Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849– November 19, 1887) was an American poet born in New York City. She is best known for “The New Colossus”, a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus’s death. Lazarus was born into a large Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family, the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus and Esther Nathan, The Lazarus family was from Germany, and the Nathan family was originally from Portugal and resident in New York long before the American Revolution.

William James “Billy” Collins (born March 22, 1941) is an American poet, appointed as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He is a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York and is the Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute, Florida. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. He is (in 2015) a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton. Early years Collins was born in Manhattan to William and Katherine Collins and grew up in Queens and White Plains. Collins was a very late child who parents were both 39 at the time, which was very late back then. William, his dad was from a big family from Ireland and Katherine his mom was from Canada. Katherine Collins was a nurse who stopped working to raise the couple’s only child. Mrs. Collins had the ability to recite verses on almost any subject, which she often did, and cultivated in her young son the love of words, both written and spoken. Billy Collins attended Archbishop Stepinac High School in White Plains and received a B.A. in English from the College of the Holy Cross in 1963; he received his M.A. and Ph.D in Romantic Poetry from the University of California, Riverside. His professors at Riverside included Victorian scholar and poet Robert Peters. In 1975 Collins founded The Mid-Atlantic Review with his friend Walter Blanco and Steve Bailey. As a kid in middle school Collins was writing dark, Gothic-poetry. Collins started to get more into poetry because his dad would bring Poetry magazine home from his work. There he came under the influence of contemporary poets like Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov and Reed Whittemore.During his adolescence he was influence by Beat Generation with poems like “Howl”; who were a group of authors around the 50’s after WWII who would write about materialism, human condition and religion. Career Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College in the Bronx, where he joined the faculty in 1968. Additionally, he is a founding Advisory Board member of the CUNY Institute for Irish-American Studies at Lehman College. He also has taught and served as a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York as well as teaching workshops across the U.S. and in Ireland. Collins is a member of the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook Southampton, where (2015) he teaches poetry workshops. Collins was named U.S. Poet Laureate in 2001 and held the title until 2003. Collins served as Poet Laureate for the State of New York from 2004 until 2006. Collins enjoyed a stint with the Winter Park Institute in Winter Park, Florida, an affiliate of Rollins College. Named the Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Winter Park Institute, his affiliation that began in 2008 ended in 2015 when the college’s interim president, Craig MacAllaster, emailed Collins saying his contract would not be renewed because of budget issues. Collins invited friends of his to be guests at the Institute, including such luminaries as Pulitzer Prize winners Jules Feiffer and Marsha Norman, Paul Simon, Sir Paul McCartney, and Jane Pauley. In 2012, Collins became Poetry Consultant for Smithsonian Magazine. During the summer of 2013, Collins guest hosted Garrison Keillor’s popular daily radio broadcast, The Writer’s Alamanac, on NPR. Collins has been invited to read at The White House three times—in 2001, 2011, and 2014. In 2014 he traveled to Russia as a cultural emissary of the U.S. State Department. In 2013 and 2015, Collins toured with the singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, performing on stage with her in a music-poetry-conversation format. Collins and Paul Simon have engaged in four onstage conversations about poetry, music, and lyrics, starting in 2008. The conversations were held in 2008 at New York’s 92nd Street Y and The Winter Park Institute, in 2013 at the Chautauqua Institution, and in 2013 at Emory University as part of the Richard Ellman Lectures in Modern Literature, where Simon was the 2013 Richard Ellman Lecturer. Collins presented a TED talk, Everyday moments, caught in time at TED 2012. Collins, as one of the Favorite 100 TED speakers of all time, was invited to give another TED talk at TED 2014 in Vancouver, Canada. As U.S. Poet Laureate, Collins read his poem The Names at a special joint session of the United States Congress on September 6, 2002, held to remember the victims of the 9/11 attacks. Though, unlike their British counterparts, U.S. poets laureate are not asked or expected to write occasional poetry, Collins was asked by the Librarian of Congress to write a poem especially for that event. Collins initially refused to read “The Names” in public, though he has read it two times in public since 2002. He vowed not to include it in any of his books, refusing to capitalize on the 9/11 attacks. However, “The Names” was included in the The Poets Laureate Anthology put out by the Library of Congress, for which Collins wrote the foreword. The only book-published version of “The Names”, it contains a number of regrettable typographical errors. The poem also appeared in the New York Times, September 6, 2002. Collins finally agreed to include “The Names” in his new and selected volume Aimless Love in 2013. As Poet Laureate, Collins instituted the program Poetry 180 for high schools. Collins chose 180 poems for the program and the accompanying book, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry—one for each day of the school year. Collins edited a second anthology, 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day to refresh the supply of available poems. The program is online, and poems are available there for no charge. In 1997, Collins recorded The Best Cigarette, a collection of 34 of his poems, that would become a bestseller. In 2005, the CD was re-released under a Creative Commons license, allowing free, non-commercial distribution of the recording. He also recorded two of his poems for the audio versions of Garrison Keillor’s collection Good Poems (2002). Collins has appeared on Keillor’s radio show, A Prairie Home Companion, numerous times, where he gained a portion of his large following. In 2005, Collins recorded Billy Collins Live: A Performance in New York City. Collins was introduced by his friend, actor Bill Murray. Billy Collins has been called “The most popular poet in America” by the New York Times. When he moved from the University of Pittsburgh Press to Random House, the advance he received shocked the poetry world—a six-figure sum for a three-book deal, virtually unheard of in poetry. The deal secured for Collins through his literary agent, Chris Calhoun, then of Sterling Lord Literistic, with the editor Daniel Menaker, remained the talk of the poetry world, and indeed the literary world, for quite some time. Over the years, the U.S. magazine Poetry has awarded Collins several prizes in recognition of poems they publish. During the 1990s, Collins won five such prizes. The magazine also selected him as “Poet of the Year” in 1994. In 2005 Collins was the first annual recipient of its Mark Twain Prize for Humor in Poetry. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts and in 1993, from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. A major accomplishment of his is in 2002, Collins was asked to write a poem commemorating the first anniversary of the fall of the Twin Towers on September 11. The reading was in front of a joint session of Congress held outside of Washington D.C. One of his most critically acclaimed works, “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” has been added to the preserved works of the United States Native American literary registry as being deemed a culturally significant poem. The poem has been included on national Advance Placement exams for high school students. In 2012, Collins appeared as himself in an episode of the PBS animated series Martha Speaks. Collins is on the editorial board at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Most recently he contributed to the 30th anniversary edition. He is on the advisory board at the Southern Review, and is similarly named in other journals. Awards and honors 1983 Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts 1986 Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts 1991 National Poetry Series publication prize. Winner for Questions About Angels 1992 New York Public Library “Literary Lion” 1993 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation 1994 Poetry magazine’s “Poet of the Year” 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Academy of American Poets. Shortlist for The Art of Drowning 2001 American Irish Historical Society Cultural Award 2001–2003 United States Poet Laureate 2004–2006 New York State Poet Laureate 2005 Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry 2013 Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry 2014 Norman Mailer Prize for Poetry Other Awards include these from Poetry magazine: The Oscar Blumenthal Prize The Bess Hokin Prize The Frederick Bock Prize The Levinson Prize Poetry collections * Pokerface (1977) * Video Poems (1980) * The Apple That Astonished Paris. University of Arkansas Press. 1988. ISBN 978-1-55728-024-4. See also version printed by University of Arkansas Press, 2006, ISBN 978-1-55728-823-3 * The Art of Drowning. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-8229-5567-2. * Picnic, Lightning. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1998. ISBN 978-0822956709. * Questions About Angels. University of Pittsburgh Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0822956983. * Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. Picador. 2000. ISBN 978-0330376501. * Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems. Random House. 2001–2002. ISBN 978-0-375-75519-4. * Nine Horses. Random House, Inc. 2002. ISBN 978-1-58836-278-0. * The Trouble with Poetry. 2005. ; Random House, Inc., 2007, ISBN 978-0-375-75521-7 * She Was Just Seventeen. Modern Haiku Press. 2006. ISBN 978-0974189420. * Ballistics. 2008. ISBN 978-1-4000-6491-5. * Horoscopes for the Dead. Random House. 2011. ISBN 978-1-4000-6492-2. * Aimless Love. Random House. 2013. ISBN 978-0-6796-4405-7. * Voyage. Bunker Hill Publishing. 2014. ISBN 978-1-59373-154-0. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Collins

John Lawrence Ashbery (born July 28, 1927) is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Renowned for its postmodern complexity and opacity, Ashbery's work still proves controversial. Ashbery has stated that he wishes his work to be accessible to as many people as possible, and not to be a private dialogue with himself. At the same time, he once joked that some critics still view him as "a harebrained, homegrown surrealist whose poetry defies even the rules and logic of Surrealism." Langdon Hammer, chairman of the English Department at Yale University, wrote in 2008, "No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery" and "No American poet has had a larger, more diverse vocabulary, not Whitman, not Pound." Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared Ashbery to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible". Life Ashbery was born in Rochester, New York, the son of Helen (née Lawrence), a biology teacher, and Chester Frederick Ashbery, a farmer. He was raised on a farm near Lake Ontario; his brother died when they were children. Ashbery was educated at Deerfield Academy, an all-boys school, where he read such poets as W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas and began writing poetry. Two of his poems were published in Poetry magazine under the name of a classmate who had submitted them without Ashbery's knowledge or permission. Ashbery also published a handful of poems, including a sonnet about his frustrated love for a fellow student, and a piece of short fiction in the school newspaper, the Deerfield Scroll. His first ambition was to be a painter. From the age of 11 until he was 15 Ashbery took weekly classes at the art museum in Rochester. Ashbery at a 2007 tribute to W.H. Auden at Cooper Union in New York City. Ashbery graduated in 1949 with an A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College, where he was a member of the Harvard Advocate, the university's literary magazine, and the Signet Society. He wrote his senior thesis on the poetry of W. H. Auden. At Harvard he befriended fellow writers Kenneth Koch, Barbara Epstein, V. R. Lang, Frank O'Hara and Edward Gorey, and was a classmate of Robert Creeley, Robert Bly and Peter Davison. Ashbery went on to study briefly at New York University, and received an M.A. from Columbia in 1951. After working as a copywriter in New York from 1951 to 1955, from the mid-1950s, when he received a Fulbright Fellowship, through 1965, Ashbery lived in France. He was an editor of the 12 issues of Art and Literature (1964–67) and the New Poetry issue of Harry Mathews' Locus Solus (# 3/4; 1962). To make ends meet he translated French murder mysteries, served as the art editor for the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune and was an art critic for Art International (1960–65) and a Paris correspondent for Art News (1963–66), when Thomas Hess took over as editor. During this period he lived with the French poet Pierre Martory, whose books Every Question but One (1990), The Landscape is behind the Door (1994) and The Landscapist he has translated (2008), as he has Arthur Rimbaud (Illuminations), Max Jacob (The Dice Cup), Pierre Reverdy (Haunted House), and many titles by Raymond Roussel. After returning to the United States, he continued his career as an art critic for New York and Newsweek magazines while also serving on the editorial board of ARTNews until 1972. Several years later, he began a stint as an editor at Partisan Review, serving from 1976 to 1980. During the fall of 1963, Ashbery became acquainted with Andy Warhol at a scheduled poetry reading at the Literary Theatre in New York. He had previously written favorable reviews of Warhol's art. That same year he reviewed Warhol's Flowers exhibition at Galerie Illeana Sonnabend in Paris, describing Warhol's visit to Paris as "the biggest transatlantic fuss since Oscar Wilde brought culture to Buffalo in the nineties". Ashbery returned to New York near the end of 1965 and was welcomed with a large party at the Factory. He became close friends with poet Gerard Malanga, Warhol's assistant, on whom he had an important influence as a poet. In 1967 his poem Europe was used as the central text in Eric Salzman's Foxes and Hedgehogs as part of the New Image of Sound series at Hunter College, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. When the poet sent Salzman Three Madrigals in 1968, the composer featured them in the seminal Nude Paper Sermon, released by Nonesuch Records in 1989. In the early 1970s, Ashbery began teaching at Brooklyn College, where his students included poet John Yau. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983. In the 1980s, he moved to Bard College, where he was the Charles P. Stevenson, Jr., Professor of Languages and Literature, until 2008, when he retired; since that time, he has continued to win awards, present readings, and work with graduate and undergraduates at many other institutions. He was the poet laureate of New York State from 2001 to 2003, and also served for many years as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He serves on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions. He was a Millet Writing Fellow at Wesleyan University, in 2010, and participated in Wesleyan's Distinguished Writers Series. Ashbery lives in New York City and Hudson, New York, with his partner, David Kermani. Work Ashbery's long list of awards began with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1956. The selection, by W. H. Auden, of Ashbery's first collection, Some Trees, later caused some controversy. His early work shows the influence of Auden, along with Wallace Stevens, Boris Pasternak, and many of the French surrealists (his translations from French literature are numerous). In the late 1950s, John Bernard Myers, co-owner of the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, categorized the common traits of Ashbery's avant-garde poetry, as well as that of Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, Barbara Guest, Kenward Elmslie and others, as constituting a "New York School". Ashbery published some work in the avant-garde little magazine Nomad at the beginning of the 1960s. He then wrote two collections while in France, the highly controversial The Tennis Court Oath (1962) and Rivers and Mountains (1966), before returning to New York to write The Double Dream of Spring, published in 1970. Increasing critical recognition in the 1970s transformed Ashbery from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets (though still one of its most controversial). After the publication of Three Poems (1973) came Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror, for which he was awarded the three major American poetry awards: the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award). The collection's title poem is considered to be one of the masterpieces of late-20th-century American poetic literature. His subsequent collection, the more difficult Houseboat Days (1977), reinforced Ashbery's reputation, as did 1979's As We Know, which contains the long, double-columned poem "Litany". By the 1980s and 1990s, Ashbery had become a central figure in American and more broadly English-language poetry, as his number of imitators attested. Ashbery's works are characterized by a free-flowing, often disjunctive syntax; extensive linguistic play, often infused with considerable humor; and a prosaic, sometimes disarmingly flat or parodic tone. The play of the human mind is the subject of a great many of his poems. Ashbery once said that his goal was "to produce a poem that the critic cannot even talk about". Formally, the earliest poems show the influence of conventional poetic practice, yet by The Tennis Court Oath a much more revolutionary engagement with form appears. Ashbery returned to something approaching a reconciliation between tradition and innovation with many of the poems in The Double Dream of Spring, though his Three Poems are written in long blocks of prose. Although he has never again approached the radical experimentation of The Tennis Court Oath poems or "The Skaters" and "Into the Dusk-Charged Air" from his collection Rivers and Mountains, syntactic and semantic experimentation, linguistic expressiveness, deft, often abrupt shifts of register, and insistent wit remain consistent elements of his work. Ashbery's art criticism has been collected in the 1989 volume Reported Sightings, Art Chronicles 1957-1987, edited by the poet David Bergman. He has written one novel, A Nest of Ninnies, with fellow poet James Schuyler, and in his 20s and 30s penned several plays, three of which have been collected in Three Plays (1978). Ashbery's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University were published as Other Traditions in 2000. A larger collection of his prose writings, Selected Prose, appeared in 2005. In 2008, his Collected Poems 1956–1987 was published as part of the Library of America series. Poetry Collections * Turandot and other poems (1953) * Some Trees (1956), winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize * The Tennis Court Oath (1962) * Rivers and Mountains (1966) * The Double Dream of Spring (1970) * Three Poems (1972) * The Vermont Notebook (1975), illustrated prose poems * Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award Houseboat Days (1977) * As We Know (1979) * Shadow Train (1981) * A Wave (1984), awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Bollingen Prize * April Galleons (1987) * Flow Chart (1991), book-length poem * Hotel Lautréamont (1992) * And the Stars Were Shining (1994) * Can You Hear, Bird? (1995) * Wakefulness (1998) * Girls on the Run (1999), a book-length poem inspired by the work of Henry Darger * Your Name Here (2000) * As Umbrellas Follow Rain (2001) * Chinese Whispers (2002) * Where Shall I Wander (2005) (finalist for the National Book Award) * Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems (2007) (winner of the 2008 International Griffin Poetry Prize) * A Worldly Country (2007) * Planisphere (2009) * Collected Poems 1956-87 (Carcanet Press) (2010), ed. Mark Ford Quick Question (2012) * Breezeway (2015) * No i wiesz (1993) (translated into Polish by Bohdan Zadura, Andrzej Sosnowski and Piotr Sommer) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ashbery

Adelaide Crapsey (September 9, 1878– October 8, 1914) was an American poet. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was raised in Rochester, New York, daughter of Adelaide T. Crapsey and Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who had been transferred from New York City to Rochester.

Phillis Wheatley was the first black poet in America to publish a book. She was born around 1753 in West Africa and brought to New England in 1761, where John Wheatley of Boston purchased her as a gift for his wife. Although they brought her into the household as a slave, the Wheatleys took a great interest in Phillis's education. Many biographers have pointed to her precocity; Wheatley learned to read and write English by the age of nine, and she became familiar with Latin, Greek, the Bible, and selected classics at an early age. She began writing poetry at thirteen, modeling her work on the English poets of the time, particularly John Milton, Thomas Gray, and Alexander Pope. Her poem "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield" was published as a broadside in cities such as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia and garnered Wheatley national acclaim. This poem was also printed in London. Over the next few years, she would print a number of broadsides elegizing prominent English and colonial leaders. Wheatley's doctor suggested that a sea voyage might improve her delicate health, so in 1771 she accompanied Nathaniel Wheatley on a trip to London. She was well received in London and wrote to a friend of the "unexpected and unmerited civility and complaisance with which I was treated by all." In 1773, thirty-nine of her poems were published in London as Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. The book includes many elegies as well as poems on Christian themes; it also includes poems dealing with race, such as the often-anthologized "On Being Brought from Africa to America." She returned to America in 1773. After Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley died, Phillis was left to support herself as a seamstress and poet. It is unclear precisely when Wheatley was freed from slavery, although scholars suggest it occurred between 1774 and 1778. In 1776, Wheatley wrote a letter and poem in support of George Washington; he replied with an invitation to visit him in Cambridge, stating that he would be "happy to see a person so favored by the muses." In 1778, she married John Peters, who kept a grocery store. They had three children together, all of whom died young. Because of the war and the poor economy, Wheatley experienced difficulty publishing her poems. She solicited subscribers for a new volume that would include thirty-three new poems and thirteen letters, but was unable to raise the funds. Phillis Wheatley, who had once been internationally celebrated, died alone in a boarding house in 1784. She was thirty-one years old. Many of the poems for her proposed second volume disappeared and have never been recovered.

Richard Gary Brautigan (January 30, 1935 – ca. September 16, 1984) was an American novelist, poet, and short story writer. His work often employs black comedy, parody, and satire. He is best known for his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America. Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, the only child of Bernard Frederick “Ben” Brautigan, Jr., a factory worker and laborer, and Lulu Mary “Mary Lou” Keho, a waitress. In 1984, at age 49, Richard Brautigan had moved to Bolinas, California, where he was living alone in a large, old house that he had bought with his earnings years earlier. He died of a self-inflicted .44 Magnum gunshot wound to the head.

