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    Default Paying Homage To Those Magnificently Talented But Lesser Known Poets

    I have been thinking of starting this thread- to pay homage to those, Magnificently Talented But Lesser Known Poets...
    Now after a 11 month delay, I finally start building the foundation, despite my very limited time available to venture into this.
    So this thread will likely not be getting a daily contribution from me..--Tyr



    Paying Homage To Those Magnificently Talented But Lesser Known Poets


    Biography of Frank Lebby Stanton

    Frank Lebby Stanton—born 1857 February 22 in Charleston, South Carolina, died 1927 January 7 in Atlanta, Georgia, and frequently credited as Frank L. Stanton, Frank Stanton or F. L. Stanton—was an American lyricist.

    He was also the initial columnist for the Atlanta Constitution and became the first poet laureate of the State of Georgia, a post to which he was appointed by Governor Clifford Walker in 1925 and which Stanton held until his death.

    Stanton has been frequently compared with Indiana's James Whitcomb Riley or called "the James Whitcomb Riley of the South"; Stanton and Riley were close friends who frequently traded poetic ideas. Although Stanton frequently wrote in the dialect of black southerners and poor whites, he was an opponent of the less-admirable aspects (such as lynching) of the culture in which he lived, and he tended to be compatible in philosophy with the southern progressivism of his employer, the Atlanta Constitution, for which he wrote editorials. He collaborated with African American composer Harry Thacker Burleigh in the sheet music for Stanton's poem "Jean" (Burleigh composed and harmonized the tune). These and other characteristics of Stanton are well elaborated in the scholarly essays on him by Francis J. Bosha and Bruce M. Swain.

    Multi-voice-ranges 1901 cover of Ethelbert Nevin's tune for "Mighty Lak' a Rose" for which Stanton wrote the lyrics. The dialect title means (approximately) "very much like a rose" and is supposedly sung by a mother to her young son. The first line, by which the opus is occasionally known, is "Sweetest li'l feller" (sweetest little fellow).

    Shortly after his death Stanton was commemorated in the naming of the Frank Lebby Stanton Elementary School, which, after the redesignation of a street name for its eponym still unborn at the time of Stanton's death, is at 1625 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in Atlanta.

    Poems by Frank Lebby Stanton

    1. A Hopeful Brother 9/22/2010
    2. A Little Thankful Song 9/22/2010
    3. A Plantation Ditty 9/22/2010
    4. A Poor Unfortunate 9/22/2010
    5. Fellow Who Had Done His Best 9/22/2010
    6. He Whistled 9/22/2010
    7. Here's Hopin' 9/22/2010
    8. One Country 9/22/2010
    9. So Many! 9/22/2010
    10. The Famous Mulligan Ball 9/22/2010
    11. The Mocking-Bird 9/22/2010
    12. We'Re Marchin' With The Country 9/22/2010
    13. An Old Battle-Field 9/22/2010
    14. This World 9/22/2010
    15. Jest A-Wearyin' Fer You 9/22/2010
    16. A Little Way 9/22/2010
    17. Hoe Your Row 9/22/2010
    18. A Song Of To-Morrow 9/22/2010
    19. The Graveyard Rabbit 9/22/2010
    20. Just Whistle 9/22/2010
    21. Keep A-Goin'! 9/22/2010



    Poems by Frank Lebby Stanton


    The Mocking-Bird - Poem by Frank Lebby Stanton


    He did n’t know much music
    When first he come along;
    An’ all the birds went wonderin’
    Why he did n’t sing a song.

    They primped their feathers in the sun,
    An’ sung their sweetest notes;
    An’ music jest come on the run
    From all their purty throats!

    But still that bird was silent
    In summer time an’ fall;
    He jest set still an’ listened,
    An’ he would n’t sing at all!

    But one night when them songsters
    Was tired out an’ still,
    An’ the wind sighed down the valley
    An’ went creepin’ up the hill;

    When the stars was all a-tremble
    In the dreamin’ fields o’ blue,
    An’ the daisy in the darkness
    Felt the fallin’ o’ the dew,—

    There come a sound o’ melody
    No mortal ever heard,
    An’ all the birds seemed singin’
    From the throat o’ one sweet bird!

    Then the other birds went Mayin’
    In a land too fur to call;
    Fer there warn ’t no use in stayin’
    When one bird could sing fer all!

    ----------------------------------------

    Here's Hopin' - Poem by Frank Lebby Stanton

    Year ain't been the very best;-
    Purty hard by trouble pressed;
    But the rough way leads to rest,-
    Here's hopin'!

    Maybe craps way short; the rills
    Couldn't turn the silent mills;
    But the light's behind the hills,-
    Here's hopin'!

    Where we planted roses sweet
    Thorns come up an' pricked the feet;
    But this old world's hard to beat,-
    Here's hopin'!

    P'r'aps the buildin' that we planned
    'Gainst the cyclone couldn't stand;
    But, thank God we've got the
    land
    ,-
    Here's hopin'!

    Maybe flowers we hoped to save
    Have been scattered on a grave;
    But the heart's still beatin' brave,-
    Here's hopin'!

    That we'll see the mornin' light-
    That the very darkest night
    Can't hide heaven from our sight,-
    Here's hopin'!
    Frank Lebby Stanton

    ---------------------------------------

    Jest A-Wearyin' Fer You - Poem by Frank Lebby Stanton


    JEST a-wearyin' fer you
    All the time a-feelin' blue;
    Wishin' fer you wonderin' when
    You'll be comin' home again ;
    Restless don't know what to do
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you I

    Keep a-mopin' day by day :
    Dull in everybody's way;
    Folks they smile an' pass along
    Wonderin' what on earth is wrong;
    'Twouldn't help 'em if they knew
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you.

    Room's so lonesome, with your chair
    Empty by the fireplace there,
    Jest can't stand the sight o' it!
    Go outdoors an' roam a bit:
    But the woods is lonesome, too,
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you.

    Comes the wind with sounds that' jes
    Like the rustlin' o' your dress ;
    An' the dew on flower an' tree
    Tinkles like your step to me!
    Violets, like your eyes so blue
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you !

    Mornin' comes, the birds awake
    (Them that sung so fer your sake!),
    But there's sadness in the notes
    That come thrillin' from their throats!
    Seem to feel your absence, too
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you.

    Evenin' comes: I miss you more
    When the dark glooms in the door ;
    'Pears jest like you orter be
    There to open it fer me!
    Latch goes tinklin' thrills me through,
    Sets me wearyin' fer you!

    Jest a-wearyin' fer you
    All the time a-f eelin' blue !
    Wishin' fer you wonderin' when
    You'll be comin' home again;
    Restless don't know 'what to do
    Jest a-wearyin' fer you!


    ----------------------------------------


    The Graveyard Rabbit
    - Poem by Frank Lebby Stanton

    In the white moonlight, where the willow waves,
    He halfway gallops among the graves—
    A tiny ghost in the gloom and gleam,
    Content to dwell where the dead men dream,

    But wary still!
    For they plot him ill;
    For the graveyard rabbit hath a charm
    (May God defend us!) to shield from harm.

    Over the shimmering slabs he goes—
    Every grave in the dark he knows;
    But his nest is hidden from human eye
    Where headstones broken on old graves lie.

    Wary still!
    For they plot him ill;
    For the graveyard rabbit, though sceptics scoff,
    Charmeth the witch and the wizard off!

    The black man creeps, when the night is dim,
    Fearful, still, on the track of him;
    Or fleetly follows the way he runs,
    For he heals the hurts of the conjured ones.

    Wary still!
    For they plot him ill;
    The soul’s bewitched that would find release,—
    To the graveyard rabbit go for peace!

    He holds their secret—he brings a boon
    Where winds moan wild in the dark o’ the moon;
    And gold shall glitter and love smile sweet
    To whoever shall sever his furry feet!

    Wary still!
    For they plot him ill;
    For the graveyard rabbit hath a charm
    (May God defend us!) to shield from harm.
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 09-30-2016 at 03:59 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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    John Donne
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    For other people named John Donne, see John Donne (disambiguation).
    John Donne
    JohnDonne.jpg
    John Donne
    Born 22 January 1573[1]
    London, England
    Died 31 March 1631 (aged 58)[2]
    London, England
    Occupation Poet, priest, lawyer
    Nationality English
    Alma mater Oxford University
    Genre Satire, love poetry, elegy, sermons
    Subject Love, sexuality, religion, death
    Literary movement Metaphysical poetry

    John Donne (/ˈdʌn/ DUN) (22 January 1573[1] – 31 March 1631)[2] was an English poet and a cleric in the Church of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.[3]

    Despite his great education and poetic talents, Donne lived in poverty for several years, relying heavily on wealthy friends. He spent much of the money he inherited during and after his education on womanising, literature, pastimes, and travel. In 1601, Donne secretly married Anne More, with whom he had twelve children.[4] In 1615, he became an Anglican priest, although he did not want to take Anglican orders. He did so because King James I persistently ordered it. In 1621, he was appointed the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London. He also served as a member of Parliament in 1601 and in 1614.

    -------------------------------------------
    -------------------------------------------


    John Donne Biography

    Poet (c. 1572–1631)
    Quick Facts

    Name
    John Donne

    Occupation
    Poet

    Birth Date
    c. 1572

    Death Date
    March 31, 1631

    Education
    University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Lincoln’s Inn

    Place of Birth
    London, England

    Place of Death
    London, England

    Full Name
    John Donne

    John Donne, leading English poet of the Metaphysical school, is often considered the greatest loved poet in the English language.

    1 of 4
    quotes
    “Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp.”
    —John Donne
    Synopsis

    The first two editions of John Donne's poems were published posthumously, in 1633 and 1635, after having circulated widely in manuscript copies. Readers continue to find stimulus in his fusion of witty argument with passion, his dramatic rendering of complex states of mind, and his ability to make common words yield up rich poetic meaning. Donne also wrote songs, sonnets and prose.
    Profile

    John Donne was born into a Catholic family in 1572, during a strong anti-Catholic period in England. Donne’s father, also named John, was a prosperous London merchant. His mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was the grand-niece of Catholic martyr Thomas More. Religion would play a tumultuous and passionate role in John’s life.

    Donne’s father died in 1576, and his mother remarried a wealthy widower. He entered Oxford University at age 11 and later the University of Cambridge, but never received degrees, due to his Catholicism. At age 20, Donne began studying law at Lincoln’s Inn and seemed destined for a legal or diplomatic career. During the 1590s, he spent much of his inheritance on women, books and travel. He wrote most of his love lyrics and erotic poems during this time. His first books of poems, “Satires” and “Songs and Sonnets,” were highly prized among a small group of admirers.

    In 1593, John Donne’s brother, Henry, was convicted of Catholic sympathies and died in prison soon after. The incident led John to question his Catholic faith and inspired some of his best writing on religion. At age 25, Donne was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal of England. He held his position with Egerton for several years and it's likely that around this period Donne converted to Anglicanism.

    On his way to a promising career, John Donne became a Member of Parliament in 1601. That same year, he married 16-year-old Anne More, the niece of Sir Egerton. Both Lord Egerton and Anne’s father, George More, strongly disapproved of the marriage, and, as punishment, More did not provide a dowry. Lord Egerton fired Donne and had him imprisoned for a short time. The eight years following Donne’s release would be a struggle for the married couple until Anne’s father finally paid her dowry.

    In 1610, John Donne published his anti-Catholic polemic “Pseudo-Martyr,” renouncing his faith. In it, he proposed the argument that Roman Catholics could support James I without compromising their religious loyalty to the pope. This won him the king’s favor and patronage from members of the House of Lords. In 1615, Donne was ordained soon thereafter was appointed Royal Chaplain. His elaborate metaphors, religious symbolism and flair for drama soon established him as a great preacher.

    In 1617, John Donne’s wife died shortly after giving birth to their 12th child. The time for writing love poems was over, and Donne devoted his energies to more religious subjects. In 1621, Donne became dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. During a period of severe illness, he wrote “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions,” published in 1624. This work contains the immortal lines “No man is an island” and “never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” That same year, Donne was appointed Vicar of St. Dunstan’s-in-the-West and became known for his eloquent sermons.

    As John Donne’s health continued to fail him, he became obsessed with death. Shortly before he died, he delivered a pre-funeral sermon, “Death’s Duel.” His writing was charismatic and inventive. His compelling examination of the mortal paradox influenced English poets for generations. Donne’s work fell out of favor for a time, but was revived in the 20th century by high-profile admirers such as T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.


    1. Psalme Cxxxvii. 10/21/2014
    2. The Soule 10/21/2014
    3. Good Friday 10/21/2014
    4. To Sir Henry Wotton 4/9/2010
    5. To The Earl Of Doncaster 4/9/2010
    6. Mercurius Gallo-Belgicus 4/9/2010
    7. Raderus 4/9/2010
    8. Klockius 4/9/2010
    9. Holy Sonnet Xi: Spit In My Face You Jews, And Pierce My Side 4/9/2010
    10. To Mr. Tilman After He Had Taken Orders 4/9/2010
    11. Translated Out Of Gazaeus, 4/9/2010
    12. To Sir Henry Wotton Ii 4/9/2010
    13. To Sir Henry Goodyere 4/9/2010
    14. Ralphius 4/9/2010
    15. To The Countess Of Bedford Ii 4/9/2010
    16. Nativity 4/9/2010
    17. La Corona 4/9/2010
    18. Satire Ii 4/9/2010
    19. To Mr. Rowland Woodward 4/9/2010
    20. To Mr. Samuel Brooke 4/9/2010
    21. To Mr.I.L. 4/9/2010
    22. Temple 4/9/2010
    23. Upon The Translation Of The Psalms By Sir Philip Sidney And The Countess Of Pembroke, His Sister 4/9/2010
    24. Epithalamion Made At Lincoln's Inn 4/9/2010
    25. To Mr. I. P. 4/9/2010
    26. To Sir Henry Wotton At His Going Ambassador To Venice 4/9/2010
    27. To The Countess Of Bedford I 4/9/2010
    28. Elegy Xii 4/9/2010
    29. Niobe 4/9/2010
    30. To The Praise Of The Dead And The Anatomy 4/9/2010
    31. Satire V 4/9/2010
    32. Holy Sonnet Xix: Oh, To Vex Me, Contraries Meet In One 4/9/2010
    33. To Mr.T.W. 4/9/2010
    34. Holy Sonnet Viii: If Faithful Souls Be Alike Glorified 4/9/2010
    35. Crucifying 4/9/2010
    36. Elegy Xi: The Bracelet 4/9/2010
    37. The Annunciation And Passion 4/9/2010
    38. Elegy:The End Of Funeral Elegies 4/9/2010
    39. Valediction To His Book 4/9/2010
    40. To The Lady Magdalen Herbert, Of St. Mary Magdalen




    The Soule - Poem by John Donne

    Thee, eye of heaven, this great soule envies not;
    By thy male force is all wee have begot;
    In the first East thou now begins to shine;
    Suck'st early balme, and island spices there;
    And wilt anon, in thy loose-rein'd careere
    At Tagus, Po, Sene, Thames, and Danon dine,
    And see at night thy Westerne land of Myne :
    Yet hast thou not more nations seene than shee,
    That before thee one day beganne to bee,
    And, thy fraill light being quenched, shall long, long outlive thee.

    -----------------------------------------------------------

    No Man Is An Island - Poem by John Donne


    No man is an island,
    Entire of itself,
    Every man is a piece of the continent,
    A part of the main.
    If a clod be washed away by the sea,
    Europe is the less.
    As well as if a promontory were.
    As well as if a manor of thy friend's
    Or of thine own were:
    Any man's death diminishes me,
    Because I am involved in mankind,
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
    It tolls for thee.

    ----------------------------------------------------------------------



    Ode - Poem by John Donne


    I. VENGEANCE will sit above our faults ; but till
    She there do sit,
    We see her not, nor them. Thus blind, yet still
    We lead her way ; and thus, whilst we do ill,
    We suffer it.

    2. Unhappy he whom youth makes not beware
    Of doing ill.
    Enough we labour under age, and care ;
    In number, th' errors of the last place are
    The greatest still.

    3. Yet we, that should the ill we now begin
    As soon repent,
    Strange thing ! perceive not ; our faults are not seen,
    But past us ; neither felt, but only in
    The punishment.

    4. But we know ourselves least ; mere outward shows
    Our minds so store,
    That our souls no more than our eyes disclose
    But form and colour. Only he who knows
    Himself, knows more.

    -----------------------------------------------------------

    Oh My Blacke Soule! Now Thou Art Summoned - Poem by John Donne

    Oh my black Soule! Now thou art summoned
    By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;
    Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
    Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
    Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,
    Wisheth himselfe deliverd from prison;
    But damn'd and hal'd to execution,
    Wisheth that sill he might be imprisioned;
    Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;
    But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
    Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke;
    And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
    Or wash thee in Christ's blood, which hath this might
    That being red, it dyes red soules to white.
    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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    Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897 – February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945.

    As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century.

    The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, "Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the "reactionary generation." This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques.

    Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan "one of the finest lyric poets America has produced," and added that "the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending."


    Biography
    Early years

    Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, where her father, Daniel Bogan, worked for various paper mills and bottling factories. She spent most of her childhood years with her parents and brother growing up in mill towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, where she and her family lived in working-class hotels and boardinghouses until 1904.

    With the help of a female benefactor, Bogan was able to attend the Girls' Latin School for five years, which eventually gave her the opportunity to attend Boston University. In 1916, after only completing her freshman year and giving up a fellowship to Radcliffe, she left the university to marry Curt Alexander, a corporal in the U.S. Army, but their marriage ended in 1918. Bogan moved to New York to pursue a career in writing, and their only daughter, Maidie Alexander, was left in the care of Bogan's parents. After her first husband's death in 1920, she left and spent a few years in Vienna, where she explored her loneliness and her new identity in verse. She returned to New York City and published her first book of poetry, Body of This Death: Poems, in 1923, meeting that year the poet and novelist Raymond Holden. They were married by 1925. Four years later, she published her second book of poetry, Dark Summer: Poems, and shortly after was hired as a poetry editor for The New Yorker. She was divorced from Holden in 1937.
    Career

    Bogan's poetic style was unlike that of Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. Suzanne Clark, an English professor from the University of Oregon, stated that Bogan often refers to her female speakers as "the locus of intemperate, dangerous, antisocial desires." This coincides with the notion that Bogan brought a different perspective to the traditional viewpoint of women.

    Not only was it difficult being a female poet in the 1930s and 1940s, but her lower-middle-class Irish background and limited education also brought on much ambivalence and contradiction for Louise Bogan. She even refused to review women poets in her early career and stated, "I have found from bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory." Bogan did not discuss intimate details of her life (and disdained such confessional poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman).

    Most of her work was published before 1938. This includes Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She also translated works by Ernst Jünger, Goethe, and Jules Renard. Later in Bogan's life, a volume of her collected works, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923–1968, was published with such poems as "The Dream" and "Women."

    In late 1969, shortly before her death, she ended her 38-year career as a reviewer for The New Yorker, stating: "No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square."

    One of her admirers was W. H. Auden.[citation needed]

    Her poetry was published in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner's, and Atlantic Monthly. Her Collected Poems: 1923–1953 won her the Bollingen award in 1955 as well as an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and she was the poetry reviewer of The New Yorker from 1931 until 1969, when she retired. She was a strong supporter, as well as a friend, of the poet Theodore Roethke.

    In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she detailed a raucous affair that she and the yet-unpublished Roethke carried on in 1935, during the time between his expulsion from Lafayette College and his return to Michigan. At the time she seemed little impressed by what she called his "very, very small lyrics"; she seems to have viewed the affair as, at most, a possible source for her own work (see What the Woman Lived: Collected letters of Louise Bogan).

    On February 4, 1970, Louise Bogan died of a heart attack in New York City. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds some of her papers.

    A number of autobiographical pieces were published posthumously in Journey around My Room (1980). Elizabeth Frank's biography of Louise Bogan, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Ruth Anderson's sound poem I Come Out of Your Sleep (revised and recorded on Sinopah 1997 XI) is constructed from speech sounds in Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia."

    "I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!" – Louise Bogan

    In 1923, Louise Bogan released her first volume of poetry, Body of this Death, containing her poem "Medusa". Though open to interpretation, "Medusa" is a poem that revolves around the petrification of the speaker who contemplates the concept of time. In the poem, after the speaker bears witness to the apparition of the Gorgon Medusa, the speaker ponders on how nature and life will continue, as "the water will always fall, and will not fall" and "the grass will always be growing for hay" while "I shall stand here like a shadow" and "nothing will ever stir". While many interpretations of the poem exist, one possible explanation for the bleakness of this poem may revolve around Bogan’s depression and solitude after divorcing from her first husband and living in poverty with a daughter in hand.[1] The idea that one would become petrified and lost in time by Medusa is similar to a feeling of loss and despair as one feels helpless and stuck in a situation where one feels their situation is unchangeable. Brett C. Millier, a Professor of Literature at Middlebury College, describes Bogan’s poetry as one where "Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme."[2] At a time where she most likely felt betrayed by her husband and society, Bogan feels like the speaker in "Medusa", stuck in a dead scene where her eyes could no longer drift away to a better life.
    Personal life

    Bogan married twice. In 1916 she married a soldier, Curt Alexander, and had one daughter, but the couple separated before Alexander's death in 1920. She was married to poet Raymond Holden from July 10, 1925 to 1937.

    Despite the hardships Bogan encountered during the 1920s and '30s, she was able to experience the fascinations of Renaissance painting, sculpture, and ornament.


    ************************************************

    Louise Bogan Poems
    1. Zone 4/15/2010
    2. To Be Sung On The Water 10/24/2013
    3. Statue And Birds 4/15/2010
    4. Cassandra 4/15/2010
    5. Words For Departure 1/13/2003
    6. Leave-Taking 4/15/2010
    7. Solitary Observation Brought Back From A Sojourn In Hell 1/3/2003
    8. Chanson Un Peu Naïve 1/13/2003
    9. Portrait 1/3/2003
    10. A Tale 1/3/2003
    11. Betrothed 1/13/2003
    12. Sonnet 1/13/2003
    13. Juan's Song 1/13/2003
    14. The Frightened Man 1/13/2003
    15. Women 1/3/2003
    16. Epitaph For A Romantic Woman 1/3/2003
    17. Man Alone 1/13/2003
    18. Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom 1/3/2003
    19. Knowledge 1/13/2003
    20. Tears In Sleep 1/3/2003
    21. The Alchemist 1/3/2003
    22. Last Hill In A Vista 1/3/2003
    23. To A Dead Lover 4/15/2010
    24. Medusa 1/3/2003
    25. The Crossed Apple 1/3/2003
    26. Roman Fountain 1/13/2003
    27. Song For The Last Act 1/13/2003
    28. The Dream 1/3/2003

    Sonnet

    Since you would claim the sources of my thought
    Recall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,
    The reedy traps which other hands have times
    To close upon it. Conjure up the hot
    Blaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snow
    Devised to strike it down. It will be free.
    Whatever nets draw in to prison me
    At length your eyes must turn to watch it go.

