Ernest Hemingway, 1899 - 1961

Robert Penn Warren (1905- 1989) on Hemingway (1899-1961) :

Hemingway’s heroes are not squealers, welchers, compromisers, or cowards, and when they confront defeat they realize that the stance they take, the stoic endurance, the stiff upper lip means a kind of victory. If they are to be defeated they are defeated upon their own terms; some of them have even courted their defeat; and certainly they have maintained, even in the practical defeat, an ideal of themselves – some definition of how a man should behave, formulated or unformulated – by which they have lived. They represent some notion of a code, some notion of honor, that makes a man a man, and that distinguishes him from people who merely follow their random impulses and who are, by consequence, “messy.”

I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn't show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

All our words from loose using have lost their edge.

Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.

An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools.

But man is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.

Courage is grace under pressure.

Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination.

Cowardice... is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend functioning of the imagination.

Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

For a war to be just three conditions are necessary - public authority, just cause, right motive.

Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it-don't cheat with it.

Truman Capote, 1924 - 1984

American writer Truman Capote was born in New Orleans (1924). Even as a child, Capote wanted to become famous. He moved with his mother to New York City and applied to the prestigious Trinity School. He was given an IQ test as an entrance exam, and he scored 215, the highest in the school's history. Capote said, "I was having 50 perceptions a minute to everyone else's five. I always felt nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing." One day he read a news release about the murder of a family in western Kansas, and he decided to write about it. He moved to Holcomb, Kansas with his friend Harper Lee, and became attached to the community as it recovered from the crime. Capote compiled over 6,000 pages of notes on the crime, 80% of which he threw away. Eventually, he wrote his most famous work, In Cold Blood (1966), about the murders. He got to know the two murderers well and worked for many years to have their death sentences reduced. When the two men were hanged, Capote became physically ill. In Cold Blood introduced a new genre, the "non-fiction novel." Capote received nearly two million dollars for text and movie rights.

Capote craved fame and spent much of his life socializing. He was an unassuming figure—small and with a high lisping voice. But he was a lively storyteller, and an expert charmer. George Plimpton said, "He knew he had to sing for his supper but, my God, what a song it was!"

Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

*A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

*All literature is gossip.

*Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

*Fame is only good for one thing - they will cash your check in a small town.

*Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.

*Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody. You can't have too many friends because then you're just not really friends.

*Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there."

*I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

*I can see every monster as they come in.

*I got this idea of doing a really serious big work-it would be precisely like a novel, with a single difference: Every word of it would be true from beginning to end.

*I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.

*It is the want to know the end that makes us believe in God, or witchcraft, believe, at least, in something.

*Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

*Mick Jagger is about as sexy as a pissing toad.

*Most contemporary novelists, especially the American and the French, are too subjective, mesmerized by private demons; they're enraptured by their navels and confined by a view that ends with their own toes.

*My major regret in life is that my childhood was unnecessarily lonely.

*Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

*That's not writing, that's typing.

*The quietness of his tone italicized the malice of his reply.

*To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music that words make.

*Venice is like eating an entire box of chocolate liqueurs in one go.

Well, I'm about as tall as a shotgun, and just as noisy.

*When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended for self-flagellation solely.

*Writing has laws of perspective, of light and shade just as painting does, or music. If you are born knowing them, fine. If not, learn them. Then rearrange the rules to suit yourself.

*Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

*People who are having a love-sex relationship are continuously lying to each other because the very nature of the relationship demands that they do, because you have to make a love object of this person, which means that you editorialize about them. You cut out what you don't want to see, you add this if it isn't there. And so therefore you're building a lie.

*No one will ever know what 'In Cold Blood' took out of me. It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me.

Maya Angelou, 1928 -

Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Annie Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri (1928), the author of six autobiographical volumes, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970). As a teenager, she and her mom and brother moved to San Francisco. There she became a streetcar conductor, the first black person and the first woman to be one there. She was only 16. A few months after graduating from high school, she gave birth to a son. Later, she married a Greek sailor named Tosh Angelos and began using a variation of his surname — Angelou — for her stage name at the Purple Onion cabaret in San Francisco, where she was a calypso dancer. She toured Europe as a dancer in a government-sponsored production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, and when she returned to the U.S., she settled in New York City, where she performed off-Broadway, sang at the Apollo Theater, and started going to meetings of the Harlem Writer's Guild. She met James Baldwin and Jules Feiffer, who thought that she should write about her life in the manner that she spoke, in the "same rhythmical cadences with which she mesmerized" her friends and others with whom she interacted. She did, in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The sixth volume of her autobiography, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, came out in 2002.

