who having outlived enjoyment remains isolated irretrievably with his own horrible loathsome self.” One glimpses Rossetti’s affection for God’s smallest creatures in the pleasure she took in visiting a garden where she “sat so long and so quietly that a wild garden creature or two made its appearance: a water rat, perhaps, or a water-hunting bird.” She goes on, “Few have been my personal experiences of the sort, and this one gratified me.”

    After her mother’s death in 1886 Rossetti continued to keep house for her elderly aunts Charlotte and Eliza until their deaths in 1890 and 1893, respectively, while working on a commentary on the Book of Revelation. The last of Rossetti’s six devotional studies, The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse, published in 1892, bears the familiar dedication to her mother, but now “for the first time to her beloved, revered, cherished memory.” A substantial work, The Face of the Deep consists of wide-ranging, free-association meditations on each verse of Revelation. While some passages engage in traditional exegesis, others are more personally contemplative and address issues of spiritual and moral duty. More important for today’s reader, The Face of the Deep includes more than two hundred poems; Rossetti combined them with poems from Called to Be Saints and Time Flies into a volume of devotional poems titled simply Verses. Published in 1893 by the S.P.C.K., this collection of 331 religious lyrics was Rossetti’s last volume to appear during her lifetime. She undertook extensive revisions and arranged the poems into eight sections that form a double poetic sequence: spiritual progress is traced in terms of the individual’s relationship with God in the first four sections and from a universal perspective in the final four. Rossetti’s devotional poems have received scant critical attention, but Verses enjoyed great popularity and continued to be reprinted well into the twentieth century.

    In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson’s death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister’s life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti’s life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump’s The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry.

    While many other women poets are still in the process of being “rediscovered,” Rossetti is undergoing a radical revaluation which promises a new appreciation of the complexity and variety of her work. In the century after her death her reputation survived largely on the strength of “Goblin Market” and a handful of lyrics. Her lyric gift has never been doubted, but the unassuming tone and flawless finish of these compositions has sometimes led critics to suggest that their lyric purity is achieved at the expense of intellectual depth and aesthetic complexity. Such assessments have been bolstered by William’s description of her as a “casual” and “spontaneous” poet to whom verse came “very easily, without her meditating a possible subject,” and without her having to undertake substantial revisions. More recently critics have expressed suspicion of William’s reconstruction of his sister’s life, his censorship of her letters, and his revisionist editing in the posthumous collections of her poetry.
    For several decades after her death Rossetti criticism tended to be narrowly biographical, her mournful lyrics and fantastic allegories being used to construct narratives of agonizing conflict between secular and sacred impulses, renounced love, and repressed passion. In the 1980s a Rossetti renaissance began as feminist critics undertook a reexamination of her poetry, addressing particularly “Goblin Market” and exploring Rossetti’s representation of sororal bonds, female creativity, and sexuality and her critique of patriarchal amatory values and gender relations. The trends today run toward a proliferation of critical approaches, many of which re-contextualize Rossetti in Victorian culture, and toward critical interest in a wider range of her works, including her fiction, nonfiction, and children’s poetry. Critics continue to study Rossetti’s response to and influence in a women writers’ tradition; also under discussion are gender-conscious models for positioning Rossetti in the mainstream (that is, predominantly male) canon. Christina Rossetti has often been called the greatest Victorian woman poet, but her poetry is increasingly being recognized as among the most beautiful and innovative of the period by either sex.
    In 1892 Rossetti was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy that was performed in her own home. The cancer recurred the following year, and after months of acute suffering she died on 29 December 1894. Rossetti had attained fame as a poet and had earned high regard as a spiritual guide; some had even speculated, after Tennyson’s death in 1892, that she would make a suitable successor to the laureateship. After her death many articles appeared with personal reminiscences, expressing admiration of her saintliness and assessing her poetry and prose. The sole surviving sibling, William made special efforts to document his sister’s life and edit her work. In New Poems, Hitherto Unpublished or Uncollected he made available carefully edited and annotated texts of poems from periodicals and anthologies and many unpublished ones, some written late in Rossetti’s life and others that she had written earlier but had not published presumably because she deemed them either too personal or not up to the standard of her best work. Maude appeared in 1897 and The Poetical Works in 1904; the latter remained, despite its awkward divisions and arrangement, the standard edition of her poetry until Rebecca W. Crump’s The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1979- 1990), which prompted a modern reassessment of Rossetti’s poetry.
    Entire article was a pleasure to read and very, very informative.. especially so the above paragraphed quoted.-Tyr
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Poetry News
    RIP John Ashbery (1927-2017)
    By Harriet Staff

