Ralph Waldo Emerson: America’s Most Influential Essayist

Emerson may have been an ordained minister and the son of an ordained minister, but he was anything but a Christian. He was the, in fact, the man credited with being the primary leader of the American transcendentalist movement and the father of it.

Actually though, transcendentalism was really nothing new in the world but hearkened back to the more ancient nature religions of the past pre-Christian eras of history. The core value of this “new” post Christian American philosophy is that both man and nature are good and that everything in nature is God and that God is diffused throughout nature. This is called pantheism. In other words, everything that exists is God and contains God and thus reality cannot be understood outside the realm of nature.

The values of individualism and self reliance were also paramount in Emerson’s transcendentalist philosophy, in which the highest state of man is to be an independent free thinker whose thought transcends the traditional norms of society. Thus the values of individualism and self reliance were important to both Emerson and his protege David Henry Thoreau and still hold sway over American people today as being perceived to be the ultimate freedom for the freedom loving American people.

Born on May 25, 1803 in aristocratic Boston, Massachusetts to a Unitarian minister father and a staunch Anglican mother, Emerson indeed became a Unitarian minister after graduating from Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School, which was in the keeping with the family tradition of his forefathers being in the ministry. But not believing in the miracles of the Bible, he got disillusioned with Christianity and left the ministry. He then began to write his very influential essays and poems and to give speeches at various colleges and universities. His first published transcendentalist essay was entitled “Nature” and he went onto deliver a highly influential speech at Harvard University entitled “The American Scholar” which the then prominent poet Oliver Wendell Holmes went on to call “America’s Intellectual Declaration of Independence” . And Emerson’s influence is still felt in the halls of higher learning today since the objective of most schools today is to teach the students the principles of independent critical thinking. In this way Emerson is still an important influence on American education, touching nearly all of us.

Emerson went on to give many important speeches which he edited into a final essay format which he divided into two groups; Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series and some of the things that he said are as follows:

1, Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world, a heaven.

2, But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars.

3. The happiest man is he who learns from nature the lesson of worship.

…………………………………………………………………………………………

Emerson was considered to be an American mystic because of his focus on the intuition and spirit, however he was not a Christian mystic because he did not belive in a personal God.

He died on April 27, 1882 in the city of Concord, Massachusetts.

Francis Scott Key: On The Fence in Freedom’s Defense

Some poets are famous for only one poem, and Francis Scott Key, a Fredrick, Maryland lawyer is the amateur poet who was famous for writing the immortal words of America’s national anthem; The Star Spangled Banner.

He had boarded an English warship during the War of 1812 to secure the release of one prisoner of war by the name of Dr. William Beans. The War of 1812 was a naval war over maritime rights between the two nations on the high seas and the British bad habit of impressing American merchant seamen into into service in the British Navy. And it was in the morning after one especially fierce battle on September 14, 1814 that Key felt inspired to write the words of the poem originally entitled the “Defense of Fort M’ Henry”as he beheld the sight of a tattered American flag still flying high over Baltimore’s own fort, Fort M’ Henry. And the words are truly stirring.

The Star-Spangled Banner
Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
‘Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war’s desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!
But unfortunately this ‘ home of the free and land of the brave’ as expressed in the first stanza of this four stanza poem was not a totally free country; America in 1814 was still half slave and half free, and the poet himself was on the fence between the two opinions on the issue.

Key himself was a slave owner by the year of 1800, and for this, both he and his poem received bad reviews in abolitionist circles, but in Key’s defense, he was also a man who was experiencing a measure of personal growth in his morals and values, so he freed most of his slaves in the 1830’s and hired one man back and paid him wages to manage his farm. However Key was also a lawyer who played both sides by representing slaves who were trying to gain their freedom at no charge to them, but also he represented slave owners who were trying to recover their runaway slaves. So this man was definitely on the fence regarding freedom and liberty for all and still had a lot of growing to do in his views by his death in the year of 1843 (as did the rest of the nation).

And grow the nation did, but slowly, and it took the growing pains involved in fighting a bloody Civil War to bring civil liberty to everyone which was beautifully expressed in a fifth stanza added to the “Star Spangled Banner’” by poet Oliver Wendell Holmes eighteen years after Key’s death during the Civil War.

When our land is illum’d with Liberty’s smile,
If a foe from within strike a blow at her glory,
Down, down, with the traitor that dares to defile
The flag of her stars and the page of her story!
By the millions unchain’d who our birthright have gained
We will keep her bright blazon forever unstained!
And the Star-Spangled Banner in triumph shall wave
While the land of the free is the home of the brave.

There were many patriotic songs like “America the Beautiful” and “My Country Tis of Thee” being considered for the honor of being named America’s National Anthem, but on March 3, 1931 ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, now the anthem of the US Navy, was declared to be the National Anthem by the Congress of the United States and was signed into law by President Herbert Hoover.

And America has been experiencing intense social justice growing pains ever since the Civil War and the penning of those poignant words and continues to struggle in the American quest for equality and freedom to this very day.

Mary Oliver and Her Wise Connection to the Natural World

Mary Oliver was such a natural born poet that she started writing by the young age of 14, eventually winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 2007. And the New York Times said of her “that she was by far this country’s best selling poet. But Oliver was first and foremost nature’s most prominent post modern poet.

