The modernist period

"barn burning" william faulkner

(set in about 1895) opens in a country store, which is doubling as a Justice of the Peace Court. A hungry boy named Sarty craves the meat and cheese in the store. He's afraid. His father, Abner Snopes, is in court, accused of burning down Mr. Harris's barn. Sarty is called up to testify against his father, and he knows he's going to have to lie and say his father didn't burn the barn. The Justice and Mr. Harris realize they are putting the young boy in a bad position, and they let him off the hook. The Judge tells Mr. Snopes to leave the county and never come back. On the way out of the courthouse a kid calls Sarty "Barn Burner!" and knocks him down, twice (16). Sarty tries to chase the kid but his father stops him. Sarty, his older brother, and his father get into the family wagon, where his mother, aunt, and two sisters are waiting. The wagon is already loaded with their broken possessions. That night, the family camps. After Sarty falls asleep, his father wakes him up and tells Sarty to follow him. Sarty does. His father accuses him of being on the verge of betraying him in court. He hits Sarty. Then he tells him that the most important thing is to stand by your family. The next day the Snopes arrive at their new home, a shack on the farm where they will be working as tenant farmers. Abner wants to talk to the owner and he takes Sarty with him. When Sarty sees the owner's fancy, white mansion he feels like everything just might be all right after all. He thinks his father can't possibly hurt people who live in a house like that. In the yard, Abner deliberately steps in some fresh horse poop, forces his way into the mansion, and tracks the poop all over the white rug in the front room. Later that day, the owner of the rug and mansion, Mr. de Spain, has the rug dropped off at Abner's shack. Abner sets his two daughters to cleaning it, and then dries it in front of the fire. Early the next morning, Abner wakes Sarty and the two of them return the rug to de Spain. De Spain shows up shortly after, insulting Abner and complaining that the rug is "ruined" (62). He tells Abner he's going to charge him twenty extra bushels of corn to pay for the hundred-dollar rug. When he leaves, Sarty tells Abner that they shouldn't give de Spain any corn at all. After working hard all week, Sarty goes with his family to town that Saturday. He goes with his father into a store, and sees that a Justice of the Peace Court is in session. De Spain is there. Sarty doesn't realize that Abner is suing de Spain to have the fee of twenty bushels reduced. Sarty blurts out that his father isn't guilty of burning any barns. Abner sends him back to the wagon, but he stays in the store to see what happens. The Justice decides that Abner is responsible for the damage to the rug, but he reduces the fee to ten bushels. Sarty, his father, and his brother spend some time in town and don't go home until the sun has almost set. After dinner Sarty hears his mother trying to stop his father from doing something. He realizes his father is planning to burn the de Spain barn. His father and brother realize that Sarty is planning on alerting de Spain, and they leave him behind, held tight in his mother's arms. Sarty breaks free and runs to the de Spain house. He's only able to say "Barn!" a few times, and then he's on the run again. De Spain is right behind him, about to run him over. Sarty jumps into a ditch and then returns to the road. He hears three gunshots and soon after, behind him, sees the red glow of the de Spain barn on fire. At midnight Sarty is on top of a hill. He's come a long way. Everything is behind him. He mourns the loss of his father (who he seems to assume is dead), but is no longer afraid. He falls asleep and feels better when he wakes up. The whippoorwills (birds) are singing and it's almost morning. He starts walking toward the woods in front of him. He doesn't turn around.

Claude McKay

A poet who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance movement and wrote the poem "If We Must Die" after the Chicago riot of 1919.

After Apple-Picking - Robert Frost

After a long day's work, the speaker is tired of apple picking. He has felt drowsy and dreamy since the morning when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough. Now he feels tired, feels sleep coming on, but wonders whether it is a normal, end-of-the-day sleep or something deeper.

John Steinbeck

American novelist who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath". (1939) A story of Dustbowl victims who travel to California to look for a better life.

Hart Crane (1899-1932)

American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope. In his most ambitious work, The Bridge, Crane sought to write an epic poem, in the vein of The Waste Land, that expressed a more optimistic view of modern, urban culture than the one that he found in Eliot's work. Works: The Bridge, White Buildings (a collection of shorter works)

Gertude Stein

An American woman who hosted many authors of the Lost Generation in her Paris home, author of "The making of Americans"

the autobiography of an ex-colored man (james weldon johnson)

Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is told from the first-person point of view of an unnamed male narrator. He starts his tale by stating that he is going to reveal the great secret of his life. He first takes the reader to his childhood in Georgia where he was raised by a single mother. His father occasionally visits, but one day when the narrator is very young, he and his mother move to Connecticut. The narrator is a very intelligent young man and soon proves himself a musical prodigy. He enters a public school and becomes close friends with an older and bigger white boy who he nicknames "Red". He is intrigued by the African American students at his school - in particular, an exceptionally bright and ambitious boy who goes by the nickname "Shiny". One day the principal comes into the narrator's classroom and asks all of the white children to stand. When the narrator stands, the principal asks him to sit down. Through this traumatic incident, the narrator learns that he is not white. He asks his mother and she is clearly anguished, admitting that she is indeed "colored", and that his father is a great white man. The narrator starts seeing America differently, through the lens of his race. As a child, he becomes wary of others, and devotes his time to music and literature. He falls in love with a young violinist, but she does not return his affections. He comes into contact with his father once, and admires the man's pale skin and calm demeanor. Their meeting is a bit strained, however, and the narrator's father does not stay long. He later gifts his son a piano. The narrator and his mother have a frank discussion about race, and he notes that she never criticizes his father even though he failed to publicly acknowledge his son and is married to another (white) woman. The narrator graduates from grammar school, and is stunned and inspired by Shiny's grand oratory at the graduation ceremony. In high school the narrator continues his cerebral activities and begins to think about college. However, his mother dies from an unfortunate illness, so he decides to forego an Ivy League education and return to his Southern roots, enrolling at Atlanta University. Atlanta proves to be an uninspiring locale, and the narrator finds himself having to make new plans when all his money is stolen. He hears that he will be able to find work in hotels in Jacksonville, Florida. Instead, he finds work as a cigar-maker and then as a "reader", a position that requires him to read books and newspapers aloud in Spanish to the other cigar-makers during the workday. While working at the factory, the narrator concludes that there are "three types of colored people": the desperate class, the domestic servant class, and the educated class. He feels that he falls in with the latter. When the cigar factory shuts down, the narrator and a few other men decide to move to New York. Soon after they arrive, they spend a decadent night out on the town at a gambling house and later, at the Club, where the narrator is introduced to ragtime. He comments on the racial diversity in the Club. Soon, the narrator is no longer content making cigars and falls into a pattern of gambling, earning lots of money and then losing it. He spends all of his time at the Club and soon masters the art of ragtime. One day, a cultured white millionaire hears the narrator play and offers him a job performing at one of his lavish dinner parties. The narrator soon becomes the millionaire's employee, playing for him all the time. Meanwhile, the millionaire's avid love for music is the only thing keeping him from utter boredom. One evening, the narrator gets into some trouble when he flirts with a rich white widow whose hotheaded African American companion is violently jealous. The widow's companion catches the widow sitting (platonically) with the narrator and shoots the woman dead. The narrator flees, afraid he is somehow responsible. He tells his woes to the millionaire, who invites him to accompany him to Europe. The narrator agrees, and the two men depart immediately. The millionaire and the narrator travel to Paris first and the narrator immediately falls in love with the city. They move on to London, which soon endears itself to him as well. Amsterdam and Berlin follow, and it is in the latter city that the narrator experiences an epiphany when he hears a German musician turn a ragtime piece into classical music. The narrator realizes he wants to get back to America and start composing again. He decides to return to the South and draw inspiration from the African American community. When the narrator nervously shares his plan with the millionaire, the man responds with incredulity that the narrator, who has been easily passing for white, would choose to live the life of a "colored man". The millionaire is very pragmatic, and believes that it is important to be happy in life and that the narrator should continue to improve his fortunes in Europe. The narrator finds a great deal of truth in these words; but even though he feels he is being a bit selfish, he decides to return to the South. On the ship back to America, the narrator discusses race with an African American doctor. Back in the States, the narrator spends time with the doctor and his friends in Washington, D.C., a city that he feels represents both the best and worst of Black America. He finds his way to Macon, Georgia, where the narrator ruminates on the differences between Southerners and Northerners in their thoughts on African Americans as individuals and as a race. He also attends a big religious meeting and observes the popularity of the African American preacher John Brown and music leader Singing Johnson. While the narrator is not a religious man, he admires their charisma and feels swept up in the emotion. He befriends a school teacher and stays with him for a few days, remarking on the young man's youth and passion. He does, however, find the teacher to be too earnest regarding the race question. One night in Macon, the narrator witnesses a gang of white assailants burning a black man alive. This traumatic event causes him to distance himself fully from his race and choose to pass as a white man. The narrator returns to New York, and after some sightseeing and a dreary search for work, he enters a business college and takes a job as a clerk. His Spanish comes in handy and he easily moves up the corporate ladder. He is motivated almost solely by his drive for wealth and amasses a great fortune by speculating in real estate. The issue of the narrator's race only re-emerges when he falls in love with a white woman and wants to propose marriage. When he finally confesses the truth about his race to his beloved, he is heartbroken when she is flummoxed and quickly departs without comment. She leaves the city for the summer and the narrator is confused and tortured about their fate. However, she does return and agrees to marry him. They have two children and he continues to pass as a white man. Unfortunately, the narrator's wife dies during the birth of their second child. He concludes the novel by saying he is mostly glad he chose to pass as white, especially for his children's sake. Sometimes, though, he wonders if his life as a middle-class white man meant that he "sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage"

Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

Born in the U.S. but spent most of his life in Europe. Was a friend and inspiration to many modernist writers. Founded a group of modernist poets called imagists. Eventually moved away from imagism and towards a new movement called Vorticism (highly abstract and modern). *In a Station of the Metro *The Cantos *A Pact

the leader of the people (john steinbeck)

