Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant


Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

*Types of Poetry
There are three types of poetry:
1) Lyric: is a relatively short poem which expresses the thoughts or feelings of a single speaker.
2) Narrative: is a type of poetry that tells a story. Milton’s Paradise Lost is a narrative poem.
3) Dramatic poetry: is the term used for the verse encountered in for instance, a Shakespeare play.

The Monster by Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900

A man said to the universe:
"Sir I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation."

-- Stephen Crane

Stephen Crane was a war correspondent, fiction writer and poet. He is considered as pioneer of realism and a rebel against Romanticism. Crane was born in Newark (1871). He was the youngest of 14 children, and was very frail. His first published novel, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), a novel about a soldier in the Civil War, was very well received, although those critics who read it refused to believe that Crane was not a veteran soldier, since the story was so vivid, real and detailed. After The Red Badge of Courage was published, Crane released a book titled Maggie: Girl of the Streets, which he had written when he was 16 years old. Crane was also a war correspondent for The Westminster Gazette and The New York Journal for the Greco-Turkish War, and eventually went to Cuba as the Journal's correspondent, witnessing the operations at Santiago and Havana and Puerto Rico. He made his home in England, and died on June 6, 1900. Stephen Crane, who said: "The nearer a writer gets to life, the greater he becomes as an artist."

His 1899 collection, The Monster and Other Stories, was well received. Like a number of Crane's short stories, The Monster is set in the fictitious town of Whilomville, New York, a site loosely based on Crane's childhood hometown of Port Jervis, New Jersey.

Summary of the Monster:

In this tale Crane relates the story of Henry Johnson, a black coachman whose face is brutally and permanently misshapen by fire when he rescues his employer's son from a burning house. Henry's employer, Dr. Trescott, not only preserves Henry's life after the accident, but gratefully vows to take care of him as long as he lives. However, the people of Whilomville are terrified of Henry, whom they have transformed through gossip and half-truths into a horrific monster. Dr. Trescott's son, whom Henry rescued, and his companions play games at Henry's expense, and even Dr. Trescott's friends demand that he keep Henry elsewhere and then abuse the doctor when he refuses to comply. Although Henry is the ostensible monster in this tale because of his physical deformity, Crane's depiction of small-town hypocrisy and cruelty reveals society as the true monster.


*Little Jim was, for the time, engine Number 36, and he was making the run between Syracuse and Rochester. He was fourteen minutes behind time, and the throttle was wide open. In consequence, when he swung around the curve at the flower-bed, a wheel of his cart destroyed a peony. Number 36 slowed down at once and looked guiltily at his father, who was mowing the lawn. The doctor had his back to this accident, and he continued to pace slowly to and fro, pushing the mower.

*After Johnson had taken his supper in the kitchen, he went to his loft in the carriage-house and dressed himself with much care. No belle of a court circle could bestow more mind on a toilet than did Johnson. On second thought, he was more like a priest arraying himself for some parade of the church. As he emerged from his room and sauntered down the carriage drive, no one would have suspected him of ever having washed a buggy.
It was not altogether a matter of the lavender trousers, nor yet the straw hat with its bright silk band. The change was somewhere far in the interior of Henry. But there was no cake-walk hyperbole in it. He was simply a quiet, well-bred gentleman of position, wealth, and other necessary achievements out for an evening stroll, and he had never washed a wagon in his life.

*Johnson passed through two rooms and came to the head of the stairs. As he opened the door great billows of smoke poured out, but gripping Jimmie closer, he plunged down through them. All manner of odors assailed him during this flight. They seemed to be alive with envy, hatred, and malice. At the entrance to the laboratory he confronted a strange spectacle. The room was like a garden in the region where might be burning flowers. Flames of violet, crimson, green, blue, orange, and purple were blooming everywhere.

*The band played a waltz which involved a gift of prominence to the bass horn, and one of the young men on the sidewalk said that the music reminded him of the new engines on the hill pumping water into the reservoir. A similarity of this kind was not inconceivable, but the young man did not say it because he disliked the band's playing. He said it because it was fashionable to say that manner of thing concerning the band. However, over in the stand, Billie Harris, who played the snare-drum, was always surrounded by a throng of boys, who adored his every whack.

