2nd Semester Coach Cochran

Katherine Ann Porter

Born Callie Russel Porter to Harrison Boone Porter and Mary Alice (Jones) Porter. In 1892, when Porter was two years old, her mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's father took his four surviving children (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas. The depth of her grandmother's influence can be inferred from Porter's later adoption of her name. Her grandmother died while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas. After her grandmother's death, the family lived in several towns in Texas and Louisiana, staying with relatives or living in rented rooms. She was enrolled in free schools wherever the family was living, and for a year in 1904 she attended the Thomas School, a private Methodist school in San Antonio, Texas. This was her only formal education beyond grammar school. In 1906, at age sixteen, Porter left home and married John Henry Koontz in Lufkin, Texas. She subsequently converted to his religion, Roman Catholicism. Koontz, the son of a wealthy Texas ranching family, was physically abusive; they divorced in 1914. In 1914 she escaped to Chicago, where she worked briefly as an extra in movies. She then returned to Texas and worked the small-town entertainment circuit as an actress and singer. In 1915, she asked that her name be changed to Katherine Anne Porter as part of her divorce decree. Also in 1915, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent the following two years in sanatoria, where she decided to become a writer. It was discovered during that time, however, that she had bronchitis, not TB. In 1917, she began writing for the Fort Worth Critic, critiquing dramas and writing society gossip. In 1918, she wrote for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colorado. In the same year, Katherine almost died in Denver during the 1918 flu pandemic. When she was discharged from the hospital months later, she was frail and completely bald. When her hair finally grew back, it was white and remained that color for the rest of her life. Her experience was reflected in her trilogy of short novels, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), for which she received the first annual gold medal for literature in 1940 from the Society of Libraries of New York University. In 1919, Porter moved to Greenwich Village in New York City and made her living ghost writing, writing children's stories and doing publicity work for a motion picture company. The year in New York City had a politically radicalizing effect on her; and in 1920, she went to work for a magazine publisher in Mexico, where she became acquainted with members of the Mexican leftist movement, including Diego Rivera. Eventually, however, Porter became disillusioned with the revolutionary movement and its leaders. In the 1920s she also became intensely critical of religion and remained so until the last decade of her life, when she again embraced the Roman Catholic Church. Between 1920 and 1930, Porter traveled back and forth between Mexico and New York City and began publishing short stories and essays. Her first published story was "Maria Concepcion" in The Century Magazine. (In his 1960s novel Providence Island, Calder Willingham had the character Jim fantasize a perfect lover and he called her Maria Concepcion Diaz.) In 1930, she published her first short-story collection, Flowering Judas and Other Stories. An expanded edition of this collection was published in 1935 and received such critical acclaim that it alone virtually assured her place in American literature. In 1926, Porter married Ernest Stock and lived briefly in Connecticut before divorcing him in 1927. During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Porter enjoyed a prominent reputation as one of America's most distinguished writers, but her limited output and equally-limited sales had her living on grants and advances for most of the era. During the 1930s, Porter spent several years in Europe during which she continued to publish short stories. In 1930, she married Eugene Pressly, a writer. In 1938, upon returning from Europe, she divorced Pressly and married Albert Russel Erskine, Jr., a graduate student. He reportedly divorced her in 1942 after discovering her real age and that she was 20 years his senior. Porter became an elected member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943, and was a writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities, including the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, and the University of Virginia. Between 1948 and 1958, Porter taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Texas, where her unconventional manner of teaching made her popular with students. Three of Porter's stories were adapted into radio dramas on the program NBC University Theatre. "Noon Wine" was made into an hour drama in early 1948 and two years later "Flowering Judas" and "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" each were produced in half-hour dramas on an episode of the hour-long program. Porter herself made two appearances on the radio series giving critical commentary on works by Rebecca West and Virginia Woolf. In the 1950s and '60s she occasionally appeared on television in programs discussing literature. Porter published her only novel, Ship of Fools in 1962, based on her reminiscences of a 1931 ocean cruise she had taken from Vera Cruz, Mexico, to Germany. The novel's success finally gave her financial security (she reportedly sold the film rights for Ship of Fools for $500,000). Producer David O. Selznick was after the film rights; but United Artists who owned the property, demanded $400,000. The novel was adapted for film by Abby Mann; producer and director Stanley Kramer featured Vivien Leigh in her final film performance. Despite Porter's claim that after the publication of Ship of Fools she would not win any more prizes in America, in 1966 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the U.S. National Book Award for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter. That year she was also appointed to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1977, Porter published The Never-Ending Wrong, an account of the notorious trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which she had protested 50 years earlier. Porter died in Silver Spring, Maryland, on September 18, 1980, at the age of 90, and her ashes were buried next to her mother at Indian Creek Cemetery in Texas.

Robert Frost

Born in California but identified with New England. Father died when he was 11, left California. Family moved to New England, mother supported them as a teacher. Graduated from high school in 1891 in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Shared valedictorian with Edith White whom he later married. Occasional attendance at Dartmouth College and Harvard and a variety of different jobs including an attempt to run a farm in New Hampshire, marked his next 20 years. Made a new start in 1912, taking his family, which included four children, to England. In England he worked on his poetry and found a publisher for his first book, A Boy's Will. Pound reviewed it favorably. Pound helped get his 2nd book, North of Boston, published in 1914 which became widely praised. This favorable reception persuaded Frost to return home. Bought another farm in New Hampshire. Made money from books, papers, teaching, and lecturing, however this success came too late to ease bitterness of earlier struggles. Personal tragedy came with the suicide of a son and mental breakdown of a daughter. Clarity of fiction, colloquial rhythms, simplicity of images, folksy speaker intended to make the poems look natural and unplanned. Modernist movement, response to high modernisms fondness for obscurity and difficulty. Rejected modernist internationalism and revitalized the tradition of New England regionalism, spreading the myth that rural New England was the heart of America. Played the rhythms of ordinary speech against formal patterns of line and verse and contained them within traditional forms. Colloquial diction: interacting with blank verse, was central to his Dramatic Monologue. Traditional forms were the essence of poetry, material with which poets responded to flux and disorder, what he called decay. Poetry was, he said, one step backward taken. His poems fall into a few types: nature lyrics, dramatic narratives in blank verse about country people, poems of commentary or generaliz, and humorous or sardonic. In the nature lyrics a comparison often emerges between the outer scene and the psyche, a comparison of what Frost in one poem called "Outer and Inner weather". Often interpreted as an ideological descendant of the 19th century American Transcendentalists. However, where they saw a benign creator, he saw "no expression, nothing to express". He avoided political movements, because they were movements group undertakings. Opposed social programs like FDR's New Deal and artistic programs similarly aimed. A Further Range earned him his third of four Pulitzer Prizes. Left-leaning critics denounced the volumes "reactionary" construction of his poetic voice. First responded with a newly didactic kind of poetry.

Ezra Pound

Born in Idaho. Parents settled near Philadelphia. Knew at 15 what he wanted to do. Had this in mind at the University of Pennsylvania. Here he met William Carlos Williams and romanced Hilda Doolittle (H. D.) at Hamilton College. Received M.A. in 1906. Planned to support himself as college teacher while writing. Poetry he had in mind was melodious in versification and diction, romantic in themes, world weary in tone (DECADENT). He was committed to art for arts sake. Personality did not work well with being a teacher, lost his 1st teaching job at Wabash College in Indiana in less than 6 months. Thought America had no place for him and went to Europe. Settled in London and became immersed in literary life. Supported himself by teaching and reviewing for several journals. Married Dorothy Shakespeare. Propagandized against poetry that made him want to be a poet, desire to "make new" but had a deep attachment to the old. Campaigned for imagism, which attempted to present object directly, avoiding ornate diction and complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry. It's significance had to appear inherent in its spare, clean presentation. It's elaborate grammatical constructions seemed artificial. Pound soon moved on to Vorticism, which, although still espousing direct and bare presentation, sought for some principle of dynamism and energy in the image. During his Imagist phase, Pound was connected with H.D. and Richard Arlington, a British poet who became H.D.'s husband. As a corticosteroids he allied with iconoclastic writer and artist Wyndham Lewis. Thought the United States was culturally backward major works during London years were free translations of languages I know to most Westerners. Experimented with dramatic monologue form developed by Robert Browning. Poems from these years appeared in his volumes. Though imagist view of poetry seemed to exclude the long poem as a workable form, Pound could not overcome the traditional belief that a really great poem had to be long. Hoped to write a poem for his time that would unite biography and history by representing the total content of his mind and memory. To this end he began working on Cantos. Cantos were separate poems of varying lengths, combining reminiscence, meditation, description, and transcriptions from books

William Carlos Williams

Born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to the United States with her son, remarried, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son, Williams's father, married a Puerto Rican woman of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. Williams received his primary and secondary education in Rutherford until 1897, when he was sent for two years to a school near Geneva and to the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. He attended the Horace Mann School upon his return to New York City and, having passed a special examination, was admitted in 1902 to the medical school of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1906. Upon leaving University of Pennsylvania, Williams did internships at both French Hospital and Child's Hospital in New York before going to Leipzig for advanced study of pediatrics. He published his first book, Poems, in 1909. Williams married Florence Herman (1891-1976) in 1912, after he returned from Germany. They moved into a house in Rutherford, New Jersey, which was their home for many years. Shortly afterward, his second book of poems, The Tempers, was published by a London press through the help of his friend Ezra Pound, whom he met while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Around 1914, Williams had his first son, William E. Williams, followed by his second son, Paul H. Williams, in 1917. His first son would grow up to follow Williams in becoming a doctor. Although his primary occupation was as a family doctor, Williams had a successful literary career as a poet. In addition to poetry (his main literary focus), he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement through his friendships with Pound and H.D. (whom he also befriended at the University of Pennsylvania), but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from theirs and his style changed to express his commitment to a modernist expression of his immediate environment. In 1920, Williams was sharply criticized by many of his peers (such as H.D., Pound and Wallace Stevens) when he published one of his most experimental books, Kora in Hell: Improvisations. Pound called the work "incoherent" and H.D. thought the book was "flippant". The Dada artist and poet Baroness Elsa critiqued Williams's sexual and artistic politics in her experimental prose poem review entitled "Thee I call 'Hamlet of Wedding Ring'", published in The Little Review in March 1921. Three years later, Williams published one of his seminal books of poetry, Spring and All, which contained the classic poems "By the road to the contagious hospital", "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "To Elsie". However, in 1922, the year it was published, the appearance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land became a literary sensation and overshadowed Williams's very different brand of poetic Modernism. In his Autobiography, Williams would later write, "I felt at once that The Waste Land had set me back twenty years and I'm sure it did. Critically, Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit". And although he respected the work of Eliot, Williams became openly critical of Eliot's highly intellectual style with its frequent use of foreign languages and allusions to classical and European literature. Instead, Williams preferred colloquial American English. -Say it, no ideas but in things— nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident— split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained— secret—into the body of the light!"" from Paterson: Book I In his modernist epic collage of place entitled Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), an account of the history, people, and essence of Paterson, New Jersey, Williams wrote his own modern epic poem, focusing on "the local" on a wider scale than he had previously attempted. He also examined the role of the poet in American society and famously summarized his poetic method in the phrase "No ideas but in things" (found in his poem "A Sort of a Song" and repeated again and again in Paterson). In his later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets. He had an especially significant influence on many of the American literary movements of the 1950s, including the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. One of Williams's most dynamic relationships as a mentor was with fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth section of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's important first book, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. Williams suffered a heart attack in 1948 and, after 1949, a series of strokes. Severe depression after one such stroke caused him to be confined to Hillside Hospital, New York, for four months in 1953. He died on March 4, 1963, at the age of 79 at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell said of his poetry, "William Carlos Williams is as magically observant and mimetic as a good novelist. He reproduces the details of what he sees with surprising freshness, clarity, and economy; and he sees just as extraordinarily, sometimes, the forms of this earth, the spirit moving behind the letters. His quick transparent lines have the nervous and contracted strength, move as jerkily and intently as a bird."R. P. Blackmur said of Williams poetry "the Imagism of 1912, self-transcended." A contemporary, Harriet Monroe said of Williams 'to assert his freedoms he must play the devil, showing himself rioting in purple and turquoise pools of excess.' Williams's major collections are Spring and All (1923), The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), and Paterson (1963, repr. 1992). His most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow", an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also "This Is Just To Say"). However, Williams, like his peer and friend Ezra Pound, had already rejected the Imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. In 1920, this project took shape in Contact, a periodical launched by Williams and fellow writer Robert McAlmon: "The two editors sought American cultural renewal in the local condition in clear opposition to the internationalists—Pound, The Little Review, and the Baroness." Yvor Winters, the poet/critic, judged that Williams's verse bears a certain resemblance to the best lyric poets of the 13th century. Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh and uniquely American form of poetry whose subject matter centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He came up with the concept of the "variable foot" which Williams never clearly defined, although the concept vaguely referred to Williams's method of determining line breaks. The Paris Review called it "a metrical device to resolve the conflict between form and freedom in verse." One of Williams's aims, in experimenting with his "variable foot", was to show the American (opposed to European) rhythm that he claimed was present in everyday American language. Stylistically, Williams also worked with variations on a line-break pattern that he labeled "triadic-line poetry" in which he broke a long line into three free-verse segments. A well-known example of the "triadic line " can be found in Williams's love-poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower." In a review of Herbert Leibowitz's biography of William Carlos Williams, "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams, book critic Christopher Benfey wrote of Williams's poetry: "Early and late, Williams held the conviction that poetry was, in his friend Kenneth Burke's phrase, 'equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.' The American ground was wild and new, a place where a blooming foreigner needed all the help he could get. Poems were as essential to a full life as physical health or the love of men and women." Williams expressed this viewpoint most famously in a line from his poem "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower" in which he wrote: It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Familial instability