    John Ashbery

    Yesterday, we received the devastating news of the death of John Ashbery, a poet whose seemingly boundless imagination opened more avenues of exploration for generations of poets and readers alike than possibly any other writer of his generation or poet since. Beyond the honors bestowed upon Ashbery during his life, essentially all possible honors a poet might be awarded, his body of work created the paradigm for writing poetry in America during the latter half of the twentieth century and continuing on through to the current moment. We can expect further possibilities for the art of poetry to be found in Ashbery's verse for a long time to come. Many news outlets have noted Ashbery's passing, but we'll begin with word from The Guardian:

    John Ashbery, an enigmatic genius of modern poetry whose energy, daring and boundless command of language raised American verse to brilliant and baffling heights, died early Sunday at age 90.

    Ashbery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and often mentioned as a Nobel candidate, died at his home in Hudson, New York. His husband, David Kermani, said his death was from natural causes.

    Few poets were so exalted in their lifetimes. Ashbery was the first living poet to have a volume published by the Library of America dedicated exclusively to his work. His 1975 collection, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, was the rare winner of the American book world’s unofficial triple crown: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize. In 2011, he was given a National Humanities Medal and credited with changing “how we read poetry”.

    Among a generation that included Richard Wilbur, WS Merwin and Adrienne Rich, Ashbery stood out for his audacity and for his wordplay, for his modernist shifts between high oratory and everyday chatter, for his humor and wisdom and dazzling runs of allusions and sense impressions.

    “No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery,” Langdon Hammer wrote in the New York Times in 2008. “Ashbery’s phrases always feel newly minted; his poems emphasize verbal surprise and delight, not the ways that linguistic patterns restrict us.”

    But to love Ashbery, it helped to make sense of Ashbery, or least get caught up enough in such refrains as “You are freed/including barrels/heads of the swan/forestry/the night and stars fork” not to worry about their meaning.

    Writing for Slate, the critic and poet Meghan O’Rourke advised readers “not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music”. Writer Joan Didion once attended an Ashbery reading simply because she wanted to determine what the poet was writing about.

    “I don’t find any direct statements in life,” Ashbery once explained to the Times in London. “My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness comes to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don’t think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation.”

    Interviewed by the Associated Press in 2008, Ashbery joked that if he could turn his name into a verb, “to Ashbery”, it would mean “to confuse the hell out of people”.

    Ashbery had a long history with Poetry magazine, beginning in the 1950s and continuing into every decade of his life. Of particular note was the publication of "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," the titular poem to the collection that would go on to win Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976, which originally appeared in the August 1974 issue. More recently, in the April 2011 issue, Ashbery contributed a portfolio of translations to the magazine from Rimbaud's Illuminations. In 2015, Ashbery's "The Mauve Notebook" was featured on the then new podcast for the Foundation, PoetryNow. Even until a year ago, Ashbery continued to contribute poems, with his now final appearance in the magazine with four poems from the March 2016 issue. We encourage you to head over to our new collection, "Remembering John Ashbery," to read a poem and celebrate John's life and legacy.
    Originally Published: September 4th, 2017
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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    Poetry’s Place in the History of Banned Books
    Posted
    August 09, 2017



    For as long as there have been writers, there have been texts that have been challenged, censored, burned, and banned. The stories of banned literature do not just belong in the history books; even today, some of the most influential texts in our bookstores and libraries are currently being challenged or have been challenged at some point before. Here we take a look at fifteen significant poems, poetry collections, and poets that have been censored and banned throughout history. Find out more about these books and others during Banned Books Week, September 24 to 30, 2017.



    Les Fleurs du Mal
    Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), Charles Baudelaire

    As soon as Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal was published in June of 1857, thirteen of its 100 poems were arraigned for inappropriate content. On August 20, 1857, French lawyer Ernest Pinard, who had also famously prosecuted French author Gustave Flaubert, prosecuted Baudelaire for the collection.

    The court banned six of the erotic poems: “Lesbos,” “Femmes damnés,” Le Léthé,” “À celle qui est trop gaie,” “Les Bijoux,” and “Les Métamorphoses du Vampire.” The offensiveness of the texts, the court held, lay not only in their context, but also in their “realism.” According to the judges, the poems “necessarily lead to the excitement of the senses by a crude realism offensive to public decency.”