It is now March and Jody walks to the wire fence to find Billy Buck feeding "mildly interested cattle" (4.1) the last of the old year's haystack. Jody asks if there will be any mice and if he can hunt them down with the dogs. Billy thinks that would be fine and, to prove the point, he lifts another forkful of hay and three mice scurry out and run away. Jody's pumped—he gets to murder some rodents. What fun. But then Billy takes back his permission and tells Jody to ask his father about the plan first. Carl will be home soon. Looking up at the sky, Jody wonders if it will rain. Then he curses the mice and looks away. Jody sees his dog, Doubletree Mutt, digging in a squirrel hole on the side-hill. The dog stops digging suddenly and looks up the hill. Jody follows his gaze and sees that his father has arrived. And he has a letter. Huge news in the olden days. Jody runs back to the house shouting, "We got a letter!" (4.21) to his mother. You'd think, from the level of his excitement, he'd just found out Disneyland exists. But nope. Just some dumb mail. Carl comes into the house and shows off the letter. It is from Mrs. Tiflin's father. Mrs. Tiflin opens it up and reads out loud that her father is coming to visit on Saturday. Wait a second... that's today. Mrs. Tiflin catches a disapproving look on her husband's face and she automatically defends her father. Carl says that her father "only talks about one thing" (4.36). We like to imagine his eyes rolling. Jody finishes the thought and chimes in that his g-pop talks only about "Indians and crossing the plains!" (4.37). For this contribution to the conversation, the boy is shooed out of the house. He sits under the kitchen window playing with a rock and eavesdropping. Still, his father totally agrees: "He just goes on and on, and he never changes a word in the things he tells" (4.40). Fair enough, says Mrs. Tiflin, but look at it this way: crossing the plains was the biggest thing her father ever did in his life. "He led a wagon train clear across the plains to the coast, and when it was finished, his life was done" (4.41). Her father would have kept going too, if only the ocean hadn't stopped him. In other words, cut the old guy some slack. All right, all right, Carl agrees. And hey, if it gets too bad, he can always hang out with Billy at the bunkhouse. Having heard enough, Jody goes off to do his chores. When he's finished he asks his mother if he can go wait for their visitor. Mrs. Tiflin agrees it's a good idea and Jody wanders up the road to meet him. Soon, Jody sees a horse and cart coming up from Salinas. Jody gives a "glad cry" (4.54) and rushes to meet his Grandfather. They're all smiles and happy greetings and finally Jody asks his Gramps to go mouse hunting with him. Gramps just laughs and jokes in response, and tells Jody he's grown nearly an inch since the last time he saw him. Jody says they might kill a pig in honor of his Grandfather's visit but the old man won't have it. Not on his account. Together, Grandfather and grandson walk to the Tiflin ranch. When they arrive, Carl, Billy Buck and Mrs. Tiflin come out to greet her dear old dad at the front gate. Billy Buck takes hold of his horse to put in the barn. The family goes inside and the old man eats a steak. As he does, he begins to talk about how hungry he is, which reminds him of—you guessed it—the crossing. He goes on to tell stories they have all heard a billion times before. He also tells Billy Buck that he knew his father. The old man tells about the time when they ran out of meat during the crossing. He was the leader of the people so it was his job to hunt and kill some animals before the people broke down and started killing their oxen. A big moth flies into the room as Grandfather is telling his story. He cups it in his hand and drops it out the window. After dinner, Jody watches as his Grandfather starts to doze off. His head falls to his chest and the old man startles himself awake by the fire. Which means it's time for another story. This one time, at band camp, some Indians stole their horses and... Carl interrupts him, saying they'd heard it before... lots of times, in fact. Jody says he'd like to hear it again but the old man looks totally bummed by Carl's interjection. "Tell me about Indians" (4.99), Jody says softly. Gramps goes on to tell another story about when Indians attacked their crossing party. Jody looks around and notices that his father, mother, and Billy Buck are all bored out of their minds. Then, Jody notices that even his Grandfather seems to have lost interest in the story he is telling. Now that's a snooze. When the story is finished, Billy Buck heads off to catch some z's. Carl asks Grandfather how the country is from here to Monterey. It's dry, he says. And that's that. Carl tells Jody he should be off to bed. Jody remembers about the mice in the old haystack and asks his father if he can kill them. Why not? says Papa Tiflin. Excellent. Jody's pumped for tomorrow. As he tries to doze off that night, Jody wishes he were alive during the time of the great crossing. It sounds kind of cool: "A race of giants had lived then, fearless men, men of a staunchness unknown in this day" (4.113). At dawn, Jody passes through the kitchen, telling his mother he is off to find a good stick for beating mice to death with. Typical kid stuff. Jackpot. He finds an old broom handle and a piece of scrap-wood and ties them together to make an über-implement of death. It's time for breakfast, and Jody can't hide his excitement at the prospect of some good old fashioned rodent bludgeoning: "I'll bet they don't know what's going to happen to them today" (4.123). Billy replies, rather philosophically, "No, nor you either... nor me, nor anyone" (4.124). Deep. And alarming. Inside, breakfast is ready but Gramps hasn't showed. Carl and Mrs. Tiflin start to argue about the old man. Carl's still complaining about the old man's repetitive stories: "Why can't he forget it, now it's done?" (4.130) he asks. The kitchen door closes. Poor Gramps is standing there, and he heard everything. Oops. Carl backpedals, and how. He immediately says, "I don't know what got into me, sir. I didn't mean it" (4.135). Jody's all, since when does my dad ever backpedal? He realizes that his father must be really ashamed of himself. G-pop says he is not mad and that maybe Carl has a point. Carl apologizes again but the old man insists that maybe Carl's right: "The crossing is finished. Maybe it should be forgotten, now it's done" (4.139). Totally embarrassed, Carl flees the room, after telling Billy to take his time before joining him for their day's work. In an attempt to salvage the situation, Jody asks his Grandfather if he will tell him more stories. Grandfather agrees to tell stories to "people who want to hear them" (4.142). Then Jody goes outside and grabs his mice-killing stick. He wants Gramps to join him, but the old codger just wants to stay put for a while. Very sweetly, Jody tells his Grandfather that he can use his (Jody's) stick if he likes. But his Grandfather chooses to stay and sit on the porch while Jody goes off to do boyish things. At the old haystack, Jody tries to "whip up his enthusiasm with thoughts of fat, juicy mice" (4.150), but he just can't shake the sadness of his Grandfather. So he walks back to the porch. The two sit in silence for a spell, watching as the "porch boards grew warm in the sunshine" (4.154). At length, the old man speaks up and says he shouldn't stay much longer. He seems worried that maybe the crossing didn't actually mean as much as he thought it meant. Still, he's proud of that part of his life: "We carried life out here and set it down the way those ants carry eggs. And I was the leader" (4.158). Jody looks up and says that maybe someday, he, too, can be a leader. But Grandfather tells the boy that there is nowhere left to go. The ocean stops people. Um, hello? Boats? But Grandfather tells the boy that "Every place is taken," and "Westering isn't a hunger anymore. It's all done. Your father is right. It is finished" (4.163). What a bummer, thinks Jody. Then he offers to make his Grandfather a glass of lemonade. Yum, yum, says the old guy, and Jody runs off to pour a glass. In the kitchen, Jody asks his mother for a lemon to make his Grandfather a lemonade. Mrs. Tiflin asks if Jody is going to have one, too. Jody says nope. His mother tells him that he is "sick!" (4.169). Mrs. Tiflin tells Jody to get a lemon out of the cooler and then says she'll "reach the squeezer down" to him (4.169), so he can make his old Gramps a tall glass.

the grapes of wrath (john steinbeck)

Meet Tom Joad. He's making his way home to Sallisaw, Oklahoma by hitchhiking his way there. He has just spent four years in the McAlester State Penitentiary after killing a man with a shovel, and is on parole. As he approaches his homeland, he comes across Reverend Jim Casy, his childhood preacher. Casy isn't a preacher anymore and tells Tom about all of the lecherous things he did when he was a reverend. The two men make their way to the old Joad farm, only to discover that it's completely abandoned. We're talking not a doily in sight. Muley Graves, an old family friend, stops by. He's a little creepy and looks like a man who has lived all by himself on a desert island for ten years. Muley shares his rabbit, and the three dine famously. Muley gives Tom and Casy the lowdown. The tenant farmers (people who cultivate someone else's land, giving the landowner a share of the crops) have been forced off of the land by the landowners (i.e., the banks). The drought has made the land dry up, and the dust storm has made farming nearly impossible. There's no money to be had in the farming business. The economy is a mess (thanks to the stock market crash of 1929), and the landowners have realized that one tractor can do the work of an entire family and requires less money to operate and maintain. So the landowners have forced tenant farmers off of the land and out of their homes. Families have gathered all of their belongings, have vacated their homes (homes that have been in their families for generations), and have begun to move west to California. It is rumored that there is lots of space and plenty of jobs out west. Muley tells Tom that the Joad family is currently staying at Uncle John Joad's house and that they are planning to move west pretty soon, too. Muley's own family left town a long while ago, but he didn't follow them. He couldn't bear the idea of letting the landowners win. So, he lives the life of a vagrant, sleeping in abandoned homes and in riverbeds, making it his life's work to annoy the landowners and their minions. Tom, Casy, and Muley dive into the cornfields when they see a car approach their campfire. The landowner-minions have arrived to see who is trespassing. They search the house and flood the corn rows with light, but to no avail. The next morning, Tom and Casy walk to Uncle John Joad's house. Lots of hootin' and hollerin' occur when the Joad's realize that their boy has come home at last. Tom is reunited with his mother (Ma Joad), his father (Pa Joad), his grandfather (Grampa), his grandmother (Granma), his brother Noah, his brother Al, his sister Rose of Sharon, his sister's husband Connie, his little brother Winfield, and his little sister Ruthie. Ma Joad is especially moved. She cooks up a delicious breakfast for everyone. The Joads get ready for their trip. They pack up their car, a Jalopy, with their most essential possessions, and they sell the rest for $18 in town. When everything is packed a ready to go, Grampa realizes he wants to stay behind. He tells everyone he won't leave his home, and so they put four doses of sleepytime cough medicine in his coffee, and then they carry him to the car. It's not pleasant going. The only people protected from the sun are the three people in the driver and shotgun seats. Everyone else has to ride on top of the car, fully exposed to the sun. On the first day, one of their dogs gets run over by a car. It's pretty sad. The Joads meet a couple who've set up camp on the side of the road, Ivy and Sairy Wilson. The Wilsons let Grampa take a nap in their tent, because he's acting strangely. Grampa dies soon after of a stroke, and the men bury him in a really deep grave. Touched by each other's kindness, the Wilsons and Joads join forces, and the two families decide to caravan their way to California. On the third day, the Wilsons' car breaks down. Tom and Al are master mechanics and realize that they need a new part in order to fix the car. Tom suggests that the families go on ahead without him and the preacher, and that they will stay behind and get the car fixed. Ma Joad refuses to leave anyone behind. And so the Joads go find a campsite down the road where they can chill (because Granma is not well) while Tom, Al, and the preacher stay and fix the broken car. It doesn't take long for Tom and Al to fix the car, and they catch up with their family at a campsite whose owner charges people fifty cents a day to camp there. That's a lot of money when you only have $40 bucks to get you to California. A bunch of men are hanging out on the steps of the campsite owner's house. One man tells everyone that he's on his way back from California. He says that it's miserable out west, and that there aren't any jobs. Tom and Pa Joad are freaked out, but they decide not to worry about it too much. The Joads keep on truckin', going over the New Mexico mountains and through Arizona on Route 66. They see lots and lots of cars going west, but very few cars coming east. When they cross the California border, they stop at a campsite in Needles, CA by the Colorado River. Because they have to get across the sweltering hot desert (that would be the Mojave Desert), the Joads and Wilsons decide to sleep during the day and then drive at night. The men go swimming in the cool river, and encounter a father and son who are on their way back from California. The father and son tell the Joads that life is bitter in California—there are no jobs to be had, and the Californians hate the migrant workers. Tom settles down for a nap, and his brother, Noah, tells him that he's not going with the family any further, that he's going to live by the Colorado River. Noah disappears. Ma Joad looks after Granma. Granma is really sick, and a strange woman (a Jehovite) barges into the Joad tent and tells Ma Joad that Granma's going to die and she would like to assemble a prayer circle around her. Ma Joad tells her to get the h-e-double-hockey-sticks out of their tent, and she sends the woman packing. A policeman stops by the tent to tell Ma that they have to leave, or else. Ma chases him out of the tent, too, with a skillet. Sairy Wilson is nearing death herself, and Ivy Wilson tells the Joads to push on without them. The Joads leave at 4 p.m., making their way across the Mojave Desert. Later that night they arrive at a border patrol station, and the guard wants to inspect their truck to make sure they aren't smuggling fruit. Ma pleads with the border patrol to let them go quickly. She says that Granma is really sick. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Granma died a few miles back. Ma Joad doesn't want the family to get in trouble for having a dead old lady in their truck. The Joads push through to Bakersfield, CA. They are awestruck by the beauty of the Californian valley country. After depositing Granma's body at the Bakersfield coroner's office, the Joads find a campsite just out of town. The campsite is called a Hooverville. It's a shady place with lots of half-starved families living in tattered tents and makeshift shacks. Tom and Al make friends with one of the men there who is getting ready to go north to look for jobs. The man, Floyd Knowles, warns them that there are no jobs to be had here and the entire farming system is corrupt. Landowners are paying workers practically nothing, and the law is on their side, too. A man posing as a contractor arrives at the Hooverville in a shiny car, and he tells the men he has work for them. Floyd demands to see his contracting license and to know how much the man intends to pay the workers. The contractor sets a policeman on Floyd, and Floyd runs away. Tom trips the policeman, the policeman tries to shoot Floyd (but shoots a woman's knuckles off instead), and then Casy kicks the policeman unconscious. More police arrive, and Casy turns himself in, saying goodbye to the Joads. Around the same time, everyone realizes that Connie Rivers (Rose of Sharon's husband) has run away for good—the pregnant Rose of Sharon is a mess, and Uncle John gets drunk. Tom drives the family south to Weedpatch, a government camp with hot running water, showers, and real toilets. The family is overjoyed to be around decent people, and they stay there for a month. The Joad men can't find steady work, however, and so Tom drives the family to a peach camp where pickers are needed. Here, the landowners are paying pickers five cents for every bushel of peaches picked. The Joads pick tirelessly and eat a delicious meal that night of hamburgers. There are picketers outside of the peach camp, and Tom sneaks out that night to find out why they are picketing. Tom encounters Reverend Casy in tent not far down the road. The two exchange stories, and Casy tells Tom he and his buddies have been picketing low wages, trying to get landowners to treat workers fairly. The men hear footsteps and realize that they are being pursued. Casy and Tom escape along the creek, but they are soon caught by the authorities. Someone drives a pick axe into Casy's head. Tom's nose gets broken and his cheek is torn. He takes the pick axe from Casy's head and drives it into the man who killed Casy. Tom sneaks back to the peach camp and must hide throughout the next day. The Joads sneak Tom out of the peach camp nestled between two mattresses. Tom decides to separate from his family and to live in the bushes while they look for work picking cotton. The Joad family sets up camp near an abandoned boxcar. Not much later, twelve-year-old Ruthie Joad gets into a fight and tells her bully that her brother has killed two men already and could kill the bully's brother, too. Ma finds Tom to tell him that the word is out and that he is in danger. Ma and Tom say goodbye to one another. The winter rains come, and the creek near the abandoned boxcars starts to rise. Rose of Sharon goes into labor. Pa convinces a bunch of men to help him build troughs to keep the creek water from rising too quickly, but they are no match for the flood. Rose of Sharon's baby is stillborn. The waters continue to rise until they flood the boxcars. The Joads build a platform to keep themselves dry. Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon, Ruthie, and Winfield decide to leave the boxcar (where Al will remain with his new fiancée, Aggie, and her parents, the Wainwrights), and they go in search of a dry shelter. They come across an abandoned barn. Inside a little boy is sitting next to his half-starved father who has been feeding his son instead of feeding himself. Rose of Sharon asks everyone to leave the barn, and she lies down next to the half-starved man, letting him drink her breast milk.

