Du Bois, 1868 - 1963

Sociologist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (1868). He grew up in New England and didn't experience racial inequality until he went to college at Fisk University in Nashville. He did his graduate studies at Harvard; he was the first African American to get his Ph.D. there.
He became an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and for his first sociological study he personally surveyed five thousand African Americans living in Philadelphia about their background, family structure, employment, income, social activities and other aspects of their lives. It was the first serious sociological study of blacks in America and it was the first time that someone had attempted to prove that poverty and crime in black communities was the result not of racial inferiority but of racial barriers and in education and employment.
He's best known for his book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). It was a collection of essays, and one of the first attempts by an African American to describe the experience of racism in post-slavery America. Du Bois wrote, "It is a peculiar sensation ... this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
Du Bois went on to found the N.A.A.C.P., and he grew more and more alienated from the United States. He eventually joined the communist party and moved to Africa, renouncing his American citizenship. He died in Ghana on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington.

Modus Operandi

Words to Ponder
“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) 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.

Autobiography

Cover of the first English edition of 1793 of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography

An autobiography (from the Greek, αὐτός-autos self + βίος-bios life + γράφειν-graphein to write) is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.
The word autobiography was first used by the poet Robert Southey in 1809 in the English periodical Quarterly Review, but the form goes back to antiquity. Biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints; an autobiography however may be based entirely on the writer's memory. Closely associated with autobiography (and sometimes difficult to precisely distinguish from it) is the form of memoir.
See List of autobiographies and Category:Autobiographies for examples. Also see main article Memoir.
[edit]Nature of autobiography

[edit]The classical period: Apologia, oration, confession
In antiquity such works were typically entitled apologia, implying as much self-justification as self-documentation. John Henry Newman's autobiography (first published in 1864) is entitled Apologia Pro Vita Sua in reference to this tradition.
The pagan rhetor Libanius (c. 314–394) framed his life memoir (Oration I begun in 374) as one of his orations, not of a public kind, but of a literary kind that could be read aloud in privacy.
Augustine (354–430) applied the title Confessions to his autobiographical work, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the same title in the 18th century, initiating the chain of confessional and sometimes racy and highly self-critical, autobiographies of the Romantic era and beyond.
In the spirit of Augustine's Confessions is the 11th-century Historia Calamitatum of Peter Abelard, outstanding as an autobiographical document of its period.
[edit]Early autobiographies


A scene from the Baburnama.
Zāhir ud-Dīn Mohammad Bābur,who founded the Mughal dynasty of South Asia kept a journal Bāburnāma (Chagatai/Persian: بابر نامہ; literally: "Book of Babur" or "Letters of Babur") which was written between 1493 and 1529.
One of the first great autobiographies of the Renaissance is that of the sculptor and goldsmith Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), written between 1556 and 1558, and entitled by him simply Vita (Italian: Life). He declares at the start: 'No matter what sort he is, everyone who has to his credit what are or really seem great achievements, if he cares for truth and goodness, ought to write the story of his own life in his own hand; but no one should venture on such a splendid undertaking before he is over forty'.[1] These criteria for autobiography generally persisted until recent times, and most serious autobiographies of the next three hundred years conformed to them.
Another autobiography of the period is De vita propria, by the Italian physician and astrologer Gerolamo Cardano (1574).
The earliest known autobiography in English is the early 15th-century Booke of Margery Kempe, describing among other things her pilgrimage to the Holy Land and visit to Rome. The book remained in manuscript and was not published until 1936.
Notable English autobiographies of the seventeenth century include those of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1643, published 1764) and John Bunyan (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, (1666)).
[edit]Memoir
Main article: Memoir
A memoir is slightly different in character from an autobiography. While an autobiography typically focuses on the "life and times" of the writer, a memoir has a narrower, more intimate focus on his or her own memories, feelings and emotions. Memoirs have often been written by politicians or military leaders as a way to record and publish an account of their public exploits. One early example is that of Leonor López de Córdoba (1362-1420) who wrote what is supposed to be the first autobiography in Spanish. The English Civil War (1642–1651) provoked a number of examples of this genre, including works by Sir Edmund Ludlow and Sir John Reresby. French examples from the same period include the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz (1614–1679) and the Duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1755).
[edit]18th and 19th centuries
Notable 18th-century autobiographies in English include those of Edward Gibbon and Benjamin Franklin. Following the trend of Romanticism, which greatly emphasised the role and the nature of the individual, and in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, a more intimate form of autobiography, exploring the subject's emotions, came into fashion. An English example is William Hazlitt's Liber Amoris (1823), a painful examination of the writer's love-life.
With the rise of education, cheap newspapers and cheap printing, modern concepts of fame and celebrity began to develop, and the beneficiaries of this were not slow to cash in on this by producing autobiographies. It became the expectation — rather than the exception — that those in the public eye should write about themselves — not only writers such as Charles Dickens (who also incorporated autobiographical elements in his novels) and Anthony Trollope, but politicians (e.g. Henry Brooks Adams), philosophers (e.g. John Stuart Mill), churchmen such as Cardinal Newman, and entertainers such as P. T. Barnum. Increasingly, in accordance with romantic taste, these accounts also began to deal, amongst other topics, with aspects of childhood and upbringing — far removed from the principles of 'Cellinian' autobiography.
[edit]Versions of the autobiography form