Broken home and families, family is NOT stable

Claude McKay

Claude McKay, born Festus Claudius McKay, was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. His work ranged from vernacular verse celebrating peasant life in Jamaica to poems challenging white authority in America, and from generally straightforward tales of black life in both Jamaica and America to more philosophically ambitious fiction addressing instinctual/intellectual duality, which McKay found central to the black individual's efforts to cope in a racist society. Consistent in his various writings is his disdain for racism and the sense that bigotry's implicit stupidity renders its adherents pitiable as well as loathsome. McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in 1889. The son of peasant farmers, he was infused with racial pride and a great sense of his African heritage. His early literary interests, though, were in English poetry. Under the tutelage of his brother, schoolteacher Uriah Theophilus McKay, and a neighboring Englishman, Walter Jekyll, McKay studied the British masters—including John Milton, Alexander Pope, and the later Romantics—and European philosophers such as eminent pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, whose works Jekyll was then translating from German into English. It was Jekyll who advised aspiring poet McKay to cease mimicking the English poets and begin producing verse in Jamaican dialect. At age 17 McKay departed from Sunny Ville to apprentice as a woodworker in Brown's Town. But he studied there only briefly before leaving to work as a constable in the Jamaican capital, Kingston. In Kingston he experienced and encountered extensive racism, probably for the first time in his life. His native Sunny Ville was predominantly populated by blacks, but in substantially white Kingston blacks were considered inferior and capable of only menial tasks. McKay quickly grew disgusted with the city's bigoted society, and within one year he returned home to Sunny Ville. During his brief stays in Brown's Town and Kingston McKay continued writing poetry, and once back in Sunny Ville, with Jekyll's encouragement, he published the verse collections Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads in London in 1912. In these two volumes McKay portrays opposing aspects of black life in Jamaica. Songs of Jamaica presents an almost celebratory portrait of peasant life, with poems addressing subjects such as the peaceful death of McKay's mother and the black people's ties to the Jamaican land. Constab Ballads, however, presents a substantially bleaker perspective on the plight of Jamaican blacks and contains several poems explicitly critical of life in urban Kingston. Writing in The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone noted the differing sentiments of the two collections, but he also contended that the volumes share a sense of directness and refreshing candor. He wrote: "These first two volumes are already marked by a sharpness of vision, an inborn realism, and a freshness which provides a pleasing contrast with the conventionality which, at this time, prevails among the black poets of the United States." For Songs of Jamaica McKay received an award and stipend from the Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences. He used the money to finance a trip to America, and in 1912 he arrived in South Carolina. He then traveled to Alabama and enrolled at the Tuskegee Institute, where he studied for approximately two months before transferring to Kansas State College. In 1914 he left school entirely for New York City and worked various menial jobs. As in Kingston, McKay encountered racism in New York City, and that racism compelled him to continue writing poetry. In 1917, under the pseudonym Eli Edwards, McKay published two poems in the periodical Seven Arts. His verses were discovered by critic Frank Hattis, who then included some of McKay's other poems in Pearson's Magazine. Among McKay's most famous poems from this period is "To the White Fiends," a vitriolic challenge to white oppressors and bigots. A few years later McKay befriended Max Eastman, communist sympathizer and editor of the magazine Liberator. McKay published more poems in Eastman's magazine, notably the inspirational "If We Must Die," which defended black rights and threatened retaliation for prejudice and abuse. "Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack," McKay wrote, "Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" In Black Poets of the United States, Jean Wagner noted that "If We Must Die" transcends specifics of race and is widely prized as an inspiration to persecuted people throughout the world. "Along with the will to resistance of black Americans that it expresses," Wagner wrote, "it voices also the will of oppressed people of every age who, whatever their race and wherever their region, are fighting with their backs against the wall to win their freedom." Upon publication of "If We Must Die" McKay commenced two years of travel and work abroad. He spent part of 1919 in Holland and Belgium, then moved to London and worked on the periodical Workers' Dreadnought. In 1920 he published his third verse collection, Spring in New Hampshire, which was notable for containing "Harlem Shadows," a poem about the plight of black prostitutes in the degrading urban environment. McKay used this poem, which symbolically presents the degradation of the entire black race, as the title for a subsequent collection. McKay returned to the United States in 1921 and involved himself in various social causes. The next year he published Harlem Shadows, a collection from previous volumes and periodicals publications. This work contains many of his most acclaimed poems—including "If We Must Die"—and assured his stature as a leading member of the literary movement referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. He capitalized on his acclaim by redoubling his efforts on behalf of blacks and laborers: he became involved in the Universal Negro Improvement Association and produced several articles for its publication, Negro World, and he traveled to the Soviet Union which he had previously visited with Eastman, and attended the Communist Party's Fourth Congress. Eventually McKay went to Paris, where he developed a severe respiratory infection and supported himself intermittently by working as an artist's model. His infection eventually necessitated his hospitalization, but after recovering he resumed traveling, and for the next eleven years he toured Europe and portions of northern Africa. During this period he also published three novels and a short story collection. The first novel, Home to Harlem, may be his most recognized title. Published in 1928, it concerns a black soldier—Jake—who abruptly abandons his military duties and returns home to Harlem. Jake represents, in rather overt fashion, the instinctual aspect of the individual, and his ability to remain true to his feelings enables him to find happiness with a former prostitute, Felice. Juxtaposed with Jake's behavior is that of Ray, an aspiring writer burdened with despair. His sense of bleakness derives largely from his intellectualized perspective, and it eventually compels him to leave alien, racist America for his homeland of Haiti. In The Negro Novel in America, Robert Bone wrote that the predominantly instinctual Jake and the intellectual Ray "represent different ways of rebelling against Western civilization." Bone added, however, that McKay was not entirely successful in articulating his protagonists' relationships in white society. He declared that Home to Harlem was "unable to develop its primary conflict" and thus "bogs down in the secondary contrast between Jake and Ray." The novel also provides a detailed portrayal of the underside of black urban life, with its prostitutes and gamblers, and McKay was applauded for creating "a work of vivid social realism," according to Alan L. McLeod in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. However, McKay himself "stressed that he aimed at emotional realism—he wanted to highlight his characters' feelings rather than their social circumstances," McLeod continued. Nevertheless, it was his glimpse into the "unsavory aspects of New York black life" that was prized by readers—and condemned by such prominent black leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois. Home to Harlem—with its sordid, occasionally harrowing scenes of ghetto life—proved extremely popular, and it gained recognition as the first commercially successful novel by a black writer. McKay quickly followed it with Banjo: A Story without a Plot, a novel about a black vagabond living in the French port of Marseilles. Like Jake from Home to Harlem, protagonist Banjo embodies the largely instinctual way of living, though he is considerably more enterprising and quick-witted than the earlier character. Ray, the intellectual from Home to Harlem, also appears in Banjo. His plight is that of many struggling artists who are compelled by social circumstances to support themselves with conventional employment. Both Banjo and Ray are perpetually dissatisfied and disturbed by their limited roles in white society, and by the end of the novel the men are prepared to depart from Marseilles. Banjo failed to match the acclaim and commercial success of Home to Harlem, but it confirmed McKay's reputation as a serious, provocative artist. "It was apparent to critics that McKay's imagination had been somewhat strained and that the novel was essentially an autobiographical exercise," McLeod remarked. Commentators have found the autobiographical thread in Home to Harlem and Banjo primarily in the character of Ray, whose peripatetic existence to some extent mirrors the author's own, as does the character's admiration for the beauty of young men's bodies. Patti Cappel Swartz digs for clues to McKay's sexuality in the author's fictional works, and points to a dream sequence in Home to Harlem and the fact that "for Ray, the bonds with men will always supersede those with women," as is shown in the conclusion of Banjo. "Like McKay, Ray is not the marrying kind, but rather the vagabond who must always travel on," Swartz continued. In his third novel, Banana Bottom, McKay presented a more incisive exploration of his principal theme, the black individual's quest for cultural identity in a white society. Banana Bottom recounts the experiences of a Jamaican peasant girl, Bita, who is adopted by white missionaries after suffering a rape. Bita's new providers try to impose their cultural values on her by introducing her to organized Christianity and the British educational system. Their actions culminate in a horribly bungled attempt to arrange Bita's marriage to an aspiring minister. The prospective groom is exposed as a sexual aberrant, whereupon Bita flees white society. She eventually marries a drayman, Jubban, and raises their child in an idealized peasant Jamaican environment. "Bita has pride in blackness, is free of hypocrisy, and is independent and discerning in her values," remarked McLeod. "Praise for Banana Bottom has been unanimous." Critics agree that Banana Bottom is McKay's most skillful delineation of the black individual's predicament in white society. Unfortunately, the novel's thematic worth was largely ignored when the book first appeared in 1933. Positive reviews of the time were related to McKay's extraordinary evocation of the Jamaican tropics and his mastery of melodrama. In the ensuing years, though, Banana Bottom has gained increasing acknowledgement as McKay's finest fiction and the culmination of his efforts to articulate his own tension and unease through the novel. McKay's other noteworthy fiction publication during his final years abroad was Gingertown, a collection of twelve short stories. Six of the tales are devoted to Harlem life, and they reveal McKay's preoccupation with black exploitation and humiliation. Other tales are set in Jamaica and even in North Africa, McKay's last foreign home before he returned to the United States in the mid-1930s. Once back in Harlem he began an autobiographical work, A Long Way from Home, in which he related his own problems as a black individual in a white society. The book is considered unreliable as material for his autobiography because, for example, in it McKay denies his membership in the communist party, as McLeod points out. However, A Long Way from Home does state McKay's long-held belief that American blacks should unite in the struggle against colonialism, segregation, and oppression. By the late 1930s McKay had developed a keen interest in Catholicism. Through Ellen Tarry, who wrote children's books, he became active in Harlem's Friendship House. His newfound religious interest, together with his observations and experiences at the Friendship House, inspired his essay collection, Harlem: Negro Metropolis, which offers an account of the black community in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s. Like Banjo, Banana Bottom, and Gingertown, Harlem: Negro Metropolis failed to spark much interest from a reading public that was a tiring of literature by and about blacks. Critic McLeod offers a more recent evaluation of the work, the writing of which was based as much on scholarly inquiry as on personal observation, as McKay was absent from the country for a good deal of the period covered: "The book has been superseded by many more-scholarly studies, yet it retains value as a reexamination of Harlem by one who had established a necessary critical distance." With his reputation already waning, McKay moved to Chicago and worked as a teacher for a Catholic organization. By the mid-1940s his health had deteriorated. He endured several illnesses throughout his last years and eventually died of heart failure in May 1948. In the years immediately following his death McKay's reputation continued to decline as critics found him conventional and somewhat shallow. Recently, however, McKay has gained recognition for his intense commitment to expressing the predicament of his fellow blacks, and he is now admired for devoting his art and life to social protest. As Robert A. Smith wrote in his Phylon publication, "Claude McKay: An Essay in Criticism": "Although he was frequently concerned with the race problem, his style is basically lucid. One feels disinclined to believe that the medium which he chose was too small, or too large for his message. He has been heard." McKay continues to be associated with the phenomenon known as the Harlem Renaissance, though he lived outside of the country for much of the period, and has found new audiences among readers of commonwealth literature and gay and lesbian literature.