*She was a woman of great mind. She had adamantine opinions upon the situation in Armenia, the condition of women in China, the flirtation between Mrs. Minster of Niagara Avenue and young Griscom, the conflict in the Bible class of the Baptist Sunday-school, the duty of the United States toward the Cuban insurgents, and many other colossal matters. Her fullest experience of violence was gained on an occasion when she had seen a hound clubbed, but in the plan which she had made for the reform of the world she advocated drastic measures. For instance, she contended that all the Turks should be pushed into the sea and drowned, and that Mrs. Minster and young Griscom should be hanged side by side on twin gallows. In fact, this woman of peace, who had seen only peace, argued constantly for a creed of illimitable ferocity…… Her dreams, which in early days had been of love of meadows and the shade of trees, of the face of a man, were now involved otherwise, and they were companioned in the kitchen curiously, Cuba, the hot-water kettle, Armenia, the washing of the dishes, and the whole thing being jumbled. In regard to social misdemeanors, she who was simply the mausoleum of a dead passion was probably the most savage critic in town.

*"No, maybe you are not exactly ruining yourself," said Twelve, slowly, "but you are doing yourself a great deal of harm. You have changed from being the leading doctor in town to about the last one. It is mainly because there are always a large number of people who are very thoughtless fools, of course, but then that doesn't change the condition."

Leslie Marmon Silko, 1948 -

Novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). Silko was raised on a Pueblo Reservation in the Laguna tradition. Her community was made up matrilineal families, where women own the houses and the fields, and are the authority figures, and men do much of the child rearing. Silko once said, "I grew up with women who were really strong, women with a great deal of power. If someone was going to thwart you or frighten you, it would tend to be a woman. Your dad is the one who's the soft touch." Her first major success came in 1977, with her novel Ceremony (1977). It is the story of Tayo, a former World War II prisoner of war, who returns to his Laguna Pueblo reservation, where he listens to the ancient stories of his people. In it, Silko wrote, "I will tell you something about stories/[he said]/They aren't just entertainment./Don't be fooled./They are all we have, you see,/all we have to fight off illness and death./You don't have anything/if you don't have the stories."

Jefferson's hidden slave legacy

By Allan Little
BBC News, Monticello, Virginia

Thomas Jefferson's home at Monticello is a place of pilgrimage for Americans of every political stripe.

Thousands come every day.

They stand on the terrace and look down on the forested green plains of Virginia.

They gaze in awe at Jefferson's little chess set, where he sat, two hundred years ago, with his friend and apostle James Madison.

Between them, these two men in effect dreamed a new nation into existence.

Jefferson designed Monticello himself.

JEFFERSON AND HIS SLAVES

It is true to the man - the elegant proportions, the white domed roof above pillared porticoes, the bricks so brown they are almost ebony - the colour of the Virginia soil from which they were hewn and baked.

Huge sash windows bring light flooding in. This is the aesthetic of the rational eighteenth century mind - the Enlightenment in architectural form.

But slave hands baked those bricks and stacked them, and throughout his life time more than two hundred slaves - Jefferson's personal property - worked the fields of his estate.

Slavery and equality

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal".

The words of the American Declaration of Independence are Jefferson's own.

In the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson's election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants
Michael Lind, New America Foundation
All men, he goes on, "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" and among these are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".

How did the author of that ringing declaration of universal human rights reconcile himself to the ownership of slaves?

It is one of the great contradictions of Jefferson's life, of his age, and of the America that he and the founding generations conjured into being.

Jefferson's wife, Martha, died in the tenth year of their marriage.

Present in the room at the moment of her death, with Jefferson himself, was Martha's half sister, a young slave girl called Sally Hemings. She was the daughter of Martha's own father and a slave called Elizabeth.

Slave Mistress

Years later, in Paris, Jefferson began a relationship with Sally. Together, they had six children.

Jefferson's enemies accused him of misconduct and tried to use the scandal against him when he ran for president. It didn't work. Jefferson said nothing, neither confirming nor denying it.