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American man of letters. Perhaps best known as a poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance), he is also an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. He has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder served as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and he also served for a time on the California Arts Council. Early life Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. Snyder is of German, Scots-Irish, and English ancestry. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There they tended dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles, until moving to Portland, Oregon ten years later. At the age of seven, Snyder was laid up for four months by an accident. "So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he recalled in interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious — I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're eighteen. And I didn't stop." Also during his ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature. In 1942, following his parents' divorce, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon with his mother and his younger sister, Anthea. Their mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey), worked during this period as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of Gary's boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy boy, also at the Oregonian. Also, during his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor, and went mountain climbing with the Mazamas youth group. Climbing remained an interest of his, especially during his twenties and thirties. In 1947, he started attending Reed College on a scholarship. Here he met, and for a time, roomed with the education author Carl Proujan and Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent the summer of 1948 working as a seaman. He joined the now defunct Marine Cooks and Stewards union to get this job, and would later work as a seaman in the mid-1950s to gain experience of other cultures in port cities. Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months, and divorced in 1952. While attending Reed, Snyder did folklore research on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated with a dual degree in anthropology and literature in 1951. He spent the following few summers working as a timber scaler at Warm Springs, developing relationships with its people that were less rooted in academia. This experience formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in the book The Back Country. He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East's traditional attitudes toward nature. He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology. (Snyder also began practicing self-taught Zen meditation.) He left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to 'sink or swim as a poet'. Snyder worked for two summers in the North Cascades in Washington as a fire lookout, on Crater Mountain in 1952 and Sourdough Mountain in 1953 (both locations on the upper Skagit River). His attempts to get another lookout stint in 1954 (at the peak of McCarthyism), however, failed. He had been barred from working for the government, due to his association with the Marine Cooks and Stewards. Instead, he went back to Warm Springs to work in logging as a chokersetter (fastening cables to logs). This experience contributed to his Myths and Texts and the essay Ancient Forests of the Far West. The Beats Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his growing interest in Zen. Snyder's reading of the writings of D.T. Suzuki had in fact been a factor in his decision not to continue as a graduate-student in anthropology, and in 1953 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley to study Asian culture and languages. He studied ink and wash painting under Chiura Obata and Tang Dynasty poetry under Ch'en Shih-hsiang. Snyder continued to spend summers working in the forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. He spent some months in 1955 and 1956 living in a cabin (which he dubbed "Marin-an") outside Mill Valley, California with Jack Kerouac. It was also at this time that Snyder was an occasional student at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where Saburō Hasegawa and Alan Watts, among others, were teaching. Hasegawa introduced Snyder to the treatment of landscape painting as a meditative practice. This inspired Snyder to attempt something equivalent in poetry, and with Hasegawa's encouragement, he began work on Mountains and Rivers without End, which would be completed and published forty years later. During these years, Snyder was writing and collecting his own work, as well as embarking on the translation of the "Cold Mountain" poems by the 8th-century Chinese recluse Han Shan; this work appeared in chapbook-form in 1969, under the title Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems. Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when the latter sought Snyder out on the recommendation of Kenneth Rexroth. Then, through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac came to know each other. This period provided the materials for Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder was the inspiration for the novel's main character, Japhy Ryder, in the same way Neal Cassady had inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. As the large majority of people in the Beat movement had urban backgrounds, writers like Ginsberg and Kerouac found Snyder, with his backcountry and manual-labor experience and interest in things rural, a refreshing and almost exotic individual. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later referred to Snyder as 'the Thoreau of the Beat Generation'. Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at the poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco (October 7, 1955) that heralded what was to become known as the San Francisco Renaissance. This also marked Snyder's first involvement with the Beats, although he was not a member of the original New York circle, but rather entered the scene through his association with Kenneth Rexroth. As recounted in Kerouac's Dharma Bums, even at age 25 Snyder felt he could have a role in the fateful future meeting of West and East. Snyder's first book, Riprap, which drew on his experiences as a forest lookout and on the trail-crew in Yosemite, was published in 1959. Japan and India Independently, some of the Beats, including Philip Whalen, had become interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the more serious scholars of the subject among them, preparing in every way he could think of for eventual study in Japan. In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan, but the State Department refused to issue him a passport, informing him that "it has been alleged you are a Communist." A subsequent District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruling forced a change in policy, and Snyder got his passport. In the end, his expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, for whom he was supposed to work; but initially he served as personal attendant and English tutor to Zen abbot Miura Isshu, at Rinko-in, a temple in Shokoku-ji in Kyoto, where Dwight Goddard and R. H. Blyth had preceded him. Mornings, after zazen, sutra chanting, and chores for Miura, he took Japanese classes, bringing his spoken Japanese up to a level sufficient for kōan study. He developed a friendship with Philip Yampolsky, who took him around Kyoto. In early July 1955, he took refuge and requested to become Miura's disciple, thus formally becoming a Buddhist. He returned to California via the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Sri Lanka and various Pacific Islands, in 1958, voyaging as a crewman in the engine room on the oil freighter Sappa Creek, and took up residence at Marin-an again. He turned one room into a zendo, with about six regular participants. In early June, he met the poet Joanne Kyger. She became his girlfriend, and eventually his wife. In 1959, he shipped for Japan again, where he rented a cottage outside Kyoto. He became the first foreign disciple of Oda Sesso Roshi, the new abbot of Daitoku-ji. He married Kyger on February 28, 1960, immediately after her arrival, which Sasaki insisted they do, if they were to live together and be associated with the First Zen Institute of America. Snyder and Joanne Kyger were married from 1960 to 1965. During the period between 1956 and 1969, Snyder went back and forth between California and Japan, studying Zen, working on translations with Ruth Fuller Sasaki, and finally living for a while with a group of other people on the small, volcanic island of Suwanosejima. His previous study of written Chinese assisted his immersion in the Zen tradition (with its roots in Tang Dynasty China) and enabled him to take on certain professional projects while he was living in Japan. Snyder received the Zen precepts and a dharma name (Chofu, "Listen to the Wind"), and lived sometimes as a de facto monk, but never registered to become a priest and planned eventually to return to the United States to 'turn the wheel of the dharma'. During this time, he published a collection of his poems from the early to mid '50s, Myths & Texts (1960), and Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965). This last was the beginning of a project that he was to continue working on until the late 1990s. Much of Snyder's poetry expresses experiences, environments, and insights involved with the work he has done for a living: logger, fire-lookout, steam-freighter crew, translator, carpenter, and itinerant poet, among other things. During his years in Japan, Snyder was also initiated into Shugendo, a form of ancient Japanese animism, (see also Yamabushi). In the early 1960s he traveled for six months through India with his wife Joanne, Allen Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky. Snyder and Joanne Kyger separated soon after a trip to India, and divorced in 1965. Dharma Bums In the 1950s, Snyder took part in the rise of a strand of Buddhist anarchism emerging from the Beat movement. Snyder was the inspiration for the character Japhy Rider in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958). Snyder had spent considerable time in Japan studying Zen Buddhism, and in 1961 published an essay, Buddhist Anarchism, where he described the connection he saw between these two traditions, originating in different parts of the world: "The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void." He advocated "using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence" and defended "the right of individuals to smoke ganja, eat peyote, be polygymous, polyandrous or homosexual" which he saw as being banned by "the Judaeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West". Kitkitdizze In 1966, Snyder joined Allen Ginsberg, Zentatsu Richard Baker, Roshi of the San Francisco Zen Center, and Donald Walters, a.k.a. "Swami Kriyananda," to buy 100 acres (0.40 km2) in the Sierra foothills, north of Nevada City, California. In 1970, this would become his home, with the Snyder family's portion being named Kitkitdizze. Snyder spent the summers of 1967 and 1968 with a group of Japanese back-to-the-land drop-outs known as "the Tribe" on Suwanosejima (a small Japanese island in the East China Sea), where they combed the beaches, gathered edible plants, and fished. On the island, on August 6, 1967, he married Masa Uehara, whom he had met in Osaka a year earlier. In 1968, they moved to California with their infant son, Kai (born April 1968). Their second son, Gen, was born a year later. In 1971, they moved to the San Juan Ridge in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada of Northern California, near the South Yuba River, where they and friends built a house that drew on rural-Japanese and Native-American architectural ideas. In 1967 his book The Back Country appeared, again mainly a collection of poems stretching back over about fifteen years. Snyder devoted a section at the end of the book to his translations of eighteen poems by Kenji Miyazawa. Later life and writings Regarding Wave appeared in 1969, a stylistic departure offering poems that were more emotional, metaphoric, and lyrical. From the late 1960s, the content of Snyder's poetry increasingly had to do with family, friends, and community. He continued to publish poetry throughout the 1970s, much of it reflecting his re-immersion in life on the American continent and his involvement in the back-to-the-land movement in the Sierra foothills. His 1974 book Turtle Island, titled after a Native American name for the North American continent, won a Pulitzer Prize. It also influenced numerous West Coast Generation X writers, including Alex Steffen, Bruce Barcott and Mark Morford. His 1983 book Axe Handles, won an American Book Award. Snyder wrote numerous essays setting forth his views on poetry, culture, social experimentation, and the environment. Many of these were collected in Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work (1980), The Practice of the Wild (1990), A Place in Space (1995), and The Gary Snyder Reader (1999). In 1979, Snyder published He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth, based on his Reed thesis. Snyder's journals from his travel in India in the mid-1960s appeared in 1983 under the title Passage Through India. In these, his wide-ranging interests in cultures, natural history, religions, social critique, contemporary America, and hands-on aspects of rural life, as well as his ideas on literature, were given full-blown articulation. In 1986, Snyder became a professor in the writing-program at the University of California, Davis. Snyder is now professor emeritus of English. Snyder was married to Uehara for twenty-two years; the couple divorced in 1989. Snyder married Carole Lynn Koda (October 3, 1947 – June 29, 2006), who would write Homegrown: Thirteen brothers and sisters, a century in America, in 1991, and remained married to her until her death of cancer. She had been born in the third generation of a successful Japanese-American farming family, noted for its excellent rice. She shared Buddhism, extensive travels, and work with Snyder, and performed independent work as a naturalist. As Snyder's involvement in environmental issues and his teaching grew, he seemed to move away from poetry for much of the 1980s and early 1990s. However, in 1996 he published the complete Mountains and Rivers Without End, a mixture of the lyrical and epic modes celebrating the act of inhabitation on a specific place on the planet. This work was written over a 40-year period. It has been translated into Japanese and French. In 2004 Snyder published Danger on Peaks, his first collection of new poems in twenty years. Snyder was awarded the Levinson Prize from the journal Poetry, the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award (1986), was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987), and won the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry and, that same year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing. Snyder also has the distinction of being the first American to receive the Buddhism Transmission Award (for 1998) from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation. For his ecological and social activism, Snyder was named as one of the 100 visionaries selected in 1995 by Utne Reader. Snyder's life and work was celebrated in John J. Healy's 2010 documentary The Practice of the Wild. The film, which debuted at the 53rd San Francisco International Film Festival, features wide-ranging, running conversations between Snyder and poet, writer and longtime colleague Jim Harrison, filmed mostly on the Hearst Ranch in San Simeon, California. The film also shows archival photographs and film of Snyder's life. Poetic work Gary Snyder uses mainly common speech-patterns as the basis for his lines, though his style has been noted for its "flexibility" and the variety of different forms his poems have taken. He does not typically use conventional meters nor intentional rhyme. "Love and respect for the primitive tribe, honour accorded the Earth, the escape from city and industry into both the past and the possible, contemplation, the communal", such, according to Glyn Maxwell, is the awareness and commitment behind the specific poems. The author and editor Stewart Brand once wrote: "Gary Snyder's poetry addresses the life-planet identification with unusual simplicity of style and complexity of effect." According to Jody Norton, this simplicity and complexity derives from Snyder's use of natural imagery (geographical formations, flora, and fauna)in his poems. Such imagery can be both sensual at a personal level yet universal and generic in nature. In the 1968 poem "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," the author compares the intimate experience of a lover's caress with the mountains, hills, cinder cones, and craters of the Uintah Mountains. Readers become explorers on both a very private level as well as a very public and grand level. A simplistic touch becoming a very complex interaction occurring at multiple levels. This is the effect Snyder intended. In an interview with Faas, he states." There is a direction which is very beautiful, and that's the direction of the organism being less and less locked into itself, less and less locked into its own body structure and its relatively inadequate sense organs, towards a state where the organism can actually go out from itself and share itself with others." Snyder has always maintained that his personal sensibility arose from his interest in Native Americans and their involvement with nature and knowledge of it; indeed, their ways seemed to resonate with his own. And he has sought something akin to this through Buddhist practices, Yamabushi initiation, and other experiences and involvements. However, since his youth he has been quite literate, and he has written about his appreciation of writers of similar sensibilities, like D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and some of the great ancient Chinese poets. William Carlos Williams was another influence, especially on Snyder's earliest published work. Starting in high school, Snyder read and loved the work of Robinson Jeffers, his predecessor in poetry of the landscape of the American West; but, whereas Jeffers valued nature over humankind, Snyder saw humankind as part of nature. Snyder commented in interview "I have some concerns that I'm continually investigating that tie together biology, mysticism, prehistory, general systems theory". Snyder argues that poets, and humans in general, need to adjust to very long timescales, especially when judging the consequences of their actions. His poetry examines the gap between nature and culture so as to point to ways in which the two can be more closely integrated. In 2004, receiving the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards Grand Prize, Snyder highlighted traditional ballads and folk songs, Native American songs and poems, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Noh drama, Zen aphorisms, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Duncan as significant influences on his poetry, but added, "the influence from haiku and from the Chinese is, I think, the deepest." Romanticism Snyder is among those writers who have sought to dis-entrench conventional thinking about primitive peoples that has viewed them as simple-minded, ignorantly superstitious, brutish, and prone to violent emotionalism. In the 1960s Snyder developed a "neo-tribalist" view akin to the "post-modernist" theory of French Sociologist Michel Maffesoli. The "re-tribalization" of the modern, mass-society world envisioned by Marshall McLuhan, with all of the ominous, dystopian possibilities that McLuhan warned of, subsequently accepted by many modern intellectuals, is not the future that Snyder expects or works toward. Snyder's is a positive interpretation of the tribe and of the possible future. Todd Ensign describes Snyder's interpretation as blending ancient tribal beliefs and traditions, philosophy, physicality, and nature with politics to create his own form of Postmodern-environmentalism. Snyder rejects the perspective which portrays nature and humanity in direct opposition to one another. Instead, he chooses to write from multiple viewpoints. He purposely sets out to bring about change on the emotional, physical, and political levels by emphasizing the ecological problems faced by today's society. Beat Gary Snyder is widely regarded as a member of the Beat Generation circle of writers: he was one of the poets that read at the famous Six Gallery event, and was written about in one of Kerouac's most popular novels, The Dharma Bums. Some critics argue that Snyder's connection with the Beats is exaggerated and that he might better be regarded as a member of the West-Coast group the San Francisco Renaissance, which developed independently. Snyder himself has some reservations about the label "Beat", but does not appear to have any strong objection to being included in the group. He often talks about the Beats in the first person plural, referring to the group as "we" and "us". A quotation from a 1974 interview at the University of North Dakota Writers Conference (published in The Beat Vision): I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats', but let's say that the original meeting, association, comradeship of Allen [Ginsberg], myself, Michael [McClure], Lawrence [Ferlinghetti], Philip Whalen, who's not here, Lew Welch, who's dead, Gregory [Corso], for me, to a somewhat lesser extent (I never knew Gregory as well as the others) did embody a criticism and a vision which we shared in various ways, and then went our own ways for many years. Where we began to come really close together again, in the late '60s, and gradually working toward this point, it seems to me, was when Allen began to take a deep interest in Oriental thought and then in Buddhism which added another dimension to our levels of agreement; and later through Allen's influence, Lawrence began to draw toward that; and from another angle, Michael and I after the lapse of some years of contact, found our heads very much in the same place, and it's very curious and interesting now; and Lawrence went off in a very political direction for a while, which none of us had any objection with, except that wasn't my main focus. It's very interesting that we find ourselves so much on the same ground again, after having explored divergent paths; and find ourselves united on this position of powerful environmental concern, critique of the future of the individual state, and an essentially shared poetics, and only half-stated but in the background very powerfully there, a basic agreement on some Buddhist type psychological views of human nature and human possibilities. Snyder has also commented "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers ... the immediate group around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us ... belong together in the category of the San Francisco Renaissance. ... Still, beat can also be defined as a particular state of mind ... and I was in that mind for a while". Bibliography * Myths & Texts (1960) * Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965) * The Back Country (1967) * Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969) * Regarding Wave (1969) * Earth House Hold (1969) * Turtle Island (1974) * The Old Ways (1977) * He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979) * The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 (1980) * Axe Handles (1983) * Passage Through India (1983) * Left Out in the Rain (1988) * The Practice of the Wild (1990) * No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992) * A Place in Space (1995) * narrator of the audio book version of Kazuaki Tanahashi's Moon in a Dewdrop from Dōgen's Shōbōgenzō * Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) * The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999) * The High Sierra of California, with Tom Killion (2002) * Look Out: a Selection of Writings (November 2002) * Danger on Peaks (2005) * Back on the Fire: Essays (2007) * The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, 1956-1991"(2009) * Tamalpais Walking, with Tom Killion (2009) * The Etiquette of Freedom, with Jim Harrison (2010) film by Will Hearst with book edited by Paul Ebenkamp * Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, with Julia Martin, Trinity University Press (2014). * This Present Moment (April 2015) * Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder (May 2015) * The Great Clod: Notes and Memories on the Natural History of China and Japan (March 2016) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder

James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871– June 26, 1938) was an American author, educator, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, and civil rights activist. Johnson is best remembered for his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920 he was the first African American to be chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novels, and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of black culture. He was appointed under President Theodore Roosevelt as US consul in Venezuela and Nicaragua for most of the period from 1906 to 1913. In 1934 he was the first African-American professor to be hired at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.

Charles Simic (born Dušan Simić; May 9, 1938) is a Serbian-American poet and was co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007. Biography Early years Dušan Simić was born in Belgrade. In his early childhood, during World War II, he and his family were forced to evacuate their home several times to escape indiscriminate bombing of Belgrade. Growing up as a child in war-torn Europe shaped much of his world-view, Simic states. In an interview from the Cortland Review he said, “Being one of the millions of displaced persons made an impression on me. In addition to my own little story of bad luck, I heard plenty of others. I’m still amazed by all the vileness and stupidity I witnessed in my life.” Simic immigrated to the United States with his brother and mother in order to join his father in 1954 when he was sixteen. He grew up in Chicago. In 1961 he was drafted into the U.S. Army, and in 1966 he earned his B.A. from New York University while working at night to cover the costs of tuition. He is professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, where he has taught since 1973 and lives on the shore of Bow Lake in Strafford, New Hampshire. Career He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid-1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred to Simic’s poems as “tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes”. He himself stated: “Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is merely the bemused spectator.” Simic writes on such diverse topics as jazz, art, and philosophy. He is a translator, essayist and philosopher, opining on the current state of contemporary American poetry. He held the position of poetry editor of The Paris Review and was replaced by Dan Chiasson. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1995, received the Academy Fellowship in 1998, and was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2000. Simic was one of the judges for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize and continues to contribute poetry and prose to The New York Review of Books. Simic received the US$100,000 Wallace Stevens Award in 2007 from the Academy of American Poets. He was selected by James Billington, Librarian of Congress, to be the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding Donald Hall. In choosing Simic as the poet laureate, Billington cited “the rather stunning and original quality of his poetry”. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Frost Medal, presented annually for “lifetime achievement in poetry.” Awards * PEN Translation Prize (1980) * Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship (1983) * MacArthur Fellowship (1984–1989) * Pulitzer Prize finalist (1986) * Pulitzer Prize finalist (1987) * Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1990) * Wallace Stevens Award (2007) * Frost Medal (2011) * Vilcek Prize in Literature (2011) * The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2014) * Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings (2017) Bibliography References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic

Francis Brett Hart, known as Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902), was an American short story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been most often reprinted, adapted, and admired. Biography Early life Harte was born in the capital city of Albany, New York. He was named Francis Brett Hart after his great-grandfather, Francis Brett. When he was young, his father, Henry, changed the spelling of the family name from Hart to Harte. Henry’s father was Bernard Hart, an Orthodox Jewish immigrant who flourished as a merchant, becoming one of the founders of the New York Stock Exchange. Later, Francis preferred to be known by his middle name, but he spelled it with only one “t”, becoming Bret Harte.An avid reader as a boy, Harte published his first work at age 11, a satirical poem titled “Autumn Musings”, now lost. Rather than attracting praise, the poem garnered ridicule from his family. As an adult, he recalled to a friend, “Such a shock was their ridicule to me that I wonder that I ever wrote another line of verse”. His formal schooling ended when he was 13, in 1849. Career in California Harte moved to California in 1853, later working there in a number of capacities, including miner, teacher, messenger, and journalist. He spent part of his life in the northern California coastal town of Union (now Arcata), a settlement on Humboldt Bay that was established as a provisioning center for mining camps in the interior.The Wells Fargo Messenger of July 1916, relates that, after an unsuccessful attempt to make a living in the gold camps, Harte signed on as a messenger with Wells Fargo & Co. Express. He guarded treasure boxes on stagecoaches for a few months, then gave it up to become the schoolmaster at a school near the town of Sonora, in the Sierra foothills. He created his character Yuba Bill from his memory of an old stagecoach driver. Among Harte’s first literary efforts, a poem was published in The Golden Era in 1857, and, in October of that same year, his first prose piece on “A Trip Up the Coast”. He was hired as editor of The Golden Era in the spring of 1860, which he attempted to make into a more literary publication. Mark Twain later recalled that, as an editor, Harte struck “a new and fresh and spirited note” which “rose above that orchestra’s mumbling confusion and was recognizable as music”. Among his writings were parodies and satires of other writers, including The Stolen Cigar-Case featuring ace detective “Hemlock Jones”, which Ellery Queen praised as “probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written”.The 1860 massacre of between 80 and 200 Wiyot Indians at the village of Tuluwat (near Eureka in Humboldt County, California) was reported by Harte in San Francisco and New York. While serving as assistant editor of the Northern Californian, Harte was left in charge of the paper during the temporary absence of his boss, Stephen G. Whipple. Harte published a detailed account condemning the slayings, writing: “a more shocking and revolting spectacle never was exhibited to the eyes of a Christian and civilized people. Old women wrinkled and decrepit lay weltering in blood, their brains dashed out and dabbled with their long grey hair. Infants scarcely a span long, with their faces cloven with hatchets and their bodies ghastly with wounds.”After he published the editorial, Harte’s life was threatened, and he was forced to flee one month later. Harte quit his job and moved to San Francisco, where an anonymous letter published in a city paper is attributed to him, describing widespread community approval of the massacre. In addition, no one was ever brought to trial, despite the evidence of a planned attack and references to specific individuals, including a rancher named Larabee and other members of the unofficial militia called the Humboldt Volunteers. Harte married Anna Griswold on August 11, 1862 in San Rafael, California. From the start, the marriage was rocky. Some suggested that she was handicapped by extreme jealousy, while early Harte biographer Henry C. Merwin privately concluded that she was “almost impossible to live with”.The well-known minister Thomas Starr King recommended Harte to James Thomas Fields, editor of the prestigious magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, which published Harte’s first short story in October 1863. In 1864, Harte joined with Charles Henry Webb in starting a new literary journal called The Californian. He became friends with and mentored poet Ina Coolbrith.In 1865 Harte was asked by bookseller Anton Roman to edit a book of California poetry; it was to be a showcase of the finest California writers. When the book, called Outcroppings, was published, it contained only nineteen poets, many of them Harte’s friends (including Ina Coolbrith and Charles Warren Stoddard). The book caused some controversy, as Harte used the preface as a vehicle to attack California’s literature, blaming the state’s “monotonous climate” for its bad poetry. While the book was widely praised in the East, many newspapers and poets in the West took umbrage at his remarks.In 1868, Harte became editor of The Overland Monthly, another new literary magazine, published by Roman Anton with the intention of highlighting local writings. The Overland Monthly was more in tune with the pioneering spirit of excitement in California. Harte’s short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” appeared in the magazine’s second issue, propelling him to nationwide fame.When word of Charles Dickens’s death reached Harte in July 1870, he immediately sent a dispatch across the bay to San Francisco to hold back the forthcoming issue of the Overland Monthly for 24 hours so that he could compose the poetic tribute, “Dickens in Camp”. Harte’s fame increased with the publication of his satirical poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” in the September 1870 issue of the Overland Monthly. The poem became better known by its alternate title, “The Heathen Chinee”, after being republished in a Boston newspaper in 1871. It was also quickly republished in a number of other newspapers and journals, including the New York Evening Post, the New York Tribune, the Boston Evening Transcript, the Providence Journal, the Hartford Courant, Prairie Farmer, and the Saturday Evening Post. Harte was chagrined, however, to find that the popularity of the poem, which he had written to criticize the prevalence of anti-Chinese sentiment among the white population of California, was largely the result of its being taken literally by the very people he had lampooned, who completely misconstrued the ironic intent of Harte’s words. Leaving the West He was determined to pursue his literary career and traveled back East with his family in 1871 to New York and eventually to Boston where he contracted with the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly for an annual salary of $10,000, “an unprecedented sum at the time”. His popularity waned, however, and by the end of 1872 he was without a publishing contract and increasingly desperate. He spent the next few years struggling to publish new work or republish old, and delivering lectures about the gold rush. The winter of 1877–1878 was particularly hard for Harte and his family. He later recalled it as a “hand-to-mouth life” and wrote to his wife Anna, “I don’t know—looking back—what ever kept me from going down, in every way, during that awful December and January”.After months of soliciting for such a role, Harte accepted the position of United States Consul in the town of Krefeld, Germany in May 1878. Mark Twain had been a friend and supporter of Harte’s until a substantial falling out, and he had previously tried to block any appointment for Harte. In a letter to William Dean Howells, he complained that Harte would be an embarrassment to the United States because, as he wrote, “Harte is a liar, a thief, a swindler, a snob, a sot, a sponge, a coward, a Jeremy Diddler, he is brim full of treachery... To send this nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too much”. Eventually, Harte was given a similar role in Glasgow in 1880. In 1885, he settled in London. Throughout his time in Europe, he regularly wrote to his wife and children and sent monthly financial contributions. He declined, however, to invite them to join him, nor did he return to the United States to visit them. His excuses were usually related to money. During the 24 years that he spent in Europe, he never abandoned writing and maintained a prodigious output of stories that retained the freshness of his earlier work. He died in Camberley, England in 1902 of throat cancer, and is buried at Frimley. His wife Anna (née Griswold) Harte died on August 2, 1920. The couple lived together only 16 of the 40 years that they were married. Reception In Round the World, Andrew Carnegie praised Harte as uniquely American:"A whispering pine of the Sierras transplanted to Fifth Avenue! How could it grow? Although it shows some faint signs of life, how sickly are the leaves! As for fruit, there is none. America had in Bret Harte its most distinctively national poet.” Mark Twain, however, characterized him and his writing as insincere. Writing in his autobiography four years after Harte’s death, Twain criticized the miners’ dialect used by Harte, claiming that it never existed outside of his imagination. Additionally, Twain accused Harte of “borrowing” money from his friends with no intention of repaying it and of financially abandoning his wife and children. He referred repeatedly to Harte as “The Immortal Bilk”. Works * Condensed Novels and Other Papers (1867) * Outcroppings (1865), editor * The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870) * Poems (1871) * The Tales of the Argonauts (1875) * Flip and Found at Blazing Star (1882) * Gabriel Conroy (1876) * Two Men of Sandy Bar (1876) * Drift from Two Shores (1878) * An Heiress of Red Dog, and Other Tales (1879) * A Millionaire of Rough-And-Ready and Devil’s Ford (1887) * The Crusade of the Excelsior (1887) * The Argonauts of North Liberty (1888) * A First Family of Tasajara (1892) * Colonel Starbottle’s Client, and some other people (1892) * A Protégée of Jack Hamlin’s; and Other Stories (1894) * Barker’s Luck etc. (1896) * Under the Red-Woods (1901) * Her Letter, His Answer, and Her Last Letter (1905) Dramatic and musical adaptations * Several film versions of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” have been made, including one in 1937 with Preston Foster and another in 1952 with Dale Robertson. * Tennessee’s Partner (1955) with John Payne and Ronald Reagan was based on the story of the same name. * Paddy Chayefsky’s treatment of the film version of Paint Your Wagon seems to borrow from “Tennessee’s Partner”: two close friends – one named “Pardner” – share the same woman. The spaghetti western Four of the Apocalypse is based on “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp”. * The Soviet movie Armed and Dangerous (Russian: Вооружён и очень опасен, 1977) is based on Gabriel Conroy and another of Harte’s stories. * Operas based on “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” include those by Samuel Adler and by Stanford Beckler. * The actor Craig Hill was cast as Harte in the 1956 episode, “Year of Destiny”, on the syndicated anthology series Death Valley Days, hosted by Stanley Andrews. The “year of destiny” is 1857, when Harte arrived in California. First a stagecoach guard, then a newspaper editor and schoolteacher, he slowly finds fame as a western writer. Legacy * Bret Harte Memorial in San Francisco * Bret Harte, California, a census-designated place (CDP) in Stanislaus County * Twain Harte, a CDP in Tuolumne County, California, named after both Mark Twain and Bret Harte. * The Mark Twain Bret Harte Historic Trail (Marker Number 431 erected in 1948 by the California Centennial Commission), also named after both writers. * Bret Harte Village in the Gold River community of Sacramento County. Sacramento, California * Bret Harte Court, a street in Sacramento, California * Bret Harte Library, a public library in Long Beach, California * Bret Harte Hall, Roaring Camp Railroads Felton, California * Bret Harte High School in Angels Camp, California is named after him. * Bret Harte Lane in Humboldt Hill, California. * Bret Harte Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois * Bret Harte Preparatory Middle School (Vermont Vista) South Los Angeles, California * Bret Harte Middle School in San Jose, California * Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland, California * Bret Harte Middle School in Hayward, California * Bret Harte High School in Altaville, California is named after him and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2005 * Bret Harte Elementary in Corcoran, California * Bret Harte Elementary in San Francisco, California * Bret Harte Elementary in Burbank, California * Bret Harte Elementary in Cherry Hill, New Jersey * Bret Harte Elementary in Sacramento, California * Bret Harte Elementary School in Modesto, California * A community called The Shores of Poker Flat, California claims to have been the location of Poker Flat, although it is usually accepted that the story takes place further north. * Bret Harte Road in Frimley (the town in which Harte was buried) is named after him. * Bret Harte Place in San Francisco, California is named after him. * Bret Harte Lane, Bret Harte Road, and Harte Ave in San Rafael, California. * Bret Harte Road in Berkeley, California. * Bret Harte Road in Redwood City, California. * Bret Harte Road in Angels Camp, California. * Bret Harte Road and Bret Harte Drive in Murphys, California. * Bret Harte Avenue in Reno, Nevada. * Bret Harte House, at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. * Bret Harte Alley in Arcata, California. * Bret Harte Park in Danville, California. * In 1987 Harte appeared on a $5 U.S. Postage stamp, as part of the “Great Americans series” of issues. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bret_Harte

Anne Bradstreet was born in Northampton, England, in the year 1612, daughter of Thomas Dudley and Dorothy Yorke; Dudley, who had been a leader of volunteer soldiers in the English Reformation and Elizabethan Settlement, was then a steward to the Earl of Lincoln; Dorothy was a gentlewoman of noble heritage and she was also well educated. At the age of 16, Anne was married to Simon Bradstreet, a 25 year old assistant in the Massachusetts Bay Company and the son of a Puritan minister, who had been in the care of the Dudleys since the death of his father. Anne and her family emigrated to America in 1630 on the Arabella, one of the first ships to bring Puritans to New England in hopes of setting up plantation colonies. The journey was difficult; many perished during the three month journey, unable to cope with the harsh climate and poor living conditions, as sea squalls rocked the vessel, and scurvy brought on by malnutrition claimed their lives. Anne, who was a well educated girl, tutored in history, several languages and literature, was ill prepared for such rigorous travel, and would find the journey very difficult. Their trials and tribulations did not end upon their arrival, though, and many of those who had survived the journey, either died shortly thereafter, or elected to return to England, deciding they had suffered through enough. Thomas Dudley and his friend John Winthrop made up the Boston settlement's government; Winthrop was Governor, Dudley Deputy-Governor and Bradstreet Chief-Administrator. The colonists' fight for survival had become daily routine, and the climate, lack of food, and primitive living arrangements made it very difficult for Anne to adapt. She turned inwards and let her faith and imagination guide her through the most difficult moments; images of better days back in England, and the belief that God had not abandoned them helped her survive the hardships of the colony. Having previously been afflicted with smallpox, Anne would once again fall prey to illness as paralysis took over her joints; surprisingly, she did not let her predicament dim her passion for living, and she and her husband managed to make a home for themselves, and raise a family. Despite her poor health, she had eight children, and loved them dearly. Simon eventually came to prosper in the new land, and for a while it seemed things would not be so bad. Tragedy struck once more, when one night the Bradstreet home was engulfed in flames; a devastating fire which left the family homeless and devoid of personal belongings. It did not take too long for them to get back on their feet, thanks to their hard work, and to Simon's social standing in the community. While Anne and her husband were very much in love, Simon's political duties kept him traveling to various colonies on diplomatic errands, so Anne would spend her lonely days and nights reading from her father's vast collection of books, and educating her children. The reading would not only keep her from being lonely, but she also learned a great deal about religion, science, history, the arts, and medicine; most of all, reading helped her cope with life in New England. Anne Bradstreet was especially fond of poetry, which she had begun to write herself; her works were kept private though, as it was frowned upon for women to pursue intellectual enlightenment, let alone create and air their views and opinions. She wrote for herself, her family, and close circle of educated friends, and did not intend on publication. One of her closest friends, Anne Hutchinson, who was also a religious and educated woman had made the mistake of airing her views publicly, and was banished from her community. However, Anne's work would not remained unnoticed... Her brother-in-law, John Woodbridge, had secretly copied Anne's work, and would later bring it to England to have it published, albeit without her permission. Woodbridge even admitted to it in the preface of her first collection, "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, By a Gentlewoman of Those Parts", which was published in 1650. The book did fairly well in England, and was to be the last of her poetry to be published during her lifetime. All her other poems were published posthumously. Anne Bradstreet's poetry was mostly based on her life experience, and her love for her husband and family. One of the most interesting aspects of her work is the context in which she wrote; an atmosphere where the search for knowledge was frowned upon as being against God's will, and where women were relegated to traditional roles. Yet, we cAnneot help but feel the love she had for both God, and her husband, and her intense devotion to both, and to her family, despite the fact that she clearly valued knowledge and intellect, and was a free thinker, who could even be considered an early feminist. By Anne Bradstreet's health was slowly failing; she had been through many ailments, and was now afflicted with tuberculosis. Shortly after contracting the disease, she lost her daughter Dorothy to illness as well, but her will was strong, and perhaps, as a reflection of her own acceptance of death, she found solace in thinking of her daughter in a better place. Soon thereafter, Anne Bradstreet's long and difficult battle with illness would be at an end, and she passed away on September 16, 1672, in Andover, Massachusetts, at the age 60.