    My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,
    My body hear no echo save its own,
    Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,
    Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spell
    That we obey, strain to the wind, be thrown
    Straight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud
    Louise Bogan

    Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

    Men loved wholly beyond wisdom
    Have the staff without the banner.
    Like a fire in a dry thicket
    Rising within women's eyes
    Is the love men must return.
    Heart, so subtle now, and trembling,
    What a marvel to be wise.,
    To love never in this manner!
    To be quiet in the fern
    Like a thing gone dead and still,
    Listening to the prisoned cricket
    Shake its terrible dissembling
    Music in the granite hill.

    To A Dead Lover

    The dark is thrown
    Back from the brightness, like hair
    Cast over a shoulder.
    I am alone,

    Four years older;
    Like the chairs and the walls
    Which I once watched brighten
    With you beside me. I was to waken
    Never like this, whatever came or was taken.

    The stalk grows, the year beats on the wind.
    Apples come, and the month for their fall.
    The bark spreads, the roots tighten.
    Though today be the last
    Or tomorrow all,
    You will not mind.

    That I may not remember
    Does not matter.
    I shall not be with you again.
    What we knew, even now
    Must scatter
    And be ruined, and blow
    Like dust in the rain.

    You have been dead a long season
    And have less than desire
    Who were lover with lover;
    And I have life—that old reason
    To wait for what comes,
    To leave what is over.



    ******************************************



    Louise Bogan is one of the best unknown or under-known poets of all time. Her best poems make her a major poet, in my opinion. She's a poet who deserves to be read and studied. In particular, her "After the Persian," "Juan's Song" and "Song for the Last Act" are "must reads."

    Song For The Last Act
    by Louise Bogan

    Now that I have your face by heart, I look
    Less at its features than its darkening frame
    Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
    Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook.
    Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
    The lead and marble figures watch the show
    Of yet another summer loath to go
    Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

    Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

    Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
    In the black chords upon a dulling page
    Music that is not meant for music's cage,
    Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
    The staves are shuttled over with a stark
    Unprinted silence. In a double dream
    I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
    The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

    Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

    Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
    The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
    The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
    On a strange beach under a broken sky.
    O not departure, but a voyage done!
    The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
    Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
    Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

    Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

    *************************************
    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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    poet Edwin Arlington Robinson



    Biography of Edwin Arlington Robinson
    Edwin Arlington Robinson poet

    Edwin Arlington Robinson was an American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

    Biography

    Robinson was born in Head Tide, Lincoln County, Maine, but his family moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1870. He described his childhood in Maine as "stark and unhappy": his parents, having wanted a girl, did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort; other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected a man from Arlington, Massachusetts to draw a name out of a hat.

    Robinson's early difficulties led many of his poems to have a dark pessimism and his stories to deal with "an American dream gone awry". His brother Dean died of a drug overdose. His other brother, Herman, a handsome and charismatic man, married the woman Edwin himself loved, but Herman suffered business failures, became an alcoholic, and ended up estranged from his wife and children, dying impoverished in a charity hospital in 1901. Robinson's poem "Richard Cory" is thought to refer to this brother.

    In late 1891, at the age of 21, Edwin entered Harvard University as a special student. He took classes in English, French, and Shakespeare, as well as one on Anglo-Saxon that he later dropped. His mission was not to get all A's, as he wrote his friend Harry Smith, "B, and in that vicinity, is a very comfortable and safe place to hang".

    His real desire was to get published in one of the Harvard literary journals. Within the first fortnight of being there, The Harvard Advocate published Robinson's "Ballade of a Ship". He was even invited to meet with the editors, but when he returned he complained to his friend Mowry Saben, "I sat there among them, unable to say a word". Robinson's literary career had false-started.

    Edwin's father, Edward, died after Edwin's first year at Harvard. Edwin returned to Harvard for a second year, but it was to be his last one as a student there. Though short, his stay in Cambridge included some of his most cherished experiences, and there he made his most lasting friendships. He wrote his friend Harry Smith on June 21, 1893:

    I suppose this is the last letter I shall ever write you from Harvard. The thought seems a little queer, but it cannot be otherwise. Sometimes I try to imagine the state my mind would be in had I never come here, but I cannot. I feel that I have got comparatively little from my two years, but still, more than I could get in Gardiner if I lived a century.

    Robinson had returned to Gardiner by mid-1893. He had plans to start writing seriously. In October he wrote his friend Gledhill:

    Writing has been my dream ever since I was old enough to lay a plan for an air castle. Now for the first time I seem to have something like a favorable opportunity and this winter I shall make a beginning.

    With his father gone, Edwin became the man of the household. He tried farming and developed a close relationship with his brother's wife Emma Robinson, who after her husband Herman's death moved back to Gardiner with her children. She twice rejected marriage proposals from Edwin, after which he permanently left Gardiner. He moved to New York, where he led a precarious existence as an impoverished poet while cultivating friendships with other writers, artists, and would-be intellectuals. In 1896 he self-published his first book, The Torrent and the Night Before, paying 100 dollars for 500 copies. Robinson meant it as a surprise for his mother. Days before the copies arrived, Mary Palmer Robinson died of diphtheria.

    His second volume, The Children of the Night, had a somewhat wider circulation. Its readers included President Theodore Roosevelt's son Kermit, who recommended it to his father. Impressed by the poems and aware of Robinson's straits, Roosevelt in 1905 secured the writer a job at the New York Customs Office. Robinson remained in the job until Roosevelt left office.

    Gradually his literary successes began to mount. He won the Pulitzer Prize three times in the 1920s. During the last twenty years of his life he became a regular summer resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where several women made him the object of their devoted attention, but he maintained a solitary life and never married. Robinson died of cancer on April 6, 1935 in the New York Hospital (now New York Cornell Hospital) in New York City.

    Recognition

    Edwin Arlington Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry three times: in 1922 for his first Collected Poems, in 1925 for The Man Who Died Twice, and in 1928 for Tristram.

    Edwin Arlington Robinson's Works:

    Poetry

    The Torrent and the Night Before (1896)
    Luke Havergal (1897)
    The Children of the Night (1897)
    Richard Cory (1897)
    Captain Craig and Other Poems (1902)
    The Town Down the River (1910)
    Miniver Cheevy (1910)
    The Man Against the Sky (1916)
    Merlin (1917)
    Ben Trovato (1920)
    The Three Taverns (1920)
    Avon's Harvest (1921)
    Collected Poems (1921)
    Haunted House (1921)
    Roman Bartholomew (1923)
    The Man Who Died Twice (1924)
    Dionysus in Doubt (1925)
    Tristram (1927)
    Fortunatus (1928)
    Sonnets, 1889-1917 (1928)
    Cavender's House (1929)
    Modred (1929)
    The Glory of the Nightingales (1930)
    Matthias at the Door (1931)
    Selected Poems (1931)
    Talifer (1933)
    Amaranth (1934)
    King Jasper (1935)
    Collected Poems (1937)

    Plays

    Van Zorn (1914)
    The Porcupine (1915)

    Letters

    Selected Letters (1940)

    Untriangulated Stars: Letters to Harry de Forest Smith 1890-1905 (1947)
    Edwin Arlington Robinson's Letters to Edith Brower (1968)

    Miscellany

    Uncollected Poems and Prose (1975)

    This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia Edwin Arlington Robinson; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA






    Edwin Arlington Robinson
    Edwin Arlington Robinson (22 December 1869 – 6 April 1935 / Maine / United States)

    poet Edwin Arlington Robinson

    Edwin Arlington Robinson Poems
    Search in the poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson :

    Order By Title Order By Date Added Order By Hit New Poems

    1. Haunted House 4/19/2016
    2. Why He Was There 11/26/2014
    3. Horace To Leuconoë 1/3/2003
    4. Tasker Norcross 1/3/2003
    5. Momus 1/3/2003
    6. The Return Of Morgan And Fingal 1/3/2003
    7. Erasmus 1/3/2003
    8. Fragment 1/3/2003
    9. Job The Rejected 1/3/2003
    10. The Old King's New Jester 1/3/2003
    11. Lazarus 1/3/2003
    12. Demos 1/3/2003
    13. Nimmo 1/3/2003
    14. Inferential 1/3/2003
    15. Leffingwell 1/3/2003
    16. Lingard And The Stars 1/3/2003
    17. Llewellyn And The Tree 1/3/2003
    18. Isaac And Archibald 1/3/2003
    19. Lisette And Eileen 1/3/2003
    20. Rahel To Varnhagen 1/3/2003
    21. Theophilus 1/3/2003
    22. The Sunken Crown 1/3/2003
    23. L'Envoy 1/3/2003
    24. Discovery 1/3/2003
    25. The New Tenants 1/3/2003
    26. Lost Anchors 1/3/2003
    27. The Whip 1/3/2003
    28. The Altar 1/3/2003
    29. The Revealer 1/3/2003
    30. Recalled 1/3/2003
    31. For Some Poems By Matthew Arnold 1/3/2003
    32. The Chorus Of Old Men In Aegus 1/3/2003
    33. The Klondike 1/3/2003
    34. Clavering 1/3/2003
    35. Two Octaves 1/3/2003
    36. The Book Of Annandale 1/3/2003
    37. The Pilot 1/3/2003
    38. The Corridor 1/3/2003
    39. But For The Grace Of God 1/3/2003
    40. The Gift Of God 1/3/2003
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    poet Edwin Arlington Robinson


    A Happy Man
    - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson


    When these graven lines you see,
    Traveller, do not pity me;
    Though I be among the dead,
    Let no mournful word be said.

    Children that I leave behind,
    And their children, all were kind;
    Near to them and to my wife,
    I was happy all my life.

    My three sons I married right,
    And their sons I rocked at night;
    Death nor sorrow never brought
    Cause for one unhappy thought.

    Now, and with no need of tears,
    Here they leave me, full of years,--
    Leave me to my quiet rest
    In the region of the blest.
    Edwin Arlington Robinson

    ---------------------------------------------
    ---------------------------------------------

    An Old Story
    - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson

    Strange that I did not know him then.
    That friend of mine!
    I did not even show him then
    One friendly sign;

    But cursed him for the ways he had
    To make me see
    My envy of the praise he had
    For praising me.

    I would have rid the earth of him
    Once, in my pride...
    I never knew the worth of him
    Until he died.

    ----------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------

    Miniver Cheevy - Poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson

    Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
    Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
    He wept that he was ever born,
    And he had reasons.

    Miniver loved the days of old
    When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
    The vision of the warrior bold
    Would set him dancing.

    Miniver sighed for what was not,
    And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
    He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
    And Priam's neighbors.

    Miniver mourned the ripe renown
    That made so many a name so fragrant;
    He mourned Romance, now on the town,
    And Art, a vagrant.

    Mininver loved the Medici,
    Albeit he had never seen one;
    He would have sinned incessantly
    Could he have been one.

    Miniver cursed the commonplace
    And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
    He missed the medieval grace
    Of iron clothing.

    Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
    But sore annoyed was he without it;
    Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
    And thought about it.

    Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
    Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
    Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
    And kept on drinking.
    Edwin Arlington Robinson
    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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    Wulf and Eadwacer
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2010) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

    Wulf and Eadwacer is an Old English poem of famously difficult interpretation. It has been variously characterised, (modernly) as an elegy, (historically) as a riddle, and (in speculation on the poem's pre-history) as a song or ballad with refrain. The poem's complexities are, however, often asserted simply to defy genre classification, especially with regard to its narrative content. The poem's only extant text is found within the 10th century Exeter Book, along with certain other texts to which it possesses qualitative similarities.

    Contents

    1 Genre
    2 Manuscript evidence
    2.1 Characters
    2.2 Synopsis
    3 Differing arguments
    4 Text and translation
    5 References
    5.1 Sources
    6 External links

    Genre

    The characterisation of the poem as a riddle is the oldest of its various treatments, the argument for which characterisation is based largely upon the obscurity of its subject and the placement of the poem within the Exeter Book, preceding the texts of the extant riddles themselves. However, its length and its various textual problems not characteristic of the riddles have led few scholars to pursue a simple riddle interpretation in modern textual study, and few such explanations have garnered serious attention in the recent history of its scholarship. Rather, the thematic similarity of the poem to The Wife's Lament, also found in the Exeter Book, has caused most modern scholars to place it, along with the Wife's Lament, solidly within the genre of the frauenlied, or woman's song and, more broadly, in that of the Old English elegy. Its adjacency to the riddles has, however, continued to inform commentary and interpretation. The short lines and refrains of Wulf and Eadwacer, along with the stream of consciousness narration have made it a popular feminist reading. These features aided by the rhythm and syntax, cause the emotional buildup of the poem.
    Manuscript evidence

    For lack of any historical evidence or attestation outside the Exeter Book's text, historical criticism is limited to study of the Exeter Book itself and, particularly, to comparative study of its various contained works. Though it is generally held that the poem's composition occurred at a date significantly earlier than the date of the Exeter Book's own compilation, the degree of the poem's age relative to the codex is difficult if not impossible to ascertain. The dating of the poem in criticism is thus generally limited to what can be ascertained from the known history of the Exeter Book, for which suggested dates of compilation range from 960CE to 990CE. Though the folios on which the poem is recorded are not subject to any significant damage necessitating reconstruction, its textual problems and, particularly, the grammatical confusion of the first lines of the text, have resulted in widespread postulation that the initial lines of the poem may have been lost prior to its inclusion in the Exeter Book but subsequent to an earlier transcription. There is no manuscript evidence to directly support this theory, however.

    Proposals regarding its heritage prior to inscription in the Exeter codex are consequently many and various. The inclusion of a refrain in the text of the poem may support an originally non-English origin, as the refrain is not conventional to the Old English elegy or to any other known Old English poetical form. Among proposed explanations for this anomaly, a Scandinavian inspiration for the Anglo-Saxon text offers one possible solution to this problem, and has similarly been considered as an explanation for its difficult language, but this theory, as with most others on the poem's prehistory, can only be regarded as hypothetical given lack of substantive corroborating evidence. The suggestion is that the poem derives from some interpretation of the Wayland story; that the woman is Beadohilde, Wulf is Wayland, and Eadwacer her angry father. This episode is also discussed in the poem Deor.
    Characters

    The most conventional interpretation of the poem is as a lament spoken in the first person by an unnamed woman who is or has in the past been involved with two men whose names are Wulf and Eadwacer respectively. Both of these are attested Anglo-Saxon names, and this interpretation is the basis for the common titling of the poem (which is not based on any other manuscript evidence). However, even this point proves controversial. Some interpretations favour a single male character, and virtually all commentaries acknowledge the possibility, though this is the less orthodox of the two views. In recognition of this fact, for example, preeminent Old English scholar Michael Alexander has chosen the title "Wulf" for his own reproduction of it in The Earliest English Poems (Penguin, 1973). It has also been known to be titled simply as Eadwacer. The title Wulf and Eadwacer, however, though apocryphal, has gained such widespread acceptance over time that in the majority of texts it is accepted regardless of the treatment of the titular name(s) and character(s).
    Synopsis

    The speaker of the poem is evidently separated from her lover and/or husband, Wulf, both symbolically and materially (Wulf is on iege, | ic on oþerre), and this separation is seemingly maintained by threat of violence (willað hy hine aþecgan, | gif he on þreat cymeð), possibly by her own people (Leodum is minum | swylce him mon lac gife). Crying out in her sorrow for her lover, she longs for him to take her in his arms (þonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde). She finds comfort in his coming, but it is also bittersweet (wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað). She then addresses 'Eadwacer', who may be her husband or her captor, and she appears to identify their 'whelp' (Uncerne earne hwelp), generally understood to metaphorically imply 'child' and possibly a reference to the child's being the 'whelp' of a man named 'Wulf'. She describes this child as being taken off 'to the woods' (to wuda).
    Differing arguments

    Even though the poem is a mere nineteen lines there are many differing interpretations. The before-mentioned is the most popular interpretation. One of the others is that the word Eadwacer in the poem is not a proper noun, but a simple common noun which means "property watcher". This brings the characters in the poem from three to two, the speaker and her lover, Wulf. If one adopts this interpretation then her exclamation ("Do you hear me, Eadwacer?") could be meant to be sarcastic or a calling out of his manhood. She is saying that his long absences have made him anything but a protector to her and their child who she worries about. Using this interpretation, the speaker's use of irony when speaking of her lover makes the last two lines make sense. The speaker may be saying that Wulf has been her lover and her child's father, but has never treated her as or actually been her husband. Therefore, the complications of their relationship is easily unbound. However, this seems to be more easily done by Wulf than the speaker herself (Adams).

    Though this argument is debatable among scholars, there is the thought that the character of Wulf is actually the speaker's child and not her lover. In this case she would be lamenting and pining after her son, hoping that he was okay, and not her lover. One scholar says: "In Wulf and Eadwacer a woman finds herself in a situation typical of Old English poetry, torn between conflicting loyalties. Many commentators see this particular situation as a sexual triangle, with Wulf the woman’s lover and Eadwacer her husband. If so, then Wulf and Eadwacer is not typical, because most Old English loyalty crises occur within the family group…It is…true that romantic or sexual love was not the literary commonplace before the twelfth century it has been since; other loves took precedence…The situation in Wulf and Eadwacer is far more typically Anglo-Saxon than as usually interpreted, if the speaker is understood to be the mother of the person she addresses as Wulf, as well as of the ‘whelp’ of line 16."[1] This argument that Wulf is actually the narrator’s son gives a different depth to the elegy—it becomes a poem of mourning for her son that seems to be exiled from her and their people. This idea has credibility when put in context that she was peace-weaved to Eadwacer, making Wulf their son.
    Text and translation

    Leodum is minum swylce him mon lac gife;
    willað hy hine aþecgan, gif he on þreat cymeð.
    Ungelic is us.
    Wulf is on iege, ic on oþerre.

    Fæst is þæt eglond, fenne biworpen.
    Sindon wælreowe weras þær on ige;
    willað hy hine aþecgan, gif he on þreat cymeð.
    Ungelice is us.
    Wulfes ic mines widlastum wenum dogode;

    þonne hit wæs renig weder ond ic reotugu sæt,
    þonne mec se beaducafa bogum bilegde,
    wæs me wyn to þon, wæs me hwæþre eac lað.
    Wulf, min Wulf, wena me þine
    seoce gedydon, þine seldcymas,

    murnende mod, nales meteliste.
    Gehyrest þu, Eadwacer? Uncerne earne hwelp
    bireð Wulf to wuda.
    þæt mon eaþe tosliteð þætte næfre gesomnad wæs,
    uncer giedd geador.


    It is to my people as if someone gave them a gift.
    They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
    It is different for us.
    Wulf is on one island I on another.

    That island, surrounded by fens, is secure.
    There on the island are bloodthirsty men.
    They want to kill him, if he comes with a troop.
    It is different for us.
    I thought of my Wulf with far-wandering hopes,

    Whenever it was rainy weather, and I sat tearfully,
    Whenever the warrior bold in battle encompassed me with his arms.
    To me it was pleasure in that, it was also painful.
    Wulf, my Wulf, my hopes for you have caused
    My sickness, your infrequent visits,

    A mourning spirit, not at all a lack of food.
    Do you hear, Eadwacer? A wolf is carrying
    our wretched whelp to the forest,
    that one easily sunders which was never united:
    our song together.[2]
    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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    Lucy Maud Montgomery Poems

    A Summer Day I The dawn laughs out on orient hills And ...
    A Winter Dawn Above the marge of night a star still shines, ...
    A Winter Day I The air is silent save where stirs A ...
    As The Heart Hopes It is a year dear one, since you ...
    Down Home Down home to-night the moonshine falls Across a ...
    The Truce Of Night Lo, it is dark, Save for the crystal ...
    Come, Rest Awhile Come, rest awhile, and let us idly stray ...

    More poems of Lucy Maud Montgomery »

    When The Dark Comes Down

    When the dark comes down, oh, the wind is on the sea
    With lisping laugh and whimper to the red reef's threnody,
    The boats are sailing homeward now across the harbor bar
    With many a jest and many a shout from fishing grounds afar.
    So furl your sails and take your rest, ye fisher folk so brown,
    For task and quest are ended when the dark comes down.

    When the dark comes down, oh, the landward valleys fill
    Like brimming cups of purple, and on every landward hill
    There shines a star of twilight that is watching evermore
    The low, dim lighted meadows by the long, dim-lighted shore,
    For there, where vagrant daisies weave the grass a silver crown,
    The lads and lassies wander when the dark comes down.

    When the dark comes down, oh, the children fall asleep,
    And mothers in the fisher huts their happy vigils keep;
    There's music in the song they sing and music on the sea,
    The loving, lingering echoes of the twilight's litany,
    For toil has folded hands to dream, and care has ceased to frown,
    And every wave's a lyric when the dark comes down.
    Lucy Maud Montgomery
    **************************************

    The Seeker

    I sought for my happiness over the world,
    Oh, eager and far was my quest;
    I sought it on mountain and desert and sea,
    I asked it of east and of west.
    I sought it in beautiful cities of men,
    On shores that were sunny and blue,
    And laughter and lyric and pleasure were mine
    In palaces wondrous to view;
    Oh, the world gave me much to my plea and my prayer
    But never I found aught of happiness there!

    Then I took my way back to a valley of old
    And a little brown house by a rill,
    Where the winds piped all day in the sentinel firs
    That guarded the crest of the hill;
    I went by the path that my childhood had known
    Through the bracken and up by the glen,
    And I paused at the gate of the garden to drink
    The scent of sweet-briar again;
    The homelight shone out through the dusk as of yore
    And happiness waited for me at the door!
    Lucy Maud Montgomery
    **********************************

    The Old Man's Grave

    Make it where the winds may sweep
    Through the pine boughs soft and deep,
    And the murmur of the sea
    Come across the orient lea,
    And the falling raindrops sing
    Gently to his slumbering.

    Make it where the meadows wide
    Greenly lie on every side,
    Harvest fields he reaped and trod,
    Westering slopes of clover sod,
    Orchard lands where bloom and blow
    Trees he planted long ago.

    Make it where the starshine dim
    May be always close to him,
    And the sunrise glory spread
    Lavishly around his bed.
    And the dewy grasses creep
    Tenderly above his sleep.

    Since these things to him were dear
    Through full many a well-spent year,
    It is surely meet their grace
    Should be on his resting-place,
    And the murmur of the sea
    Be his dirge eternally.
    Lucy Maud Montgomery

    xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


    Lucy Maud Montgomery

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Lucy Maud Montgomery
    L. M. Montgomery
    L. M. Montgomery c. 1920s
    Born November 30, 1874
    Clifton, Prince Edward Island
    Died April 24, 1942 (aged 67)
    Toronto, Ontario
    Occupation Fiction writer
    Nationality Canadian
    Education Prince of Wales College, Dalhousie University
    Period 1896–1940
    Genre Canadian literature, children's novels
    Notable works

    Anne of Green Gables
    Rilla of Ingleside
    Emily of New Moon

    Spouse Ewen ("Ewan") Macdonald
    Children Chester (1912–1963)
    Hugh (1914–1914)
    Stuart (1915–1982)

    L.M. Montgomery OBE (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), was the pen name of Lucy Maud Montgomery, a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. The book was an immediate success. The central character, Anne Shirley, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following.[1] The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Most of the novels were set in Prince Edward Island, and locations within Canada's smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site—namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park. She was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935.