[edit]Autobiographies as critiques of totalitarianism
Victims and opponents of totalitarian regimes have been able to present striking critiques of these regimes through autobiographical accounts of their oppression. Among the more renowned of such works are the writings of Primo Levi, one of many personal accounts of the Shoah. Similarly, there are many works detailing atrocities and malevolence of Communist regimes (e.g., Nadezhda Mandelstam's Hope against Hope. From the Bed-Stuy, New York area;
[edit]Sensationalist and celebrity 'autobiographies'
From the 17th century onwards, "scandalous memoirs" by supposed libertines, serving a public taste for titillation, have been frequently published. Typically pseudonymous, they were (and are) largely works of fiction written by ghostwriters.
So-called "autobiographies" of modern professional athletes and media celebrities—and to a lesser extent about politicians, generally written by a ghostwriter, are routinely published. Some celebrities, such as Naomi Campbell, admit to not having read their "autobiographies."[citation needed]
[edit]Autobiographies of the non-famous
Until recent years, few people without some genuine claim to fame wrote or published autobiographies for the general public. With the critical and commercial success in the United States of such memoirs as Angela’s Ashes and The Color of Water, however, more and more people have been encouraged to try their hand at this genre.
[edit]Fake autobiographies
This trend has also encouraged fake autobiographies, particularly those associated with 'misery lit,' where the writer has allegedly suffered from being a part of a dysfunctional family, or from social problems, or political repression.
[edit]Fictional autobiography
The term "fictional autobiography" has been coined to define novels about a fictional character written as though the character were writing their own biography, of which Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, is an early example. Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is another such classic, and J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye is a well-known modern example of fictional autobiography. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is yet another example of fictional autobiography, as noted on the front page of the original version. The term may also apply to works of fiction purporting to be autobiographies of real characters, e.g., Stephen Marlowe's The Death and Life of Miguel de Cervantes.
[edit]References

Harold Bloom, July 11 1930 -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spring and All by William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

[1923]

Stephen Crane, 1871 - 1900

The wayfarer 


Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said, 5
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last, 10
“Doubtless there are other roads.”

Herman Melville Quotations

*A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.

*If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.

*Life's a voyage that's homeward bound.

*Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticisms made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed.

*When beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.
Herman Melville, "Moby Dick"

*To the last, I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851

Opening lines of Moby Dick:

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.


*A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things.
Herman Melville

*A smile is the chosen vehicle of all ambiguities.

*A whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.

*Art is the objectification of feeling.

*At sea a fellow comes out. Salt water is like wine, in that respect.

*Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.