For two hundred years, Jefferson scholars for the most part dismissed what came to be known as the "Sally Question" as implausible.

The Jefferson that Americans had written into their national mythology - the Jefferson who is carved into Mount Rushmore - could not have had such a relationship.

It could not be allowed to stand.

New evidence

Recently, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed rescued Sally and the entire slave population of Monticello from the shadows and gave them flesh and blood, names, characters, personalities, and life stories.

Please turn on JavaScript. Media requires JavaScript to play.

Author Annette Gordon-Reed on Jefferson and his family of slaves.

DNA evidence establishes beyond doubt that Jefferson fathered Sally's children.

Her remarkable research challenges a certain conception of America, an idea of the Republic that has prevailed for two hundred years.

Why, I asked her, do so many Americans continue to resist the idea that Sally was so intimately involved in the life of the greatest of all the founding fathers?

"I think it points to contemporary racial attitudes," she told me.

"They are very much like past racial attitudes. Jefferson is seen as the embodiment of the American spirit. It is absolutely about ownership of the story of the Republic, of the Republic itself.

"If you founded something, you own it. And the founding story is of a group of white men who come together with high ideals and found this new nation".

Jeffersonian Democracy

Jefferson is so identified with the founding ideals of the Republic that he gave his name to great American experiment itself.

Republicans or Democrats, northerners or southerners, black, white Hispanic, recent immigrant or settled for generations, Americans are all children of "Jeffersonian democracy".

It is a democracy in which the citizen is free to live a life without interference or instruction from government; a democracy of small, weak, unobtrusive government.

Jefferson's great rival, his near contemporary Alexander Hamilton, dreamed a different America into being, an America that sat alongside Jefferson's ideal in a relationship of dynamic tension.

Hamilton's America needed a strong federal government, a standing army, a national currency and a central bank.

Jefferson thought all that smacked of the European - and specifically British - monarchism and imperialism he despised.

Jeffersonian America was conceived as the alternative to all that.

Jefferson's United States is spoken in the plural - "the United States are…" he thought of, and referred to, Virginia as his "country".

Hamiltonian America is emphatically singular.

Defender of states' rights

Jefferson the Virginian, the Southerner, the defender of the rights of the slave holding states believed in an agrarian America of free and independent gentlemen farmers, living their lives unmolested by government.

He believed the likes of Hamilton, the New Yorker, and the Northern states in general had been lured away from that ideal by urbanisation, industry, commerce, banks, finance and the accumulation of money.

Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, believes the fault line that opened up between Jefferson and Hamilton two hundred years ago still operates in America's two-party system:

"You can make the case that in the US the natural ruling coalition since Jefferson's election in 1800 has been a coalition of Southern Whites and Catholics in the North East and Mid West against their common enemy: white New England Protestants".

Look at America today - its powerful federal government, its enormous army, its commitments overseas, the still-mighty US dollar.

America may be a Hamiltonian country.

But its heart, both nostalgic and aspiring, still belongs to Thomas Jefferson.

Allan Little's programme on Thomas Jefferson will be broadcast on BBC World Service radio on Sunday 26 October.

Emily Dickinson, 1830 - 1886

The poet Emily Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts (1830), who dropped out of college at Mount Holyoke to take care of the family household when her mother had a nervous breakdown. She didn't enjoy being a housekeeper, hated dusting, and hated hosting all the men who stopped by to talk politics with her father every day. She watched as her friends got married and moved away, and she grew increasingly isolated from her community, in part because she did not consider herself a Christian and so she did not go to church. Many biographers have tried to find some other reason why she withdrew from the world, suggesting that she may have fallen in love with a man who rejected her. But there's no definite evidence for that theory.
What we do know is that Dickinson spent most of her adult life in her corner bedroom, which contained a writing table, a dresser, a Franklin stove, a clock, a ruby decanter, and pictures on the wall of three writers: George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Thomas Carlyle. She wrote on scraps of paper and old grocery lists, compiled her poetry and tucked it away neatly in her desk drawer. After a few years of writing, she began collecting her handwritten poems into packets of folded paper, stitching the spines herself. She often included poems in her numerous letters to friends.
Dickinson eventually wrote more than 1,700 poems, most of them composed during the Civil War. She wrote 366 poems in 1862 alone, about one per day. Only seven of all her poems were published in her lifetime. Her sister Lavinia found the huge stash of the rest of her poems after Dickinson's death, but they were heavily edited when they finally came out in 1890. For a while, Dickinson was considered an interesting minor poet. It wasn't until 1955 that a more complete edition of her poetry was published, with the original punctuation intact. She's now considered the first great lyric poet in American history.
Emily Dickinson said, "To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else."