    Montgomery's work, diaries and letters have been read and studied by scholars and readers worldwide.[2]

    Contents

    1 Early life
    2 Writing career, romantic interests, and family life
    2.1 Published books and suitors
    2.2 Marriage and family
    2.3 Later life
    3 Death
    4 Legacy
    4.1 Collections
    4.2 Landmarked places
    4.3 Honours and awards
    5 Works
    5.1 Novels
    5.1.1 Anne of Green Gables series
    5.1.2 Emily trilogy
    5.1.3 Pat of Silver Bush
    5.1.4 The Story Girl
    5.1.5 Miscellaneous
    5.2 Short story collection
    5.2.1 Short stories by chronological order
    5.3 Poetry
    5.4 Non-fiction
    5.5 Autobiography
    6 Notes and references
    6.1 Notes
    6.2 References
    6.3 Bibliography
    7 External links
    7.1 Texts, images and collections
    7.2 Audio
    7.3 Organizations

    Early life
    Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1884 (age 10)

    Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) in Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Her mother Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery died of tuberculosis when Maud was 21 months old. Stricken with grief over his wife's death, Hugh John Montgomery gave custody to Montgomery's maternal grandparents.[3] Later he moved to Prince Albert, North-West Territories (now Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) when Montgomery was seven.[4] She went to live with her maternal grandparents, Alexander Marquis Macneill and Lucy Woolner Macneill, in the nearby community of Cavendish and was raised by them in a strict and unforgiving manner. Montgomery's early life in Cavendish was very lonely.[5] Despite having relatives nearby, much of her childhood was spent alone. Montgomery credits this time of her life, in which she created many imaginary friends and worlds to cope with her loneliness, with developing her creativity.[6]

    Montgomery completed her early education in Cavendish with the exception of one year (1890–1891) during which time she was in Prince Albert with her father and her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae.[4] In November 1890, while in Prince Albert, Montgomery's first work, a poem entitled "On Cape LeForce,"[4][6] was published in the Charlottetown paper, The Daily Patriot. She was as excited about this as she was about her return to her beloved Prince Edward Island in 1891.[6] The return to Cavendish was a great relief to her. Her time in Prince Albert was unhappy,for she did not get along with her stepmother[7] and because by, "... Maud’s account, her father's marriage was not a happy one."[8] In 1893, following the completion of her grade school education in Cavendish, she attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, and obtained a teacher's license. She completed the two-year program in one year.[4] In 1895 and 1896, she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
    Writing career, romantic interests, and family life
    Published books and suitors
    Birthplace of Lucy Maud Montgomery

    Upon leaving Dalhousie, Montgomery worked as a teacher in various Prince Edward Island schools. Though she did not enjoy teaching, it afforded her time to write. Beginning in 1897, she began to have her short stories published in magazines and newspapers. Montgomery was prolific and had over 100 stories published from 1897 to 1907.

    During her teaching years, Montgomery had numerous love interests. As a highly fashionable young woman, she enjoyed "slim, good looks"[6] and won the attention of several young men. In 1889, at 14, Montgomery began a relationship with a Cavendish boy named Nate Lockhart. To Montgomery, the relationship was merely a humorous and witty friendship. It ended abruptly when Montgomery refused his marriage proposal.[9]

    The early 1890s brought unwelcome advances from John A. Mustard and Will Pritchard.[10] Mustard, her teacher, quickly became her suitor; he tried to impress her with his knowledge of religious matters. His best topics of conversation were his thoughts on Predestination and "other dry points of theology",[11] which held little appeal for Montgomery. During the period when Mustard's interest became more pronounced, Montgomery found a new interest in Will Pritchard, the brother of her friend Laura Pritchard. This friendship was more amiable but, again, he felt more for Montgomery than she did for him.[12] When Pritchard sought to take their friendship further, Montgomery resisted. Montgomery refused both marriage proposals; the former was too narrow-minded,[13] and the latter was merely a good chum.[5] She ended the period of flirtation when she moved to Prince Edward Island. However, she and Pritchard did continue to correspond for over six years, until Pritchard caught influenza and died in 1897.[14]

    In 1897, Montgomery accepted the proposal of Edwin Simpson,[4] who was a student in French River near Cavendish.[15][16] Montgomery wrote that she accepted his proposal out of a desire for "love and protection" and because she felt her prospects were rather low.[5] While teaching in Lower Bedeque, she had a brief but passionate romantic attachment to Herman Leard, a member of the family with which she boarded.[17] In 1898, after much unhappiness and disillusionment, Montgomery broke off her engagement to Simpson.[18] Montgomery no longer sought romantic love.[6]

    In 1898, Montgomery moved back to Cavendish to live with her widowed grandmother. For a nine-month period between 1901 and 1902, she worked in Halifax as a substitute proofreader for the newspapers Morning Chronicle and The Daily Echo.[4][19] Montgomery was inspired to write her first books during this time on Prince Edward Island. Until her grandmother's death in March 1911, Montgomery stayed in Cavendish to take care of her. This coincided with a period of considerable income from her publications.[6] Although she enjoyed this income, she was aware that “marriage was a necessary choice for women in Canada.”[7]
    Marriage and family

    In 1908, Montgomery published her first book, Anne of Green Gables. An immediate success, it established Montgomery's career, and she would write and publish material (Including numerous sequels to Anne) continuously for the rest of her life. Shortly after her grandmother's death in 1911, she married Ewen (spelled in her notes and letters as "Ewan"[20]) Macdonald (1870–1943), a Presbyterian minister,[4] and they moved to Ontario where he had taken the position of minister of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, Leaskdale in present-day Uxbridge Township, also affiliated with the congregation in nearby Zephyr. Montgomery wrote her next eleven books from the Leaskdale manse. The structure was subsequently sold by the congregation and is now the Lucy Maud Montgomery Leaskdale Manse Museum.

    The Macdonalds had three sons; the second was stillborn. The great increase of Montgomery's writings in Leaskdale is the result of her need to escape the hardships of real life.[21] Montgomery underwent several periods of depression while trying to cope with the duties of motherhood and church life and with her husband’s attacks of religious melancholia (endogenous major depressive disorder) and deteriorating health: "For a woman who had given the world so much joy, [life] was mostly an unhappy one."[7] For much of her life, writing was her one great solace.[11] Also, during this time, Montgomery was engaged in a series of "acrimonious, expensive, and trying lawsuits with the publisher L.C. Page, that dragged on until she finally won in 1929."[22]

    Montgomery stopped writing about Anne in about 1920, writing in her journal that she had tired of the character. She preferred instead to create books about other young, female characters, feeling that her strength was writing about characters who were either very young or very old. Other series written by Montgomery include the "Emily" and "Pat" books, which, while successful, did not reach the same level of public acceptance as the "Anne" volumes. She also wrote a number of stand-alone novels, which were also generally successful, if not as successful as her Anne books.
    Later life
    Leaskdale manse, home of Lucy Maud Montgomery from 1911 to 1926

    In 1926, the family moved into the Norval Presbyterian Charge, in present-day Halton Hills, Ontario, where today the Lucy Maud Montgomery Memorial Garden can be seen from Highway 7.

    In 1935, upon her husband's retirement, Montgomery moved to Swansea, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, buying a house which she named Journey's End, situated on Riverside Drive along the east bank of the Humber River. Montgomery continued to write, and (in addition to writing other material) returned to writing about Anne after a 15-year hiatus, filling in previously unexplored gaps in the chronology she had developed for the character. She published Anne of Windy Poplars in 1936 and Anne of Ingleside in 1939. Jane of Lantern Hill, a non-Anne novel, was also composed around this time and published in 1937.

    In the last year of her life, Montgomery completed what she intended to be a ninth book featuring Anne, titled The Blythes Are Quoted. It included fifteen short stories (many of which were previously published) that she revised to include Anne and her family as mainly peripheral characters; forty-one poems (most of which were previously published) that she attributed to Anne and to her son Walter, who died as a soldier in the Great War; and vignettes featuring the Blythe family members discussing the poems. The book was delivered to Montgomery's publisher on the day of her death, but for reasons unexplained, the publisher declined to issue the book at the time. Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre speculates that the book's dark tone and anti-war message (Anne speaks very bitterly of WWI in one passage) may have made the volume unsuitable to publish in the midst of the second world war.

    An abridged version of this book, which shortened and reorganized the stories and omitted all the vignettes and all but one of the poems, was published as a collection of short stories called The Road to Yesterday in 1974, more than 30 years after the original work had been submitted. A complete edition of The Blythes Are Quoted, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, was finally published in its entirety by Viking Canada in October 2009, more than 67 years after it was composed.
    Death
    The gravestone of Montgomery, in a grassy cemetery. The text on the gravestone says, "Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald/wife of/Ewan Macdonald/1874–1942.
    Gravestone

    Montgomery died on April 24, 1942. A note was found beside her bed, reading, in part, "I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best."[23] Montgomery died from coronary thrombosis in Toronto.[24][a] However, it was revealed by her granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, in September 2008 that Montgomery suffered from depression – possibly as a result of caring for her mentally ill husband for decades – and may have taken her own life via a drug overdose.[25] But, there is another point of view.[23][26] According to Mary Rubio, who wrote a biography of Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (2008), the message may have been intended to be a journal entry as part of a journal that can no longer be found, rather than a simple suicide note.[26]

    During her lifetime, Montgomery published 20 novels, over 500 short stories, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. Aware of her fame, by 1920 Montgomery began editing and recopying her journals, presenting her life as she wanted it remembered. In doing so certain episodes were changed or omitted.[27]

    She was buried at the Cavendish Community Cemetery in Cavendish following her wake in the Green Gables farmhouse and funeral in the local Presbyterian church.
    Legacy
    Collections

    The L. M. Montgomery Institute, founded in 1993, at the University of Prince Edward Island, promotes scholarly inquiry into the life, works, culture, and influence of L. M. Montgomery and coordinates most of the research and conferences surrounding her work. The Montgomery Institute collection consists of novels, manuscripts, texts, letters, photographs, sound recordings and artifacts and other Montgomery ephemera.[28]

    Her major collections are archived at the University of Guelph.

    The first biography of Montgomery was The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery (1975), written by Mollie Gillen. Dr. Gillen also discovered over 40 of Montgomery's letters to her pen-friend George Boyd MacMillan in Scotland and used them as the basis for her work. Beginning in the 1980s, her complete journals, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, were published by the Oxford University Press. From 1988–95, editor Rea Wilmshurst collected and published numerous short stories by Montgomery. Most of her essays, along with interviews with Montgomery, commentary on her work, and coverage of her death and funeral, appear in Benjamin Lefebvre's The L. M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print (2013).[29]

    Despite the fact that Montgomery published over twenty books, "she never felt she achieved her one 'great' book".[6] Her readership, however, has always found her characters and stories to be among the best in fiction. Mark Twain said Montgomery’s Anne was “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice". Montgomery was honoured by being the first female in Canada to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and by being invested in the Order of the British Empire in 1935.[30] However, her fame was not limited to Canadian audiences. Anne of Green Gables became a success worldwide. For example, every year, thousands of Japanese tourists "make a pilgrimage to a green-gabled Victorian farmhouse in the town of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island".[31] In 2012, the original novel Anne of Green Gables was ranked number nine among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily U.S. audience.[32] The British public ranked it number 41 among all novels in The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey to determine the "nation's best-loved novel".[33]
    Landmarked places

    Montgomery's home of Leaskdale Manse in Ontario, and the area surrounding Green Gables and her Cavendish home in Prince Edward Island, have both been designated National Historic Sites.[34][35] Montgomery herself was designated a Person of National Historic Significance by the Government of Canada in 1943.[36]

    Bala's Museum in Bala, Ontario, is a house museum established in 1992. Officially it is "Bala's Museum with Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery", for Montgomery and her family stayed in the boarding house during a July 1922 holiday that inspired her novel The Blue Castle (1926). The museum hosts some events pertaining to Montgomery or her fiction, including re-enactment of the holiday visit.[37]
    Honours and awards

    Montgomery was honoured by Britain's King George V as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), as there were no Canadian orders, decorations or medals for civilians until the 1970s.

    Montgomery was named a National Historic Person in 1943 by the Canadian federal government. Her Ontario residence was designated a National Historic Site (NHS) in 1997 (Leaskdale Manse NHS), while the place that inspired her famous novels, Green Gables, was designated "L. M. Montgomery's Cavendish NHS" in 2004.

    On May 15, 1975, the Post Office Department issued a stamp to "Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables" designed by Peter Swan and typographed by Bernard N. J. Reilander. The 8¢ stamps are perforated 13 and were printed by Ashton-Potter Limited.[38]

    A pair of stamps was issued in 2008 by Canada Post, marking the centennial of the publication of Montgomery's classic first novel.[39]

    The City of Toronto named a park for her (Lucy Maud Montgomery Park) and in 1983 placed a historical marker there near the house where she lived from 1935 until her death in 1942.[40]

    On November 30, 2015 (her 141st birthday), Google honoured Lucy Maud Montgomery with a Google Doodle published in twelve countries.[41]
    Works
    Novels
    Anne of Green Gables series
    First page of "Anne of Green Gables", published in 1908

    Anne of Green Gables (1908)
    Anne of Avonlea (1909)
    Anne of the Island (1915)
    Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
    Anne's House of Dreams (1917)
    Anne of Ingleside (1939)
    Rainbow Valley (1919)
    Rilla of Ingleside (1921)
    The Blythes Are Quoted (2009) — was given to publisher the day before her death and lost. Finally found in mid–2000s.

    Emily trilogy

    Emily of New Moon (1923)
    Emily Climbs (1925)
    Emily's Quest (1927)

    Pat of Silver Bush

    Pat of Silver Bush (1933)
    Mistress Pat (1935)

    The Story Girl

    The Story Girl (1911)
    The Golden Road (1913)

    Miscellaneous

    Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910)
    The Blue Castle (1926)
    Magic for Marigold (1929)
    A Tangled Web (1931)
    Jane of Lantern Hill (1937)

    Short story collection

    Chronicles of Avonlea (1912)
    "The Hurrying of Ludovic"
    "Old Lady Lloyd"
    "Each In His Own Tongue"
    "Little Joscelyn"
    "The Winning of Lucinda"
    "Old Man Shaw's Girl"
    "Aunt Olivia's Beau"
    "Quarantine at Alexander Abraham's"
    "Pa Sloane's Purchase"
    "The Courting of Prissy Strong"
    "The Miracle at Carmody"
    "The End of a Quarrel"
    Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920)
    "Aunt Cynthia's Persian Cat"
    "The Materializing of Cecil"
    "Her Father's Daughter"
    "Jane's Baby"
    "The Dream-Child"
    "The Brother Who Failed"
    "The Return of Hester"
    "The Little Brown Book of Miss Emily"
    "Sara's Way"
    "The Son of his Mother"
    "The Education of Betty"
    "In Her Selfless Mood"
    "The Conscience Case of David Bell"
    "Only a Common Fellow"
    "Tannis of the Flats"



    The Road to Yesterday (1974)
    "An Afternoon With Mr. Jenkins"
    "Retribution"
    "The Twins Pretend"
    "Fancy's Fool"
    "A Dream Come True"
    "Penelope Struts Her Theories"
    "The Reconciliation"
    "The Cheated Child"
    "Fool's Errand"
    "The Pot and the Kettle"
    "Here Comes the Bride"
    "Brother Beware"
    "The Road to Yesterday"
    "A Commonplace Woman"
    The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories, selected by Catherine McLay (1979)
    Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1988)
    Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1989)
    Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1990)
    After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1991)
    Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1993)
    At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1994)
    Across the Miles: Tales of Correspondence, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1995)
    Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories, edited by Rea Wilmshurst (1995)
    The Blythes Are Quoted, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre (2009) (companion book to Rilla of Ingleside)

    Short stories by chronological order

    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1896 to 1901 (2008)
    "A Case of Trespass" (1897)
    "A Christmas Inspiration" (1901)
    "A Christmas Mistake" (1899)
    "A Strayed Allegiance" (1897)
    "An Invitation Given on Impulse" (1900)
    "Detected by the Camera" (1897)
    "In Spite of Myself" (1896)
    "Kismet" (1899)
    "Lillian's Business Venture" (1900)
    "Miriam's Lover" (1901)
    "Miss Calista's Peppermint Bottle" (1900)
    "The Jest that Failed" (1901)
    "The Pennington's Girl" (1900)
    "The Red Room" (1898)
    "The Setness of Theodosia" (1901)
    "The Story of An Invitation" (1901)
    "The Touch of Fate" (1899)
    "The Waking of Helen" (1901)
    "The Way of Winning Anne" (1899)
    "Young Si" (1901)
    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1902 to 1903 (2008)
    "A Patent Medicine Testimonial" (1903)
    "A Sandshore Wooing" (1903)
    "After Many Days" (1903)
    "An Unconventional Confidence" (1903)
    "Aunt Cyrilla's Christmas Basket" (1903)
    "Davenport's Story" (1902)
    "Emily's Husband" (1903)
    "Min" (1903)
    "Miss Cordelia's Accommodation" (1903)
    "Ned's Stroke of Business" (1903)
    "Our Runaway Kite" (1903)
    "The Bride Roses" (1903)
    "The Josephs' Christmas" (1902)
    "The Magical Bond of the Sea" (1903)
    "The Martyrdom of Estella" (1902)
    "The Old Chest at Wyther Grange" (1903)
    "The Osborne's Christmas" (1903)
    "The Romance of Aunt Beatrice" (1902)
    "The Running Away of Chester" (1903)
    "The Strike at Putney" (1903)
    "The Unhappiness of Miss Farquhar" (1903)
    "Why Mr. Cropper Changed His Mind" (1903)
    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1904 (2008)
    "A Fortunate Mistake" (1904)
    "An Unpremeditated Ceremony" (1904)
    "At the Bay Shore Farm" (1904)
    "Elizabeth's Child" (1904)
    "Freda's Adopted Grave" (1904)
    "How Don Was Saved" (1904)
    "Miss Madeline's Proposal" (1904)
    "Miss Sally's Company" (1904)
    "Mrs. March's Revenge" (1904)
    "Nan" (1904)
    "Natty of Blue Point" (1904)
    "Penelope's Party Waist" (1904)
    "The Girl and The Wild Race" (1904)
    "The Promise of Lucy Ellen" (1904)
    "The Pursuit of the Ideal" (1904)
    "The Softening of Miss Cynthia" (1904)
    "Them Notorious Pigs" (1904)
    "Why Not Ask Miss Price?" (1904)
    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1905 to 1906 (2008)
    "A Correspondence and a Climax" (1905)
    "An Adventure on Island Rock" (1906)
    "At Five O'Clock in the Morning" (1905)
    "Aunt Susanna's Birthday Celebration" (1905)
    "Bertie's New Year" (1905)
    "Between the Hill and the Valley" (1905)
    "Clorinda's Gifts" (1906)
    "Cyrilla's Inspiration" (1905)
    "Dorinda's Desperate Deed" (1906)
    "Her Own People" (1905)



    [1905 to 1906, continued]
    "Ida's New Year Cake" (1905)
    "In the Old Valley" (1906)
    "Jane Lavinia" (1906)
    "Mackereling Out in the Gulf" (1905)
    "Millicent's Double " (1905)
    "The Blue North Room" (1906)
    "The Christmas Surprise At Enderly Road" (1905)
    "The Dissipation of Miss Ponsonby" (1906)
    "The Falsoms' Christmas Dinner" (1906)
    "The Fraser Scholarship" (1905)
    "The Girl at the Gate" (1906)
    "The Light on the Big Dipper" (1906)
    "The Prodigal Brother" (1906)
    "The Redemption of John Churchill" (1906)
    "The Schoolmaster's Letter" (1905)
    "The Story of Uncle Dick" (1906)
    "The Understanding of Sister Sara" (1905)
    "The Unforgotten One" (1906)
    "The Wooing of Bessy" (1906)
    "Their Girl Josie " (1906)
    "When Jack and Jill Took a Hand" (1905)
    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1907 to 1908 (2008)
    "A Millionaire's Proposal" (1907)
    "A Substitute Journalist" (1907)
    "Anna's Love Letters" (1908)
    "Aunt Caroline's Silk Dress" (1907)
    "Aunt Susanna's Thanksgiving Dinner" (1907)
    "By Grace of Julius Caesar" (1908)
    "By the Rule of Contrary" (1908)
    "Fair Exchange and No Robbery " (1907)
    "Four Winds" (1908)
    "Marcella's Reward" (1907)
    "Margaret's Patient" (1908)
    "Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves" (1908)
    "Missy's Room" (1907)
    "Ted's Afternoon Off" (1907)
    "The Girl Who Drove the Cows" (1908)
    "The Doctor's Sweetheart" (1908)
    "The End of the Young Family Feud" (1907)
    "The Genesis of the Doughnut Club" (1907)
    "The Growing Up of Cornelia" (1908)
    "The Old Fellow's Letter " (1907)
    "The Parting of the Ways" (1907)
    "The Promissory Note" (1907)
    "The Revolt of Mary Isabel" (1908)
    "The Twins and a Wedding" (1908)
    Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories: 1909 to 1922 (2008)
    "A Golden Wedding" (1909)
    "A Redeeming Sacrifice" (1909)
    "A Soul that Was Not At Home" (1915)
    "Abel And His Great Adventure" (1917)
    "Akin to Love" (1909)
    "Aunt Philippa and the Men" (1915)
    "Bessie's Doll" (1914)
    "Charlotte's Ladies" (1911)
    "Christmas at Red Butte " (1909)
    "How We Went to the Wedding" (1913)
    "Jessamine" (1909)
    "Miss Sally's Letter" (1910)
    "My Lady Jane" (1915)
    "Robert Turner's Revenge" (1909)
    "The Fillmore Elderberries" 1909)
    "The Finished Story" (1912)
    "The Garden of Spices" (1918)
    "The Girl and the Photograph" (1915)
    "The Gossip of Valley View" (1910)
    "The Letters" (1910)
    "The Life-Book of Uncle Jesse" (1909)
    "The Little Black Doll" (1909)
    "The Man on the Train" (1914)
    "The Romance of Jedediah" (1912)
    "The Tryst of the White Lady" (1922)
    "Uncle Richard's New Year Dinner" (1910)
    "White Magic" (1921)

    Poetry

    The Watchman & Other Poems (1916)
    The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, selected by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe (1987)

    Non-fiction

    Courageous Women (1934) (with Marian Keith and Mabel Burns McKinley)

    Autobiography

    The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career (1974; originally published in Everywoman's World in 1917)
    The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (5 vols.), edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (1985–2004)
    The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years 1889–1911 (2 vols.), edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston (2012–2014)
    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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    Robert Creely (1926-2005)

    The author of more than 60 books — including novels and short story collections — Robert Creely is perhaps the most well-credentialed poet you’ve never heard of. An early member of the Black Mountain poets — a short-lived school of formless poetry originating in the late '40s and early '50s at Black Mountain College — Creely's breakthrough collection didn’t come until 1962’s For Love. Following For Love’s publication, Creely went on to advocate for teaching children about poetry, an agenda he pushed during his two-year tenure as the New York Poet Laureate from 1989-1991.