She grew up in the semi rural Cleveland suburb of Maple Heights, Ohio and was by and large a lover of the great outdoors. Born to Edward William and Helen Oliver on September 10, 1935, and she described her childhood as being lonely and difficult and her family as dysfunctional, so she felt strongly drawn to the woods outside and escaped into a world of poetry. Nature was her comfort and poetry her retreat Oliver said of her hometown,

It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family.
I don’t know why I feel such an affinity with the
natural world except it was available to me.

Perhaps the sky, the birds and the trees became her “extended family because her own family had emotionally abandoned her. And it’s poems such as The Kitten that shows the poets unique perspective on nature and how she was one woman, as one critic put it, “thar stood on the line between earth and sky…human and animal.”

The Kitten

More amazed than anything
I took the perfectly black
stillborn kitten
with one large eye
in the center of its small forehead
from the house cat’s bed
and buried it in a field
behind the house.

I suppose I could have given it
to a museum,
I could have called the local
newspaper.

But instead I took it out into the field
and opened the earth
and put it back
saying it was real,
saying, life is infinitely inventive,
saying what other amazements
lie in the dark seed of the earth
lie in the dark seed of the earth, yes,

I think I did right to go out alone
and give it back peacefully, and cover the place
with the reckless blossoms of weeds.

Here, in just plain, ordinary everyday English, Oliver mesmerizes the reader with the wonder of this anomaly of nature while holding the hapless dead creature to the highest standard of dignity, as if it was a human being.

Oliver never finished earning her college degrees at Ohio State University and Vassar University, but at age 17 she paired with Norma Millay to organize the papers of the late Pulitzer Prize winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, no doubt getting a real education on how to write fine poetry. Oliver’s own prize winning book was entitled American Primitive.

Oliver died shortly after being diagnosed with lung cancer on January 17, 2019 at age 83.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sweet Lady Poet of the Love Sonnet

Elizabeth Browning was the proverbial child prodigy who began writing at the early age of 11, and her lifetime body of work boasted of the largest collections of childhood poetry in existence. Then after being accepted as an adult into some of Britain’s most prestigious literary circles during the Victorian era, she bedazzled both readers and other poets alike with her love sonnets, becoming an influence on such great American poets as Edgar Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson. In fact, she was so renown in Great Britain that she was being considered for the office of Poet Laureate by the Royal Family.

Born on March 6, 1806 to a well off Englishman named Edward Moulton Barrett, she was the eldest child of 12 children and spent a happy childhood in a large country home in Durham, England. However, she fell ill at age 15 succumbing to headaches, and after the death of a brother, she became a bit reclusive and shy. But, she was not too shy to be swept off her feet by another poet, Robert Browning, who fell deeply in love with her after reading her beautiful verses about love, but fearing the disapproval of her father, she kept her marriage a secret for a week while still living under his roof as if she were still single. And he did indeed disown her, and her most famous Sonnet “How Do I Love Thee” tells of her legendary love for the man, a poem that is a pure joy to read.

How Do I Love Thee

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling is out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with passion put to use
In my old griefs, and my childhood’s faith.
I loved thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall love thee better after death.

Now this kind of love smacks of intense unconditional, almost everlasting commited love “beyond death,” if possible, howbeit she had to keep it discreet by calling it her “most quiet need,” she had a controlling father after all, and she did live in Victorian times when Christianity ruled and propriety was the order of the day, and girls were mostly educated at home, and when all outward manifestations of outward passion had to be kept under one’s strict control at all times.

Her most famous book was entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese, all love poems and she died on June 29, 1861 in Florence, Italy, but not before this poetess made giant inroads for many English speakin female poets that came after her.

Sonnets Are the ‘Little Songs’ of Wise Poets

Form. Form. Form. Form is what the sonnet is all about. All types of sonnets are written by the same basic rules of being a total of fourteen lines written according to a strict rhyme scheme and meter of certain common patterns employed at discretion of the poet. And most often iambic pentameter, a meter of ten syllables per line with a strong syllable being followed by a weak one, is used in the English speaking world.

The sonnet itself had it’s beginning in Italy and was the invention of Giacomo da Lentini who served as a poet in the court of Fredrick the II, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 13th century Sicily. The early sonnets always presented a problem or a perplexing situation at the beginning and ending with a solution or a wise reflection on the problem. And classically the problem involved the love for a dispassionate beautiful woman and a broken-heart-ed suitor. But as time went on, and the form evolved, these sonnets also included a more realistic woman and and were written on a variety of subjects by the time of Shakespeare.

In the English tradition there are three main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarch-an) sonnet, the Spenserian sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet, The Italian sonnet is characterized by an octave of eight lines with an ABBAABBA rhyme scheme and a sextet with a with either a CDECDE or a CDCDCD rhyming pattern as seen in this example by Milton:

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide;
“Doth God exact day labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask, But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or His own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best, His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

The Shakespearean sonnet is written in three quatrains of four lines each and ends in a couplet with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG as in this example:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do their death bury their parents’ strife,
The fearful passage of their death-mark’d love,
And the continuance of their parents’ rage,
Which, but their children’s end, nought remove,
Is now the two hours’ traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

The Spenserian sonnet is a very complex form with the interlocking rhyme scheme of ABAB BCBC CDCD EE making the poem a tight unified ,
little unit, and although these poems are relatively short, they are in really huge masterpieces in form.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I write it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay,
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like this decay,
and eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so, (quod I} let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.
…………………………..

