Eu·rip·i·des c480–406? b.c,

 Eu·rip·i·des  [yoo-rip-i-deez, yuh-]  Show IPA noun c480–406? b.c, Greek dramatist.  Related forms Eu·rip·i·de·an, adjective.

Travel Literature

As the new world opened up and exotic specimens and curiosities were brought back from faraway lands a new thirst for knowledge of travellers' adventures arose. This was met in large part by the new genre of travel literature.

The first wave of travel literature in the century following Columbus was full of heroic tales of crusades, conquests and pilgrimages. Yet as the veracity of these tales began to be questioned and as the value to natural philosophy of the newly discovered phenomena began to be appreciated, a different style of travel narrative emerged. This was more oriented to the natural historian and natural philosopher and often included 'true reports' and 'authentic narratives and histories'.

Travel literature soon became an important source of knowledge in natural philosophy. The reading of such literature was promoted by Francis Bacon who realised their importance as sources of facts for the construction of natural histories. It was these histories that, in Bacon's view, constituted the basis of natural philosophy. Bacon's advice and example was taken up by many leading natural philosophers including Boyle and Locke. In fact, travel literature became so integrated with the interests of natural philosophers that by the mid-seventeenth century it really became continuous with natural philosophy itself. This is evidenced in the extensive travel reports that appear in the journal of the Royal Society, the Philosophical Transactions.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Prayer

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe'er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou'st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

Bob Dylan 1941- "Masters Of War"

Come you masters of war

You that build all the guns

You that build the death planes

You that build all the bombs

You that hide behind walls

You that hide behind desks

I just want you to know

I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'

But build to destroy

You play with my world

Like it's your little toy

You put a gun in my hand

And you hide from my eyes

And you turn and run farther

When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old

You lie and deceive

A world war can be won

You want me to believe

But I see through your eyes

And I see through your brain

Like I see through the water

That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers

For the others to fire

Then you set back and watch

When the death count gets higher

You hide in your mansion'

As young people's blood

Flows out of their bodies

And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear

That can ever be hurled

Fear to bring children

Into the world

For threatening my baby

Unborn and unnamed

You ain't worth the blood

That runs in your veins.

How much do I know

To talk out of turn

You might say that I'm young

You might say I'm unlearned

But there's one thing I know

Though I'm younger than you

That even Jesus would never

Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question

Is your money that good

Will it buy you forgiveness

Do you think that it could

I think you will find

When your death takes its toll

All the money you made

Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die

And your death'll come soon

I will follow your casket

In the pale afternoon

And I'll watch while you're lowered

Down to your deathbed

And I'll stand over your grave

'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

The purpose of life

The purpose of life is to live and if one cannot mange that one should do one's best to survive. All life however is a preparation for that final moment when when one lets go of that rope which connects us to this world and releases us into eternity.

Aes·chy·lus 525–456 b.c, Greek poet and dramatist.

Aes·chy·lus  [es-kuh-luh s or, esp. British, ee-skuh-]

*He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God. 

Although no contemporary writers or biographers provide much reliable information about the life of Aeschylus as it actually unfolded, it has been possible to reconstruct, from later ancient chroniclers and historians, a tentative outline. Aeschylus was born around 525 B.C.E at Eleusis, a town west of Athens and famous home of the cult of Demeter, a mystery cult which, through various rituals, prepared Greek souls for their transition into the afterlife. His father was named Europhion and there is documentation of a brother who was later killed at the Battle or Marathon. The playwright matured under as the Athenian democracy regained power after a period of tyranny and sought to hold it against both internal and external threats. Significantly, his adolescent years saw the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Pisistratid family and establish the first democracy. The tension between democratic ideals and tyranny would eventually find its way into his plays, including Agagmemnon. Moreover, the ancient writer Pausanias wrote that Aeschylus' tombstone made no mention of drama's such as the Oresteia, but proclaimed his participation as a soldier in those famous Athenian military victories against the Persians at Salamis and Marathon which contributed to much to the growth of Athenian confidence and power. Athens returned the favor, since it regarded Aeschylus as one of the main representatives of its Golden Age, before the Peloponnesian War and the teaching of the Sophists had weakened traditional Athenian society.

Aeschylus is known to have fought with his brother for Greece against Persian invaders at Marathon in 490. It was the first successful major repulsion of the Persians by Greeks; Aeschylus was around thirty-five years old at the time. He went to war again at Salamis and Artemisium in 480 and possibly the next year at Plataea. By this time, however, his career as a dramatist was already well underway.

