Literature: a Sine qua non

I feel we had a very good year together. I would like to congratulate you on your hard work and your interest. Literature (to borrow from what Matthew Arnold said about culture) invites us "to know the best that has been said and thought in the world." It is not a matter of luxury but a necessity. William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) who declared that "men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there" in poetry, was stressing this essential need. The best of American literature like the best literature of any other nation makes its appeal to mankind everywhere and forever. It is universal and immortal.

In our course we studied American literature from its inception to the present time. The aim of this course was not so much to impart information, but to come to grips with the imaginative wisdom and artistic vision of a nation fighting for its moral and existential survival. It was an attempt to reach out and greet the literary experience of a country that has made a tremendous impact in the modern era.

We covered authors such as Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), Walt Whitman (1819-1892), Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Henry James (1843-1916), Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Robert Frost (1874–1963), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), Jerome David Salinger, (1919-), Toni Morrison (1931-), Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), William Faulkner (1897 –1962), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), Woody Allen (1935-), Groucho Marx (October 2, 1890 – August 19, 1977), Hart Crane (1899-1932), Sylvia Plath (1932–1963), Alice Walker (February 9, 1944-), Kate Chopin (1851-1904), Henry James (1843-1916), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), Bret Easton Ellis (1964-), Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), William "Bill" McGuire Bryson (1951-), Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005), Truman Capote (1924-1984).

We started the year with a poem by William Carlos Williams. It will be apt to also end with another poem by Williams in praise of poetic imagination:

Through this hole
at the bottom of the cavern
of death, the imagination
escapes intact.
It is imagination
which cannot be fathomed.
It is through this hole we escape...


Only the imagination is real!
I have declared it
time without end.
If a man die
it is because death
has first
possessed his imagination...