This is first a three part series on this most historically important form of poetry which will include an article about the works of contemporary writers and the life and works of Elizabeth Browning, a lady master of the sonnet. Contemporary poets vary both the rhyme schemes and meters of the seemingly “simple” sonnet.

Excilia Saldaña: La Latina Matriarch of Cuban Poetry

Award winning Cuban poetess Excilia Saldaña is the Wise Poet of this week. Born in on August 7, 1946, she was raised in Havana by her grandmother and her young teenage mother, and being raised in a matriarchal family like that, Saldaña became the poetic voice of those women born into into the Afro-Cuban tradition. She wrote about such issues as motherhood and the role of Afro-Cuban women in Cuban society, and the guilt and shame inherently associated with being born a woman. And being a Black Cuban national descendant of West African enslaved people, she must have been keenly aware of violence against woman in the history of her people and the shame of being a victim of such violence.

According to statistics 62% of the Cuban population is of African decent and of the Afro-Cuban tradition of the Santeria religion, meaning The Way of the Saints, which is a hybrid of the original religion of the Yoruban people of West Africa and Roman Catholicism. They believe that there is only one God but that the forces of nature are overseen by lesser godlike beings called corishas, spirits which are pleased through divination. Saldaña’s family roots were dug deep into this tradition of religion and culture, music, dance and literature. She was most known as an academic and a children’s author, but she was also an accomplished poet whose poetry was translated from Spanish into both French and English, and she was recognized by the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba for her excellent writing, and her first book of poems entitled Enlloro was unpublished during her lifetime but won acclaim from the Casa de las Americas Prize board shortly after her death on July 20, 1999.

Her poem entitled Anonymous Landscape is a poem about the shame of just being an average woman and not famous or a man and is the voice of a woman feeling quite insignificant.

Anonymous Landscape

Every afternoon
The woman sits
before an open window
guilty of not being air, water
–or at least a wing that flies-
of being only a woman before an open window.

Every afternoon
the sky hangs itself out to dry
beyond the open window
ashamed of not being man, flesh, body
—or at least earth—
of being only sky beyond an open window,
Secret passion of guilt and shame:
a golden woman of violet sky
every afternoon through an open window.

Although this poem about feeling insignificant initially reads plain and almost prose-like in style in the beginning and the body of the piece, it ends with the vivid imagery of a golden woman and a violet sky and signifies the true significance of a mere woman who is not a man, This poem flares up into color at the end.

Writer William Faulkner: The Free Spirit of the South

William Faulkner, he was the legend the English class who was known as the writer whose intellect was so big that his mind could not be contained in a formal classroom or in a regular nine to five job.
He started out in the lower elementary grades as a good student, but this free spirit grew bored and dropped out of high school after repeating the 11th and 12th grades in order to read and study on his own. And legend has it that this man was such a voracious reader that he would about bankrupt the library shelves of all it’s books, and he was also even fired from his postal job in the mail room of a university for reading other people’s mail.

Faulkner was quite the Southern rebel as an author, for rather than writing for the traditional publishers of the day, he wrote mostly motivated just by the art of it, and thus, he faced the rejection of both his short stories and his early books, such as his World War I based novels entitled Soldiers Pay and Flags in the Dust, although the latter did finally find a publisher. He even wrote a biting satire mocking the established Southern literary scene entitled Mosquitoes. He was also quite dispassionate about the formal technique the publishers expected when he said in an interview,

Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no ,mechanical way to get writing done, no shortcuts. The young writer would be a fool to follow such theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes…

Faulkner was much influenced by such modernist writers such as James Joyce, often employing a Joycean brand of stream of consciousness style.

Faulkner was born William Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897 but was raised in Oxford, Mississippi, located in Lafayette County, by his businessman father Murry Cuthbert Falkner, and his mother, Maud Falkner, and he was much inspired by stories of the bold life of his Civil War hero great grandfather Colonel William Clark Falkner, who was also a legend as a railway builder and an author in his own rite. And young Falkner even emulated his great grandfather by doing a stint in The Royal Canadian Air Force during WWI, however, he did not see combat.

The young William Falkner later adopted the pen name of Faulkner which was the result of a misprint of his name on a title page. Most of his most important novels such as The Sound and the Fury and as I Lay Dying were set in a fictional county and based on Lafayette County and the town of Oxford called Yoknapatawpha County and the fictional town of Jefferson and dealt with such sophisticated subjects as Southern racism in America and the complex relationships between the the members of a poor white family while transporting the decaying corpse of their dead mother across the county to the nearby town of Jefferson. The expression of each person’s thought processes along the way was expressed in stream of consciousness writing. And the book proves to be quite gristly and private thoughts quite dicey with each character harboring their own secret ulterior motives for making the arduous trip across creek and county.

In writing these masterpieces Faulkner proved himself to be one of the South’s most accomplished writers by winning both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962 while dwelling in a nursing facility in Byhalia, Mississippi.