T.S. Elliot (1888-1965)

Most dominant literary figure between the world wars. Wrote: The Waste Land, Tradition and the Individual Talent

the great gatsby (f. scott fitzgerald)

Our narrator, Nick Carraway, moves to the East Coast to work as a bond trader in Manhattan. He rents a small house in West Egg, a nouveau riche town in Long Island. In East Egg, the next town over, where old money people live, Nick reconnects with his cousin Daisy Buchanan, her husband Tom, and meets their friend Jordan Baker. Tom takes Nick to meet his mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Myrtle is married to George Wilson, who runs a gas station in a gross and dirty neighborhood in Queens. Tom, Nick, and Myrtle go to Manhattan, where she hosts a small party that ends with Tom punching her in the face. Nick meets his next-door neighbor, Jay Gatsby, a very rich man who lives in a giant mansion and throws wildly extravagant parties every weekend, and who is a mysterious person no one knows much about. Gatsby takes Nick to lunch and introduces him to his business partner - a gangster named Meyer Wolfshiem. Nick starts a relationship with Jordan. Through her, Nick finds out that Gatsby and Daisy were in love five years ago, and that Gatsby would like to see her again. Nick arranges for Daisy to come over to his house so that Gatsby can "accidentally" drop by. Daisy and Gatsby start having an affair. Tom and Daisy come to one of Gatsby's parties. Daisy is disgusted by the ostentatiously vulgar display of wealth, and Tom immediately sees that Gatsby's money most likely comes from crime. We learn that Gatsby was born into a poor farming family as James Gatz. He has always been extremely ambitious, creating the Jay Gatsby persona as a way of transforming himself into a successful self-made man - the ideal of the American Dream. Nick, Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, and Jordan get together for lunch. At this lunch, Daisy and Gatsby are planning to tell Tom that she is leaving him. Gatsby suddenly feels uncomfortable doing this in Tom's house, and Daisy suggests going to Manhattan instead. In Manhattan, the five of them get a suite at the Plaza Hotel where many secrets come out. Gatsby reveals that Daisy is in love with him. Tom in turn reveals that Gatsby is a bootlegger, and is probably engaged in other criminal activities as well. Gatsby demands that Daisy renounce Tom entirely, and say that she has never loved him. Daisy can't bring herself to say this because it isn't true, crushing Gatsby's dream and obsession. It's clear that their relationship is over and that Daisy has chosen to stay with Tom. That evening, Daisy and Gatsby drive home in his car, with Daisy behind the wheel. When they drive by the Wilson gas station, Myrtle runs out to the car because she thinks it's Tom driving by. Daisy hits and kills her, driving off without stopping. Nick, Jordan, and Tom investigate the accident. Tom tells George Wilson that the car that struck Myrtle belongs to Gatsby, and George decides that Gatsby must also be Myrtle's lover. That night, Gatsby decides to take the blame for the accident. He is still waiting for Daisy to change her mind and come back to him, but she and Tom skip town the next day. Nick breaks up with Jordan because she is completely unconcerned about Myrtle's death. Gatsby tells Nick some more of his story. As an officer in the army, he met and fell in love with Daisy, but after a month had to ship out to fight in WWI. Two years later, before he could get home, she married Tom. Gatsby has been obsessed with getting Daisy back since he shipped out to fight five years earlier. The next day, George Wilson shoots and kills Gatsby, and then himself. The police leave the Buchanans and Myrtle's affair out of the report on the murder-suicide. Nick tries to find people to come to Gatsby's funeral, but everyone who pretended to be Gatsby's friend and came to his parties now refuses to come. Even Gatsby's partner Wolfshiem doesn't want to go to the funeral. Wolfshiem explains that he first gave Gatsby a job after WWI and that they have been partners in many illegal activities together. Gatsby's father comes to the funeral from Minnesota. He shows Nick a self-improvement plan that Gatsby had written for himself as a boy. Disillusioned with his time on the East coast, Nick decides to return to his home in the Midwest.

the modernist period

The modernist period began with WWI. Writers experimented with writing. This was a period of uncertainty which gave way to anger and protest. The writers protested against the nature of society. There was stream-of-consciousness in writing. (1910-1945)

"Ancedote of the Jar" wallace stevens

We start off with a simple jar, placed in the Tennessee wilderness. We get a description of that jar, which seems maybe a little bigger than your average jar, but after all, it's still a jar. The surprising thing is that this jar seems to take over. The wilderness is ruled by the jar and seems no longer wild. But still, the jar is out of place in Tennessee, and there are things that the wilderness can do, like grow and breed, that the jar can't.

that evening sun (william faulkner)

We start with twenty-four-year-old Quentin remembering his hometown of Jefferson. He recalls how the black women would do the white people's laundry. He doesn't point out anything wrong with this sharp racial divide, though. C'mon, Quentin. Then he focuses on Nancy, the black servant who did his family's laundry. He remembers how she was a prostitute for white men. This, as you can imagine, was a traumatizing experience for poor Nancy. She was beaten by one of her customers. She tried to commit suicide in jail and was beaten there too, and ended up drinking and sleeping too much to blot out the memory of her abusive johns. She also had a husband named Jesus who seemed prone to getting into fights. One day he threatened to cut off the penis of some white man who'd impregnated Nancy. Then Quentin recalls a specific day when Nancy was afraid to walk home. Jesus had skipped town, but she'd been told he was back, and she feared he meant to kill her because she was pregnant. Yikes, dude. Quentin, at nine years old, shows a special sensitivity to Nancy's plight, but he doesn't help her despite his discomfort with the situation. As the adult narrator, he chalks up his nine-year-old unease to the fact that their kitchen (where Nancy was worrying about Jesus) was lonely and cold instead of busy and cheerful. He seems uncomfortable with the memory. His father walks Nancy home, which makes his mother complain. His younger siblings, Caddy and Jason, tag along, Caddy teasing Jason for being afraid to walk the lane to Nancy's house in the dark. That concludes the first section. Pretty simple, right? Moving right along to the next section. We see Nancy staying at the white family's house overnight, since the mother is too scared to be left alone while her husband walks the servant home. That night, Nancy begins wailing in fear, seemingly detached from reality. The father, armed with a gun, checks for Jesus, but he's nowhere in sight. The next day, Dilsey, another black servant, tries to help Nancy figure out what to do. Nancy says she is hellborn; she feels doomed to death at the hands of Jesus. Boom—now we're in the third section. Nancy gets even more frightened and wants to stay in the children's room, but the mother won't have it. So the servant comes up with a new idea: the kids should stay with her, at her house. It's as though she thinks their very whiteness will protect her from Jesus. She promises them fun, and after a little debate, the three kids go with her. Section four; are you ready for more? (We're poets and we know it.) Nancy tries to keep the children entertained by telling a story and popping popcorn, but the kids are increasingly restless and fearful that their parents are looking for them. Meanwhile, Nancy is acting a wee bit unhinged. She leaves her hand on a hot lamp chimney and in the fire and seems not to notice the pain. The kids are pretty creeped out, and then everyone hears someone coming. Nancy begins wailing. We're worried Jesus is coming to kill them all. That's it for the antepenultimate section. (Vocab time: antepenultimate is a million-point SAT word meaning next to-next to-last.) The penultimate section (next to last!) reveals that the "someone coming" was the white family's father. He tells Nancy that Jesus is nowhere in sight and suggests she go stay with someone else. The servant insists that would do no good— her death at Jesus' hands belongs to her like a destiny. The father tells the children to come home with him. Good call, Pops. The adult Quentin goes off on a digression about a Mr. Lovelady who collected black folks' burial insurance. It seems he's increasingly disturbed by remembering Nancy's plight—like maybe he's trying to change the subject in his head. But then, in the last (ultimate!) section, he narrates how the family returned home. They hear Nancy wailing as they abandon her. The nine-year-old Quentin asks, "Who will do our washing now, Father?" The story ends with his two younger siblings arguing pointlessly over Jason being afraid to walk back in the dark. Quentin's questioning and Caddy and Jason's arguing seem to be all the inadequate family can do in the face of Nancy's plight. That the adult Quentin ended the story with those two items suggests he's realized how unfair his white family's indifference to Nancy's fate was. We're left hanging as to whether Jesus kills her or not.

"maddona of the evening flowers" Amy Lowell

speaks about the author coming home and noticing the house is empty. She speaks of missing her lover, but suddenly seeing her love and becoming happy.

"helen" H.D.

"Helen" is a short poem made up three stanzas. Each stanza describes Greece's reaction to Helen (after she has been whisked away to Troy by Paris, that is). In the first stanza, we're told that "all Greece hates" Helen; they hate her eyes and her hands. In the second stanza, we're told that "all Greece reviles" her face—particularly her smiles, and her expressions of sadness. In the third stanza, we're told that the only way Greece can love Helen is if she's dead. That's way harsh, Greece.

"mother" Sherwood Anderson

"Mother" is concerned with Elizabeth Willard, George Willard's mother. She and her husband, Tom Willard, run a boarding house in Winesburg, which is perpetually on the verge of failure, like her marriage. Elizabeth is frequently ill and has become a pale, ghostly figure, wandering aimlessly through their home. Tom, an energetic man with a zest for politics, is embarrassed by his wife, and spends his time airing his grievances. He is a Democrat in a heavily Republican town, lamenting the fact that he should have achieved great things politically, but now time has passed him by. The relationship between Elizabeth and her son is stiff and uncomfortable, and they frequently sit together for long periods of time without talking.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

the life of Janie Crawford, a girl of mixed black and white heritage, around the turn of the century...which was not an easy time to be of mixed race. As an adolescent, Janie sees a bee pollinating a flower in her backyard pear tree and becomes obsessed with finding true love. (Because there's nothing hotter than a little bee-on-flower action.) From there, the novel documents her emotional growth and maturity through three marriages. Janie's first marriage, to farmer Logan Killicks, is planned and executed by Janie's well-intentioned grandmother, Nanny. Unfortunately, Nanny's plan doesn't go so well. In this marriage, Janie chafes under the uninspired but reliable Logan. Make that uninspired, reliable...and abusive. After he threatens to kill her for not obeying him, Janie leaves Logan for the suave and ambitious Joe Starks. Joe takes Janie to Eatonville, Florida, America's first all-black city, where she lives the high life as the mayor's wife. However, Janie finds that her husband has very rigid definitions of a woman's role. Joe often silences Janie and refuses to listen to others' opinions...which is no kind of good. As Joe grows old, he tries to divert public attention from his failing body by accusing Janie of acting too young for her age. Finally, Janie can't bear it anymore and lashes out at Joe, insulting his manhood and pride. Joe is deflated and takes to his deathbed, refusing to let Janie visit him. Janie bursts into Joe's room in his final moments and speaks her mind. After his untimely death, Janie dons widow's clothes and lives happily as a single woman until she meets a slick and fun-loving vagrant named Tea Cake. Although Tea Cake is 12 years younger than Janie, with him she finds the true love she has dreamed of all her life. In their relationship, both sides experience bouts of jealousy, but Janie and Tea Cake eventually find happiness working in the fields of the Everglades and mingling with the migrant workers. Disaster arrives in the form of a hurricane. Tea Cake is given plenty of warnings about its coming and even an opportunity to flee, but he chooses to stay on the "muck" for the love of money. The hurricane strikes with divine ferocity, forcing all of the Everglades' inhabitants to either leave or die. While fleeing the storm, Tea Cake saves Janie from a ferocious dog but gets himself bitten in the process. Tea Cake gets rabies, and his natural jealousy turns into aggressive suspicion and paranoia over Janie. In the end, Janie is forced to shoot her husband to protect herself—rabies is not pretty. Though she's put on trial for murder, she's pronounced innocent. After Tea Cake's funeral, Janie returns home to Eatonville. There, she meets up with her old friend, Pheoby Watson, and tells her the whole story. This narration to Pheoby provides the framing for the whole novel.