    A lifelong world traveler, Creely spent a number of his early years as a writer living on islands off the coast of Spain — some of his early long-form narrative works were composed during that time — and he briefly moved to San Francisco after the closure of Black Mountain College in 1957. There, he become friends with a number of prominent Beat poets like Kerouac, Ginsberg and the aforementioned Gary Synder.

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    Once known primarily for his association with the group called the “Black Mountain Poets,” at the time of his death in 2005, Robert Creeley was widely recognized as one of the most important and influential American poets of the twentieth century. His poetry is noted for both its concision and emotional power. Albert Mobilio, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, observed: “Creeley has shaped his own audience. The much imitated, often diluted minimalism, the compression of emotion into verse in which scarcely a syllable is wasted, has decisively marked a generation of poets.”

    Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1926. When his father died in 1930, he was raised by his mother and sister in Acton. An accident when he was four left him blind in one eye. He attended Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire, on a scholarship, and his articles and stories appeared regularly in the school’s literary magazine. Creeley was admitted to Harvard in 1943, but admitted later that he had felt discouraged by “the sardonic stance of my elders.” He left Harvard to serve in the American Field Service in 1944 and 1945, and drove an ambulance in India and South-East Asia. Creeley returned to Harvard after the war, though he never graduated. He later received an MA from the University of New Mexico. He began corresponding with William Carlos Williams, who seems to have put him in touch with Charles Olson, a poet who was to have a substantial influence on the direction of his future work. Excited especially by Olson’s ideas about literature, Creeley began to develop a distinctive and unique poetic style.

    Throughout the 1950s, Creeley was associated with the “Black Mountain Poets,” a group of writers including Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and others who had some connection with Black Mountain College, an experimental, communal college in North Carolina that was a haven for many innovative writers and artists of the period. Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review and developed a close and lasting relationship with Olson, who was the rector of the college. The two engaged in a lengthy, intensive correspondence about literary matters that has been collected and published in ten volumes as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence (Volume 1, 1980). Olson and Creeley together developed the concept of “projective verse,” a kind of poetry that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed verse that took shape as the process of composing it was underway. Olson called this process “composition by field,” and his famous essay on the subject, “Projective Verse,” was as important for the poets of the emerging generation as T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was to the poets of the previous generation. Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of this new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.”

    Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work. Creeley’s marriage to Ann MacKinnon ended in divorce in 1955. The breakup of that relationship is chronicled in fictional form in his only novel, The Island (1963), which drew upon his experiences on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain, where he lived with MacKinnon and their three children in 1953 and 1954. After the divorce Creeley returned to Black Mountain College for a brief time before moving west. He was in San Francisco during the flowering of the “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance” and became associated for a time with the writers of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, and others. His work appeared in the influential anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960), edited by Donald Allen.

    In 1956 Creeley accepted a teaching position at a boys’ school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he met his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hall. Though Creeley published poetry and fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s and had even established his own imprint, the Divers Press, in 1952, his work did not receive important national recognition until Scribner published his first major collection, For Love: Poems 1950-1960, in 1962. This book collected work that he had been issuing in small editions and magazines during the previous decade. When For Love debuted, Mobilio wrote, “it was recognized at once as a pivotal contribution to the alternative poetics reshaping the American tradition. . . . The muted, delicately contrived lyrics . . . were personal and self-contained; while they drew their life from the everyday, their techniques of dislocation sprang from the mind’s naturally stumbled syntax.”

    The very first poem in For Love, “Hart Crane,” with its unorthodox, Williams-like line breaks, its nearly hidden internal rhymes, and its subtle assonance and sibilance, announces the Creeley style—a style defined by an intense concentration on the sounds and rhythms of language as well as the placement of the words on the page. In a piece for the London Review of Books, Stephen Burt wrote that “We recognise Creeley’s poems first by what they leave out: he uses few long or rare words, no regular metres and almost no metaphors,” and, noting how little that style changed, “Creeley kept for five decades a way of writing whose markers include parsimonious diction, strong enjambment, two to four-line stanzas and occasional rhyme. What changed over his career was not his language but the use he made of it, the attitudes and goals around which the small, clear crystals of his verse might form.”

    Though For Love and Words (1967) both received critical acclaim, by the late ‘60s Creeley was already abandoning the spare style which had made him famous. In Pieces, A Day Book, Thirty Things, and Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976, all published between 1968 and 1978, Creeley attempts to break down the concept of a “single poem” by offering his readers sequential, associated fragments of poems with indeterminate beginnings and endings. All of these works are energized by the same heightened attention to the present that characterizes Creeley’s earlier work, and many of the poems in Hello (1976) refer to the last days of Creeley’s relationship with his second wife, Bobbie. That marriage ended in divorce in 1976, the same year he met Penelope Highton, his third wife, while traveling in New Zealand. For all of Creeley’s experimentation, he has always been in some ways an exceedingly domestic poet; his mother, children, wives, and close friends are the subjects of his best work. Because Creeley’s second marriage lasted nearly twenty years, the sense of a major chunk of his life drifting away from him is very strong in Hello. Creeley here conveys the traumatic emotional state that almost always accompanies the breakup of long-term relationships.

    Creeley’s next major collection, Later (1979), is characterized by a greater emphasis on memory, a new sense of life’s discrete phases, and an intense preoccupation with aging. In “Myself,” the first poem in Later, he writes: “I want, if older, / still to know / why, human, men / and women are / so torn, so lost / why hopes cannot / find a better world / than this.” This futile but deeply human quest captures the spirit of Creeley’s later work. It embodies a commonly shared realization: one becomes older but still knows very little about essential aspects of life, particularly the mysteries of human relationships. The ten-part title poem was written over a period of ten days in September of 1977. The poem begins by evoking lost youth—youth, in later life, can only become a palpable part of the present through the power of memory—and presents a kaleidoscopic view of Creeley’s life, both past and present: a lost childhood dog and memories of his mother, friends and neighbors are all mapped onto the poetry he is composing in an attic room in Buffalo, September, 1977.

    The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 was published in 1982. The poems Creeley wrote in the last decades of his life increasingly remember and reflect on memory and the past. As Stephen Burt described them: “The later poems are more traditional than their predecessors, in their sounds and in their goals. They rhyme more often. They have recognisable closure. Few are so short as to pose conceptual puzzles about what a poem is. When they are bad they are prosy or repetitive, not insubstantial or nonsensical. They never sound like Olson (much less like Ginsberg), and at their best they recall Thomas Hardy: they are, in the end, mostly poems of old age.” Life and Death (1998) examines the poet’s increasing age and mortality. Reviewing the book, Forrest Gander acknowledged Creeley’s lasting importance to American poetry: “Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind’s concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed . . . Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word.”

    Creeley was a prolific poet, even late in life: the volumes after Life and Death came in regular succession, including Loops: Ten Poems (1995); Ligeia: A Libretto (1996); So There: Poems 1976-83 (1998); En Famille: A Poem by Robert Creeley (1999); Thinking(2000); Just In Time: Poems, 1984-1994 (2001); and If I Were Writing This (2003). R. D. Pohl in the Buffalo News, praised If I Were Writing This, declaring that it “contains some of the starkest and most memorable poems Creeley has written.” Pohl and a Publishers Weekly reviewer both saw If I Were Writing This as a companion volume to Life and Death, each of them “composed primarily of poems dedicated to family and friends (dead and living), collaborative verses, and such poems as ‘For You’ in which intimacy of tone coincides with cryptic, lyrical abstraction.” Pohl noted that If I Were Writing This is the first major volume to appear since Creeley joined the ranks of such poetic giants as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery by winning the prestigious Yale University Bollingen Prize in 1999. He continued: “The fragility of our common experience in language and the world resonates through every line of Creeley’s recent work.”

    Creeley also wrote a considerable amount of prose and was editor of a number of volumes, including Best American Poetry 2002. Creeley’s prose includes a novel, essays, and short stories, as well as a play, collected letters, and an autobiography, published in 1990. Creeley taught for over 30 years at the State University of New York-Buffalo, helping to turn its English and Poetics program into one of the most famous havens for avant-garde writing in the world. In 2003 he was appointed distinguished professor of English at Brown University. In an appreciation of Creeley written for the Poetry Project Newsletter, Peter Gizzi said, “He was a devoted teacher, undeterred by the persistent critique of the role of poets in universities. Conversely, on the Black Mountain model, he was more interested in bending institutions to support poetry. That was one of his labors.” Also noted for his enthusiastic support of other poets, Robert Creeley served as a mentor and friend to many, many poets. Charles Bernstein, a colleague of Creeley’s at SUNY-Buffalo wrote in the Brooklyn Rail: “So many poets had an intimate relation with Creeley; he had a way of connecting with each of us in particular and, through that connection with him, to a company of poets in the U.S. and around the world.”Creeley died in 2005 in Odessa, Texas, of complications resulting from lung disease. He had been completing a residency for the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

    Don Byrd quoted him in Contemporary Poets: “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.” Asked about “good” poems, Creeley, who had written in the introduction to Best American Poetry 2002 that the poem is “that place we are finally safe in” where “understanding is not a requirement. You don’t have to know why. Being there is the one requirement,” responded, “If one only wrote ‘good’ poems, what a dreary world it would be.”



    (Biography updated by the Poetry Foundation, 2009)
    Bibliography

    POETRY

    Le Fou, Golden Goose Press, 1952.
    The Kind of Act Of, Divers Press (Mallorca, Spain), 1953.
    The Immoral Proposition, Jonathan Williams, 1953.
    A Snarling Garland of Xmas Verse (published anonymously), Divers Press (Mallorca, Spain), 1954.
    All That Is Lovely in Men, Jonathan Williams (Asheville, NC), 1955.
    (With others) Ferrin and Others, Gerhardt (Germany), 1955.
    If You, Porpoise Bookshop (San Francisco, CA), 1956.
    The Whip, Migrant Books, 1957.
    A Form of Women, Jargon Books (New York, NY), 1959.
    For Love: Poems, 1950-1960, Scribner (New York, NY), 1962.
    Distance, Terrence Williams, 1964.
    Mister Blue, Insel-Verlag, 1964.
    Two Poems, Oyez, 1964.
    Hi There!, Finial Press, 1965.
    Words (eight poems), Perishable Press, 1965.
    Poems, 1950-1965, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1966.
    About Women, Gemini, 1966.
    For Joel, Perishable Press, 1966.
    A Sight, Cape Coliard Press, 1967.
    Words (eighty-four poems), Scribner (New York, NY), 1967.
    Robert Creeley Reads (with recording), Turret Books, 1967.
    The Finger, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1968, enlarged edition published as The Finger Poems, 1966-1969, Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1970.
    5 Numbers (five poems), Poets Press (New York, NY), 1968, published as Numbers (text in English and German), translation by Klaus Reichert, Galerie Schmela (Dusseldorf, Germany), 1968.
    The Charm: Early and Collected Poems, Perishable Press, 1968, expanded edition published as The Charm, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1969.
    Divisions and Other Early Poems, Perishable Press, 1968.
    Pieces (fourteen poems), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1968.
    The Boy (poem poster), Gallery Upstairs Press, 1968.
    Mazatlan: Sea, Poets Press (New York, NY), 1969.
    Pieces (seventy-two poems), Scribner (New York, NY), 1969.
    Hero, Indianakatz (New York, NY), 1969.
    A Wall, Bouwerie Editions (New York, NY), 1969.
    For Betsy and Tom, Alternative Press, 1970.
    For Benny and Sabrina, Samuel Charters, 1970.
    America, Press of the Black Flag, 1970.
    In London, Angel Hair Books, 1970.
    Christmas: May 10, 1970, Lockwood Memorial Library, State University of New York at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), 1970.
    St. Martin's, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1971.
    1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0, drawings by Arthur Okamura, Shambhala (New York, NY), 1971.
    Sea, Cranium Press, 1971.
    For the Graduation, Cranium Press, 1971.
    Change, Hermes Free Press, 1972.
    One Day after Another, Alternative Press, 1972.
    For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley, 8 April 1887-7 October 1972 (limited edition), Sceptre Press (London, England), 1973.
    His Idea, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.
    The Class of '47, Bouwerie Editions (New York, NY), 1973.
    Kitchen, Wine Press, 1973.
    Sitting Here, University of Connecticut Library, 1974.
    Thirty Things, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1974.
    Backwards, Sceptre Press (London, England), 1975.
    Hello, Hawk Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), 1976, expanded edition published as Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976, New Directions (New York, NY), 1978.
    Away, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1976.
    Presences (also see below), Scribner (New York, NY), 1976.
    Selected Poems, Scribner (New York, NY), 1976, revised edition, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.
    Myself, Sceptre Press (London, England), 1977.
    Later, Toothpaste (West Branch, IA), 1978, expanded edition, New Directions (New York, NY), 1979.
    Desultory Days, Sceptre Press (London, England), 1979.
    Corn Close, Sceptre Press (London, England), 1980.
    Mother As Voice, Am Here Books/Immediate Editions, 1981.
    The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1982.
    Echoes, Toothpaste (West Branch, IA), 1982, New Directions (New York, NY), 1994.
    Going On: Selected Poems, 1958-1980, Dutton (New York, NY), 1983.
    Mirrors, New Directions (New York, NY), 1983.
    A Calendar: Twelve Poems, Coffee House Press (West Branch, IA), 1984.
    The Collected Prose of Robert Creeley, Scribner (New York, NY), 1984.
    Memories, Pig Press, 1984.
    Memory Gardens, New Directions (New York, NY), 1986.
    The Company, Burning Deck, 1988.
    Window, edited by Richard Blevins, State University of New York at Buffalo (Buffalo, NY), 1988.
    (With Libby Larsen) A Creeley Collection: For Mixed Voices, Solo Tenor, Flute, Percussion, and Piano, E. C. Schirmer, 1989.
    (With Francesco Clemente) 64 Pastels, Bruno Bischofberger, 1989.
    Places, Shuffaloff Press, 1990.
    Windows, New Directions (New York, NY), 1990.
    Have a Heart, Limberlost Press, 1990.
    Selected Poems, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1991.
    The Old Days, Ambrosia Press, 1991.
    Gnomic Verses, Zasterle Press, 1991.
    A Poetry Anthology, Edmundson Art Foundation, 1992.
    Life and Death, Grenfell Press, 1993, New Directions (New York, NY), 1998.
    Loops: Ten Poems, Nadja, 1995.
    Ligeia: A Libretto, Granary Books, 1996.
    So There: Poems 1976-83, New Directions (New York, NY), 1998.
    En Famille: A Poem by Robert Creeley, Granary Books, 1999.
    (With Alex Katz) Edges, Peter Blum, 1999.
    (With Max Gimblett and Alan Loney) The Dogs of Auckland, Holloway Press, 1998.
    (With John Millei) Personal: Poems, Peter Koch, 1998.
    (With Daisy DeCapite) Cambridge, Mass 1944, Boog Literature, 2000.
    Thinking, Z Press, 2000.
    Clemente's Images, Backwoods Broadsides, 2000.
    For Friends, Drive He Sd Books, 2000.
    (With Archie Rand, illustrations) Drawn and Quartered, Distributed Art Publishers, 2001.
    Just In Time: Poems, 1984-1994, New Directions (New York, NY), 2001.
    Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1975-2005, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2006.
    Selected Poems 1945-2005, edited by Benjamin Friedlander, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2008.

    EDITOR

    Charles Olson, Mayan Letters, Divers Press (Mallorca, Spain), 1953.
    (With Donald M. Allen, and contributor) New American Story, Grove (New York, NY), 1965, reprinted 2001.
    (And author of introduction) Charles Olson, Selected Writings, New Directions (New York, NY), 1966.
    (With Donald Allen, and contributor) The New Writing in the U.S.A., Penguin (New York, NY), 1967.
    Whitman: Selected Poems, Penguin (New York, NY), 1973.
    (And contributor) The Essential Burns, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1989.
    Tim Prythero, Peters Corporation, 1990.
    Olson, Selected Poems, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1993.
    (With David Lehman) The Best American Poetry 2002, Scribner (New York, NY), 2002.

    PROSE

    The Gold Diggers (short stories), Divers Press (Mallorca, Spain), 1954, expanded edition published as The Gold Diggers and Other Stories, J. Calder, 1965.
    The Island (novel), Scribner (New York, NY), 1963.
    A Day Book (poems and prose), Scribner (New York, NY), 1972.
    Mabel: A Story, and Other Prose (includes A Day Book and Presences), Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1976.
    Collected Prose, Marion Boyars (New York, NY), 1984, corrected edition, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1988, Dalkey Archive Press (Chicago, IL), 2001.

    NONFICTION

    An American Sense (essay), Sigma Press, 1965.
    A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays, edited by Donald M. Allen, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1970.
    Notebook, Bouwerie Editions (New York, NY), 1972.
    A Sense of Measure (essays), Calder & Boyars (London, England), 1972.
    Inside Out (lecture), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1973.
    The Creative (lecture), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1973.
    Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1979.
    Collected Essays, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1989.
    Autobiography, Hanuman Books, 1990.
    Day Book of a Virtual Poet (essays), Spuyten Duyvil (New York, NY), 1998.

    OTHER

    Listen (play; produced in London, 1972), Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1972.
    Contexts of Poetry: Interviews, 1961-1971, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1973.
    Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, ten volumes, edited by George F. Butterick, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1980-96.
    Jane Hammond, Exit Art, 1989.
    Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Ekbert Faas and Sabrina Reed, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.
    Tales out of School: Selected Interviews, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1993.
    Robert Creeley, reading with jazz musicians David Cast, Chris Massey, Steve Swallow, and David Torn accompanying, Cuneiform Records, 1998.
    (Author of foreword) The Turning, Hilda Morley, Asphodel Press, 1998.
    (With Elizabeth Licata and Amy Cappellazzo) In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations (from a traveling art show), University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1999.
    (Contributor; with others) Susan Rothenberg: Paintings from the Nineties, Rizzoli International (New York, NY), 2000.

    Work represented in numerous anthologies, including The New American Poetry: 1945-1960, edited by Donald Allen, Grove (New York, NY), 1960; A Controversy of Poets, edited by Paris Leary and Robert Kelly, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1965; Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, Norton (New York, NY), 1973; The New Oxford Book of American Verse, edited by Richard Ellmann, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1976; and Poets' Encyclopedia, edited by Michael Andre, Unmuzzled Ox Press, 1980. Contributor to literary periodicals, including Paris Review, Nation, Black Mountain Review, Origin, Yugen, and Big Table. Founder and editor, Black Mountain Review, 1954-57; advisory editor, Sagetrieb, 1983—; advisory editor, American Book Review, 1983—; contributing editor, Formations, 1984—; and advisory editor, New York Quarterly, 1984—. The major collection of Creeley's manuscripts and correspondence is housed in Special Collections, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. Other collections include the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the Yale University Library, New Haven, CT (correspondence with William Carlos Williams), Humanities Research Center, University of Texas Libraries, Austin (correspondence with Ezra Pound), John M. Olin Library, Washington University, St. Louis, MO (manuscripts and correspondence predating 1965), Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington (manuscripts and correspondence with Cid Corman), Simon Fraser University Library, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada (correspondence with Richard Emerson), and University of Connecticut Library, Storrs (correspondence with Charles Olson).
    Further Readings

    BOOKS

    Allen, Donald M., editor, Robert Creeley, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews, 1961-1971, Four Seasons Foundation (San Francisco, CA), 1973.
    Altieri, Charles, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1984.
    Butterick, George F., editor, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1980.
    Clark, Tom, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place: Together with the Poet's Own Autobiography, New Directions (New York, NY), 1993.
    Conniff, Brian, The Lyric and Modern Poetry: Olson, Creeley, Bunting, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1988.
    Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 10, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.
    Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1973, Volume 2, 1974, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 15, 1980, Volume 36, 1986.
    Contemporary Poets, 5th edition, edited by Tracy Chevalier, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.
    Corman, Cid, editor, The Gist of Origin, Viking (New York, NY), 1975.
    Creeley, Robert, Hello, Hawk Press (Christchurch, New Zealand), 1978.
    Creeley, Robert, Later, Toothpaste (West Branch, IA), 1978.
    Creeley, Robert, If I Were Writing This, New Directions (New York, NY), 2003.
    Edelberg, Cynthia Dubin, Robert Creeley's Poetry: A Critical Introduction, University of New Mexico Press (Albuquerque, NM), 1978.
    Faas, Ekbert, and Sabrina Reed, editors, Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 1953-1978, McGill-Queen's University Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.
    Faas, Ekbert, and Maria Trombaco, Robert Creeley: A Biography, University Press of New England (Hanover, NH), 2001.
    Ford, Arthur L., Robert Creeley, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1978.
    Foster, Edward Halsey, Understanding the Black Mountain Poets, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1995.
    Fox, Willard, Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan: A Reference Guide. G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1989.
    Fredman, Stephen, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1983.
    Giger, Esther, and Agnieszka Salska, editors, Freedom and Form: Essays in Contemporary American Poetry. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Lódzkiego (Lódz, Poland), 1998.
    Gwynn, R. S., editor, New Expansive Poetry: Theory, Criticism, History, Story Line (Ashland, OR), 1999.
    Novik, Mary, Robert Creeley: An Inventory, 1945-1970, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1973.
    Oberg, Arthur, Modern American Lyric: Lowell, Berryman, Creeley, and Plath, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 1977.
    Paul, Sherman, The Lost America of Love: Rereading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.
    Rifkin, Libbie, Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2000.
    Roberts, Neil, editor, A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Blackwell (Oxford, England), 2001.
    Sheffler, Ronald Anthony, The Development of Robert Creeley's Poetry, University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA), 1971.
    Tallman, Allen and Warren, editors, The Poetics of the New American Poetry, Grove (New York, NY), 1973.
    Tallman, Warren, Three Essays on Creeley, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1973.
    Terrell, Carroll F., Robert Creeley: The Poet's Workshop, University of Maine Press (Orono, ME), 1984.
    Von Hallberg, Robert, American Poetry and Culture, 1945-80, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.
    Wilson, John, editor, Robert Creeley's Life and Work: A Sense of Increment, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor, MI), 1987.