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen is one of the most representative voices of the Harlem Renaissance. His life story is essentially a tale of youthful exuberance and talent of a star that flashed across the African American firmament and then sank toward the horizon. When his paternal grandmother and guardian died in 1918, the 15-year-old Countee LeRoy Porter was taken into the home of the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, the pastor of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church, Harlem's largest congregation. There the young Countee entered the approximate center of black politics and culture in the United States and acquired both the name and awareness of the influential clergyman who was later elected president of the Harlem chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). During the 1920s, Harlem was an enormously stimulating milieu for African American intellectuals. The high hopes of the black community for acceptance and equality had turned to disillusionment at the end of World War I, when returning black soldiers all too often experienced unemployment and were otherwise mistreated. Resentment pulsated through black urban centers like Harlem, which had burgeoned during the war as black workers migrated there to fill jobs temporarily vacated by the diversion of white laborers into the military. For the first time in African American history, a black urban consciousness conducive to the flowering of the arts was developing. From Harlem, the largest of the new, densely populated black urban communities in which Cullen was listening and learning burst forth an outpouring of African American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance. While Cullen's informal education was shaped by his exposure to black ideas and yearnings, his formal education derived from almost totally white influences. This dichotomy heavily influenced his creative work and his criticism, particularly because he did extremely well at the white-dominated institutions he attended and won the approbation of white academia. In high school Cullen earned academic honors that in turn garnered him the posts of vice-president of his class and editor of the school newspaper, as well as prizes for poetry and oratory. His glory continued at New York University, where he obtained first or second prizes in a number of poetry contests, including the national Witter Bynner Contests for undergraduate poetry and contests sponsored by Poetry magazine. Literary critic and Harvard professor Irving Babbitt publicly lauded Cullen's The Ballad of the Brown Girl, and in 1925, which proved a bumper year for the young man's harvest of literary prizes, Cullen graduated from New York University, was accepted into Harvard's masters program, and published his first volume of poetry: Color. During the next four years Cullen reached his zenith. A celebrated young man about Harlem, he had in print by 1929 several books of his own poems and a collection of poetry he edited, Caroling Dusk, written by other African Americans. His letters from Harvard to his Harlem friend Harold Jackman exuded self-satisfaction and sometimes the snide intolerance of the enfant terrible. The climax of those heady years may have come in 1928. That year Cullen was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to write poetry in France, and he married Nina Yolande DuBois, the daughter of W.E.B. DuBois, a man who for decades was the acknowledged leader of the African American intellectual community. Few social events in Harlem rivaled the magnitude of the latter event, and much of Harlem joined in the festivities that marked the joining of the Cullen and DuBois lineages, two of its most notable families. Because of Cullen's success in both black and white cultures, and because of his romantic temperament, he formulated an aesthetic that embraced both cultures. He came to believe that art transcended race and that it could be used as a vehicle to minimize the distance between black and white peoples. When he chose as his models poet John Keats and to a lesser extent A.E. Housman, he did so not consciously to curry favor with white America but for four logical reasons: First, though there had been African American poets, there was not yet an African American poetic tradition—in any meaningful sense of the term—to draw upon. Second, the English poetic tradition was the one that was available to him—the one that had been taught to him in schools he attended. Third, he felt challenged to demonstrate that a black poet could excel within that traditional framework. And fourth, he felt absolutely free to choose as exemplars any poets in the world with whom he sensed a temperamental affinity (and he certainly had that affinity with Housman and, especially, Keats). In addition, he shared their romantic self-involvement; he had an ego that was sensitive to the slightest tremors and that needed expression to remain whole, and like Keats he had to believe in human perfectibility. In poems such as "Heritage" and "Atlantic City Waiter," Cullen reflects the urge to reclaim African arts—a movement called Négritude that was one of the motifs of the Harlem Renaissance. The cornerstone of his aesthetic, however, was the call for African American poets to work conservatively, as he did, within English conventions. In his 1927 foreword to Caroling Dusk, Cullen observed that "since theirs is ... the heritage of the English language, their work will not present any serious aberration from poetic tendencies of their times." Braving the wrath of less moderate peers, he further stated that "negro poets, dependent as they are on the English language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings toward an African inheritance." Even the subtitle of the collection, An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets, reflects his belief in the essential oneness of art; it implies no distinction between white poetry and black poetry, and it assumes there is only poetry, which in the case of Caroling Dusk is simply composed by African American writers. His dedication to oneness led Cullen to be cautious of any black writer's work that threatened to erect rather than pull down barricades between the races. Thus, in a February, 1926, "Dark Tower" column in which Cullen reviewed Langston Hughes's The Weary Blues, Cullen pressed Hughes not to be a "racial artist" and to omit jazz rhythms from his poems. In a later column he prodded black writers to censor themselves by avoiding "some things, some truths of Negro life and thought ... that all Negroes know, but take no pride in." For Cullen, showcasing unpleasant realities would "but strengthen the bitterness of our enemies" and thereby weaken the bridge of art between blacks and whites. Such warnings, however, did not prevent the critic Cullen from praising black artists whenever he found their work meritorious, even when it was overtly racial. In another of his "Dark Tower" columns, he complimented Amy Spingarn's Pride and Humility, for example, even though he thought its "clearest notes" were to be heard "in those poems which have a racial framework." Since his primary criterion for judging a work was always aesthetic, Cullen applauded any poetry that appealed to him, without regard to the color of the writer. He had good things to say about Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.A. Robinson, and Robert Frost, but he was less favorable toward such avant-garde poets as Amy Lowell, in whose work he found little "for the hungry heart to feed upon." Generally, three principles informed his criticism: First, he tended to be more attracted to Romantic poetry. Second, he was conservative in his tastes and therefore put off by experimentation such as that of Amy Lowell. Third, although he put special effort into trying to further the interests of black artists, he was governed by a keen sense of impartiality and a commitment to bringing the races into closer harmony. A paradox exists, however, between Cullen's philosophy and writing. While he argued that racial poetry was a detriment to the color-blindness he craved, he was at the same time so affronted by the racial injustice in America that his own best verse—indeed most of his verse—gave voice to racial protest. In fact the title of Cullen's collection, Color (1925), was not chosen unintentionally, nor did Cullen include sections with that same title in later volumes by accident. Both early and late in his career he was, in spite of himself, largely a racial poet. This is evident throughout Cullen's works from the Color pieces and the introduction of racial violence into his 1927 work The Ballad of the Brown Girl to the poems that he selected for the posthumously published On These I Stand, of which substantially more than half are racial poems. Of the six identifiable racial themes in Cullen's poetry, the first is Négritude, a pervasive international black literary movement, which included what scholar Arthur P. Davis in a 1953 Phylon essay called "the alien-and-exile theme." Specific examples of this motif in Cullen's poetry include his attribution of descent from African kings to the girl featured in The Ballad of the Brown Girl as well as the submerged pride exhibited by the waiter in the poem "Atlantic City Waiter" whose graceful movement resulted from "Ten thousand years on jungle clues." Probably the best-known illustration of the Pan-African impulse in Cullen's poetry is found in "Heritage," where the narrator realizes that although he must suppress his African heritage, he cannot ultimately surrender his black heart and mind to white civilization. "Heritage," like most of the Négritude poems of the Harlem Renaissance and like political expression such as Marcus Garvey's popular back-to-Africa movement, powerfully suggests the duality of the black psyche—the simultaneous allegiance to America and rage at her racial inequities Four similar themes recur in Cullen's poems, expressing other forms of racial bias. These include a kind of black chauvinism that prevailed at the time and that Cullen portrayed in both The Ballad of the Brown Girl and The Black Christ, when in those works he judged that the passion of blacks was better than that of whites. Likewise, the poem "Near White" exemplifies the author's admonition against miscegenation, and in "To a Brown Boy" Cullen propounds a racially motivated affinity toward death as a preferred escape from racial frustration and outrage. Another poem, "For a Lady I Know," presents a satirical view of whites obliviously mistreating their black counterparts as it depicts blacks in heaven doing their "celestial chores" so that upper-class whites can remain in their heavenly beds. Using a sixth motif, Cullen exhibits a direct expression of irrepressible anger at racial unfairness. His outcry is more muted than that of some other Harlem Renaissance poets—Hughes, for example, and Claude McKay—but that is a matter of Cullen's innate and learned gentility. Those who overlook Cullen's strong indictment of racism in American society miss the main thrust of his work. His poetry throbs with anger as in "Incident" when he recalls his personal response to being called "******" on a Baltimore bus, or in the selection "Yet Do I Marvel," in which Cullen identifies what he regards as God's most astonishing miscue that he could "make a poet black, and bid him sing!" In addition to his own personal experiences, Cullen also focuses on public events. For instance, in "Scottsboro, Too, Is Worth Its Song," he upbraids American poets, who had championed the cause of white anarchists in the controversial Sacco-Vanzetti trials, for not defending the nine black youths indicted on charges of raping two white girls in a freight car passing through Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. In The Book of American Negro Poetry, author James Weldon Johnson explained with acute sympathy Cullen's compulsion to write poetry that seems to fly in the face of his declarations against poetry of race. Johnson wrote: "Strangely, it is because Cullen revolts against ... racial limitations—technical and spiritual—that the best of his poetry is motivated by race. He is always seeking to free himself and his art from these bonds. He never entirely escapes, but from the very fret and chafe he brings forth poetry that contains the quintessence of race consciousness." Cullen, then, was a forceful but genteel protest poet; yet, he was much more. He was also consistent in his intention to write good traditional poetry for the social purpose of showing what common sense should have told white Americans but what they still demanded be proven to them—that blacks could write poetry and write it as well as anyone. To that end, much of Cullen's poetry deals with such universal subjects as faith and doubt, love, and mortality. On the subject of religion, Cullen waywardly progressed from uncertainty to Christian acceptance. Early on he was given to irony and even defiance in moments of youthful skepticism. In "Heritage," for example, he observes that a black Christ could command his faith better than the white one. When he was 24, he provided a third-person description of himself in which he commented that his "chief problem has been that of reconciling a Christian upbringing with a pagan inclination. His life so far has not convinced him that the problem is insoluble." But before very long, his grandmother Porter's influence and that of the Cullen rectory won out. Outrage over racial injustice notwithstanding, he had fairly well controlled the "pagan inclination" in favor of Christian orthodoxy by 1929, when he published The Black Christ, and Other Poems. In the opening of the book's narrative title poem, the protagonist sings of embracing God in spite of certain earthly obstacles that he summarizes as "my country's shame." The speaker's brother has been beaten to death by a white lynch mob for an innocent relationship with a white woman; the narrator's resentment toward a savior who allows such evil to occur is overcome by his mother's proclamation of her unshakable faith, and any residue of doubt disappears when the murdered brother is resurrected. At the end the family is left to prosper in its piety. Furthermore, among the few previously unpublished poems that Cullen selected for inclusion in the posthumously published collection On These I Stand is one that confirms his continuing religious commitment as a way to cope with the injustices and disappointments of his life. Written during World War I, "Christus natus est" asserts that amid all the tragedy of war "The manger still / Outshines the throne" and that "Christ must and will / Come to his own." To understand Cullen's treatment of love it is necessary first to examine the effete—weak or effeminate—quality of many of his love poems. David Levering Lewis, in When Harlem Was in Vogue, asserted that "impotence and death run through [Cullen's] poetry like dark threads, entangling his most affirmative lines." In general, Cullen's love poetry is clearly characterized not only by misgivings about women but also by a distrust of the emotion of heterosexual love. His poems "Medusa" and "The Cat," both contained in The Medea, and Some Poems, illustrate this vision of male-female relationships. In Cullen's version of the ancient myth, it is not the hideousness of Medusa that blinds the men who gaze upon her, but rather her beauty. So great is the destructive power of the attractive female that the narrator in "The Cat" imagines in the animal "A woman with thine eyes, satanic beast / Profound and cold as scythes to mow me down." Male lovers, on the other hand are often portrayed as sickly with apprehension that a relationship is about to be ended either by a fickle partner or by death. In "If Love Be Staunch," for example, the speaker warns that love lasts no longer than "water stays in a sieve" and in "The Love Tree" Cullen portrays love as a crucifixion whereby future lovers may realize that "'Twas break of heart that made the love tree grow." What Lewis identified in Cullen's love poems as a "corroding suspicion of life cursed from birth" may have resulted from Cullen's alleged homosexuality. Cullen's treatment of death in his writing was shaped by his early encounters with the deaths of his parents, brother, and grandmother, as well as by a premonition of his own premature demise. Running through his poems are a sense of the brevity of life and a romantic craving for the surcease of death. In "Nocturne" and "Works to My Love," death is readily accepted as a natural element of life. "Threnody for a Brown Girl" and "In the Midst of Life" portray even warmer feelings towards death as a welcome escape. And in poems such as "Only the Polished Skeleton" death is gratefully anticipated to bring relief from racial oppression: A stripped skeleton has no race; it can but "measure the worth of all it so despised." Looking forward to death, Cullen meanwhile accepted sleep as an effective surrogate. In the poem "Sleep" he portrays slumber as "lovelier" and "kinder" than any alternative. It is both a feline killer and gentle nourisher that suckles the sleeper: "though the suck be short 'tis good." In April, 1943, less than three years before he died of uremic poisoning, Cullen related in "Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts" that "blessedly this breath departs." After 1929 Cullen's production of verse dropped off dramatically. It was limited to his translation of Euripides' play Medea, which appeared along with some new poems in his collection The Medea, and Some Poems (1935) and later with half a dozen previously unpublished pieces that were included in his posthumously published collection, On These I Stand. A complexity of reasons contributed to the dimming of his poetic star. The Harlem Renaissance required a white audience to sustain it, and as whites became preoccupied with their own tenuous situation during the Great Depression, they lost interest in the African American arts. Also, Cullen's idealism about building a bridge of poetry between the races had been sorely tested by the time the 1920s ended. Moreover, he seemed affected by legitimate doubts concerning his growth as a poet. In "Self Criticism" he reflected whether he would go on singing a "failing note still vainly clinging / To the throat of the stricken swan." While his supporters continued to defend him on racial rather than literary grounds, his detractors gradually increased in numbers with the publication of each successive collection of his poetry. Harry Alan Potamkin, in a 1927 New Republic review of Copper Sun, found that Cullen had not really progressed since Color and that the poet had "capitalized on the fact of race." The reviewer concluded, in fact, that Cullen's poetry "begins and ends with a epithet skill." With the appearance of The Black Christ, and Other Poems in 1929, Nation's Granville Hicks joined the chorus of critics expressing reservations and remarked that "in general, Mr. Cullen's talents do not seem to be developing as one might wish." For a combination of causes, then, beginning in the early 1930s Cullen largely curtailed his poetic output and channeled his creative energy into other genres. He wrote a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), but its poor critical reception made it his only novel. The book reveals a flair for satire in its secondary plot, which centers around the Harlem salon of the irrepressible hostess Constancia Brandon; one particularly effective episode features a white intellectual bigot who is invited to read his tract, "The Menace of the Negro to Our American Civilization," to an audience of mainly black intellectuals. The novel itself, however, suffers from a fatal structural flaw. Cullen never successfully integrated the secondary plot—a takeoff on his own experience in Harlem intellectual circles—with the major story line, a melodrama in which itinerant con man Sam Lucas undergoes a fake religious conversion to edge his way into a Harlem congregation; marries and then cheats on his sweet young wife; and finally, on his death bed undergoes a change of heart. The characters in the main plot are generally based on stereotypes common in African American folklore—the fast-talking trickster and the sagacious saintly old aunt, for example. Although Cullen displays some compassion toward them and a good deal of good-natured wit in dealing with the satirical figures, the two plots never adequately come together. As Rudolph Fisher said in a New York Herald Tribune review of One Way to Heaven, it was as if Cullen were "exhibiting a lovely pastel and cartoon on the same frame." When 31-year-old Cullen turned to teaching in 1934, he was determined to find some way other than literature to contribute to social change, but he did not abandon writing entirely. In 1935 he published his version of Medea (with the speeches and choral passages curiously attenuated) and collaborated with Harry Hamilton on "Heaven's My Home," a dramatic adaptation of One Way to Heaven. The play, which was never published, is actually more contrived than Cullen's novel, but unlike the original work, "Heaven's My Home" manages to integrate the two plots by introducing a sexual relationship between the protagonists Lucas and Brandon. Toward the end of his life, in the 1940s, Cullen was relatively successful as a dramatist. With another collaborator, Owen Dodson, he worked on several projects, including "The Third Fourth of July," a one-act play printed in Theatre Arts in August, 1946. During this period Cullen rejected a professorship at Fisk University and instead remained in New York to work with Arna Bontemps on a dramatic version of his novel God Sends Sunday. Cullen, who suggested the adaptation, made this endeavor the center of his life, but the enterprise caused him much grief. By 1945 the play had become the musical "St. Louis Woman," and celebrated performer Lena Horne was expected to star in its Broadway and Hollywood productions. Then disaster struck. Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) argued that the play, set in the black ghetto of St. Louis and featuring lower-class and seedy characters, was demeaning to blacks. Cullen was blamed for revealing the seamy side of black life, the very thing he had warned other black writers not to do. Many of Cullen's friends refused to defend him; some joined the attack, which was patently unjust. Admittedly, greed and criminality figure in the play, which focuses on the struggle between overbearing salon keeper-gambler Bigelow Brown and diminutive jockey Lil Augie for the affections of Della Greene, a hard-nosed and soft-hearted beauty. But as Cullen argued, the play really deals with human virtues—honor, love, decency, and loyalty. The controversy rounding it wore on, however, until 1946. In March of that year, "St. Louis Woman" finally premiered on Broadway, featuring songs by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen such as "Come Rain, Come Shine" and making singer Pearl Bailey a star. Unfortunately, Cullen had died almost three months earlier and was to be remembered primarily for the poems he had written in his 20s when he was one of Harlem's brightest luminaries. The limitations of Cullen's poetry such as its archaic and imitative ring, its occasional verbosity, and its tendency to sacrifice sense for conventional prosody restricted his literary status to that of a minor poet with a real lyrical gift. But he was not guilty of the obsequious acceptance of white values for which 1960s black power poets such as Don Lee (Haki Madhubuti) were to dismiss him. Cullen never compromised his integrity as a black man to gain advantage for himself. His primary goal was to bring America closer to racial harmony through his own art and that of his peers and ultimately to achieve complete and colorblind artistic freedom. As he defiantly proclaimed in "To Certain Critics" (published in The Black Christ), though some might call him a traitor to blacks, his program was too universal to be contained: "Never shall the clan / Confine my singing to its ways / Beyond the ways of man." Probably more than any other writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Cullen carried out the intentions of black American intellectual leaders such as W.E.B. DuBois and James Weldon Johnson. These men had nothing but the highest praise for Cullen, for he was brilliantly practicing what they advocated, and he came close to embodying Alain Locke's "New Negro." "In a time," DuBois wrote in a 1928 Crisis essay, "when it is vogue to make much of the Negro's aptitude for clownishness or to depict him objectively as a serio-comic figure, it is a fine and praiseworthy act for Mr. Cullen to show through the interpretation of his own subjectivity the inner workings of the Negro soul and mind." Johnson was pleased with Cullen's decision not to recognize "any limitation to 'racial' themes and forms." In Cullen's wish not to be "a negro poet," Johnson insisted, the writer was "not only within his right: he is right." As these authorities attest, to read Countee Cullen's work is to hear a voice as representative of the Harlem Renaissance as it is possible to find.