Alone

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don't believe I'm wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

There are some millionaires
With money they can't use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They've got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Now if you listen closely
I'll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
'Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.

Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

______________

I know why the caged bird sings

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats downstream till the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange suns rays and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn-bright lawn and he names the sky his own.

But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied so he opens his throat to sing.

The caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.

Emerson

The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude,
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.

Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery,
But 'tis figured in the flowers,
Was never secret history,
But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song

e. e. cummings, 1894 - 1962

Poet E. E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He was a man who wrote joyful, almost childlike poems about the beauty of nature and love, even though he was actually a conservative, irritable man who hated noisy modern inventions like vacuum cleaners and radios. He spent most of his life unhappy, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized for his unpopular political views.

He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), when he traveled to Russia in 1931, hoping to write about the superior society under the rule of communism. He was horrified at what he found. He saw no lovers, no one laughing, no one enjoying themselves. The theaters and museums were full of propaganda, and the people were scared to talk to each other in the street. Everyone was miserable.

When he got home, he wrote about the experience, comparing Russia to Dante's Inferno. Most of the publishers at the time were communists themselves, and they turned their backs on Cummings for criticizing communist Russia. Many magazines refused to publish his poetry or review his books. But the attacks only made him more stubborn. He said, "To be nobody-but-yourself—in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else—means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

He tried to write a script for a ballet, but it was never performed. He tried writing for the movies in Hollywood, but found that he spent all his time painting humming birds and sunsets instead of working on screenplays. He had to borrow money from his parents and his friends. He said, "I'm living so far beyond my income that we may almost be said to be living apart." A few years later, he decided to make some extra money by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him.

The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. Even though he suffered from terrible back pains, and had to wear a metal brace that he called an "iron maiden," he began traveling and giving readings at universities across the country. By the end of the 1950s he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 2, 1962.

In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people—it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. ... You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ’tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?”

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings, 1894 - 1962

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Edgar Lee Masters

American poet Edgar Lee Masters was born in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868. Masters grew up in the small town of Lewiston, Illinois, in the Spoon River valley. His father was a lawyer who didn't approve of his son's ambition to write, so Masters became a lawyer in Chicago. While he practiced law, he started to write and publish poetry and plays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace, including A Book of Verses (1898) and Maximilian (1902), but he didn't write anything particularly successful. He dreamed of writing a novel about the small-town Illinois of his childhood.
Then in 1909, he got a gift from Marion Reedy, the editor of Reedy's Mirror in St. Louis. Masters had been submitting poems to the journal, and Reedy rejected all his poems, but he liked corresponding with Masters, and he sent him a copy of Selected Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, a book of poems from the Classical and Byzantine periods of Greek literature. Most of these poems are in the form of epigrams. After Masters read the Greek Anthology, he decided to change the form of his novel and make it into a series of monologues. These monologues would be set in a graveyard, and they would be anecdotes spoken by more than 200 dead citizens of a small town. He based the small town on a combination of Lewiston, where he grew up, and nearby Petersburg, where his grandparents had their farm, but he named it after the river that ran by these towns, and these monologues became Spoon River Anthology (1915). It was an immediate commercial success, one of the most popular books of poetry in American history. But the monologues were often cynical and showed the hypocrisies of small-town life, and so Spoon River Anthology wasn't popular with everyone. It made Masters an outcast from the small towns where he grew up — he had based many of his characters directly on people there, hadn't even changed their last names, and many of them were horrified by his unflattering depictions of them. And even beyond these towns, lots of people were scandalized by Masters's cynical view of small-town America and considered him unpatriotic. He continued writing but he never achieved the same level of success that he had with Spoon River Anthology.
Edgar Lee Masters said, "How shall the soul of a man be larger than the life he has lived?"
And he wrote in Spoon River Anthology:
"Mickey M'Grew"
It was just like everything else in life:
Something outside myself drew me down,
My own strength never failed me.
Why, there was the time I earned the money
With which to go away to school,
And my father suddenly needed help
And I had to give him all of it.
Just so it went till I ended up
A man-of-all-work in Spoon River.
Thus when I got the water-tower cleaned,
And they hauled me up the seventy feet,
I unhooked the rope from my waist,
And laughingly flung my giant arms
Over the smooth steel lips of the top of the tower —
But they slipped from the treacherous slime,
And down, down, down, I plunged
Through bellowing darkness!

- George Gray

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me --
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire --
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.

You are my sunshine

"You Are My Sunshine" is a popular song first recorded in 1939. It has been declared one of the state songs of Louisiana. Words and music by Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell.