    PERIODICALS

    American Book Review, May-June, 1984.
    American Poetry Review, November-December, 1976; May-June, 1997, p. 9; September-October, 1999, p. 17.
    Atlantic Monthly, November, 1962; February, 1968; October, 1977.
    Books Abroad, autumn, 1967.
    Boundary 2, spring, 1975; spring and fall (special two-volume issue on Creeley), 1978.
    Buffalo News, February 25, 1996, p. E1; February 7, 1999, p. E6; March 24, 2000, p. G18; September 7, 2003, p. G5.
    Cambridge Quarterly, 1998, p. 87.
    Christian Science Monitor, October 9, 1969.
    Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 1996, p. B10.
    Contemporary Literature, spring, 1972; fall, 1995, p. 79.
    Cortland Review, April, 1998.
    Critique, spring, 1964.
    Denver Quarterly, winter 1997, p. 82.
    ebr: The Alt-X Web Review, spring, 1999.
    Encounter, February, 1969.
    English: The Journal of the English Association, summer, 2001, p. 127.
    Gentleman's Quarterly, June, 1996, p. 74.
    Harper's, August, 1967; September, 1983.
    Hudson Review, summer, 1963; summer, 1967; spring, 1970; summer, 1977.
    Iowa Review, spring, 1982.
    Journal News (Westchester, NY), August 31, 2003, p. 4E.
    Journal of American Studies, August 1998, p. 263.
    Kenyon Review, spring, 1970.
    Library Journal, September 1, 1979; April 15, 1994, p. 81; April 1, 1997, p. 94; April 1, 1999, p, 95.
    Listener, March 23, 1967.
    London Magazine, June-July, 1973.
    Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 17, 1983; October 30, 1983; March 4, 1984; June 24, 1984; June 23, 1991, p. 8.
    Modern Language Quarterly, December, 1982, p. 369.
    Modern Poetry Studies, winter, 1977.
    Nation, August 25, 1962.
    National Observer, October 30, 1967.
    National Review, November 19, 1960.
    New Leader, October 27, 1969.
    New Orleans Review, spring, 1992, p. 14.
    New Republic, October 11, 1969; December 18, 1976.
    New Statesman, August 6, 1965; March 10, 1987.
    New York Review of Books, January 20, 1966; August 1, 1968.
    New York Times, June 27, 1967.
    New York Times Book Review, November 4, 1962; September 22, 1963; November 19, 1967; October 27, 1968; January 7, 1973; May 1, 1977; March 9, 1980; August 7, 1983; June 24, 1984; September 23, 1984; November 3, 1991, p. 14.
    North Dakota Quarterly, fall, 1987, p. 89.
    Northwest Review, 2000, p. 102.
    Observer (London, England), September 6, 1970.
    Paris Review, fall, 1968.
    Parnassus, fall-winter, 1984.
    Partisan Review, summer, 1968.
    Plain Dealer, September 29, 2002, p. J9.
    Poetry, March, 1954; May, 1958; September, 1958; March, 1963; April, 1964; August, 1966; January, 1968; March, 1968; August, 1968; May, 1970; December, 1970; September, 1984.
    Publishers Weekly, March 18, 1968; March 28, 1994; March 30, 1998, p. 77; September 24, 2001, p. 91; July 22, 2002, p. 170; September 1, 2003.
    Review of Contemporary Fiction, fall, 1995, pp. 79, 82, 97, 107, 110, 116, 120, 127, 137, 141.
    Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist/Objectivist Tradition, winter, 1982 (special issue); fall, 1988, p. 53; spring-fall, 1991, p. 209 (bibliog.); spring, 1999, pp. 131, 149.
    San Francisco Chronicle, April 12, 1998, p. 12.
    Saturday Review, August 4, 1962; December 11, 1965; June 3, 1967.
    Seattle Times, October 6, 2002, p. L9.
    Sewanee Review, winter, 1961.
    Southwest Review, winter, 1964.
    Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, 2001-2002, p. 49.
    Time, July 12, 1971.
    Times Literary Supplement, March 16, 1967; August 7, 1970; November 12, 1970; December 11, 1970; May 20, 1977; May 30, 1980; February 20, 1981; November 4, 1983; May 10, 1991, p. 22.
    Village Voice, October 22, 1958; December 10, 1979; November 25, 1981.
    Virginia Quarterly Review, summer, 1968; winter, 1972; spring, 1973.
    Voice Literary Supplement, September, 1991, p. 14.
    Washington Post Book World, August 11, 1991, p. 13.
    Western Humanities Review, spring, 1970.
    Winstom-Salem Journal, March 5, 2000, p. E1.
    World Literature Today, autumn, 1984; summer, 1992; spring, 1995.
    Yale Review, October, 1962; December, 1969; spring, 1970; April, 1999, p. 175.

    ONLINE

    Academy of American Poets: Poetry Exhibit, http://www.poets.org/ (March 8, 2004).
    Cortland Review, http://www.cortlandreview.com/ (April, 1998), interview with Creeley.
    Levity, http://www.levity.com/ (March 8, 2004).
    Providence Phoenix Book Reviews, http://www.providencephoenix.com/ (March 26-April 2, 1998), interview with Creeley.
    Robert Creeley Home Page, http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/creeley/ (April 26, 2000).
    University of Illinois, Department of English, http://www.english.uiuc.edu/ (March 8, 2004).

    BOOKS

    Creeley, Robert, Autobiography, Hanuman Books, 1990.

    PERIODICALS

    Los Angeles Times, April 1, 2005, p. B9.
    New York Times, April 1, 2005, p. C13.
    Times (London, England), April 1, 2005, p. 62.
    Washington Post, April 1, 2005, p. B6.

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    Poems, Articles & More
    Discover this poet's context and related poetry, articles, and media.
    Poems by Robert Creeley
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    Throughout the 1950s, Creeley was associated with the “Black Mountain Poets,” a group of writers including Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Fielding Dawson, and others who had some connection with Black Mountain College, an experimental, communal college in North Carolina that was a haven for many innovative writers and artists of the period. Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review and developed a close and lasting relationship with Olson, who was the rector of the college. The two engaged in a lengthy, intensive correspondence about literary matters that has been collected and published in ten volumes as Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence (Volume 1, 1980). Olson and Creeley together developed the concept of “projective verse,” a kind of poetry that abandoned traditional forms in favor of a freely constructed verse that took shape as the process of composing it was underway. Olson called this process “composition by field,” and his famous essay on the subject, “Projective Verse,” was as important for the poets of the emerging generation as T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was to the poets of the previous generation. Olson credited Creeley with formulating one of the basic principles of this new poetry: the idea that “form is never more than an extension of content.”

    Creeley was a leader in the generational shift that veered away from history and tradition as primary poetic sources and gave new prominence to the ongoing experiences of an individual’s life. Because of this emphasis, the major events of his life loom large in his literary work. Creeley’s marriage to Ann MacKinnon ended in divorce in 1955. The breakup of that relationship is chronicled in fictional form in his only novel, The Island (1963), which drew upon his experiences on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain, where he lived with MacKinnon and their three children in 1953 and 1954. After the divorce Creeley returned to Black Mountain College for a brief time before moving west. He was in San Francisco during the flowering of the “San Francisco Poetry Renaissance” and became associated for a time with the writers of the Beat Generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Michael McClure, and others. His work appeared in the influential anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 (1960), edited by Donald Allen.
    I was greatly influenced by this decades ago. Not one to solely travel the all too well worn path myself in regards to poetry form, restrictions and elitism, etc.. . Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 10-16-2016 at 07:31 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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    Edmund Blunden


    Blunden’s poetry focused on the First World War long after he left the trenches for good.

    Edmund Blunden joined up in August 1915 when he was 19, and still at school. He was a student at Christ’s Hospital school, and had a place at Oxford to study Classics – but he deferred his place to serve as a lieutenant in France. Even before he arrived at the front, he’d begun to write poetry in earnest: during his training, he had three volumes privately published. His pre-war poetry was pastoral and Romantic in tone: he was inspired by the English countryside, and one of his poems opened ‘I sing of the rivers and hamlets and woodlands of Sussex and Kent’. He left for France in 1916 and remained at the front for two years, until February 1919. During this time he wrote a number of poems – but the majority of his poetic output came after the war, as the writer contemplated the fighting, the suffering of his comrades and the destruction of nature in retrospect. Blunden’s friend Siegfried Sassoon called him ‘the poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it’: and indeed, much of Blunden’s poetry is concerned with the lasting trauma of the experience of fighting. In one of his most famous poems, ‘Concert Party: Busseboom’, an evening’s entertainment is interrupted and ruined by the memory of a battle in the trenches:

    The stage was set, the house was packed,
    The famous troop began;
    Our laughter thundered, act by act,
    Time light as sunbeams ran.

    Dance sprained and spun and neared and fled,
    Jest chirped at gayest pitch,
    Rhythm dazzled, action sped
    Most comically rich.

    With generals and lame privates both
    Such charms worked wonders, till
    The show was over: lagging loth
    We faced the sunset chill;

    And standing on the sandy way
    With the cracked church peering past,
    We heard another matinee,
    We heard the maniac blast

    Of barrage south by Saint Eloi,
    And the red lights flaming there
    Called madness: Come, my bonny boy,
    And dance to the latest air.

    To this new concert, white we stood,
    Cold certainty held our breath;
    While men in the tunnels below Larch Wood
    Were kicking men to death.
    Image shows a huge, fully-packed concert hall.

    Blunden shows the trauma of war invading the most pleasant of settings.

    Blunden evokes the lasting psychological trauma of the experience of fighting by allowing the past to intrude into the present: in the space of a single line the dancing colours of the show the narrator is watching blur, and resolve into a scene of battle. The war has an irresistible, magnetic pull, always dragging the narrator away from what is in front of him and back into a prison of remembering. And Blunden’s language, too, everywhere works to muddy the distinction between past and present: the entertainment is described in military language as a ‘troop’, and laughter almost violently ‘thunders’; the poet uses an army metaphor to convey the diversity of the audience, from ‘generals’ to ‘lame privates’. Later, battle is described in the language of the stage: it is ‘another matinee’, a ‘new concert’, an ‘air’ (a song).

    Elsewhere, Blunden’s poetry uses juxtaposition to different effect, in a manner similar to that of Wilfred Owen in his famous, scathing attack upon the propaganda that encouraged young men to go to war, ‘Dulce et Decorum est’. Owen’s poem describes in horrific detail the gruesome death of a soldier who has breathed in chlorine gas, and ends with the declaration that if his addressee, too, could watch the soldier die:

    My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
    To children ardent for some desperate glory
    The Old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
    Pro patria mori.


    Owen and Blunden both made their readers confront the effects of war.

    Elsewhere, and perhaps most famously in his poem ‘Mental Cases’, Owen forces his reader to confront the gruesome and the monstrous effects of battle upon men once full of grace and beauty: and Blunden’s poetry displays much the same impulse, playing on the distance between the glorified image of soldierly heroism, bravery and beauty, and the often revolting reality. In ‘Can you remember?’ for example, the speaker describes the images that constitute his memory of the war and will not allow him to escape:

    New-old shapes for ever
    Intensely recur

    And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
    Young, heroic, mild;
    And some incurable, twisted,
    Shrieking, dumb, defiled.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Edmund Blunden
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Edmund Blunden
    Edmundblundencirca1914.jpg
    Born 1 November 1896
    London, England
    Died 20 January 1974 (aged 77)
    Long Melford, Suffolk, England
    Resting place Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford
    Occupation Poet, author
    Nationality British
    Education Christ's Hospital; The Queen's College, Oxford
    Notable works Poems 1913 and 1914; An Elegy and Other Poems; Cricket Country; Poems on Japan
    Notable awards Military Cross; C.B.E.; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
    Spouse Mary Daines
    Sylva Norman
    Claire Margaret Poynting
    Partner Aki Hayashi
    Children seven

    Edmund Charles Blunden, CBE, MC (1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

    Contents

    1 Biography
    1.1 Early years and World War I
    1.2 Career as a writer
    1.3 Personal life
    1.4 Honours
    1.5 Works
    2 Notes
    3 References
    4 External links

    Biography
    Early years and World War I

    Born in London, Blunden was the eldest of the nine children of Charles Edmund Blunden (1871–1951) and his wife, Georgina Margaret née Tyler, who were joint-headteachers of Yalding school.[1] Blunden was educated at Christ's Hospital and The Queen's College, Oxford.[2]

    In August 1915, during the First World War (1914–1918), Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment[1] and served with the 11th (Southdowns) Battalion on the Western Front right up to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, and receiving the Military Cross in the process. Unusually for a junior infantry officer, Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury, but for the rest of his life bore mental scars from his experiences.[1] With characteristic self-deprecation he attributed his survival to his diminutive size: he made "an inconspicuous target".[3] His own account of his frequently traumatic experiences was published in 1928 under the title Undertones of War.
    Career as a writer

    Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship at Oxford that he had won while still at school.[1] On the same English Literature course was Robert Graves, and the two were close friends during their time at Oxford together, but Blunden found university life unsatisfactory and left in 1920 to take up a literary career, at first acting as assistant to Middleton Murry on the Athenaeum. An early supporter was Siegfried Sassoon, who became a lifelong friend. In 1920 Blunden published a collection of poems, The Waggoner, and with Alan Porter edited the poems of John Clare (mostly from Clare's manuscript).[1]

    Blunden's next book of poems, The Shepherd, published in 1922 won the Hawthornden Prize, but his poetry, though well reviewed, did not provide enough to live on, and in 1924 he accepted the post of Professor of English at the University of Tokyo. He returned to England in 1927, and was literary editor of the Nation for a year. In 1927 he published a short book, On the Poems of Henry Vaughan, Characteristics and Intimations, with his principal Latin poems carefully translated into English verse (London: H. Cobden-Sanderson, 1927), expanding and revising an essay that he had published in November 1926 in the London Mercury. In 1931 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Merton College, where he was highly regarded as a tutor.[1] During his years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Choice or Chance (1934) and Shells by a Stream (1944), prose works on Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Keats's publisher; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Life Story); John Taylor; and Thomas Hardy; and a book about a game he loved, Cricket Country (1944). He returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement. In 1947 he returned to Japan as a member of the British liaison mission in Tokyo. In 1953, after three years back in England he accepted the post of Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong.[1]

    Blunden retired in 1964 and settled in Suffolk. In 1966 he was nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in succession to Robert Graves; with some misgivings he agreed to stand and was elected by a large majority over the other candidate, Robert Lowell. However, he now found the strain of public lecturing too much for him, and after two years he resigned.[1]

    He died of a heart attack at his home at Long Melford, Suffolk, on 20 January 1974, and is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford.
    Personal life

    Blunden was married three times. While still in the army he met and married Mary Daines in 1918. They had three children, the first of whom died in infancy. They divorced in 1931, and in 1933 Blunden married Sylva Norman, a young novelist and critic. That marriage, which was childless, was dissolved in 1945, and in the same year he married Claire Margaret Poynting (1918-2000), a former pupil of his; they had four daughters. While in Japan in the summer of 1925, he met Aki Hayashi, with whom he began a relationship.[4] When Blunden returned to England in 1927, Aki accompanied him and would become his secretary.[5] The relationship later changed from a romantic one to a platonic friendship, and they remained in contact for the rest of her life.[1]

    Blunden's love of cricket, celebrated in his book Cricket Country, is described by the biographer Philip Ziegler as fanatical. Blunden and his friend Rupert Hart-Davis regularly opened the batting for a publisher's eleven in the 1930s (Blunden insisted on batting without gloves).[6] An affectionate obituary tribute in The Guardian commented, "He loved cricket ... and played it ardently and very badly",[3] while in a review of Cricket Country, George Orwell described him as "the true cricketer":

    The test of a true cricketer is that he shall prefer village cricket to 'good' cricket [.... Blunden's] friendliest memories are of the informal village game, where everyone plays in braces, where the blacksmith is liable to be called away in mid-innings on an urgent job, and sometimes, about the time when the light begins to fail, a ball driven for four kills a rabbit on the boundary.[7]

    In a 2009 appreciation of the book and its author, Bangalore writer Suresh Menon writes,

    Any cricket book that talks easily of Henry James and Siegfried Sassoon and Ranji and Grace and Richard Burton (the writer, not the actor) and Coleridge is bound to have a special charm of its own. As Blunden says, "The game which made me write at all, is not terminated at the boundary, but is reflected beyond, is echoed and varied out there among the gardens and the barns, the dells and the thickets, and belongs to some wider field."

    Perhaps that is what all books on cricket are trying to say.[8]

    Blunden had a robust sense of humour. In Hong Kong he relished linguistic misunderstandings such as those of the restaurant that offered "fried prawn's balls" and the schoolboy who wrote, "In Hong Kong there is a queer at every bus-stop."[9]

    His fellow poets' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions to a dinner in his honour for which poems were specially written by Cecil Day-Lewis and William Plomer; T. S. Eliot and Walter de la Mare were guests; and Siegfried Sassoon provided the Burgundy.[10]
    Honours

    Blunden's public honours included the C.B.E., 1951; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, 1956; The Royal Society of Literature's Benson Medal; the Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class (Japan), 1963; and Honorary Membership of the Japan Academy.[2] On 11 November 1985, Blunden was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey[11] The inscription on the stone was written by fellow Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."[12]
    Works

    Blunden's output was prolific. To those who thought he published too much he quoted Walter de la Mare's observation that time was the poet's best editor.[13] His books of poetry include Poems 1913 and 1914 (1914); Poems Translated from the French (1914); Three Poems (1916); The Barn (1916); The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill; Stane Street; The Gods of the World Beneath, (1916); The Harbingers (1916); Pastorals (1916); The Waggoner and Other Poems (1920); The Shepherd, and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922); Old Homes (1922); To Nature: New Poems (1923); Dead Letters (1923); Masks of Time: A New Collection of Poems Principally Meditative (1925); Japanese Garland (1928); Retreat (1928); Winter Nights: A Reminiscence (1928); Near and Far: New Poems (1929); A Summer's Fancy (1930); To Themis: Poems on Famous Trials (1931); Constantia and Francis: An Autumn Evening, (1931); Halfway House: A Miscellany of New Poems, (1932); Choice or Chance: New Poems (1934); Verses: To H. R. H. The Duke of Windsor, (1936); An Elegy and Other Poems (1937); On Several Occasions (1938); Poems, 1930–1940 (1940); Shells by a Stream (1944); After the Bombing, and Other Short Poems (1949); Eastward: A Selection of Verses Original and Translated (1950); Records of Friendship (1950); A Hong Kong House (1959); Shelley, A Life Story (1965) by Oxford University Press, with strong evidence on pp. 278 and 290 that Percy Bysshe Shelley was murdered; Poems on Japan (1967).[2]

    Artists Rifles, an audiobook CD published in 2004, includes a reading of Concert Party, Busseboom by Blunden himself, recorded in 1964 by the British Council. Other Great War poets heard on the CD include Siegfried Sassoon, Edgell Rickword, Robert Graves, David Jones and Lawrence Binyon. Blunden can also be heard on Memorial Tablet, an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003.[14]
    Notes

    Bergonzi, Bernard, "Blunden, Edmund Charles (1896–1974)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 28 Nov 2008
    "Blunden, Edmund Charles", Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2007; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007 accessed 28 Nov 2008
    The Guardian obituary
    Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A Biography, p. 151.
    Webb, p. 156.
    Ziegler, pp. pp and 116–17
    Quoted in Menon 2009.
    Menon 2009.
    Hart-Davis, Volume 5, Letter of 5 June 1960
    Ziegler, p. 150
    http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/poets/poets.html
    http://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/poets/Preface.html
    The Times obituary

    http://www.ltmrecordings.com/artistsriflesaudioCD.html

    References

    Hart-Davis, Rupert (ed), Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters Vol 5, John Murray, London 1983. ISBN 0-7195-3999-4
    Menon, Suresh. "The passionate poet." Cricinfo, 5 April 2009.
    The Guardian obituary, 22 January 1974, p. 12
    The Times obituary, 21 January 1974, p. 14
    Ziegler, Philip, Rupert Hart-Davis: Man of Letters Chatto and Windus, London, 2004. ISBN 0-7011-7320-3
    John Greening (Ed.): Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war, Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871661-7

    I remember his name from my reading some of his truly great poetry decades go.--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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    Isaac Rosenberg

    Isaac Rosenberg was born in 1890 in Bristol, the son of Lithuanian Jews who had moved to Britain a few years earlier. As a child, his teachers noticed his talent for drawing and writing poetry, but his parents couldn’t afford to keep him at school, and so he was apprenticed to an engraver’s company in 1905. In spite of this, Rosenberg attending evening classes in painting and drawing, and in the early 1910s a wealthy Jewish woman offered to pay his fees to attend art school. Before the war started he published two volumes of poems, one called Night and Day, and another Youth. Despite being resolutely pacifist, he enlisted for the war in 1915 – and wrote many poems while he was in the fighting until his death in 1918.
    Image shows a lark sitting on a mossy branch.

    Rosenberg contrasts the innocent song of birdsong with the horror of war.

    In perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Returning, we hear the larks’, Rosenberg plays with the idea that the dread, foreboding and ultimate violent destruction of war has poisoned all of nature. The innocent song of larks in the dark is a pure, beautiful and strange comfort – but it is everywhere underlain with the threat that bullets, gas, and death might rain out of the night and onto the soldiers. The images of weightlessness and insubstantiality that pervade the final stanza: ‘a blind man’s dreams’ dropped on the sand by a violent sea, or the hair of a girl, are ultimately reversed, replaced in the final line by an image of a kiss that seems soft and light but conceals the poison of a snake:

    Sombre the night is.
    And though we have our lives, we know
    What sinister threat lurks there.

    Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
    This poison-blasted track opens on our camp—
    On a little safe sleep.

    But hark! joy—joy—strange joy.
    Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
    Music showering on our upturned list’ning faces.

    Death could drop from the dark
    As easily as song—
    But song only dropped,
    Like a blind man’s dreams on the sand
    By dangerous tides,
    Like a girl’s dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
    Or her kisses where a serpent hides.
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------


    Isaac Rosenberg
    Poet Details
    1890–1918

    Isaac Rosenberg may be remembered as a Jewish-English poet, or a poet of war, but his poetry stretches beyond those narrow categories. Since Rosenberg was only twenty-eight when he died, most critics have tended to treat his corpus as a promising but flawed start, and they wonder if he would have become a great poet had he lived. Rosenberg's status as an English poet is thus still debated: he was a Jewish poet, he was an English poet; he was a war poet, he was a painter-poet; he was a young poet; he was a great poet and a minor poet. In his brief career, Rosenberg created a small selection of poems and a great many questions.

    Rosenberg was born on November 25, 1890 in Bristol. His parents, Dovber "Barnett" Rosenberg and Hacha "Hannah" Davidov Rosenberg, were Jewish immigrants from Russia. During Rosenberg's childhood, they moved into the squalid streets of London's Jewish ghetto, and there set up a butcher's shop. The shop was soon confiscated, however, and Rosenberg's parents were forced to work as itinerants during the rest of his life. Rosenberg himself was only able to attend school briefly; at age fourteen, he began to work as an engraver's apprentice, spending his spare time practicing painting. He eventually showed so much promise in the visual arts that he was granted funds to attend the Slade Art School, a significant center of aesthetic theory. The school—which trained artists of various stripes, including Rosenberg's friend Mark Gertler—prized originality above all, and rewarded students with vision above those with labored skill.

    Rosenberg ultimately developed "infinity of suggestion," particularly in his poetry. But his early works seem too deeply influenced by the romantics to reveal much of Rosenberg's own voice. In Night and Day (1912), for example, Rosenberg's poems tend to ring with "poetical" sounding words, lending the verse a self-conscious, antique air. As Thomas Staley remarked in Dictionary of Literary Biography: "The poems in this thin volume are much like his early paintings in that they lacked originality, a distinctive voice. The influence of Shelley and Keats, especially Keats's 'Endymion,' is clear, and even the imagery is suffused with Keatsian diction. But the subject matter seems to probe beyond this influence to go backward in search of a more comprehensive vision of the world." Rosenberg produced one more volume of poetry, Youth (1915), before enlisting in a battalion to fight in World War I. Francine Ringold, writing for the Encyclopedia of World Literature, noted that Youth follows the general pattern of Night and Day: "all of these self-published works [Rosenberg's first volumes of poetry] demonstrate the moral earnestness and predilection for sonorous language that give R[osenberg]'s work its richness yet, when in excess, detract from its effectiveness." Irving Howe comments, similarly: "The early Rosenberg is always driving himself to say more than he has to say, because he thinks poets must speak to large matters. Later he learns that in a poppy in the trenches or a louse in a soldier's shirt, there is enough matter for poetry."