*Friendship at first sight, like love at first sight, is said to be the only truth.

*He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it.

*He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great.

*Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending.

*Hope is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity.

*I am, as I am; whether hideous, or handsome, depends upon who is made judge.

*In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

*Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?

*It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.

*It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open.

Archibald MacLeish, 1892 - 1982

Poet, playwright, and statesman Archibald Macleish, born in Glencoe, Illinois (1892). He did his best writing in the 1920's and 30's, starting when he quit his job as a lawyer and moved his family to Paris to concentrate on poetry. He wrote The Pot of Earth (1925), Streets in the Moon (1926), and Einstein (1929). He wrote radio verse plays, including The Fall of the City (1937), Air Raid (1938), and The Great American Fourth of July Parade (1975).

Hal Sirowitz

Correcting an Unbalance

I never listen to commercials, Father said.
They're aimed at trying to sell me something
I don't need. If I do need it I want to know
that the need originated from me & not
from others. I don't want to end up with lots
of junk I'm only going to throw out. Half
the things in this house aren't used. We
only really need food, clothing, shelter,
& of course, each other. You do need me.
Don't you? Your mother never gives me
much opportunity to talk. I'm supposed to listen.
I'm able to talk to you, but it'd please me
if you said something once in a while.

Teaching Poetry to 3rd Graders by Gary Short

At recess a boy ran to me
with a pink rubber ball and asked
if I would kick it to him. He handed me the ball,
then turned and ran
and ran and ran, not turning back
until he was far out in the field.
I wasn't sure I could kick the ball
that far. But I tried,
launching a perfect and lucky kick.
The ball sailed in a beautiful arc
about eight stories high,
landed within a few feet of the 3rd grader
and took a big bounce off the hard playground dirt.
Pleased, I turned to enter the school building.
And then (I don't know where they came from
so quickly) I heard a rumbling behind me
full tilt. They were carrying pink balls and yellow balls
of different sizes, black and white checkered
soccer balls. They wanted me to kick for them.
And now this is a ritual—this is how we spend recess.
They stand in line, hand me the ball and run.
The balls rise like planets
and the 3rd graders
circle dizzily beneath the falling sky,
their arms outstretched.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature. They were all women-to teach a mixed class in the privacy of my home was too risky, even if we were discussing harmless works of fiction. One persistent male student, although barred from our class, insisted on his rights. So he, Nima, read the assigned material, and on special days he would come to my house to talk about the books we were reading.

.................

I could not see my favorite mountains from where I sat, but opposite my chair, on the far wall of the dining room, was an antique oval mirror, a gift from my father, and in its reflection, I could see the mountains capped with snow, even in summer, and watch the trees change color. That censored view intensified my impression that the noise came not from the street below but from some far-off place, a place whose persistent hum was our only link to the world we refused, for those few hours, to acknowledge.

That room, for all of us, became a place of transgression. What a wonderland it was! Sitting around the large coffee table covered with bouquets of flowers, we moved in and out of the novels we read. Looking back, I am amazed at how much we learned without even noticing it. We were, to borrow from Nabokov, to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic eye of fiction.

Vladimir Nabokov, 1899 - 1977

*The following passage is not for the general reader, but for the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune in some crash, thinks he understands me.
My old (since 1917) quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship so wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who "hates the Reds" because they "stole" his money and land is complete. The nostalgia I have been cherishing all these years is a hypertrophied sense of lost childhood, not sorrow for lost banknotes.

(Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), Russian-born U.S. novelist, poet. Speak, Memory, ch. 3 (1966).)

*“Discussion in class, which means letting twenty young blockheads and two cocky neurotics discuss something that neither their teacher nor they know.”

*“Life is a great surprise. I don't see why death should not be an even greater one.”

* “To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute”

*“Existence is a series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece.”