Desert Places (Robert Frost)

All the animals are crouched in their lairs due to severe cold. He was very much disheartened to be able to count the number of these animals. He had been suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness. And this is such a sort of loneliness which will go on making me lonelier rather than less. The speaker was in the grip of a blank fear and spiritual exhaustion which is neither explicable nor has an outlet. The deserted places in the external world or in the sky between the stars, where no human creature lives, cannot scare or frighten him any more than the desert places within his own soul which lives so close to him.

Eugene O'Neill

America's great playwright of tragedy; author of "The Iceman Cometh," "Long Day's Journey into Night," and "Moon for the Misbegotten'

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

Carl August Sandburg, American poet, historian, novelist, balladeer and folklorist. Major GRE works: "Chicago" and "The Fog"

Of mice and men (john steinbeck)

Lennie and George are best friends on a road trip, but this isn't that fun kind of road trip with wacky adventures. They're broke and looking for work on the farms of Northern California. The broke part is a problem, since they're planning on owning a farm someday. George is the brains behind this operation, while Lennie is, well, a few crayons short of a 164-colors box. The duo can't hold down jobs for long, thanks to Lennie's childlike mentality and odd fetish for petting things, which includes mice, rabbits, puppies, and women. (This last one, of course, being the biggest issue—and it actually got them kicked out of their last job.) Good fortune smiles upon them briefly when they get work at a ranch near Soledad, California. Their co-workers include Candy (an old, one-handed fellow who owns a smelly dog), Crooks (a lonely stable hand who, BTW, is black), and Curley (an unfaithful man with severe anger management problems). We learn that Curley also has a new wife, who no one is allowed to look at (not her rule—she loves male attention). We also meet Slim, our local and wise ranch demi-god; and Carlson, a callous ranch hand, who tells Candy to adopt a new puppy and shoot his old dog because it's smelly. But, since Candy can't bring himself to shoot the old dog, Carlson does it for him. Nice, Carlson. And that's not the only act of violence: Curley is itching for a fight after he (falsely) suspects Slim of making time with his girl, so he gets into a brawl with Lennie—who crushes his hand. Woohoo, Saturday night! Which means, time for drunken visits to the whorehouse for most of the farmhands. Slim, Lennie, Crooks, and Candy are hanging back at the ranch talking about their farm-owning dreams when Curley's wife shows up to tease them all for being weak, as they were left behind while the others went whoring (obviously a manly activity, much like shooting your dog). When Crooks tries to get her to leave his room, she explodes, reminding him that he's African american and that she could have him "strung up on a tree so easy it ain't even funny." That's exactly the buzzkill it sounds like, and the party breaks up. On Sunday afternoon, Lennie's in the barn with a dead puppy. He admonishes the puppy for "going and getting killed," which we think is actually not so much the puppy's fault as it is Lennie's. Just then, Curley's wife walks into the barn and offers up her hair as a petting object. She worries about him messing it up though, and as she wriggles to avoid a ruined hairdo, Lennie panics and, again accidentally, breaks her neck and kills her. He runs off in a panic. Again. Candy discovers Curley's wife's body and runs out to George, who identifies it is as classic Lennie handiwork. When Curley finds out, he's ready to exact some vigilante-style justice—but Slim and George want a nobler death for their friend, who's currently hiding out in his safe spot and hallucinating about bunnies. (Really.) Finally, George shows up. He's acting all weird, so we're pretty sure something bad is about to happen. And it does. George starts talking about their dream farm and tells Lennie to look out over the river and imagine it—and then shoots him in the head. When the vigilantes show up, George tells a story about how Lennie got shot in a struggle as George tried to take the gun away. Slim get it, but everyone else is confused about why George is upset.

"oread" H.D.

Oread, a mountain nymph, yells at the sea. She tells it to "whirl up," and compares the peaks of its waves to pine trees in the forest. She commands the sea to "splash" its "pines" (well, really its waves) upon the rocks. She commands it to "hurl" itself over the land, and to cover all of us landlubbers with water. The end. She's a pretty bossy nymph, if we do say so ourselves.

The Old Man and the Sea (ernest hemingway)

The Old Man and the Sea is the story of an epic struggle between an old, seasoned fisherman and the greatest catch of his life. For eighty-four days, Santiago, an aged Cuban fisherman, has set out to sea and returned empty-handed. So conspicuously unlucky is he that the parents of his young, devoted apprentice and friend, Manolin, have forced the boy to leave the old man in order to fish in a more prosperous boat. Nevertheless, the boy continues to care for the old man upon his return each night. He helps the old man tote his gear to his ramshackle hut, secures food for him, and discusses the latest developments in American baseball, especially the trials of the old man's hero, Joe DiMaggio. Santiago is confident that his unproductive streak will soon come to an end, and he resolves to sail out farther than usual the following day. On the eighty-fifth day of his unlucky streak, Santiago does as promised, sailing his skiff far beyond the island's shallow coastal waters and venturing into the Gulf Stream. He prepares his lines and drops them. At noon, a big fish, which he knows is a marlin, takes the bait that Santiago has placed one hundred fathoms deep in the waters. The old man expertly hooks the fish, but he cannot pull it in. Instead, the fish begins to pull the boat. Unable to tie the line fast to the boat for fear the fish would snap a taut line, the old man bears the strain of the line with his shoulders, back, and hands, ready to give slack should the marlin make a run. The fish pulls the boat all through the day, through the night, through another day, and through another night. It swims steadily northwest until at last it tires and swims east with the current. The entire time, Santiago endures constant pain from the fishing line. Whenever the fish lunges, leaps, or makes a dash for freedom, the cord cuts Santiago badly. Although wounded and weary, the old man feels a deep empathy and admiration for the marlin, his brother in suffering, strength, and resolve. On the third day the fish tires, and Santiago, sleep-deprived, aching, and nearly delirious, manages to pull the marlin in close enough to kill it with a harpoon thrust. Dead beside the skiff, the marlin is the largest Santiago has ever seen. He lashes it to his boat, raises the small mast, and sets sail for home. While Santiago is excited by the price that the marlin will bring at market, he is more concerned that the people who will eat the fish are unworthy of its greatness. As Santiago sails on with the fish, the marlin's blood leaves a trail in the water and attracts sharks. The first to attack is a great mako shark, which Santiago manages to slay with the harpoon. In the struggle, the old man loses the harpoon and lengths of valuable rope, which leaves him vulnerable to other shark attacks. The old man fights off the successive vicious predators as best he can, stabbing at them with a crude spear he makes by lashing a knife to an oar, and even clubbing them with the boat's tiller. Although he kills several sharks, more and more appear, and by the time night falls, Santiago's continued fight against the scavengers is useless. They devour the marlin's precious meat, leaving only skeleton, head, and tail. Santiago chastises himself for going "out too far," and for sacrificing his great and worthy opponent. He arrives home before daybreak, stumbles back to his shack, and sleeps very deeply. The next morning, a crowd of amazed fishermen gathers around the skeletal carcass of the fish, which is still lashed to the boat. Knowing nothing of the old man's struggle, tourists at a nearby café observe the remains of the giant marlin and mistake it for a shark. Manolin, who has been worried sick over the old man's absence, is moved to tears when he finds Santiago safe in his bed. The boy fetches the old man some coffee and the daily papers with the baseball scores, and watches him sleep. When the old man wakes, the two agree to fish as partners once more. The old man returns to sleep and dreams his usual dream of lions at play on the beaches of Africa.

"The Waste Land" by T.S. Elliot

The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence ("I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter"). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader "something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust" (Evelyn Waugh took the title for one of his best-known novels from these lines). The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a "hyacinth girl" and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagner's operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (an important collection of Symbolist poetry), accusing the reader of sharing in the poet's sins.

"buffalo bill's" e.e. cummings

he describes buffalo bill as perfection. by speaking of his death, he describes how even the most beautiful things have to die.

"the river-merchant wife: a letter" ezra pound

A lonely housewife hasn't seen her husband for five months, so she decides to write him a letter. In the letter, she recalls her first memory of their meeting. Then she recalls how she acted after they first got married—at the tender age of fourteen. Eesh. Then, when she was fifteen, the wife started to feel more settled in the marriage. But when she was sixteen, her husband had to go to work. While the husband travels and sells his goods, the wife tells him (through this letter) all the beautiful things he's missing and how she can't wait for him to get home.

"to brooklyn bridge" Hart Crane

A seagull takes flight from its perch on the water. It flies past the "chained" shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge and on into the distance past the Statue of Liberty. It flies out of sight like a boat sailing out of a harbor, or like a page of sales figures that an office clerk files away. The sea gull's disappearing flight reminds the speaker of the ghostlike flickers of movies. Movies are like a prophecy or the promise of some truth that is never told. He's not too keen on them. The speaker admires the bridge from across the harbor: the way the sun hits it, the way the bridge embodies potential energy, the way it hangs free in the air. A insane person runs to the top of the bridge, stands for a moment, then jumps off, committing suicide. The person is anonymous and seen only from a distance. On Wall Street, bright light passes down through the girders of high buildings on to the street below. Clouds are flying by and tall structures called derricks seem to be turning. The wind from the North Atlantic passes through the cables of the bridge. The bridge offers the promise of a reward as mysterious as the heaven described in Jewish scriptures. It also seems to praise the anonymity of people. It makes them feel small and anonymous, even more than the passage of time. Like a king, it pardons people. The bridge is described as a fusion of religious and artistic symbols. It's a refuge for extraordinary and marginal figures like prophets, pariahs, and lovers. As night falls, the speaker watches the traffic lights go over the bridge. The lights remind him of eternity, and the bridge seems to hold the sky up on its towers. The speaker stands by the piers in Manhattan, looking at the shadow of the bridge in the light of the city. The lights in the windows of office buildings and apartments have already gone out. It's winter and another year is passing. But, like the river beneath it, the bridge never sleeps. Not only does it connect one side of the river with another, it seems to connect one side of America with another. It connects Americans. In the final two lines, the speaker asks the bridge to descend to the level of mere mortals and to help fill the space that God has left empty.

"mending wall" Robert frost

A stone wall separates the speaker's property from his neighbor's. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: "Good fences make good neighbors." The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

American lyrical poet, playwright and feminist who often wrote sonnets. Well-known poems: "First Fig" (1920) "I, Being Born a Woman and Distressed" "Euclid Alone Has Looked on Beauty Bare" (1922) "Renascence" "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" "The Penitent"

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)

American poet and part of the Harlem Renaissance, he was influenced by jazz music.

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)

An American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the N*ggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Many readers objected to the representation of African American dialect in Hurston's novels, given the racially charged history of dialect fiction in American literature. Her stylistic choices in terms of dialogue were influenced by her academic experiences. Thinking like a folklorist, Hurston strove to represent speech patterns of the period which she documented through ethnographic research

"this is just to say" William carlos williams

And what it says is that the speaker ate the plums, which he thinks "you," someone who, we can guess, lives with the speaker, was saving for breakfast. If we were this "you" and our speaker were our roomie, well, you can bet Shmoop would be a little peeved. We love us some plums. He asks for the person's forgiveness. But hey, he just couldn't resist. The plums were really yummy—sweet and cold. They were, he told us earlier, in the icebox, just waiting to be devoured. Of course we'll find out as we go if this poem is really "just to say" or something more.

"the road not taken" Robert frost

At heart, this poem is about choice: how one decision can change a person's entire life. The speaker chose one path over another, and that, he says, "has made all the difference." The fork in the road is symbolic of the choice the speaker has to make about his life. Each path corresponds to a different direction his life may take, so he has to choose carefully

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America -Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, Frost is anything but a regional poet; he is a quintessentially modern poet -He has received many honors and much acclaim, including four Pulitzer Prizes

"the jilting of granny weatherall" Kathereine anne porter

Eighty-ish-year-old Granny is sick and stuck in bed. Well, she doesn't think she's sick...but Doctor Harry and her daughter Cornelia are pretty worried about her. To pass the time in bed, Granny starts thinking. A lot. First, she thinks about all the stuff she wants to accomplish the next day. She also thinks about three things: Death, her family, and this really painful memory of being jilted, which basically means being stood up at your own wedding. Cornelia interrupts Granny's thoughts to ask her how she's feeling. She gets pretty freaked out after Granny says a few weird things, so Doctor Harry gives her a shot that causes her to have some trippy hallucinations. Then, a priest named Father Connolly shows up. When Granny sees him, she's reminded again of the ugly jilting episode because he was the priest who was going to marry them. Granny's having a hard time trying to communicate with Father Connolly and Cornelia—she's having trouble hearing, and nobody can really understand what she's saying. Granny's other kids Lydia and Jimmy arrive, but she's so out of it that she barely recognizes them. She does realize, though, that the fact that they've come to see her is probably a pretty good sign that she's dying. She stares at a light and waits for a 'sign from God,' but doesn't get one. Once again, Granny thinks about being jilted. Then, the narrator tells us that she "blew out the light," which seems like a pretty nice way of saying that Granny has died.