Erza Pound: The Wise Poet Arrested for Treason

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound, born in the rural Idaho on October 30, 1885, was a pioneer in the early Imagist movement in which poetry was characterized by succinct language and exact detail in visual images. And the man influenced such greats as Elliott, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway. But this poet also had a dark side; he was a fervent fascist sympathizer who wrote against the United States in various anti-American fascist publications while living as an ex-patriot in Great Britain. And then he blasted America and the President of the United States in numerous radio broadcasts while living in Italy during WWII.

Consequently, he was arrested by the American forces in at the war’s end in 1945 and charged with treason. However, he was found to be mentally insane by the court after his arrival back to the States and was confined to St. Elizabeth Hospital for the criminally insane for the next twelve years of his life.

He had written 70 poetry books and published his work in 70 other publications in his lifetime, but it was while he was still in Italy imprisoned in a 6 foot by 6 foot open air cage that he began to write the most important section in his masterpiece book, The Cantos, entitled The Pisan Cantos for which he won the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress, a controversial move by the Library indeed. The Cantos was a lengthy poem of 116 sections that was never really finished by Pound during his 12 year long stay at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, but this small portion of Canto I amply illustrates the stark beauty of his lovely and succinct and detailed verse.

Canto I 
BY EZRA POUND
And then went down to the ship,
Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and
We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,
Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also
Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward
Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,
Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.
Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller,
Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end.

Ezra Pound was not just a master of complex poetic verse, but he was also an expert linguist proficient at the classic languages of Latin and Greek and had become a professor of the Romance languages of French, Spanish, and Italian after graduation from Hamilton College with a BA in philosophy and the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Masters Degree in the Romance languages.

On the urging of his fellow poets, Pound was released from the hospital in 1958 and set sail for Italy where he quietly lived until his death in 1972.

Dr. Seuss: The Pied Piper of Children’s Poetry

Dr. Seuss, born Theodor Seuss Geisel on March 2, 1904, was the author who spirited away a generation of children from their parents into a world of mesmerizing rhymes, strange characters, and free thinking. And with personified characters such as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas he imparted values to the children of the WWII post baby boom such as the importance of spiritual things over materal goods and the importance of being able to think outside the box and resist the status quo.

Seuss was the most wildly popular illustrator and children’s author of his time, and the secret to this Bard’s success lay in large part to his enchanting rhymes and mesmerizing meters. His most commonly used meter was called anapestic tetrameter which consists of two weak syllables followed by a strong syllable from this example from Wiki Pedia

And today the Great Yertle
that Marvelous he
Is King of the Mud. That is all
he can see.

But some of his verse also contained a kind of meter wherein every other was the stressed syllable called amphibrachic tetrameter, and most of his rhyme schemes most often consisted of AABB and ABCB all these elements together giving the poetry a the sing-songy appeal most familiar to children:

All ready to put up the tents
for my circus.
I think I will call it the circus
Mcgurkus

……………..

“Dr. Seuss”Giesel was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College and a graduate student at Lincoln College where he adoted the “Dr.” in front of his name when he did not finish his doctorate studies. After college he became an illustrator for Vanity Fair Magazine and a prosperous advertiser for Standard Oil. During WWII Giesel became a satirical political cartoonist for New York’s PM Magazine and wrote his first children’s book entitled “And To Think That I First Saw It on Mulberry Street, which
was subsequently rejected by 30 publishers before it found a home. All in all he wrote 60 children’s books and one adult book which flopped. He said about adults, “Adults are obsolete children. To hell with them.”

‘Dr. Seuss” Giesel was born Springfield, Massachusetts and died on
September 24, 1991 in La Jolla, California at the ripe old age of 87 and sold over 600 million copies of his books and won the Pulitzer prize for his massive contribution to literature. He led a long, prosperous and prolific life,

Mark Twain: The Man of the Mighty Mississippi

The stock advise for aspiring writers is to “Write what you know,” and Mark Twain did just that. He was born, with the given name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in the town of Florida Missouri, but was raised in the town of Hannibal situated right on the iconic Mississippi river. And so being intimately acquainted with this beloved waterway, he used this river and his hometown as the setting for two of his most loved novels; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the sequel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and it was this idyllic setting that Twain used to write his adventure stories and dealt with such serious topics as slavery, the value of freedom and human worth.

In fact, the primary plot of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn involves quest of two individuals to find freedom by escaping from their circumstances by way of the Mississippi river. Jim is an escaped slave, who is headed for the free state of Illinois and Huck is the wild-child who is running away from a tyrannical drunken father and the social norms of society which don’t make sense to him and being imposed on him by his very religious guardian, the widow Douglas. Thus, the wild and woolly river itself symbolizes freedom for the both of them as they both flee from their “owners.” This book is also a kind of coming of age story for Huck as he comes to the realization that the norms and common beliefs of his elders really are often unjust, unfair, and just plain wrong when he utters what are probably some of the most important words in American literature, “All right, then. I’ll go to hell,” regarding the common belief in his hometown that those helping an escaped slave will suffer eternal damnation. This statement is in fact the climax of the book and the moment when Huck truly becomes free in his own mind and finds the courage to become his own independently thinking man.

Mark Twain, himself, was also an independently thinking man and a truly colorful, larger than life, public figure who mastered many trades in his lifetime. He was a printer, a journalist, a steamboat pilot, a witty humorist and public speaker, as well as the author of 20 novels. And in his books about the American South, he was also a master of writing in local dialect of the town, thereby making his characters come alive through their unique colloquial speech.