Jerry by Carl Sandburg

"Jerry" by Carl Sandburg, from Billy Sunday and Other Poems

Six years I worked in a knitting mill at a machine
And then I married Jerry, the iceman, for a change.
He weighed 240 pounds, and could hold me,
Who weighed 105 pounds, outward easily with one hand.
He came home drunk and lay on me with the breath of stale
beer
Blowing from him and jumbled talk that didn't mean anything.
I stood it two years and one hot night when I refused him
And he struck his bare fist against my nose so it bled,
I waited till he slept, took a revolver from a bureau drawer,
Placed the end of it to his head and pulled the trigger.
From the stone walls where I am incarcerated for the natural
term
Of life, I proclaim I would do it again.

Vladimir Nabokov, 1899 - 1977

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia (1899). He described himself as "a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library." He learned to read and write English before he could do so in Russian, and his family spoke in a mixture of English, French, and Russian. He had a happy childhood, complementing his studies with tennis, soccer, butterfly collecting, and art. But Nabokov's family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution.
Nabokov never saw Russia again, and he missed it terribly. His novels were banned in his home country, but among Russian expatriates he came to be known as one of the greatest writers of his generation. Then, at the outbreak of World War II, he sailed to America and arrived in New York City poor and almost completely unknown.
He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. He eventually got a job at Cornell University teaching modern literature, where he forced his students to memorize the details of Madame Bovary's hairdo, a diagram of Anna Karenina's railway carriage, and a map of James Joyce's Dublin.
He wanted to distinguish himself as a writer in America. He decided to switch to writing in English, but he found the transition agonizing. In one of his first poems in English, about giving up the Russian language, Nabokov wrote, "Just here we part, / softest of tongues, my true one, all my own ... / And I am left to grope for heart and art / and start anew with clumsy tools of stone."
In the summer of 1951, he began to work on a novel that his friends told him he should never publish because it would be too scandalous—it was about a middle-aged man who falls in love with a 12-year-old girl. The novel was indeed a scandal when it came out in 1955, but the scandal made it a huge success and allowed Nabokov to quit his job teaching. And that novel was, of course, Lolita.

Herman Melville, 1819 - 1891

The man who wrote "Call me Ishmael," one of the most famous first lines in literature: Herman Melville, was born in New York City, in 1819. Melville's father was a successful import merchant who told his eight children adventure stories of sailing and distant places. But his father died when Melville was young, and from the age of 12, he worked to support himself as a clerk, farmhand, and teacher. When he was 20, he worked as a cabin boy on a ship that went to Liverpool and back, the first of his many voyages. In 1841, he joined the crew of the whaler Acushnet, which sailed around Cape Horn and through the South Pacific. He spent time as a clerk in Honolulu, and for a while he lived with the Typee people of the Marquesas Islands, a tribe of cannibals who treated Melville well. Inspired by his adventures at sea, Melville returned to his mother's house in New York and settled down to write about his travels. The result was his novel Typee (1846). It was rejected by a Boston publisher, so Melville published it in London, where it became an immediate best seller. He wrote a sequel called Omoo (1847), which was also a big success. But then Melville decided to write for himself instead of to please his readers, so his third book, Mardi and a Voyage Thither (1849), was more psychological, less romantic, and readers were disappointed. He continued to write and publish, but he was never as popular again.
Melville got married and had four children, and the family bought a farm in Massachusetts, where Melville became friends with Nathaniel Hawthorne. Melville was working on Moby-Dick, his story of Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the great white whale, and Hawthorne encouraged him to make the novel an allegory, not just an account of whaling.
Melville became consumed with writing Moby-Dick. He would work all day without eating until evening, and he would bellow across the house, "Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand!" He was elated when he finished his novel (published in 1851) and considered it his greatest work yet. He wrote to Hawthorne, "I have written a wicked book and feel as spotless as the lamb." But it was a flop. Readers didn't like it. His American publisher only printed 3,000 copies, and most of those never even sold; in 1853, a warehouse fire destroyed the plates and the unsold books, and the publisher refused to reset the book or compensate Melville.
Melville wrote two more novels just to make money, and he said the experience was like "sawing wood," but he still couldn't make enough to live on. His work became darker and more psychological, and it sold even fewer copies, and Melville began to get depressed. His last major work was The Confidence Man (1857), a biting satire of American life. He wrote poetry but couldn't find a publisher, so he had to publish it himself. He moved to New York and got a job as a customs inspector on the New York docks. The manuscript of his final work, Billy Budd, was found in his desk after he died. At the time of his death, Melville had been almost completely forgotten, and The New York Times called him "Henry Melville" in his obituary. Moby-Dick is now considered one of the great American novels.
In Moby-Dick, he wrote, "Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air."
He said, "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
And, "Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian."