Aeschylus is thought to have written his first plays around the year 500, for the legendary dramatic competition, the Great Dionysa, at the Festival of Dionysus in Athens, where they were performed. The competition, held in the annually in the spring, drew the most talented playwrights from around Greece for several decades. Plays were composed in trilogies, three lofty tragedies in unsequential arrangement or on a common theme, and one satyr play, or burlesque comedy. They were then judged according to high aesthetic criteria as well as the approval of the general audience. Aeschylus won his first victory in 484 and went on to win twelve more after that. In total, Aeschylus wrote approximately ninety plays, the titles of about eighty of which are known. However, only seven tragedies of the prodigious playwright's works survive.

His earliest existing play is The Persians, presented in 472. A historical tragedy about the Battle of Salam?s, set in Persia at the court of the mother of King Xerxes I, the play drew an invitation from Hieron I, tyrant of Syracuse, to performance before his court. It is highly probably Aeschylus drew on his own experiences at Salamis with the Persians, who had again invaded Greece around 480, in creating the famous play. Although Aeschylus was the undisputed champion of the competition at Athens for most of his illustrious career, he suffered a memorable defeat in 486 to a young Sophocles. There were not to be two in a row, for the next year Aeschylus produced his Oedipus trilogy of which Seven Against Thebes is the only survivor. The Oresteia, Aeschylus' masterpiece and his only intact trilogy, was writen in 458. Shortly after presenting it, the playwright traveled to Sicily for a second time. It was there also, in Gela, that Aeschylus died in 455-6 B.C.E. His son Europhion was a prominent dramatist in his own right, stealing victory from Sophocles and Euripides in a subsequent round of the competition his father had once dominated for so many years.

Aeschylus's innovations in the ancient dramatic form were fundamental. Chiefly, he was responsible for the introduction of a second actor. Whereas, previous to Aeschylus, plays had been more like recitations between a single actor and a chorus, the use of a second actor increased immensely the possiblities for flexible dramatic action and dialogue. He also expanded the presentation of drama by means of more elaborate costuming, stage machinery, and scenery. Majesty, profundity, and loft of language and theme are characteristic of the grand style of the so-called "Father of Tragedy."

We Band of Brothers

KING. What's he that wishes so? 

My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin; 

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow 

To do our country loss; and if to live, 

The fewer men, the greater share of honour. 

God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more. 

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold, 

Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost; 

It yearns me not if men my garments wear; 

Such outward things dwell not in my desires. 

But if it be a sin to covet honour, 

I am the most offending soul alive. 

No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England. 

God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour 

As one man more methinks would share from me 

For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more! 

Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host, 

That he which hath no stomach to this fight, 

Let him depart; his passport shall be made, 

And crowns for convoy put into his purse; 

We would not die in that man's company 

That fears his fellowship to die with us. 

This day is call'd the feast of Crispian. 

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, 

Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd, 

And rouse him at the name of Crispian. 

He that shall live this day, and see old age, 

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, 

And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian.' 

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, 

And say 'These wounds I had on Crispian's day.' 

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, 

But he'll remember, with advantages, 

What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, 

Familiar in his mouth as household words- 

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, 

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester- 

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red. 

This story shall the good man teach his son; 

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, 

From this day to the ending of the world, 

But we in it shall be remembered- 

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 

Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, 

This day shall gentle his condition; 

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed 

Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, 

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre- London, England

My native English, now I must forgo

Mowbray’s reaction to being banished. Instead of talking about how he’ll miss the family, his friends or his country, he makes a beautiful speech lamenting the loss of his language:

The language I have learn’d these forty years,

My native English, now I must forgo;

And now my tongue’s use is to me no more

Than an unstringed viol or a harp,

Or like a cunning instrument cas’d up

Or, being open, put into his hands

That knows no touch to tune the harmony:

Within my mouth you have engaol’d my tongue,

Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips;

And dull, unfeeling, barren ignorance

Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

I am too old to fawn upon a nurse,

Too far in years to be a pupil now:

What is thy sentence, then, but speechless death,

Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?

Perchance to Dream

HAMLET: To be, or not to be--that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--
No more--and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep--
To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. -- Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! -- Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

William Shakespeare - All the world's a stage (from As You Like It 2/7)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws* and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

*saw3   [saw]  

noun

a sententious saying; maxim; proverb: He could muster an old saw for every occasion.