“Pap” Finn, for example, was the course drunken father of Huck who did not believe in education, and his profound ignorance becomes apparent when he blasts his son for learning to read,

Don’t you give me none o’ your lip….You’ve put on considerable frills since I been away. I’ll take you down a peg before I get done with you. You’re educated they say-can read and write,…I’ll take it out of you. Who told you you might meddle with such hifalut’n foolishness, hey?—who told you you could?

Pap Finn goes on to blast the “govment” for giving black people the right to vote in free states in a later part of the book.

Now while Twain denigrates Huck’s abusive father, he elevates Jim, the escaped slave, with dialogue when Jim speaks about the realization of his true worth as a person when he says;

I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’;d dollars. I wish I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’ .

Twain was one of America’s greatest and most endearing writers of all time and more than succeeded in writing “The Great American Novel”, and was adept at capturing both the entertainment value of adventure in a book and also highlighting the important issues of his day. He was truly larger than life and a real versatile literary genius with a whole range of talent.

He died on April 21, 1910 of a heart attack.

They Kissed the Blarney Stone: The Wise Bards of Ireland

With the advent of Christianity and monasteries in Ireland came the commencement of a new age of literacy and alphabet in the nation; then, naturally, a tradition of highly structured syllabic and lyrical poetry followed, a tradition in the two languages of Gaelic first and then English. And while the secular poets glorified and commemorated the heroes of the land, as was the universal theme of most of the ancient world, the religious poets, however, venerated both the love of nature and religion in verse, with solitude being a real ideal in their poetry. And in this an excerpt of from such poetry quoting a character named Marbin the Hermit they wrote:

Sound of wind in a branching wood grey cloud,
river falls-beautiful music.

This verse is almost Japanese in it’s complex profound simplicity with its imagery of the pristine scenes of nature including the senses of sight and sound.

These styles and themes persisted down through time, but with the turn of the 20th century and fast approaching shift in culture to city life brought on by the Industrial Revolution came the Northern Irish school of modernist poetry and the celtic Revival which produced two Nobel Prize winning poets during the course of the century, William Butler Yeats, who was on June 13, 1865 and died on January 28, 1939 and Seamus Heaney who was born in Northern Ireland on April 13, 1939. Thus the Irish virtually dominated the world of fine literature in the 20th century.

Yeats was born into the Protestant tradition, but he rejected this form of Christianity because of it’s focus on material prosperity and embraced his own interpretation of the pagan beliefs and mysticism of his ancient Gaelic ancestors, and he was considered a master of the traditional forms of Irish poetry and French symbolism. Yeats would use just one word or a group of words to symbolize an abstract
thought or idea, and in the following words he used a simple ladder to symbolize both the vigor and the loss of his youth as he aged.

Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down here
where all ladders start
in the rag and bone shop of the heart.

The “rag and bones shop” here refers to a vendor of secondhand stuff, or junk if you will, or second hand emotions. He also aptly wrote about the changes and loss of the comfort of love in his poem When You Are Old.

When You Are Old 
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

Then Yeats, aging Yates, being a non-religious pagan himself, also believed in “Spiritus Mundi” which is the collective memory of the universe that fuels and inspires all poets.

Now while Yeats was born Protestant, Heaney on the other hand was born in Northern Ireland to a Catholic family and being in the minority religion of the region, he felt a bit marginalized by society and was well acquainted with the political turmoil known as The Troubles which served as the backdrop of all his writings, both poetry and prose.. But instead of embracing the mysticism of Yeats, he chose to write about more concrete things such as the quickly passing away of the rural life in Ireland and the death of nature in his first book appropriately entitled The Death of a Naturalist in which he lamented the death of the innocence and natural world of traditional farm life he so enjoyed as a boy.

Death of a Naturalist
BY SEAMUS HEANEY
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.

    Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Here he expertly captures both the innocent curiosity of a boy growing tadpoles in a jar and with the coming of his age of his metaphoric adult bull frog to the coming of age his full blown anger over the loss of a beloved way of life.

Yeats swon the Nobel Prize in 1923, “…For his always inspired poetry, which in high artistic highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation,” and Yeats was not just a supremely accomplished poet, but he was also a vitally important playwright and a giant figure in the theater arts.

And Heaney won the same Nobel prize at the latter end of the century in 1995 “…for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exult everyday miracles and the living past…” He was also a teacher and a tenured professor at Harvard University. He died on August 30, 2013 of a stroke.

When it comes to poetry of the 20th century, the Irish poets rule.

Ernest Hemingway: The Paradox of a Full and Empty Life

Ernest Hemingway was what you call a “Man’s Man”, and he did just about everything. He was a traveler, a soldier, a sportsman, a fisherman, a great adventurer. And he made his living as a daring young dashing foreign correspondent living as an ex patriot in France and Spain and as a fiction writer.