Poem: "Art," by Herman Melville.
Art
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt-a wind to freeze;
Sad patience-joyous energies;
Humility-yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity-reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel-Art.

______

From Moby-Dick Capter 36:

In this passage, Captain Ahab is talking with Starbuck, the first mate of the Pequod, a rational man who opposes Ahab's obsession.

"Captain Ahab," said Starbuck, who, with Stubb and Flask, had thus far been eyeing his superior with increasing surprise, but at last seemed struck with a thought which somewhat explained all the wonder. "Captain Ahab, I have heard of Moby Dick- but it was not Moby Dick that took off thy leg?"

"Who told thee that?" cried Ahab; then pausing, "Aye, Starbuck; aye, my hearties all round; it was Moby Dick that dismasted me; Moby Dick that brought me to this dead stump I stand on now. Aye, aye," he shouted with a terrific, loud, animal sob, like that of a heart-stricken moose; "Aye, aye! it was that accursed white whale that razeed me; made a poor pegging lubber of me for ever and a day!" Then tossing both arms, with measureless imprecations he shouted out: "Aye, aye! and I'll chase him round Good Hope, and round the Horn, and round the Norway Maelstrom, and round perdition's flames before I give him up. And this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth, till he spouts black blood and rolls fin out. What say ye, men, will ye splice hands on it, now? I think ye do look brave."

"Aye, aye!" shouted the harpooneers and seamen, running closer to the excited old man: "A sharp eye for the white whale; a sharp lance for Moby Dick!"

"God bless ye," he seemed to half sob and half shout. "God bless ye, men. Steward! go draw the great measure of grog. But what's this long face about, Mr. Starbuck; wilt thou not chase the white whale! art not game for Moby Dick?"

"I am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? it will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market."

"Nantucket market! Hoot! But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer. If money's to be the measurer, man, and the accountants have computed their great counting-house the globe, by girdling it with guineas, one to every three parts of an inch; then, let me tell thee, that my vengeance will fetch a great premium here!"

"He smites his chest," whispered Stubb, "what's that for? methinks it rings most vast, but hollow."

"Vengeance on a dumb brute!" cried Starbuck, "that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous."

"Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.


_______

Walt Whitman, 1819 - 1892

Poet Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York (1819). He grew up in Brooklyn and lived in New York City for most of his life. He began working as a printer's assistant from a very young age, and in the '40s and '50s he worked for a series of newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He always loved New York. In one editorial, he wrote that New York City was "the great place of the Western continent, the heart, the brain, the focus, the main spring, the pinnacle, the extremity, the no more beyond of the New World."
It was in New York City, in 1855, that Whitman published the first edition of his poetry collection Leaves of Grass. He couldn't find anyone to publish it for him so he sold a house and used the money to publish it himself. There was no publisher's name or author's name on the cover, just a picture of Whitman himself. He wrote the poems in a new style, a kind of free verse without rhyme or meter. He said in one preface to the book, "Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves."
Leaves of Grass got mostly bad reviews, but Ralph Waldo Emerson called it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed." Whitman printed Emerson's comment on the second edition of the book, and he wrote an anonymous review of it himself, hoping to spark sales.
Whitman continued to add poems to Leaves of Grass and publish it in different editions throughout his life. It eventually went through nine different editions; Whitman compared the finished book to a cathedral that took years to build, or a tree with visible circles of growth. In the 1880s, the Society for the Suppression of Vice called it immoral in a Boston newspaper, and that's when it finally started to sell. Whitman used the money to buy a cottage in Camden, where he spent the rest of his life.