Born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane was a highly anxious and volatile child. He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets—Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne—and the nineteenth-century French poets—Vildrac, Laforgue, and Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write. Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman. His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-three, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico. A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY Poetry The Complete Poems and Selected Letters and Prose (1966) The Bridge (1930) White Buildings (1926) Prose Letters (1952) References Poets.org – http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/233

Sidney Clopton Lanier (February 3, 1842– September 7, 1881) was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate army, worked on a blockade running ship for which he was imprisoned (resulting in his catching tuberculosis), taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he used dialects. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a university professor and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry. Many schools, other structures and two lakes are named for him. Biography Sidney Clopton Lanier was born February 3, 1842, in Macon, Georgia, to parents Robert Sampson Lanier and Mary Jane Anderson; he was mostly of English ancestry. His distant French Huguenot ancestors immigrated to England in the 16th century, fleeing religious persecution. He began playing the flute at an early age, and his love of that musical instrument continued throughout his life. He attended Oglethorpe University, which at the time was near Milledgeville, Georgia, and he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He graduated first in his class shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War. He fought in the American Civil War (1861–65), primarily in the tidewater region of Virginia, where he served in the Confederate signal corps. Later, he and his brother Clifford served as pilots aboard English blockade runners. On one of these voyages, his ship was boarded. Refusing to take the advice of the British officers on board to don one of their uniforms and pretend to be one of them, he was captured. He was incarcerated in a military prison at Point Lookout in Maryland, where he contracted tuberculosis (generally known as “consumption” at the time). He suffered greatly from this disease, then incurable and usually fatal, for the rest of his life. Shortly after the war, he taught school briefly, then moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he worked as a desk clerk at The Exchange Hotel and also performed as a musician. He was the regular organist at The First Presbyterian Church in nearby Prattville. He wrote his only novel, Tiger Lilies (1867) while in Alabama. This novel was partly autobiographical, describing a stay in 1860 at his grandfather’s Montvale Springs resort hotel near Knoxville, Tennessee. In 1867, he moved to Prattville, at that time a small town just north of Montgomery, where he taught and served as principal of a school. He married Mary Day of Macon in 1867 and moved back to his hometown, where he began working in his father’s law office. After taking and passing the Georgia bar, Lanier practiced as a lawyer for several years. During this period he wrote a number of poems, using the “cracker” and “negro” dialects of his day, about poor white and black farmers in the Reconstruction South. He traveled extensively through southern and eastern portions of the United States in search of a cure for his tuberculosis. While on one such journey in Texas, he rediscovered his native and untutored talent for the flute and decided to travel to the northeast in hopes of finding employment as a musician in an orchestra. Unable to find work in New York City, Philadelphia, or Boston, he signed on to play flute for the Peabody Orchestra in Baltimore, Maryland, shortly after its organization. He taught himself musical notation and quickly rose to the position of first flautist. He was famous in his day for his performances of a personal composition for the flute called “Black Birds”, which mimics the song of that species. In an effort to support Mary and their three sons, he also wrote poetry for magazines. His most famous poems were “Corn” (1875), “The Symphony” (1875), “Centennial Meditation” (1876), “The Song of the Chattahoochee” (1877), “The Marshes of Glynn”, (1878) and “Sunrise” (1881). The latter two poems are generally considered his greatest works. They are part of an unfinished set of lyrical nature poems known as the “Hymns of the Marshes”, which describe the vast, open salt marshes of Glynn County on the coast of Georgia. (The longest bridge in Georgia is in Glynn County and is named for Lanier.) Later life Late in his life, he became a student, lecturer, and, finally, a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, specializing in the works of the English novelists, Shakespeare, the Elizabethan sonneteers, Chaucer, and the Old English poets. He published a series of lectures entitled The English Novel (published posthumously in 1883) and a book entitled The Science of English Verse (1880), in which he developed a novel theory exploring the connections between musical notation and meter in poetry. Lanier finally succumbed to complications caused by his tuberculosis on September 7, 1881, while convalescing with his family near Lynn, North Carolina. He was 39. Lanier is buried in Green Mount Cemetery in Baltimore. Writing style and literary theory With his theory connecting musical notation with poetic meter, and also being described as a deft metrical technical, in his own words ‘daring with his poem ’Special Pleading’ to give myself such freedom as I desired, in my own style’ and also by developing a unique style of poetry written in logaoedic dactyls, which was strongly influenced by the works of his beloved Anglo-Saxon poets. He wrote several of his greatest poems in this meter, including “Revenge of Hamish” (1878), “The Marshes of Glynn” and “Sunrise”. In Lanier’s hands, the logaoedic dactylic meter led to a free-form, almost prose-like style of poetry that was greatly admired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Bayard Taylor, Charlotte Cushman, and other leading poets and critics of the day. A similar poetical meter was independently developed by Gerard Manley Hopkins at about the same time (there is no evidence that they knew each other or that either of them had read any of the other’s works). Lanier also published essays on other literary and musical topics and a notable series of four redactions of literary works about knightly combat and chivalry in modernized language more appealing to the boys of his day: The Boy’s Froissart (1878), a retelling of Jean Froissart’s Froissart’s Chronicles, which tell of adventure, battle and custom in medieval England, France and Spain The Boy’s King Arthur (1880), based on Sir Thomas Malory’s compilation of the legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table The Boy’s Mabinogion (1881), based on the early Welsh legends of King Arthur, as retold in the Red Book of Hergest. The Boy’s Percy (published posthumously in 1882), consisting of old ballads of war, adventure and love based on Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. He also wrote two travelogues that were widely read at the time, entitled Florida: Its Scenery, Climate and History (1875) and Sketches of India (1876) (although he never visited India). Legacy and honors The Sidney Lanier Cottage in Macon, Georgia is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The square, stone Monument to Poets of Georgia, located between 7th & 8th St. in Augusta, lists Lanier as one of Georgia’s four great poets, all of whom saw Confederate service. The southeastern side bears this inscription: "To Sidney Lanier 1842–1880. The catholic man who hath nightly won God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain and sight out of Blindness and Purity out of stain." The other poets on the monument are James Ryder Randall, Fr. Abram Ryan, and Paul Hayne. Baltimore honored Lanier with a large and elaborate bronze and granite sculptural monument, created by Hans K. Schuler and located on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University. In addition to the monument at Johns Hopkins, Lanier was also later memorialized on the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Upon the construction of the iconic Duke Chapel between 1930 and 1935 on the university’s West Campus, a statue of Lanier was included alongside two fellow prominent Southerners, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee. This statue, which appears to show a Lanier older than the 39 years he actually lived, is situated on the right side of the portico leading into the Chapel narthex. It is prominently featured on the cover of the 2010 autobiographical memoir Hannah’s Child, by Stanley Hauerwas, a Methodist theologian teaching at Duke Divinity School. Lanier’s poem “The Marshes of Glynn” is the inspiration for a cantata by the same name that was created by the modern English composer Andrew Downes to celebrate the Royal Opening of the Adrian Boult Hall in Birmingham, England, in 1986. Piers Anthony used Lanier, his life, and his poetry in his science-fiction novel Macroscope (1969). He quotes from “The Marshes of Glynn” and other references appear throughout the novel. Several entities have been named for Sidney Lanier: Inhabited places Lanier Heights Neighborhood, Washington, D.C. Lanier County, Georgia Indirectly, USS Lanier, which was named for the county. Bodies of water Lake Lanier, operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers northeast of Atlanta, Georgia (The lake was created by the damming of the Chattahoochee River, a river that was the subject of one of Lanier’s poems.) Lake Lanier in Tryon, North Carolina Schools Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, Alabama Sidney Lanier School in Gainesville, Florida Lanier University short-lived university, first Baptist, then owned by the Ku Klux Klan, in Atlanta, Georgia The Sidney Lanier Building (previously Sidney Lanier Elementary School) on the campus of Glynn Academy, in Brunswick, Georgia Lanier Middle School in Buford, Georgia Lanier Elementary School in Gainesville, Georgia Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Tulsa, Oklahoma Sidney Lanier High School in Austin, Texas Sidney Lanier Expressive Arts Vanguard Elementary School in Dallas, Texas Lanier Middle School in Houston, Texas Lanier High School in San Antonio, Texas Lanier Middle School in Fairfax, Virginia Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Tampa, Florida Lanier Technical College in Oakwood, Georgia Other Sidney Lanier Cottage, the birthplace of Lanier, in Macon, Georgia Sidney Lanier Bridge over the South Brunswick River in Brunswick, Georgia Lanier’s Oak in Brunswick, Georgia The Lanier Library, Tryon, North Carolina. Lanier’s widow, Mary, donated two of his volumes of poetry to begin the collection when the library was established in 1890. Sidney Lanier Camp, Eliot, Maine. Sidney Lanier Boulevard in Duluth, GA References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Lanier

Sharon Olds, born November 19, 1942 in San Francisco, California, is an American poet recipient of many awards including the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. She currently teaches creative writing at New York University.