"to elise" William Carlos Willams

Elsie's early life is sketched in a few lines: "reared by the state and/ sent out at fifteen to work in/ some hard-pressed/ house in the suburbs." Not even the first mention of her name, "some Elsie," dispels the aura of obscurity that surrounds her. Moreover, this introduction is delayed until the fourteenth stanza, well into the poem. Before Elsie herself is acknowledged, the poet implies her benighted conception: Stanzas 3 through 9 report promiscuous encounters between "devil-may-care men" and "young slatterns." Such coupling is brutish and violent in its carelessness: "succumbing without/ emotion/ save numbed terror." Issuing from such an act, this "desolate" girl expresses "with broken/ brain the truth about us." She embodies the indictment that opens the poem: "The pure products of America/ go crazy." Elsie's body—her "ungainly" hips and "flopping" breasts—represent the perversity of a vulgar, ultimately sterile culture. Her attraction to "cheap/ jewelry" and "rich young men with fine eyes" suggests the roving, lustful acquisitiveness that causes Americans to treat the earth that bears and would nurture them as "excrement." They live as "degraded prisoners/ destined/ to hunger" until they "eat filth." Although the poet envisions "isolate flecks" in which "something/ is given off"—illumination in glimpses—"No one" is there "to witness/ and adjust"; that is, to interpret the signs and institute reform. The poem concludes with the observation that there is "no one to drive the car." America runs recklessly, devoid of vision or good judgment.

"Fire and Ice" robert frost

Frost creates a clear dichotomy between fire and ice and the two groups of people that believe in each element. By using the term "some" instead of "I" or "an individual," Frost asserts that the distinction between the two elements is a universal truth, not just an idea promoted by an individual. In addition to the unavoidable contradiction between fire and ice, these first lines also outline the claim that the world will end as a direct result of one of these elements. It is unclear which element will destroy the world, but it is significant to note that fire and ice are the only options. The poem does not allow for any other possibilities in terms of the world's fate, just as there are not any other opinions allowed in the black-and-white debate between fire and ice.

"chaplinesque" Hart Crane

Hart Crane's "Chaplinesque" is a poem in five stanzas, the first two containing four lines each, the last three with five lines each. The title introduces the central metaphor of the poem, the film actor and comedian Charlie Chaplin. The poem is a striking dramatization of the tenuous position in modern society of those who are, for whatever reason, excluded from the establishment. The persona, the "we" of the poem, represents all outsiders, not only poets and other artists—although they are central to Crane's vision—but also all sensitive and feeling people who do not fit into the structured society. Although Crane sees the human condition as rather bleak and tragic, he finds brief but welcome consolation in elements of everyday life as well as in kindness, imagination, and humor.

"objects" gertude stein

Have you ever gotten so used to seeing the same everyday objects that you barely notice them anymore? In Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein breaks up the monotony of everyday objects by describing objects in unusual ways. Take, for example, the title, Tender Buttons. Anyone who has worn a shirt before is familiar with buttons. Most of us barely consider a button until one comes loose in the laundry, and we find ourselves with a shirt in need of repair. But by describing a common object like a button with an adjective that no one would think to associate with a button, such as 'tender,' Stein forces her readers to reexamine their associations and preconceptions about buttons and all other common, everyday objects. The experimental nature of Stein's collection is also apparent in the syntax Stein uses. Her poems are full of rhythm and sound. Stein uses odd syntax that sometimes does not make logical sense, but she is always aware of the sound of her poems. Let's look closer at two of the poems in the book and explore how Stein uses literary techniques in them.

In a Station of the Metro (Ezra Pound)

In the poem, Pound describes a moment in the underground metro station in Paris in 1912; Pound suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best put into a poem not with a description but with an "equation". Because of the treatment of the subject's appearance by way of the poem's own visuality, it is considered a quintessential Imagist text. the poem is essentially a set of images that have unexpected likeness and convey the rare emotion that Pound was experiencing at that time. Arguably the heart of the poem is not the first line, nor the second, but the mental process that links the two together. "In a poem of this sort," as Pound explained, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock (T.S. Elliot)

It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem's speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to "force the moment to its crisis" by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to "dare" an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for "presuming" emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings—a cityscape (the famous "patient etherised upon a table") and several interiors (women's arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock's emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status ("I am not Prince Hamlet'). "Prufrock" is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.

"sunday morning" Wallace Stevens

It's a Sunday morning, and while many people are at church, a woman is sitting outside in her nightgown, eating a late breakfast and enjoying the morning. If not for all the beauty around her, including a pet tropical bird, she'd feel guilty about not being in church. But, when she starts to daydream, she has very serious thoughts about the death of Christ. She imagines herself traveling with a bunch of ghosts to Christ's tomb in Palestine. After this vision, she entertains skepticism about Christianity. She wonders why she only has thoughts about Christ when she is not thinking about other things. She likes the idea of heaven, but she believes that the natural world provides just as much comfort. She decides there is nothing divine apart from the emotions she experiences in nature.

"in just-" e.e. cummings

It's that day in May when the sun starts shining for the first time in weeks and everybody you know heads out to the park. The story's pretty simple: spring has sprung. Everything's growing and all-around delightful. The kids, in fact, jump for joy when the man selling balloons starts to whistle. Clowns (and other balloon-selling folk) have gotten a bad rap for being scary and creepy, but this guy seems to be all right. At the very least, he gets the kiddies to come running to him.

Queen anne's lace (william carlos williams)

Its title suggests it is about the common field flower also known as the wild carrot. A wide, white flower about a hand's width in size, Queen Anne's lace contains scores of tiny blossoms and, in the center, a dark spot. In I Wanted to Write a Poem (1958), William Carlos Williams said that he used "straight observationin [his] four poems about flowers, 'Daisy,' 'Primrose,''Queen Ann's Lace,' and 'Great Mullen.'" He "thought of them as still lifes. [and] looked at the actual flowers as they grew." Indeed, the poem's speaker might be observing a field of Queen Anne's lace as the sun's rays touch it. The poem's opening line, however, announces a much different subject: the whiteness of a woman's body, which the speaker contrasts briefly in the first three lines with "anemone petals." He finds "Her body is not so white," "nor so smooth—nor/ so remote a thing." Then, throughout the remainder of the poem, he compares her body's whiteness with a commonplace "field/ of the wild carrot." With this comparison, there is "no question" of too much "whiteness," for at each flower's center rests "a purple mole." Initially, the wildflower exerts its power, "taking/ the field by force," not allowing the grass to "raise above it." In the second half of the poem, however, the...

Trifles, Susan Glaspell

John Wright has been strangled to death with a rope in his mega-creepy Midwestern farmhouse. The main suspect of the grizzly crime? His wife. As the County Attorney, Sheriff Peters, and a neighboring farmer named Mr. Hale investigate the house for clues, the real sleuths turn out to be Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters. Though the menfolk constantly make fun of the women for worrying about female things, like Mrs. Wright's unfinished quilt, it's the ladies' attention to "woman stuff" that allows them to crack the case. When the ladies discover Mrs. Wright's pet canary with its neck wrung, they immediately put the mystery together. Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Peters know that the harsh Mr. Wright snapped the canary's neck, and that, after years of neglect and emotional abuse, Mrs. Wright repaid her husband by giving him a taste of what her pet bird got. (And we don't mean birdseed.) The play comes to its spine-tingling conclusion when the ladies hide the bird from the male authorities, denying them the evidence of motive they need to convict Mrs. Wright. In the end, we're left with lots of juicy questions about the true meaning of justice for women... and oppressed people everywhere.

A farwell to arms (ernest hemingway)

Lieutenant Frederic Henry is a young American ambulance driver serving in the Italian army during World War I. At the beginning of the novel, the war is winding down with the onset of winter, and Henry arranges to tour Italy. The following spring, upon his return to the front, Henry meets Catherine Barkley, an English nurse's aide at the nearby British hospital and the love interest of his friend Rinaldi. Rinaldi, however, quickly fades from the picture as Catherine and Henry become involved in an elaborate game of seduction. Grieving the recent death of her fiancé, Catherine longs for love so deeply that she will settle for the illusion of it. Her passion, even though pretended, wakens a desire for emotional interaction in Henry, whom the war has left coolly detached and numb. When Henry is wounded on the battlefield, he is brought to a hospital in Milan to recover. Several doctors recommend that he stay in bed for six months and then undergo a necessary operation on his knee. Unable to accept such a long period of recovery, Henry finds a bold, garrulous surgeon named Dr. Valentini who agrees to operate immediately. Henry learns happily that Catherine has been transferred to Milan and begins his recuperation under her care. During the following months, his relationship with Catherine intensifies. No longer simply a game in which they exchange empty promises and playful kisses, their love becomes powerful and real. As the lines between scripted and genuine emotions begin to blur, Henry and Catherine become tangled in their love for each other. Once Henry's damaged leg has healed, the army grants him three weeks convalescence leave, after which he is scheduled to return to the front. He tries to plan a trip with Catherine, who reveals to him that she is pregnant. The following day, Henry is diagnosed with jaundice, and Miss Van Campen, the superintendent of the hospital, accuses him of bringing the disease on himself through excessive drinking. Believing Henry's illness to be an attempt to avoid his duty as a serviceman, Miss Van Campen has Henry's leave revoked, and he is sent to the front once the jaundice has cleared. As they part, Catherine and Henry pledge their mutual devotion. Henry travels to the front, where Italian forces are losing ground and manpower daily. Soon after Henry's arrival, a bombardment begins. When word comes that German troops are breaking through the Italian lines, the Allied forces prepare to retreat. Henry leads his team of ambulance drivers into the great column of evacuating troops. The men pick up two engineering sergeants and two frightened young girls on their way. Henry and his drivers then decide to leave the column and take secondary roads, which they assume will be faster. When one of their vehicles bogs down in the mud, Henry orders the two engineers to help in the effort to free the vehicle. When they refuse, he shoots one of them. The drivers continue in the other trucks until they get stuck again. They send off the young girls and continue on foot toward Udine. As they march, one of the drivers is shot dead by the easily frightened rear guard of the Italian army. Another driver marches off to surrender himself, while Henry and the remaining driver seek refuge at a farmhouse. When they rejoin the retreat the following day, chaos has broken out: soldiers, angered by the Italian defeat, pull commanding officers from the melee and execute them on sight. The battle police seize Henry, who, at a crucial moment, breaks away and dives into the river. After swimming a safe distance downstream, Henry boards a train bound for Milan. He hides beneath a tarp that covers stockpiled artillery, thinking that his obligations to the war effort are over and dreaming of his return to Catherine. Henry reunites with Catherine in the town of Stresa. From there, the two escape to safety in Switzerland, rowing all night in a tiny borrowed boat. They settle happily in a lovely alpine town called Montreux and agree to put the war behind them forever. Although Henry is sometimes plagued by guilt for abandoning the men on the front, the two succeed in living a beautiful, peaceful life. When spring arrives, the couple moves to Lausanne so that they can be closer to the hospital. Early one morning, Catherine goes into labor. The delivery is exceptionally painful and complicated. Catherine delivers a stillborn baby boy and, later that night, dies of a hemorrhage. Henry stays at her side until she is gone. He attempts to say goodbye but cannot. He walks back to his hotel in the rain.

"if we must die" Claude McKay

Lines 1 through 4 establish that the speaker and his allies are under attack. The speaker urges his allies not to give up without a fight. The next four lines draw on the emotions of the allies to die honorably. Lines 9 through 12 contain the speaker's rallying cry to his allies. He calls on them to fight back even though they have no chance of winning. The last two lines can be summed up like so: "Even though we're going to die, we are going to fight like men."

Ernest Hemingway

Lost Generation writer, spent much of his life in France, Spain, and Cuba during WWI, notable works include A Farewell to Arms

William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Mississippi novelist who explored the South's collective memory of racism and conservatism in his fictional chronicle of "Yoknapatawpha" County. His many modernist novels inspired a twentieth-century southern literary renaissance.