The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot's pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I've known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

Chief Seattle, 1786 - 1866

Suqwamish and Duwamish

Seattle, also known as Sealth, was very young when George Vancouver came to Puget Sound to map the region. Before that time, the Duwamish and Suquamish (his mother and father's respective tribes) had had very little contact with the whites. Seattle's brief experience with Vancouver impressed him greatly, which was perhaps why, in later life, he tried to advocate a peaceful coexistence with the settlers. When he was a young man Seattle inherited his father's position as chief, after first having proved his leadership in warfare against other tribes in the area. Seattle was so impressed by the French Catholic missionaries that in the 1830's he converted to Christianity, taking the baptismal name "Noah".
By the 1850's the settlement had begun to grow and prosper and the name was changed from Alki Point to Seattle. More and more settlers began to move into the area, and in 1855 the governor of Washington Territory called together the tribes to propose a new treaty. This treaty would send the tribes to a reservation and their lands would be controlled by the government. Although Seattle continued to council for peace, the conflict lasted many years. Finally Seattle moved onto a small patch of land on the western side of Puget Sound where he spent the remainder of his life.

Quotes:

"The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man."

"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on."

"What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected."

"Take only memories, leave nothing but footprints."

"How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the earth is sacred to my people."

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the son of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."


_______

"In 1851 Seattle, chief of the Suquamish and other Indian tribes around Washington's Puget Sound, delivered what is considered to be one of the most beautiful and profound environmental statements ever made. The city of Seattle is named for the chief, whose speech was in response to a proposed treaty under which the Indians were persuaded to sell two million acres of land for $150,000." -- Buckminster Fuller in Critical Path.
Chief Seattle's Thoughts

How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us.

If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. The sap which courses through the trees carries the memories of the red man.

The white man's dead forget the country of their birth when they go to walk among the stars. Our dead never forget this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man --- all belong to the same family.

So, when the Great Chief in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land, he asks much of us. The Great Chief sends word he will reserve us a place so that we can live comfortably to ourselves. He will be our father and we will be his children.

So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes, and feed our children. If we sell you our land, you must remember, and teach your children, that the rivers are our brothers and yours, and you must henceforth give the rivers the kindness you would give any brother.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert.

I do not know. Our ways are different than your ways. The sight of your cities pains the eyes of the red man. There is no quiet place in the white man's cities. No place to hear the unfurling of leaves in spring or the rustle of the insect's wings. The clatter only seems to insult the ears. And what is there to life if a man cannot hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwill or the arguments of the frogs around the pond at night? I am a red man and do not understand. The Indian prefers the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of a pond and the smell of the wind itself, cleaned by a midday rain, or scented with pinon pine.

The air is precious to the red man for all things share the same breath, the beast, the tree, the man, they all share the same breath. The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench. But if we sell you our land, you must remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.

The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. And if we sell you our land, you must keep it apart and sacred as a place where even the white man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow's flowers.

So we will consider your offer to buy our land. If we decide to accept, I will make one condition - the white man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers.

I am a savage and do not understand any other way. I have seen a thousand rotting buffaloes on the prairie, left by the white man who shot them from a passing train. I am a savage and do not understand how the smoking iron horse can be made more important than the buffalo that we kill only to stay alive.

What is man without the beasts? If all the beasts were gone, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. For whatever happens to the beasts, soon happens to man. All things are connected.

You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children that we have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. If men spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.

This we know; the earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected.

Even the white man, whose God walks and talks with him as friend to friend, cannot be exempt from the common destiny. We may be brothers after all. We shall see. One thing we know which the white man may one day discover; our God is the same God.