Characteristics of Imagism

Direct presentation of the object, avoidance of ornate diction, complex but predictable verse forms of traditional poetry, significance had to appear inherent in its spare, clean presentation, elaborate grammatical constructions seemed artificial, typically tended to work in disjointed fragments

E. E. Cummings

Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School. He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken anti-war convictions. After the war, he settled into a life divided between his lifetime summer home, Joy Farm in New Hampshire, and Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris. He also traveled throughout Europe, meeting poets and artists, including Pablo Picasso, whose work he particularly admired. In 1920, The Dial published seven poems by Cummings, including "Buffalo Bill 's." Serving as Cummings' debut to a wider American audience, these "experiments" foreshadowed the synthetic cubist strategy Cummings would explore in the next few years. In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex. The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is "one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings's poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence." During his lifetime, Cummings received a number of honors, including an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship at Harvard, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1958, and a Ford Foundation grant. At the time of his death, September 3, 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost. He is buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

Everyone in a small town lives a similar life, being born, growing up, growing old, and dying

Characteristics of Modernism

Existential angst, Bourgeois nihilism, Loss of logos, Libidinal chaos, Familial instability, Declining or evolving American Christianity

Edward Arlington Robinson

His stories deal with "an American dream gone awry". His parents (who had wanted a girl) did not name him until he was six months old, when they visited a holiday resort — at which point other vacationers decided that he should have a name, and selected a man from Arlington, Massachusetts to draw a name out of a hat. An American poet who won three Pulitzer Prizes for his work. Felt he was born too late and looked to poetry for an escape. His brief story and portrait poems are in traditional forms with metrically regular verse, rhymes, and elevated diction. Dignified the subject matter and provides a contrast where his subject is unpoetic by traditional standards, that emphasizes its sadness and banality. His father's lumber business and land speculations failed during the Panic of 1893. One of his brothers, a physician, became a drug addict, while his other brother, a business man, became an alcoholic. He studied at Harvard for two years before running out of money and returning home to Gardiner, Maine where he was supported by friends and patrons while he worked to become a professional poet. His first Pulitzer Prize brought him financial security, but by this time he was over 50 years old. He continued studying after his education ended, reading classic works in many languages as well as reading Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, and Henry James. He found himself drawn to the bleak, tragic vision of British novelist Thomas Hardy. He displayed his influences in the gloomy, austere, and sonorous verse of his 2nd book, Children of the Night. Celebrating the pain of isolated lives, Robinson worked through to a residue of affirmation, an occasional "light" or "word" that is glimpsed in the "night" of the poems. The Town Down the River and The Man Against the Sky won increasing numbers of readers and critics awards. Made a trilogy of long poems in imitation of medieval narratives, beginning with Merlin, the last of these poems, Tristram, brought him his 3rd Pulitzer Prize.

Romanticism and Realism; Life on the Mississippi

In his life Twain wrote in two distinctive literary styles, one which he shifted from as he became older. What are these literary styles and what story did we read which distinctly shows them?

Edith Wharton

Lived in the upper echelons of society, wrote about the corruption of high soceity

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Man wants a woman but thinks he's incredibly uninteresting. Decides he's too odd to get a woman. Friend tries to get him to find his best qualities. Tells him to essentially own who he is. Basically gives up

Bourgeois nihilism

Middle Class feeling of nothing

Muckrakers

Novels which criticized big business and the wealthy people behind them, exposing the corruption of business (criticism of the rich people and their behavior as we see in Grapes of Wrath and marginally in The Great Gatsby)

The Road Not Taken

Observational poem comparing two roads or paths, debate of whether it's optimistic or pessimistic

The Red Wheelbarrow

Observational poem observing the all important wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater leaning up by a wall

In a Station of the Metro

Observational poem observing the people waiting for the train

Libidinal chaos

Out of control sex drive

next to of course god america i

Patriotic but questioning poem. Speaker is trying to console parents of dead soldiers trying to say anything he can but know the parents may not or don't really believe it himself

Declining or evolving American Christianity

Resulting view of American Christianity because of Modernism in which Christianity will either fall into irrelevance or change until unrecognizable to today's Christianity

Walt Whitman

Revolutionized American poetry, challenging many conventions of his day. Rejected poetic traditions, improvising the form that has come to be known as free verse. He held enormous influence on later poets. Born in 1819 on Long Island, he was the second of eight surviving children, living in Brooklyn from 4 years old on. He left school when he was eleven and was employed in a printing office of a newspaper; when his family moved east on Long Island in 1833, he remained in Brooklyn. In his mid-teens he began contributing writing to "The Mirror". He would travel frequently between Brooklyn and Manhattan in 1835, but two major fires that year disrupted the printing industry and he rejoined his family. Taught at schools for 5 years before starting his own newspaper, working in the newspaper industry for some time. By early 1840 he had started the series "Sun-Down Papers from the Desk of a School-Master" for the Jamaica, New York, Democrat, and was writing poems and fiction. Just before he turned 21 he stopped teaching, went back to Manhattan daily, the Aurora. He began a political career by speaking for the Democratic rallies and writing for the Democratic Review. He exulted in the extremes of the city, where street-gang violence was countered by the lectures of Emerson and where even a young editor could get to know the poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the Evening Post. After he was fired from the Aurora, which publicly charged him with laziness, he wrote a temperance novel, Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate, for a 1-issue extra of the New World late in 1842. After 3 years of various literary and political jobs, he returned to Brooklyn in 1845, becoming a special contributor to the Long Island Star, assigned to Manhattan events including theatrical and musical performances. He attended operas on his journalist pass which he says helped to write Leaves of Grass. Served as the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle for some time. Served as a delegate to the Buffalo Free Soul Convention and helped to found free-soil newspaper the Brooklyn Freeman. Around this time he began writing poetry seriously, experimenting with form and prosody; he published several topical poems in 1850, including "Europe". In 1855 he took out a copyright on Leaves of Grass and spent the spring and early summer seeing his book through the press. Published in Brooklyn, the volume was bound in dark green cloth with a sprig of grass in gilt on the cover, it contained 12 untitled poems and a solid preface and featured a working class frontispiece. These poems introduced his use of catalogues. In 1856 Leaves of Grass was reprinted, now with 33 poems. Edited Brooklyn Times from 1857-59. In 1860 the third edition of Leaves of Grass, now with thematic groupings, 15 poems on love of man for woman, adhesive love got 45 poems in "Calamus". In 1867, 1871, 1881, and 1891-92 more editions, grouped slightly differently and having more poems. He served as a nurse during the Civil War at New York Hospital and open-air hospitals in DC. His poetry during this time reflected his changing view of the war. Wrote "The Real War will never get in the Books", "Oh Captain, My Captain", and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom". Clerk at Department of the Interior, where he was later fired for writing on obscene book. Continued to rework Leaves of Grass, putting "Drum Taps" in it in 1867. Published two essays in 1867 and 68, which he expanded into Democratic Vistas in 1870. In 1873 he suffered a paralytic stroke and his mother died a few months later, he lived with his brother George in Camden, New Jersey to recover. He celebrated the mystical, divine potential of the individual; a poet of the urban, he wrote about the sights, sounds, and energy of the modern metropolis.

Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens, wrote under a pseudonym, worked many different jobs through the course of his life including captain of a steamboat, typesetter, journalist, and lecturer

Jack London

Some of his most famous works include The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. Part of the radical literary group "The Crowd" in San Francisco and a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers. He wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics, such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. Born John Griffith Chaney in San Francisco, son of Flora Wellman Chaney and William H. Chaney. William abandoned Flora when he found out she was pregnant. 9 months after the child's birth, Flora married John London , a Civil War vet and construction worker who adopted "Johnny". Lived with surrogate parents, the Prentisses, African American neighbors who called him "Jack". At 15 he joined the Oyster Pirates and sailed San Francisco Bay, drinking with the Cali. Fish Patrol and Oyster Pirates, he developed alcoholism. Entranced by the sea, he sailed aboard the seal ship, Sophia Sunderland. Returned home in 1893 to publish his 1st, prize winning story "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan", in the San Francisco Call. In 1894, marched with Coxey's Army. Arrested as a vagrant at Niagara Falls and did 30 days in Erie County Pen. in Buffalo, NY. Returned home vowed to educate himself, and turned himself to socialism, ran for mayor of Oakland twice on Socialist ticket. Went to University of Cali for 1 semester due to money. At 21 went to Alaska for Klondike Gold Rush. In 1900 the Atlantic Monthly featured "An Odyssey of the North", Houghton Miflin published his 1st book, The Son of the Wolf, married Bessie Mae Maddern (2 daughters before divorce and marriage to Chorian Kittredge). Traveled to London and wrote sociological exposé The People of the Abyss, and to Korea to cover the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, and bought land in Sonoma County. Wrote 1000 words a day and won international acclaim with The Call of the Wild, and The Sea Wolf. After his extensive South Seas travels and residence in Hawaii he became modern America's 1st Pacific Rim writer. Though saying he wrote only for money, he was disciplined and careful craftsman, drew from many literary, philosophical, scientific, and other sources and writing on many subjects. Important influence on Hemingway and Wright for both adventure writing and socialist works. By the time he died in 1916 he was the bestselling author in America and was on the way to most popular American author in the world. Published 18 novels, 198 short stories, 3 poems, hundreds of nonfiction books and articles.

Mending Wall

Speaker questions why his neighbor supports the low rock wall fence marking the boundary of their property. All his neighbor says in defense is "Good fences make good neighbors"

Modern Poetry

Started in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. These poets wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction.