Stephen Crane (November 1, 1871– June 5, 1900) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism. He is recognized by modern critics as one of the most innovative writers of his generation. The ninth surviving child of Protestant Methodist parents, Crane began writing at the age of four and had published several articles by the age of 16. Having little interest in university studies, he left college in 1891 to work as a reporter and writer. Crane’s first novel was the 1893 Bowery tale Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, generally considered by critics to be the first work of American literary Naturalism. He won international acclaim in 1895 for his Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, which he wrote without having any battle experience. In 1896, Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after appearing as a witness in the trial of a suspected prostitute, an acquaintance named Dora Clark. Late that year he accepted an offer to travel to Cuba as a war correspondent. As he waited in Jacksonville, Florida, for passage, he met Cora Taylor, with whom he began a lasting relationship. En route to Cuba, Crane’s vessel the SS Commodore, sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him and others adrift for 30 hours in a dinghy. Crane described the ordeal in “The Open Boat”. During the final years of his life, he covered conflicts in Greece (accompanied by Cora, recognized as the first woman war correspondent) and later lived in England with her. He was befriended by writers such as Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Plagued by financial difficulties and ill health, Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium in Germany at the age of 28. At the time of his death, Crane was considered an important figure in American literature. After he was nearly forgotten for two decades, critics revived interest in his life and work. Crane’s writing is characterized by vivid intensity, distinctive dialects, and irony. Common themes involve fear, spiritual crises and social isolation. Although recognized primarily for The Red Badge of Courage, which has become an American classic, Crane is also known for his poetry, journalism, and short stories such as “The Open Boat”, “The Blue Hotel”, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, and The Monster. His writing made a deep impression on 20th-century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists. Biography Early years Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, New Jersey, to Jonathan Townley Crane, a minister in the Methodist Episcopal church, and Mary Helen Peck Crane, daughter of a clergyman, George Peck. He was the fourteenth and last child born to the couple. At 45, Helen Crane had suffered the early deaths of her previous four children, each of whom died within one year of birth. Nicknamed “Stevie” by the family, he joined eight surviving brothers and sisters—Mary Helen, George Peck, Jonathan Townley, William Howe, Agnes Elizabeth, Edmund Byran, Wilbur Fiske, and Luther. The Cranes were descended from Jaspar Crane, a founder of New Haven Colony, who had migrated there from England in 1639. Stephen was named for a putative founder of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, who had, according to family tradition, come from England or Wales in 1665, as well as his great-great-grandfather Stephen Crane (1709–1780), a Revolutionary War patriot who served as New Jersey delegate to the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Crane later wrote that his father, Dr. Crane, “was a great, fine, simple mind,” who had written numerous tracts on theology. Although his mother was a popular spokeswoman for the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and a highly religious woman, Crane wrote that he did not believe “she was as narrow as most of her friends or family.” The young Stephen was raised primarily by his sister Agnes, who was 15 years his senior. The family moved to Port Jervis, New York, in 1876, where Dr. Crane became the pastor of Drew Methodist Church, a position that he retained until his death. As a child, Stephen was often sickly and afflicted by constant colds. When the boy was almost two, his father wrote in his diary that his youngest son became “so sick that we are anxious about him.” Despite his fragile nature, Crane was an intelligent child who taught himself to read before the age of four. His first known inquiry, recorded by his father, dealt with writing; at the age of three, while imitating his brother Townley’s writing, he asked his mother, “how do you spell O?” In December 1879, Crane wrote a poem about wanting a dog for Christmas. Entitled “I’d Rather Have –”, it is his first surviving poem. Stephen was not regularly enrolled in school until January 1880, but he had no difficulty in completing two grades in six weeks. Recalling this feat, he wrote that it “sounds like the lie of a fond mother at a teaparty, but I do remember that I got ahead very fast and that father was very pleased with me.” Dr. Crane died on February 16, 1880, at the age of 60; Stephen was eight years old. Some 1,400 people mourned Dr. Crane at his funeral, more than double the size of his congregation. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Crane moved to Roseville, near Newark, leaving Stephen in the care of his older brother Edmund, with whom the young boy lived with cousins in Sussex County. He next lived with his brother William, a lawyer, in Port Jervis for several years. His older sister Helen took him to Asbury Park to be with their brother Townley and his wife, Fannie. Townley was a professional journalist; he headed the Long Branch department of both the New-York Tribune and the Associated Press, and also served as editor of the Asbury Park Shore Press. Agnes, another Crane sister, joined the siblings in New Jersey. She took a position at Asbury Park’s intermediate school and moved in with Helen to care for the young Stephen. Within a couple of years, the Crane family suffered more losses. First, Townley and his wife lost their two young children. His wife Fannie died of Bright’s disease in November 1883. Agnes Crane became ill and died on June 10, 1884, of meningitis at the age of 28. Schooling Crane wrote his first known story, “Uncle Jake and the Bell Handle”, when he was 14. In late 1885, he enrolled at Pennington Seminary, a ministry-focused coeducational boarding school 7 miles (11 km) north of Trenton. His father had been principal there from 1849 to 1858. Soon after her youngest son left for school, Mrs. Crane began suffering what the Asbury Park Shore Press reported as “a temporary aberration of the mind.” She had apparently recovered by early 1886, but later that year, her son, 23-year-old Luther Crane, died after falling in front of an oncoming train while working as a flagman for the Erie Railroad. It was the fourth death in six years among Stephen’s immediate family. After two years, Crane left Pennington for Claverack College, a quasi-military school. He later looked back on his time at Claverack as “the happiest period of my life although I was not aware of it.” A classmate remembered him as a highly literate but erratic student, lucky to pass examinations in math and science, and yet “far in advance of his fellow students in his knowledge of History and Literature”, his favorite subjects. While he held an impressive record on the drill field and baseball diamond, Crane generally did not excel in the classroom. Not having a middle name, as was customary among other students, he took to signing his name “Stephen T. Crane” in order “to win recognition as a regular fellow”. Crane was seen as friendly, but also moody and rebellious. He sometimes skipped class in order to play baseball, a game in which he starred as catcher. He was also greatly interested in the school’s military training program. He rose rapidly in the ranks of the student battalion. One classmate described him as “indeed physically attractive without being handsome”, but he was aloof, reserved and not generally popular at Claverack. Although academically weak, Crane gained experience at Claverack that provided background (and likely some anecdotes from the Civil War veterans on the staff) that proved useful when he came to write The Red Badge of Courage. In mid-1888, Crane became his brother Townley’s assistant at a New Jersey shore news bureau, working there every summer until 1892. Crane’s first publication under his byline was an article on the explorer Henry M. Stanley’s famous quest to find the Scottish missionary David Livingstone in Africa. It appeared in the February 1890 Claverack College Vidette. Within a few months, Crane was persuaded by his family to forgo a military career and transfer to Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, in order to pursue a mining engineering degree. He registered at Lafayette on September 12, and promptly became involved in extracurricular activities; he took up baseball again and joined the largest fraternity, Delta Upsilon. He also joined both rival literary societies, named for (George) Washington and (Benjamin) Franklin. Crane infrequently attended classes and ended the semester with grades for four of the seven courses he had taken. After one semester, Crane transferred to Syracuse University, where he enrolled as a non-degree candidate in the College of Liberal Arts. He roomed in the Delta Upsilon fraternity house and joined the baseball team. Attending just one class (English Literature) during the middle trimester, he remained in residence while taking no courses in the third trimester. Concentrating on his writing, Crane began to experiment with tone and style while trying out different subjects. He published his fictional story, “Great Bugs of Onondaga,” simultaneously in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the New York Tribune. Declaring college “a waste of time”, Crane decided to become a full-time writer and reporter. He attended a Delta Upsilon chapter meeting on June 12, 1891, but shortly afterward left college for good. Full-time writer In the summer of 1891, Crane often camped with friends in the nearby area of Sullivan County, New York, where his brother Edmund owned a house. He used this area as the geographic setting for several short stories, which were posthumously published in a collection under the title Stephen Crane: Sullivan County Tales and Sketches. Crane showed two of these works to Tribune editor Willis Fletcher Johnson, a friend of the family, who accepted them for the publication. “Hunting Wild Dogs” and “The Last of the Mohicans” were the first of fourteen unsigned Sullivan County sketches and tales that were published in the Tribune between February and July 1892. Crane also showed Johnson an early draft of his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Later that summer, Crane met and befriended author Hamlin Garland, who had been lecturing locally on American literature and the expressive arts; on August 17 he gave a talk on novelist William Dean Howells, which Crane wrote up for the Tribune. Garland became a mentor for and champion of the young writer, whose intellectual honesty impressed him. Their relationship suffered in later years, however, because Garland disapproved of Crane’s alleged immorality, related to his living with a woman married to another man. Stephen moved into his brother Edmund’s house in Lakeview, a suburb of Paterson, New Jersey, in the fall of 1891. From here he made frequent trips into New York City, writing and reporting particularly on its impoverished tenement districts. Crane focused particularly on The Bowery, a small and once prosperous neighborhood in the southern part of Manhattan. After the Civil War, Bowery shops and mansions had given way to saloons, dance halls, brothels and flophouses, all of which Crane frequented. He later said he did so for research. He was attracted to the human nature found in the slums, considering it “open and plain, with nothing hidden”. Believing nothing honest and unsentimental had been written about the Bowery, Crane became determined to do so himself; this was the setting of his first novel. On December 7, 1891, Crane’s mother died at the age of 64, and the 20-year-old appointed Edmund as his guardian. Despite being frail, undernourished and suffering from a hacking cough, which did not prevent him from smoking cigarettes, in the spring of 1892 Crane began a romance with Lily Brandon Munroe, a married woman who was estranged from her husband. Although Munroe later said Crane “was not a handsome man”, she admired his “remarkable almond-shaped gray eyes.” He begged her to elope with him, but her family opposed the match because Crane lacked money and prospects, and she declined. Their last meeting likely occurred in April 1898, when he again asked her to run away with him and she again refused. Between July 2 and September 11, 1892, Crane published at least ten news reports on Asbury Park affairs. Although a Tribune colleague stated that Crane “was not highly distinguished above any other boy of twenty who had gained a reputation for saying and writing bright things,” that summer his reporting took on a more skeptical, hypocrisy-deflating tone. A storm of controversy erupted over a report he wrote on the Junior Order of United American Mechanics’ American Day Parade, entitled “Parades and Entertainments”. Published on August 21, the report juxtaposes the “bronzed, slope-shouldered, uncouth” marching men “begrimed with dust” and the spectators dressed in “summer gowns, lace parasols, tennis trousers, straw hats and indifferent smiles”. Believing they were being ridiculed, some JOUAM marchers were outraged and wrote to the editor. The owner of the Tribune, Whitelaw Reid, was that year’s Republican vice-presidential candidate, and this likely increased the sensitivity of the paper’s management to the issue. Although Townley wrote a piece for the Asbury Park Daily Press in his brother’s defense, the Tribune quickly apologized to its readers, calling Stephen Crane’s piece “a bit of random correspondence, passed inadvertently by the copy editor”. Hamlin Garland and biographer John Barry attested that Crane told them he had been dismissed by the Tribune, although Willis Fletcher Johnson later denied this. The paper did not publish any of Crane’s work after 1892. Life in New York Crane struggled to make a living as a free-lance writer, contributing sketches and feature articles to various New York newspapers. In October 1892, he moved into a rooming house in Manhattan whose boarders were a group of medical students. During this time, he expanded or entirely reworked Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which is about a girl who “blossoms in a mud-puddle” and becomes a pitiful victim of circumstance. In the winter of 1893, Crane took the manuscript of Maggie to Richard Watson Gilder, who rejected it for publication in The Century Magazine. Crane decided to publish it privately, with money he had inherited from his mother. The novel was published in late February or early March 1893 by a small printing shop that usually printed medical books and religious tracts. The typewritten title page for the Library of Congress copyright application read simply: "A Girl of the Streets, / A Story of New York. /—By—/Stephen Crane." The name “Maggie” was added to the title later. Crane used the pseudonym “Johnston Smith” for the novel’s initial publication, later telling friend and artist Corwin Knapp Linson that the nom de plume was the “commonest name I could think of. I had an editor friend named Johnson, and put in the ”t", and no one could find me in the mob of Smiths." Hamlin Garland reviewed the work in the June 1893 issue of The Arena, calling it “the most truthful and unhackneyed study of the slums I have yet read, fragment though it is.” Despite this early praise, Crane became depressed and destitute from having spent $869 for 1,100 copies of a novel that did not sell; he ended up giving a hundred copies away. He would later remember “how I looked forward to publication and pictured the sensation I thought it would make. It fell flat. Nobody seemed to notice it or care for it... Poor Maggie! She was one of my first loves.” In March 1893, Crane spent hours lounging in Linson’s studio while having his portrait painted. He became fascinated with issues of the Century that were largely devoted to famous battles and military leaders from the Civil War. Frustrated with the dryly written stories, Crane stated, “I wonder that some of those fellows don’t tell how they felt in those scraps. They spout enough of what they did, but they’re as emotionless as rocks.” Crane returned to these magazines during subsequent visits to Linson’s studio, and eventually the idea of writing a war novel overtook him. He would later state that he “had been unconsciously working the detail of the story out through most of his boyhood” and had imagined “war stories ever since he was out of knickerbockers.” This novel would ultimately become The Red Badge of Courage. From the beginning, Crane wished to show how it felt to be in a war by writing “a psychological portrayal of fear.” Conceiving his story from the point of view of a young private who is at first filled with boyish dreams of the glory of war and then quickly becomes disillusioned by war’s reality, Crane borrowed the private’s surname, “Fleming”, from his sister-in-law’s maiden name. He later said that the first paragraphs came to him with “every word in place, every comma, every period fixed.” Working mostly nights, he wrote from around midnight until four or five in the morning. Because he could not afford a typewriter, he wrote carefully in ink on legal-sized paper, seldom crossing through or interlining a word. If he did change something, he would rewrite the whole page. While working on his second novel, Crane remained prolific, concentrating on publishing stories to stave off poverty; “An Experiment in Misery”, based on Crane’s experiences in the Bowery, was printed by the New York Press. He also wrote five or six poems a day. In early 1894, he showed some of his poems, or “lines” as he called them, to Hamlin Garland, who said he read “some thirty in all” with “growing wonder.” Although Garland and William Dean Howells encouraged him to submit his poetry for publication, Crane’s free verse was too unconventional for most. After brief wrangling between poet and publisher, Copeland & Day accepted Crane’s first book of poems, The Black Riders and Other Lines, although it would not be published until after The Red Badge of Courage. He received a 10 percent royalty, and the publisher assured him that the book would be in a form “more severely classic than any book ever yet issued in America.” In the spring of 1894, Crane offered the finished manuscript of The Red Badge of Courage to McClure’s Magazine, which had become the foremost magazine for Civil War literature. While McClure’s delayed giving him an answer on his novel, they offered him an assignment writing about the Pennsylvania coal mines. “In the Depths of a Coal Mine”, a story with pictures by Linson, was syndicated by McClure’s in a number of newspapers, heavily edited. Crane was reportedly disgusted by the cuts, asking Linson: “Why the hell did they send me up there then? Do they want the public to think the coal mines gilded ball-rooms with the miners eating ice-cream in boiled shirt-fronts?” Sources report that following an encounter with a male prostitute that spring, Crane began a novel on the subject entitled Flowers of Asphalt, which he later abandoned. The manuscript has never been recovered. After discovering that McClure’s could not afford to pay him, Crane took his war novel to Irving Bacheller of the Bacheller-Johnson Newspaper Syndicate, which agreed to publish The Red Badge of Courage in serial form. Between the third and the ninth of December 1894, The Red Badge of Courage was published in some half-dozen newspapers in the United States. Although it was greatly cut for syndication, Bacheller attested to its causing a stir, saying "its quality [was] immediately felt and recognized." The lead editorial in the Philadelphia Press of December 7 said that Crane “is a new name now and unknown, but everybody will be talking about him if he goes on as he has begun”. Travels and fame At the end of January 1895, Crane left on what he called “a very long and circuitous newspaper trip” to the west. While writing feature articles for the Bacheller syndicate, he traveled to Saint Louis, Missouri, Nebraska, New Orleans, Galveston, Texas and then Mexico City. Irving Bacheller would later state that he “sent Crane to Mexico for new color”, which the author found in the form of Mexican slum life. Whereas he found the lower class in New York pitiful, he was impressed by the “superiority” of the Mexican peasants’ contentment and "even refuse[d] to pity them.” Returning to New York five months later, Crane joined the Lantern (alternately spelled “Lanthom” or “Lanthorne”) Club organized by a group of young writers and journalists. The Club, located on the roof of an old house on William Street near the Brooklyn Bridge, served as a drinking establishment of sorts and was decorated to look like a ship’s cabin. There Crane ate one good meal a day, although friends were troubled by his “constant smoking, too much coffee, lack of food and poor teeth”, as Nelson Greene put it. Living in near-poverty and greatly anticipating the publication of his books, Crane began work on two more novels: The Third Violet and George’s Mother. The Black Riders was published by Copeland & Day shortly before his return to New York in May, but it received mostly criticism, if not abuse, for the poems’ unconventional style and use of free verse. A piece in the Bookman called Crane “the Aubrey Beardsley of poetry,” and a commentator from the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean stated that “there is not a line of poetry from the opening to the closing page. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass were luminous in comparison. Poetic lunacy would be a better name for the book.” In June, the New York Tribune dismissed the book as “so much trash.” Crane was pleased that the book was “making some stir”. In contrast to the reception for Crane’s poetry, The Red Badge of Courage was welcomed with acclaim after its publication by Appleton in September 1895. For the next four months the book was in the top six on various bestseller lists around the country. It arrived on the literary scene “like a flash of lightning out of a clear winter sky”, according to H. L. Mencken, who was about 15 at the time. The novel also became popular in Britain; Joseph Conrad, a future friend of Crane, wrote that the novel “detonated... with the impact and force of a twelve-inch shell charged with a very high explosive.” Appleton published two, possibly three, printings in 1895 and as many as eleven more in 1896. Although some critics considered the work overly graphic and profane, it was widely heralded for its realistic portrayal of war and unique writing style. The Detroit Free Press declared that The Red Badge would give readers “so vivid a picture of the emotions and the horrors of the battlefield that you will pray your eyes may never look upon the reality.” Wanting to capitalize on the success of The Red Badge, McClure Syndicate offered Crane a contract to write a series on Civil War battlefields. Because it was a wish of his to “visit the battlefield—which I was to describe—at the time of year when it was fought”, Crane agreed to take the assignment. Visiting battlefields in Northern Virginia, including Fredericksburg, he would later produce five more Civil War tales: “Three Miraculous Soldiers”, “The Veteran”, “An Indiana Campaign”, “An Episode of War” and The Little Regiment. Scandal At the age of 24, Crane, who was reveling in his success, became involved in a highly publicized case involving a suspected prostitute named Dora Clark. At 2 a.m. on September 16, 1896, he escorted two chorus girls and Clark from New York City’s Broadway Garden, a popular “resort” where he had interviewed the women for a series he was writing. As Crane saw one woman safely to a streetcar, a plainclothes policeman named Charles Becker arrested the other two for solicitation; Crane was threatened with arrest when he tried to interfere. One of the women was released after Crane confirmed her erroneous claim that she was his wife, but Clark was charged and taken to the precinct. Against the advice of the arresting sergeant, Crane made a statement confirming Dora Clark’s innocence, stating that “I only know that while with me she acted respectably, and that the policeman’s charge was false.” On the basis of Crane’s testimony, Clark was discharged. The media seized upon the story; news spread to Philadelphia, Boston and beyond, with papers focusing on Crane’s courage. The Stephen Crane story, as it became known, soon became a source for ridicule; the Chicago Dispatch in particular quipped that “Stephen Crane is respectfully informed that association with women in scarlet is not necessarily a 'Red Badge of Courage’ ”. A couple of weeks after her trial, Clark pressed charges of false arrest against the officer who had arrested her. The next day, the officer physically attacked Clark in the presence of witnesses for having brought charges against him. Crane, who initially went briefly to Philadelphia to escape the pressure of publicity, returned to New York to give testimony at Becker’s trial despite advice given to him from Theodore Roosevelt, who was Police Commissioner at the time and a new acquaintance of Crane. The defense targeted Crane: police raided his apartment and interviewed people who knew him, trying to find incriminating evidence in order to lessen the effect of his testimony. A vigorous cross-examination took place that sought to portray Crane as a man of dubious morals; while the prosecution proved that he frequented brothels, Crane claimed this was merely for research purposes. After the trial ended on October 16, the arresting officer was exonerated, but Crane’s reputation was ruined. Cora Taylor and the Commodore shipwreck Given $700 in Spanish gold by the Bacheller-Johnson syndicate to work as a war correspondent in Cuba as the Spanish–American War was pending, the 25-year-old Crane left New York on November 27, 1896, on a train bound for Jacksonville, Florida. Upon arrival in Jacksonville, he registered at the St. James Hotel under the alias of Samuel Carleton to maintain anonymity while seeking passage to Cuba. While waiting for a boat, he toured the city and visited the local brothels. Within days he met 31-year-old Cora Taylor, proprietor of the downtown bawdy house Hotel de Dream. Born into a respectable Boston family, Taylor (whose legal name was Cora Ethel Stewart) had already had two brief marriages; her first husband, Vinton Murphy, divorced her on grounds of adultery. In 1889, she had married British Captain Donald William Stewart. She left him in 1892 for another man, but was still legally married. By the time Crane arrived, Taylor had been in Jacksonville for two years. She lived a bohemian lifestyle, owned a hotel of assignation, and was a well-known and respected local figure. The two spent much time together while Crane awaited his departure. He was finally cleared to leave for the Cuban port of Cienfuegos on New Year’s Eve aboard the SS Commodore. The ship sailed from Jacksonville with 27 or 28 men and a cargo of supplies and ammunition for the Cuban rebels. On the St. Johns River and less than 2 miles (3.2 km) from Jacksonville, Commodore struck a sandbar in a dense fog and damaged its hull. Although towed off the sandbar the following day, it was beached again in Mayport and again damaged. A leak began in the boiler room that evening and, as a result of malfunctioning water pumps, the ship came to a standstill about 16 miles (26 km) from Mosquito Inlet. As the ship took on more water, Crane described the engine room as resembling “a scene at this time taken from the middle kitchen of hades.” Commodore’s lifeboats were lowered in the early hours of the morning on January 2, 1897 and the ship ultimately sank at 7 a.m. Crane was one of the last to leave the ship in a 10-foot (3.0 m) dinghy. In an ordeal that he recounted in the short story “The Open Boat”, Crane and three other men (including the ship’s Captain) floundered off the coast of Florida for a day and a half before trying to land the dinghy at Daytona Beach. The small boat overturned in the surf, forcing the exhausted men to swim to shore; one of them died. Having lost the gold given to him for his journey, Crane wired Cora Taylor for help. She traveled to Daytona and returned to Jacksonville with Crane the next day, only four days after he had left on the Commodore. The disaster was reported on the front pages of newspapers across the country. Rumors that the ship had been sabotaged were widely circulated but never substantiated. Portrayed favorably and heroically by the press, Crane emerged from the ordeal with his reputation enhanced, if not restored, after the battering he had received in the Dora Clark affair. Meanwhile, Crane’s affair with Taylor blossomed. Three seasons of archaeological investigation were conducted in 2002-04 to examine and document the exposed remains of a wreck near Ponce Inlet, FL conjectured to be that of the SS Commodore. The collected data, and other accumulated evidence, finally substantiated the identification of the Commodore beyond a reasonable doubt. Greco-Turkish War Despite contentment in Jacksonville and the need for rest after his ordeal, Crane became restless. He left Jacksonville on January 11 for New York City, where he applied for a passport to Cuba, Mexico and the West Indies. Spending three weeks in New York, he completed “The Open Boat” and periodically visited Port Jervis to see family. By this time, however, blockades had formed along the Florida coast as tensions rose with Spain, and Crane concluded that he would never be able to travel to Cuba. He sold “The Open Boat” to Scribner’s for $300 in early March. Determined to work as a war correspondent, Crane signed on with William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal to cover the impending Greco-Turkish conflict. He brought along Taylor, who had sold the Hotel de Dream in order to follow him. On March 20, they sailed first to England, where Crane was warmly received. They arrived in Athens in early April; between April 17 (when Turkey declared war on Greece) and April 22, Crane wrote his first published report of the war, “An Impression of the 'Concert’ ”. When he left for Epirus in the northwest, Taylor remained in Athens, where she became the Greek war’s first woman war correspondent. She wrote under the pseudonym “Imogene Carter” for the New York Journal, a job that Crane had secured for her. They wrote frequently, traveling throughout the country separately and together. The first large battle that Crane witnessed was the Turks’ assault on General Constantine Smolenski’s Greek forces at Velestino. Crane wrote, “It is a great thing to survey the army of the enemy. Just where and how it takes hold upon the heart is difficult of description.” During this battle, Crane encountered “a fat waddling puppy” that he immediately claimed, dubbing it “Velestino, the Journal dog”. Greece and Turkey signed an armistice on May 20, ending the 30-day war; Crane and Taylor left Greece for England, taking two Greek brothers as servants and Velestino the dog with them. England and Spanish–American War After staying in Limpsfield, Surrey, for a few days, Crane and Taylor settled in Ravensbrook, a plain brick villa in Oxted. Referring to themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Crane, the couple lived openly in England, but Crane concealed the relationship from his friends and family in the United States. Admired in England, Crane thought himself attacked back home: “There seem so many of them in America who want to kill, bury and forget me purely out of unkindness and envy and—my unworthiness, if you choose”, he wrote. Velestino the dog sickened and died soon after their arrival in England, on August 1. Crane, who had a great love for dogs, wrote an emotional letter to a friend an hour after the dog’s death, stating that “for eleven days we fought death for him, thinking nothing of anything but his life.” The Limpsfield-Oxted area was home to members of the socialist Fabian Society and a magnet for writers such as Edmund Gosse, Ford Madox Ford and Edward Garnett. Crane also met the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad in October 1897, with whom he would have what Crane called a “warm and endless friendship”. Although Crane was confident among peers, strong negative reviews of the recently published The Third Violet were causing his literary reputation to dwindle. Reviewers were also highly critical of Crane’s war letters, deeming them self-centered. Although The Red Badge of Courage had by this time gone through fourteen printings in the United States and six in England, Crane was running out of money. To survive financially, he worked at a feverish pitch, writing prolifically for both the English and the American markets. He wrote in quick succession stories such as The Monster, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, “Death and the Child” and “The Blue Hotel”. Crane began to attach price tags to his new works of fiction, hoping that “The Bride”, for example, would fetch $175. As 1897 ended, Crane’s money crisis worsened. Amy Leslie, a reporter from Chicago and a former lover, sued him for $550. The New York Times reported that Leslie gave him $800 in November 1896 but that he’d repaid only a quarter of the sum. In February he was summoned to answer Leslie’s claim. The claim was apparently settled out of court, because no record of adjudication exists. Meanwhile, Crane felt “heavy with troubles” and “chased to the wall” by expenses. He confided to his agent that he was $2,000 in debt but that he would “beat it” with more literary output. Soon after the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, under suspicious circumstances, Crane was offered a £60 advance by Blackwood’s Magazine for articles “from the seat of war in the event of a war breaking out” between the United States and Spain. His health was failing, and it is believed that signs of his pulmonary tuberculosis, which he may have contracted in childhood, became apparent. With almost no money coming in from his finished stories, Crane accepted the assignment and left Oxted for New York. Taylor and the rest of the household stayed behind to fend off local creditors. Crane applied for a passport and left New York for Key West two days before Congress declared war. While the war idled, he interviewed people and produced occasional copy. In early June, he observed the establishment of an American base in Cuba when Marines seized Guantánamo Bay. He went ashore with the Marines, planning “to gather impressions and write them as the spirit moved.” Although he wrote honestly about his fear in battle, others observed his calmness and composure. He would later recall “this prolonged tragedy of the night” in the war tale “Marines Signaling Under Fire at Guantanamo”. After showing a willingness to serve during fighting at Cuzco, Cuba, by carrying messages to company commanders, Crane was officially cited for his “material aid during the action”. He continued to report upon various battles and the worsening military conditions and praised Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, despite past tensions with the Commissioner. In early July, Crane was sent to the United States for medical treatment for a high fever. He was diagnosed with yellow fever, then malaria. Upon arrival in Old Point Comfort, Virginia, he spent a few weeks resting in a hotel. Although Crane had filed more than twenty dispatches in the three months he had covered the war, the World’s business manager believed that the paper had not received its money’s worth and fired him. In retaliation, Crane signed with Hearst’s New York Journal with the wish to return to Cuba. He traveled first to Puerto Rico and then to Havana. In September, rumors began to spread that Crane, who was working anonymously, had either been killed or disappeared. He sporadically sent out dispatches and stories; he wrote about the mood in Havana, the crowded city sidewalks, and other topics, but he was soon desperate for money again. Taylor, left alone in England, was also penniless. She became frantic with worry over her lover’s whereabouts; they were not in direct communication until the end of the year. Crane left Havana and arrived in England on January 11, 1899. Death Rent on Ravensbrook had not been paid for a year. Upon returning to England, Crane secured a solicitor to act as guarantor for their debts, after which Crane and Taylor relocated to Brede Place. This manor in Sussex, which dated to the 14th century and had neither electricity nor indoor plumbing, was offered to them by friends at a modest rent. The relocation appeared to give hope to Crane, but his money problems continued. Deciding that he could no longer afford to write for American publications, he concentrated on publishing in English magazines. Crane pushed himself to write feverishly during the first months at Brede; he told his publisher that he was “doing more work now than I have at any other period in my life”. His health worsened, and by late 1899 he was asking friends about health resorts. The Monster and Other Stories was in production and War Is Kind, his second collection of poems, was published in the United States in May. None of his books after The Red Badge of Courage had sold well, and he bought a typewriter to spur output. Active Service, a novella based on Crane’s correspondence experience, was published in October. The New York Times reviewer questioned “whether the author of 'Active Service’ himself really sees anything remarkable in his newspapery hero.” In December, the couple held an elaborate Christmas party at Brede, attended by Conrad, Henry James, H. G. Wells and other friends; it lasted several days. On December 29 Crane suffered a severe pulmonary hemorrhage. In January 1900 he’d recovered sufficiently to work on a new novel, The O’Ruddy, completing 25 of the 33 chapters. Plans were made for him to travel as a correspondent to Gibraltar to write sketches from Saint Helena, the site of a Boer prison, but at the end of March and in early April he suffered two more hemorrhages. Taylor took over most of Crane’s correspondence while he was ill, writing to friends for monetary aid. The couple planned to travel on the continent, but Conrad, upon visiting Crane for the last time, remarked that his friend’s “wasted face was enough to tell me that it was the most forlorn of all hopes.” On May 28, the couple arrived at Badenweiler, Germany, a health spa on the edge of the Black Forest. Despite his weakened condition, Crane continued to dictate fragmentary episodes for the completion of The O’Ruddy. He died on June 5, 1900, at the age of 28. In his will he left everything to Taylor, who took his body to New Jersey for burial. Crane was interred in Evergreen Cemetery in what is now Hillside, New Jersey. Fiction and poetry Style and technique Stephen Crane’s fiction is typically categorized as representative of Naturalism, American realism, Impressionism or a mixture of the three. Critic Sergio Perosa, for example, wrote in his essay, “Stephen Crane fra naturalismo e impressionismo,” that the work presents a “symbiosis” of Naturalistic ideals and Impressionistic methods. When asked whether or not he would write an autobiography in 1896, Crane responded that he “dare not say that I am honest. I merely say that I am as nearly honest as a weak mental machinery will allow.” Similarities between the stylistic techniques in Crane’s writing and Impressionist painting—including the use of color and chiaroscuro—are often cited to support the theory that Crane was not only an Impressionist but also influenced by the movement. H. G. Wells remarked upon “the great influence of the studio” on Crane’s work, quoting a passage from The Red Badge of Courage as an example: “At nightfall the column broke into regimental pieces, and the fragments went into the fields to camp. Tents sprang up like strange plants. Camp fires, like red, peculiar blossoms, dotted the night.... From this little distance the many fires, with the black forms of men passing to and fro before the crimson rays, made weird and satanic effects.” Although no direct evidence exists that Crane formulated a precise theory of his craft, he vehemently rejected sentimentality, asserting that “a story should be logical in its action and faithful to character. Truth to life itself was the only test, the greatest artists were the simplest, and simple because they were true.” Poet and biographer John Berryman suggested that there were three basic variations, or “norms”, of Crane’s narrative style. The first, being “flexible, swift, abrupt and nervous”, is best exemplified in The Red Badge of Courage, while the second ("supple majesty") is believed to relate to “The Open Boat”, and the third ("much more closed, circumstantial and 'normal’ in feeling and syntax") to later works such as The Monster. Crane’s work, however, cannot be determined by style solely on chronology. Not only does his fiction not take place in any particular region with similar characters, but it varies from serious in tone to reportorial writing and light fiction. Crane’s writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is consistently driven by immediacy and is at once concentrated, vivid and intense. The novels and short stories contain poetic characteristics such as shorthand prose, suggestibility, shifts in perspective and ellipses between and within sentences. Similarly, omission plays a large part in Crane’s work; the names of his protagonists are not commonly used and sometimes they are not named at all. Crane was often criticized by early reviewers for his frequent incorporation of everyday speech into dialogue, mimicking the regional accents of his characters with colloquial stylization. This is apparent in his first novel, in which Crane ignored the romantic, sentimental approach of slum fiction; he instead concentrated on the cruelty and sordid aspects of poverty, expressed by the brashness of the Bowery’s crude dialect and profanity, which he used lavishly. The distinct dialect of his Bowery characters is apparent at the beginning of the text; the title character admonishes her brother saying: “Yeh knows it puts mudder out when yes comes home half dead, an’ it’s like we’ll all get a poundin’.” Major themes Crane’s work is often thematically driven by Naturalistic and Realistic concerns, including ideals versus realities, spiritual crises and fear. These themes are particularly evident in Crane’s first three novels, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage and George’s Mother. The three main characters search for a way to make their dreams come true, but ultimately suffer from crises of identity. Crane was fascinated by war and death, as well as fire, disfigurement, fear and courage, all of which inspired him to write many works based on these concepts. In The Red Badge of Courage, the main character both longs for the heroics of battle but ultimately fears it, demonstrating the dichotomy of courage and cowardice. He experiences the threat of death, misery and a loss of self. Extreme isolation from society and community is also apparent in Crane’s work. During the most intense battle scenes in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, the story’s focus is mainly “on the inner responses of a self unaware of others”. In “The Open Boat”, “An Experiment in Misery” and other stories, Crane uses light, motion and color to express degrees of epistemological uncertainty. Similar to other Naturalistic writers, Crane scrutinizes the position of man, who has been isolated not only from society, but also from God and nature. “The Open Boat”, for example, distances itself from Romantic optimism and affirmation of man’s place in the world by concentrating on the characters’ isolation. While he lived, Stephen Crane was denominated by critical readers a realist, a naturalist, an impressionist, symbolist, Symboliste, expressionist and ironist; his posthumous life was enriched by critics who read him as nihilistic, existentialist, a neo-Romantic, a sentimentalist, protomodernist, pointilliste, visionist, imagist and, by his most recent biographer, a “bleak naturalist.” At midcentury he was a “predisciple of the New Criticism”; by its end he was “a proto-deconstructionist anti-artist hero” who had “leapfrogged modernism, landing on postmodernist ground.” Or, as Sergio Perosa wrote in 1964, “The critic wanders in a labyrinth of possibilities, which every new turn taken by Crane’s fiction seems to explode or deny.” One undeniable fact about Crane’s work, as Anthony Splendora noted in 2015, is that Death haunts it; like a threatening eclipse it overshadows his best efforts, each of which features the signal demise of a main character. Allegorically, “The Blue Hotel,” at the pinnacle of the short story form, may even be an autothanatography, the author’s intentional exteriorization or objectification, in this case for the purpose of purgation, of his own impending death. Crane’s “Swede” in that story can be taken, following current psychoanalytical theory, as a surrogative, sacrificial victim, ritually to be purged. Transcending this “dark circumstance of composition,” Crane had a particular telos and impetus for his creation: beyond the tautologies that all art is alterity and to some formal extent mimesis, Crane sought and obviously found “a form of catharsis” in writing. This view accounts for his uniqueness, especially as operative through his notorious “disgust” with his family’s religion, their “vacuous, futile psalm-singing”. His favorite book, for example, was Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, in which God is mentioned only twice—once as irony and once as “a swindle.” Not only did Crane call out God specifically with the lines "Well then I hate thee / righteous image" in “The Black Riders” (1895), but even his most hopeful tropes, such as the “comradeship” of his “Open Boat” survivors, make no mention of deity, specifying only “indifferent nature.” His antitheism is most evident in his characterization of the human race as “lice clinging to a space-lost bulb,” a climax-nearing speech in “The Blue Hotel,” Ch. VI. It is possible that Crane utilized religion’s formal psychic space, now suddenly available resulting from the recent “Death of God,” as a milieu for his compensative art. Novels Beginning with the publication of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1893, Crane was recognized by critics mainly as a novelist. Maggie was initially rejected by numerous publishers because of its atypical and true-to-life depictions of class warfare, which clashed with the sentimental tales of that time. Rather than focusing on the very rich or middle class, the novel’s characters are lower-class denizens of New York’s Bowery. The main character, Maggie, descends into prostitution after being led astray by her lover. Although the novel’s plot is simple, its dramatic mood, quick pace and portrayal of Bowery life have made it memorable. Maggie is not merely an account of slum life, but also represents eternal symbols. In his first draft, Crane did not give his characters proper names. Instead, they were identified by epithets: Maggie, for example, was the girl who “blossomed in a mud-puddle” and Pete, her seducer, was a “knight”. The novel is dominated by bitter irony and anger, as well as destructive morality and treacherous sentiment. Critics would later call the novel “the first dark flower of American Naturalism” for its distinctive elements of naturalistic fiction. Written thirty years after the end of the Civil War and before Crane had any experience of battle, The Red Badge of Courage was innovative stylistically as well as psychologically. Often described as a war novel, it focuses less on battle and more on the main character’s psyche and his reactions and responses in war. It is believed that Crane based the fictional battle in the novel on that of Chancellorsville; he may also have interviewed veterans of the 124th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, commonly known as the Orange Blossoms, in Port Jervis, New York. Told in a third-person limited point of view, it reflects the private experience of Henry Fleming, a young soldier who flees from combat. The Red Badge of Courage is notable in its vivid descriptions and well-cadenced prose, both of which help create suspense within the story. Similarly, by substituting epithets for characters’ names ("the youth", “the tattered soldier”), Crane injects an allegorical quality into his work, making his characters point to a specific characteristic of man. Like Crane’s first novel, The Red Badge of Courage has a deeply ironic tone which increases in severity as the novel progresses. The title of the work is ironic; Henry wishes “that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage”, echoing a wish to have been wounded in battle. The wound he does receive (from the rifle butt of a fleeing Union soldier) is not a badge of courage but a badge of shame. The novel expresses a strong connection between humankind and nature, a frequent and prominent concern in Crane’s fiction and poetry throughout his career. Whereas contemporary writers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau) focused on a sympathetic bond on the two elements, Crane wrote from the perspective that human consciousness distanced humans from nature. In The Red Badge of Courage, this distance is paired with a great number of references to animals, and men with animalistic characteristics: people “howl”, “squawk”, “growl”, or “snarl”. Since the resurgence of Crane’s popularity in the 1920s, The Red Badge of Courage has been deemed a major American text. The novel has been anthologized numerous times, including in Ernest Hemingway’s 1942 collection Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time. In the introduction, Hemingway wrote that the novel “is one of the finest books of our literature, and I include it entire because it is all as much of a piece as a great poem is.” Crane’s later novels have not received as much critical praise. After the success of The Red Badge of Courage, Crane wrote another tale set in the Bowery. George’s Mother is less allegorical and more personal than his two previous novels, and it focuses on the conflict between a church-going, temperance-adhering woman (thought to be based on Crane’s mother) and her single remaining offspring, who is a naive dreamer. Critical response to the novel was mixed. The Third Violet, a romance that he wrote quickly after publishing The Red Badge of Courage, is typically considered as Crane’s attempt to appeal to popular audiences. Crane considered it a “quiet little story.” Although it contained autobiographical details, the characters have been deemed inauthentic and stereotypical. Crane’s second to last novel, Active Service, revolves around the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, with which the author was familiar. Although noted for its satirical take on the melodramatic and highly passionate works that were popular of the nineteenth century, the novel was not successful. It is generally accepted by critics that Crane’s work suffered at this point due to the speed which he wrote in order to meet his high expenses. His last novel, a suspenseful and picaresque work entitled The O’Ruddy, was finished posthumously by Robert Barr and published in 1903. Short fiction Crane wrote many different types of fictional pieces while indiscriminately applying to them terms such as “story”, “tale” and “sketch”. For this reason, critics have found clear-cut classification of Crane’s work problematic. While “The Open Boat” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” are often considered short stories, others are variously identified. In an 1896 interview with Herbert P. Williams, a reporter for the Boston Herald, Crane said that he did “not find that short stories are utterly different in character from other fiction. It seems to me that short stories are the easiest things we write.” During his brief literary career, he wrote more than a hundred short stories and fictional sketches. Crane’s early fiction was based in camping expeditions in his teen years; these stories eventually became known as The Sullivan County Tales and Sketches. He considered these “sketches”, which are mostly humorous and not of the same caliber of work as his later fiction, to be “articles of many kinds,” in that they are part fiction and part journalism. The subject matter for his stories varied extensively. His early New York City sketches and Bowery tales accurately described the results of industrialization, immigration and the growth of cities and their slums. His collection of six short stories, The Little Regiment, covered familiar ground with the American Civil War, a subject for which he became famous with The Red Badge of Courage. Although similar to Crane’s noted novel, The Little Regiment was believed to lack vigor and originality. Realizing the limitations of these tales, Crane wrote: “I have invented the sum of my invention with regard to war and this story keeps me in internal despair.” The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) contains thirteen short stories that deal with three periods in Crane’s life: his Asbury Park boyhood, his trip to the West and Mexico in 1895, and his Cuban adventure in 1897. This collection was well received and included several of his most critically successful works. His 1899 collection, The Monster and Other Stories, was similarly well received. Two posthumously published collections were not as successful. In August 1900 The Whilomville Stories were published, a collection of thirteen stories that Crane wrote during the last year of his life. The work deals almost exclusively with boyhood, and the stories are drawn from events occurring in Port Jervis, where Crane lived from the age of six to eleven. Focusing on small-town America, the stories tend toward sentimentality, but remain perceptive of the lives of children. Wounds in the Rain, published in September 1900, contains fictional tales based on Crane’s reports for the World and the Journal during the Spanish–American War. These stories, which Crane wrote while desperately ill, include “The Price of the Harness” and “The Lone Charge of William B. Perkins” and are dramatic, ironic and sometimes humorous. Despite Crane’s prolific output, only four stories—"The Open Boat", “The Blue Hotel”, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, and The Monster—have received extensive attention from scholars. H. G. Wells considered “The Open Boat” to be “beyond all question, the crown of all his work”, and it is one of the most frequently discussed of Crane’s works. Poetry Crane’s poems, which he preferred to call “lines”, are typically not given as much scholarly attention as his fiction; no anthology contained Crane’s verse until 1926. Although it is not certain when Crane began to write poetry seriously, he once said that his overall poetic aim was “to give my ideas of life as a whole, so far as I know it”. The poetic style used in both of his books of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines and War is Kind, was unconventional for the time in that it was written in free verse without rhyme, meter, or even titles for individual works. They are typically short in length; although several poems, such as “Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind”, use stanzas and refrains, most do not. Crane also differed from his peers and poets of later generations in that his work contains allegory, dialectic and narrative situations. Critic Ruth Miller claimed that Crane wrote “an intellectual poetry rather than a poetry that evokes feeling, a poetry that stimulates the mind rather than arouses the heart”. In the most complexly organized poems, the significance of the states of mind or feelings is ambiguous, but Crane’s poems tend to affirm certain elemental attitudes, beliefs, opinions and stances toward God, man and the universe. The Black Riders in particular is essentially a dramatic concept and the poems provide continuity within the dramatic structure. There is also a dramatic interplay in which there is frequently a major voice reporting an incident seen ("In the desert / I saw a creature, naked, bestial") or experienced ("A learned man came to me once"). The second voice or additional voices represent a point of view which is revealed to be inferior; when these clash, a dominant attitude emerges. Legacy In four years, Crane published five novels, two volumes of poetry, three short story collections, two books of war stories, and numerous works of short fiction and reporting. Today he is mainly remembered for The Red Badge of Courage, which is regarded as an American classic. The novel has been adapted several times for the screen, including John Huston’s 1951 version. By the time of his death, Crane had become one of the best known writers of his generation. His eccentric lifestyle, frequent newspaper reporting, association with other famous authors, and expatriate status made him somewhat of an international celebrity. Although most stories about his life tended toward the romantic, rumors about his alleged drug use and alcoholism persisted long after his death. By the early 1920s, Crane and his work were nearly forgotten. It was not until Thomas Beer published his biography in 1923, which was followed by editor Wilson Follett’s The Work of Stephen Crane (1925–1927), that Crane’s writing came to the attention of a scholarly audience. Crane’s reputation was then enhanced by faithful support from writer friends such as Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford, all of whom either published recollections or commented upon their time with Crane. John Berryman’s 1950 biography of Crane further established him as an important American author. Since 1951 there has been a steady outpouring of articles, monographs and reprints in Crane scholarship. Today, Crane is considered one of the most innovative writers of the 1890s. His peers, including Conrad and James, as well as later writers such as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Willa Cather, hailed Crane as one of the finest creative spirits of his time. His work was described by Wells as “the first expression of the opening mind of a new period, or, at least, the early emphatic phase of a new initiative.” Wells said that “beyond dispute”, Crane was “the best writer of our generation, and his untimely death was an irreparable loss to our literature.” Conrad wrote that Crane was an “artist” and “a seer with a gift for rendering the significant on the surface of things and with an incomparable insight into primitive emotions”. Crane’s work has proved inspirational for future writers; not only have scholars drawn similarities between Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and The Red Badge of Courage, but Crane’s fiction is thought to have been an important inspiration for Hemingway and his fellow Modernists. In 1936, Hemingway wrote in The Green Hills of Africa that “The good writers are Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Mark Twain. That’s not the order they’re good in. There is no order for good writers.” Crane’s poetry is thought to have been a precursor to the Imagist movement, and his short fiction has also influenced American literature. “The Open Boat”, “The Blue Hotel”, The Monster and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky” are generally considered by critics to be examples of Crane’s best work. Several institutions and places have endeavored to keep Crane’s legacy alive. Badenweiler and the house where he died became something of a tourist attraction for its fleeting association with the American author; Alexander Woollcott attested to the fact that, long after Crane’s death, tourists would be directed to the room where he died. Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library has a collection of Crane and Taylor’s personal correspondence dating from 1895 to 1908. Near his brother Edmund’s Sullivan County home in New York, where Crane stayed for a short time, a pond is named after him. The Stephen Crane House in Asbury Park, New Jersey, where the author lived with his siblings for nine years, is operated as a museum dedicated to his life and work. Syracuse University has an annual Stephen Crane Lecture Series which is sponsored by the Dikaia Foundation. Columbia University purchased much of the Stephen Crane materials held by Cora Crane at her death. The Crane Collection is one of the largest in the nation of his materials. Columbia University had an exhibit: 'The Tall Swift Shadow of a Ship at Night’: Stephen and Cora Crane, November 2, 1995 through February 16, 1996, about the lives of the couple, featuring letters and other documents and memorabilia. Selected list of works Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) The Red Badge of Courage (1895) The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) George’s Mother (1896) The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898) War is Kind (1899) Active Service (1899) The Monster and Other Stories (1899) Wounds in the Rain (1900) Great battles of the world (1901) The O’Ruddy (1903) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Crane