You may think now that you own Him as you wish to own our land; but you cannot. He is the God of man, and His compassion is equal for the red man and the white. The earth is precious to Him, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. The whites too shall pass; perhaps sooner than all other tribes. Contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in your own waste.

But in your perishing you will shine brightly fired by the strength of the God who brought you to this land and for some special purpose gave you dominion over this land and over the red man.

That destiny is a mystery to us, for we do not understand when the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires.

Where is the thicket? Gone. Where is the eagle? Gone.

The end of living and the beginning of survival.

Vienna Is Watching You

Vienna is a cat (British Shorthair) that is present somewhere in the class. She has an excellent way of keeping out of sight. She likes to watch your performance in the seminars and give her biting comments!

American Dream

Historian and writer James Truslow Adams coined the phrase "American Dream" in his 1931 book Epic of America:

"The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."[2]

Benjamin Franklin, 1706 - 1790

Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston (1706). Books were hard to come by when he was a young apprentice in his brother's printing shop, but he got hold of an odd volume of Addison and Steele's The Spectator and used it to teach himself how to write. He took notes on each of the pieces, then hid the book and tried to reconstruct the essays from the notes alone. He toyed with the idea of becoming a poet, but his father assured him that "verse-makers were generally beggars," and he turned his attention to the cultivation of virtue and the aid of humanity. He became better known than any of the leaders of the Revolution except George Washington; he signed every document associated with the founding of the Republic, and took Paris by storm when he appeared at court to secure an alliance with France. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, charted the Gulf Stream on his way across the Atlantic, and chased tornadoes on horseback. He was flirtatious on up into his seventies. In 1731, Franklin founded America's first circulating library so that people could borrow books to read even though they might not have been able to afford to buy them. He was the author, printer, and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanack, an annually published book of useful encouragement, advice, and factual information, beginning in 1732. It contains maxims such as "Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise" and "In this world nothing can said to be certain except death and taxes.

Katherine Lee Bates, 1859 - 1929

Poet Katherine Lee Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts (1859), who wrote the poem that begins,
"O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!"
She was a poet and professor of English at Wellsley, who, in the summer of 1893, traveled with a group of teachers to Colorado, hiked to the top of Pikes Peak, and said, "I was looking out over the expanse of fertile country spreading away so far under those ample skies, [when] the opening lines of [a poem] floated into my mind." And by the time she left Colorado, she had written four stanzas in her notebook of "America the Beautiful," which was published on the 4th of July, 1895. It was set to music about ten years later.

O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain;
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain!
America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea.

O beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life!
America! America!
May God thy gold refine,
Till all success be nobleness,
And every gain divine.

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self control,
Thy liberty in law.

A Nation's Strength

by Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882

What makes a nation's pillars high
And it's foundations strong?
What makes it mighty to defy
The foes that round it throng?

It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand
Go down in battle shock;
Its shafts are laid on sinking sand,
Not on abiding rock.

Is it the sword? Ask the red dust
Of empires passed away;
The blood has turned their stones to rust,
Their glory to decay.

And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown
Has seemed to nations sweet;
But God has struck its luster down
In ashes at his feet.

Not gold but only men can make
A people great and strong;
Men who for truth and honor's sake
Stand fast and suffer long.

Brave men who work while others sleep,
Who dare while others fly...
They build a nation's pillars deep
And lift them to the sky.

* Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He started out as a Unitarian minister, but when his wife died in 1831 he questioned his faith and eventually he left his position. He had liked giving sermons, and he was a great public speaker, so he started giving lectures in the Boston area.
Public lectures were becoming more and more common in New England in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Emerson was one of the first people to make his living off of them. Many of his first lectures were on natural history. In November of 1833, he gave a lecture for the Natural History Society. The lecture, "The Uses of Natural History," was so successful that Emerson was invited to give more lectures on science by many other organizations in the winter of 1834.
In 1836, his first great essay, "Nature," was published in Boston, and it got a lot of attention in America and England. That winter, Emerson was invited to give a series of twelve lectures in the Masonic Temple in Boston. The subjects ranged from "Philosophy of History" to "Trades and Professions."
By this time, lecturing had become his main source of income, and Emerson needed the money to take care of his family. In order to make as much money as he could from the lectures, he wrote his own advertising and oversaw ticket sales himself. Tickets cost two dollars for twelve lectures, and they could be bought at Boston bookstores. Emerson considered the lectures a success: each lecture drew about 350 people, which was pretty good considering he was competing against many other lecturers in Boston at the time.
He often scheduled three or four lectures a week, each in a different city. His reputation grew quickly, and by the winter of 1840, more people went to his lectures in New York than those of all the other speakers combined.
Emerson began giving lectures outside of New England, as far west as St. Louis, and also in England and France. By the end of his life he was making about a hundred dollars per lecture, and he had become a celebrity in America and Europe.
Emerson said,"Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote those books."

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

*Types of Poetry
There are three types of poetry:
1) Lyric: is a relatively short poem which expresses the thoughts or feelings of a single speaker.
2) Narrative: is a type of poetry that tells a story. Milton’s Paradise Lost is a narrative poem.
3) Dramatic poetry: is the term used for the verse encountered in for instance, a Shakespeare play.

A short criticism of a poem by Anne Bradstreet (ca. 1612-1672).
To my Dear and Loving Husband


1 If ever two were one, then surely we.
2 If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.
3 If ever wife was happy in a man,
4 Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
5 I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold
6 Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
7 My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
8 Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.
9 Thy love is such I can no way repay.
10 The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
11 Then while we live, in love let's so persever
12 That when we live no more, we may live ever.
Notes

1] we: Anne's husband was Simon Bradstreet (1603-97). They were married in England in 1628.

6] the East: East Indies.

11] persever: likely accented on the second syllable.


The first three lines of the poem start with the words “If ever” to emphasize speaker’s assertion that her experience of unity, love and happiness scores the highest point amongst human beings. The third line is presented as a challenge to all other women telling them no matter how happy they may be with their husbands, their happiness will fall short of the one experienced by the speaker. There is no mention of what makes her experience extraordinary and no specific instances of what is so unique about her relationship with her spouse. Then the poem proceeds to describe the feeling of love through the use of an image which is usually considered the symbol of material possession, i.e. that of gold. The words “riches that the East” “repay”, “recompense” also amplify this picture presented in the poem where emotional is evaluated in terms of trade and monetary exchange. The price tag (mines of gold, and riches of the East) albeit the highest the speaker can think, weakens the poem and fails to stir the reader. The word ‘persevere’ in the penultimate line which shows a way to immortality through constancy brings to mind the image of an endurance test and a determination to hold on to the finish rather than any emotional strength informed by the greatness of love.


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

Harold Bloom


*“A blank page is actually a whitewashed wall with no door and no window. Beginning to tell a story is like making a pass at a total stranger in a restaurant. Remember Chekhov’s Gurov in “ the Lady with the dog”? Gurov beckons to the little dog, wagging his finger at it over and over again, until the lady says, blushing, “ He doesn’t bite”, whereupon Gurov asks her permission to give the dog a bone. Both Gurov and Chekhov have now been given a thread to go by; the flirtation begins and story takes off.
The beginning of almost every story is actually a bone, something with which to court the dog, which may bring you closer to the lady.”

Amos Oz

Modus Operandi
Approach:

The emphasis of the course will not be on information, but on finding our critical individual voice for evaluating and understanding the American literary experience that spans over five centuries. Genuine American literature has been to a large extent a pioneer experience. It has been the expression of a necessity to arrive at a unique personal account vis à vis the surrounding universe. Emerson in his famous essay Self Reliance exhorts his readers to “judge for yourself” and Emily Dickinson promotes the individual “house” of human consciousness that is able “to support itself”. This attitude is at the core of American experience. To thoroughly come to terms with this viewpoint one needs at the end to stand on one’s own intellectual feet and judge for oneself.


Evaluation:

1) Diary: An ongoing record based on a short summary of authors and concepts discussed in the class plus one or two paragraphs of personal comments and criticism at the end of each entry. Neatness and legibility is important.