Well, the other night dear, as I lay sleeping
I dreamed I held you in my arms
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken
And I hung my head and I cried.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away

I'll always love you and make you happy,
So nothing else could come between.
Now you've left me to love another;
You have shattered all my dreams:

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqNPx1hbhfo

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.

Etruscan civilization

Etruscan civilization is the modern English name given to the culture and way of life of a people of ancient Italy, residing between the Apennines and the River Tiber, whom the ancient Romans called Etrusci or Tusci.[1] The Attic Greek word for them was Τυρρήνιοι (Tyrrhēnioi) from which Latin also drew the names Tyrrhēni (Etruscans), Tyrrhēnia (Etruria) and Mare Tyrrhēnum (Tyrrhenian Sea).[2] The Etruscans themselves used the term Rasenna, which was syncopated to Rasna or Raśna.[3]
As distinguished by its own language, the civilization endured from an unknown prehistoric time prior to the founding of Rome until its complete assimilation to Italic Rome in the Roman Republic. At its maximum extent during the foundation period of Rome and the Roman kingdom, it flourished in three confederacies of cities: of Etruria, of the Po valley with the eastern Alps, and of Latium and Campania.[4] Rome was sited in Etruscan territory. There is considerable evidence that early Rome was dominated by Etruscans until the Romans sacked Veii in 396 BC.
Culture that is identifiably and certainly Etruscan developed in Italy after about 800 BC approximately over the range of the preceding Iron Age Villanovan culture. The latter gave way in the seventh century to a culture that was influenced by Greek traders and Greek neighbours in Magna Graecia, the Hellenic civilization of southern Italy. After 500 BC the political destiny of Italy passed out of Etruscan hands.[5]

Doc Watson, 1923 -

Singer and guitarist Doc Watson, born in Deep Gap, North Carolina, 1923.



When it's peach picking time in Georgia apple picking time in Tennessee
Cotton picking time in Mississippi that everybody picks on me
And when it's roundup time in Texas the cowboys make whoopee
Way down in old Carolina it's gal picking time to me

[ yodel ]
They got the bluegrass in old Kentucky Virginia's where they do the swing
Carolina I'm coming to you to spend the spring
Arkansas I hear you calling and I hope I'll see you soon
There I'm gonna do a little picking underneath the Ozark moon

[ guitar - piano - dobro - guitar ]
Now when hard times overtake me I won't let the blues get me
For I've got a sweetheart in old Caroline and I know she waits for me
Soon I'm a goin' to see her and I know that won't be long
Till we gonna pick a little cabin to call our mountain home

[ guitar ]
When the folks begin to pick the cotton then I pick a weddin' ring
And we'll go to town to pick a little gown for the wedding in the spring
I hope the preacher knows his business cause he can't fool me
When it's peach picking time in Georgia it's gal picking time to me

[ yodel ]

Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right, 5
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snowdrop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? 10
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.



key words Heal-all: a common roadside wildflower in the mint family that is usually blue in color. Blight: anything that spoils or damages something. Froth: anything that rises or overflows in a soft, light mass (figurative). Wayside: the edge of a road. Kindred: similar in kind- related. Thither: to or toward that place (archaic). Appall: to greatly dismay or horrify. Design: purpose, planning or intention that exists or is thought to exist behind an action, fact, or material object.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950

Sonnet: Love Is Not All

Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
and rise and sink and rise and sink again.
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
pinned down by need and moaning for release
or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It may well be. I do not think I would.

Bill Bryson, 1952 -

The travel writer Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa (1952). As a young man he settled in England and supported himself with a series of jobs as a copy editor, and then he began writing about books lexicography, including The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984). He had been living outside of the United States for more than a decade, when he got the idea go back to America and write about how the country had changed in his absence. He borrowed his mother's Chevy and began driving to all the places he'd visited with his family on vacations as a child. He ultimately covered almost 14,000 miles, and visited 38 states.
The result was his book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989), in which Bryson poked fun at his home country, while reminiscing about his Iowa childhood. He wrote, "Much as I resented having to grow up in Des Moines, it gave me a real appreciation for every place in the world that's not Des Moines."

Algonkin- Now I Am Left

Among the many surviving Native American legends is this poem concerning an Algonkin woman who probably lived near what is now Maine, at a time prior to the arrival of the first European. It is apparently the lament of a young woman marooned on an island by jealous rivals, "false friends." Like all oral literature, this song is one of many versions passed from generation to generation. And as is the case with all translations it can only approximate the tone and meaning of the original. Yet the universal qualities of human feeling remain for all to appreciate.