    Rosenberg fought in World War I between 1915 and 1918, dying in the battle of Arras on April 1. During this period, his work reached a kind of early maturity; in this period he found a truly distinctive voice, one particularly indebted to the Old Testament and his sidelined Jewish identity. Many critics see Rosenberg strictly through his war poems. Others, however, insist that the war was only a subject for Rosenberg, or perhaps a challenge for which he was eminently suited. In many ways, Rosenberg's vision of the human relationship with God depends on his Jewish heritage—it depends on the metaphors of the Old Testament, at least. Rosenberg's Judaism is perhaps most apparent in his dramatic fragments, Moses and The Unicorn. "Had Rosenberg lived to develop further along the lines on which he had already moved," wrote David Daiches in Commentary, "he might have changed the course of modern English poetry, producing side by side with the poetry of Eliot and his school a richer and more monumental kind of verse, opposing a new romantic poetry to the new metaphysical brand."

    Ultimately, critics tend to dismiss Rosenberg based on his brief career and his thin contribution to English letters. But in his final poems, Rosenberg offers something more than war poetry or Jewish English poetry. "The tragedy of war gave [his] affinities full expression in his later poems," Staley concluded, "and as war became the universe of his poetry, the power of his Jewish roots and the classical themes became the sources of his moral vision as well as his poetic achievement."
    Bibliography

    Night and Day, privately printed (London), 1912.
    Youth, privately printed (London), 1915.
    Moses: A Play, privately printed (London), 1916, facsimile edition, Imperial War Museum, Department of Printed Books (London), 1990.
    Poems, edited by Gordon Bottomley, Heinemann (London), 1922.
    The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Bottomley and Denys Harding, Chatto & Windus (London), 1937.
    Collected Poems, edited by Bottomley and Harding, Chatto & Windus, 1949, Schocken, 1949, 1974.
    The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings, and Drawings, edited by Ian Parsons, Chatto & Windus, 1979.
    The Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, edited by Vivien Noakes, Oxford University Press, 2005.

    Further Readings

    BOOKS

    Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 20: British Poets, 1914-1945, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983, pp. 318-21.
    Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 707-08.
    Reference Guide to English Literature, 2nd edition, 3 volumes, St. James Press, 1991, pp. 1159-60.
    Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Volume 12, Gale, 1984, pp. 285-314.

    PERIODICALS

    American Scholar, autumn, 1980, Dan Jacobson, "The Burning of the Temple," pp. 564-67.
    Commentary, July, 1950, David Daiches, "Isaac Rosenberg: Poet," pp. 91-93.
    Critical Survey, Volume 2, number 2, 1990, Matt Simpson, "Only a Living Thing," pp. 128-36, Jennifer Breen, "Representations of the 'Feminine' in First World War Poetry," pp. 169-75; Volume 4, number 1, 1992, Diana Hendry, "Up with the Lark(s)," pp. 67-69.
    English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, Volume 39, number 2, 1996, Beth Ellen Roberts, "The Female God of Isaac Rosenberg," pp. 319-32.
    New York Times, February 26, 1950, p. 5.*
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Dead Man’s Dump
    ----- By Isaac Rosenberg
    The plunging limbers over the shattered track
    Racketed with their rusty freight,
    Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,
    And the rusty stakes like sceptres old
    To stay the flood of brutish men
    Upon our brothers dear.

    The wheels lurched over sprawled dead
    But pained them not, though their bones crunched,
    Their shut mouths made no moan.
    They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,
    Man born of man, and born of woman,
    And shells go crying over them
    From night till night and now.

    Earth has waited for them,
    All the time of their growth
    Fretting for their decay:
    Now she has them at last!
    In the strength of their strength
    Suspended—stopped and held.

    What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?
    Earth! have they gone into you!
    Somewhere they must have gone,
    And flung on your hard back
    Is their soul’s sack
    Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.
    Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

    None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
    Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
    Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
    When the swift iron burning bee
    Drained the wild honey of their youth.

    What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,
    Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,
    Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,
    Immortal seeming ever?
    Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,
    A fear may choke in our veins
    And the startled blood may stop.

    The air is loud with death,
    The dark air spurts with fire,
    The explosions ceaseless are.
    Timelessly now, some minutes past,
    Those dead strode time with vigorous life,
    Till the shrapnel called ‘An end!’
    But not to all. In bleeding pangs
    Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,
    Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

    Maniac Earth! howling and flying, your bowel
    Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,
    The impetuous storm of savage love.
    Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,
    What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul
    With lightning and thunder from your mined heart,
    Which man’s self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

    A man’s brains splattered on
    A stretcher-bearer’s face;
    His shook shoulders slipped their load,
    But when they bent to look again
    The drowning soul was sunk too deep
    For human tenderness.

    They left this dead with the older dead,
    Stretched at the cross roads.

    Burnt black by strange decay
    Their sinister faces lie,
    The lid over each eye,
    The grass and coloured clay
    More motion have than they,
    Joined to the great sunk silences.

    Here is one not long dead;
    His dark hearing caught our far wheels,
    And the choked soul stretched weak hands
    To reach the living word the far wheels said,
    The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,
    Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels
    Swift for the end to break
    Or the wheels to break,
    Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

    Will they come? Will they ever come?
    Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,
    The quivering-bellied mules,
    And the rushing wheels all mixed
    With his tortured upturned sight.
    So we crashed round the bend,
    We heard his weak scream,
    We heard his very last sound,
    And our wheels grazed his dead face.



    Break of Day in the Trenches

    ------------By Isaac Rosenberg


    The darkness crumbles away.
    It is the same old druid Time as ever,
    Only a live thing leaps my hand,
    A queer sardonic rat,
    As I pull the parapet’s poppy
    To stick behind my ear.
    Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
    Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
    Now you have touched this English hand
    You will do the same to a German
    Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
    To cross the sleeping green between.
    It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
    Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
    Less chanced than you for life,
    Bonds to the whims of murder,
    Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
    The torn fields of France.
    What do you see in our eyes
    At the shrieking iron and flame
    Hurled through still heavens?
    What quaver—what heart aghast?
    Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
    Drop, and are ever dropping;
    But mine in my ear is safe—
    Just a little white with the dust.

    Source: The Norton Anthology of Poetry Third Edition (1983)
    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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    They Flee from Me
    ------------- by Sir Thomas Wyatt

    They flee from me that sometime did me seek
    With naked foot stalking in my chamber.

    I have seen them gentle tame and meek
    That now are wild and do not remember
    That sometime they put themselves in danger
    To take bread at my hand; and now they range
    Busily seeking with a continual change.


    Thanked be fortune, it hath been otherwise
    Twenty times better; but once in special,
    In thin array after a pleasant guise,
    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
    And she me caught in her arms long and small;
    And therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
    And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

    It was no dream, I lay broad waking.

    But all is turned thorough my gentleness
    Into a strange fashion of forsaking;
    And I have leave to go of her goodness
    And she also to use newfangleness.

    But since that I so kindely am served,
    I would fain know what she hath deserved

    -----------------------------------------------
    -----------------------------------------------

    Granted he is not truly in the same class as true- lesser known poets -but I wanted to post this poem after reading it today.-Tyr
    Last edited by Tyr-Ziu Saxnot; 10-25-2016 at 02:26 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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    Adelaide Anne Procter (30 October 1825 – 2 February 1864 / London)


    Biography of Adelaide Anne Procter
    Adelaide Anne Procter poet

    She was the eldest daughter of the poet Bryan Waller Procter ("Barry Cornwall") and Anne Benson Skepper. As a child Adelaide showed precocious intelligence. She attained considerable proficiency in French, German, and Italian, as well as in music and drawing, and she was a great reader. Brought up in surroundings favourable to the development of literary leanings, she began to write verses at an early age, and at eighteen contributed to the "Book of Beauty".

    In 1851, she and two of her sisters became Catholics without, apparently, any disturbance of the harmonious relations of the domestic circle. In 1853, under the pseudonym of "Mary Berwick", she sent to "Household Words" a short poem, which so pleased the editor, Charles Dickens that he not only accepted it but also invited further contributions. It was not till late in the following year that Dickens learned that his unknown correspondent was the daughter of his old friend, Barry Cornwall. To "Household Words" and "All the Year Round" nearly all her poetry was in the first instance contributed. In 1858-60 her poems were collected and published in two series under the title of "Legends and Lyrics". They had a great success, reaching the tenth edition in 1866. In that year a new issue, with introduction by Dickens, was printed, and there have been several reprints since.

    Miss Procter was of a charitable disposition: she visited the sick, befriended the destitute and home- less, taught the ignorant, and endeavored to raise up the fallen ones of her own sex. She was generous yet practical with the income derived from her works. In 1859 she served on a committee to consider fresh ways and means of providing employment for women; in 1861 she edited a miscellany, entitled "Victoria Regis", which had some of the leading litterateurs of the time as contributors and which was set up in type by women compositors; and in 1862 she published a slender volume of her own poems, "A Chaplet of Verses", mostly of a religious turn, for the benefit of the Providence Row night refuge for homeless women and children, which, as the first Catholic Refuge in the United Kingdom, had been opened on 7 October, 1860, and placed under the care of the Sisters of Mercy. In her charitable zeal she appears to have unduly taxed her strength, and her health, never robust, gave way under the strain. The cure at Malvern was tried in vain; and, after an illness of fifteen months, she died calmly, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

    Adelaide Anne Procter's Works:

    A House to Let, co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins (1858)
    Legends and Lyrics, first series (1858)
    Legends and Lyrics, second series (1861)
    A Chaplet of Verses (1862)
    The Haunted House, co-written with Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, George Sala and Hesba Stretton (1859)

    This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia Adelaide Anne Procter; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.



    ************************************

    A Lost Chord

    SEATED one day at the Organ,
    I was weary and ill at ease,
    And my fingers wandered idly
    Over the noisy keys.

    I do not know what I was playing,
    Or what I was dreaming then ;
    But I struck one chord of music,
    Like the sound of a great Amen.

    It flooded the crimson twilight,
    Like the close of an Angel's Psalm,
    And it lay on my fevered spirit
    With a touch of infinite calm.

    It quieted pain and sorrow,
    Like love overcoming strife ;
    It seemed the harmonious echo
    From our discordant life.

    It linked all perplexéd meanings
    Into one perfect peace,
    And trembled away into silence
    As if it were loth to cease.

    I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
    That one lost chord divine,
    Which came from the soul of the Organ,
    And entered into mine.

    It may be that Death's bright angel
    Will speak in that chord again,
    It may be that only in Heaven
    I shall hear that grand Amen.
    Adelaide Anne Procter



    **************************************

    One By One The Sands Are Flowing


    One by one the sands are flowing,
    One by one the moments fall:
    Some are coming, some are going;
    Do not strive to grasp them all.

    One by one thy duties wait thee;
    Let thy whole strength go to each;
    Let no future dreams elate thee;
    Learn thou first what these can teach.

    One by one,-bright gifts of heaven,-
    Joys are sent thee here below;
    Take them readily when given;
    Ready be to let them go.

    One by one thy griefs shall meet thee;
    Do not fear an armed band;
    One will fade as others greet thee,-
    Shadows passing through the land.

    Every hour that fleets so slowly
    Has its task to do our bear:
    Luminous the crown and holy,
    When each gem is set with care.

    Hours are golden links, God's token
    Reaching heaven; but one by one
    Take them, lest the chain be broken
    Ere the pilgrimage be done.

    Adelaide Anne Procter


    **********************************8
    Per Pacem Ad Lucem

    I DO not ask, O Lord, that life may be
    A pleasant road;
    I do not ask that Thou wouldst take from me
    Aught of its load;

    I do not ask that flowers should always spring
    Beneath my feet;
    I know too well the poison and the sting
    Of things too sweet.

    For one thing only, Lord, dear Lord, I plead,
    Lead me aright—
    Though strength should falter, and though heart should bleed—
    Through Peace to Light.

    I do not ask, O Lord, that thou shouldst shed
    Full radiance here;
    Give but a ray of peace, that I may tread
    Without a fear.

    I do not ask my cross to understand,
    My way to see;
    Better in darkness just to feel Thy hand
    And follow Thee.

    Joy is like restless day; but peace divine
    Like quiet night:
    Lead me, O Lord,—till perfect Day shall shine,
    Through Peace to Light.
    Adelaide Anne Procter
    A truly wonderful and deep poetess.
    No trivial subjects written about nor engaging in the writing of bubble gum, cotton candy , rainbow verses so foolishly and highly praised today by the idiots that call themselves - poetry critics/experts. -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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    Emma Lazarus
    ---
    Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887

    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Emma Lazarus
    Emma Lazarus.jpg
    Emma Lazarus, c. 1872
    Born July 22, 1849
    New York City, New York
    Died November 19, 1887 (aged 38)
    New York City, New York
    Genre Poetry
    Notable works The New Colossus

    Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 – November 19, 1887) was an American poet born in New York City.

    She is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty[1] installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus's death.[2]

    Contents

    1 Background
    2 Works
    3 References
    4 Further reading
    5 External links

    Background

    Lazarus was born into a large Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family, the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus and Esther Nathan. [3] The Lazarus family was from Germany,[4] and the Nathan family was originally from Portugal and residents in New York long before the American Revolution. Lazarus's great-great grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in New York in 1752) was also a poet.[5] Lazarus was also related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

    From an early age, she studied American and British literature, as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. Her writings attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

    She was also an early admirer of Henry George, and was a part of his Single Tax movement for a number of years.[6]

    Lazarus wrote her own important poems and edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine.[7] She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts, The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about the titular figure and The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.[8]

    "The New Colossus"

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
    Emma Lazarus, 1883

    Lazarus began to be more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York, leading Lazarus to write articles on the subject, as well as the book Songs of a Semite (1882). Lazarus began at this point to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish refugees. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting.

    She is best known for the sonnet "The New Colossus"; its lines appear on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty placed in 1903.[1][2] The sonnet was written in 1883 and donated to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" in order to raise funds to build the pedestal.[9][10] Lazarus' close friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired by "The New Colossus" to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.[11] Lazarus is also known for her sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs".[12]

    She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887.[13] On one of those trips, Georgiana Burne-Jones, the wife of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, introduced her to William Morris at her home.[14] She returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip and died two months later on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma.

    She is an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term Zionism.[15] Lazarus is buried in Beth-Olom Cemetery in Brooklyn.

    Emma Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March, 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included in a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites.[16] In 2009, she was honored by induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[17] The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition about Emma Lazarus in 2012.
    Works

    Lazarus, Emma (1888). The Poems of Emma Lazarus. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Retrieved 2008-12-12.
    "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport"
    "In Exile"
    "The New Colossus"
    "By the Waters of Babylon"
    "1492"
    "The New Year"
    "The South"
    "Venus of the Louvre"

    References

    Watts, Emily Stipes. The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977: 123. ISBN 0-292-76450-2
    Young, Bette Roth (1997). Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters. The Jewish Publication Society. ISBN 0-8276-0618-4. p. 3:
    "Jewish Women's Archive: Emma Lazarus". Retrieved 2008-01-10.
    "Four Founders: Emma Lazarus". Jewish Virtual Library.
    Schor, Esther. Emma Lazarus. Schocken, 2008.
    "Progress and Poverty". The New York Times. Jewish Women's Archive. 2 October 1881. p. 3. Retrieved 21 May 2013.
    The Poems of Emma Lazarus in Two Volumes, kindle ebooks ASIN B0082RVVJ2 & ASIN B0082RDHSA
    Sugarman, Yerra (2003). "Emma Lazarus". In Parini, Jay. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 413. ISBN 978-0-19-515653-9.
    Young, Bette Roth (1997). Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters. The Jewish Publication Society. ISBN 0-8276-0618-4. p. 3: Auction event named as "Lowell says poem gave the statue "a raison e'tre;" fell into obscurity; not mentioned at statue opening; Georgina Schuyler's campaign for the plaque
    Felder, Deborah G.; Diana L Rosen (2003). Fifty Jewish Women Who Changed the World. Citadel Press. ISBN 0-8065-2443-X. p. 45: Solicited by "William Maxwell Evert" [sic; presumably William Maxwell Evarts] Lazarus refused initially; convinced by Constance Cary Harrison
    "Exhibit highlights connection between Jewish poet, Catholic nun". The Tidings. Archdiocese of Los Angeles. Catholic News Service. 17 September 2010. p. 16. Archived from the original on 21 September 2010. Retrieved 20 September 2010.
    Obituary in Century Magazine The Poems of Emma Lazarus in Two Volumes, kindle ebooks ASIN B0082RVVJ2 & ASIN B0082RDHSA
    Esther Schor, Emma Lazarus (2006)
    Judith Flanders, A Circle of Sisters (2001) page 186.
    Simon, Briana. "Zion in the Sources: Yearning for Zion". World Zionist Organization.
    "Manhattan Borough President - Home".

    "Lazarus, Emma". National Women's Hall of Fame. Retrieved 1 November 2016.

    Further reading

    Cavitch, Max. "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty," American Literary History 18.1 (2006), 1–28
    Eiselein, Gregory. Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings. USA: Broadview Press, 2002. ISBN 1-55111-285-X.
    Jacob, H. E. The World of Emma Lazarus. New York: Schocken, 1949; New York: Kessing Publishers, 2007, ISBN 1-4325-1416-4.
    Lazarus, Emma. Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems. USA: Library of America, 2005. ISBN 1-931082-77-4.
    Moore, H. S. Liberty's Poet: Emma Lazarus. USA: TurnKey Press, 2004. ISBN 0-9754803-4-0.
    Schor, Esther. Emma Lazurus. New York: Schocken, 2006. ISBN 0-8052-4216-3. Randomhouse.com
    Young, B. R. Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters. USA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997. ISBN 0-8276-0618-4.
    Vogel, Dan (1980). Emma Lazarus. Boston: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 0805772332.

    PD-icon.svg This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gilman, D. C.; Thurston, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Lazarus, Emma". New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.

    ************************************************** ******************





    The New Colossus

    -------------By Emma Lazarus
    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
    With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”


    Source: Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings (2002)

    ----------------------------------------
    By the Waters of Babylon [V. Currents]
    Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887

    Vast oceanic movements, the flux and reflux of immeasurable tides, oversweep our continent.
    From the far Caucasian steppes, from the squalid Ghettos of Europe,
    From Odessa and Bucharest, from Kief and Ekaterinoslav,
    Hark to the cry of the exiles of Babylon, the voice of Rachel mourning for her children, of Israel lamenting for Zion.
    And lo, like a turbid stream, the long-pent flood bursts the dykes of oppression and rushes hitherward.
    Unto her ample breast, the generous mother of nations welcomes them.
    The herdsman of Canaan and the seed of Jerusalem’s royal shepherd renew their youth
    amid the pastoral plains of Texas and the golden valleys of the Sierras.


    ------------------------------------------

    In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport
    Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887

    Here, where the noises of the busy town,
    The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,
    We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,
    And muse upon the consecrated spot.

    No signs of life are here: the very prayers
    Inscribed around are in a language dead;
    The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent
    That an undying radiance was to shed.

    What prayers were in this temple offered up,
    Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,
    By these lone exiles of a thousand years,
    From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!

    How as we gaze, in this new world of light,
    Upon this relic of the days of old,
    The present vanishes, and tropic bloom
    And Eastern towns and temples we behold.

    Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,
    The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,
    The slaves of Egypt, -- omens, mysteries, --
    Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.

    A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,
    A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,
    ‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,
    Unto a people prone with reverent awe.

    The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,
    In the rich court of royal Solomon --
    Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains, --
    The exiles by the streams of Babylon.

    Our softened voices send us back again
    But mournful echoes through the empty hall:
    Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,
    And with unwonted gentleness they fall.

    The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,
    All found their comfort in the holy place,
    And children’s gladness and men’s gratitude
    ‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.

    The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!
    We know not which is sadder to recall;
    For youth and happiness have followed age,
    And green grass lieth gently over all.

    Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,
    With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.
    Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,
    Before the mystery of death and God.

    ----------------------------------
    ----------------------------------
    year
    sort ascending
    title author
    1888 Age and Death Emma Lazarus
    1888 Chopin Emma Lazarus
    1888 1492 Emma Lazarus
    1888 Long Island Sound Emma Lazarus
    1888 Echoes Emma Lazarus
    1888 Critic and Poet Emma Lazarus
    1887 By the Waters of Babylon [V. Currents] Emma Lazarus
    1887 By the Waters of Babylon Emma Lazarus
    1885 Venus of the Louvre Emma Lazarus
    1884 To R.W.E. Emma Lazarus

    1883 The New Colossus Emma Lazarus
    1882 The Feast of Lights Emma Lazarus
    1882 The New Year Emma Lazarus
    1882 In Exile Emma Lazarus
    1878 The South Emma Lazarus
    1871 Work Emma Lazarus
    1867 In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport Emma Lazarus
    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.

  19. #13
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    Lola Ridge
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Lola Ridge
    Lola Ridge.jpg
    Born Rose Emily Ridge
    12 December 1873
    Dublin
    Died 19 May 1941 (aged 67)
    Nationality American
    Ethnicity Irish
    Genre Poetry
    Literary movement Greenwich Village
    Notable awards Guggenheim Fellowship,
    Shelley Memorial Award

    Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge (12 December 1873 Dublin – 19 May 1941 Brooklyn) was an Irish-American anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.[1] Along with other political poets of the early Modernist period, Ridge has received renewed critical attention since the beginning of the 21st century and is praised for making poetry directly from harsh urban life.[2] A new selection of her poetry was published in 2007 and a biography in 2016.[3]

    Contents

    1 Early life and marriages
    2 Literary career
    3 Political activities
    4 Quotation
    5 Works
    6 Legacy and honours
    7 21st-century Appreciation
    8 References
    9 Further reading
    10 External links

    Early life and marriages

    She was born Rose Emily Ridge in 1873 in Dublin, Ireland to Joseph Henry and Emma (Reilly) Ridge and was their only surviving child. When Rose was 13, her mother emigrated with her to New Zealand, where Emma later married a Scottish miner. Rose Ridge became politically active there. In 1895, while living in New Zealand, Rose Ridge married the manager of a gold mine. After they divorced, she moved to Sydney, attending Trinity College and also studying painting at Académie Julienne with Rossi Ashton.[4]

    Ridge emigrated to the United States after her mother died, settling first in San Francisco in 1907. There she identified as Lola Ridge, a poet and painter. She had her first poem published in the US in 1908 in Overland Monthly.