Carl Sandburg, 1878 - 1967

Journalist, poet, novelist and biographer Carl Sandburg, born in Galesburg, Illinois (1878). As a hobo he collected and learned a number of folk songs and published them in a collection called The American Songbag (1927).

Eventually, he attended college and a professor, Phillip Green Wright, was the first to publish a book of Sandburg's verse, In Reckless Ecstasy, in 1904. He went on publishing poems along with articles about the labor movement but he didn't have any real financial success until a publisher suggested that he write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. His Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, published in 1926, was Sandburg's first bestseller. He moved to a new home and devoted the next several years to completing four additional volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, for which he won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize.

His Complete Poems won him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Carl Sandburg said, "[Poetry is] the successful synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits."

At a Window


GIVE me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Donald Hall, 1928 -

The newly appointed poet laureate of the United States, Donald Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut (1928). He's the author of many collections of poetry, including The Dark Houses (1958), Kicking the Leaves: Poems (1978), and Willow Temple: New and Selected Poems (2003).

As a boy, he spent summers on his grandfather's farm in New Hampshire, and he often listened to his grandfather recite long narrative poems like "Casey at the Bat." It was one of those summers at his grandfather's house that Donald Hall began writing his own first poems at a tiny desk in the room where he slept. His first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe. Hall said, "I wanted to be mad, addicted, obsessed, haunted, and cursed; I wanted to have eyes that burned like coals, profoundly melancholy, profoundly attractive."

When he was 16, he met Robert Frost at a writers' conference, and while he was in college he met the elder poets T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Dylan Thomas. He said that meeting professional poets gave him the idea that being a poet was something that you worked at steadily, for a long time.

His collection White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006 came out this year. He was named the poet laureate this June.

Donald Hall said, "I try every day to write great poetry—as I tried when I was 14. ... What else is there to do?"



We Bring Democracy To The Fish

It is unacceptable that fish prey on each other.
For their comfort and safety, we will liberate them
into fishfarms with secure, durable boundaries
that exclude predators. Our care will provide
for their liberty, health, happiness, and nutrition.
Of course all creatures need to feel useful.
At maturity the fish will discover their purposes.

______

T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot 1888 –1965)

T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, was born into a prominent Unitarian family in Saint Louis (1888). He was fond of his childhood, and he liked to watch steamboats going up the Mississippi River. He adored his Irish nurse, Annie, who brought him to church and talked to him about God. He loved to read, especially the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a bird watcher and could identify more than 70 kinds of birds.

But he didn't have many friends as a boy, and he also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse.

After Harvard, Eliot moved to England, where he got a job as a banker. He was a fastidious worker, arriving at 9:30 and leaving at 5:30 every day, working one Saturday every month. He ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, called Baker's Chop House. He met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't bring himself to shave in front of her. A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity.

From a young age, Eliot wrote about moral decay and getting old and the hopelessness of life, and he expressed those feelings in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), a long dark poem about the search for redemption in a post-World War I world.

After he divorced, Eliot had other women who loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie.

Eliot and his wife were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States—to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals.

Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."

The Waste-Land published 1922

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.
*In my beginning is my end.

*You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find in a life composed so much of odds and ends… to find a friend who has these qualities, who has, and gives those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you -without these friendships - life, what cauchemar!

*You are the music while the music lasts.

*What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

*When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes.

*I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.

*If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.

*Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

*Humankind cannot stand very much reality.

*Humor is also a way of saying something serious.

*I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.

*Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.

*The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.

*Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.

*Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

*We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.



The Hollow Men
T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

      A penny for the Old Guy

      I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

      II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

      III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

      IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

      V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

After the Wedding by John Daniel

After the white balloons were swept away

on the wind that had swallowed

most of our vows, after the embraces

and tears, the flung rose petals,

after new friends and old friends and aunts

from all over, after you tossed

the bouquet, and the cries of the children

raised coyote cries on the rim,

after chicken grilled on juniper coals,

cold beer from the cattle trough

and hours of hot dancing to Beatles and Stones,

the last of us swaying arms on shoulders,

singing ourselves hoarse,

                                              how good it is

to find you now beyond all

the loud joy, driving north in rain

and the lovely ease of our silence.

Bernard Malamud 1914 -1986

Novelist Bernard Malamud, born in Brooklyn, New York (1914). He grew up in Brooklyn in a household where both Yiddish and English were spoken. He wrote a few stories in college, but after he graduated he was too preoccupied with finding a job to start writing seriously. It was the middle of the Depression and he was struggling just to earn enough money to eat and pay the rent. He said, "I would dream of new suits."