    Baudelaire was charged with a fine of 300 (later reduced to 50) francs, and Les Fleurs du mal suffered from the controversy, becoming known only as a depraved, pornographic work.

    In 1861, a second, enlarged edition of Les Fleurs du mal was published, but the six banned poems would not be republished again until Baudelaire’s 1866 collection Les Épaves, published in Belgium. The official ban on the poems was not revoked until 1949.



    “We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks

    One of Gwendolyn Brooks’s most famous poems, “We Real Cool,” was banned in schools in Mississippi and West Virginia in the 1970s for the penultimate sentence in the poem: “We / Jazz June.” The school districts banned the poem for the supposed sexual connotations of the word “jazz.”

    However, Brooks herself maintained that that interpretation was erroneous. As she was quoted as saying in Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks (University Press of Mississippi, 2003): “I didn’t mean that at all. I meant that these young men would have wanted to challenge anything that was accepted by ‘proper’ people, so I thought of something that is accepted by almost everybody, and that is summertime, the month of June. So these pool players, instead of paying the customary respect to the loveliness of June—the flowers, blue sky, honeyed weather—wanted instead to derange it, to scratch their hands in it as if it were a head of hair. This is what went through my head; that is what I meant.

    “However, a space can be permitted for a sexual interpretation. Talking about different interpretations gives me a chance to say something I firmly believe—that poetry is for personal use. When you read a poem, you may not get out of it all that the poet put into it, but you are different from the poet. You’re different from everybody else who is going to read the poem, so you should take from it what you need. Use it personally.”



    Alice in Wonderland
    Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

    Though many are familiar with the poems and fantastical story of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, perhaps not as well known is the book’s history of censorship. The book has been challenged and banned several times since its publication in 1865, largely due to its alleged promotion of drug use. In the book, Alice encounters a caterpillar who sits on top of a mushroom smoking hookah. Alice herself becomes exposed to psychedelic, mind- and body-altering experiences, in which she grows and shrinks in size (undoubtedly inspired by Carroll’s own experiences with a rare neurological disorder that causes hallucinations and affects the sufferer’s perception of size—later named Alice in Wonderland Syndrome).

    However, it was not the drug references but the talking animals that ultimately got Carroll banned in China in 1931. Though characters like the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit remain amongst the most popular in Carroll’s Wonderland novels, General Ho Chien, the governor of Hunan province, deemed it offensive that animals were anthropomorphized and placed on the same level as humans.



    Canterbury Tales
    Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

    In the late 1300s, Geoffrey Chaucer, considered the “father of English literature,” wrote Canterbury Tales, a humorous and critical examination of twenty-nine archetypal characters of late medieval English society. The text drew immediate criticism due to its critical look at the medieval church, as well as its obscene language and sexual innuendos, the latter of which remained a point of contention even centuries later.

    In 1873, Anthony Comstock, founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, achieved a federal bill that banned the mailing of “every obscene, lewd, lascivious or filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter writing, print or other publication of an indecent character.” The Comstock Act, officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, banned many world classics, including Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, for its sexual content.



    Mahmoud Darwish

    Though he was widely considered the Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish frequently faced controversy and censorship with his work. As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his activism. He later became increasingly involved in politics, openly criticizing Arab governments and Palestinian politicians. He lived in exile from Israel for twenty-six years, until he was able to return in 1996.

    In 2000, Yossi Sarid, then the education minister of Israel, suggested including works by Darwish in the school curriculum. But right-wing members of President Ehud Barak’s government threatened to introduce a motion of no-confidence. Barak said Israel was “not ready” to teach Darwish in the schools. After Darwish had learned of the controversy, he said, “It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem.”

    The issue of Darwish’s censorship came up again in 2014, when his works were removed from a major book fair in Saudi Arabia for containing “blasphemous passages.”



    Howl
    Howl, Allen Ginsberg

    In the mid-1950s, Allen Ginsberg began writing “Strophes,” which he later renamed “Howl,” based on a peyote-inspired vision he had of the ancient Phoenician god Moloch. On October 7, 1955, Ginsberg publicly read part of “Howl” for the first time at the Six Gallery in San Francisco, to the praise and acclaim of his fellow Beat writers. The following day, City Lights publisher and poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti sent Ginsberg a telegram asking for the manuscript of the poem. Anticipating a controversial release, before City Lights published the manuscript, Ferlinghetti asked the American Civil Liberties Union if it would defend the book in court if he were prosecuted.