Julia Ann Moore, the “Sweet Singer of Michigan”, born Julia Ann Davis in Plainfield Township, Kent County, Michigan (December 1, 1847–June 5, 1920), was an American poet, or more precisely, poetaster. Like Scotland’s William McGonagall, she is famed chiefly for writing notoriously bad poetry. Biography Young Julia grew up on her family’s Michigan farm, the eldest of four children. When she was ten, her mother became ill, and Julia assumed many of her mother’s responsibilities. Her formal education was thereby limited. In her mid-teens, she started writing poetry and songs, mostly in response to the death of children she knew, but any newspaper account of disaster could inspire her. At age 17, she married Frederick Franklin Moore, a farmer. Julia ran a small store and, over the years, bore ten children, of whom six survived to adulthood. She continued to write poetry and songs. Moore’s first book of verse, The Sentimental Song Book was published in 1876 by C. M. Loomis of Grand Rapids, and quickly went into a second printing. A copy ended up in the hands of James F. Ryder, a Cleveland publisher, who republished it under the title The Sweet Singer of Michigan Salutes the Public. Ryder sent out numerous review copies to newspapers across the country, with a cover letter filled with low key mock praise. And so Moore received national attention. Following Ryder’s lead, contemporary reviews were amusedly negative. The Rochester Democrat wrote of Sweet Singer, that Shakespeare, could he read it, would be glad that he was dead …. If Julia A. Moore would kindly deign to shed some of her poetry on our humble grave, we should be but too glad to go out and shoot ourselves tomorrow. The Hartford Daily Times said that to meet such steady and unremitting demands on the lachrymal ducts one must be provided, as Sam Weller suspected Job Trotter was, ‘with a main, as is allus let on.’… The collection became a curious best-seller, though it is unclear whether this was due to public amusement with Moore’s poetry or genuine appreciation of the admittedly “sentimental” character of her poems. It was, more or less, the last gasp of that school of obituary poetry that had been broadly popular in the U. S. throughout the mid-19th century. Moore gave a reading and singing performance, with orchestral accompaniment, in 1877 at a Grand Rapids opera house. She managed to interpret jeering as criticism of the orchestra. Moore’s second collection, A Few Choice Words to the Public appeared in 1878, but found few buyers. Moore gave a second public performance in late 1878 at the same opera house. By then she had figured out that the praise directed to her was false and the jeering sincere. She began by admitting her poetry was “partly full of mistakes” and that “literary is a work very hard to do”. After the poetry and the laughter and jeering in response was over, Moore ended the show by telling the audience: You have come here and paid twenty-five cents to see a fool; I receive seventy-five dollars, and see a whole houseful of fools. Afterwards, her husband forbade her to publish any more poetry. Three more poems were eventually published, and she would write poems for friends. In 1880, she also published, in newspaper serialization, a short story “Lost and Found”, a strongly moralistic story about a drunkard, and a novella “Sunshine and Shadow”, a peculiar romance set in the American Revolution. The ending of “Sunshine and Shadow” was perhaps intended to be self-referential: the farmer facing foreclosure is gratefully rescued by his wife’s publishing her secret cache of fiction. According to some reports, though, her husband was not grateful, but embarrassed. Shamed or not, he moved the family 100 miles north to Manton in 1882. Moore’s notoriety was known in Manton, but the locals respected her, and did not cooperate with the occasional reporter trying to revisit the past. They were a successful business couple, he with an orchard and sawmill, she with a store. Her husband died in 1914. The next year, Julia republished “Sunshine and Shadow” in pamphlet form. She spent much of her widowhood “melancholy”, sitting on her porch. She died quietly in 1920. The news of her death was widely reported, sometimes with a light touch. On her poetry Some comparison to William McGonagall is worth making. Unlike McGonagall, Moore commanded a fairly wide variety of meters and forms, albeit like Emily Dickinson the majority of her verse is in the ballad meter. Like McGonagall, she held a maidenly bluestocking’s allegiance to the Temperance movement, and frequently indited odes to the joys of sobriety. Most importantly, like McGonagall, she was drawn to themes of accident, disaster, and sudden death; as has been said of A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, in her pages you can count the dead and wounded. Edgar Wilson Nye called her “worse than a Gatling gun”. Here, she is inspired by the Great Chicago Fire: The great Chicago Fire, friends, Will never be forgot; In the history of Chicago It will remain a darken spot. It was a dreadful horrid sight To see that City in flames; But no human aid could save it, For all skill was tried in vain. Her less morbid side is on display when she hymns Temperance Reform Clubs: Many a man joined the club That never drank a drachm, Those noble men were kind and brave They care not for the slang— The slang they meet on every side: “You’re a reform drunkard, too; You’ve joined the red ribbon brigade, Among the drunkard crew.” Despite her acknowledgment that “Literary is a work very difficult to do,” she did not approve of the life of Byron: The character of “Lord Byron” Was of a low degree, Caused by his reckless conduct, And bad company. He sprung from an ancient house, Noble, but poor, indeed. His career on earth, was marred By his own misdeeds. Influence Mark Twain was a self-described fan of Moore (though not for the reasons Moore would have liked). Twain alluded to her work in Following the Equator, and it is widely assumed that Moore served as a literary model for the character of Emmeline Grangerford in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Grangerford’s funereal ode to Stephen Dowling Botts: O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul did from this cold world fly By falling down a well. They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great. (Twain) is not far removed from Moore’s poems on subjects like Little Libbie: One more little spirit to Heaven has flown, To dwell in that mansion above, Where dear little angels, together roam, In God’s everlasting love. (Moore) Moore was also the inspiration for comic poet Ogden Nash, as he acknowledged in his first book, and whose daughter reported that her work convinced Nash to become a “great bad poet” instead of a “bad good poet”. The Oxford Companion to American Literature describes Nash as using Moore’s hyperdithyrambic meters, pseudo-poetic inversions, gangling asymmetrical lines, extremely pat or elaborately inexact rimes, parenthetical dissertations, and unexpected puns. Selections of Moore appeared in D. B. Wyndham-Lewis and Charles Lee’s famous Stuffed Owl anthology, and in other collections of bad poetry. Most of her poetry was reprinted in a 1928 edition, which can be found online. Her complete poetry and prose, with biography, notes, and references, can be found in the Riedlinger edited collection Mortal Refrains. Most poetry collections reprint the latest, “best”, versions of their contents. Riedlinger has adopted the opposite philosophy. Moore has been grouped into the Western Michigan School of Bad Versemakers. Her local contemporaries—including Dr. William Fuller, S.H. Ewell, J.B. Smiley, and Fred Yapple—do not appear to have had relationships with each other, but their proximity and similar penchant for exceptionally laughable verse have led to their posthumous grouping together.

Thomas Merton (January 31, 1915 – December 10, 1968) was an American Trappist monk, writer, theologian, mystic, poet, social activist, and scholar of comparative religion. On May 26, 1949, he was ordained to the priesthood and given the name Father Louis.Merton wrote more than 70 books, mostly on spirituality, social justice and a quiet pacifism, as well as scores of essays and reviews. Among Merton’s most enduring works is his bestselling autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which sent scores of World War II veterans, students, and even teenagers flocking to monasteries across the US, and was also featured in National Review’s list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. Merton was a keen proponent of interfaith understanding. He pioneered dialogue with prominent Asian spiritual figures, including the Dalai Lama, the Japanese writer D. T. Suzuki, the Thai Buddhist monk Buddhadasa, and the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and authored books on Zen Buddhism and Taoism. In the years since his death, Merton has been the subject of several biographies.

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938– August 2, 1988) was an American short-story writer and poet. Carver contributed to the revitalization of the American short story in literature during the 1980s. Early life Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, a mill town on the Columbia River, and grew up in Yakima, Washington, the son of Ella Beatrice (née Casey) and Clevie Raymond Carver. His father, a sawmill worker from Arkansas, was a fisherman and heavy drinker. Carver’s mother worked on and off as a waitress and a retail clerk. His one brother, James Franklin Carver, was born in 1943. Carver was educated at local schools in Yakima, Washington. In his spare time, he read mostly novels by Mickey Spillane or publications such as Sports Afield and Outdoor Life, and hunted and fished with friends and family. After graduating from Yakima High School in 1956, Carver worked with his father at a sawmill in California. In June 1957, at age 19, he married 16-year-old Maryann Burk, who had just graduated from a private Episcopal school for girls. Their daughter, Christine La Rae, was born in December 1957. Their second child, a boy named Vance Lindsay, was born a year later. He supported his family by working as a delivery man, janitor, library assistant, and sawmill laborer. During their marriage, Maryann also supported the family by working as an administrative assistant and a high school English teacher, salesperson, and waitress. Writing career Carver became interested in writing in Paradise, California, where he had moved with his family to be close to his mother-in-law. While attending Chico State College, he enrolled in a creative writing course taught by the novelist John Gardner, a recent doctoral graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who became a mentor and had a major influence on Carver’s life and career. Carver’s first published story, “The Furious Seasons”, appeared in 1961. More florid than his later work, the story strongly bore the influence of William Faulkner. “Furious Seasons” was later used as a title for a collection of stories published by Capra Press, and is now in the recent collection, No Heroics, Please and Call If You Need Me. It is a common misconception that Carver was influenced by Ernest Hemingway, as both writers exhibit a similar economical and plain prose style. In his essay “On Influence”, however, Carver states clearly that, while he was an admirer of Hemingway’s fiction, he never saw him as an influence, citing instead the work of Lawrence Durrell. Carver continued his studies under the short-story writer Richard Cortez Day (like Gardner, a recent PhD alumnus of the Iowa program) at Humboldt State College in Arcata, California. After electing not to take the foreign language courses required by the English program, he received his B.A. in general studies in 1963. During this period he was first published and served as editor for Toyon, the university’s literary magazine, in which he published several of his own pieces under his own name as well as the pseudonym John Vale. With his B– average—exacerbated by his penchant to forsake coursework for literary endeavors—ballasted by a sterling recommendation from Day, Carver was accepted into the Iowa Writers’ Workshop on a $1,000 fellowship for the 1963–1964 academic year. Homesick for California and unable to fully acclimate to the program’s upper middle class milieu, he only completed 12 credits out of the 30 required for a M.A. degree or 60 for the M.F.A. degree. Although he was awarded a fellowship for a second year of study from program director Paul Engle after Maryann Carver personally interceded and compared her husband’s plight to Tennessee Williams’ deleterious experience in the program three decades earlier, Carver decided to leave the program at the end of the semester. Maryann (who postponed completing her education to support her husband’s educational and literary endeavors) eventually graduated from San Jose State College in 1970 and taught English at Los Altos High School until 1977, when she enrolled in the University of California, Santa Barbara’s doctoral program in English. In the mid-1960s, Carver and his family resided in Sacramento, California, where he briefly worked at a bookstore before taking a position as a night custodian at Mercy Hospital. He did all of the janitorial work in the first hour and then wrote at the hospital through the rest of the night. He audited classes at what was then Sacramento State College, including workshops with poet Dennis Schmitz. Carver and Schmitz soon became friends, and Carver wrote and published his first book of poems, Near Klamath, under Schmitz’s guidance. With the appearance of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? in Martha Foley’s annual Best American Short Stories anthology and the impending publication of Near Klamath by the English Club of Sacramento State College, 1967 was a landmark year for Carver. He briefly enrolled in the library science graduate program at the University of Iowa that summer but returned to California following the death of his father. Shortly thereafter, the Carvers relocated to Palo Alto, California, so he could take his first white-collar job at Science Research Associates (a subsidiary of IBM), where he worked intermittently as a textbook editor and public relations director through 1970. Following a 1968 sojourn to Israel, the Carvers relocated to San Jose, California; as Maryann finished her undergraduate degree, he continued his graduate studies in library science at San Jose State through the end of 1969 before failing once again to take a degree. Nevertheless, he established vital literary connections with Gordon Lish and the poet/publisher George Hitchcock during this period. After the publication of “Neighbors” in the June 1971 issue of Esquire at the instigation of Lish (by now ensconced as the magazine’s fiction editor), Carver began to teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz at the behest of provost James B. Hall (an Iowa alumnus and early mentor to Ken Kesey at the University of Oregon), commuting from his new home in Sunnyvale, California. Following a succession of failed applications, he received a $4,000 Stegner Fellowship to study in the prestigious non-degree graduate creative writing program at Stanford University during the 1972–1973 term, where he cultivated friendships with Kesey-era luminaries Ed McClanahan and Gurney Norman in addition to contemporaneous fellows Chuck Kinder, Max Crawford, and William Kittredge. The fellowship enabled the Carvers to buy a house in Cupertino, California. He took on another teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley that year and briefly rented a pied-à-terre in the city; this development was largely precipitated by his instigation of an extramarital affair with Diane Cecily, a University of Montana administrator and mutual friend of Kittredge who would subsequently marry Kinder. During his years of working at miscellaneous jobs, rearing children, and trying to write, Carver started abusing alcohol. By his own admission, he essentially gave up writing and took to full-time drinking. In the fall semester of 1973, Carver was a visiting lecturer in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop with John Cheever, but Carver stated that they did less teaching than drinking and almost no writing. With the assistance of Kinder and Kittredge, he attempted to simultaneously commute to California and maintain his lectureship at Santa Cruz; after missing all but a handful of classes due to the inherent logistical hurdles of this arrangement (including various alcohol-related illnesses), Hall gently enjoined Carver to resign his position. The next year, after leaving Iowa City, Carver went to a treatment center to attempt to overcome his alcoholism, but continued drinking for three years. His first short story collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was published in 1976. The collection itself was shortlisted for the National Book Award, though it sold fewer than 5,000 copies that year. After being hospitalized three times (between June 1976 and February or March 1977), Carver began his “second life” and stopped drinking on June 2, 1977, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. While he continued to regularly smoke marijuana and later experimented with cocaine at the behest of Jay McInerney during a 1980 visit to New York City, Carver believed he would have died of alcoholism at the age of 40 had he not overcome his drinking. Carver was nominated again in 1984 for his third major-press collection, Cathedral, the volume generally perceived as his best. Included in the collection are the award-winning stories “A Small, Good Thing”, and “Where I’m Calling From”. John Updike selected the latter for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century. For his part, Carver saw Cathedral as a watershed in his career, in its shift towards a more optimistic and confidently poetic style. Personal life and death Decline of first marriage The following excerpt from Scott Driscoll’s review of Maryann Burk Carver’s 2006 memoir describes the decline of Maryann and Raymond’s marriage. The fall began with Ray’s trip to Missoula, Mont., in '72 to fish with friend and literary helpmate Bill Kittredge. That summer Ray fell in love with Diane Cecily, an editor at the University of Montana, whom he met at Kittredge’s birthday party. “That’s when the serious drinking began. It broke my heart and hurt the children. It changed everything.” “By fall of '74", writes Carver, “he was more dead than alive. I had to drop out of the Ph.D. program so I could get him cleaned up and drive him to his classes”. Over the next several years, Maryann’s husband physically abused her. Friends urged her to leave Raymond. “But I couldn’t. I really wanted to hang in there for the long haul. I thought I could outlast the drinking. I’d do anything it took. I loved Ray, first, last and always.” Carver describes, without a trace of rancor, what finally put her over the edge. In the fall of '78, with a new teaching position at the University of Texas at El Paso, Ray started seeing Tess Gallagher, a writer from Port Angeles, who would become his muse and wife near the end of his life. “It was like a contretemps. He tried to call me to talk about where we were. I missed the calls. He knew he was about to invite Tess to Thanksgiving.” So he wrote a letter instead. “I thought, I’ve gone through all those years fighting to keep it all balanced. Here it was, coming at me again, the same thing. I had to get on with my own life. But I never fell out of love with him.” Second marriage Carver met the poet Tess Gallagher at a writers’ conference in Dallas, Texas, in November 1977. Beginning in January, 1979, Carver and Gallagher lived together in El Paso, Texas; in a borrowed cabin near Port Angeles, Washington; and in Tucson, Arizona. In 1980, the two moved to Syracuse, New York, where Gallagher had been appointed the coordinator of the creative writing program at Syracuse University; Carver taught as a professor in the English department. He and Gallagher jointly purchased a house in Syracuse, at 832 Maryland Avenue. In ensuing years, the house became so popular that the couple had to hang a sign outside that read “Writers At Work” in order to be left alone. In 1982, Carver and first wife, Maryann, were divorced. He married Gallagher in 1988 in Reno, Nevada. Six weeks later, on August 2, 1988, Carver died in Port Angeles, Washington, from lung cancer at the age of 50. In the same year, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In December 2006, Gallagher published an essay in The Sun magazine, titled “Instead of Dying”, about alcoholism and Carver’s having maintained his sobriety. The essay is an adaptation of a talk she initially delivered at the Welsh Academy’s Academi Intoxication Conference in 2006. The first lines read: “Instead of dying from alcohol, Raymond Carver chose to live. I would meet him five months after this choice, so I never knew the Ray who drank, except by report and through the characters and actions of his stories and poems.” Death On August 2, 1988, Carver died from lung cancer at the age of 50. He is buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Port Angeles, Washington. The inscription on his tombstone reads: LATE FRAGMENT And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth. His poem “Gravy” is also inscribed. As Carver’s will directed, Tess Gallagher assumed the management of his literary estate. Memorials In Carver’s birth town of Clatskanie, Oregon, a memorial park and statue were constructed in the late 2000s spearheaded by the local Friends of the Library, using mostly local donations. Tess Gallagher was present at the dedication. It is located in the old town on the corner of Lillich and Nehalem Streets, across from the library. A block away, the building where Raymond Carver was born still stands. There is a plaque of Carver in the foyer. Legacy and posthumous publications The novelist Chuck Kinder published Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (2001), a roman à clef about his friendship with Carver in the 1970s. Carver’s high school sweetheart and first wife, Maryann Burk Carver, wrote a memoir of her years with Carver, What it Used to be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (2006). The New York Times Book Review and San Francisco Chronicle named Carol Sklenicka’s unauthorized biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life (2009), published by Scribner, one of the Best Ten Books of that year; and the San Francisco Chronicle deemed it: “exhaustively researched and definitive biography”. Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, refused to engage with Sklenica. His final (incomplete) collection of seven stories, titled Elephant in Britain (included in “Where I’m Calling From”) was composed in the five years before his death. The nature of these stories, especially “Errand”, have led to some speculation that Carver was preparing to write a novel. Only one piece of this work has survived– the fragment “The Augustine Notebooks”, first printed in No Heroics, Please. Tess Gallagher published five Carver stories posthumously in Call If You Need Me; one of the stories ("Kindling") won an O. Henry Award in 1999. In his lifetime Carver won five O. Henry Awards; these winning stories were “Are These Actual Miles” (originally titled “What is it?”) (1972), “Put Yourself in My Shoes” (1974), “Are You A Doctor?” (1975), “A Small, Good Thing” (1983), and “Errand” (1988). Tess Gallagher fought with Knopf for permission to republish the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love as they were originally written by Carver, as opposed to the heavily edited and altered versions that appeared in 1981 under the editorship of Gordon Lish. The book, entitled Beginners, was released in hardback on October 1, 2009 in Great Britain, followed by its U.S. publication in the Library of America edition that collected all of Carver’s short fiction in a single volume. Literary characteristics Carver’s career was dedicated to short stories and poetry. He described himself as “inclined toward brevity and intensity” and “hooked on writing short stories” (in the foreword of Where I’m Calling From, a collection published in 1988 and a recipient of an honorable mention in the 2006 New York Times article citing the best works of fiction of the previous 25 years). Another stated reason for his brevity was "that the story [or poem] can be written and read in one sitting." This was not simply a preference but, particularly at the beginning of his career, a practical consideration as he juggled writing with work. His subject matter was often focused on blue-collar experience, and was clearly reflective of his own life. Characteristics of minimalism are generally seen as one of the hallmarks of Carver’s work, although, as reviewer David Wiegand notes: Carver never thought of himself as a minimalist or in any category, for that matter. “He rejected categories generally,” Sklenicka says. “I don’t think he had an abstract mind at all. He just wasn’t built that way, which is why he’s so good at picking the right details that will stand for many things.” Carver’s editor at Esquire, Gordon Lish, was instrumental in shaping Carver’s prose in this direction– where his earlier tutor John Gardner had advised Carver to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five, Lish instructed Carver to use five in place of fifteen. Objecting to the “surgical amputation and transplantation” of Lish’s heavy editing, Carver eventually broke with him. During this time, Carver also submitted poetry to James Dickey, then poetry editor of Esquire. Carver’s style has also been described as dirty realism, which connected him with a group of writers in the 1970s and 1980s that included Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff (two writers with whom Carver was closely acquainted), as well as others such as Ann Beattie, Frederick Barthelme, and Jayne Anne Phillips. With the exception of Beattie, who wrote about upper-middle-class people, these were writers who focused on sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people—often lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized people. Works Fiction Collections * Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (first published 1976) * Furious Seasons and other stories (1977) * What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) * Cathedral (1983) * Elephant (1988)– this title only published in Great Britain; included as a section of Where I’m Calling From: New & Selected Stories in the U.S. Compilations * Where I’m Calling From: New & Selected Stories (1988) * Short Cuts: Selected Stories (1993)– published to accompany the Robert Altman film Short Cuts * Collected Stories (2009)– complete short fiction including Beginners Poetry Collections * Near Klamath (1968) * Winter Insomnia (1970) * At Night The Salmon Move (1976) * Fires (1983) * Where Water Comes Together With Other Water (1985) * Ultramarine (1986) * A New Path To The Waterfall (1989) * Gravy (Unknown year) Compilations * In a Marine Light: Selected Poems (1988) * All of Us: The Collected Poems (1996) Screenplays * Dostoevsky (1985, with Tess Gallagher) Films and theatre adaptations * Short Cuts directed by Robert Altman (1993), based on nine Carver short stories and a poem * Everything Goes directed by Andrew Kotatko (2004), starring Hugo Weaving and Abbie Cornish, based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” * Whoever Was Using This Bed, also directed by Andrew Kotatko (2016), starring Jean-Marc Barr, Radha Mitchell and Jane Birkin, based on Carver’s short story of the same name * Jindabyne directed by Ray Lawrence (2006), based on Carver’s short story “So Much Water So Close to Home” * “After The Denim” directed by Gregory D. Goyins (2010) starring Tom Bower and Karen Landry, based on Carver’s short story “If It Please You” * Everything Must Go directed by Dan Rush (2010), and starring Will Ferrell, based on Carver’s short story “Why Don’t You Dance?” * Carver a production directed by William Gaskill at London’s Arcola Theatre in 1995, adapted from five Carver short stories including “What’s In Alaska?” “Put Yourself in My Shoes” and “Intimacy” * Studentova žena (Croatian) directed by Goran Kovač, based on “The Student’s Wife” * Carousel (Croatian) directed by Toma Zidić, inspired by “Ashtray” * Men Who Don’t Work directed by Alexander Atkins and Andrew Franks, based on “What Do You Do in San Francisco?” * Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, depicts the mounting of a Broadway production of “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” as its central storyline. The film’s main character, Riggan Thomson, attributes his choice of acting as a profession to a complimentary note he once received from Raymond Carver written on a cocktail napkin. The film also preludes with Carver’s poem “Late Fragment.” In February 2015, Birdman won four Oscars, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. Musical adaptions * Everything’s Turning to White is a folk rock track written and performed by Paul Kelly on the album So Much Water So Close to Home (1989), which was based on Carver’s short story of the same name. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Carver