He led a full life, but ironically, Hemingway was also empty enough inside and depressed enough to end his own life in suicide, as did six other members of his immediate family, including a sister, with a self inflicted gunshot wound with a shot gun. And his sparse, unadorned minimalist style of writing aptly reflected the emptiness within him and the emptiness he saw in the lives of other ex patriots living in Europe. He wrote his novels in a typical journalist style and captured the depravity of his morally failing characters in typical journalistic dialogue using short, quip-like quotes such as these in his short story about Madrid entitled The Capital of the World about the life of a second rate matador is is sexually harassing a chamber maid.

…The sister of Paco had gotten out of the embrace of the matador…”These are hungry people. A failed bullfighter. With your tonload of fear. If you have so much of that, use it in the ring.”

“That is the way a whore talks.”

“A whore is also a woman, but I am not a whore.”

“You’ll be one,”

“Not through you.” …

‘Leave me”… “You dirty little whore.”

………………………………………………………

Hemingway loved Spain and bullfighting.

Hemingway was born Ernest Miller Hemingway in Oak Park, Illinois to an average middle class family on July 21, 1899 and attended public school, but upon graduation from high school he elected not to attend college but to start his career as a newspaper reporter immediately after graduation. When WWI broke out he was rejected by the Army, Navy and Marines because he suffered with poor eyesight, so he opted to become a volunteer ambulance driver and was severely wounded while serving in Italy and where he also saw much suffering and bloody carnage and later he wrote about picking up the little pieces of human remains. He also survived two plane crashes while in Africa in 1952; the man no doubt suffered from Post Traumatic Stress disorder.

All in all this prolific writer wrote seven novels with such famous titles as The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises, a book that gives us an apt description the follies of of a group of American ex patriots living strictly for pleasure in Paris, six short story collections and two books in the nonfiction genre. Hemingway was a wildly popular writer that had a multi generational appeal and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for literature. But he was not so popular with the US government because he chose to live in Cuba during WWII and he was suspected by the FBI as being a spy for the Soviet Union during the Cold War. But he finally moved home to the USA and died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2, 1961 by his own town, and his famous, super-model granddaughter Mariel Hemingway followed him also followed him in suicide. Mental illness ran in the family.

He both lived and died big, and he was also married a total of four times in the fashion of a man who was larger than life.

T. S. Eliot: A Tale of Two Countries 

Today’s distinguished poet T.S. Eliot wrote such intellectually challenging verse that it is difficult to read his poetry without cross-referencing some of his imagery, He was a forefather of the modernist movement in poetry with it’s plain language, stark imagery and pessimistic tone as opposed to the more ornate imagery, flowery language and idealistic poetry of the Romantic and Victorian era. And it was a most pessimistic and complicated poem that gave him the claim to international fame and the Nobel Prize for literature. The name of the poem is “The Wasteland” which and in this brief excerpt from this 22 page poem Elliot aptly paints a picture of the bleakness of post WWI London, the hypocrisy of war and the emptiness of early 20^th century man between the two World Wars.

Except from part one; The Burial of the Dead

One must be so careful these days.

  Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,

“Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again!

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!

This part of the poem is written in signature Modernist free verse with a touch of rhyme at the end, and I believe that at the end of stanza, the poet calls himself a hypocrite because of the similarity of his own sins to his friend’s during the war.

Eliot was a distinguished individual indeed, not just for his poetry and his brilliant literary reviews and criticisms, but also for his family pedigree as he hailed fro m one of the oldest founding families of Boston, Massachusetts, however he was born in St. Lewis, Missouri on September 26, 1888 since his family transplanted themselves to that Southern state to establish a Unitarian Church. So, being a family of Northerners living in a Southern state, Eliot felt like quite the outsider as a boy and also suffering from a congenital double in hernia which excluded him from playing sports with his peers, Eliot was an isolated child indeed, so he immersed himself the world of books and gained a deep love for literature. He eventually went to college and became a poet there in his own rite by writing and publishing his first landmark poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock considered to be his first Modernist masterpiece. Eliot went on to move back to Boston and to attend Harvard University as a Philosophy major where he graduated in three years instead of the usual four year, but his strong ancestral connections to England drew him to move to London where he was mentored by the great Modernist pioneer poet Ezra Pound and became a British subject and joining the Anglican Church on June 29, 1927. He died on the January 4, 1965 in London.

Charlotte Bronte

With secret rooms in looming towers and gloomy mansions nessled in the countryside Charlotte Bronte and her sister Emily set the stage for the classic Gothic novel with their books, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively. In both books the heroin is an innocent, young, penniless woman of low estate who goes to an imposing manner house to serve in some capacity, in Charlotte’s case as a governess, only to be met with certain dangers and perils that she must overcome and survive. These two books were prototypes of what we know as the Gothic novels in which the heroins faced their natural human enemies, but sometimes the protagonists in this genre were supernatural spirits and ghosts.

In Charlotte’s famous book, Jane Eyre, her primary character is a physically plain governess who, after leaving the bleak orphanage school for unwanted girls in which she was raised and was subsequently teaching, falls in love with her new boss, Edward Rochester, who is equally plain in his looks. But Jane finds herself being bullied by a more attractive and socially superior rival in romance for her Master’s love who viciously calls out her plain “physiognomy” and her inferior social status. However, Rochester reciprocates Jane’s love and proposes marriage to her, only for Jane to find out that Rochester is already married to a “crazy ” woman who he is hiding in the attic under the care of a nurse. So Jane runs away from home and sets up shop as a school mistress in another town where she is proposed to by a clergyman who wants to take her to an African mission field with the not so sweet words, “Jane, you were not made for love. You were made for hard work,” but Jane refuses him. She then returns to the Rochester mansion to find that her former fiance has been blinded and physically disabled as a result of escaping from a house fire that was set by his first wife and that his first wife has died. So Jane marries her lover after all in order to work to support and take care of him, and ironically, finds out that she was made for both love and hard work.