    Howl and Other Poems was then published on November 1, 1956, as part of the City Lights Pocket Poets Series. With its long, winding lines; profane language; and frank, racy content about drug use and sexuality, Howl was deemed obscene and Ferlinghetti was arrested and taken to court.

    In the case of People of California v. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, on October 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that Ferlinghetti was not guilty. The defense included reviews praising the collection and the analysis of nine literary experts, all of whom agreed that the work had “literary merit, that it represented a sincere effort by the author to present a social picture, and that the language used was relevant to the theme.”



    Nazim Hikmet

    Considered Turkey’s greatest modern poet, acclaimed both nationally and internationally for his works, Nazim Hikmet was a Communist who was stripped of his citizenship for his political views. His work, which praised his country and the common man, was deemed “subversive” and banned in Turkey from 1938 to 1965.

    Hikmet himself spent several years in Turkish prisons and in exile. He wrote many of his most popular poems during these times, such as his masterpiece Human Landscapes from My Country, which he wrote while imprisoned from 1938 to 1950.

    Despite the controversy surrounding his works, Hikmet’s poems won the praise and support of artists from all over the world, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pablo Neruda, Pablo Picasso, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Now Hikmet’s work is available in more than fifty languages, and he is praised as a major figure in modern poetry.



    Complete Poems of D. H. Lawrence
    D. H. Lawrence

    D. H. Lawrence was no stranger to censorship; his novels Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Rainbow were censored and banned. However, many of Lawrence’s poems came under fire as well. His poems—such as “All of Us," a sequence of thirty-one war poems—attacked politicians and criticized World War I and imperial policy, but the censorship and editing of the series ultimately rendered the works unreadable.

    Lawrence, who wrote poetry from 1905 until his death in 1930, struggled to get his poems into print, especially after the controversy surrounding his other published works of the time. It wasn’t until decades later that Lawrence’s works began to be published in their entirety.



    Federico García Lorca

    Federico García Lorca is one of the most important Spanish poets and dramatists of the twentieth century, the author of such celebrated works as Romancero Gitano (The Gypsy Ballads), which was reprinted seven times during his lifetime. But his work was still the object of censorship in Spain in the early 1900s. Lorca was openly homosexual and known for his outspoken socialist views, and his works were deemed dangerous for their sexual content, language, and political underpinnings.

    In 1936, Lorca was shot to death by Spanish nationalists due to his support of the deposed Republican government. Lorca’s work was burned in Granada’s Plaza del Carmen and banned from Francisco Franco’s Spain. His books remained censored until Franco’s death in 1975.



    Ars Amatoria
    Amores (Loves) & Ars amatoria (Art of Love), Ovid

    Ovid, best known for his epic poem Metamorphoses, also considered himself a “teacher of love,” so at the end of the first century BC, he wrote Ars amatoria, a guide to love and courtship for his Roman contemporaries. The poem is split into three books; the first two books instruct men how to meet, seduce, and keep a woman, and the third gives comparable advice to women. In 8 AD Caesar Augustus banished Ovid to Tomis on the charge of what Ovid describes as “a poem and a mistake.” The poem in question may very well have been the risqué work, but some believe it may have been Metamorphoses.

    In 1497, Girolamo Savonarola, a Dominican monk living in Florence, Italy, began burning all objects he found immoral and corruptive in what would be called the Burning of the Vanities. All of Ovid’s works were included in the pyre.

    Ovid’s works were challenged again a century later in Elizabethan England as Amores, elegiac poems in a set of three books that describe one of Ovid’s affairs, was proscribed in the 1599 Bishops’ Ban. Ordered by John Whitgift, the archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Bancroft, the bishop of London, the Bishops’ Ban resulted into the cessation of the printing of questionable books and the destruction of existing copies of those texts. Christopher Marlowe’s translation of the Amores was included in the ban.

    More recently, Ars amatoria was one of the books proscribed in the American Library Association catalogue in 1904, and the U.S. Customs Service banned the import of Ars amatoria as late as 1930.



    Various Plays by William Shakespeare

    Although undoubtedly a stalwart of English literature, Shakespeare has not been immune to various standards of censorship and banning. The Bard’s words have not all been music to the ears of some people, who have had classics like Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear withdrawn from school reading lists because of the obscenities, as well as the references to sex and violence. These references were not the full extent of the criticism Shakespeare’s plays have gotten from censors over the years; in the early 1800s, dialogue that in any way incriminated the monarchy or members of the clergy, as well as scenes that addressed differences in social classes, was considered risqué and in bad taste.

