Thomas Stearns Eliot, 1888 - 1965

2. The poem: The Hollow Men, written in 1925 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Published the same year.

Mistah Kurtz –he dead.
A penny for the Old Guy.

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

Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom
15 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
20 In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column.
There, is a tree swinging
25 And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

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

No nearer-

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom.

III
This is the dead land,
40 This is the 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.

45 Is it like this,
In death’s other kingdom
Walking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness.
50 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,
55 In this hollow valley,
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech,
60 Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star,
Multifoliate rose
65 Of death’s twilight kingdom.
The hope only
Of empty men.

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

Between the idea
And the reality,


Between the motion
75 And the act,
Falls the Shadow.

For Thine is the Kingdom.

Between the conception
And the creation,
80 Between the emotion
And the response,
Falls the Shadow.

Life is very long.

Between the desire
85 And the spasm,
Between the potency
And the existence,
Between the essence
And the descent,
90 Falls the Shadow.

For Thine is the Kingdom.

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

95 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.

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.

Maya Angelou, 1928 -

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

Idiom of the Day

Throw in the sponge, Informal. To concede defeat; yield; give up: The early election returns were heavily against him, but he wasn't ready to throw in the sponge.
Origin:

Hamlet. A monologue from the play by William Shakespeare

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.

Guttersnipe

Guttersnipe

— n
1. a child who spends most of his time in the streets, esp in a slum area
2. a person regarded as having the behaviour, morals, etc, of one brought up in squalor

[C19: originally a name applied to the common snipe (the bird), then to a person who gathered refuse from gutters in city streets]

stew (in your own juice)
informal

Definition
to think about or suffer the results of your own silly actions, without anyone giving you any help
(Definition of stew (in your own juice) from

After John stewed in his own juice for a while, he decided to come back and apologize to us.

Cut to the chase, Informal . to get to the main point.

Cut to the chase (informal)
to talk about or deal with the important parts of a subject and not waste time with things that are not important I didn't have long to talk to him so I cut to the chase and asked whether he was still married.

Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

If

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And which is more; you'll be a Man, my son!

Ezra Pound, 1885 - 1972

The Rest

O helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved!

Artist broken against her,
A-stray, lost in the villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against.

Lovers of beauty, starved,
Thwarted with systems,
Helpless against the control;

You who can not wear yourselves out
By persisting to successes,
You who can only speak,
Who can not steel yourselves into reiteration;

You of the finer sense,
Broken against false knowledge,
You who can know at first hand,
Hated, shut in, mistrusted:

Take thought:
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.


________

Ballad of the Goodly Fere

Ha' we lost the goodliest fere o' all
For the priests and the gallows tree?
Aye lover he was of brawny men,
O' ships and the open sea.

When they came wi' a host to take Our Man
His smile was good to see,
"First let these go!" quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Or I'll see ye damned," says he.

Aye he sent us out through the crossed high spears
And the scorn of his laugh rang free,
"Why took ye not me when I walked about
Alone in the town?" says he.

Oh we drank his "Hale" in the good red wine
When we last made company,
No capon priest was the Goodly Fere
But a man o' men was he.

I ha' seen him drive a hundred men
Wi' a bundle o' cords swung free,
That they took the high and holy house
For their pawn and treasury.

They'll no' get him a' in a book I think
Though they write it cunningly;
No mouse of the scrolls was the Goodly Fere
But aye loved the open sea.

If they think they ha' snared our Goodly Fere
They are fools to the last degree.
"I'll go to the feast," quo' our Goodly Fere,
"Though I go to the gallows tree."

"Ye ha' seen me heal the lame and blind,
And wake the dead," says he,
"Ye shall see one thing to master all:
'Tis how a brave man dies on the tree."

A son of God was the Goodly Fere
That bade us his brothers be.
I ha' seen him cow a thousand men.
I have seen him upon the tree.

He cried no cry when they drave the nails
And the blood gushed hot and free,
The hounds of the crimson sky gave tongue
But never a cry cried he.

I ha' seen him cow a thousand men
On the hills o' Galilee,
They whined as he walked out calm between,
Wi' his eyes like the grey o' the sea,

Like the sea that brooks no voyaging
With the winds unleashed and free,
Like the sea that he cowed at Genseret
Wi' twey words spoke' suddently.

A master of men was the Goodly Fere,
A mate of the wind and sea,
If they think they ha' slain our Goodly Fere
They are fools eternally.