"Of modern poetry" Wallace Stevens

Modern poetry, he says, has to be "The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice" (1-2). In case that sounds a little obscure, Stevens spends the rest of the poem explaining it. In short, Stevens starts by saying that poets used to have an easier job. They knew what was good (i.e., classic poetry) and they did their best to imitate it. But the twentieth century brought along some changes that made it a lot harder for people to enjoy poems about courtly lovers and humble shepherds; so poetry had to change, too.

"stopping by woods on a snowy evening" robert frost

On the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening. He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or she can rest for the night.

E.E. Cummings (1894-1962)

One of the most notable poets of the 20th C., used creativity in his poems. Wrote: -The Enormous Room -Tulips and Chimneys

the lynching (claude mckay)

Opening with the carefully composed "His Spirit in smoke ascended," McKay creates a repeating pattern of "s" sounds (called "sibilance") which parallels the trails of smoke rising from the body. Coupled with the alliteration of "high heaven," this first line thus depends rather strongly on sound devices, and with this attention to the textures of language McKay demonstrates his aim to protest this horrific subject matter specifically as a poet. However, this interest in aesthetics does not at all mean that McKay sees his art as less political, and certainly his rendering of lynching in poetry does not aestheticize it in any way. One of the crucial aspects of this poem, in fact, is that McKay refuses to use any similes or metaphors, making sure his language does not sanitize, mitigate, or explain away the brutal facts of the lynching. While the opening lines clearly establish a comparison between the lynched victim and Christ on the cross, McKay soon demonstrates that the comparison does not hold: here the death of an innocent man does not redeem anyone. Indeed, in McKay's poem the very fact of lynching means that even Christ's death has not redeemed "the awful sin," a failure which the poem emphasizes formally with the imperfect rhyme on heaven/unforgiven. Curiously, McKay does not capitalize "father," and the description of going back to God that the poem provides is not at all comforting or justificatory. For here God chooses—or at least does not stop—the "cruelest" death for his son, and the comma that separates the word "father" from "pain" suggests a fundamental separation from the victim's suffering. By confining the poem's explicitly religious words to only this first stanza, McKay ultimately emphasizes God's absence in the scene of the lynching more than his presence, particularly after the second quatrain when the poem's attention turns towards the lynchers. Tucked away in the poem's first envelope stanza, any notions of salvation or redemption are denied to the white spectators, and McKay roundly condemns a culture that, while ostensibly Christian, can perpetuate such inhuman violence.

the widows lament in springtime (william carlos williams)

Our speaker, a widow, compares her sorrow to her yard, making note of how the new growth of spring seems different at this point in her life - colder and isolating. She mentions how long she lived with her husband, then quickly changes the subject to her description of the flowers on the plum tree, the cherry tree, and the bushes in her yard. The bright colors of the flowers, she tells us, are not as strong as the grief she feels. She no longer takes joy in them. Then she mentions that her son told her about a place out in the meadows, where there were trees with white flowers. She declares that she would like to go out there and sink into the marsh.

"a pact" Ezra Pound

Pound begins this poem by acknowledging his animosity towards American poet Walt Whitman, writing that he's "detested [him] long enough," and offering to make a pact. Pound describes himself as "a grown child who has had a pig headed father," and offers his friendship to Whitman. Pound admits that he has come to recognize the ways in which Whitman has paved the way for his own work. He ends with "let there be commerce between us," accepting the inspiration that Whitman has given him.

"first fig" Edna st. vincent millay

Pretty much any explanation we come up with for this poem is going to be longer than the poem itself, which makes explanation a tricky business. Here's our short(ish) take on "First Fig," though: in one short stanza, Millay comes up with a single metaphor that opens up onto all sorts of interesting things. See, the speaker, who remains unnamed, has this candle. Oddly, it burns at both ends. (Don't try this at home, folks.) And even though it'll burn out really quickly, it also burns about twice as brightly as any normal candle. Simple enough, eh? Okay, so candles might seem like pretty boring business. But once you start thinking about the candle as a metaphor for other things (like, say, the speaker's life, or her sexuality, or even Millay's own career as a poet), well, then things start to get a whole lot more interesting.

Spring and all (william carlos williams)

Someone has stopped by the side of a road that leads to a hospital, and he or she is looking at the landscape. This person (the speaker of the poem) begins by describing the scene: the dead plants that cover everything at the end of winter. Then, the poem shifts, and the speaker describes the coming of spring, imagining how new life will emerge from this landscape as it begins to wake up.

"The cantos" ezra pound

The Cantos by Ezra Pound is a long, incomplete poem in 116 sections, each of which is a canto. Most of it was written between 1915 and 1962, although much of the early work was abandoned and the early cantos, as finally published, date from 1922 onwards. It is a book-length work, widely considered to be an intense and challenging read. The Cantos is generally considered one of the most significant works of modernist poetry in the 20th century. As in Pound's prose writing, the themes of economics, governance and culture are integral to the work's content.

"out, out-" robert frost

The buzz saw, though technically an inanimate object, is described as a cognizant being, aggressively snarling and rattling as it does its work. When the sister makes the dinner announcement, the saw demonstrates that it has a mind of its own by "leaping" out of the boy's hand in its excitement. Frost refuses to lay blame for the injury on the boy, who is still a "child at heart." In addition to blaming the saw, Frost blames the adults at the scene for not intervening and telling the boy to "call it a day" before the accident occurred. Had the boy received an early excuse from the workday, he would have avoided cutting off his hand and would have been saved from death. Moreover, a mere half-hour break from his job would have allowed the boy to regain part of his childhood, if only for a moment. Frost's emphasis on the boy's passivity and innocence in this situation is particularly significant in the context of the time period. After moving to England with his family, Frost was forced to return to America because of the onset of World War I in 1915, an event that would destroy the lives of many innocent young boys. With that in mind, this poem can be read as a critique of the world events that forced boys to leave their childhoods behind and ultimately be destroyed by circumstances beyond their control. After the boy's hand is nearly severed, he is still enough of an adult to realize that he has lost too much blood to survive. He attempts to "keep the life from spilling" from his hand, but even that is only an attempt, since nothing can be done. Above all, though, the boy hopes to maintain his physical dignity in his death, rather than die with a missing hand. Again, Frost channels the horrors already occurring on the battlefields in Europe, where death from enemy shells was automatically devoid of dignity.

"sweat" Zora neal hurston

The first line of "Sweat" is concise and introduces us to a very specific and important part of the story: the setting. We learn that the protagonist, Delia Jones, is a washwoman and that her husband, Sykes, has disappeared with her horse and cart. In the middle of sorting clothes, "something long, round, limp and black fell upon [Delia's] shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her" (3). No, it's not a snake (her worst fear), but Sykes's bullwhip. He berates her for bringing 'white folks' clothes into the house and tells her to quit working. When she doesn't, he kicks the clothes around. This guy sounds like a real joy to be around, doesn't he? A frustrated Delia defends her job and herself with an iron skillet—she's not messing around. This causes a flabbergasted Sykes to leave the house (score). Although he treats her like dirt and is sleeping with another woman by the name of Bertha, Delia vows not to let her no-good hubby bring her down. It seems as if most of the men in town dislike Sykes—they talk about hanging him, how much of a womanizer he is, and a bunch of other stuff. When he comes into Joe Clarke's shop with Bertha, however, they all grow mute. It's a curious case of a bad man allowed to stay bad by all parties, and we're not quite sure why he gets away with so much dirt. Things go from bad to worse on the marriage front when Sykes brings a rattlesnake home. Delia asks Sykes to kill it, but of course he won't. One day, the snake escapes and Delia flees the house. Sykes comes home and the snake strikes him with a fatal bite. Delia watches and listens to him suffer, waiting patiently for him to die.

"fog" carl sandburg

The fog rolls in over a harbor and city, looking mighty catlike. At first it's quiet and unsuspecting, like a cat. Then, again very much like a cat, it moves on and either disappears or pounces on another harbor/city. And the fog does all of this in a whopping space of only six lines.

"the broken tower" Hart Crane

The image of the tower is the most outstanding signal of the poem's central theme. True, one can argue that it is indeed a bell tower. The Tower of Babel comes to mind as well; but when a poet talks about a tower, he invites his reader to think of the fabled ivory tower wherein he finds his necessary isolation and elevated point of view from which to contemplate and comment on the human condition.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

The play is set in the summer home of the Tyrone family, August 1912. The action begins in the morning, just after breakfast. We learn as the first act unravels that Mary has returned to her family recently after receiving treatment in a sanatorium for morphine addiction. Edmund, meanwhile, has in recent weeks begun to cough very violently, and we learn later on in the play that, as Tyrone and Jamie suspect, he has tuberculosis. Throughout the course of the play, we slowly find out that Mary is still addicted to morphine, much to the disappointment of her family members. The gradual revelation of these two medical disasters makes up most of the play's plot. In between these discoveries, however, the family constantly revisits old fights and opens old wounds left by the past, which the family members are never unable to forget. Tyrone, for example, is constantly blamed for his own stinginess, which may have led to Mary's morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat the pain caused by childbirth. Mary, on the other hand, is never able to let go of the past or admit to the painful truth of the present, the truth that she is addicted to morphine and her youngest son has tuberculosis. They all argue over Jamie and Edmund's failure to become successes as their father had always hoped they would become. As the day wears on, the men drink more and more, until they are on the verge of passing out in Act IV. Most of the plot of the play is repetitious, just as the cycle of an alcoholic is repetitious. The above arguments occur numerous times throughout the four acts and five scenes. All acts are set in the living room, and all scenes but the last occur either just before or just after a meal. Act II, Scene i is set before lunch; scene ii after lunch; and Act III before dinner. Each act focuses on interplay between two specific characters: Act I features Mary and Tyrone; Act II Tyrone and Jamie, and Edmund and Mary; Act III Mary and Jamie; Act IV Tyrone and Edmund, and Edmund and Jamie. The repetitious plot also helps develop the notion that this day is not remarkable in many ways. Instead, it is one in a long string of similar days for the Tyrones, filled with bitterness, fighting, and an underlying love.

"the emporor of ice-cream" Wallace Stevens

The poem begins with cigars and ice cream being prepared. Women ("wenches") are hanging out and boys are bringing flowers. Hey, is somebody having a party? Nope, it turns out. These are preparations for a funeral, or perhaps more likely a wake. Who died? We learn that it's a she, and that she has "horny feet." Not attractive. Beyond that, we don't really know much about this woman, other than the she used to like to sew, and that her dresser is missing some knobs. Sad. The speaker calls for a lamp to be lit, and reminds us that "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

"I, being born a woman and distressed" edna st. vincent millay

The poem begins with the speaker describing her own emotions when she is confronted with a potential lover. The man, just through his presence, is able to make her feel the "notions of" her kind. Her female biology makes her desire him whether her brain wants to or not. It is a feeling of "zest" she gets for the weight of him upon her. She knows, from experience, and from what she has been taught, that sex is meant to be a way that a man comes to possess a woman. The overpowering emotions that come along with it can cloud a woman's mind until she cannot see or think straight. Many believe this is how it has to be, but it is not. In the final section she describes how she has the power to walk away from any man she chooses. She can be with a man, and then leave him if they have no emotional or mental connection. She is not made to be possessed.

"the young housewife" William Carlos williams

The poem is told by a first-person narrator who seems to be William Carlos Williams himself, although one has no way of knowing that this is the case. The title identifies a woman who is the object of attention of the poem's narrator, indicating that she is young, recently married, and identified in relation to the house in which she and her husband live.

"poetry" Marianne Moore

The poet admits that she does not like poetry and that there are many more important things. However, if one reads it with "contempt" one might discover something genuine in it. Things like hands, eyes, and hair show their importance not because of the fancy interpretations one can build on them but because they are "useful." When they are no longer understandable then they do not matter; we cannot admire "what / we cannot understand." The poet gives examples of things that are "useful": a bat in a cave looking for food, a horse, a wolf under a tree, a critic's face twitching, a baseball fan, a statistician. One should not dismiss business documents or textbooks either. There is a distinction that should be made, though. Just writing about these things does not constitute genuine poetry. When "half poets" write of these subjects, they remain trivial; they have not captured the essence of these things because, though they may attend to literal things, they are not yet "literalists of the imagination." When they can finally give us "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," then it will be real poetry. Until that happens, if you defy the half poets, and demand poetry constituted of "raw material" and "genuine" feeling, you can officially be deemed "interested in poetry."

"thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird" wallace stevens

The poet imagines a blackbird or multiple blackbirds in various settings. Each of the poem's thirteen sections contains the word "blackbird," but not all of them are "about" blackbirds. In general, the poem follows a circular pattern, starting in the snowy mountains in the first section, moving toward human society in the middle of the poem, and ending back in a sparse, snowy environment.