    Thomas Bowdler was the first to censor Shakespeare’s works on a grand scale. In 1807, Bowdler published the first edition of Family Shakespeare, which included a version of Hamlet with large chunks of dialogue cut out. Bowdler and his sister, Harriet Bowdler, had removed what they considered profanities, obscenities, and indecencies that they believed detracted from the “genius” of the work. Bowdler wrote that nothing “can afford an excuse for profaneness or obscenity; and if these could be obliterated, the transcendent genius of the poet would undoubtedly shine with more unclouded luster.”

    While censorship of Shakespeare’s plays certainly occurred in the past, the practice is hardly ancient history. The problematic The Merchant of Venice was banned in the 1930s in schools in Buffalo and Manchester, New York, for its anti-Semitism, but in 1949, a lower court in New York refused to uphold the ban. Still, the issue arose again in 1980, when the play was banned in schools in Midland, Michigan.

    In 1996, a school in New Hampshire banned Twelfth Night—in which a young woman disguises herself as a man and attracts a countess—under the school board’s Prohibition of Alternative Lifestyle Instruction Act for allegedly promoting an alternative lifestyle that isn’t good for children to learn about.

    More recently, in 2011, according to Arizona state law A.R.S.-15-112, The Tempest—in which a banished duke with magical servants seeks to reclaim his throne—was deemed inappropriate for schools, as the law prohibited courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government, promote resentment toward a race or class of people, are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”



    A Light in the Attic
    A Light in the Attic, Shel Silverstein

    Known for his whimsical illustrations and verses about mischievous children, transformed adults, and strange monsters and beasts, Shel Silverstein published his second poetry collection, A Light in the Attic, in 1981. The book spent 182 weeks on The New York Times general nonfiction bestseller list and spent fourteen weeks in the number one spot.

    However, Silverstein’s books were accused of being not for children, encouraging bad behavior, and addressing topics some people deemed inappropriate for kids. Challengers at two elementary schools in Wisconsin said one poem “encourages children to break dishes so they won’t have to dry them,” and that other poems “glorified Satan, suicide, and cannibalism, and also encouraged children to be disobedient.”

    The book was so contested that it became number fifty-one on the list of 100 most frequently challenged books in the 1990s.



    Sappho

    The Greek poet Sappho lived on the island of Lesbos and is famously known for her poems of romantic longing and her affairs with other women. Though Plato referred to her as the “tenth muse,” her sexuality occasionally overshadowed her work, which was frequently viewed as obscene and objectionable. In 180 AD, the Assyrian ascetic Tatian decried Sappho as a “whorish woman, love-crazy, who sang about her own licentiousness.”

    Before it was destroyed, the library of Alexandria housed nine collections of Sappho’s poems. But in 380 AD, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, the bishop of Constantinople, ordered her work burned. Later, in 1073, Pope Gregory VII also ordered that her work be publicly burned. Most of her work was destroyed; only one complete poem survived—until the discovery of some more of her poem fragments by scholars in 1898.



    Dlatego żyjemy
    Dlatego żyjemy (That’s What We Live For), Wislawa Szymborska

    Wislawa Szymborksa is considered one of the major modern Polish poets; she published several poetry collections and was awarded a Nobel Prize in literature in 1996. Szymborska spent much of her life in a Stalinist Poland, in which socialism was enforced upon Polish artists.

    In 1949 her first book, Dlatego żyjemy, was set for publication but was banned for being too preoccupied with the war and not loyal enough to the socialist regime. The book would not be published until 1952. By 1957, however, Szymborska had renounced Communism and her early poetry, which she viewed as no longer representative of her as a writer.



    Leaves of Grass
    Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

    Seminal to the history of American verse, Leaves of Grass, a frank and sensual celebration of America and the human body, would later be considered a classic that established Whitman as one of the originators of a uniquely American poetic voice.

    Fellow writer and critic Ralph Waldo Emerson attempted to persuade Whitman to drop some controversial, sexualized passages, but Whitman refused. However, when it was first published in 1855, Emerson wrote a letter to Whitman praising the collection: “I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”

    Many critics did not give such a warm welcome to the book, which they denounced as crude and offensive. The Watch and Ward Society in Boston and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice pressured booksellers to suppress the sale of the book, and the Society of Suppression of Vice then sought to obtain a legal ban of a new edition of the book in Boston, which caused it to be famously “banned in Boston” in 1882.
    18 U.S. Code § 2381-Treason Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

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