    She later moved to New York, settling in Greenwich Village. After supporting herself writing ad copy, she left that to focus on her poetry. Working as a model and in a factory, she became involved in working class politics and protests.[4] Peter Quartermain described her in the Dictionary of Literary Biography described her as "the nearest prototype in her time of the proletarian poet of class conflict, voicing social protest or revolutionary idealism."[4]

    Lola Ridge's first book of poetry was published in 1918. On 22 October 1919, she married David Lawson, a fellow radical.[4]
    Literary career

    After living for some time in New York, Ridge gained considerable notice with her long poem, The Ghetto, first published in 1918 in The New Republic. It was included in her first book, The Ghetto and Other Poems, published that year. The title poem portrays the Jewish immigrant community of Hester Street in the Lower East Side of New York. It explores the effects of capitalism, gender and generational conflict in ways that bear comparison to the works of Charles Reznikoff. But she also expressed the individuality of numerous immigrants, to show they were as various as other Americans and shared many human qualities.[1] The book was a critical success.

    This recognition led to opportunities for Ridge; she became involved with and edited new avant-garde magazines such as Others in 1919, and Broom, founded in 1921 by Harold Loeb, for which she was the American editor from 1922–1923, while he published in Rome. While working with Loeb, she had an apartment next to the basement office of Broom in the townhouse of his estranged wife Marjorie Content.[4]

    Ridge published 61 poems from 1908 to 1937 in such leading magazines as Poetry, New Republic, and The Saturday Review of Literature.[1] She was a contributing editor to The New Masses.[4]

    She wrote and published four more books of poetry through 1935, and single poems into 1937. Her work was also collected in anthologies. Her third book, Red Flag (1927) collected much of her political poetry.[1]

    In 1929, Ridge was accepted for a residency at the writers colony of Yaddo. That year she published Firehead, a long poem that was a radical retelling of Jesus' crucifixion. It and her last book, published in 1935 were more philosophical compared to her earlier work.[1]

    She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1935. She received the Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America for the years 1934 and 1935. Publishing until 1937, she died in 1941 of pulmonary tuberculosis.[4]
    Political activities

    Ridge did not join any political party, but was active in radical causes. She protested against the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and was among those arrested that day. In the 1930s, she supported the defence of Tom Mooney and Warren Billings, who had been framed for a 1916 bombing at the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco.
    Quotation

    My doll Janie has no waist
    and her body is like a tub with feet on it.
    Sometimes I beat her
    but I always kiss her afterwards.
    When I have kissed all the paint off her body
    I shall tie a ribbon about it
    so she shan't look shabby.
    But it must be blue –
    it mustn't be pink –
    pink shows the dirt on her face
    that won't wash off.

    I beat Janie
    and beat her...
    but still she smiled...
    so I scratched her between the eyes with a pin.
    Now she doesn't love me any more...
    she scowls... and scowls...
    though I've begged her to forgive me
    and poured sugar in the hole at the back of her head.

    -- from Sun-Up and Other Poems

    Works

    The Ghetto, and Other Poems, Huebsch, 1918.
    Sun-Up, and Other Poems, Huebsch, 1920
    Red Flag, Viking, 1927.
    Firehead, Payson & Clarke, 1929.
    Dance of Fire, Smith & Haas, 1935.
    Daniel Tobin, ed. (2007). Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems. Quale Press. ISBN 978-0-9792999-1-9.

    Legacy and honours

    1934 and 1935, Ridge won the Shelley Memorial Award, given by the Poetry Society of America
    Her papers are held at Smith College.[5]

    21st-century Appreciation

    With renewed scholarly interest in her work since the late 20th century, a selection of her first three books of poetry was published posthumously as Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems (2007), edited and with an introduction by Daniel Tobin. He notes that she is "part of the confluence of politics, culture and the burgeoning of women's voices at the advent of modernism to the start of World War II."[6]

    Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, wrote that contemporary readers needed "to appreciate the magnitude and freshness of her enterprise: to make poetry out of the actual city."[2] He likens her to 18th-century British poet William Blake in her ability to express the perspective of children, evoking "innocence and experience in a way that blurs the ambiguous boundary between them."[2] Pinsky also notes that Ridge preceded American Hart Crane, known for his long poem The Bridge about the Brooklyn Bridge, in her assigning "ecstatic, high language of the past, especially of the Elizabethans, to the squalid and the sublime realities of the actual, 20th-century American city."[2]
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


    The Dream
    - Poem by Lola Ridge

    I have a dream
    to fill the golden sheath
    of a remembered day....
    (Air
    heavy and massed and blue
    as the vapor of opium...
    domes
    fired in sulphurous mist...
    sea
    quiescent as a gray seal...
    and the emerging sun
    spurting up gold
    over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay....)
    But the day is an up-turned cup
    and its sun a junk of red iron
    guttering in sluggish-green water--
    where shall I pour my dream?
    Lola Ridge

    ---------------------------------------
    ---------------------------------------


    Dispossessed
    - Poem by Lola Ridge

    Tender and tremulous green of leaves
    Turned up by the wind,
    Twanging among the vines -
    Wind in the grass
    Blowing a clear path
    For the new-stripped soul to pass…

    The naked soul in the sunlight…
    Like a wisp of smoke in the sunlight
    On the hill-side shimmering.

    Dance light on the wind, little soul,
    Like a thistle-down floating
    Over the butterflies
    And the lumbering bees…

    Come away from that tree
    And its shadow grey as a stone…

    Bathe in the pools of light
    On the hillside shimmering -
    Shining and wetted and warm in the sun-spray falling like golden rain -

    But do not linger and look
    At that bleak thing under the tree.
    Lola Ridge
    ----------------------------------
    ----------------------------------

    A Memory
    - Poem by Lola Ridge

    I remember
    The crackle of the palm trees
    Over the mooned white roofs of the town…
    The shining town…
    And the tender fumbling of the surf
    On the sulphur-yellow beaches
    As we sat… a little apart… in the close-pressing night.

    The moon hung above us like a golden mango,
    And the moist air clung to our faces,
    Warm and fragrant as the open mouth of a child
    And we watched the out-flung sea
    Rolling to the purple edge of the world,
    Yet ever back upon itself…
    As we…

    Inadequate night…
    And mooned white memory
    Of a tropic sea…
    How softly it comes up
    Like an ungathered lily.

    ********************

    A PARTIAL LIST OF LOLA RIDGE POEMS

    1. In Harness 2/8/2012
    2. Jaguar 2/8/2012
    3. The Everlasting Return 4/21/2010
    4. The Fiddler 4/21/2010
    5. Reveille 2/8/2012
    6. Potpourri 2/8/2012
    7. Thaw 2/8/2012
    8. To Larkin 2/8/2012
    9. The Legion Of Iron 4/21/2010
    10. The Song 4/21/2010
    11. The Alley 2/8/2012
    12. Wild Duck 2/8/2012
    13. Windows 2/8/2012
    14. Wall Street At Night 2/8/2012
    15. The Fire 4/21/2010
    16. The Fog 4/21/2010
    17. The Foundling 4/21/2010
    18. The Spilling Of The Wine 4/21/2010
    19. The White Bird 4/21/2010
    20. Submerged 4/21/2010
    21. Under-Song 4/21/2010
    22. The Song Of Iron 4/21/2010
    23. To Alexander Berkman 2/8/2012
    24. Wind Rising In The Alleys 2/8/2012
    25. Train Window 2/8/2012
    26. The Tidings 4/21/2010
    27. Sun-Up 2/8/2012
    28. The Destroyer 4/21/2010
    29. The Woman With Jewels 4/21/2010
    30. The Garden 4/21/2010
    31. Jude 2/8/2012
    32. To The American People 2/8/2012
    33. To The Others 4/21/2010
    34. The Edge 4/21/2010
    35. Skyscrapers 2/8/2012
    36. Sons Of Belial 2/8/2012
    37. Iron Wine 4/21/2010
    38. Portraits 2/8/2012
    39. Interim 2/8/2012
    40. Secrets
    THIS IMMENSELY TALENTED POETESS WAS NEW TO ME UNTIL A FEW DAYS AGO WHEN A POET FRIEND SUGGESTED THAT I CHECK OUT HER WORK.
    His appraisal of her work was spot on..
    She wrote a lot and all of it was top level poetry IMHO.-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.

  20. #14
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    Vera Mary Brittain

    Poet Details
    1893–1970



    Vera Brittain’s reputation centers on her achievements as an influential British feminist and pacifist and on her famous memoir of World War I, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925. That work has never been out of print since first published in 1933, and its influence has been strengthened by a 1979 BBC television adaptation and new paperback editions. During her lifetime Brittain was also known internationally as a successful journalist, poet, public speaker, biographer, autobiographer, and novelist. Interest in her writings, personality, and relationships (notably her close friendship with Winifred Holtby) has grown steadily, especially among feminist critics, and the publication in 1995 of a noteworthy biography by her friend and literary executor Paul Berry with Mark Bostridge has now provided scholarship with an authoritative account of her life and achievements.

    Vera Mary Brittain was born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a town in Staffordshire in the Midlands, on 29 December 1893. After a childhood in nearby Macclesfield she grew into what she later called “provincial young ladyhood” in Buxton, a fashionable health resort in the Peak District of Derbyshire. She was the elder child of Thomas Arthur Brittain, a prosperous businessman and partner in Brittains Limited, a paper-manufacturing company based on the paper mill established by his grandfather. He had married Edith Bervon, daughter of a Welsh-born organist and choirmaster, in 1891. The second of their two children, Edward Harold Brittain, was almost two years younger than Vera. During childhood the siblings formed a close relationship, protectively isolated as they were in their wealthy middle-class home, where they were tended by servants and a governess.

    In “A Writer’s Life,” an article originally published in Parents’ Review in June 1961 and later collected in Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (1985), Brittain commented that “An inclination to write shows itself very early in a few fortunate individuals, who are never in doubt what their work in life is to be.” She was one of those individuals: “As soon as I could hold a pen I started to write, and before that I told stories to my brother. I had written five `novels,’ illustrated with melodramatic drawings, before I was 11.” Strongly influenced by her reading of such books as the sensational romances of Mrs. Henry Wood (which were among the few books in the Brittain household), her juvenile fiction has qualities that point to the five novels of her maturity: idealistic and moralistic, they are infused with references to religion and death and focus on noble, independent, self-sacrificing heroines.

    By the time she came to write the five mature novels published between 1923 and 1948, Brittain’s ambition was to succeed as both a critically respected and a popular writer; she consciously set out to write bestsellers. She was therefore generally content to utilize traditional forms and modes—the experimentation of Modernist contemporaries made little impression on her literary technique. She also, even more than in her juvenilia, based characters and events firmly on her own life and experience so that autobiographical elements tend to predominate over imaginative. Both tendencies were reinforced by her desire to promote, in all her writings, values associated with her social and political activism. Therefore, her novels tend to be somewhat didactic.

    Brittain wrote in 1925 that her “literary and political work” were entwined: “The first . . . is simply a popular interpretation of the second; a means of presenting my theories before people who would not understand or be interested in them if they were explained seriously.” Toward the end of her life she restated that position, maintaining that a writer’s highest reward comes from “the power of ideas to change the shape of the world and even help to eliminate its evils. ... Contemporary writers have the important task of interpreting for their readers this present revolutionary and complex age which has no parallel in history.” For this purpose above all, Brittain always championed the novel as the preeminent genre. For instance, in a 1929 review (“New Fiction: Pessimists and Optimists”), she insisted that

    no one can preach the gospel of optimism more successfully than the novelist who, between the sober covers of the book, creeps unobtrusively into those households where the politician, the ecclesiastic or the teacher would hesitate to intrude.

    So even when writing Testament of Youth, Brittain deliberately set out to exploit novelistic qualities: “I wanted to make my story as truthful as history,” she wrote, “but as readable as fiction.”

    Her education endorsed such tendencies—and especially the moral earnestness that marks all her writing. As a young girl she was taught to value conventional “correct” essaylike style and novelists such as George Eliot and Arnold Bennett, whose books became lifelong major influences. St. Monica’s, the girls’ boarding school her parents sent her to (while Edward was sent to a public school, Uppingham) was run by one of her mother’s sisters, Florence Bervon, together with Louise Heath-Jones. The latter was an inspiring teacher who stressed current affairs and social commitment and was sympathetic to feminism and the work of the suffragettes. She introduced Brittain to Woman and Labour (1911), a feminist polemic by the South African writer Olive Schreiner—another lifelong influence which intensified when Brittain was given a copy of Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm (1883) as a gift from Roland Leighton, a school friend of Edward’s with whom she fell in love.

    That relationship, cemented in a brief engagement, began shortly before World War I. Brittain admired Leighton’s intellectual and poetic abilities and his literary family: both parents were successful popular novelists. Determined to go to university when this was still unusual for a young woman (both Roland and Edward were expected to go as a matter of course), Brittain persuaded her parents to allow her to prepare for the entrance examination of Somerville College, a women’s college in Oxford, and in the summer of 1914 she learned that she had won a scholarship to study English literature there.

    World War I began just weeks before she went up to Oxford. Edward and Roland—and two of Edward’s friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, whom she was beginning to know well—volunteered as officers, and within a year Brittain decided to leave Oxford for war service as a Voluntary Aid Detachment (V.A.D.) nurse. Roland was killed near the end of 1915; Richardson and Thurlow in 1917, when Brittain was serving in Malta; and Edward only months before the war ended.

    While at St. Monica’s, Brittain had begun to keep a diary, and from 1913 she regularly wrote long entries until her return to England in 1917. That diary, recording private and public events and the anguish she suffered during the war, was published in 1981 in edited and abridged form under her title: Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary, 1913-1917. A second extensive diary, kept between 1932 and 1945, has also been published, in two volumes: Chronicle of Friendship: Diary of the Thirties, 1932-1939 (1986) and Wartime Chronicle: Diary, 1939-1945 (1989). Brittain’s literary achievement as a diarist is now firmly established, and critical attention is likely to increase. Her many fluent, trenchant letters during the first war, so far unpublished, similarly show the nature of her strongest literary talent: straightforward unmediated expression of observation and opinion.

    The only other genre in which she wrote during the war was lyric poetry, and her first major publication was Verses of a V.A.D. (1918). Here her achievement is debatable, drawing some praise but a more frequent judgment that her poems are at best conventional and competent—a recording of intense response to events such as the death of Leighton, but in style and form so indebted to Victorian models and to Rupert Brooke‘s 1914 and Other Poems (1915) that their emotional force is severely diminished.

    After the war, close to a breakdown after years of strain and loss, Brittain returned to Oxford, now electing to study modern history rather than English literature. She found she was sharing her modern European history tutorials, taught by C.R.M.F. Cruttwell (dean of Hertford College), with a fellow undergraduate at Somerville: Winifred Holtby. After a sharp quarrel over Brittain’s belief that Holtby had set out to humiliate her in a college debate, they went on to establish a close and fruitful friendship. They were both feminists, politically leftist (both later became members of the Labour Party), fervently committed to the cause of world peace, and ambitious to achieve success as journalists, novelists, public speakers, and social activists.

    Leaving Oxford in 1921 with second-class degrees, the two young women set up a flat together in London where, until Brittain’s marriage in 1925, they worked at establishing their careers. The lasting excellence of their journalism is obvious in the selection Testament of a Generation. Much of it is feminist in orientation; both women were members of the Six Point Group founded in 1921 by Lady Margaret Rhondda, who was also founder and editor of the influential feminist journal Time and Tide, in which much of their journalism was published. “I Denounce Domesticity!,” first published in Quiver in August 1932 and collected in Testament of a Generation, indicates the fervor and range of Brittain’s convictions:


    I suppose there has never been a time when the talent of women was so greatly needed as it is at the present day. Whether great talent or small, whether political, literary, practical, academic or mechanical, its use is a social duty. . .. Even her children should not be permitted to destroy [a woman’s] social effectiveness, and it is no more to their advantage than to hers that they should do so. Babies and toddlers are far happier when they can enjoy the society of their contemporaries in properly equipped day nurseries and nursery schools, than living, lonely and constantly thwarted, in houses primarily adapted—in so far as they are adapted to anything—to the needs of adults.

    Brittain and Holtby also wrote on a variety of topics other than feminism, including international politics; for this reason they traveled during 1922 in war-ravaged Europe and observed League of Nations activities in Geneva. They were committed members of the League of Nations Union, valuing its promise as a peacekeeping organization, and they quickly became popular speakers at its public meetings.

    In the midst of all this activity, Brittain and Holtby completed their first two novels, helping each other with advice and criticism. Brittain’s The Dark Tide was rejected by several publishers before Grant Richards brought it out in 1923; but, as she noted in “A Writer’s Life,” it attracted “seventy-three reviews, including a long and favourable criticism in the Times Literary Supplement. This result put me `on the map,’ and led to many more freelance articles.” The Dark Tide also attracted a threat of prosecution for libel (over an incautious statement implying that Manchester Guardian reporters could be bribed), a shock of anger in Oxford, and a husband. The latter was George Catlin, a young political scientist and later assistant professor at Cornell who had been Brittain’s unknown contemporary at Oxford; his admiration for the novel moved him to correspond with its author, and two years later he persuaded her to marry him.

    The anger in Oxford and especially in Somerville College had been earned by the unflattering depiction in the novel of life in a women’s college easily identified as Somerville and of many characters whose originals were just as obvious to those who knew them. Brittain had indeed made notes for the novel while at Oxford after the war. Since the plot directly exploited events of that period, such as the incident of the Somerville debate with Holtby and was centered on the relationship of two characters who were clearly if superficially fictional representatives of Holtby and Brittain (Daphne Lethbridge and Virginia Dennison, respectively), the melodramatic characters and plot seemed all the more outrageous. For instance, the outrageously villainous don Raymond Sylvester, whom Daphne agrees, disastrously, to marry just after Virginia has rejected him, could hardly escape being seen as a malicious portrait of Cruttwell, the history tutor.

    Yet despite its flaws (when it was reprinted in 1935, its author acknowledged “the crude violence of its methods”), Brittain’s “Oxford novel” remains interesting and enjoyable and is now something of a period piece. Its feminist main theme—women’s right to independence and self-fulfillment—is, however, damaged by her failure to disentangle it from the contradictory theme of self-sacrifice in the cause of duty. As the novel ends, Virginia’s long, idealistic speech eulogizing self-sacrifice exposes a confusion which Brittain herself was later to recognize and attack.

    Those two themes are again prominent in Brittain’s second novel, Not Without Honour (1924), but separated to some extent since they are now related respectively to the protagonist Christine Merivale (again a representative of Brittain herself) and the Reverend Albert Clark, whose values are submitted to severe criticism. In this novel Brittain drew even more directly on her own life, cannibalizing her diary not only for characters and incidents but also for long passages incorporated in the novel with little or no change.

    The main action of Not Without Honour is set in 1913-1914, the period leading up to the outbreak of World War I, and its setting is Buxton—thinly disguised under the name Torborough. Recalling some years later, in Testament of Youth, her angry rejection of Buxton’s vapidity and “social snobbery,” Brittain wrote: “None of my books have had large sales and the least successful of them all was my second novel, Not Without Honour, but I have never enjoyed any experience more than the process of decanting my hatred into that story of the social life of a small provincial town.” The plot, echoing Brittain’s diary, describes the infatuation of an intelligent, ambitious girl for a charismatic Anglican curate whose unorthodox views and socialist activities bring him into conflict with the local hierarchy. Brittain’s father had been witheringly hostile toward Clark’s original, the Reverend Joseph Ward, who preached social change and whose church services attracted the poor. The two central characters are both highly imaginative, with “a mutual aspiration after martyrdom.” Clark achieves that aspiration, killed, like Leighton, on the western front; Christine learns of his death at Oxford, where she is finding her way to independence, self-fulfillment, and the maturity that both have lacked.

    This novel brings together, although still sketchily, the feminist, socialist, and pacifist themes that dominated Brittain’s next novel and that she defined in her polemical writings as intrinsically connected. If Not Without Honour is a more coherent novel than its predecessor, it is also less vigorous. But it earned a set of largely positive reviews.

    Then ensued, as far as novels are concerned, a long silence. Some of the reasons are obvious: marriage and a year of exile (as Brittain felt it to be) in the United States. She so much disliked her situation as a faculty wife at Cornell, and felt so strongly that her writing career was being destroyed by her absence from England, that she and Catlin agreed to attempt a “semi-detached marriage.” She was back in London by August 1926 and almost immediately set off with Holtby for Geneva, with a commission to write articles about the League of Nations Assembly. From then until Holtby’s death in 1935 they shared a home in Chelsea to which, when he was back from Cornell during vacations, Catlin was intermittently added: an arrangement that raised some eyebrows but seems to have worked extremely well for both women and for Brittain and Catlin’s two children, John (born in 1927) and Shirley (born in 1930).

    All through that decade Brittain was a prolific and increasingly successful freelance journalist, but she still aspired, even in her much busier daily life, to write a best-selling novel that would establish a high literary reputation. Late in the 1920s the “War Books Boom” began, and with increased fervor after seeing R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End in 1929, Brittain set out to use her diary of World War I as the foundation of a novel, following the model of Not Without Honour. However, she found that fictionalizing this material was unsatisfactory. Avidly she had read the many recently published war memoirs, reviewing some of them for Time and Tide; Robert Graves’s Good-Bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929), in particular, showed her that autobiography was a genre appropriate to her material and talent. Recognizing that no book of comparable stature had yet presented a woman’s experience of the war, she threw herself into writing her “Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925,” which was titled Testament of Youth.

    Its publication in 1933 and quick achievement of best-seller status changed Brittain’s life: as an international celebrity she was now in constant demand for public appearances, lectures, articles, and new books. In 1934 she went on the first of three successful but grueling American lecture tours; all through it she was working, whenever she had the time and energy, on a new novel. But in 1935 disaster struck: first her father, then Winifred Holtby, died. Recovering from the double blow, she found her work as Holtby’s literary executor quite demanding, especially in arranging the publication of Holtby’s last novel, South Riding (1937); but even while correcting the proofs of Holtby’s book she resumed work on her own.


    Honourable Estate: A Novel of Transition, published in 1936, is Brittain’s longest and most ambitious novel. It originated as two novels almost a decade before Holtby’s death and is to some extent a companion to South Riding: recapturing, in different circumstances, something of the professional partnership that had supported the writing of their first novels a decade earlier. It is also a companion to Testament of Youth, rendering in fictional terms the same historical period and—with a different emphasis—similar central themes.

    Although increasingly judged to be Brittain’s best and most important novel, Honourable Estate has not been republished in recent years and is not easy to obtain. The main reason is that Brittain’s husband, George Catlin, resented the representation of his parents as Janet and Thomas Rutherston, judging the latter characterization “grossly libellous.” For, apart from fictionalizing her own experiences, as in her first two novels, Brittain had now cast her net wider to exploit the recent history of both the Brittain and Catlin families—most importantly, the marital relations of George Catlin’s parents as revealed in his mother’s diaries.