Taken form American Literature Ginn Literature Series



Now I am left on this lonely island to die—
No one to hear the sound of my voice.
Who will bury me when I die?
Who will sing my death-song?
My false friends leave me here to die alone;
Like a wild beast, I am left on this island to die.
I wish the wind spirit would carry my cry to my love!
My love is swift as the deer; he would speed through the
forest to find me.
Now I am left on this lonely island to die.
I wish the wind spirit would carry my cry to my love!
My love is as swift as the deer; he would speed through the
forest to find me;
Now I am left on this lonely island to die.
I wish the spirit of air would carry my breath to my love.
My love's canoe, like sunlight, would shoot through the water
to my side;
But I am left on this lonely island to die, with no one to pity
me but the little birds.
My love is brave and strong; but, when he hears my fate, his
heart will break.
And I am on this lonely island to die.
Now the night comes on, and all is silent but the owl.
He sings a mournful song to his mate, in pity for me.
I will try to sleep.
I wish the night spirit to hear my song; he will tell my love of
my fate; and when I awake, I shall see the one I love.
I am on this lonely island to die.

“Iowa Farmer” by Margaret Abigail Walker 1915-

I talked to a farmer one day in Iowa.
We looked out far over acres of wheat.
He spoke with pride and yet not boastfully;
he had no need to fumble for his words.
He knew his land and there was love for home
within the soft serene eyes of his son.
His ugly house was clean against the storm;
there was no hunger deep within the heart
nor burning riveted within the bone,
but here they ate a satisfying bread.
Yet in the Middle West where wheat was plentiful;
Where grain grew golden under sunny skies
And cattle fattened through the summer heat
I could remember more familiar sights.

Thomas Paine, 1737 - 1809

Writer and revolutionary Thomas Paine was born in Thetford, England (1737). He's best known for writing Common Sense (1776), the pamphlet that convinced many Americans, including George Washington, to fight for independence from England. The original title Paine came up with for the pamphlet was Plain Truth, and he also is credited with proposing the name "United States of America" for the new nation.
Paine was fired twice in four years from his job as a tax collector in England when he was a young man. His first recorded writing was a short article arguing for better salaries and working conditions. Paine was also an inventor, holding a patent in Europe for the single span iron bridge. He worked with John Fitch on steam engines, and he also developed a smokeless candle.
Paine published a series of pamphlets during the Revolutionary War called The American Crisis (1776). The first pamphlet begins with the famous line, "These are the times that try men's souls." It was so inspiring that George Washington had it read to all Patriot troops to boost morale after some early battle losses. Paine said, "War involves in its progress such a train of unforeseen and unsupposed circumstances that no human wisdom can calculate the end. It has but one thing certain, and that is to increase taxes."
Paine met with Napoleon in 1800, and Napoleon supposedly told him that a gold statue should be erected to Paine in every city in the world. Today, there are only five statues worldwide dedicated to him, and one is in Paris, France.
He said, "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right." He also said, "Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."


December 23, 1776

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

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."

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*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.
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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---

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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.

John Steinbeck, 1902 - 1968

John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California (1902). He is the author of the epic novel The Grapes Of Wrath (1939), and also Of Mice and Men (1937).
Steinbeck enrolled at Stanford in 1919, but he did so only to please his parents. He dropped in and out of the university for six years, only taking classes he thought were interesting, and he never finished a degree. Then he worked construction and tried to make it as a reporter in New York City, but he disliked that job and returned to California. Then, Steinbeck became a caretaker for an estate near Lake Tahoe. The job lasted for three years, and it was during this time that he wrote many drafts of what would become his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929).
Steinbeck's most productive period as a writer was the 1930s. He wrote several books, including the two for which he is most famous today, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. His wife edited his prose, typed his manuscripts and suggested titles, which may explain why Steinbeck was so productive and successful. When The Grapes of Wrath was first published, the first printing of nearly 20,000 copies sold out quickly, and by May the book was selling 10,000 copies per week. Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel the following year.
As he grew older, Steinbeck became increasingly jaded by what he saw as American greed and waste. So he traveled across the country in a camper truck and then wrote the book Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), where he celebrated what he found so admirable about his country: its individuals.
John Steinbeck said, "A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun."


*I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

*It always seemed strange to me that the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, aquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and selfinterest are the traits of sucess. And while men admire the quality of the first, they love the produce of the second.

*It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure on the world.

*Power does not corrupt. Fear corrupts... perhaps the fear of a loss of power.

*No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

*As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment.

*Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

*A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

*I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, plenty, and security - out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism, in which rebellion against the world as it is, and myself as I am, are submerged in listless self-satisfaction.

*This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.