In 1940, he got a job as a clerk in the U.S. Census Bureau. He spent mornings checking drainage ditch statistics, but as soon as that work was done he would crouch over his desk and write short stories on company time. Eventually, he got a few stories published in magazines and he got a job as a professor at Oregon State College.

It was while he was working there that he published his first novel, The Natural (1952), about a talented baseball player who is dragged down by his own desires and obsessions. He was inspired to write the novel after reading biographies of Babe Ruth and Bobby Feller. It was a huge success and he went on to publish many more novels.

Malamud said, "I ... write a book, or a short story, at least three times—once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."

*The purpose of the writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.

*Without heroes, we are all plain people, and don't know how far we can go.

*We have two lives—the one we learn with and the life we live after that.

*Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

*There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to go - if there are no doors or windows he walks through wall.

*Life is a tragedy full of joy."

*Those who write about life, reflect about life. you see in others who you are.

*What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews"

*I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

*The idea is to get the pencil moving quickly.

Word of the Day

Come a cropper
Fig. to have a misfortune; to fail. (Meaning 'fall off one's horse.') Bob invested all his money in the stock market just before it fell. Boy, did he come a cropper. Jane was out all night before she took her final. She really came a cropper.


Come a cropper, Informal.
a.
to fail; be struck by some misfortune: His big deal came a cropper.
b.
to fall headlong, especially from a horse.

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 - 1569)

According to Brueghel*

when Icarus* fell

it was spring

a farmer was ploughing

his field

the whole pageantry*

of the year was

awake tingling*

near

the edge of the sea

concerned 

with itself

sweating in the sun

that melted

the wings' wax

unsignificantly

off the coast

there was

a splash quite unnoticed

this was

Icarus drowning

*Brueghel , Bruegel or Breughel  (broi-guh l) 
— n

1. Jan  (jɑn). 1568--1625, Flemish painter, noted for his detailed still lifes and landscapes

2. his father, Pieter  (ˈpiːtər), called the Elder . ?1525--69, Flemish painter, noted for his landscapes, his satirical paintings of peasant life, and his allegorical biblical scenes

3. his son, Pieter , called the Younger . ?1564--1637, Flemish painter, noted for his gruesome pictures of hell

*Ic·a·rus  [ik-er-uh s, ahy-ker-]  
noun

1.

Also, Ikaros. Classical Mythology . a youth who attempted to escape from Crete with wings of wax and feathers but flew so high that his wings melted from the heat of the sun, and he plunged to his death in the sea.

*pageantry  (ˈpædʒəntrɪ)

— n  , pl -ries
1. spectacular display or ceremony

* tin·gle  [ting-guh l]   verb, tin·gled, tin·gling, noun.
verb (used without object)
1.
to have a sensation of slight prickles, stings, or tremors, as from cold, a sharp blow, excitement, etc.: I tingle all over.
2.
to cause such a sensation: The scratch tin

On "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"

Audrey T. Rodgers

"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" touches upon the Greek myth of the tragedy of Icarus. As we know, according to Ovid and Appolodorus, Icarus, son of Daedalus, took flight from imprisonment wearing the fragile wings his father had fashioned for him. Heedless of his father's warning to keep a middle course over the sea and avoid closeness with the sun, the soaring boy exultantly flew too close to the burning sun, which melted his wings so that Icarus hurtled to the sea and death. The death of Icarus, the poet tells us "According to Brueghel," took place in spring when the year was emerging in all its pageantry. The irony of the death of Icarus, who has always been an emblem for the poet's upward flight that ends in tragedy, is that his death goes unnoticed in the spring--a mere splash in the sea. The fear of all poets--that their passing will go "quite unnoticed"--is an old and pervasive theme. That Williams reiterates the theme is significant in the life of a poet who always felt the world had never fully recognized his accomplishments.

From Virgin and Whore: The Image of Women in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams. Copyright © 1982 by Audrey T. Rodgers.

David W. Cole

William Carlos Williams ends his poem with these lines:

a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning

He had begun it with an appeal to his authority, Brueghel, before going on to describe The Fall of Icarus in detail: the farmer doing his plowing, the awakening of spring, the self absorption of life at the edge of the sea, and the small detail of Icarus's fast disappearing legs. A crucial aspect of Brueghel's painting is its perspective. The landscape and the action are seen from above-- from the viewpoint, in other words, of Daedalus. The force of the picture is thus, I think, to move the viewer not only to recognize the unconcern for catastrophe inherent in the preoccupation of ongoing life, but also to register a horrified protest that it should be so. Perspective allows the painter to make this protest. How is the poet to do it?