John Steinbeck

Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He was of German, English, and Irish descent. Johann Adolf Großsteinbeck (1828-1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, shortened the family name to Steinbeck when he immigrated to the United States. His father, John Ernst Steinbeck (1862-1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867-1934), a former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. The Steinbecks were members of the Episcopal Church, although Steinbeck later became agnostic. Steinbeck lived in a small rural town, no more than a frontier settlement, set in some of the world's most fertile land. He spent his summers working on nearby ranches and later with migrant workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in such works as Of Mice and Men. He explored his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms. While working at Spreckels Sugar Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable mechanical aptitude and fondness for repairing things he owned. Steinbeck graduated from Salinas High School in 1919 and went on to study English Literature at Stanford University near Palo Alto, leaving, without a degree, in 1925. He travelled to New York City where he took odd jobs while trying to write. When he failed to publish his work, he returned to California and worked in 1928 as a tour guide and caretaker at Lake Tahoe, where he met Carol Henning, his first wife. They married in January 1930 in Los Angeles, where, with friends, he attempted to make money by manufacturing plaster mannequins. When their money ran out six months later due to a slow market, Steinbeck and Carol moved back to Pacific Grove, California, to a cottage owned by his father, on the Monterey Peninsula a few blocks outside the Monterey city limits. The elder Steinbecks gave John free housing, paper for his manuscripts, and from 1928, loans that allowed him to write without looking for work. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck bought a small boat, and later claimed that he was able to live on the fish and crab that he gathered from the sea, and fresh vegetables from his garden and local farms. When those sources failed, Steinbeck and his wife accepted welfare, and on rare occasions, stole bacon from the local produce market. Whatever food they had, they shared with their friends. Carol became the model for Mary Talbot in Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row.In 1930, Steinbeck met the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, who became a close friend and mentor to Steinbeck during the following decade, teaching him a great deal about philosophy and biology. Between 1930 and 1936, Steinbeck and Ricketts became close friends. Steinbeck's wife began working at the lab as secretary-bookkeeper. Steinbeck helped on an informal basis. They formed a common bond based on their love of music and art, and John learned biology and Ricketts' ecological philosophy. When Steinbeck became emotionally upset, Ricketts sometimes played music for him. Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of the city of Panama, sometimes referred to as the 'Cup of Gold', and on the women, fairer than the sun, who were said to be found there. Between 1930 and 1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood. To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn, follows the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship of the land he works. Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that he would achieve greatness. Steinbeck achieved his first critical success with Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel set in post-war Monterey, California, that won the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. It portrays the adventures of a group of classless and usually homeless young men in Monterey after World War I, just before U.S. prohibition. They are portrayed in ironic comparison to mythic knights on a quest and reject nearly all the standard mores of American society in enjoyment of a dissolute life devoted to wine, lust, camaraderie and petty theft. In presenting the 1962 Nobel Prize to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy cited "spicy and comic tales about a gang of paisanos, asocial individuals who, in their wild revels, are almost caricatures of King Arthur's Knights of the Round Table. It has been said that in the United States this book came as a welcome antidote to the gloom of the then prevailing depression." Tortilla Flat was adapted as a 1942 film of the same name, starring Spencer Tracy, Hedy Lamarr and John Garfield, a friend of Steinbeck. With some of the proceeds, he built a summer ranch-home in Los Gatos. Steinbeck began to write a series of "California novels" and Dust Bowl fiction, set among common people during the Great Depression. These included In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. He also wrote an article series called The Harvest Gypsies for the San Francisco News about the plight of the migrant worker. Steinbeck followed this wave of success with The Grapes of Wrath (1939), based on newspaper articles about migrant agricultural workers that he had written in San Francisco. It is commonly considered his greatest work. According to The New York Times, it was the best-selling book of 1939 and 430,000 copies had been printed by February 1940. In that month, it won the National Book Award, favorite fiction book of 1939, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. Later that year, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted as a film directed by John Ford, starring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad; Fonda was nominated for the best actor Academy Award.Grapes was controversial. Steinbeck's New Deal political views, negative portrayal of aspects of capitalism, and sympathy for the plight of workers, led to a backlash against the author, especially close to home. Claiming the book was both obscene and misrepresented conditions in the county, the Kern County Board of Supervisors banned the book from the county's publicly funded schools and libraries in August 1939. This ban lasted until January 1941.Of the controversy, Steinbeck wrote, "The vilification of me out here from the large landowners and bankers is pretty bad. The latest is a rumor started by them that the Okies hate me and have threatened to kill me for lying about them. I'm frightened at the rolling might of this damned thing. It is completely out of hand; I mean a kind of hysteria about the book is growing that is not healthy." Steinbeck's novel The Moon Is Down (1942), about the Socrates-inspired spirit of resistance in an occupied village in Northern Europe, was made into a film almost immediately. It was presumed that the unnamed country of the novel was Norway and the occupiers the Nazis. In 1945, Steinbeck received the Haakon VII Cross of freedom for his literary contributions to the Norwegian resistance movement. In 1943, Steinbeck served as a World War II war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and worked with the Office of Strategic Services (predecessor of the CIA). It was at that time he became friends with Will Lang, Jr. of Time/Life magazine. During the war, Steinbeck accompanied the commando raids of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.'s Beach Jumpers program, which launched small-unit diversion operations against German-held islands in the Mediterranean. At one point, he accompanied Fairbanks on an invasion of an island off the coast of Italy and helped capture Italian and German prisoners, using a Tommy Gun. Some of his writings from this period were incorporated in the documentary Once There Was a War (1958). Steinbeck returned from the war with a number of wounds from shrapnel and some psychological trauma. He treated himself, as ever, by writing. He wrote Alfred Hitchcock's movie, Lifeboat (1944), and the film, A Medal for Benny (1945), with screenwriter Jack Wagner about paisanos from Tortilla Flat going to war. He later requested that his name be removed from the credits of Lifeboat, because he believed the final version of the film had racist undertones. In 1944, suffering from homesickness for his Pacific Grove/Monterey life of the 1930s, he wrote Cannery Row (1945), which became so famous that Ocean View Avenue in Monterey, the location of the book, was renamed Cannery Row in 1958. After the war, he wrote The Pearl (1947), knowing it would be filmed eventually. The story first appeared in the December 1945 issue of Woman's Home Companion magazine as "The Pearl of the World." It was illustrated by John Alan Maxwell. The novel is an imaginative telling of a story which Steinbeck had heard in La Paz in 1940, as related in The Log From the Sea of Cortez, which he described in Chapter 11 as being "so much like a parable that it almost can't be". Steinbeck traveled to Mexico for the filming with Wagner who helped with the script; on this trip he would be inspired by the story of Emiliano Zapata, and subsequently wrote a film script (Viva Zapata!) directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando and Anthony Quinn. In 1947, Steinbeck made the first of many trips to the Soviet Union, this one with photographer Robert Capa. They visited Moscow, Kiev, Tbilisi, Batumi and Stalingrad, some of the first Americans to visit many parts of the USSR since the communist revolution. Steinbeck's 1948 book about their experiences, A Russian Journal, was illustrated with Capa's photos. In 1948, the year the book was published, Steinbeck was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1952 Steinbeck's longest novel, East of Eden, was published. According to his third wife, Elaine, he considered it his magnum opus, his greatest novel. In 1952, John Steinbeck appeared as the on-screen narrator of 20th Century Fox's film, O. Henry's Full House. Although Steinbeck later admitted he was uncomfortable before the camera, he provided interesting introductions to several filmed adaptations of short stories by the legendary writer O. Henry. About the same time, Steinbeck recorded readings of several of his short stories for Columbia Records; the recordings provide a record of Steinbeck's deep, resonant voice. Following the success of Viva Zapata!, Steinbeck collaborated with Kazan on East of Eden, James Dean's film debut. Rocinante, camper truck in which Steinbeck traveled across the United States in 1960. Travels with Charley: In Search of America is a travelogue of his 1960 road trip with his poodle Charley. Steinbeck bemoans his lost youth and roots, while dispensing both criticism and praise for America. According to Steinbeck's son Thom, Steinbeck went on the trip, because he knew he was dying and wanted to see the country one last time. Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), examines moral decline in America. The protagonist Ethan grows discontented with his own moral decline and that of those around him. The book has a very different tone from Steinbeck's amoral and ecological stance in earlier works like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row. It was not a critical success. Many reviewers recognized the importance of the novel, but were disappointed that it was not another Grapes of Wrath. In the Nobel Prize presentation speech next year, however, the Swedish Academy cited it most favorably: "Here he attained the same standard which he set in The Grapes of Wrath. Again he holds his position as an independent expounder of the truth with an unbiased instinct for what is genuinely American, be it good or bad." Apparently taken aback by the critical reception of this novel, and the critical outcry when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, Steinbeck published no more fiction in the next six years before his death.In 1962, Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for literature for his "realistic and imaginative writing, combining as it does sympathetic humor and keen social perception." The selection was heavily criticized, and described as "one of the Academy's biggest mistakes" in one Swedish newspaper. The reaction of American literary critics was also harsh. The New York Times asked why the Nobel committee gave the award to an author whose "limited talent is, in his best books, watered down by tenth-rate philosophising", noting that "The international character of the award and the weight attached to it raise questions about the mechanics of selection and how close the Nobel committee is to the main currents of American writing.... We think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer ... whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age". Steinbeck, when asked on the day of the announcement if he deserved the Nobel, replied: "Frankly, no." Biographer Jackson Benson notes, "This honor was one of the few in the world that one could not buy nor gain by political maneuver. It was precisely because the committee made its judgment ... on its own criteria, rather than plugging into 'the main currents of American writing' as defined by the critical establishment, that the award had value." In his acceptance speech later in the year in Stockholm, he said: the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. John Steinbeck died in New York City on December 20, 1968, of heart disease and congestive heart failure. He was 66, and had been a lifelong smoker. An autopsy showed nearly complete occlusion of the main coronary arteries. In accordance with his wishes, his body was cremated, and interred on March 4, 1969 at the Hamilton family gravesite in Salinas, with those of his parents and maternal grandparents. His third wife, Elaine, was buried in the plot in 2004. He had written to his doctor that he felt deeply "in his flesh" that he would not survive his physical death, and that the biological end of his life was the final end to it.

Winter Dreams

Story of Dexter and Judy, served as the prototype for The Great Gatsby

Romanticism

The rise of realism was a response to what literary style?

Wallace Stevens

The son of a prosperous lawyer, Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel (1886-1963, also known as Elsie Moll), a young woman who had worked as a saleswoman, milliner, and stenographer. After a long courtship, he married her in 1909 over the objections of his parents, who considered her lower-class. As The New York Times reported in an article in 2009, "Nobody from his family attended the wedding, and Stevens never again visited or spoke to his parents during his father's lifetime." A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. In 1913, the Stevenses rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. Her striking profile was later used on Weinman's 1916-1945 Mercury dime design and possibly for the head of the Walking Liberty Half Dollar. In later years Elsie Stevens began to exhibit symptoms of mental illness and the marriage suffered as a result, but the Stevenses remained married. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he was hired on January 13, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company. By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. Stevens' Hartford residence. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. His first residence was located at 594 Prospect Avenue, but he remained there for only one year. In 1917 Stevens and his wife moved to 210 Farmington Avenue where they remained for the next seven years and where he completed his first book of poems, Harmonium. From 1924 to 1932 he resided at 735 Farmington Avenue. In 1932 he purchased a 1920s Colonial at 118 Westerly Terrace where he resided for the remainder of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company. After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford. From 1922 to 1940, Stevens made numerous visits to Key West, Florida, where he generally lodged at the Casa Marina, a hotel on the Atlantic Ocean. He first visited in January 1922, while on a business trip. "The place is a paradise," he wrote to Elsie, "midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen." The influence of Key West upon Stevens's poetry is evident in many of the poems published in his first two collections, Harmonium and Ideas of Order. In February 1935, Stevens encountered the poet Robert Frost at the Casa Marina. The two men argued, and Frost reported that Stevens had been drunk and acted inappropriately. The following year, Stevens allegedly assaulted Ernest Hemingway at a party at the Waddell Avenue home of a mutual acquaintance in Key West. Stevens broke his hand, apparently from hitting Hemingway's jaw, and was repeatedly knocked to the street by Hemingway. Stevens later apologized. In 1940, Stevens made his final trip to Key West. Frost was at the Casa Marina again, and again the two men argued. On March 28, 1955 Stevens first went to see Dr. James Moher. Dr. Moher's examination did not reveal anything and ordered Stevens to undergo an x-ray and barium enema on April 1, neither of which showed anything. On April 19 Stevens underwent a G.I. series that revealed diverticulitis, a gallstone, and a severely bloated stomach. Stevens was admitted to St. Francis Hospital and on April 26 he was operated on by Dr. Benedict Landry. It was determined that Stevens was suffering from stomach cancer. Stevens was released on May 11 and returned to his home on Westerly Terrace to recuperate. His wife insisted on trying to attend to him as he recovered but she had suffered a stroke in the previous winter and she was not able to assist as she had hoped. Stevens entered the Avery Convalescent Hospital on May 20. By early June he had recovered some of his strength and on June 9 he attended a ceremony at the University of Hartford where he received an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree from the Hartt College of Music. On June 13 he traveled to New Haven to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University. On June 20 he returned to his home at Westerly Terrace and also insisted on returning to work. On July 21 Stevens was readmitted to St. Francis Hospital and his condition deteriorated. On August 1 he lapsed into a coma and died on August 2, 1955 at eight-thirty in the morning. He is buried in Hartford's Cedar Hill Cemetery. Stevens may have been baptized a Catholic in April 1955 by Fr. Arthur Hanley, chaplain of St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens spent his last days suffering from stomach cancer. This purported deathbed conversion is disputed, particularly by Stevens's daughter, Holly. There is no official record of Stevens's "baptism." Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled "Phases" in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at age 35, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana, with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned 50. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the "best and most representative" American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius. His contemporary, Harriet Monroe, termed Stevens "a poet, rich and numerous and profound, provocative of joy, creative beauty in those who can respond to Him". Helen Vendler notes that there are three distinguishable moods present in Stevens' long poems: ecstasy, apathy, and reluctance between ecstasy and apathy. Stevens's first book of poetry, a volume of rococo inventiveness titled Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the annual National Book Award for Poetry twice, in 1951 for The Auroras of Autumn and in 1955 for Collected Poems. Stevens, whose work was meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas. "The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully," he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens's work "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in "The Idea of Order at Key West", Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker's rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, "After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life's redemption." But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible. Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: "The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible." Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape. As Stevens says in his essay "Imagination as Value", "The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them." The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns. Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction", an idea that would serve as a fictive replacement for the idea of God, known to be fictive but willfully believed. In this example from the satirical "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman", Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality: Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms Like windy citherns, hankering for hymns. We agree in principle. That's clear. But take The opposing law and make a peristyle, And from the peristyle project a masque Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness, Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, Is equally converted into palms, Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, Madame, we are where we began. The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book, Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens's poetry: "A great many of Stevens' poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement." In the end, reality remains. In one of his last poems, "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour", Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, "This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing." This one thing is "a light, a power, the miraculous influence" wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a comforting order, "A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind." Stevens concludes that God is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. "finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth." In this way, Stevens's poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist in the unconscious currents of the imagination. "The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end." The "first idea" is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality—a reality that must always be qualified—and as such, always misses the mark to some degree—always contains elements of unreality. Miller summarizes Stevens's position: "Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal . . . ."[From the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, "There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail." The Poetry Foundation states that "by the early 1950s Stevens was regarded as one of America's greatest contemporary poets, an artist whose precise abstractions exerted substantial influence on other writers." Some critics, like Randall Jarrell and Yvor Winters, praised Stevens' early work but were critical of his more abstract and philosophical later poems. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens's position in the canon as one of the key figures of 20th-century American Modernist poetry. Bloom has called Stevens "a vital part of the American mythology" and unlike Winters and Jarrell, Bloom has cited Stevens's later poems, like "Poems of our Climate," as being among Stevens's best poems.