John Orley Allen Tate (November 19, 1899– February 9, 1979) was an American poet, essayist, social commentator, and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1943 to 1944. Life Early years Tate was born near Winchester, Kentucky, to John Orley Tate, a businessman, and Eleanor Parke Custis Varnell. In 1916 and 1917 Tate studied the violin at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music. Vanderbilt University, Kenyon College and The Fugitives He began attending Vanderbilt University in 1918, where he met fellow poet Robert Penn Warren. Warren and Tate were invited to join an informal literary group of young Southern poets under the leadership of John Crowe Ransom; the group were known as the Fugitives. Tate contributed to the group’s magazine The Fugitive. The aim of the group, according to the critic J. A. Bryant, was "to demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium [of poetry], devoid of sentimentality and carefully crafted," and they wrote in the formalist tradition that valued the skillful use of meter and rhyme. Tate also joined Ransom to teach at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Some of his notable students there included the poets Robert Lowell and Randall Jarrell. Lowell’s early poetry was particularly influenced by Tate’s formalist brand of Modernism. 1920s In 1924, Tate moved to New York City where he met poet Hart Crane, with whom he had been exchanging correspondence for some time. Over a four-year period, he worked freelance for The Nation, contributed to the Hound & Horn, Poetry magazine, and others. To make ends meet, he worked as a janitor. (Some years later, he would also contribute articles to the conservative National Review.) During a summer visit with the poet Robert Penn Warren in Kentucky, he began a relationship with writer Caroline Gordon. The two lived together in Greenwich Village, but moved to “Robber Rocks”, a house in Patterson, New York, with friends Slater Brown and his wife Sue, Hart Crane, and Malcolm Cowley. Tate married Gordon in New York in May 1925. Their daughter Nancy was born in September. In 1928, along with others New York City friends, he went to Europe. In London, he visited with T. S. Eliot, whose poetry and criticism he greatly admired, and he also visited Paris. In 1928, Tate published his first book of poetry, Mr. Pope and Other Poems, which contained his most famous poem, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (not to be confused with “Ode to the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery” by the Civil War poet Henry Timrod). That same year, Tate also published a biography Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier. Just before leaving for Europe in 1928, Tate described himself to John Gould Fletcher as “an enforced atheist”. He later told Fletcher, “I am an atheist, but a religious one—which means that there is no organization for my religion.” He regarded secular attempts to develop a system of thought for the modern world as misguided. “Only God,” he insisted, “can give the affair a genuine purpose.” In his essay “The Fallacy of Humanism” (1929), he criticized the New Humanists for creating a value system without investing it with any identifiable source of authority. “Religion is the only technique for the validation of values,” he wrote. Although he was attracted to Roman Catholicism, he deferred converting. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. observes that Tate may have waited “because he realized that for him at this time it would be only a strategy, an intellectual act”. In 1929, Tate published a second biography Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall. 1930s After two years abroad, he returned to the United States, and in 1930 was back in Tennessee. Here he took up residence in an antebellum mansion with an 85-acre estate attached, that had been bought for him by one of his brothers, “who had made a lot of northern money out of coal.” He resumed his senior position with the Fugitives. Along with fellow Fugitives, Warren and Ransom, as well as nine other Southern writers, Tate also joined the conservative political group known as the Southern Agrarians. The group was made up of 12 members who published essays on their political philosophy in the book I’ll Take My Stand published in 1930. Tate contributed the essay, “Remarks on the Southern Religion” to I’ll Take My Stand. This book was followed in 1938 by Who Owns America?, the Southern Agrarians’ response to The New Deal. During this time, Tate also became the de facto associate editor of The American Review, which was published and edited by Seward Collins. Tate believed The American Review could popularize the work of the Southern Agrarians. He objected to Collins’s open support of Fascists Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, and condemned fascism in an article in The New Republic in 1936. Much of Tate’s major volumes of poetry were published in the 1930s, and the scholar David Havird describes this publication history in poetry as follows: By 1937, when he published his first Selected Poems, Tate had written all of the shorter poems upon which his literary reputation came to rest. This collection—which brought together work from two recent volumes, Poems: 1928-1931 (1932) and the privately printed The Mediterranean and Other Poems (1936), as well as the early Mr. Pope—included “Mother and Son,” “Last Days of Alice,” “The Wolves,” “The Mediterranean,” “Aeneas at Washington,” “Sonnets at Christmas,” and the final version of “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” In 1938 Tate published his only novel, The Fathers, which drew upon knowledge of his mother’s ancestral home and family in Fairfax County, Virginia. 1940s Tate and Gordon were divorced in 1945 and remarried in 1946. Though devoted to one another for life, they could not get along and later divorced again. Tate was a poet-in-residence at Princeton University until 1942. He founded the Creative Writing program at Princeton, and mentored Richard Blackmur, John Berryman, and others. In 1942, Tate assisted novelist and friend Andrew Lytle in transforming The Sewanee Review, America’s oldest literary quarterly, from a modest journal into one of the most prestigious in the nation. Tate and Lytle had attended Vanderbilt together prior to collaborating at The University of the South. 1950s In 1950, Tate converted to Roman Catholicism. He also married the poet Isabella Gardner in the early 1950s. 1960s While teaching at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, he met Helen Heinz, a nun enrolled in one of his courses and began an affair with her. Tate divorced Gardner and married Heinz in 1966. They moved to Sewanee, Tennessee. In 1967, Tate became the father of twin sons. The youngest died at eleven months from an accident. A third son was born in 1969. Tate died in Nashville, Tennessee ten years later. His papers are collected at the Firestone Library at Princeton University. Attitudes on race Literary scholars have questioned the relationship between the cultural attitudes of Modernist poets on issue such as race and the writing produced by these poets. The decade of the 1930s saw Tate’s most notable stances on matters that may or may not be connected to literary craft. For example, though Tate spoke well of the work of fellow Modernist poet Langston Hughes, in 1931, Tate pressured his colleague Thomas Mabry into canceling a reception for Hughes, comparing the idea of socializing with the black poet to meeting socially with his black cook. From the 1930s until as late as the 1960s, Tate held prejudices against both African-Americans and Jews. He expressed views against interracial marriage and miscegenation and refused to associate with African-American writers (like the aforementioned Langston Hughes). Up until the 1960s, Tate also believed in white supremacy. In 1933, Tate wrote a letter for Hound & Horn explaining his views on interracial sex. “The negro race is an inferior race....miscegenation due to a white woman and a negro man” threatened the white family. “Our purpose..is to keep the negro blood from passing into the white race.” According to the critic Ian Hamilton, Tate and his co-agrarians had been more than ready at the time to overlook the anti-Semitism and pro-Hitlerism of the American Review in order to promote their 'spiritual’ defence of the Deep South’s traditions. In a 1934 review, “A View of the Whole South” Tate reviews W. T. Couch’s “Culture in The South: A Symposium by Thirty-one Authors” and defends racial hegemony: “I argue it this way: the white race seems determined to rule the Negro race in its midst; I belong to the white race; therefore I intend to support white rule. Lynching is a symptom of weak, inefficient rule; but you can’t destroy lynching by fiat or social agitation; lynching will disappear when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned in social crises.” According to the poetry editor of The New Criterion, David Yezzi, Tate held the conventional social views of a white Southerner in 1934: an “inherited racism, a Southern legacy rooted in place and time that Tate later renounced.” Tate was born of a Scotch-Irish lumber manager whose business failures required moving several times per year, Tate said of his upbringing ""we might as well have been living, and I been born, in a tavern at a crossroads." However, his views on race were not passively incorporated; Thomas Underwood documents Tate’s pursuit of racist ideology: “Tate also drew ideas from nineteenth-century proslavery theorists such as Thomas Roderick Dew, a professor at The College of William and Mary, and William Harper, of the University of South Carolina—”We must revive these men, he said.” Bibliography References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Tate

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825– February 22, 1911) was an African-American abolitionist, suffragist, poet and author. She was also active in other types of social reform and was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, which advocated the federal government taking a role in progressive reform. Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, she had a long and prolific career, publishing her first book of poetry at age 20 and her widely praised Iola Leroy, at age 67. In 1850, she became the first woman to teach sewing at the Union Seminary. In 1851, alongside William Still, chairman of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, she helped escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad on their way to Canada. She began her career as a public speaker and political activist after joining the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1853. Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854) became her biggest commercial success. Her short story “Two Offers” was published in the Anglo-African in 1859. She published Sketches of Southern Life in 1872. It detailed her experience touring the South and meeting newly freed Black people. In these poems she described the harsh living conditions of many. After the Civil War she continued to fight for the rights of women, African Americans, and many other social causes. She helped or held high office in several national progressive organizations. In 1873 Harper became superintendent of the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women’s Christian Temperance Union. In 1894 she helped found the National Association of Colored Women and served as its vice president. Harper died February 22, 1911, nine years before women gained the right to vote. Her funeral service was held at the Unitarian Church on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. She was buried in Eden Cemetery, next to her daughter, who had died two years before. Life and Works Early Life and Education Frances Ellen Watkins was born to free parents in Baltimore, Maryland. After her mother died when she was three years old in 1828, Watkins was orphaned. She was raised by her maternal aunt and uncle, Rev. William Watkins, who was a civil rights activist. She was educated at his Academy for Negro Youth. Watkins was a major influence on her life and work. At fourteen, Frances found work as a seamstress. Writing career Frances Watkins had her first volume of verse, Forest Leaves, published in 1845 when she was 20. Her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects (1854), was extremely popular. Over the next few years, it was reprinted numerous times. In 1859, her story “The Two Offers” was published in Anglo-African Magazine, making her the first Black woman to publish a short story. She continued to publish poetry and short stories. She had three novels serialized in a Christian magazine from 1868 to 1888, but was better known for what was long considered her first novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), published as a book when she was 67. At one time considered the first novel by an African American, it is one of the earliest. (Discoveries of earlier works by Harriet E. Wilson and William Wells Brown have displaced Harper’s work.) While using the conventions of the time, she dealt with serious social issues, including education for women, passing, miscegenation, abolition, reconstruction, temperance, and social responsibility. Teaching and Public Activism In 1850, Watkins moved to Ohio, where she worked as the first female teacher at Union Seminary, established by the Ohio Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Union closed in 1863 when the AME Church diverted its funds to purchase Wilberforce University, the first black-owned and operated college.) The school in Wilberforce was run by the Rev. John Mifflin Brown, later a bishop in the AME Church. In 1853, Watkins joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and became a traveling lecturer for the group. In 1854, Watkins delivered her first anti-slavery speech on “Education and the Elevation of Colored Race”. The success of this speech resulted in a two-year lecture tour in Maine for the Anti-Slavery Society. She continued to travel, lecturing throughout the East and Midwest from 1856 to 1860. Progressive Causes Frances Watkins Harper was a strong supporter of abolitionism, prohibition and woman’s suffrage, progressive causes which were connected before and after the American Civil War.. She was also active in the Unitarian Church, which supported abolitionism. An example of her support of the abolition cause, Harper wrote to John Brown (abolitionist), “I thank you that you have been brave enough to reach out your hands to the crushed and blighted of my race; I hope from your sad fate great good may arise to the cause of freedom.” She often read her poetry at the public meetings, including the extremely popular “Bury Me in a Free Land.” In 1858 She refused to give up her seat or ride in the “colored” section of a segregated trolley car in Philadelphia (100 years before Rosa Parks) and wrote one of her most famous poems, “Bury Me In A Free Land,” when she got very sick while on a lecturing tour. Her short story “The Two Offers” became the first short story to be published by a Black woman. In 1866, Harper gave a moving speech before the National Women’s Rights Convention, demanding equal rights for all, including Black women. During the Reconstruction Era, she worked in the South to review and report on living conditions of freedmen. This experience inspired her poems published in Sketches Of Southern Life (1872). She uses the figure of an ex-slave, called Aunt Chloe, as a narrator in several of these. Harper was active in the growing number of Black organizations and came to believe that Black reformers had to be able to set their own priorities. From 1883 to 1890, she helped organize events and programs for the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She had worked with members of the original WCTU, because “it was the most important women’s organization to push for expanding federal power.” “Activists like Harper and Willard campaigned not only for racial and sexual equality but also for a new understanding of the federal government’s responsibility to protect rights, regulate morality, and promote social welfare”. Harper was disappointed when Willard gave priority to white women’s concerns, rather than support Black women’s goals of gaining federal support for an anti-lynching law, defense of black rights, or abolition of the convict lease system. Together with Mary Church Terrell, Harper helped organize the National Association of Colored Women in 1894, and was elected vice president in 1897. Frances Harper died on February 22, 1911.

John Crowe Ransom (April 30, 1888– July 3, 1974) was an American educator, scholar, literary critic, poet, essayist and editor. He is considered to be a founder of the New Criticism school of literary criticism. As a faculty member at Kenyon College, he was the first editor of the widely regarded Kenyon Review. Highly respected as a teacher and mentor to a generation of accomplished students, he also was a prize-winning poet and essayist.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich (November 11, 1836– March 19, 1907) was an American literary figure notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic, during which he published works by Charles Chesnutt and for his poetry, including “The Unguarded Gates.” Biography Early life and education Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on November 11, 1836. When Aldrich was a child, his father moved to New Orleans. After 10 years, Aldrich was sent back to Portsmouth to prepare for college. This period of his life is partly described in his semi-autobiographical novel The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), in which “Tom Bailey” is the juvenile hero. Career Aldrich abandoned college preparations after his father’s death in 1849. At age 16, he entered his uncle’s business office in New York in 1852 and became a constant contributor to the newspapers and magazines. Aldrich befriended other young poets, artists and wits of the metropolitan bohemia of the early 1860s, including Edmund Clarence Stedman, Richard Henry Stoddard, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Bayard Taylor and Walt Whitman. From 1856 to 1859, Aldrich was on the staff of the Home Journal, then edited by Nathaniel Parker Willis. During the Civil War, he was the editor of the New York Illustrated News. In 1865 Aldrich returned to New England, where he was editor in Boston for ten years for Ticknor and Fields—then at the height of their prestige—of the eclectic weekly Every Saturday. It was discontinued in 1875. From 1881 to 1890, Aldrich was editor of the important Atlantic Monthly. As editor, he created tension with his publisher Henry Houghton by refusing to publish commissioned articles by his friends, including Woodrow Wilson and Marion Crawford. When Houghton chastised Aldrich for turning down submissions from his friend Daniel Coit Gilman, Aldrich threatened to resign and finally did so in June 1890. Meanwhile Aldrich continued his private writing, both in prose and verse. His talent was many-sided. He was well known for his form in poetry. His successive volumes of verse, chiefly The Ballad of Babie Bell (1856), Pampinea, and Other Poems (1861), Cloth of Gold (1874), Flower and Thorn (1876), Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book (1881), Mercedes and Later Lyrics (1883), Wyndham Towers (1889), and the collected editions of 1865, 1882, 1897 and 1900, showed him to be a poet of lyrical skill and light touch. Critics believed him to show the influence of Robert Herrick. Aldrich’s longer narrative or dramatic poems were not as successful. Notable work includes such lyrics as “Hesperides,” “When the Sultan Goes to Ispahan,” “Before the Rain,” “Nameless Pain,” “The Tragedy,” “Seadrift,” “Tiger Lilies,” “The One White Rose,” “Palabras Cariñosas,” “Destiny,” or the eight-line poem “Identity.” Beginning with the collection of stories entitled Marjorie Daw and Other People (1873), Aldrich wrote works of realism and quiet humor. His novels Prudence Palfrey (1874), The Queen of Sheba (1877), and The Stillwater Tragedy (1880) had more dramatic action. The first portrayed Portsmouth with the affectionate touch shown in the shorter humorous tale, A Rivermouth Romance (1877). In An Old Town by the Sea (1893), Aldrich commemorated his birthplace again. Travel and description are the theme of From Ponkapog to Pesth (1883). Marriage and later life Aldrich married Lillian Woodman and had two sons. Mark Twain apparently detested Aldrich’s wife, writing in 1893: “Lord, I loathe that woman so! She is an idiot—an absolute idiot—and does not know it... and her husband, the sincerest man that walks... tied for life to this vacant hellion, this clothes-rack, this twaddling, blethering, driveling blatherskite!” The Aldriches were close friends of Henry L. Pierce, former mayor of Boston and chocolate magnate. At his death in 1896, he willed them his estate at Canton, Massachusetts. In 1901, Aldrich’s son Charles, married the year before, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Aldrich built two houses, one for his son and one for him and his family, in Saranac Lake, New York, then the leading treatment center for the disease. On March 6, 1904, Charles Aldrich died of tuberculosis, age thirty-four. The family left Saranac Lake and never returned. Aldrich died in Boston on March 19, 1907. His last words were recorded as, “In spite of it all, I am going to sleep; put out the lights.” His Life was written by Ferris Greenslet (1908). In 1920, Aldrich’s widow Lillian Woodman Aldrich wrote her memoirs under the title Crowding Memories. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bailey_Aldrich

Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau.

John Updike was a poet, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and novelist John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, on March 18, 1932. His father taught high school math, and his mother wrote short stories and novels. Updike received his BA from Harvard University in 1954, the year he began to publish in The New Yorker. Thomas M. Disch wrote in Poetry magazine, "Updike enjoys such pre-eminence as a novelist that his poetry could be mistaken as a hobby or a foible," adding, "It is a poetry of civility—in its epigrammatical lucidity . . . and in its tone of vulgar bonhomie and good appetite." The Los Angeles Times noted that he "has earned an . . . imposing stance on the literary landscape . . . earning virtually every American literary award, repeated bestsellerdom and the near-royal status of the American author-celebrity." Updike is the author of more than fifty books. Among his volumes of poetry are Americana and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993), Facing Nature (1985), Tossing and Turning (1977), Seventy Poems (1972), Midpoint and Other Poems (1969), and The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958). His novels and short-story collections include Toward the End of Time (1997), The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994), Problems and Other Stories (1981), Marry Me (1976), Rabbit Redux (1971), and Couples (1968). Updike received numerous honors and awards including the National Book Award, American Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and a National Arts Club Medal of Honor. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for Rabbit is Rich and another Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for Rabbit at Rest. John Updike died due to complications of lung cancer on January 27, 2009. Poetry The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (Harper and Brothers, 1958) Telephone Poles and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 1963) Midpoint and Other Poems (1969) Tossing and Turning (1977) Facing Nature (1985) Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993) Americana: and Other Poems (2001) References Poets.org - www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/660

Katharine Lee Bates (August 12, 1859– March 28, 1929) was an American songwriter. She is remembered as the author of the words to the anthem “America the Beautiful”. She popularized “Mrs. Santa Claus” through her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride (1889). Life and career Bates was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the daughter of Congregational pastor William Bates and his wife, Cornelia Frances Lee. She graduated from Wellesley High School in 1874 and from Wellesley College with a B.A. in 1880. She taught at Natick High School during 1880–81 and at Dana Hall School from 1885 until 1889. She returned to Wellesley as an instructor, then an associate professor 1891–93 when she was awarded an M.A. and became full professor of English literature. She studied at Oxford University during 1890–91. While teaching at Wellesley, she was elected a member of the newly formed Pi Gamma Mu honor society for the social sciences because of her interest in history and politics. Bates was a prolific author of many volumes of poetry, travel books, and children’s books. She popularized Mrs. Claus in her poem Goody Santa Claus on a Sleigh Ride from the collection Sunshine and other Verses for Children (1889). She contributed regularly to periodicals, sometimes under the pseudonym James Lincoln, including Atlantic Monthly, The Congregationalist, Boston Evening Transcript, Christian Century, Contemporary Verse, Lippincott’s and Delineator. A lifelong, active Republican, Bates broke with the party to endorse Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis in 1924 because of Republican opposition to American participation in the League of Nations. She said: “Though born and bred in the Republican camp, I cannot bear their betrayal of Mr. Wilson and their rejection of the League of Nations, our one hope of peace on earth.” Bates never married. In 1910, when a colleague described “free-flying spinsters” as “fringe on the garment of life”, Bates answered: “I always thought the fringe had the best of it. I don’t think I mind not being woven in.” Bates died in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on September 28, 1929, and is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery at Falmouth. The historic home and birthplace of Bates in Falmouth, was sold to Ruth P. Clark in November 2013 for $1,200,000. Relationship with Katharine Coman Bates lived in Wellesley with Katharine Coman, who was a history and political economy teacher and founder of the Wellesley College School Economics department. The pair lived together for twenty-five years until Coman’s death in 1915. In 1922, Bates published Yellow Clover: A Book of Remembrance, a collection of poems written “to or about my Friend” Katharine Coman, some of which had been published in Coman’s lifetime. Some describe the couple as intimate lesbian partners, citing as an example Bates’ 1891 letter to Coman: "It was never very possible to leave Wellesley [for good], because so many love-anchors held me there, and it seemed least of all possible when I had just found the long-desired way to your dearest heart... Of course I want to come to you, very much as I want to come to Heaven." Others contest the use of the term lesbian to describe such a “Boston marriage”. Writes one: “We cannot say with certainty what sexual connotations these relationships conveyed. We do know that these relationships were deeply intellectual; they fostered verbal and physical expressions of love.” America the Beautiful The first draft of “America the Beautiful” was hastily jotted down in a notebook during the summer of 1893, which Bates spent teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Later she remembered: One day some of the other teachers and I decided to go on a trip to 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. We hired a prairie wagon. Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse. The words to her only famous poem first appeared in print in The Congregationalist, a weekly journal, for Independence Day, 1895. The poem reached a wider audience when her revised version was printed in the Boston Evening Transcript on November 19, 1904. Her final expanded version was written in 1913. When a version appeared in her collection America the Beautiful, and Other Poems (1912), a reviewer in the New York Times wrote: “we intend no derogation to Miss Katharine Lee Bates when we say that she is a good minor poet.” The hymn has been sung to several tunes, but the familiar one is by Samuel A. Ward (1847–1903), written for his hymn “Materna” (1882). Honors The Bates family home on Falmouth’s Main Street is preserved by the Falmouth Historical Society. There is also a street named in her honor, “Katharine Lee Bates Road” in Falmouth. A plaque marks the site of the home where she lived as an adult on Centre Street in Newton, Massachusetts. The Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School on Elmwood Road in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and the Katharine Lee Bates Elementary School, founded in 1957 in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Bates Hall dormitory at Wellesley College are named for her. The Katharine Lee Bates Professorship was established at Wellesley shortly after her death. Bates was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. Collections of Bates’s manuscripts are housed at the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College; Falmouth Historical Society; Houghton Library, Harvard University; Wellesley College Archives. In 2012, she was listed as one of the 31 LGBT history “icons” by the organisers of LGBT History Month.