"Disillusion of then O'clock" Wallace stevens

The speaker describes houses that are haunted by boring, white nightgowns. He or she then goes on to list a number of more interesting options for nightgowns (we have just one question: where's the taffeta?). Finally, the speaker concludes that the people who wear the boring nightgowns will have boring dreams, but the drunk, old sailors are going to have crazy dreams, perhaps because they're sleeping in their boots.

"the wood pile" Robert Frost

The speaker is walking through a frozen swamp. He considers going back but decides to continue. A small bird flies ahead of him, interacting with him cautiously. Then the speaker happens upon a decayed woodpile, for which he forgets the bird. He wonders who made the pile and why that person left it there to rot.

"The snow man" wallace stevens

The speaker rambles a bit about how it takes a wintry mindset to look at all the cold, blustery snowy stuff around you and not think it's all ten kinds of miserable. And if you do have the mind of winter, you realize you're nothing, and you can see that pretty much everything else is nothing, too. Natch.

"a rose for emily" william faulkner

The story is divided into five sections. In section I, the narrator recalls the time of Emily Grierson's death and how the entire town attended her funeral in her home, which no stranger had entered for more than ten years. In a once-elegant, upscale neighborhood, Emily's house is the last vestige of the grandeur of a lost era. Colonel Sartoris, the town's previous mayor, had suspended Emily's tax responsibilities to the town after her father's death, justifying the action by claiming that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum. As new town leaders take over, they make unsuccessful attempts to get Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade. She asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out. In section II, the narrator describes a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed Emily was to marry. As complaints mount, Judge Stevens, the mayor at the time, decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides, but the townspeople begin to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, remembering how her great aunt had succumbed to insanity. The townspeople have always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emily's father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily is still single by the time she turns thirty. The day after Mr. Grierson's death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father's body over for burial. In section III, the narrator describes a long illness that Emily suffers after this incident. The summer after her father's death, the town contracts workers to pave the sidewalks, and a construction company, under the direction of northerner Homer Barron, is awarded the job. Homer soon becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, which scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station. As the affair continues and Emily's reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She offers no explanation, and the package arrives at her house labeled "For rats." In section IV, the narrator describes the fear that some of the townspeople have that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. Her potential marriage to Homer seems increasingly unlikely, despite their continued Sunday ritual. The more outraged women of the town insist that the Baptist minister talk with Emily. After his visit, he never speaks of what happened and swears that he'll never go back. So the minister's wife writes to Emily's two cousins in Alabama, who arrive for an extended stay. Because Emily orders a silver toilet set monogrammed with Homer's initials, talk of the couple's marriage resumes. Homer, absent from town, is believed to be preparing for Emily's move to the North or avoiding Emily's intrusive relatives. After the cousins' departure, Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray. Despite the occasional lesson she gives in china painting, her door remains closed to outsiders. In what becomes an annual ritual, Emily refuses to acknowledge the tax bill. She eventually closes up the top floor of the house. Except for the occasional glimpse of her in the window, nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house. In section V, the narrator describes what happens after Emily dies. Emily's body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the townspeople. The room is frozen in time, with the items for an upcoming wedding and a man's suit laid out. Homer Barron's body is stretched on the bed as well, in an advanced state of decay. The onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer's body and a long strand of Emily's gray hair on the pillow.

"babylon revisited" F. scott fitzgerald

The story opens with Charlie Wales questioning the barman at the Ritz as to the fortunes and whereabouts of his former drinking buddies. He gives the barman his brother-in-law's address to pass on to Mr. Schaeffer. Things have clearly changed in Paris since his last visit. He finds the emptiness of the Ritz bar portentous, and is saddened that it is no longer the center for the Americans of Paris. Alix tells him of the decline in fortune of his former friends. Wales explains he is in business in Prague and that he has returned to see his little girl. Wales tells the barman that he is now taking it easy There is a feeling of regret as he walks along the Left Bank, deciding that he spoiled the city for himself by behaving badly there. He arrives at his in-law's house in the Rue Palatine and is greeted excitedly by his nine-year-old daughter, Honoria. Wales then encounters his sister-in-law, whose response to him is lukewarm as she attempts to hide her distrust. He boasts of his success in Prague to his brother-in-law, Lincoln. This is in a bid to demonstrate his stability, but his boasts are poorly received. They discuss the declining numbers of Americans in Paris, and the Peters' acknowledge it has made life better for them. Wales reminisces over his experiences of Paris - "We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible." Marion picks up on the fact that he has been in a bar and is not impressed. This fact seems to confirm her negative opinion of him. He has dinner with the Peters' and his daughter, then walks around Paris, looking at his old haunts. He remembers the excesses of his time there, and the consequences: the loss of custody of his child and the death of his wife. He dines with Honoria following day at Le Grand Vatel, a place he does not associate with his wilder days. He offers to buy her toys, but she is unenthusiastic about presents. They are spotted by Duncan Schaeffer and Lorraine Quarrles, who are obviously continuing the vigorous party lifestyle that Wales has abandoned. He turns down dinner with them, but lets them know that he and Honoria are going to the vaudeville later. They turn up and have drinks at the interval at a table with Wales and his daughter. Honoria says that she wants to live with her father, and Wales is overjoyed. Honoria goes to bed, and Wales resumes his conversation with Marion and Lincoln. He tells them that he now only takes one drink a day, and that he has reformed from his wild days of three years ago. He knows his request to take Honoria will not be a popular one. Marion is direct in her interrogation of him, asking for how long he will be sober. She says her duty is to Helen, Honoria's mother. Wales pleads his case, saying that he does not want to miss Honoria's childhood, and that he will be taking a French governess to care for her in Prague. His financial situation is clearly more stable that the Peters' and both of them are irritated that Wales should be so prosperous. Finally, Marion explodes. She clearly blames Wales for her sister's death. Wales leaves the house and reflects on Helen's death. They had argued for hours. She had kissed a young man when Wales had tried to take her home, and she had said something angry. He left her there, went home and locked the door. She had arrived home alone an hour later, to find herself locked out in the snow. She had died later, after their quarrel had been resolved, but Marion still believed him to be responsible. He hears Helen talking to him in his sleep, telling him that she wants Honoria to be with him. He wakes up happy, and the Peters have agreed he can take Honoria, though they will retain legal guardianship. He finds a letter at his hotel, redirected from the Ritz, from Lorraine Quarrles, who wishes to see him again. She recounts an incident where they stole a butcher's tricycle and they rode it together. He is surprised at his own former irresponsibility. Wales takes gifts to the Peters' house and they agree that he and Honoria can leave in a few days. Then the doorbell rings. It is Duncan and Lorraine, utterly drunk, inviting Wales to dinner. Wales is shocked, and Marion runs from the room. Their dinner is off as Marion is so disturbed by the intrusion. He is told to call Lincoln the next day. He goes to the Ritz bar for a drink and calls Lincoln. The agreement over Honoria leaving is postponed due to Marion's distress. He is frustrated, knowing that his opportunity has been lost. He decides that he will return and try again. "He would come back some day; they couldn't make him pay forever."

the snows of kilimanjaro (ernest hemingway)

The story opens with a paragraph about Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, which is also called the "House of God." There is, we are told, the frozen carcass of a leopard near the summit. No one knows why it is there. Then we are introduced to Harry, a writer dying of gangrene, and his rich wife Helen, who are on safari in Africa. Harry's situation makes him irritable, and he speaks about his own death in a matter-of-fact way that upsets his wife, predicting that a rescue plane will never come. He quarrels with her over everything, from whether he should drink a whiskey-and-soda to whether she should read to him. Helen is obviously concerned for his welfare, but self-pity and frustration make him unpleasant to her. He then begins to ruminate on his life experiences, which have been many and varied, and on the fact that he feels he has never reached his potential as a writer because he has chosen to make his living by marrying a series of wealthy women. In italicized portions of the text that are scattered throughout the story, Hemingway narrates some of Harry's experiences in a stream-of-consciousness style. Harry's first memories are of traveling around Europe following a battle, hiding a deserter in a cottage, hunting and skiing in the mountains, playing cards during a blizzard, and hearing about a bombing run on a train full of Austrian officers. Harry then falls asleep and wakes in the evening to find Helen returning from a shooting expedition. He meditates on how she is really thoughtful and a good wife to him, but how his life has been spent marrying a series of women who keep him as "a proud possession" and neglecting his true talent, writing. Helen, he remembers, is a rich widow who was bored by the series of lovers she took before she met him and who married him because she admired his writing and they had similar interests. Harry then recalls the process by which he developed gangrene two weeks before: he had been trying to get a picture of some water-buck and had scratched his knee on a thorn. He had not used iodine and it had become septic. As Helen returns to drink cocktails with Harry, they make up their quarrel. Harry's second memory sequence then begins, and he recalls how he once patronized a series of prostitutes in Constantinople while pining for a woman in New York. Specifically, he had a fight with a British soldier over an Armenian prostitute and then left Constantinople for Anatolia, where he ran from an army of Turkish soldiers. Later, he recalls that he returned to Paris and to his then-wife. Helen and Harry eat dinner, and then Harry has another memory, this time of how his grandfather's log house burned down. He then relates how he fished in the Black Forest and how he lived in a poor quarter of Paris and felt a kinship with his neighbors because they were poor. Next, he remembers a ranch and a boy he turned in to the authorities after the boy protected Harry's horse feed by shooting a thief. Next, he remembers an officer named Williamson who was hit by a bomb and to whom Harry subsequently fed all his morphine tablets. As Harry lies on his cot remembering, he feels the presence of death and associates it with a hyena that is running around the edge of the campsite. Presently, Helen has Harry's cot moved into the tent for the night, and just as she does, he feels death lying on his chest and is unable to speak. Harry dreams that it is the next morning and that a man called Compton has come with a plane to rescue him. He is lifted onto the plane and watches the landscape go by beneath him. Suddenly, he sees the snow-covered top of Mt. Kilimanjaro and knows that is where he is bound. Helen wakes up in the middle of the night to a strange hyena cry and sees Harry dead on his cot. ANALYSIS This story focuses on the self-critical ruminations and memories of a writer dying of a preventable case of gangrene on safari. Its main themes are death and regret, and Harry's morbid thoughts epitomize a classic case of taking things for granted. Harry takes his blessings, including his caring wife, his full life, and his writing talent, for granted, and on his deathbed muses on how he could have appreciated each more. His main regret, of course, is that he has not reached his full potential as a writer because he has chosen to make a living by marrying wealthy women rather than memorializing his many and varied life experiences in writing. The progression of his gangrene symbolizes his rotting sense of self-worth. This last regret is made so bitter to Harry because, as he admits, it is his own fault he has not adequately exercised his great talent: "He had destroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in." In a strange parallel, it is also Harry's fault that he developed gangrene; by not using iodine on his scratch, he allowed it to become septic and is therefore to blame for his impending death. Viewed in this light, Harry's predicament is self-inflicted, and is therefore a fitting punishment for his repeated acts of self-betrayal over the years. The lingering question of the story is how Harry's situation is resolved by the dream sequence that ends the narration. Does his journey to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro symbolize Harry's acceptance of his punishment and acquiescent passage into the afterlife, or does it stand for Harry's redemption as a character and continuing desire to rise above his past mistakes, even at the moment of his death? What does Kilimanjaro stand for? There is abundant symbolism in this story, as many scholars have noted. The actual significance and meaning of these symbols has been hotly debated, but generally, the frozen leopard on the summit of Kilimanjaro is associated with death, immortality, and possibly redemption. The hyena and vultures are associated with illness, fear, and death, and Kilimanjaro itself, though its role has sparked the most controversy among scholars and critics, seems associated with a sort of redemptive heavenly afterlife. In addition, throughout the story, low-lying, hot plains areas are associated with difficult or painful episodes in Harry's life, including the situation in which he begins the story, and snowy mountainous areas are associated with his happier, more uplifting experiences, including his final imagined ascent to the top of Kilimanjaro. In addition, gangrene, the rotting of the flesh, is symbolic of Harry's rotting soul. In terms of style, Hemingway narrates the sequences between Harry and Helen in a straightforward third person format and breaks into italicized stream-of-consciousness for Harry's many memory sequences. These memories are often conveyed using run-on sentences and consist of bewildering pastiches of characters, places, and events which are consistent with Harry's delirium. According to Hemingway scholars, these memories are mostly autobiographical. Using Harry as a vehicle, Hemingway writes of a log house he visited as a child in Michigan, of his experiences during World War I, of his life in Paris with his first wife and their fishing trip to the Black Forest, of his skiing trips in Austria, and of a location near the Yellowstone River in Wyoming. Harry, as a character, produces similes and metaphors with regularity as he speaks to Helen ("Love is a dunghill...And I'm the cock that gets on it to crow"; "Your damned money was my armour"). This is also true during his memory sequences ("the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird"; "in some way he could work the fat off his soul the way a fighter went into the mountains to work and train in order to burn it out of his body").