2) Seminar: Every student will be responsible for presenting one seminar per semester. Students should choose a topic ahead of time (a list will be provided) and offer an oral presentation to the class lasting between ten to fifteen minutes. A team of two students can work together on a topic and offer a joint presentation.


3) One short essay around 500 words.


4) Regular attendance and active participation in the discussions.


4) Use of secondary material without providing the source will be considered plagiarism.


Recommended Texts:

1) An Outline of American Literature by Peter B. High, Longman, 1986
2) An Introduction to American Literature: time present and time past by Françoise Grellet, Hachette
3) La Littérature américaine par Dominique Lescanne, Langues Pour Tous, 2004

*Practical Criticism
Practical Criticism is a close reading of a text and writing an evaluation of that text based on first hand evidence.

Thomas Jefferson, 1743 - 1826

http://alafaco.blogspot.com/


Thomas Jefferson was born on his father's plantation in Albemarle County, Virginia (1743).
He was just 33 years old when he was chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. He actually suggested John Adams for the job, but Adams replied, "I am obnoxious, suspected, and unpopular. You are very much otherwise. … [Also] you can write 10 times better than I."
In that founding document, Jefferson wrote the famous words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." Jefferson hadn't invented the idea of human rights. He was borrowing from contemporary philosophers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, John Locke, and Voltaire. But he was the first person in history to propose founding a new nation on the basis of those human rights.
In addition to being a writer, Jefferson was also a hard-nosed politician, lawyer, naturalist, musician, architect, geographer, inventor, scientist, paleontologist, and philosopher. Jefferson filled his house with scientific gadgets and inventions, collected mastodon bones, and kept detailed notes on the most obscure details of his life, including the daily fluctuation of the barometric pressure. After he missed the start of the solar eclipse in 1811, he designed his own more accurate astronomical clock. He composed all his papers in later life with a device that allowed him to write with two pens at the same time, so that he could keep copies of all the papers he produced.


*A coward is much more exposed to quarrels than a man of spirit.

*A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.

*A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor and bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government.

*Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

*All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.

*All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.

*Always take hold of things by the smooth handle.

*An association of men who will not quarrel with one another is a thing which has never yet existed, from the greatest confederacy of nations down to a town meeting or a vestry.

*An injured friend is the bitterest of foes.

*Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.

*Be polite to all, but intimate with few.

*Bodily decay is gloomy in prospect, but of all human contemplations the most abhorrent is body without mind.

*But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.

*Commerce with all nations, alliance with none, should be our motto.

*Delay is preferable to error.

*Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

*Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

*Do not bite at the bait of pleasure, till you know there is no hook beneath it.

*Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.

*Don't talk about what you have done or what you are going to do.

*Educate and inform the whole mass of the people... They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

*Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.

*Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

*Every citizen should be a soldier. This was the case with the Greeks and Romans, and must be that of every free state.

Transcendentalism

"Standing on the bare ground, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God."

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 –1882

"I went to the wood because I wanted to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach...."

*"when a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army and subject to military law, then it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize."

Henry David Thoreau 1817 –1862

*Our friend the fugitive... has given image to the dire entity of slavery, and it was an impressive lesson to my children..."

Bronson Alcott

* Louisa May Alcott born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), who started out writing these sensational stories about duels and suicides, opium addiction, mind control, bigamy, and murder. She called it "blood and thunder" literature and she said, "I seem to have a natural ambition for the lurid style." She published under male pseudonyms to keep from embarrassing her family. But in 1867, an editor suggested that she try writing what he called "a girl's book," and she said she would.
The result was Little Women (1868), which was based on her own family and her own experience as an aspiring writer. Alcott was disappointed at how popular Little Women became, because she was obligated to keep writing more books in the same vein.



*Then the little Hiawatha
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How they built their nests in summer,
Where they hid themselves in winter,
Talked with them whene'er he met them,
Called them "Hiawatha's Chickens."
Of all beasts he learned the language,
Learned their names and all their secrets,
How the beavers built their lodges,
Where the squirrels hid their acorns,
How the reindeer ran so swiftly,
Why the rabbit was so timid,
Talked with them whene'er he met them,
Called them "Hiawatha's Brothers."

By: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882