Bronte herself had attended an unpleasant boarding school for girls and had served as a governess, first to her own surviving siblings, after her two older sisters had died of tuberculosis, and then to a stranger’s family. And she had a great disdain for serving in this profession because of disrespect she herself had experienced serving in her profession. So Jane Eyre was, in a great part, a reflection of her own hard life.

Charlotte was born on April 21, 1816 in Thornton, England to Irish Anglican minister, Patrick Bronte and his wife Maria, but her mother died when she was only 5 years old, and she was the eldest of three sisters who survived into adulthood. She and her four sisters were educated at Clergy Daughter’s School where Charlotte experienced the unpleasant conditions in school that she wrote about in her book. After the untimely deaths of her two older sisters, Charlotte and her two surviving younger sisters actually became a writing trio together whiling away their childhood hours making up elaborate stories set in imaginary countries and experimenting with poetry. And in fact, their first published book was a collaborative collection of self published poems under the assumed male pen names of Currier, Ellis and Acton Bell. They did not want the public to know that they were woman for fear of being pandered to and humored by the male literary critics of the day due to their gender, thereby receiving insincere praise. But, unfortunately, the book did not thrive and sold only two copies since Victorian tastes in literature were transitioning from poetry to prose and narrative fiction.

Bronte’s first work of fiction The Professor did not fly with the publishers and did not make it into print, however, but her second novel Jane Eyre debuted to rave reviews and was heartily accepted by the public.

Bronte eventually married the love of her life, Arthur Bell Nicholls, a man her father did not approve of because of his relative poverty and died shortly after the wedding, along with her unborn child, due to the complications of pregnancy, on March 31, 1855. at the untimly age of 38 years.

Slave Girl Phillis Wheatley and Her Amazing Life and Works

Phillis Wheatley, born in 1753 in Senegal, West Africa, was a woman of uncanny talent and intelligence, Kidnapped in her homeland and sold as a slave in 1761 while still a child, her wit and talent garnered her special attention by her owners, John and Susanna Wheatley who treated her as one of their own children, and most importantly, they took the unusual step of teaching her to read and nurture her special talent as a poet. Phillis Wheatly then went on to dazzle the Bostonian gentry with her poetry and her mastery of Greek and Latin and her translations of many classical works, Thus, in essence, she began to challenge the racial stereotypes of early American history.

Her first poem was to be published in 1767 and was entitled Messrs. Hussy and Coffin, a poem in which Wheatley encourages two men not to trust God and to not fear the sea, and most of her work was highly moral and spiritual in theme. However, her most important poem, for all intents and purposes was “On Being Brought from Africa to America” a work that very gently pricked the colonial American conscience and laid some ground work for the Abolitionist Movement many years hence. Yet the the poem is also an expression of the Poet’s basic shame and modesty about not being born White, no doubt, making the gentle rebuke of the poem more palatable to Americans of that present day.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too:

Once redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their color is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and joined the’ angelic train.

Phillis Wheatley was a devout Christian who reminds us here that both Black and White Christians are on an equal footing in the sight of God, thus making both races truly equal, a radical thought in her day.

After her debut in America and the publication of her first book, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis traveled with the Wheatleys England where the venerable Poetess also bedazzled crowds in London both with her social grace and mental prowess and upon return to America she was set free by the Wheatleys shortly before they both died when she married another freed slave named John Peters. But he in turn left her in poverty, and she died shortly afterwards in childbirth on December 5, 1784 but not without leaving a lasting legacy for all American.

Mother Teresa: The Sainted Secret Bard

Not wanting to garner too much public attention for her writings, Mother Teresa of Calcutta wrote her diary and poems in secret as part and parcel of her own private spiritual self-discipline, But it was this kind of self-discipline that propelled her into India’s worst slums to care for the poor and earned her a prominent place in the world’s history books.

Born in Skoppje, Macedonia of the Ottoman Empire, Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was baptized into the the Roman Catholic Church August 27, 1910 just one day after her birthday and was the daughter of the town grocer, But being devout in religion she went to Ireland to study at t6her Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary where in six short weeks she became a novice teaching nun with the Sisters of Loretto and set sail for Calcutta India to teach school there and was now known as Sister Mary Teresa Bojaxhiu when she wrote this sad farewell poem about leaving her safe, familiar life as she knew it:

Farewell

 I’m leaving my dear house

And my beloved land

To steamy Bengal go I

To a distant shore,

I’m leaving my old friends

Forsaking family and home

My heart draws me onward

To serve my Christ.

Goodbye, O mother dear

May God be with you all

A Higher Power compels me

Toward torrid India.

The ship moves slowly ahead

Cleaving the ocean waves,

As my eyes take one last look

At Europe’s dear shores,

Bravely standing on the deck

Joyful, peaceful of mien,

Christ’s happy little one,

His new bride to be,

In her hand a cross of Iron

On which the Savior hangs,

While her eager soul offers there

Its painful sacrefice.