"euclid alone has looked on beauty bare" Edna st. vincent millay

The theme of individual liberty and the frank acknowledgment of emotion are ever-present in Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems. She speaks as clearly for a democracy of persons, in whatever relationship, as Whitman does and with no hint of snobbery or elitism. She values the simple and common in nature; the reader never finds her straining after exotic effects. Millay is a realist in her expectations, and she refuses conventional romantic attitudes—a refusal that often results in the ironic tone of some of her love poems. It is not surprising that she acknowledged her fondness for Andrew Marvell, the poet of "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and "The Nymph's Reply."

the mind is an enchanting thing (marianne moore)

This poem does not tell a story. In other words, it's not like, "Susie went to the store, bought a pound of gumdrops, ate them, then went to bed with a doozy of a stomachache." Rather, this poem is a meditation on the mind. Through a series of images, Moore flexes her creative muscles to compare the mind to all kinds of things: insects, birds, musicians, and even gyroscopes. Then it ends. Because nothing happens in this poem.

"i sing of olaf glad and big" e.e. cummings

This poem presents a strong antiwar statement as Cummings lauds a conscientious objector for his resistance and eventual refusal to participate in battle. Although Olaf's actions eventually result in his death by torture, the narrator believes that he will see Olaf in heaven: Olaf has chosen a Christ-centered path and will be forgiven for his lack of "patriotism," since in this case patriotism is evil.

"Grass" carl Sandburg

This short poem is not spoken by a human being, but by the grass. (That's some pretty impressive vegetation, if we do say so ourselves.) In the first stanza, the grass commands soldiers to "pile the bodies high" at Austerlitz and Waterloo, two famous battlefields from the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century. The grass then says that it covers "all." In the second stanza, the grass lists other famous battlefields—Gettysburg from the Civil War, and Ypres and Verdun, from WWI. It commands soldiers to pile the bodies high again. The grass imagines that, in the future, ordinary people will travel on trains past the battlefields, and wonder what they are; they will not remember the battles or see signs of them on the landscape. The grass then ends the poem with the declaration: "let me work."

"the red wheelbarrow" william carlos williams

Three images are involved: the wheelbarrow, described simply as red, the qualifying adjectival phrase "glazed with rain/ water," which relieves the excessive severity of the second stanza, and the contrasting white chickens of the final stanza. The first line is colloquial and open in its invitation; the second line, the preposition "upon," prepares the reader for the specifics to follow. Each two-line stanza has two stressed syllables in the first line and one in the second, and yet there is lively variation in where the stresses fall. In "The Red Wheelbarrow," Williams discovers an aesthetic pattern and sensory pleasure in an ordinary sight. The poem—or the moment of perception it reports—evokes no cultural traditions or literary associations. The absence of these is strongly noticed, however, for if the poem is an immediate experience, it is also a demonstration and argument. "So much depends," it says, on the object being there, but it also means that so much depends on the reader's response to what is seen. If one's response is dull, the world takes on this quality, and the converse is also true. Thus, although Williams believed that the American environment offered a new challenge and possibility to poetry, his deeper meaning was that anything, however familiar or even drab, would become significant and moving when met with a full response.

"anyone lived in a pretty how town" e.e. cummings

We start by learning that some guy named "anyone" lived in a pretty how town. He does his thing and lives his life day by day, singing about the stuff he's never done and dancing about the stuff he has. His town doesn't sound all that friendly because the women and men apparently don't care about anyone at all. They're too concerned with raising a bunch of boring kids who are all alike. The kids in anyone's town think that a woman named "noone" is in love with him. But they stop caring as they (the kids) grow older and turn into adults who don't care about anyone. All the while, the seasons keep turning and time keeps passing. And it looks like the kids were right. Noone and anyone are totally in love and they share almost every emotion with one another. While anyone and noone are in love, the other people in the pretty how town get married and have kids and repeat the same cycle of American life. They all laugh and they all cry and then... they eventually die. One day, anyone finally dies and noone is there to kiss his face when he's laid in his coffin. Noone dies not long after and she is buried next to anyone. Meanwhile, the people of the pretty little town move on with their lives and keep having kids and laughing and crying and dying. The seasons keep spinning and it all keeps happening, over and over.

Birches Robert Frost

When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that they are bent because boys have been "swinging" them. He knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging at the tree's crest to the ground. He used to do this himself and dreams of going back to those days. He likens birch swinging to getting "away from the earth awhile" and then coming back.

"the book of the grotesque" Sherwood anderson

Winesburg, Ohio begins with a prologue, describing an old writer who has hired a carpenter to rebuild his bed, so it will be level with his window. After the work is completed, the old writer lies in bed and thinks about death. As he nears sleep, all the people he has ever met pass slowly before his eyes. He sees them all as "grotesques," some amusing, some terribly sad, and some horrifying. Immediately after this experience, he climbs out of bed and writes everything that he saw down in a book, which he calls "The Book of the Grotesque." In this book, he conjectures that the world is full of different truths, all of them beautiful, but when a person seizes on and tries to live by only a single truth, that person's life becomes distorted. The old man writes on this subject for hundreds and hundreds of pages, his obsession almost making himself a grotesque; in the end, he never publishes the book.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

a novelist and chronicler of the jazz age. his wife, zelda and he were the "couple" of the decade but hit bottom during the depression. his noval THE GREAT GATSBY is considered a masterpiece about a gangster's pursuit of an unattainable rich girl.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

an American Modernist poet, critic, translator, and editor. Her poetry is noted for formal innovation, precise diction, irony, and wit.

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)

an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.

Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941)

an American novelist and short story writer, known for subjective and self-revealing works. Self-educated, he rose to become a successful copywriter and business owner in Cleveland and Elyria, Ohio. In 1912, Anderson had a nervous breakdown that led him to abandon his business and family to become a writer.

Susan Glaspell

an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook she founded the Provincetown Players,[1] the first modern American theatre company.[2] During the Great Depression, she served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.

William Carlos Williams

an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pediatrics and general medicine. He was affiliated with Passaic General Hospital, where he served as the hospital's chief of pediatrics from 1924 until his death. The hospital, which is now known as St. Mary's General Hospital, paid tribute to Williams with a memorial plaque that states "we walk the wards that Williams walked

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 1886-1961

an American poet, novelist, and memoirist, associated with the early 20th century avant-garde Imagist group of poets, including Ezra Pound and Richard Aldington.

"winter dreams" f. scott fitzgerald

in winter, Dexter Green, son of the owner of the second-best grocery store in Black Bear, Minnesota, skis across the snowed-in golf course where he caddies in the warmer months to earn his pocket money. In April, the spring thaw begins and the first golfers brave the course. Unlike the dismal spring, the autumn and winter empower Dexter and stimulate his imagination. Dexter imagines beating the golf club's most esteemed members. At work, he crosses paths with Judy Jones, who, attended by her nurse, asks Dexter to carry her clubs. Dexter can't leave his post, and Judy throws a tantrum and tries to strike her nurse with her clubs. When the caddy-master promptly returns and Dexter is free to be Judy's caddy, he quits. Hastily ending his employment as a caddie is the first in a lifelong series of impetuous acts that would be dictated to Dexter by his so-called winter dreams, which drive him to desire material success.

"hands" Sherwood Anderson

it tells the story of Wing Biddlebaum, an eccentric, nervous man who lives on the outskirts of the town of Winesburg, Ohio. Despite having lived in Winesburg for twenty years, Biddlebaum has never become close to anyone, with the exception of George Willard, a young man who works as a reporter for the Winesburg Eagle. On this particular evening, Biddlebaum is pacing on his porch, hoping that George will visit. As he paces, he fiddles with his hands, which are famous for their dexterity and wanton behavior. "Their restless activity," Anderson writes, "like unto the beating of the wings of an imprisoned bird, had given him his name." He has difficulty controlling his hands, which have a tendency to wander inappropriately of their own accord. The last time he was talking with George, he jerked back in horror after finding himself starting to caress the young man's face.

"tradition and the individual talent" T.S. Elliot

one of Eliot's early essays, typifies his critical stance and concerns; it has been called his most influential single essay. Divided into three parts, appearing in The Egoist in September and December, 1919, the essay insists upon taking tradition into account when formulating criticism—"aesthetic, not merely historical criticism."

"journey of the magi" T.S. Elliot

opens with a quote about a journey, and it's a cold and difficult one. From the title of the poem, we can guess that this is the journey of the Three Kings (or Three Wise Men, or Magi) to the birthplace of Jesus. After the opening quote, the poem elaborates on the difficulties of travel, including grumpy camels, wishing for home (home being warm, palatial, and full of girls and servants), fires going out, unfriendly and expensive towns, and a distinct lack of places to sleep. The speaker notes that the Magi preferred to just travel all night for these reasons, and that through their travels, a little voice in their heads kept suggesting that maybe this whole thing was all for nothing. Then, the narrator goes on to tell of the Magi's arrival in Bethlehem, a place he describes as "a temperate valley" (21). They still can't find any info about where they were supposed to go from the villagers, however, so they eventually have to find the stable in which they were to witness the birth of the baby Jesus. The trio arrives just in time. The last part of the poem is more blatantly the Magus reminiscing about the story ("all this was a long time ago, I remember" [32]), and in his recollection he seems to be doubtful about whether or not the birth was a good or a bad thing, replacing as it would his own religion and culture. In fact, at the end of the poem he seems to regard it as a bad thing indeed, with the Magus wishing for his own death alongside the death of his peoples' old religion and ways.

"next to of course god america i" e.e. cummings

seems to be spoken from the heart of E.E. Cummings himself. He removes himself from the poem by using a speaker within a speaker, but the content of the poem directly corresponds with Cummings' life experiences. As a volunteer during World War I, Cummings acquired a bitterness for war which he did not scruple to express. He was outspoken and willing to go against the grain to stand up for what he believed in, no matter what the cost. This poem reveals some of his deepest, if unpopular, beliefs.

Amy lowell

she enhanced her promotion of imagism as a viable alternative to traditional forms with the composition of over 600 poems. The sheer volume of verse mars her canon by the inclusion of mediocre works among such masterpieces as "Patterns" and "The Sisters," a defense of female artistry. Until feminist criticism defended her place among early-twentieth-century poets, she was largely neglected, in part because homophobic critics rejected her bisexual and lesbian views on human relationships.

"chicago" Carl sandburg

speaker describes the life of the city. A mysterious "they" tells the speaker that Chicago is "wicked," "crooked," and "brutal," and the speaker agrees with all of these judgments. He has seen prostitutes, killers, and starving families. But the speaker responds to this "they" and pronounces Chicago is "so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning." It's a vibrant and dynamic city, and the speaker finds beauty in it, despite its dark corners. The speaker then describes Chicago again in a series of short lines. Chicago is constantly "building, breaking, rebuilding." This is the life cycle of the city. Then the speaker describes Chicago even further. The city almost becomes the very people who inhabit it. The city feels the pulse and the "the heart of the people."

"flowering judas" Katherine anne porter

the story of Laura, an alienated young American woman who travels to Mexico where she is courted by Braggioni, a corrupt but charismatic leader in the Mexican revolution. The two of them have vastly different worldviews—Laura's traditional background clashing with Braggioni's fiery socialism. Laura becomes increasingly isolated and faces a crisis of faith. The story focuses heavily on Christian themes and symbolism, as the characters in the story are seen to reflect versions of iconic Christian figures. It also explores themes of idealism, class struggle, and revolution. "Flowering Judas" is considered one of the best examples of the American short story; its complex symbolism has allowed it to endure and be studied and analyzed today. One of Porter's most enduring works, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as part of Porter's larger anthology The Collected Stories in 1966.

Design (Robert Frost)

three white creatures and flower are brought together for some terrible reason. The terrible reason is a dark design of death or we can say the food chain in a positive term. By bringing all these white things together, the speaker is trying to highlight the food chain lying in the nature. The moth has gone there in search of the juice of heal-all flower and spider has gone there in search of the moth. One day, even the spider will become the food for the flower. All these things of the universe are interconnected. The nature has designed us to be interdependent. Even living thing and being survives upon each other. Nature has already designed this interconnection.