I ha' seen him eat o' the honey-comb
Sin' they nailed him to the tree.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe by Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
"Every 'I' is a dramatic 'I'")
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love
and I'm sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

The good, the bad and the inconvenient by Marge Piercy

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles

are "good" and which are "bad"
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.

Katherine Anne Porter, 1890 - 1980

Writer Katherine Anne Porter was born Callie Russell Porter in Indian Creek, Texas (1890). Her mother died when she was two years old, and her father didn’t pay much attention to young Callie or her brothers and sisters. She was raised by her grandmother, Catherine Anne Skaggs, in the town of Kyle, which had about 500 people. Catherine Anne Skaggs traced her family back to Daniel Boone. Porter wrote later: "Grandmother was by nature lavish, she loved leisure and calm, she loved luxury, she loved dress and adornment, she loved to sit and talk with friends or listen to music; she did not in the least like pinching or saving and mending and making things do. ... But the evil turn of fortune in her life tapped the bottomless reserves of her character." Porter grew up in poverty, but she soaked in her grandmother’s stories of the affluent family she had left behind in Kentucky, and a family history full of important and wealthy people. She described herself as "a precocious child full of miscellaneous talents and hellish energy."
But then her grandmother died, and Porter hated living with her father — they argued constantly and lived in squalid conditions, with Porter supporting both of them by giving lessons. So when she was 15 years old she ran off with a man named John Henry Koontz, who was from a wealthy ranching family. They got married just after her 16th birthday. The marriage was unhappy — Koontz was physically abusive, he had affairs, and he drank too much. Finally, after he beat her unconscious with a hairbrush, she decided she had to get out and she divorced him. In the divorce proceedings, Callie Porter changed her name to Katherine Porter, in honor of her grandmother, and soon started going as Katherine Anne Porter.
After a struggle with tuberculosis, Porter got a job writing for a newspaper in Fort Worth, then at the Rocky Mountain News. She barely survived the influenza epidemic, and afterwards she set out for a new life as a writer in Greenwich Village. In 1922, she sold her first short story to Century magazine, and in 1930 published her first book of short stories, Flowering Judas. Her writing got good reviews but not a lot of attention, until she published her first and only novel, Ship of Fools (1962),which came out on April Fools’ Day. It was the best-selling novel of 1962, and she finally had the financial security she had wanted for so long. Three years later, she published The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965), which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She died in 1980 at the age of 90.
Her friend Kitty Barry Crawford, who founded the Fort Worth Critic and inspired Porter to write, said of her friend: "I am frank to say, however, that K.A. as a person has always interested me more than her writings. She had and perhaps still has qualities of personality which lift her far, far above even highly talented people. Her delicate beauty — lovely black-lashed violet eyes, dark wavy hair, small nose, pertly snubbed — just to look at her was to love her."
Katherine Anne Porter said: "If I didn’t know the ending of a story, I wouldn’t begin. I always write my last lines, my last paragraph first, and then I go back and work towards it. I know where I’m going. I know what my goal is. And how I get there is God’s grace."
In Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Porter wrote: "He had his uniforms made by the best tailor he could find, he confided to Miranda one day when she told him how squish he was looking in his new soldier suit. ‘Hard enough to make anything of the outfit, anyhow,’ he told her. ‘It’s the least I can do for my beloved country, not to go around looking like a tramp.’ He was twenty-four years old and a Second Lieutenant in an Engineers Corps, on leave because his outfit expected to be sent over shortly. ‘Came in to make my will,’ he told Miranda, ‘and get a supply of toothbrushes and razor blades. By what gorgeous luck do you suppose,’ he asked her, ‘I happened to pick on your rooming house? How did I know you were there?’
"Strolling, keeping step, his stout polished well-made boots setting themselves down firmly beside her thin-soled black suede, they put off as long as they could the end of their moment together, and kept up as well as they could their small talk that flew back and forth over little grooves worn in the thin upper surface of the brain, things you could say and hear clink reassuringly at once without disturbing the radiance which played and darted about the simple and lovely miracle of being two persons named Adam and Miranda, twenty-four years old each, alive and on the earth at the same moment: ‘Are you in the mood for dancing, Miranda?’ and ‘I’m always in the mood for dancing, Adam!’ but there were thing in the way, the day that ended with dancing was a long way to go."

Ted Turner, 1938 -

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise”. Ted Turner, American Entrepreneur.