Theodore Roethke

Theodore Roethke hardly fits anyone's image of the stereotypical high-minded poet-intellectual of the 1940s through 1960s. Born in Saginaw, Michigan, his father was a German immigrant who owned and ran a 25-acre greenhouse. Though as a child he read a great deal and as a high school freshman he had a Red Cross campaign speech translated into 26 languages, he suffered from issues of abandonment and loss, and his lack of self-esteem led him to strive to be accepted by peers. When he was 14, his father died of cancer and his uncle committed suicide. He attended the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he adopted a tough, bear-like image (weighing over 225 pounds) and even developed a fascination with gangsters. Eccentric and nonconformist—he later called himself "odious" and "unhappy"—Roethke yearned for a friend with whom he could talk and relate his ambitions. Poet and writer James Dickey once named Roethke the greatest of all American poets: "I don't see anyone else that has the kind of deep, gut vitality that Roethke's got. Whitman was a great poet, but he's no competition for Roethke." His difficult childhood, his bouts with manic depression, and his ceaseless search for truth through his poetry writing led to a difficult life, but also helped to produce a remarkable body of work that would influence future generations of American poets to pursue the mysteries of one's inner self. Roethke's awareness evolved at Michigan into a decision to pursue teaching—and poetry—as a career. He earned his BA and MA from the University of Michigan. The fascination with nature he explored so deeply in his later poetry compelled him to write in an undergraduate paper: "When I get alone under an open sky where man isn't too evident—then I'm tremendously exalted and a thousand vivid ideas and sweet visions flood my consciousness." In addition to the stories, essays, and criticism commonly expected of English students, Roethke began writing poetry at this time. "If I can't write, what can I do," he said, and though Richard Allen Blessing claimed he "wrote a reasonably good prose," it still would "have taken a keen eye to detect the mature poet beneath the layers of undergraduate baby fat." The direction towards his eventual career cleared somewhat when Roethke dropped out "in disgust" after a brief stint as a University of Michigan law student: "I didn't wish to become a defender of property or a corporation lawyer as all my cousins on one side of the family had done." The attitude evident in this decision supported biographer Allan Seager's conclusion that it was more than an unsuppressible awareness of life that led him to choose poetry as a career: "It would be flattering to call it courage; more accurately it seems to have been an angry, defiant, Prussian pigheadedness that was leading him to his decision." The first 15 years of Roethke's writing career, from his beginnings as an undergraduate to the publication of Open House, formed a "lengthy and painful apprenticeship" for the young writer. During this time, he briefly attended Harvard Law School, where he studied with poet Robert Hillyer, but he abandoned law school due to the Great Depression. In cultivating his poetic expression in the 1930s, Roethke relied heavily upon T.S. Eliot's belief that "the only way to manipulate any kind of English verse, [is] by assimilation and imitation." With this model in mind, Roethke himself once wrote "imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning to write. ... The final triumph is what the language does, not what the poet can do, or display." In her book The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke, Jenijoy La Belle summarized Roethke's major challenge as a "conscious imitator": "The modern poet should move away from the Romantic concept of personal expression. ... He must, in effect, march through the history of poetry—rewrite the poems of the past—that he may come out at the end of his journey a poet who has absorbed the tradition and who thus may take one step forward and add to that tradition." Roethke's task was no easy one. In addition to debts to such contemporaries as W.H. Auden, Louise Bogan, Babette Deutsch, and William Carlos Williams, his extensive and varied poetic tradition included Wordsworth, Blake, Christopher Smart, Donne, Sir John Davies, Whitman, Yeats, Eliot, and Dante. Along with these influences, the source of much of Roethke's poetry was the notebooks he dutifully kept throughout his life. A measure of the devotion given to his craft can be found in his statement "I'm always working," and indeed his pockets were seemingly always filled with jottings of striking thoughts and conversations. His less spontaneous reflections found a place in the workbench of his poetry—his notebooks. Though Roethke is not generally considered a prolific writer, a more accurate account of the time and effort spent developing his verse is apparent in this extensive accumulation of criticism (of himself and others), abstract thoughts, reflections on childhood, and, of course, poetry. In his biography of Roethke, The Glass House, Allan Seager estimated that only three percent of the lines of poetry in the more than two hundred notebooks was ever published. The introspective Roethke announced his bold "intention to use himself as the material for his art" through the title of his first published volume, Open House. Not surprisingly, however, the book reflected the imitative and traditional elements of his "conscious imitation" apprenticeship. Regardless of the limitations evident in Open House, Seager pointed out that "most of the reviews were good and those that contained adverse criticisms tacitly acknowledged that this was the work of a genuine poet and not a beginner." Marveling at Roethke's "rare" ability to "remember and to transform the humiliation ['of feeling physically soiled and humiliated by life'] into something beautiful," Auden called Open House "completely successful." In another review of the book, Elizabeth Drew felt "his poems have a controlled grace of movement and his images the utmost precision; while in the expression of a kind of gnomic wisdom which is peculiar to him as he attains an austerity of contemplation and a pared, spare strictness of language very unusual in poets of today." Roethke kept both Auden's and Drew's reviews, along with other favorable reactions to his work. As he remained sensitive to how peers and others he respected should view his poetry, so too did he remain sensitive to his introspective drives as the source of his creativity. Understandably, critics picked up on the self as the predominant preoccupation in Roethke's poems. Others, however, interpreted Roethke's introspection more positively, claiming it is the essence of his work. Ralph J. Mills called this self-interest "the primary matter of artistic exploration and knowledge, an interest which endows the poems with a sense of personal urgency, even necessity." Stanley Poss also heralded Roethke as "a test case of the writer whose interest in himself is so continuous, so relentless, that it transforms itself and becomes in the end centrifugal. With hardly a social or political bone in his body he yet touches all our Ur-selves, our fear and love of our fathers, ... our relish of the lives of plants and animals, our pleasures in women who have more sides than seals, our night fears, our apprehensions of Immanence." Whether this introspection is a weakness or a strength of his poetry, the intensity he devoted to teaching demonstrates an obvious concern outside the self. An immensely popular professor, Roethke succeeded in driving his students to share his enthusiasm for poetry. Not only was he well liked, often extending classroom sessions into the local bar, he was unique, as demonstrated by a popular anecdote from one of his classes at Michigan State University: To stimulate his class in an assignment of the description of physical action, Roethke told his students to describe the act he was about to perform. He then crawled outside through a classroom window and inched himself along the ledge, making faces into each of the surrounding windows. Such actions corresponded with what Roethke, a very demanding teacher, expected from his students' poetry. Oliver Everette recalled him exclaiming, "You've got to have rhythm. If you want to dance naked in an open barndoor with a chalk in your navel, I don't care! You've got to have rhythm." Another student remembered him saying, "Please let me see evidences of an active mind. Don't be so guarded—let your mind buzz around." And, Roethke impressed poet David Wagoner with the line "motion is equal to emotion." In addition to Wagoner, Roethke's best-known students include the poets Richard Hugo, James Wright, Carolyn Kizer, and Jack Gilbert. This energetic pursuit of both a teaching and a writing career at times understandably affected his outlook. Part of his frustration stemmed from the amount of time teaching entailed. "I'm teaching well," he wrote in 1947, "—if I can judge by the response—but haven't done one damned thing on my own. It's no way to live—to go from exhaustion to exhaustion." Later, the fatigue seemed even more crucial to him. "I think I can say there's a real need for me to get out of teaching for a time," he wrote William Carlos Williams in 1949. "I'm getting caught up in it: too obsessed with making dents in these little bitches. The best ones keep urging me to quit: not worth it, etc. etc." There were times when Roethke was unable to maintain any semblance of balance. His well-publicized mental breakdowns were, at least in part, the result from his going "from exhaustion to exhaustion." Allan Seager explained the apparent inevitability of first attack (1935): "There was no great mystery about his going to the hospital—he had nearly ruined himself in a mad attempt to go without sleep, work hard on everything, eat only one or two meals a day because he was so intent on 'this experiment' he was making in his classes." Roethke himself told Rolfe Humphries (with what Seager noted is a "perfectly rational" explanation) that the reason for his illness, which eventually brought him to the Mercywood Sanitarium in Ann Arbor, "was his own stupidity in trying to live 'a pure and industrious life all of a sudden.'" He suffered a second breakdown ten years later, in 1945, and they became increasingly more frequent in the ensuing decade; by 1958, he was attending therapy sessions six times a week. Despite his difficulties with mental illness, Roethke remained an invaluable and highly esteemed member of university faculty. Although Seager admitted the cause of Roethke's problems "may have lain in the chemistries of his blood and nerves," some have claimed that they were attributable to his intense self-exploration and that he was able to see into himself more clearly because of his illnesses. Kenneth Burke has shown that by willingly immersing himself in the conflicts of his childhood Roethke precipitated his second breakdown; one psychiatrist has said, "I think his troubles were merely the running expenses he paid for being his kind of poet." Not denying the personal tragedy of Roethke's illness, Rosemary Sullivan maintained, "he was able to see in his experience a potential insight into other thresholds of consciousness." These views correspond with Roethke's premise on the search for truth: "To go forward (as a spiritual man) it is necessary first to go back." In The Lost Son (1948) he explored this pattern in the title poem and in its three companion pieces, as Sullivan explained: "They are desperate poems, each beginning in negative, life-denying solipsism which is gradually and painfully transcended until the poet achieves an exultant experience of wholeness and relation." In the same vein, Roethke probed the darkness of his childhood in "The Greenhouse Poems" of The Lost Son. The roots of the greenhouse sequence lay in the extensive greenhouses owned by Roethke's father and uncle. For Roethke, whom Seager described as "thin, undersized and sickly as a boy, obviously intelligent but shy and diffident as well," the greenhouses became a source of ambivalence: "They were to me, I realize now, both heaven and hell, a kind of tropics created in the savage climate of Michigan, where austere German Americans turned their love of order and their terrifying efficiency into something beautiful." Associated with the greenhouse in measuring the effects of childhood was his father, a German American, who died when Roethke was 14. Sullivan explained the paradoxical father-son relationship: "Otto Roethke presented an exterior of authoritarian order and discipline [but] in the greenhouse he gave expression to a deep sensitivity to the beauty of nature." The apparent tendency of Otto to hide this "vulnerable core," Sullivan added, prevented Roethke from understanding his father. Feeling "angered and abandoned," Roethke implicated himself in his father's death, a death that prevented any gradual reconciliation between them. Sullivan further theorized that "from the consequent sense of his own inadequacy Roethke seems to have acquired the burdens of fears and guilts which haunted him all his life." Certainly his writings—from essays written at the University of Michigan to the poem "Otto" in The Far Field—uphold Seager's comment that "all his life the memory loomed over him." By scrutinizing the plants, flowers, and creatures, Roethke attempted to tie the world of the greenhouse to the "inner world" of man. "The sensual world of the greenhouse is the first garden from which we have all emerged," explained Richard Blessing, "and the attempt to make meaning of it, to recall the energies of that place occupies us all in the lonely chill of our adult beds." James G. Southworth agreed that the search through the past is a painful one, as demonstrated in the opening lines of "Cuttings (later)": "This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks, / Cut stems struggling to put down feet, / What saint strained so much, / Rose on such lopped limbs to new life?" Ultimately the message spelled from the greenhouse sequence, as interpreted by Blessing, "reads that life is dynamic, not static; that the energy of the moment from the past preserves it, in part, in the present; that experience is a continuum, not a collection of dead instant preserved and pinned on walls we have left behind." While The Lost Son focused on a child's struggle for identity, Roethke made great advances in establishing his own identity as a poet during this time. Michael Harrington felt "Roethke found his own voice and central themes in The Lost Son" and Stanley Kunitz saw a "confirmation that he was in full possession of his art and of his vision." Blessing echoed this praise when he wrote: "To my mind, the transformation of Theodore Roethke from a poet of 'lyric resourcefulness, technical proficiency and ordered sensibility' to a poet of 'indomitable creativeness and audacity ... difficult, heroic, moving and profoundly disquieting' is one of the most remarkable in American literary history." Roethke's next book of poetry, Praise to the End! (1951), followed much the same pattern set in The Lost Son by continuing "his most heroic enterprise," the sequence of interior monologues initiated in the title poem of The Lost Son. Roethke himself offered these suggestions on how to read the new book: "You will have no trouble if you approach these poems as a child would, naively, with your whole being awake, your faculties loose and alert. (A large order, I daresay!) Listen to them, for they are written to be heard, with the themes often coming alternately, as in music, and usually a partial resolution at the end. Each poem ... is complete in itself; yet each in a sense is a stage in a kind of struggle out of the slime; part of a slow spiritual progress; an effort to be born, and later, to become something more." After the intense explorations of The Lost Son and Praise to the End! "it is not surprising," as W.D. Snodgrass pointed out, "that Roethke might at this point need to step back and regather his forces. He did just that in the group of 'New Poems' in The Waking (1954)." This next book of Roethke's won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and has long since been considered one of the most important books of contemporary American poetry. The title poem, "The Waking," has been one of the most anthologized American poems of the 20th-century. Roethke's marriage, his readings in philosophy and religion, and his feelings of anxiety and illness are, according to Malkoff, the most important events projected in the "New Poems" of Words for the Wind. His love poems, which first appeared in The Waking, earned their own section in the new book, "were a distinct departure from the painful excavations of the monologues and in some respects a return to the strict stanzaic forms of the earliest work," said Stanley Kunitz. Ralph Mills described "the amatory verse" as a blend of "consideration of self with qualities of eroticism and sensuality; but more important, the poems introduce and maintain a fascination with something beyond the self, that is, with the figure of the other, or the beloved woman." Roethke's "surrender to sensualism," claimed Robert Boyers, is not permanent: "He eventually discovers that the love of woman is not the ultimate mode for him." As Malkoff noted, Roethke is not a thoroughly consistent poet. "He moves from utter despair, to resignation, to mystic faith beyond mysticism and back to despair. We shall not find in his poems the development of a systematic philosophy; there emerges rather the complex figure of a man directly confronting the limitations of his existence with none of life's possibilities ... excluded." Words for the Wind wavers in this way when, in Kunitz's words, "the love poems gradually dissolve into the death poems." The book does conclude with "The Dying Man" and "Meditations of an Old Woman," but these poems are more than gloomy contemplations of death: Blessing believed "The Dying Man" (dedicated to Roethke's spiritual father, Yeats) "remains a poem about the creative possibilities inherent in the very shapelessness of death"; Malkoff thought "Meditations of an Old Woman" "provides a kind of frame of reference for the consideration of life, and which often reappearing, is never far from the poem's surface. ... [Ultimately,] Words for the Wind, read from cover to cover, is the spiritual autobiography of a man whose excessive sensitivity to his experience magnifies rather than distorts man's universal condition." Roethke earned much of this magnified vision with an understanding of the mysticism that pervades Words for the Wind (1958) and The Far Field (1964), which both won the National Book Award for Poetry. Heavily influenced by Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism, many of his later poems follow her psychological progression, as outlined by Sullivan: "They begin with the painful apprehension of personal insufficiency, aggravated by the awareness of the possibility of a deeper reality. This is followed by a desire for purification through self-castigation and mortification, which Underhill calls the painful descent into the 'cell of knowledge.' This leads to illumination, a sudden breakthrough to a heightened visionary joy in the awakening of transcendental consciousness. These are only the first three, as it were, secular stages of mystical insight; he never laid claim to the last stages which lead to union with Absolute Being." William Heyen emphasized that Roethke was not one who dedicated "his life to educating himself to achieve union with God. Rather, Roethke was an artist who experienced moments of deep religious feeling and almost inexpressible illumination. His choice was not traditional Christianity or atheism, but a reliance upon the mystic perceptions of his own imagination." In Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical, for example, Roethke defined his focus as "a hunt, a drive toward God; an effort to break through the barrier of rational experience." McMichael, however, found a paradox involved in such an effort: "The more he thinks about that thing [something other than himself] the less likely he is to know it as it really is; for as soon as he begins to acquire for him any of the qualities that his conceptual faculty is ready to impose upon it, his intuition and love of it are lost." Roethke does reach points of ecstasy in his poems, though, and Heyen defended him against critics who have charged that his joy is superficial and too easily attained: "It is important to realize that the happiness achieved in any Roethke poem ... is not one based on reason. ... Armed with his study of Underhill and the mystics she discusses Roethke has found his rationale ... he can rock irrationally between light and dark, can go by feeling where he has to go." Admittedly in retrospect, Seager reflected on the years preceding The Far Field and Roethke's death in 1963: "The last years of Ted's life, as we look back on them knowing they were the last, seem to have a strange air of unconscious preparation. As the fabric of his body begins to give way, the best part of his mind, his poetry, ... strives toward a mystical union with his Father. But this was unconscious. I don't think he was at all aware that he was getting ready to go. He had too much work in hand, too much projected, yet the last poems seem prophetic: they read like last poems." Perceiving a similar pattern in The Far Field, W.D. Snodgrass wrote that "these poems, recording that withdrawal [as in 'The Longing'], also, I think suffer from it. The language grows imprecise with pain. ... Metrically, too, one has a sense of discouragement and withdrawal. ... More and more, Roethke's late poems seem to have lost their appetite, their tolerance for that anguish of concreteness." The Far Field, which won the National Book Award in 1965, contained two sequences representing earlier themes and images, as well as "North American Sequence" and Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical. According to Sullivan, Roethke wished to be remembered by the last poems in the latter sequence. Roethke himself wrote that "in spite of all the muck and welter, the dreck of these poems [in Sequence, Sometimes Metaphysical], I count myself among the happy poets: I proclaim once more a condition of joy." Indeed for those distressed by the tragic self-implications of his statement—"There is nothing more disconcerting than when a rich nature thins into despair"—these last poems, in celebrating the richness of nature and the poet's "capacity to face up to genuine mystery," erase the despair. His last lines read: "And everything comes to One, / As we dance on, dance on, dance on." Roethke's death in 1963, of a heart attack while swimming in a friend's pool, was "an incalculable loss to American Literature," wrote Ralph Mills. While the poet was drinking much and suffering in his later years from a combination of ailments, including arthritis, bursitis, and periods of manic excitement, his poetry was reaching its peak and earned this praise from James Dickey: "Roethke seems to me the finest poet now writing in English. I[say] this with a certain fierceness, knowing that I have to put him up against Eliot, Pound, Graves, and a good many others of high rank. I do it cheerfully, however. ... I think Roethke is the finest poet not so much because of his beautifully personal sense of form ... but because of the way he sees and feels the aspects of life which are compelling to him." The publication of Collected Poems in 1966 brought renewed interest in Roethke and prompted illuminating overviews of his work. David Ferry felt "his seriousness is frequently too solemnly serious, his lyrical qualities too lyrically lyrical. His mystical vein often seems willed, forced. ... And yet Roethke is a very interesting and important poet. For one thing there is ... the brilliance there [in Praise to the End!] with which he uses imitations of children's voices, nursery rhymes, his beautiful sense of the lives of small creatures, the shifting rhythms and stanza forms. ... [And, in The Far Field] there are signs ... of a new and promising expansiveness and tentativeness. ... For the reader, the pity is not to be able to see where this would have taken him." Karl Malkoff wrote, "Though not definite, Roethke: Collected Poems is a major book of poetry. It reveals the full extent of Roethke's achievement: his ability to perceive reality in terms of the tensions between inner and outer worlds, and to find a meaningful system of metaphor with which to communicate this perception. ... He is one of our finest poets, a human poet in a world that threatens to turn man into an object." Roethke was altogether human, both in creating "the most exhaustive, vital, and vivid reports" we have of a soul in the several agonies normally recorded in one human life," and in impressing "his friends and readers profoundly as a human being." His appreciation for all life is evident in his statement, "If I have a complex, it's a full-life complex." Roethke lived energetically, most notably through a devotion to his teaching and through the introspection necessary to his poetry. At the same time, it is generally acknowledged that he paid for his tremendous mental and physical energy with his breakdowns. Thus, as Snodgrass said, one can view Roethke's career "with an astonished awe, yet with sadness."