Leaves of Grass. 1900.

83. I Sit and Look Out


I SIT and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth; 5
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent. 10

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.

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day was last week. The day on which we celebrate love and especially romantic love. This day is linked to Greco-Roman February holidays devoted to fertility, in particular, the festival of Lupercalia. The romantic overtone of the holiday is in commemoration of St. Valentine, a Roman priest who was martyred on February 14 in 269 A.D. It's worth noting that there are many different Christian martyrs named "Valentine," and until 1969, the Catholic Church recognized 11 different Valentine's days.

For Valentine's Day every February florists in the United States import several million pounds of roses from South America. About thirty-six million boxes of chocolates will be given as gifts today.
The holiday comes, in part, from the ancient Romans' holiday honoring Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, on the night before the Feast of Lupercalia. Roman girls would put slips of paper with their names on them into a clay jar, and the boys would choose their partner for the festival by taking a slip from the jar. This was one of the few times girls and boys were allowed to socialize, and the dancing and games often evolved into courtship and marriage.
Tradition has it that Valentine's Day as we know it began sometime in the middle of the third century. Claudius II of Rome was waging several wars and needed to recruit more soldiers for his armies. He thought that many men were reluctant to join because they didn't want to leave their wives and families, and so he temporarily banned engagements and marriages. Saint Valentine was working as a priest at the time and he and his partner Saint Marius broke the law and secretly married couples in small, candlelit rooms, whispering the ceremonial rites. Eventually Saint Valentine was caught and sentenced to death. While awaiting his punishment he would talk with the young daughter of the prison guard whose father allowed her to visit occasionally. Saint Valentine was killed on February 14, 269 A.D., but he had left a note for the guard's daughter, signed, "Love from your Valentine."
Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, didn't write much literature in her lifetime, just a novel and a few short stories, but some of her letters to her husband read like love poems.
She once wrote: "I look down the tracks and see you coming—and out of every haze and mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me. Without you, dearest dearest, I couldn't see or hear or feel or think—or live—I love you so, and I'm never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night."

Love Poem

by Donald Hall born 20 November 1928

When you fall in love,
you jockey your horse
into the flaming barn.

You hire a cabin
on the shiny Titanic.
You tease the black bear.

Reading the Monitor,
you scan the obituaries
looking for your name.

In 1918, e. e. cummings fell in love with his friend's wife, Elaine Thayer. They had an affair and later got married. The marriage only lasted a few years, but cummings wrote some of his most passionate poems to her, including:
"i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss"

The American poet Anne Bradstreet immigrated with her husband to America in 1630. Her husband was a magistrate for the Massachusetts colony, and spent long periods away from home. Anne missed him terribly, and wrote many love poems to him while he was away, including "To My Dear and Loving Husband" (1678). She wrote:
"If ever two were one then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee.
If ever wife were happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold
My love is such that rivers cannot quench
Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense"

LEONARD MICHAELS, 1933 - 2003

Short story writer and novelist LEONARD MICHAELS was born in New York City, 1933. He grew up in the Lower East Side, the son of immigrant Polish Jews, and spoke only Yiddish until he was about five or six years old. His mother introduced him to English when she bought a complete set of Charles Dickens. He said, "If you can imagine a little boy listening to his mother, who can hardly speak English, reading Dickens hour after hour in the most extraordinary accent, it might help to account for my peculiar ear." He's the author of Going Places (1969), and I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (1975).

Marianne Moore quotes

“The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; not in silence, but restraint”

“Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.”

“There never was a war that was not inward; I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war.”

“Impatience is the mark of independence, not of bondage”

“Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time..

“Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt”


“Poetry is all nouns and verbs”

“Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.”

“If you will tell me why the fen appears impassable, I then will tell you why I think that I can cross it if I try”

“The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease.”