In "Musee des Beaux Arts," Auden does not try, contenting himself with rueful recognition of the world's indifference to individual martyrdom. But Williams achieves a more subtle, more faithful, more deeply felt response to the painting by means of carefully controlled imagery, grammar and diction, punctuation (or rather the absence of any punctuation whatsoever), and order. His method is evident first in the title of the poem. We know the painting simply as The Fall of Icarus. Williams's revision of the title grammatically subordinates the tragic event to "Landscape," just as the painting subordinates the image of Icarus to all that surrounds him. Yet the last word in the title, emphatic in its position, is "Icarus." The tension between grammatical subordination and rhetorical emphasis is paralleled and amplified in the stanzas that follow.

Williams does not dwell on the images of the poem, showing us even less than Auden does. The matter-of-fact language, the absence of any punctuation (which I take to indicate an absence of expressive inflection), and of course the explicit assertion of the event's insignificance, all work to understate, if not undercut, the pathos of Icarus's headlong plunge to death. And yet the last words of the poem are "Icarus drowning." The words resonate, and the splash is not quite unnoticed. The reader is forced to take notice, forced paradoxically not only to see but to feel the painful irony of death in the midst of life. Williams's remarkable, forceful understatement brilliantly captures the protest expressed through the perspective of Brueghel's painting.

from The Explicator 58.3 (Spring 2000)

Reluctance by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods

   And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

   And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

   And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

   Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

   And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

   When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

   No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

   The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

   But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man

   Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

   To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

   Of a love or a season?

John Updike, 1932 - 2009

American author John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania (1932). His family moved to a farm when he was thirteen, so he and his father -- who was a high-school math teacher -- had to commute daily into town for school. The isolation Updike felt on the farm fueled a desire to escape his life. He escaped first through cartoons and fiction in The New Yorker, and then by winning a scholarship to Harvard. He later joined the staff at The New Yorker, but left to concentrate on his writing. A prolific writer of poetry, short stories, and essays, Updike is best known for his novels, in particular the four Rabbit books, which began with the classic Rabbit Run (1961). Updike said, "The character of Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom was for me a way in -- a ticket to the America all around me. [The four novels] became a running report on the state of my hero and his nation." Rabbit Run begins,

Boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him as a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.

Updike said: "Writers take words seriously-perhaps the last professional class that does-and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader."

* What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit

*We are most alive when we're in love. 

*We do survive every moment, after all, except the last one. 

*Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art. 

* “The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

*“Creativity is merely a plus name for regular activity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

*“Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying”

Harold Bloom, 1930 -

Literary critic and teacher Harold Bloom was born in New York City (1930) to Jewish immigrants. His first language was Yiddish, and he started reading poetry in English before he'd ever heard English spoken. He didn't do well in high school but took the statewide Regents exams, got the highest score in the state, and that won him a scholarship to Cornell.
He went on to study literature at Yale in the 1950s at a time when there was a dress code. The students wore jackets and ties. Harold Bloom wore an old Russian leather coat and a pair of fisherman's trousers. He became famous at Yale for his great love of poetry. He memorized everything that he read. He could recite enormous, long poems.
As a professor at Yale and as a critic, Bloom has moved further and further away from the mainstream of literary criticism in this country. Most other critics look at literature as a product of history, politics, and society. Whereas Bloom is one of the last critics in America who believes that great literature is a product of genius. He treats characters in books as though they are real people, and he believes that we should read not to learn about historical periods or political climates but to learn about the human soul.
In the last few years, he's begun writing books for general readers, believing that scholars have forgotten how to read for pleasure, and many of his recent books have become best sellers, including Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and How to Read and Why, and Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds.

“Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?”

*In the finest critics one hears the full cry of the human. They tell one why it matters to read.

*We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

*What matters in literature in the end is surely the idiosyncratic, the individual, the flavor or the color of a particular human suffering.

*I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike , and I don't think there really is a distinction between the two , are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.

*We read frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.

*Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

*But in the end, in the end one is alone. We are all of us alone. I mean I'm told these days we have to consider ourselves as being in society... but in the end one knows one is alone, that one lives at the heart of a solitude.

*Perhaps you learn this more fully as you get older, but in the end you choose between books, or you choose between poems, the way you choose between people. You can't become friends with every acquaintance you make, and I would not think that it is any different with what you read.