Oh God, accept this sacrifice

As a sign of my love,

Help, please, Thy creature

To glorify Thy name!

In return, I only ask of Thee,

O most kind Father of us all:

Let me save at least one soul-

One you already know,

Fine and pure as summer dew

Her soft warm tears begin to flow,

Sealing and sanctifying now

Her painful sacrifice.

After her novitiate was finished and her final vows were taken Mother Teresa settled into her new Calcutta convent home where she taught school for 17 years, but becoming more and more disturbed by the abject poverty that she saw around her and felt “The call within the call” to vacate her still comfortable life to care for the dying poor in the slums in the year of 1944. She became famous for her written quotes and she wrote “Our Lord wants me to be a free nun covered with the poverty of the cross” and she adopted both the country of India by assuming Indian citizenship and the wearing of the simple white traditional sari of Indian women. She went on to found the Order of the Missionaries of Charity women’s congregation and to open a plethora of nursing homes that served multiplied thousands of the blind, disabled, sick and dying, homeless persons of the street as she inspired millions of people throughout the world to also help the poor. And she was the author of many inspiring quotes and a compelling diary “Come Be My Light”.

She said important things with such profound simplicity.

…………………………………

“We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.”

“If you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.”

“Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.”

“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”

……………………………………

But although this woman was revered worldwide and got the attention of governors and Popes alike, even Mother Teresa had her critics as some were offended by her stance on contraception and abortion, but agree with her or disagree, I know that her poetry and her quotes have made me feel more accepting of my own personal struggles with pain and tribulation since it is all done for the the glory of Christ anyway.

Mother Teresa died on September 5, 1997 after a long bout with heart disease, pneumonia, malaria at age 87. She was beautified by Pope John Paul II on October 19 2003 and Canonized by Pope Frances on September 4, 2016.

She was also the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

OLes Murray: The Great Poet of the Vast Outback

The magnitude of the open landscape of Australia can be beyond a man’s imagination, but was deftly captured by Australia’s leading modern poet, Les Murray, who was also known as his country’s Bush-Bard. Inspired by observing a hovering cloud of fireflies on the riverbank at age !8, he decided then to become a poet, and he wrote a whopping 30 volumes of poetry in his lifetime and won many awards, including the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. He was also praised by “The New Yorker” magazine as being worthy of a Nobel Prize for Literature as he was a leading English speaking poets of his day.

Murray wrote about many subjects such as the animals and landscape of the Outback wilderness, the lives of the farmers and white settler pioneers who struggled with poverty, and the culture of the indigenous people of the land, and he was called “the last of the “Jindyworobaks”. This was a movement in Australian literature to promote indigenous ideas and culture lead by Caucasian writers.

Murray himself was raised by his impoverished stricken grandparents on a farm, and in his poem The Cows on Killing Day he actually gets into the heads of the animals themselves and writes with a certain rawness and empathy what their thoughts must have been:

The Cows on Killing Day

BY LES MURRAY

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still   

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths   

that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

All me standing on feed, move the feed inside me.

One me smells of needing the bull, that heavy urgent me,   

the back-climber, who leaves me humped, straining, but light   

and peaceful again, with crystalline moving inside me.

Standing on wet rock, being milked, assuages the calf-sorrow in me.

Now the me who needs mounts on me, hopping, to signal the bull.

The tractor comes trotting in its grumble; the heifer human   

bounces on top of it, and cud comes with the tractor,   

big rolls of tight dry feed: lucerne, clovers, buttercup, grass,   

that’s been bitten but never swallowed, yet is cud.

She walks up over the tractor and down it comes, roll on roll   

and all me following, eating it, and dropping the good pats.

The heifer human smells of needing the bull human   

and is angry. All me look nervously at her

as she chases the dog me dream of horning dead: our enemy   

of the light loose tongue. Me’d jam him in his squeals.

Me, facing every way, spreading out over feed.

One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.   

Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,   

licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.

Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human   

and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down

with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.   

Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.

All me come running. It’s like the Hot Part of the sky   

that’s hard to look at, this that now happens behind wood   

in the raw yard. A shining leaf, like off the bitter gum tree   

is with the human. It works in the neck of me

and the terrible floods out, swamped and frothy. All me make the Roar,

some leaping stiff-kneed, trying to horn that worst horror.

The wolf-at-the-calves is the bull human. Horn the bull human!

But the dog and the heifer human drive away all me.

Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,   

and a slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.

The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,   

is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter,   

and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.

The poet here brings the humans down to an equal plain with the animals as he calls the woman a heifer human and the man a bull human, and he elevates the cows to a near equality with the humans by giving them thoughts and feelings of what a human would feel in the same circumstances and also equalizes the dog by calling it “a calf of human. Thusly is there little difference between the human and the heifer in the poet’s mind here,

Les Murray was born on October 17, 1938 in Nabiac on the North Coast of New South Wales but was raised by his grandparents in nearby Bunyash His mother died when he was a toddler and his father was so sickly Murray had to care for him, so he felt “chained” to his circumstances from a young age and suffered from depression. But he was so significant as a poet, his works were translated into 11 languages.

He died at age 80 on April 29 in the year of 2019.