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank. It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on Janurary 4, 1965.

Realism

Values reason above emotion, needs of the many outweigh those of the few, looks at things realistically

Twain, Bierce, and Harte

What author(s) use local color?

War Prayer

What short story did Twain write criticizing the use of religion in justifying warfare, showing the dual nature of prayer?

Britian

Which country's citizens heavily read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and changed whether their country would support the Confederacy?

Bret Harte

Who is the author of "Outcasts of Poker Flats"?

Ambrose Bierce

Who is the author of "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"?

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Who is the author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin"?

Stephen Crane

Who is the author of 'The Open Boat"?

Walt Whitman

Who wrote "Leaves of Grass"?

Edgar Lee Masters

Who wrote "Spoon River Anthology"?

Jack London

Who wrote "To Build a Fire"?

Loss of logos

Words have no meaning anymore, no longer speaking any words that matter

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Falkner (the original spelling of his last name) was born in the small town of New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His parents, Murry Falkner and Maud Butler Faulkner, named him after his paternal great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, an adventurous and shrewd man who seven years prior was shot dead in the town square of Ripley, Mississippi. Throughout his life, William Clark Falkner worked as a railroad financier, politician, soldier, farmer, businessman, lawyer and—in his twilight years—best-selling author. The grandeur of the "Old Colonel," as almost everyone called him, loomed large in the minds of William Clark Falkner's children and grandchildren. The Old Colonel's son, John Wesley Thompson, opened the First National Bank of Oxford in 1910. Instead of later bequeathing the railroad business to his son, Murry, however, Thompson sold it. Murry worked as the business manager for the University of Mississippi. Murry's son, author William Falkner, held tightly to his great-grandfather's legacy, writing about him in his earliest novels set in the American South. As much as the older men in Faulkner's family made an impression on him, so did the women. Faulkner's mother, Maud, and grandmother Lelia Butler were voracious readers, as well as fine painters and photographers, and they taught him the beauty of line and color. Faulkner's "mammy," as he called her, was a black woman named Caroline Barr. She raised him from birth until the day he left home and was fundamental to his development. At her wake, Faulkner told the mourning crowd that it was a privilege to see her out, that she had taught him right from wrong and was loyal to his family despite having borne none of them. In later documents, Faulkner points to Barr as the impetus for his fascination with the politics of sexuality and race. As a teenager, Faulkner was taken by drawing. He also greatly enjoyed reading and writing poetry. In fact, by the age of 12, he began intentionally mimicking Scottish romantics, specifically Robert Burns, and English romantics, A. E. Housman and A. C. Swinburne. However, despite his remarkable intelligence, or perhaps because of it, school bored him and he never earned a high school diploma. After dropping out, Faulkner worked in carpentry and sporadically as a clerk at his grandfather's bank. During this time, Faulkner met Estelle Oldham. At the time of their meeting, she was both popular and exceedingly effervescent and immediately stole his heart. The two dated for a while, but another man, named Cornell Franklin, proposed to her before Faulker did. Estelle took the proposal lightheartedly, partly because Franklin had just been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian Territorial Forces and was leaving soon to report for duty. Estelle hoped it would dissolve naturally, but several months later, he mailed her an engagement ring. Estelle's parents bade her to accept the offer, as Franklin was a law graduate of the University of Mississippi and came from a family of high repute. Afflicted by Estelle's engagement, Faulkner turned to new mentor Phil Stone, a local attorney who was impressed by his poetry. Stone invited Faulkner to move and live with him in New Haven, Connecticut. There, Stone nurtured Faulkner's passion for writing. While delving into prose, Faulkner worked at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, a distinguished rifle manufacturer. Lured by the war in Europe, he joined the British Royal Flying Corps in 1918 and trained as a pilot in the first Royal Canadian Air Force. He had earlier tried to enlist in the U.S. Forces, but was rejected due to his height (he was slightly under 5' 6"). To enlist in the Royal Air Force, he lied about several facts, changing his birthplace and surname—from Falkner to Faulkner—to appear more British. Faulkner trained on British and Canadian bases, and finished his time in Toronto just before the war ended, never finding himself in harm's way. A man of skilled exaggeration, Faulkner embellished his experiences and sometimes completely fabricated war stories for his friends back home. He even donned the uniform of a lieutenant to bolster his reputation and wore it when he returned to Mississippi. By 1919, Faulkner had enrolled at the University of Mississippi. He wrote for the student newspaper, the Mississippian, submitting his first published poem and other short works. However, after three semesters as an entirely inattentive student, he dropped out. He worked briefly in New York City as a bookseller's assistant and for two years as the postmaster for the university, and spent a short stint as the scoutmaster for a local troop. In 1924, Phil Stone escorted a collection of Faulkner's poetry, The Marble Faun, to a publisher. Shortly after its 1,000-copy run, Faulkner moved to New Orleans. While there, he published several essays for The Double Dealer, a local magazine that served to unite and nurture the city's literary crowd. In 1926, Faulkner succeeded in having his first novel published, Soldiers' Pay. As soon as it had been accepted for print in 1925, he sailed from New Orleans to Europe to live for a few months at Le Grand Hôtel des Principautés Unies in Paris. During his stay, he wrote about the Luxembourg Gardens that were a short walk from his apartment. Back in Louisiana, American writer Sherwood Anderson, who had become a friend, gave Faulkner some advice: He told the young author to write about his native region of Mississippi—a place that Faulkner surely knew better than northern France. Inspired by the concept, Faulkner began writing about the places and people of his childhood, developing a great many colorful characters based on real people he had grown up with or heard about, including his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner. For his famous 1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury, he developed the fictional Yoknapatawpha County—a place nearly identical to Lafayette County, in which Oxford, Mississippi, is located. A year later, in 1930, Faulkner released As I Lay Dying. Faulkner became known for his faithful and accurate dictation of Southern speech. He also boldly illuminated social issues that many American writers left in the dark, including slavery, the "good old boys" club and Southern aristocracy. In 1931, after much deliberation, Faulkner decided to publish Sanctuary, a story that focused on the rape and kidnapping of a young woman at Ole Miss. It shocked and appalled some readers, but it was a commercial success and a critical breakthrough for his career. Years later, in 1950, he published a sequel that was a mix of conventional prose and play forms, Requiem for a Nun. Personally, Faulkner experienced both elation and soul-shocking sadness during this time in his career. Between the publishing of The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, his old flame, Estelle Oldham, divorced Cornell Franklin. Still deeply in love with her, Faulkner promptly made his feelings known, and the two were married within six months. Estelle became pregnant, and in January of 1931, she gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Alabama. Tragically, the premature baby lived for just over a week. Faulkner's collection of short stories, titled These 13, is dedicated to "Estelle and Alabama." Faulkner's next novel, Light in August (1932), tells the story of Yoknapatawpha County outcasts. In it, he introduces his readers to Joe Christmas, a man of uncertain racial makeup; Joanna Burden, a woman who supports voting rights for blacks and later is brutally murdered; Lena Grove, an alert and determined young woman in search of her baby's father; and Rev. Gail Hightower, a man besieged by visions. Time magazine listed it—along with The Sound and the Fury—as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. After publishing several notable books, Faulkner turned to screenwriting. Starting with a six-week contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, he cowrote 1933's Today We Live, starring Joan Crawford and Gary Cooper. After Faulkner's father died, and in need of money, he decided to sell the rights to film Sanctuary, later titled The Story of Temple Drake (1933). That same year, Estelle gave birth to Jill, the couple's only surviving child. Between 1932 and 1945, Faulkner traveled to Hollywood a dozen times to toil as a scriptwriter and contributed to or wrote countless films. Uninspired by the task, however, he did it purely for financial gain. During this period, Faulkner also published several novels, including the epic family saga Absalom, Absalom! (1936), the satirical The Hamlet (1940) and Go Down, Moses (1942). In 1946, Malcolm Cowley published The Portable Faulkner and interest in Faulkner's work was revived. Two years later, Faulkner published Intruder in the Dust, the tale of a black man falsely accused of murder. He was able to sell the film rights to MGM for $50,000. One of Faulkner's greatest professional moments came when he was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving the award the following year. The committee deemed him one of the most important writers of American letters. This attention brought him more awards, including the National Book Award for Fiction for Collected Stories and the Legion of Honor in New Orleans. He also won the 1951 National Book Award for The Collected Stories of William Faulkner. A few years later, Faulkner was awarded the 1955 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction along with another National Book Award for his novel A Fable, set in France during WWI. In January 1961, Faulkner willed all his major manuscripts and many of his personal papers to the William Faulkner Foundation at the University of Virginia. On July 6, 1962, coincidentally the same date as the Old Colonel's birthday, William Faulkner died of a heart attack. He was posthumously awarded his second Pulitzer in 1963 for The Reivers.