Joyce Kilmer (born as Alfred Joyce Kilmer; December 6, 1886– July 30, 1918) was an American writer and poet mainly remembered for a short poem titled “Trees” (1913), which was published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914. Though a prolific poet whose works celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his Roman Catholic religious faith, Kilmer was also a journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor. While most of his works are largely unknown, a select few of his poems remain popular and are published frequently in anthologies. Several critics—including both Kilmer’s contemporaries and modern scholars—have disparaged Kilmer’s work as being too simple and overly sentimental, and suggested that his style was far too traditional, even archaic. Many writers, including notably Ogden Nash, have parodied Kilmer’s work and style—as attested by the many parodies of “Trees”. At the time of his deployment to Europe during World War I, Kilmer was considered the leading American Roman Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation, whom critics often compared to British contemporaries G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). He enlisted in the New York National Guard and was deployed to France with the 69th Infantry Regiment (the famous "Fighting 69th") in 1917. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet at the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918 at the age of 31. He was married to Aline Murray, also an accomplished poet and author, with whom he had five children. Biography Early years and education: 1886–1908 Kilmer was born December 6, 1886 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the fourth and youngest child, of Annie Ellen Kilburn (1849–1932), a minor writer and composer, and Dr. Frederick Barnett Kilmer (1851–1934), a physician and analytical chemist employed by the Johnson and Johnson Company and inventor of the company’s baby powder. He was named Alfred Joyce Kilmer after two priests at Christ Church in New Brunswick: Alfred R. Taylor, the curate; and the Rev. Dr. Elisha Brooks Joyce (1857–1926), the rector. Christ Church is the oldest Episcopal parish in New Brunswick and the Kilmer family were parishioners. Rector Joyce, who served the parish from 1883 to 1916, baptised the young Kilmer, who remained an Episcopalian until his 1913 conversion to Catholicism. Kilmer’s birthplace in New Brunswick, where the Kilmer family lived from 1886 to 1892, is still standing, and houses a small museum to Kilmer, as well as a few Middlesex County government offices. Kilmer entered Rutgers College Grammar School (now Rutgers Preparatory School) in 1895 at the age of 8. During his years at the Grammar School, Kilmer was editor-in-chief of the school’s paper, the Argo, and loved the classics but had difficulty with Greek. He won the first Lane Classical Prize, for oratory, and obtained a scholarship to Rutgers College which he would attend the following year. Despite his difficulties with Greek and mathematics, he stood at the head of his class in preparatory school. After graduating from Rutgers College Grammar School in 1904, he continued his education at Rutgers College (now Rutgers University) from 1904 to 1906. At Rutgers, Kilmer was associate editor of the Targum, the campus newspaper, and a member of the Delta Upsilon fraternity. However, he was unable to complete the curriculum’s rigorous mathematics requirement and was asked to repeat his sophomore year. Under pressure from his mother, Kilmer transferred to Columbia University in New York City. At Columbia, Kilmer was vice-president of the Philolexian Society (a literary society), associate editor of Columbia Spectator (the campus newspaper), and member of the Debating Union. He completed his Bachelor of Arts (A.B.) degree and graduated from Columbia on May 23, 1908. Shortly after graduation, on June 9, 1908, he married Aline Murray (1888–1941), a fellow poet to whom he had been engaged since his sophomore year at Rutgers. The Kilmers had five children: Kenton Sinclair Kilmer (1909–1995); Michael Barry Kilmer (1916–1927); Deborah ("Sister Michael") Clanton Kilmer (1914–1999) who was a Catholic nun at the Saint Benedict’s Monastery; Rose Kilburn Kilmer (1912–1917); and Christopher Kilmer (1917–1984). Years of writing and faith: 1909–1917 In the autumn of 1908, Kilmer was employed teaching Latin at Morristown High School in Morristown, New Jersey. At this time, he began to submit essays to Red Cross Notes (including his first published piece, an essay on the “Psychology of Advertising”) and his early poems to literary periodicals. Kilmer also wrote book reviews for The Literary Digest, Town & Country, The Nation, and The New York Times. By June 1909, Kilmer had abandoned any aspirations to continue teaching and relocated to New York City, where he focused solely on developing a career as a writer. From 1909 to 1912, Kilmer was employed by Funk and Wagnalls, which was preparing an edition of The Standard Dictionary that would be published in 1912. According to Hillis, Kilmer’s job “was to define ordinary words assigned to him at five cents for each word defined. This was a job at which one would ordinarily earn ten to twelve dollars a week, but Kilmer attacked the task with such vigor and speed that it was soon thought wisest to put him on a regular salary.” In 1911, Kilmer’s first book of verse was published, entitled Summer of Love. Kilmer would later write that “...some of the poems in it, those inspired by genuine love, are not things of which to be ashamed, and you, understanding, would not be offended by the others.” In 1912, Kilmer became a special writer for the New York Times Review of Books and the New York Times Sunday Magazine and was often engaged in lecturing. He moved to Mahwah, New Jersey, where he resided until his service and death in World War I. By this time he had become established as a published poet and as a popular lecturer. According to Robert Holliday, Kilmer “frequently neglected to make any preparation for his speeches, not even choosing a subject until the beginning of the dinner which was to culminate in a specimen of his oratory. His constant research for the dictionary, and, later on, for his New York Times articles, must have given him a store of knowledge at his fingertips to be produced at a moment’s notice for these emergencies.” When the Kilmers’ daughter Rose (1912–1917) was stricken with poliomyelitis (also known as infantile paralysis) shortly after birth, they turned to their religious faith for comfort. A series of correspondence between Kilmer and Father James J. Daly led the Kilmers to convert to Roman Catholicism, and they were received in the church in 1913. In one of these letters Kilmer writes that he “believed in the Catholic position, the Catholic view of ethics and aesthetics, for a long time,” and he “wanted something not intellectual, some conviction not mental– in fact I wanted Faith.” Kilmer would stop “every morning for months” on his way “to the office and prayed for faith,” claiming that when “faith did come, it came, I think, by way of my little paralyzed daughter. Her lifeless hands led me; I think her tiny feet know beautiful paths. You understand this and it gives me a selfish pleasure to write it down.” With the publication of “Trees” in the magazine Poetry in August 1913, Kilmer gained immense popularity as a poet across the United States. He had established himself as a successful lecturer—particularly one seeking to reach a Catholic audience. His close friend and editor Robert Holliday wrote that it “is not an unsupported assertion to say that he was in his time and place the laureate of the Catholic Church.” Trees and Other Poems (1914) was published the following year. Over the next few years, Kilmer was prolific in his output, managing an intense schedule of lectures, publishing a large number of essays and literary criticism, and writing poetry. In 1915 he became poetry editor of Current Literature and contributing editor of Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature. In 1916 and 1917, before the American entry into World War I, Kilmer would publish four books: The Circus and Other Essays (1916), a series of interviews with literary personages entitled Literature in the Making (1917), Main Street and Other Poems (1917), and Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets (1917). War years: 1917–1918 In April 1917, a few days after the United States entered World War I, Kilmer enlisted in the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard. In August, Kilmer was assigned as a statistician with the U.S. 69th Infantry Regiment (better known as the "Fighting 69th" and later re-designated the 165th Infantry Regiment), of the 42nd “Rainbow” Division, and quickly rose to the rank of sergeant. Though he was eligible for commission as an officer and often recommended for such posts during the course of the war, Kilmer refused, stating that he would rather be a sergeant in the Fighting 69th than an officer in any other regiment. Shortly before his deployment to Europe, the Kilmers’ daughter Rose had died, and twelve days later, their son Christopher was born. Before his departure, Kilmer had contracted with publishers to write a book about the war, deciding upon the title Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. The regiment arrived in France in November 1917, and Kilmer wrote to his wife that he had not written “anything in prose or verse since I got here—except statistics—but I’ve stored up a lot of memories to turn into copy when I get a chance.” Kilmer did not write such a book; however, toward the end of the year, he did find time to write prose sketches and poetry. The most notable of his poems during this period was “Rouge Bouquet” (1918) which commemorated the deaths of two dozen members of his regiment in a German artillery barrage on American trench positions in the Rouge Bouquet forest north-east of the French village of Baccarat. At the time, this was a relatively quiet sector of the front, but the first battalion was struck by a German heavy artillery bombardment on the afternoon of March 7, 1918 that buried 21 men of the unit, killing 19 (of which 14 remained entombed). Kilmer sought more hazardous duty and was transferred to the military intelligence section of his regiment, in April 1918. In a letter to his wife, Aline, he remarked: “Now I’m doing work I love– and work you may be proud of. None of the drudgery of soldiering, but a double share of glory and thrills.” According to Hillis, Kilmer’s fellow soldiers had accorded him much respect for his battlefield demeanour—"He was worshipped by the men about him. I have heard them speak with awe of his coolness and his nerve in scouting patrols in no man’s land. This coolness and his habit of choosing, with typical enthusiasm, the most dangerous and difficult missions, led to his death.” Death and burial During the Second Battle of Marne there was heavy fighting throughout the last days of July 1918. On July 30, 1918, Kilmer volunteered to accompany Major William “Wild Bill” Donovan (later, in World War II, the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency) when Donovan’s battalion (1–165th Infantry) was sent to lead the day’s attack. During the course of the day, Kilmer led a scouting party to find the position of a German machine gun. When his comrades found him, some time later, they thought at first that he was peering over the edge of a little hill, where he had crawled for a better view. When he did not answer their call, they ran to him and found him dead. According to Father Francis P. Duffy: “A bullet had pierced his brain. His body was carried in and buried by the side of Ames. God rest his dear and gallant soul.” A sniper’s bullet likely killed him immediately. According to military records, Kilmer died on the battlefield near Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles, in France, on July 30, 1918 at the age of 31. For his valor, Kilmer was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre (War Cross) by the French Republic. Kilmer was buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne, Picardy, France. A cenotaph erected to his memory is located on the Kilmer family plot in Elmwood Cemetery, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. A Memorial Mass was celebrated at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan on October 14, 1918. Criticism and influence “Trees” Joyce Kilmer’s reputation as a poet is staked largely on the widespread popularity of one poem—"Trees" (1913). It was first published in the August 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse which had begun publishing the year before in Chicago, Illinois and was included as the title poem in a collection of poems Trees and Other Poems (1914). According to Kilmer’s oldest son, Kenton, the poem was written on February 2, 1913 when the family resided in Mahwah, New Jersey. It was written in the afternoon in the intervals of some other writing. The desk was in an upstairs room, by a window looking down a wooded hill. It was written in a little notebook in which his father and mother wrote out copies of several of their poems, and, in most cases, added the date of composition. On one page the first two lines of 'Trees’ appear, with the date, February 2, 1913, and on another page, further on in the book, is the full text of the poem. It was dedicated to his wife’s mother, Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, who was endeared to all her family. Many locations including Rutgers University (where Kilmer attended for two years), University of Notre Dame, as well as historians in Mahwah, New Jersey and in other places, have boasted that a specific tree was the inspiration for Kilmer’s poem. However, Kenton Kilmer refutes these claims, remarking that, Mother and I agreed, when we talked about it, that Dad never meant his poem to apply to one particular tree, or to the trees of any special region. Just any trees or all trees that might be rained on or snowed on, and that would be suitable nesting places for robins. I guess they’d have to have upward-reaching branches, too, for the line about ‘lifting leafy arms to pray.’ Rule out weeping willows.” The popular appeal of this simple poem is likely the source of its endurance despite the continuing negative opinion of the poem’s merits from scholars and critics. According to Robert Holliday, Kilmer’s friend and editor, “Trees” speaks “with authentic song to the simplest of hearts” and that “(t)he exquisite title poem now so universally known, made his reputation more than all the rest he had written put together. That impeccable lyric which made for immediate widespread popularity.” Its popularity has also led to parodies of the poem—some by noted poets and writers. The pattern of its first lines (I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.) is of seemingly simple rhyme and meter and easy to mimic along with the poem’s choice of metaphors. One of the best known parodies is “Song of the Open Road” by American humorist and poet Ogden Nash (1902–1971): I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. Indeed, unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all. Influences upon Kilmer’s verse Kilmer’s early works were inspired by, and were imitative of, the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ernest Dowson, Aubrey Beardsley, and William Butler Yeats (and the Celtic Revival). It was later through the influence of works by Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, and those of Alice Meynell and her children Viola Meynell and Francis Meynell, that Kilmer seems to have become interested in Catholicism. Kilmer wrote of his influences: I have come to regard them with intense admiration. Patmore seems to me to be a greater poet than Francis Thompson. He has not the rich vocabulary, the decorative erudition, the Shelleyan enthusiasm, which distinguish the Sister Songs and the Hound of Heaven, but he has a classical simplicity, a restraint and sincerity which make his poems satisfying. Because he was initially raised Episcopalian (or Anglican), Kilmer became literary editor of the Anglican weekly, The Churchman, before his conversion to Catholicism. During this time he did considerable research into 16th and 17th century Anglican poets as well as metaphysical, or mystic poets of that time, including George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, Robert Herrick, Bishop Coxe, and Robert Stephen Hawker (the eccentric vicar of the Church of Saint Morwenna and Saint John the Baptist at Morwenstow in Cornwall)—the latter whom he referred to as “a coast life-guard in a cassock.” These poets also had an influence on Kilmer’s writings. Critics compared Kilmer to British Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton—suggesting that his reputation might have risen to the level where he would have been considered their American counterpart if not for his untimely death. Criticism of Kilmer’s work Kilmer’s death at age 31 removed from him the opportunity to develop into a more mature poet. Because “Trees” is often dismissed by modern critics and scholars as simple verse, much of Kilmer’s work (especially his literary criticism) has slipped into obscurity. Only a very few of his poems have appeared in anthologies, and with the exception of “Trees”—and to a much lesser extent “Rouge Bouquet” (1917–1918)—almost none have obtained lasting widespread popularity. The entire corpus of Kilmer’s work was produced between 1909 and 1918 when Romanticism and sentimental lyric poetry fell out of favor and Modernism took root—especially with the influence of the Lost Generation. In the years after Kilmer’s death, poetry went in drastically different directions, as is seen especially in the work of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Kilmer’s verse is conservative and traditional, and does not break the formal rules of poetics—he can be considered as one of the last poets of the Romantic era. His style has been criticized for not breaking free of traditional modes of rhyme, meter, and theme, and for being too sentimental to be taken seriously. Works * 1911: Summer of Love (poetry) * 1914: Trees and Other Poems (poetry) * 1916: The Circus and Other Essays (essays) * 1917: Main Street and Other Poems. (poetry) * 1917: The Courage of Enlightenment: An address delivered in Campion College, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, to the members of the graduating class, June 15, 1917. * 1917: Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets. (poetry anthology, edited by Kilmer) * 1917: Literature in the Making by some of its Makers (criticism) * 1918: Poems, Essays and Letters in Two Volumes Volume One: Memoir and Poems, Volume Two: prose works (collected works) (published posthumously, edited by Robert Cortes Holliday). * 1919: Kilmer’s unfinished history of the Fighting 69th (165th Infantry) is posthumously printed in Father Duffy’s Story by Francis P. Duffy (New York: Doran, 1919). * 1921: The Circus and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces (published posthumously) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Kilmer