*I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.

*Criticism starts - it has to start - with a real passion for reading. It can come in adolescence, even in your twenties, but you must fall in love with poems.

Langston Hughes, 1902 –1967

     

Poet and novelist Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri (1902). His father divorced his mother and moved to Mexico when Hughes was just a baby. He was raised by his mother and grandmother, but after high school he went to Mexico to get to know his father for the first time. He was disgusted when he found that his father was obsessed with money and more racist than most white men Hughes had ever known.

He went to Columbia University for a year, but then he decided that he wanted to learn from the world rather than books. He quit college, hopped a boat to Africa, and as soon as the boat left New York Harbor, he threw all his college books overboard. He took odd jobs on ships and made his way from Africa to France, Holland, Italy, and finally back to the United States.

He got a job working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C., hotel, and one day he left three poems he had written next to the plate of the poet Vachel Lindsey. Lindsey loved them and read them to an audience the very next day. Within a few years, Hughes had published his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926).

He got involved in the Harlem Renaissance and started to write poetry influenced by the music he heard in jazz and blues clubs. He said, "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... [songs that] had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going."

Hughes was one of the first African-American poets to embrace the language of lower-class black Americans. In his essay "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926), he said, "[I want to write for] the people who have their nip of gin on Saturday nights and are not too important to themselves or the community, or too well fed, or too learned to watch the lazy world go round."

In his poem "Laughers," he made a list of what he called "my people": "Dish-washers, / Elevator boys, / Ladies' maids, / Crap-shooters, / Cooks, / Waiters, / Jazzers, / Nurses of Babies, / Loaders of Ships, /Rounders,/ Number writers, / Comedians in Vaudeville / And band-men in circuses - / Dream-singers all."


*Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly, Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams go, Life is a barren field, Frozen with snow.

Harlem  (Excerpt from Montage of a Dream Deferred)  by Langston Hughes


What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags 

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Flannery O'Connor

The novelist and short-story writer Flannery O'Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). As a young girl she was terribly shy and prone to temper tantrums. She became famous in her hometown when she was five years old by teaching one of her chickens to walk backward. A New York City reporter came and filmed the chicken for a newsreel.
She wanted either to be a writer or a cartoonist. During college, she submitted her cartoons to The New Yorker, but she was rejected, so she began to focus on her writing. She applied to one of the only creative writing programs in the country at the time, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and she was almost rejected because the admissions interviewer couldn't understand her southern accent.
Once she got into the Iowa Writer's Workshop, people there didn't know what to make of her. She never read James Joyce or Franz Kafka, or any of the other fashionable writers of the era. She was more interested in Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. During class, she almost never spoke, and her classmates only knew she was listening by the way she occasionally smiled when she thought something was funny.
But even though O'Connor was an outsider, her fiction impressed everybody, and she won an award that got her a contract to publish her first novel. She was still working on that novel when she began to notice a heaviness in her arms while she typed. Traveling home to Georgia for Christmas that year, she grew so sick on the train that she had to be hospitalized when she arrived. It turned out that she had inherited lupus, the same disease that had killed her father.
She moved in with her mother and began receiving steroid treatments, which made it difficult to walk without crutches. She said at the time, "I walk like I have one foot in the gutter but it's not an inconvenience and I get out of doing a great many things I don't want to do." Even though the disease made her extremely tired, she forced herself to write for three hours every day on the screened in porch of her mother's house. She wrote to her friend Robert Lowell, "I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing. What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer, (or so I tell myself)."
O'Connor's first novel Wise Blood came out in 1952. Three years later, she published the story collection that made her name A Good Man Is Hard To Find (1955). It contains her two most famous short stories: "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a silly, annoying old woman whose entire family gets murdered by a man called The Misfit, and "Good Country People" about a pretentious young woman whose wooden leg is stolen by a Bible salesman.
O'Connor filled her stories with crazy preachers, murderers, the deformed, the disabled, freaks and outcasts. An uncle once asked her why she didn't write about nice folks. O'Connor focused on the grotesque because she said, "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." She died a little more than a week shy of her fortieth birthday.
Flannery O'Connor said, "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."


*At its best our age is an age of searchers and discoverers, and at its worst, an age that has domesticated despair and learned to live with it happily.

*Conviction without experience makes for harshness.

*I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

*The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

*I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else's. But behind all of them there is only one truth and that is that there's no truth. 

*To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that ends in bitterness.