"Harlem Shadows"

Written by Claude McKay

"Incident"

Written by Countee Cullen

"anyone lived in a pretty how town"

Written by E. E. Cummings

"next to of course god america i"

Written by E. E. Cummings

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro"

Written by Ernest Hemingway

"In a Station of the Metro"

Written by Ezra Pound

"Winter Dreams"

Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Good Country People"

Written by Flannery O'Conner

"Travels with Charley" excerpt

Written by John Steinbeck

"The Jilting of Granny Weatherall"

Written by Katherine Ann Porter

"We Wear the Mask"

Written by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Kate Chopin

Wrote about female awakening, feminism, and equality in the South

Slave Narrative

a type of literary work that is made up of the written accounts of enslaved Africans in Great Britain and its colonies, including the later United States, Canada, and Caribbean nations

Edgar Lee Masters

an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman.

Regionalism

focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region

F. Scott Fitzgerald

born Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. His namesake (and second cousin three times removed on his father's side) was Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the "Star-Spangled Banner." Fitzgerald's mother, Mary McQuillan, was from an Irish-Catholic family that had made a small fortune in Minnesota as wholesale grocers. His father, Edward Fitzgerald, had opened a wicker furniture business in St. Paul, and, when it failed, he took a job as a salesman for Procter & Gamble that took his family back and forth between Buffalo and Syracuse in upstate New York during the first decade of Fitzgerald's life. However, Edward Fitzgerald lost his job with Procter & Gamble in 1908, when F. Scott Fitzgerald was 12, and the family moved back to St. Paul to live off of his mother's inheritance. He attended the St. Paul Academy, and when he was 13, he saw his first piece of writing appear in print: a detective story published in the school newspaper. In 1911, when Fitzgerald was 15 years old, his parents sent him to the Newman School, a prestigious Catholic preparatory school in New Jersey. There, he met Father Sigourney Fay, who noticed his incipient talent with the written word and encouraged him to pursue his literary ambitions. After graduating from the Newman School in 1913, Fitzgerald decided to stay in New Jersey to continue his artistic development at Princeton University. At Princeton, he firmly dedicated himself to honing his craft as a writer, writing scripts for Princeton's famous Triangle Club musicals as well as frequent articles for the Princeton Tiger humor magazine and stories for the Nassau Literary Magazine. However, Fitzgerald's writing came at the expense of his coursework. He was placed on academic probation, and, in 1917, he dropped out of school to join the U.S. Army. Afraid that he might die in World War I with his literary dreams unfulfilled, in the weeks before reporting to duty, Fitzgerald hastily wrote a novel called The Romantic Egotist. Though the publisher, Charles Scribner's Sons, rejected the novel, the reviewer noted its originality and encouraged Fitzgerald to submit more work in the future. Fitzgerald was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and assigned to Camp Sheridan outside of Montgomery, Alabama. It was there that he met and fell in love with a beautiful 18-year-old girl named Zelda Sayre, the daughter of an Alabama Supreme Court judge. The war ended in November 1918, before Fitzgerald was ever deployed, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City hoping to launch a career in advertising lucrative enough to convince Zelda to marry him. He quit his job after only a few months, however, and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel. The novel's new incarnation, This Side of Paradise, a largely autobiographical story about love and greed, was centered on Amory Blaine, an ambitious Midwesterner who falls in love with, but is ultimately rejected by, two girls from high-class families. The novel was published in 1920 to glowing reviews and, almost overnight, turned Fitzgerald, at the age of 24, into one of the country's most promising young writers. One week after the novel's publication, he married Zelda Sayre in New York. They had one child, a daughter named Frances Scott Fitzgerald, born in 1921. F. Scott Fitzgerald eagerly embraced his newly minted celebrity status and embarked on an extravagant lifestyle that earned him a reputation as a playboy and hindered his reputation as a serious literary writer. Beginning in 1920 and continuing throughout the rest of his career, Fitzgerald supported himself financially by writing great numbers of short stories for popular publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and Esquire. Some of his most notable stories include "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz," "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," "The Camel's Back" and "The Last of the Belles." In 1922, Fitzgerald published his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, the story of the troubled marriage of Anthony and Gloria Patch. The Beautiful and Damned helped to cement his status as one of the great chroniclers and satirists of the culture of wealth, extravagance and ambition that emerged during the affluent 1920s—what became known as the Jazz Age. "It was an age of miracles," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire." Seeking a change of scenery to spark his creativity, in 1924, Fitzgerald moved to France, and it was there, in Valescure, that Fitzgerald wrote what would be credited as his greatest novel, The Great Gatsby, published in 1925. With its beautiful lyricism, pitch-perfect portrayal of the Jazz Age, and searching critiques of materialism, love and the American Dream, The Great Gatsby is considered Fitzgerald's finest work. Although the book was well-received when it was published, it was not until the 1950s and '60s, long after Fitzgerald's death, that it achieved its stature as the definitive portrait of the "Roaring Twenties," as well as one of the greatest American novels ever written.After he completed The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's life began to unravel. Always a heavy drinker, he progressed steadily into alcoholism and suffered prolonged bouts of writer's block. His wife, Zelda, also suffered from mental health issues, and the couple spent the late 1920s moving back and forth between Delaware and France. In 1930, she suffered another breakdown and was treated at the Sheppard Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, and that same year was admitted to a mental health clinic in Switzerland. Two years later she was treated at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In 1934, after years of toil, Fitzgerald finally published his fourth novel, Tender is the Night, about an American psychiatrist in Paris, France, and his troubled marriage to a wealthy patient. Although Tender is the Night was a commercial failure and was initially poorly received due to its chronologically jumbled structure, it has since gained in reputation and is now considered among the great American novels. After another two years lost to alcohol and depression, in 1937 Fitzgerald attempted to revive his career as a screenwriter and freelance storywriter in Hollywood, and he achieved modest financial, if not critical, success for his efforts. He began work on another novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939, and he had completed over half the manuscript when he died of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44, in Hollywood, California. F. Scott Fitzgerald died believing himself a failure. None of his works received anything more than modest commercial or critical success during his lifetime. However, since his death, Fitzgerald has gained a reputation as one of the pre-eminent authors in the history of American literature due almost entirely to the enormous posthumous success of The Great Gatsby. Perhaps the quintessential American novel, as well as a definitive social history of the Jazz Age, The Great Gatsby went on to become required reading for virtually every American high school student, and has had a transportive effect on generation after generation of readers.

Local Color

style of writing derived from the presentation of the features and peculiarities of a particular locality and its inhabitants

Bret Harte

An American short story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, fiction, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired.

Existential angst

Anxiety of existence

Southwestern Humor

A dark humor commonly found in the writings of Twain, Bierce, and Harte

Ambrose Bierce

An American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist. He wrote the short story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and compiled a satirical lexicon, The Devil's Dictionary. His vehemence as a critic, his motto "Nothing matters", and the sardonic view of human nature that informed his work, all earned him the nickname "Bitter Bierce". He traveled to Mexico to gain first-hand experience of the Mexican Revolution. He was rumored to be traveling with rebel troops, and was not seen again.

It opened the eyes of the uninformed and uncaring to the horrors of slavery

What affect did "Uncle Tom's Cabin" have on the American people?

Twain, Bierce, and Harte

What author(s) use regionalism?

Samuel Clemens

What is Mark Twain's real name?

Imagism

A short formal literary movement that showed large influences on 20th century poets. Attempted to present the object directly and plainly, avoiding ornate diction.

Naturalism

A sub-genre of realism which doesn't glorify nature, but instead depicts it as very dangerous and powerful; usually places its character(s) in an extreme survival situation such as the open sea, the desert, the Arctic tundra, etc...

The Gilded Age

A term coined by Twain to describe how American society looked great from the outside, but from the inside you could easily see how rotten it was

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Daughter of Reverend Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote Beecher who wrote her books in an informal, conversational style. Most famous for her influential anti-slavery novel

Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck employs mild detective skills to investigate the happenings of a man who had been staying in a hotel room John was briefly occupying before his was ready. The man was out of town and had seen a prostitute, trashed a letter he'd started to his wife, forgot nothing supposedly indicating this wasn't the first time this had happened.

Emily Dickinson

Originally publicized as an eccentric, reclusive, death-obsessed spinster. Outlived all her family members. Lived in her parents house her whole life. Drew on current events for her poetry. Her poetry contained complex lyrics, featuring startling imagery and good vocabulary. Poetry is slightly autobiographical, but not truly confessional. Remained unmarried but had several love interests which are known only through her "love" poems. Explores psychic pain and joy, relationship of self to nature, intensely spiritual, and intensely ordinary. Confronts death with honesty, humor, curiosity, and a refusal to be comforted. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1830 into a prominent family. Father was a lawyer, state representative, state senator, helped found and was treasurer of Amherst college. Attended Amherst for 6 years, then boarded as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary for a year. Wrote "fourteener", the form of nursery rhymes, church ballads and hymns, and some classical poetry. Often presented poetic ideas in terse, striking scenes, highly abstracted moments, or setting often at the boundaries between life and death. Observations on nature are just as often psychological and spiritual as about nature. Poems are openly expressive of sexual and romantic desires. Wanted poetry published, but disagreed with the editing that occurred before publishing. "Self published" by creating 30 fascicles of sewn together papers. The final years of her life was marked by poor health and a succession of loses. Mabel Todd, mistress of her brother, transcribed many of her poems after her death and began the preservation and publication with 3 volumes of poems and a collection of her letters. Her sister-in-law and niece had some of her works published as well. Todd, her sister-in-law, and niece only slightly edited the poems before publication.

Willa Cather

Polish American, wrote stories about the travels of Polish people to America

A Rose for Emily

Story of an elderly woman in a small town written from perspective of townspeople. Follows her interaction with a man, - - -, who is implied to be gay, and eventual marriage to him. Emily slowly begins pulling out of society, especially after getting married, with no one ever seeing her until her death. When the house is opened up, the wedding bedroom is discovered with the skeleton of her husband, and a recent hair on the pillow next to him

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Story of an elderly woman, Granny Weatherall, who was dying, suffering from dementia, features strong usage of stream of consciousness to display the severity of her dementia, recalls the memory of being left at the altar

Stephen Crane

The ninth surviving child of Protestant Methodist parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had published several articles by the age of 16. Having little interest in university studies, he left college in 1891 to work as a reporter and writer. Crane's first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, generally considered by critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim in 1895 for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without having any battle experience.Crane's writing is characterized by vivid intensity, distinctive dialects, and irony. Common themes involve fear, spiritual crises and social isolation.

Modernism

This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their time. The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society reassessed

"Mending Wall"

Written by Robert Frost

"The Road Not Taken"

Written by Robert Frost

"My Papa's Waltz"

Written by Theodore Roethke

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Written by Thomas Stearns Eliot

"Anecdote of the Jar"

Written by Wallace Stevens

"The Red Wheelbarrow"

Written by William Carlos Williams

"A Rose for Emily"

Written by William Faulkner