    Edith Catlin was, Brittain wrote later in Testament of Experience: An Autobiographical Story of the Years 1925-1950 (1957), “a turbulent, thwarted, politically-unconscious woman who died prematurely in 1917.” Desperately unhappy in her marriage to a dogmatic, domineering Congregational minister, she had run away from him, abandoning her young son in 1915, and until her death two years later had worked for woman suffrage. Brittain admired Edith Catlin deeply, seeing her as a sister spirit. Soon after meeting George Catlin and learning his mother’s story, she made Edith “the heroine of a projected novel called The Springing Thorn.” Before her marriage Brittain had also made notes for a novel to be called “Kindred and Affinity,” “inspired by my father’s semi-apocryphal tales of his Staffordshire family. By 1925 the characters were already coming to life; the fictitious Alleyndenes bore a likeness to my forebears.” Both projected novels foundered, however, until, after the publication of Testament of Youth, Brittain had the inspiration that eventually produced Honourable Estate: “Why not marry Kindred and Affinity to The Springing Thorn, make the book a story of two contrasting provincial families calamitously thrown together by chance, and then, in the next generation, join the son of one household with the daughter of the other?” Denis Rutherston, the son, is of course a depiction of George Catlin; Ruth Alleyndene, the daughter, a depiction of Brittain; and many other characters have obvious originals among Brittain’s family and friends.

    Apart from the Alleyndene and Rutherston family histories, with emphasis on the defective marriages of both her and Catlin’s parents, Brittain drew again on her experiences in World War I. Characteristically, she also fictionalized three recent traumatic experiences: the discovery that her brother Edward had been a homosexual and had probably invited his 1918 death in battle so as to avoid disgrace; her passionate affair in the mid 1930s, while she was writing Honourable Estate, with her American publisher George Brett; and her quarrel in 1932 with the prolific Yorkshire novelist Phyllis Bentley (whose Inheritance was a best-seller that year), after a brief, intense friendship. The first two situations are worked out in the fate of Ruth Alleyndene’s brother Richard and in her doomed affair with the glamorous American officer Eugene Meury (Brett is superimposed, as it were, on Leighton). But the creation of the character based on Bentley—the successful and influential playwright Gertrude Ellison Campbell, with her broken friendship with Janet Rutherston, profound spiritual connection with Ruth Alleyndene, and posthumous apotheosis at the conclusion of the novel—proved especially significant and enriching:

    Beneath the grey vaulted roof, women of every rank and profession had gathered to do honour to Ellison Campbell who had once been an arch-opponent of the women’s movement. Because, by her life and work, she had indirectly conferred prestige upon them all, the women’s organizations had sent their representatives.

    Not only is Ellison Campbell arguably Brittain’s finest characterization, but her role in the theme and the rather schematic structure of the novel complicates and strengthens both. She links the generations credibly, and as an unmarried woman and antifeminist who is powerfully creative, she deepens the central ideas. Here Brittain also successfully integrates a theme characteristic of Holtby’s novels, and it seems likely that the characterization of Ellison Campbell, although primarily drawn from Bentley, gains force and complexity from Holtby associations.

    In her careful foreword to the novel Brittain states that Honourable Estate “purports to show how the women’s revolution—one of the greatest in all history—united with the struggle for other democratic ideals and the cataclysm of the war to alter the private destinies of individuals.” The qualities of the three marriages that compose the main plot—extreme failure of the Rutherstons’, partial failure of the Alleyndenes’, and qualified success of Denis and Ruth’s—filter to the reader the changing social position of women from the Victorian era to the 1930s. The title of the novel, Brittain comments in her foreword, does not refer only to the marriage service; “it also stands for that position and respect for which the world’s women and the world’s workers have striven” and for “that maturity of the spirit which comes through suffering and experience.” Despite its burdens of wordiness, overemphasis, and earnestness, Honourable Estate is an impressive success in achieving Brittain’s intentions; it gained wide critical approval and was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States.

    After the publication of this ambitious book Brittain found herself deeply disturbed by the portents of a second world war and felt compelled to give as much time and energy as possible to writing articles and making speeches in the cause of maintaining peace. She met the Anglican priest and pacifist Dick Sheppard at a peace rally where they both spoke, and she decided in 1937 to abandon the foundering League of Nations Union and join his vigorous new Peace Pledge Union. Contributing that year to the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, she proclaimed that, as “an uncompromising pacifist, I hold war to be a crime against humanity, whoever fights it and against whomever it is fought.” From then to the end of her life she never wavered in her commitment, devoting extensive time and energy to committee work, speeches, and journalism in support of pacifism.

    In addition, from 1939 through 1946 Brittain wrote and distributed some 200 issues of a discussion newsletter, Letter to Peace-Lovers; selections were published in 1940 as War-Time Letters to Peace Lovers and in 1988 as Testament of a Peace Lover: Letters from Vera Brittain. She also published several polemical works related to the war and her pacifist beliefs, including England’s Hour: An Autobiography, 1939-1941 (1941) and Humiliation with Honour (1942), and forceful shorter works arguing against the blockade and saturation-bombing: “One of These Little Ones…”: A Plea to Parents and Others for Europe’s Children (1943) and Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means (1944). The first draft of the latter had been published in the United States as “Massacre by Bombing” in the February 1944 edition of Fellowship, the magazine of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, before its British appearance; it provoked a furor, and in later years Brittain saw it as the main cause of her much-reduced popularity with American readers after the war.

    Despite the demands of her pacifist activism, in the later stages of World War II and in its immediate aftermath she managed to find time and energy to write her two final novels, Account Rendered (1944) and Born 1925: A Novel of Youth (1948). Again, both were based firmly on personal experience and observation, although now primarily biographical rather than autobiographical: the personalities and lives of two men she knew well and admired deeply provided protagonists who also embody some of her own strongest values. Both novels differ strikingly from their predecessors in being dominated by Brittain’s pacifist convictions, reflecting the shift in her life imposed by World War II; feminism and socialism are at most subsidiary themes. Both novels are notably shorter and less ambitious than Honourable Estate, and, although substantial works, they seem to show effects of Brittain’s exhaustion at the end of the war.

    Brittain recalled the genesis of her next novel in Testament of Experience:

    In the autumn of 1939, I was summoned to a murder trial as a potential witness for the defense. The prisoner, a sensitive and intelligent professional man, had caused his wife’s death and then attempted suicide, but afterwards claimed that he could remember nothing of the tragedy. A team of psychological specialists traced back this amnesia to a bomb explosion in 1918, and my acquaintance was found “Guilty but Insane.”

    Originally titled “Day of Judgment,” Account Rendered fictionalizes this “strange and tragic story which linked the First War with the Second,” allowing Brittain to demonstrate clearly the destructive effect of war on mind and spirit.

    While in prison the convicted man—Leonard Lockhart, a Nottingham doctor—readily gave Brittain permission to use his story as the basis of a novel which Brittain began to write in the autumn of 1942. Unfortunately, when the text was submitted to him in April 1943, Lockhart, by then out of prison, withdrew his permission. Typically, Brittain did not give up; she set about rewriting the novel to remove any material that might make the protagonist, Francis Halkin, identifiable as Lockhart. Halkin became a musician instead of a doctor, for instance. In the process of rewriting, Brittain added several new minor characters, including—a felicitous stroke—Ruth Alleyndene, Brittain’s fictional representative in Honourable Estate, who now, as a Labour MP, fulfills Brittain’s role as observer at the trial. Perhaps the least satisfactory elements of the novel are the sentimental romance between Halkin and the self-abnegating, hero-worshiping Enid Clay and Halkin’s climactic opportunity to prove himself a conventional hero through his courage after a bomb falls on the prison while he is still a prisoner. Significantly, both of these episodes are Brittain’s own invention, and both are thematically damaging.

    Published first in the United States, Account Rendered received some negative reviews (one termed Brittain an “unapologetic propagandist”); these were fueled, she was convinced, by political hostility. When the novel appeared in England some months later, it was much more successful, selling out its entire first printing of fifty thousand copies before publication and receiving better reviews.

    Its successor was Born 1925, Brittain’s “novel about Dick Sheppard.” In Testament of Experience she revealed that the protagonist of the novel, Robert Carbury, and much of the plot were centered on the personality and life of the charismatic priest who had founded the Peace Pledge Union, converted Brittain to full pacifism, and died before World War II began. Carbury, winner of a Victoria Cross in World War I, is a priest dedicated to the preservation of peace. Brittain alters the facts of Sheppard’s life to allow Carbury to live until the war is almost over; then, like Halkin, he is given a climactic moment of moral triumph after enduring his calvary of “war-time execration.” In such respects the novel repeats the pattern of Not Without Honour.

    Through much of the novel, however, Carbury is embroiled in private domestic conflict, first with his actress wife Sylvia and then with his son. For, like Honourable Estate, Born 1925 is a generational novel in which, through Carbury’s children Adrian and Josephine—based explicitly on Brittain’s children John and Shirley as she perceived them at the time she was writing the novel—Brittain seeks to demonstrate some of the changes brought about by World War II. The conflict between father and son, echoing that between John Catlin and his parents, is resolved at the end of the novel—but only after Robert is dead.

    Like Account Rendered, Born 1925 sold well in England and was respectfully received by critics. But it was not the triumph that Brittain had been hoping for, and she succumbed to depression, telling Catlin, “More and more I become just a `popular’ writer who makes money. . .. the prestige goes to hell.” During the next two decades she attempted no further novels; instead, when not engaged in social action or traveling (among other countries, she visited India and South Africa), she wrote in other genres—notably autobiography, such as Testament of Experience; biography, including In the Steps of John Bunyan: An Excursion into Puritan England (1950), Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait (1963), and Envoy Extraordinary: A Study of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Her Contribution to Modern India (1965); feminist history, with Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (1953) and The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (1960); and pacifist history, such as The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (1964). While these are worthy books, they also represent a decline from the high literary ambitions and achievements of the 1930s and through World War II.

    Only once, it appears, did she seriously consider writing another novel; but her proposal, in 1960, was politely rejected by Macmillan, so her literary career did not end as she would have preferred, with success in the genre she most respected. Some years earlier she had told her daughter that she “would much rather be a writer of plays and really first-class novels, instead of the biographies and `documentaries’ to which such talent as I have seems best suited.”

    That depressed comment surely minimizes her literary achievement. Apart from her incontrovertible successes in other genres, notably journalism and autobiography, at least one of Brittain’s novels, Honourable Estate, is a substantial achievement and deserves to be read widely by a new generation of readers. None of the other four lacks literary competence, interest, and thoughtful comment on central moral issues of our time. All five, revalued according to aesthetic criteria that do not automatically demote non-Modernistic writings, should be accorded a higher critical standing than they hold at present.

    Brittain’s novels, more than Holtby’s, open themselves to easy dismissal as merely autobiographical and propagandist, but apart from their attractively straightforward narrative qualities, all of them, even the last two, present unintended complexity that should interest and challenge new readers. In Born 1925, for instance, Brittain’s conception of a satisfactory marriage of equals, the woman maintaining her career, the husband sensitive and supportive, receives a jolt when Sylvia admits to herself that love is a random atavistic force quite beyond rational control: “Occasionally she found herself wishing that there was more unrestrained lust and less tender reverence in Robert’s caresses; she longed for him just sometimes to take her inconsiderately, without asking first.” Here what may be autobiographical in origin seems to interfere with the ostensible movement of the text, stirring qualification and further consideration by the reader of the final meaning of the novel.

    Brittain saw herself as representative of her generation, and as she stated in her foreword to Testament of Youth, she constantly endeavored in her writing “to put the life of an ordinary individual into its niche in contemporary history.” Her training as a historian, and her intense concern with social issues, mark all her novels. In these, no less than in Testament of Youth, she avowedly fictionalized her own experiences and opinions, and those of friends and family members; but she did so with a forceful directness that infuses all five novels with moral and historical insight. Since, like all her works, they were written to reach the widest possible audience in the hope of informing and influencing as many of her contemporaries as possible, she paid minimal attention to subtlety or complexity—though, because she was an honest and intelligent analyst, these qualities nevertheless enter her texts. However much she may at times have regretted her failure to impress highbrow critics and gain a secure reputation as one of the best novelists of her day, Brittain’s achievement as a novelist was nevertheless considerable, and her novels are eminently worthy of being read and revalued in our time.
    Bibliography

    WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:

    BOOKS

    Verses of a V.A.D. (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1918). 

    The Dark Tide (London: Richards, 1923; New York: Macmillan, 1936). 

    Not Without Honour (London: Richards, 1924). 

    Women’s Work in Modern England (London: Noel Douglas, 1928). 

    Halcyon, or the Future of Monogamy (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Trübner, 1929; New York: Dutton, 1929). 

    Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (London: Gollancz, 1933; New York: Macmillan, 1933). 

    Poems of the War and After (London: Gollancz, 1934; New York: Macmillan, 1934). 

    Honourable Estate: A Novel of Transition (London: Gollancz, 1936; New York: Macmillan, 1936). 

    Thrice a Stranger: New Chapters of Autobiography (London: Gollancz, 1938; New York: Macmillan, 1938). 

    Testament of Friendship: The Story of Winifred Holtby (London: Macmillan, 1940; New York: Macmillan, 1940). 

    War-Time Letters to Peace Lovers (London: Peace Book, 1940). 

    England’s Hour: An Autobiography 1939-1941 (London: Macmillan, 1941; New York: Macmillan, 1941). 

    Humiliation with Honour (London: Dakers, 1942; New York: Fellowship Publications, 1943). 

    “One of These Little Ones. . .” : A Plea to Parents and Others for Europe’s Children (London: Dakers, 1943). 

    Seed of Chaos: What Mass Bombing Really Means (London: Published for the Bombing Restriction Committee by New Vision, 1944). 

    Account Rendered (New York: Macmillan, 1944; London: Macmillan, 1945). 

    On Becoming a Writer (London: Hutchinson, 1947); republished as On Being an Author, with an introduction and notes by George Savage (New York: Macmillan, 1948). 

    Born 1925: A Novel of Youth (London: Macdonald, 1948; New York: Macmillan, 1949). 

    In the Steps of John Bunyan: An Excursion into Puritan England (London: Rich & Cowan, 1950); republished as Valiant Pilgrim: The Story of John Bunyan and Puritan England (New York: Macmillan, 1950). 

    Search After Sunrise (London: Macmillan, 1951). 

    The Story of St. Martin’s: An Epic of London (London: Reverend L. M. Charles Edwards, 1951). 

    Lady into Woman: A History of Women from Victoria to Elizabeth II (London: Dakers, 1953; New York: Macmillan, 1954). 

    Testament of Experience: An Autobiographical Story of the Years 1925-1950 (London: Gollancz, 1957; New York: Macmillan, 1957). 

    Long Shadows, by Brittain and George E. W. Sizer (London & Hull: A. Brown, 1958). 

    The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London: Harrap, 1960; New York: Macmillan, 1960). 

    Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963). 

    The Rebel Passion: A Short History of Some Pioneer Peacemakers (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964; Nyack, N.Y.: Fellowship Publications, 1964). 

    Envoy Extraordinary: A Study of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and Her Contribution to Modern India(London: Allen & Unwin, 1965). 

    Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (London: Femina, 1968; South Brunswick, N.J.: Barnes, 1969). 

    Chronicle of Youth: The War Diary 1913-1917, edited by Alan Bishop and Terry Smart (London: Gollancz, 1981: New York: Morrow, 1982). 

    Testament of a Generation: The Journalism of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby, edited by Paul Berry and Bishop (London: Virago, 1985). 

    Chronicle of Friendship: Diary of the Thirties, 1932-1939, edited by Bishop (London: Gollancz, 1986). 

    Testament of a Peace Lover: Letters from Vera Brittain, edited by Winifred and Alan Eden-Green (London: Virago, 1988). 

    Wartime Chronicle: Diary 1939-1945, edited by Bishop and Y. Aleksandra Bennett (London: Gollancz, 1989).

    OTHER

    Winifred Holtby, Pavements at Anderby: Tales of “South Riding” and Other Regions, edited by Brittain and H. S. Reid (London: Collins, 1937; New York: Macmillan, 1938). 

    Above All Nations: An Anthology, compiled by Brittain, George Catlin, and Sheila Hodges (London: Gollancz, 1945); revised and enlarged by Devere Allen and Gert Spindler (New York: Harper, 1949).

    LETTERS

    Selected Letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, 1920-1935, edited by Brittain and Geoffrey Handley-Taylor (London & Hull: A. Brown, 1960).


    Further Readings

    FURTHER READINGS ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Biographies:

    Shirley Williams, “My Mother and Her Friend,” Listener, 114 (21 November 1985): 33-34. 

    Hilary Bailey, Vera Brittain (London: Penguin, 1987). 

    John Catlin, Family Quartet (London: Hamilton, 1987). 

    Williams, “Testament to the Touchstone of My Life,” Independent, 29 December 1993. 

    Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995). 

    Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 


    References:

    George Catlin, For God’s Sake, Go! (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1972). 

    Geoffrey Handley-Taylor and John Malcolm Dockeray, eds., Vera Brittain: Occasional Papers (London: Black Pennell, 1983). 

    Jean E. Kennard, Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership (Hanover, N.H.: Published for the University of New Hampshire by the University Press of New England, 1989). 

    Lynn Layton, “Vera Brittain’s Testament(s),” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, edited by Margaret Higonnet and Jane Jenson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 70-83.
    ---------------------------------------------------
    ---------------------------------------------------

    August, 1914

    By Vera Mary Brittain
    God said, “Men have forgotten Me:
    The souls that sleep shall wake again,
    And blinded eyes must learn to see.”

    So since redemption comes through pain
    He smote the earth with chastening rod,
    And brought destruction's lurid reign;

    But where His desolation trod
    The people in their agony
    Despairing cried, “There is no God.”

    Source: Verses of a VAD and Other Poems (1918)
    ----------------------

    Epitaph On My Days in Hospital

    By Vera Mary Brittain

    I found in you a holy place apart,
    Sublime endurance, God in man revealed,
    Where mending broken bodies slowly healed
    My broken heart

    -----------------------------

    Roundel

    By Vera Mary Brittain

    (“Died of Wounds”)

    Because you died, I shall not rest again,
    But wander ever through the lone world wide,
    Seeking the shadow of a dream grown vain
    Because you died.

    I shall spend brief and idle hours beside
    The many lesser loves that still remain,
    But find in none my triumph and my pride;

    And Disillusion's slow corroding stain
    Will creep upon each quest but newly tried,
    For every striving now shall nothing gain
    Because you died.
    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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    Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt
    Poet Details
    1836–1919


    Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt
    Poet Details
    1836–1919
    Raised on a plantation in antebellum Lexington, Kentucky, poet Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt was educated at Henry Female College and left the South in her 20s. Her poems appeared regularly in the Louisville Journal and the New York Ledger by the time of her 1861 marriage to poet and diplomat John L. Piatt. In 1882, the Piatts moved to Cork, Ireland, where they became friends with the writers Austin Dobson, Edmund Gosse, Alice Meynell, and Katherine Tynan.

    Piatt often took an unconventional approach to form, engaging social and domestic themes by layering dialogue, dramatic realism, and irony. Critic Stephen Burt, introducing a Poetry Daily feature on her poem “The Sight of Trouble,” observed that “binocular vision—feminism and tragedy, if you like; harm remediable and irremediable, seen together—makes Piatt stand out.”

    Well-known and critically acclaimed during her life, Piatt published more than a dozen collections of poetry, including A Voyage to the Fortunate Isles and Other Poems (1885), Dramatic Persons and Moods (1880), An Irish Garland (1884), and The Witch in the Glass (1888). With her husband, she collaborated on The Nests of Washington and Other Poems (1863) and The Children Out-of-Doors (1885). Her poems are featured in An American Anthology 1787–1900 (1900) and numerous other anthologies. Piatt’s Poems appeared in 1894. She died in Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1919.

    Recent scholars, including Larry Michaels, editor of That New World: The Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt 1861–1911 (1999); Paula Bernat Bennett, editor of Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry of Sarah Piatt (2001); and Jessica Roberts, author of Genealogies of Convention: Reading the Poetry of Sarah Piatt and Herman Melville in the Nineteenth-Century American Culture of Anthologies (2005), have returned Piatt’s poetry to critical and popular audiences.



    Poems By Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt
    Army of Occupation
    Counsel—In the South
    Giving Back the Flower
    Hearing the Battle.—July 21, 1861
    The Old Slave-Music

    Poet Categorization
    Poet's Region
    U.S., Mid-Atlantic
    Life Span
    1836–1919


    ------------------------------------


    Army of Occupation -

    -------Poem by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

    The summer blew its little drifts of sound—
    Tangled with wet leaf-shadows and the light
    Small breath of scattered morning buds—around
    The yellow path through which our footsteps wound.
    Below, the Capitol rose glittering white.

    There stretched a sleeping army. One by one,
    They took their places until thousands met;
    No leader's stars flashed on before, and none
    Leaned on his sword or stagger'd with his gun—
    I wonder if their feet have rested yet!

    They saw the dust, they joined the moving mass,
    They answer'd the fierce music's cry for blood,
    Then straggled here and lay down in the grass:—
    Wear flowers for such, shores whence their feet did pass;
    Sing tenderly; O river's haunted flood!

    They had been sick, and worn, and weary, when
    They stopp'd on this calm hill beneath the trees:
    Yet if, in some red-clouded dawn, again
    The country should be calling to her men,
    Shall the r[e]veill[e] not remember these?

    Around them underneath the mid-day skies
    The dreadful phantoms of the living walk,
    And by low moons and darkness with their cries—
    The mothers, sisters, wives with faded eyes,
    Who call still names amid their broken talk.

    And there is one who comes alone and stands
    At his dim fireless hearth—chill'd and oppress'd
    By Something he had summon'd to his lands,
    While the weird pallor of its many hands
    Points to his rusted sword in his own breast!

    ----------------------------------------------


    Giving Back the Flower


    By Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

    So, because you chose to follow me into the subtle sadness of night,
    And to stand in the half-set moon with the weird fall-light on your glimmering hair,
    Till your presence hid all of the earth and all of the sky from my sight,
    And to give me a little scarlet bud, that was dying of frost, to wear,

    Say, must you taunt me forever, forever? You looked at my hand and you knew
    That I was the slave of the Ring, while you were as free as the wind is free.
    When I saw your corpse in your coffin, I flung back your flower to you;
    It was all of yours that I ever had; you may keep it, and—keep from me.

    Ah? so God is your witness. Has God, then, no world to look after but ours?
    May He not have been searching for that wild stat, with the trailing plumage, that
    flew
    Far over a part of our darkness while we were there by the freezing flowers,
    Or else brightening some planet’s luminous rings, instead of thinking of you?

    Or, if He was near us at all, do you think that He would sit listening there
    Because you sang “Hear me, Norma,” to a woman in jewels and lace,
    While, so close to us, down in another street, in the wet, unlighted air,
    There were children crying for bread and fire, and mothers who questioned His
    grace?

    Or perhaps He had gone to the ghastly field where the fight had been that day,
    To number the bloody stabs that were there, to look at and judge the dead;
    Or else to the place full of fever and moans where the wretched wounded lay;
    At least I do not believe that He cares to remember a word that you said.

    So take back your flowers, I tell you—of its sweetness I now have no need;
    Yes; take back your flower down into the stillness and mystery to keep;
    When you wake I will take it, and God, then, perhaps will witness indeed,
    But go, now, and tell Death he must watch you, and not let you walk in your sleep.
    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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