Washington Irving (April 3, 1783– November 28, 1859) was an American short story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith, and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors and the Alhambra. Irving served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846. He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and just eight months before his death (at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York), completed a five-volume biography of George Washington. Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe. Irving was also admired by some European writers, including Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Thomas Campbell, Francis Jeffrey, and Charles Dickens. As America’s first genuine internationally best-selling author, Irving advocated for writing as a legitimate profession and argued for stronger laws to protect American writers from copyright infringement. Biography Early years Washington Irving’s parents were William Irving, Sr., originally of Quholm, Shapinsay, Orkney, and Sarah (née Sanders), Scottish-English immigrants. They married in 1761 while William was serving as a petty officer in the British Navy. They had eleven children, eight of whom survived to adulthood. Their first two sons, each named William, died in infancy, as did their fourth child, John. Their surviving children were: William, Jr. (1766), Ann (1770), Peter (1771), Catherine (1774), Ebenezer (1776), John Treat (1778), Sarah (1780), and Washington. The Irving family settled in Manhattan, New York City, and was part of the city’s small, vibrant merchant class when Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783, the same week city residents learned of the British ceasefire that ended the American Revolution; Irving’s mother named him after the hero of the revolution, George Washington. At age six, with the help of a nanny, Irving met his namesake, who was then living in New York after his inauguration as president in 1789. The president blessed young Irving, an encounter Irving later commemorated in a small watercolor painting, which still hangs in his home today. The Irvings lived at 131 William Street at the time of Washington Irving’s birth. The family later moved across the street to 128 William St. Several of Washington Irving’s older brothers became active New York merchants, and they encouraged their younger brother’s literary aspirations, often supporting him financially as he pursued his writing career. An uninterested student, Irving preferred adventure stories and drama and, by age fourteen, was regularly sneaking out of class in the evenings to attend the theater. The 1798 outbreak of yellow fever in Manhattan prompted his family to send him to healthier climes upriver, and Irving was dispatched to stay with his friend James Kirke Paulding in Tarrytown, New York. It was in Tarrytown that Irving became familiar with the nearby town of Sleepy Hollow, with its quaint Dutch customs and local ghost stories. Irving made several other trips up the Hudson as a teenager, including an extended visit to Johnstown, New York, where he passed through the Catskill mountain region, the setting for “Rip Van Winkle”. "[O]f all the scenery of the Hudson", Irving wrote later, “the Kaatskill Mountains had the most witching effect on my boyish imagination”. The 19-year-old Irving began writing letters to the New York Morning Chronicle in 1802, submitting commentaries on the city’s social and theater scene under the name of Jonathan Oldstyle. The name, which purposely evoked the writer’s Federalist leanings, was the first of many pseudonyms Irving would employ throughout his career. The letters brought Irving some early fame and moderate notoriety. Aaron Burr, a co-publisher of the Chronicle, was impressed enough to send clippings of the Oldstyle pieces to his daughter, Theodosia, while writer Charles Brockden Brown made a trip to New York to recruit Oldstyle for a literary magazine he was editing in Philadelphia. Concerned for his health, Irving’s brothers financed an extended tour of Europe from 1804 to 1806. Irving bypassed most of the sites and locations considered essential for the development of an upwardly mobile young man, to the dismay of his brother William. William wrote that, though he was pleased his brother’s health was improving, he did not like the choice to “gallop through Italy... leaving Florence on your left and Venice on your right”. Instead, Irving honed the social and conversational skills that would later make him one of the world’s most in-demand guests. “I endeavor to take things as they come with cheerfulness”, Irving wrote, “and when I cannot get a dinner to suit my taste, I endeavor to get a taste to suit my dinner”. While visiting Rome in 1805, Irving struck up a friendship with the American painter Washington Allston, and nearly allowed himself to be persuaded into following Allston into a career as a painter. “My lot in life, however”, Irving said later, “was differently cast”. First major writings Irving returned from Europe to study law with his legal mentor, Judge Josiah Ogden Hoffman, in New York City. By his own admission, he was not a good student, and barely passed the bar in 1806. Irving began actively socializing with a group of literate young men he dubbed “The Lads of Kilkenny”. Collaborating with his brother William and fellow Lad James Kirke Paulding, Irving created the literary magazine Salmagundi in January 1807. Writing under various pseudonyms, such as William Wizard and Launcelot Langstaff, Irving lampooned New York culture and politics in a manner similar to today’s Mad magazine. Salmagundi was a moderate success, spreading Irving’s name and reputation beyond New York. In its seventeenth issue, dated November 11, 1807, Irving affixed the nickname “Gotham”—an Anglo-Saxon word meaning “Goat’s Town”—to New York City. In late 1809, while mourning the death of his seventeen-year-old fiancée Matilda Hoffman, Irving completed work on his first major book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a satire on self-important local history and contemporary politics. Prior to its publication, Irving started a hoax akin to today’s viral marketing campaigns; he placed a series of missing person advertisements in New York newspapers seeking information on Diedrich Knickerbocker, a crusty Dutch historian who had allegedly gone missing from his hotel in New York City. As part of the ruse, Irving placed a notice—allegedly from the hotel’s proprietor—informing readers that if Mr. Knickerbocker failed to return to the hotel to pay his bill, he would publish a manuscript Knickerbocker had left behind. Unsuspecting readers followed the story of Knickerbocker and his manuscript with interest, and some New York city officials were concerned enough about the missing historian that they considered offering a reward for his safe return. Riding the wave of public interest he had created with his hoax, Irving—adopting the pseudonym of his Dutch historian—published A History of New York on December 6, 1809, to immediate critical and popular success. “It took with the public”, Irving remarked, “and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America”. Today, the surname of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictional narrator of this and other Irving works, has become a nickname for Manhattan residents in general. After the success of A History of New York, Irving searched for a job and eventually became an editor of Analectic Magazine, where he wrote biographies of naval heroes like James Lawrence and Oliver Perry. He was also among the first magazine editors to reprint Francis Scott Key’s poem “Defense of Fort McHenry”, which would later be immortalized as “The Star-Spangled Banner”, the national anthem of the United States. Like many merchants and New Yorkers, Irving originally opposed the War of 1812, but the British attack on Washington, D.C. in 1814 convinced him to enlist. He served on the staff of Daniel Tompkins, governor of New York and commander of the New York State Militia. Apart from a reconnaissance mission in the Great Lakes region, he saw no real action. The war was disastrous for many American merchants, including Irving’s family, and in mid-1815, he left for England to attempt to salvage the family trading company. He remained in Europe for the next seventeen years. Irving was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1815. Life in Europe The Sketch Book Irving spent the next two years trying to bail out the family firm financially but eventually had to declare bankruptcy. With no job prospects, Irving continued writing throughout 1817 and 1818. In the summer of 1817, he visited Walter Scott, beginning a lifelong personal and professional friendship. Irving continued writing: he composed the short story “Rip Van Winkle” overnight while staying with his sister Sarah and her husband, Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England, a place that also inspired other works. In October 1818, Irving’s brother William secured for Irving a post as chief clerk to the United States Navy, and urged him to return home. Irving turned the offer down, opting to stay in England to pursue a writing career. In the spring of 1819, Irving sent to his brother Ebenezer in New York a set of short prose pieces that he asked be published as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. The first installment, containing “Rip Van Winkle”, was an enormous success, and the rest of the work would be equally successful; it was issued in 1819–1820 in seven installments in New York, and in two volumes in London ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" would appear in the sixth issue of the New York edition, and the second volume of the London edition). Like many successful authors of this era, Irving struggled against literary bootleggers. In England, some of his sketches were reprinted in periodicals without his permission, a legal practice as there was no international copyright law at the time. To prevent further piracy in Britain, Irving paid to have the first four American installments published as a single volume by John Miller in London. Irving appealed to Walter Scott for help procuring a more reputable publisher for the remainder of the book. Scott referred Irving to his own publisher, London powerhouse John Murray, who agreed to take on The Sketch Book. From then on, Irving would publish concurrently in the United States and Britain to protect his copyright, with Murray being his English publisher of choice. Irving’s reputation soared, and for the next two years, he led an active social life in Paris and Britain, where he was often feted as an anomaly of literature: an upstart American who dared to write English well. Bracebridge Hall and Tales of a Traveller With both Irving and publisher John Murray eager to follow up on the success of The Sketch Book, Irving spent much of 1821 travelling in Europe in search of new material, reading widely in Dutch and German folk tales. Hampered by writer’s block—and depressed by the death of his brother William—Irving worked slowly, finally delivering a completed manuscript to Murray in March 1822. The book, Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists, A Medley (the location was based loosely on Aston Hall, occupied by members of the Bracebridge family, near his sister’s home in Birmingham) was published in June 1822. The format of Bracebridge was similar to that of The Sketch Book, with Irving, as Crayon, narrating a series of more than fifty loosely connected short stories and essays. While some reviewers thought Bracebridge to be a lesser imitation of The Sketch Book, the book was well received by readers and critics. “We have received so much pleasure from this book”, wrote critic Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review, “that we think ourselves bound in gratitude... to make a public acknowledgement of it.” Irving was relieved at its reception, which did much to cement his reputation with European readers. Still struggling with writer’s block, Irving traveled to Germany, settling in Dresden in the winter of 1822. Here he dazzled the royal family and attached himself to Mrs. Amelia Foster, an American living in Dresden with her five children. Irving was particularly attracted to Mrs. Foster’s 18-year-old daughter Emily and vied in frustration for her hand. Emily finally refused his offer of marriage in the spring of 1823. He returned to Paris and began collaborating with playwright John Howard Payne on translations of French plays for the English stage, with little success. He also learned through Payne that the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was romantically interested in him, though Irving never pursued the relationship. In August 1824, Irving published the collection of essays Tales of a Traveller—including the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker”—under his Geoffrey Crayon persona. “I think there are in it some of the best things I have ever written”, Irving told his sister. But while the book sold respectably, Traveller was dismissed by critics, who panned both Traveller and its author. “The public have been led to expect better things”, wrote the United States Literary Gazette, while the New-York Mirror pronounced Irving “overrated”. Hurt and depressed by the book’s reception, Irving retreated to Paris where he spent the next year worrying about finances and scribbling down ideas for projects that never materialized. Spanish books While in Paris, Irving received a letter from Alexander Hill Everett on January 30, 1826. Everett, recently the American Minister to Spain, urged Irving to join him in Madrid, noting that a number of manuscripts dealing with the Spanish conquest of the Americas had recently been made public. Irving left for Madrid and enthusiastically began scouring the Spanish archives for colorful material. With full access to the American consul’s massive library of Spanish history, Irving began working on several books at once. The first offspring of this hard work, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, was published in January 1828. The book was popular in the United States and in Europe and would have 175 editions published before the end of the century. It was also the first project of Irving’s to be published with his own name, instead of a pseudonym, on the title page. Irving was invited to stay at the palace of the Duke of Gor, who gave him unfettered access to his library containing many medieval manuscripts. Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada was published a year later, followed by Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus in 1831. Irving’s writings on Columbus are a mixture of history and fiction, a genre now called romantic history. Irving based them on extensive research in the Spanish archives, but also added imaginative elements aimed at sharpening the story. The first of these works is the source of the durable myth that medieval Europeans believed the Earth was flat. (See Myth of the flat earth.) According to the popular book, Columbus proved the Earth was round. In 1829, Irving moved into Granada’s ancient palace Alhambra, “determined to linger here”, he said, “until I get some writings under way connected with the place”. Before he could get any significant writing underway, however, he was notified of his appointment as Secretary to the American Legation in London. Worried he would disappoint friends and family if he refused the position, Irving left Spain for England in July 1829. Secretary to the American legation in London Arriving in London, Irving joined the staff of American Minister Louis McLane. McLane immediately assigned the daily secretary work to another man and tapped Irving to fill the role of aide-de-camp. The two worked over the next year to negotiate a trade agreement between the United States and the British West Indies, finally reaching a deal in August 1830. That same year, Irving was awarded a medal by the Royal Society of Literature, followed by an honorary doctorate of civil law from Oxford in 1831. Following McLane’s recall to the United States in 1831 to serve as Secretary of Treasury, Irving stayed on as the legation’s chargé d’affaires until the arrival of Martin Van Buren, President Andrew Jackson’s nominee for British Minister. With Van Buren in place, Irving resigned his post to concentrate on writing, eventually completing Tales of the Alhambra, which would be published concurrently in the United States and England in 1832. Irving was still in London when Van Buren received word that the United States Senate had refused to confirm him as the new Minister. Consoling Van Buren, Irving predicted that the Senate’s partisan move would backfire. “I should not be surprised”, Irving said, “if this vote of the Senate goes far toward elevating him to the presidential chair”. Return to America Washington Irving arrived in New York, after seventeen years abroad, on May 21, 1832. That September, he accompanied the U.S. Commissioner on Indian Affairs, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, along with companions Charles La Trobe and Count Albert-Alexandre de Pourtales, on a surveying mission deep in Indian Territory, now known as Oklahoma. At the completion of his western tour, Irving traveled through Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, where he became acquainted with the politician and novelist John Pendleton Kennedy. Frustrated by bad investments, Irving turned to writing to generate additional income, beginning with A Tour on the Prairies, a work which related his recent travels on the frontier. The book was another popular success and also the first book written and published by Irving in the United States since A History of New York in 1809. In 1834, he was approached by fur magnate John Jacob Astor, who convinced Irving to write a history of his fur trading colony in the American Northwest, now known as Astoria, Oregon. Irving made quick work of Astor’s project, shipping the fawning biographical account titled Astoria in February 1836. In 1835, Irving, Astor, and a few others founded the Saint Nicholas Society in the City of New York. During an extended stay at Astor’s, Irving met the explorer Benjamin Bonneville, who intrigued Irving with his maps and stories of the territories beyond the Rocky Mountains. When the two met in Washington, D.C. several months later, Bonneville opted to sell his maps and rough notes to Irving for $1,000. Irving used these materials as the basis for his 1837 book The Adventures of Captain Bonneville. These three works made up Irving’s “western” series of books and were written partly as a response to criticism that his time in England and Spain had made him more European than American. In the minds of some critics, especially James Fenimore Cooper and Philip Freneau, Irving had turned his back on his American heritage in favor of English aristocracy. Irving’s western books, particularly A Tour on the Prairies, were well received in the United States, though British critics accused Irving of “book-making”. In 1835, Irving purchased a “neglected cottage” and its surrounding riverfront property in Tarrytown, New York. The house, which he named Sunnyside in 1841, required constant repair and renovation over the next twenty years. With costs of Sunnyside escalating, Irving reluctantly agreed in 1839 to become a regular contributor to The Knickerbocker magazine, writing new essays and short stories under the Knickerbocker and Crayon pseudonyms. He was regularly approached by aspiring young authors for advice or endorsement, including Edgar Allan Poe, who sought Irving’s comments on “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Irving also championed America’s maturing literature, advocating stronger copyright laws to protect writers from the kind of piracy that had initially plagued The Sketch Book. Writing in the January 1840 issue of Knickerbocker, he openly endorsed copyright legislation pending in the U.S. Congress. “We have a young literature”, he wrote, “springing up and daily unfolding itself with wonderful energy and luxuriance, which... deserves all its fostering care”. The legislation did not pass. In 1841, he was elected in the National Academy of Design as an Honorary Academician. Irving at this time also began a friendly correspondence with the English writer Charles Dickens and hosted the author and his wife at Sunnyside during Dickens’s American tour in 1842. Minister to Spain In 1842, after an endorsement from Secretary of State Daniel Webster, President John Tyler appointed Irving as Minister to Spain. Irving was surprised and honored, writing, “It will be a severe trial to absent myself for a time from my dear little Sunnyside, but I shall return to it better enabled to carry it on comfortably”. While Irving hoped his position as Minister would allow him plenty of time to write, Spain was in a state of perpetual political upheaval during most of his tenure, with a number of warring factions vying for control of the twelve-year-old Queen Isabella II. Irving maintained good relations with the various generals and politicians, as control of Spain rotated through Espartero, Bravo, then Narvaez. However, the politics and warfare were exhausting, and Irving—homesick and suffering from a crippling skin condition—grew quickly disheartened: I am wearied and at times heartsick of the wretched politics of this country. . . . The last ten or twelve years of my life, passed among sordid speculators in the United States, and political adventurers in Spain, has shewn me so much of the dark side of human nature, that I begin to have painful doubts of my fellow man; and look back with regret to the confiding period of my literary career, when, poor as a rat, but rich in dreams, I beheld the world through the medium of my imagination and was apt to believe men as good as I wished them to be. With the political situation in Spain relatively settled, Irving continued to closely monitor the development of the new government and the fate of Isabella. His official duties as Spanish Minister also involved negotiating American trade interests with Cuba and following the Spanish parliament’s debates over slave trade. He was also pressed into service by the American Minister to the Court of St. James’s in London, Louis McLane, to assist in negotiating the Anglo-American disagreement over the Oregon border that newly elected president James K. Polk had vowed to resolve. Final years and death Returning from Spain in 1846, Irving took up permanent residence at Sunnyside and began work on an “Author’s Revised Edition” of his works for publisher George Palmer Putnam. For its publication, Irving had made a deal that guaranteed him 12 percent of the retail price of all copies sold. Such an agreement was unprecedented at that time. On the death of John Jacob Astor in 1848, Irving was hired as an executor of Astor’s estate and appointed, by Astor’s will, as first chairman of the Astor library, a forerunner to the New York Public Library. As he revised his older works for Putnam, Irving continued to write regularly, publishing biographies of the writer and poet Oliver Goldsmith in 1849 and the 1850 work about the Islamic prophet Muhammad. In 1855, he produced Wolfert’s Roost, a collection of stories and essays he had originally written for The Knickerbocker and other publications, and began publishing at intervals a biography of his namesake, George Washington, a work which he expected to be his masterpiece. Five volumes of the biography were published between 1855 and 1859. Irving traveled regularly to Mount Vernon and Washington, D.C. for his research, and struck up friendships with Presidents Millard Fillmore and Franklin Pierce. He was elected an Associate Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1855. He continued to socialize and keep up with his correspondence well into his seventies, and his fame and popularity continued to soar. “I don’t believe that any man, in any country, has ever had a more affectionate admiration for him than that given to you in America”, wrote Senator William C. Preston in a letter to Irving. “I believe that we have had but one man who is so much in the popular heart”. By 1859, author Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. noted that Sunnyside had become “next to Mount Vernon, the best known and most cherished of all the dwellings in our land”. On the night of November 28, 1859, at 9:00 pm, only eight months after completing the final volume of his Washington biography, Washington Irving died of a heart attack in his bedroom at Sunnyside at the age of 76. Legend has it that his last words were: “Well, I must arrange my pillows for another night. When will this end?” He was buried under a simple headstone at Sleepy Hollow cemetery on December 1, 1859. Irving and his grave were commemorated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1876 poem, “In The Churchyard at Tarrytown”, which concludes with: How sweet a life was his; how sweet a death! Living, to wing with mirth the weary hours, Or with romantic tales the heart to cheer; Dying, to leave a memory like the breath Of summers full of sunshine and of showers, A grief and gladness in the atmosphere. Legacy Literary reputation Irving is largely credited as the first American Man of Letters, and the first to earn his living solely by his pen. Eulogizing Irving before the Massachusetts Historical Society in December 1859, his friend, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, acknowledged Irving’s role in promoting American literature: “We feel a just pride in his renown as an author, not forgetting that, to his other claims upon our gratitude, he adds also that of having been the first to win for our country an honourable name and position in the History of Letters”. Irving perfected the American short story, and was the first American writer to place his stories firmly in the United States, even as he poached from German or Dutch folklore. He is also generally credited as one of the first to write both in the vernacular, and without an obligation to the moral or didactic in his short stories, writing stories simply to entertain rather than to enlighten. Irving also encouraged would-be writers. As George William Curtis noted, there “is not a young literary aspirant in the country, who, if he ever personally met Irving, did not hear from him the kindest words of sympathy, regard, and encouragement”. Some critics, however—including Edgar Allan Poe—felt that while Irving should be given credit for being an innovator, the writing itself was often unsophisticated. “Irving is much over-rated”, Poe wrote in 1838, “and a nice distinction might be drawn between his just and his surreptitious and adventitious reputation—between what is due to the pioneer solely, and what to the writer”. A critic for the New-York Mirror wrote: “No man in the Republic of Letters has been more overrated than Mr. Washington Irving”. Some critics noted especially that Irving, despite being an American, catered to British sensibilities and, as one critic noted, wrote “of and for England, rather than his own country”. Other critics were inclined to be more forgiving of Irving’s style. William Makepeace Thackeray was the first to refer to Irving as the “ambassador whom the New World of Letters sent to the Old”, a banner picked up by writers and critics throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. “He is the first of the American humorists, as he is almost the first of the American writers”, wrote critic H.R. Hawless in 1881, “yet belonging to the New World, there is a quaint Old World flavor about him”. Early critics often had difficulty separating Irving the man from Irving the writer—"The life of Washington Irving was one of the brightest ever led by an author", wrote Richard Henry Stoddard, an early Irving biographer—but as years passed and Irving’s celebrity personality faded into the background, critics often began to review his writings as all style, no substance. “The man had no message”, said critic Barrett Wendell. Yet, critics conceded that despite Irving’s lack of sophisticated themes—Irving biographer Stanley T. Williams could be scathing in his assessment of Irving’s work—most agreed he wrote elegantly. Impact on American culture Irving popularized the nickname “Gotham” for New York City, later used in Batman comics and movies as the name of Gotham City, and is credited with inventing the expression “the almighty dollar”. The surname of his Dutch historian, Diedrich Knickerbocker, is generally associated with New York and New Yorkers, and can still be seen across the jerseys of New York’s professional basketball team, albeit in its more familiar, abbreviated form, reading simply Knicks. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, a neighborhood of New York City, there are two parallel streets named Irving Avenue and Knickerbocker Avenue; the latter forms the core of the neighborhood’s shopping district. One of Irving’s most lasting contributions to American culture is in the way Americans perceive and celebrate Christmas. In his 1812 revisions to A History of New York, Irving inserted a dream sequence featuring St. Nicholas soaring over treetops in a flying wagon—a creation others would later dress up as Santa Claus. In his five Christmas stories in The Sketch Book, Irving portrayed an idealized celebration of old-fashioned Christmas customs at a quaint English manor, that depicted harmonious warm-hearted English Christmas festivities he experienced while staying in Aston Hall, Birmingham, England, that had largely been abandoned. He used text from The Vindication of Christmas (London 1652) of old English Christmas traditions, he had transcribed into his journal as a format for his stories. The book contributed to the revival and reinterpretation of the Christmas holiday in the United States. In his biography of Christopher Columbus, Irving introduced the erroneous idea that Europeans believed the world to be flat prior to the discovery of the New World. Borrowed from Irving, the flat-Earth myth has been taught in schools as fact to many generations of Americans. The American painter John Quidor based many of his paintings on scenes from the works of Irving about Dutch New York, including such paintings as Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (1828), The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849), and The Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane (1858). Works * Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle 1802 * Salmagundi 1807–1808 * A History of New York 1809 * The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. 1819–1820 * Bracebridge Hall 1822 * Tales of a Traveller 1824 * A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus 1828 * Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada 1829 * Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus 1831 * Tales of the Alhambra 1832 * The Crayon Miscellany 1835 * Astoria 1836 * The Adventures of Captain Bonneville 1837 * The Life of Oliver Goldsmith 1840 * Biography and Poetical Remains of the Late Margaret Miller Davidson 1841 * Mahomet and His Successors 1849 * Wolfert's Roost 1855 * The Life of George Washington 1855–1859 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Irving

Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920– July 5, 1991) was an American poet. He was twice Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, from 1963 to 1964 and again from 1988 to 1990. For The Collected Poems of Howard Nemerov (1977), he won the National Book Award for Poetry, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Bollingen Prize. Nemerov was brother to photographer Diane Nemerov Arbus and father to art historian Alexander Nemerov, Professor of the History of Art and American Studies at Stanford University.

In 1917, Robert Lowell was born into one of Boston's oldest and most prominent families. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. His first and second books, Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary's Castle (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, at the age of thirty), were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy. Under the influence of Allen Tate and the New Critics, he wrote rigorously formal poetry that drew praise for its exceptionally powerful handling of meter and rhyme. Lowell was politically involved—he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam—and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized. Partly in response to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. The result was a watershed collection, Life Studies (1959), which forever changed the landscape of modern poetry, much as Eliot's The Waste Land had three decades before. Considered by many to be the most important poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century, Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results, all along defining the restless center of American poetry, until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. Robert Lowell served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977. Poetry Land of Unlikeness (1944) Lord Weary's Castle (1946) Poems, 1938-1949 (1950) The Mills of the Kavanaughs (1951) Life Studies (1959) Imitations (1961) For the Union Dead (1964) Selected Poems (1965) Near the Ocean (1967) The Voyage and Other Versions of Poems by Baudelaire (1968) Notebooks, 1967-1968 (1969) The Dolphin (1973) For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) History (1973) Selected Poems (1976) Day by Day (1977) Prose The Collected Prose (1987) Anthology Phaedra (1961) Prometheus Bound (1969) Drama The Old Glory (1965) References Poets.org - www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/10

Jones Very (August 28, 1813– May 8, 1880) was an American poet, essayist, clergyman, and mystic associated with the American Transcendentalism movement. He was known as a scholar of William Shakespeare and many of his poems were Shakespearean sonnets. He was well-known and respected amongst the Transcendentalists, though he had a mental breakdown early in his career. Born in Salem, Massachusetts to two unwed first cousins, Jones Very became associated with Harvard University, first as an undergraduate, then as a student in the Harvard Divinity School and as a tutor of Greek. He heavily studied epic poetry and was invited to lecture on the topic in his home town, which drew the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Soon after, Very asserted that he was the Second Coming of Christ, which resulted in his dismissal from Harvard and his eventual institutionalization in an insane asylum. When he was released, Emerson helped him issue a collection called Essays and Poems in 1839. Very lived the majority of his life as a recluse from then on, issuing poetry only sparingly. He died in 1880. Biography Very was born on August 28, 1813, in Salem, Massachusetts and spent much of his childhood at sea. He was the oldest of six children, born out of wedlock to two first cousins. His mother, Lydia Very, was known for being an aggressive freethinker who made her atheistic beliefs known to all. She believed that marriage was only a moral arrangement and not a legal one. His father, also named Jones Very, was a captain during the War of 1812 and was held in Nova Scotia for a time by the British as a prisoner of war. When the younger Jones Very was ten, his father, by then a shipmaster, took him on a sailing voyage to Russia. A year later, his father had Very serve as a cabin boy on a trip to New Orleans, Louisiana. His father died on the return trip, apparently due to a lung disease he contracted while in Nova Scotia. As a boy, Very was studious, well-behaved, and solitary. By 1827, he left school when his mother told him he must take the place of his father and care for the family. After working at an auction house, Very became a paid assistant to the principal of a private school in Salem as a teenager. The principal, Henry Kemble Oliver, exposed his young assistant to philosophers and writers, including James Mackintosh, to influence his religious beliefs and counteract his mother’s atheism. He composed a poem for the dedication of a new Unitarian church in Salem: “O God; On this, our temple, rest thy smile, Till bent with days its tower shall nod”. Harvard years Very enrolled at Harvard College in 1834. During his college years, he was shy, studious, and ambitious of literary fame. He had become interested in the works of Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. His first few poems were published in his hometown newspaper, the Salem Observer, while he completed his studies. He graduated from Harvard in 1836, ranked number two in his class. He was chosen to speak at his commencement; his address was titled “Individuality”. After graduating, Very served as a tutor in Greek before entering Harvard Divinity School, thanks to the financial assistance of an uncle. Though Very never completed his divinity degree, he held temporary pastorates in Maine, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Very became known for his ability to draw people into literature, and was asked to speak at a lyceum in his hometown of Salem in 1837. There he was befriended by Elizabeth Peabody, who wrote to Emerson suggesting Very lecture in Concord. In 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson arranged a talk by Very at the Concord Lyceum. Very lectured on epic poetry on April 4 of that year, after he had walked twenty miles from Salem to Concord to deliver it. Emerson made up for the meager $10 payment by inviting Very to his home for dinner. Emerson signed Very’s personal copy of Nature with the words: "Har[mony] of Man with Nature Must Be Reconciled With God". For a time, Very tried to recruit Nathaniel Hawthorne as a brother figure in his life. Though Hawthorne treated him kindly, he was not impressed by Very. Unlike Hawthorne, Emerson found him “remarkable” and, when Very showed up at his home unannounced along with Cornelius Conway Felton in 1838, Emerson invited several other friends, including Henry David Thoreau, to meet him. Emerson, however, was surprised at Very’s behavior in larger groups. “When he is in the room with other persons, speech stops, as if there were a corpse in the apartment”, he wrote. Even so, in May 1838, the same month Very published his “Epic Poetry” lecture in the Christian Examiner, Emerson brought Very to a meeting of the Transcendental Club, where the topic of discussion was “the question of mysticism”. At the meeting, held at the home of Caleb Stetson in Medford, Massachusetts, Very was actively engaged in the discussion, building his reputation as a mystic within that circle. Mental health Very was known as an eccentric, prone to odd behavior and may have suffered from bipolar disorder. The first signs of a breakdown came shortly after meeting Emerson, as Very was completing an essay on William Shakespeare. As Very later explained, “I felt within me a new will... it was not a feeling of my own but a sensible will that was not my own... These two consciousnesses, as I may call them, continued with me”. In August 1837, while traveling by train, he was suddenly overcome with terror at its speed until he realized he was being “borne along by a divine engine and undertaking his life-journey”. As he told Henry Ware, Jr., professor of pulpit eloquence and pastoral care at Harvard Divinity School, divine inspiration helped him suddenly understand the twenty-fourth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew and that Christ was having his Second Coming within him. When Ware did not believe him, Very said, “I had thought you did the will of the Father, and that I should receive some sympathy from you—But I now find that you are doing your own will, and not the will of your father”. Very also claimed that he was under the influence of the Holy Spirit and composed verse while in this state. Emerson did not believe Very’s claim and, noting the poor writing, he asked, "cannot the spirit parse & spell?" Very said he was also tormented by strong sexual desires which he believed were only held in check by the will of God. To help control himself, he avoided speaking with or even looking at women—he called it his “sacrifice of Beauty”. One of Very’s students, a fellow native of Salem named Samuel Johnson, Jr., said that people ridiculed Very behind his back since he had “gained the fame of being cracked (or crazy, if you are not acquainted with Harvard technicalities)”. During one of his tutoring sessions, Very declared that he was “infallible: that he was a man of heaven, and superior to all the world around him”. He then cried out to his students, “Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand”. Harvard president Josiah Quincy III relieved Very of his duties, referring to a “nervous collapse” that required him to be left in the care of his younger brother Washington Very, himself a freshman at Harvard. After returning to Salem, he visited Elizabeth Peabody on September 16, 1838, apparently having given up his rule “not to speak or look at women”. As she recalled, He looked much flushed and his eyes very brilliant and unwinking. It struck me at once that there was something unnatural—and dangerous in his air—As soon as we were within the parlor door he laid his hand on my head—and said “I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with Fire”—and then he prayed. After this, Very told her she would soon feel different, explaining, “I am the Second Coming”. He performed similar “baptisms” to other people throughout Salem, including ministers. It was finally Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham who had him committed. Very was institutionalized for a month at a hospital near Boston, the McLean Asylum, as he wrote, “contrary to my will”. While there, he finished an essay on Hamlet, arguing that the play is about “the great reality of a soul unsatisfied in its longings after immortality” and that “Hamlet has been called mad, but as we think, Shakespeare thought more of his madness than he did of the wisdom of the rest of the play”. During his stay at the hospital, Very lectured his fellow patients on Shakespeare and on poetry in general. He was released on October 17, 1838, though he refused to renounce his beliefs. His fellow patients reportedly thanked him as he left. McLean’s superintendent Luther Bell took credit for saving him “from the delusion of being a prophet extraordinaire”, which Luther thought was caused by Very’s digestive system being “entirely out of order”. The same month he was released, Very stayed with Emerson at his home in Concord for a week. While he was visiting, Emerson wrote in his journal on October 29, “J. Very charmed us all by telling us he hated us all.” Amos Bronson Alcott wrote of Very in December 1838: I received a letter on Monday of this week from Jones Very of Salem, formerly Tutor in Greek at Harvard College—which institution he left, a few weeks since, being deemed insane by the Faculty. A few weeks ago he visited me....He is a remarkable man. His influence at Cambridge on the best young men was very fine. His talents are of a high order....Is he insane? If so, there yet linger glimpses of wisdom in his memory. He is insane with God—diswitted in the contemplation of the holiness of Divinity. He distrusts intellect... Living, not thinking, he regards as the worship meet for the soul. This is mysticism in its highest form. Poetry Emerson saw a kindred spirit in Very and defended his sanity. As he wrote to Margaret Fuller, “Such a mind cannot be lost”. Emerson was sympathetic with Very’s plight because he himself had recently been ostracized after his controversial lecture, the “Divinity School Address”. He helped Very publish a small volume, Essays and Poems in 1839. The poems collected in this volume were chiefly Shakespearean sonnets. Very also published several poems in the Western Messenger between 1838 and 1840 as well as in The Dial, the journal of the Transcendentalists. He was disappointed, however, that Emerson, serving as editor of the journal, altered his poems. Very wrote to Emerson in July 1842, “Perhaps they were all improvements but I preferred my own lines. I do not know but I ought to submit to such changes as done by the rightful authority of an Editor but I felt a little sad at the aspect of the piece.” He was never widely read, and was largely forgotten by the end of the nineteenth century, but in the 1830s and 1840s the Transcendentalists, including Emerson, as well as William Cullen Bryant, praised his work. Very continued writing throughout his life, though sparingly. Many of his later poems were never collected but only distributed in manuscript form among the Transcendentalists. In January 1843, his work was included in the first issue of The Pioneer, a journal edited by James Russell Lowell which also included the first publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Final years and death Jones Very believed his role as a prophet would last only twelve months. By September 1839, his role was complete. Emerson suggested that Very’s temporary mental instability was worth the message he had delivered. In his essay “Friendship”, Emerson referred to Very: I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first, all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true relations with him... To stand in true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not? The last decades of Very’s life were spent in Salem as a recluse under the care of his sister. It was during these years that he held roles as a visiting minister in Eastport, Maine and North Beverly, Massachusetts, though these roles were temporary because he had become too shy. By age 45, he had retired. In his last forty years, Very did very little. As biographer Edwin Gittleman wrote, "Although he lived until 1880, Very’s effective life was over by the end of 1840." He died on May 8, 1880 and, upon hearing of Very’s death, Alcott wrote a brief remembrance on May 16, 1880: The newspapers record the death of Jones Very of Salem, Mass. It was my fortune to have known the man while he was tutor in Harvard College and writing his Sonnets and Essays on Shakespeare, which were edited by Emerson, and published in 1839. Very was then the dreamy mystic of our circle of Transcendentalists, and a subject of speculation by us. He professed to be taught by the Spirit and to write under its inspiration. When his papers were submitted to Emerson for criticism the spelling was found faulty and on Emerson’s pointing out the defect, he was told that this was by dictation of the Spirit also. Whether Emerson’s witty reply, “that the Spirit should be a better speller,” qualified the mystic’s vision does not appear otherwise than that the printed volume shows no traces of illiteracy in the text. Very often came to see me. His shadowy aspect at times gave him a ghostly air. While walking by his side, I remember, he seemed spectral,—and somehow using my feet instead of his own, keeping as near me as he could, and jostling me frequently. His voice had a certain hollowness, as if echoing mine. His whole bearing made an impression as if himself were detached from his thought and his body were another’s. He ventured, withal, to warn me of falling into idolatries, while he brought a sonnet or two (since printed) for my benefit. His temperament was delicate and nervous, disposed to visionariness and a dreamy idealism, stimulated by over-studies and the school of thought then in the ascendant. His sonnets and Shakespearean essays surpass any that have since appeared in subtlety and simplicity of execution. Critical assessment The first critical review of Very’s book was written by Margaret Fuller and published in Orestes Brownson’s Boston Quarterly Review; it said Very’s poems had “an elasticity of spirit, a genuine flow of thought, and unsought nobleness and purity”, though she admitted she preferred the prose in the collection over the poetry. She mocked the “sing song” style of the poems and questioned his religious mission. She concluded: “I am... greatly interested in Mr Very. He seems worthy to be well known.” James Freeman Clarke admired Very’s poetry enough to have several published in his journal, the Western Messenger, between 1838 and 1840. William Ellery Channing admired Very’s poetry as well, writing that his insanity “is only superficial”. Richard Henry Dana, Sr. also commented positively on Very’s poetry: “The thought is deeply spiritual; and while there is a certain character of peculiarity which we so often find in like things from our old writers, there is a freedom from quaintness... Indeed, I know not where you would... find any thing in this country to compare with these Sonnets.” Editor and critic Rufus Wilmot Griswold was impressed enough by Very’s poetry to include him in the first edition of his anthology The Poets and Poetry of America in 1842. He wrote to Emerson asking for more information about him and expressing his opinion of his poetry: “Though comparatively unknown, he seems to be a true poet.” The modern reassessment of Jones Very as an author of literary importance can be dated to a 1936 essay by Yvor Winters who wrote of the poet, “In the past two decades two major American writers have been rediscovered and established securely in their rightful places in literary history. I refer to Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. I am proposing the establishment of a third.” Winters, in speaking of Very’s relations with Emerson and his circle, concluded, “The attitude of the Transcendentalists toward Very is instructive and amusing, and it proves beyond cavil how remote he was from them. In respect to the doctrine of the submission of the will, he agreed with them in principle; but whereas they recommended the surrender, he practised it, and they regarded him with amazement.” Subsequently, William Irving Bartlett, in 1942, outlined the basic biographical facts of Very’s life in Jones Very, Emerson’s “Brave Saint.” A complete scholarly edition of Very’s poetic works belatedly appeared, over a century after the poet’s death, in 1993. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jones_Very