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Rosalía de Castro

Rosalía de Castro (Santiago de Compostela, 24 de febrero de 1837 — Padrón, 15 de julio de 1885) fue una poetisa y novelista española que escribió tanto en lengua gallega como en lengua española. Considerada en la actualidad como un ente indispensable en el panorama literario del siglo XIX, representa junto con Eduardo Pondal y Curros Enríquez una de las figuras emblemáticas del Rexurdimento gallego, no sólo por su aportación literaria en general y por el hecho de que sus Cantares Gallegos sean entendidos como la primera gran obra de la literatura gallega contemporánea, sino por el proceso de sacralización al que fue sometida y que acabó por convertirla en encarnación y símbolo del pueblo gallego. Además, es considerada junto con Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, como la precursora de la poesía española moderna. Escribir en gallego en el siglo XIX, es decir, en la época en la que vivió Rosalía, no resultaba nada fácil por un gran número de razones, la gran parte de ellas ligadas al pensamiento y estructuración de la sociedad del momento. La lengua gallega había quedado reducida a un mero dialecto, tan despreciado como desprestigiado, mostrándose cada vez más distante aquella época en la que había sido el idioma vehicular de la creación de lírica galaicoportuguesa (en forma de galaicoportugués). Toda la tradición escrita había sido perdida, por lo que se hacía necesario comenzar desde cero rompiendo con el sentimiento de desprecio e indiferencia hacia la lengua gallega, pero pocos eran los que se planteaban la tarea, pues esta constituiría un motivo de desprestigio social. En un ambiente en el castellano era la lengua de la cultura al ser la lengua que la clase minoritaria dominante protegía, Rosalía de Castro rompió a cantar, concediéndole el prestigio merecido al gallego al usarlo como vehículo de su obra denominada Cantares Gallegos y afianzando el renacer cultural de la lengua. Aunque fue una asidua cultivadora de la prosa, donde Rosalía sobresalió fue en el campo de la poesía, a través de la creación de las que pueden ser consideradas sus tres obras clave: Cantares Gallegos, Follas Novas y En las orillas del Sar. La primera de ellas representa un canto colectivo, artísticamente logrado, que sirvió de espejo dignificante a la comunidad gallega al emplearse la lengua de ésta, así como también fue útil para proseguir con la tendencia tímidamente iniciada por el pontevedrés Xoán Manuel Pintos con su obra titulada A Gaita Galega (1853). En la segunda, la escritora dio lugar a una poética de gran profundidad, que emplea el símbolo como método para expresar lo inefable y que revela la plurisignificación propia de la más elevada poesía; junto con las obras Aires da miña terra (Curros Enríquez), Saudades Gallegas (Valentín Lamas Carvajal) y Maxina ou a filla espúrea (Marcial Valladares Núñez) completa el conjunto de obras publicadas en la década de 1880 que hicieron de estos años una etapa clave en el desarrollo de la literatura gallega, si bien la obra de Rosalía siempre mantuvo una posición predominante con respecto al resto. Finalmente, en En las orillas del Sar se manifiesta un tono trágico que encaja con las duras circunstancias que rodearon los últimos años de la vida de Rosalía. Escrito en castellano, la obra ahonda en el lirismo subjetivo propio de Follas Novas al mismo tiempo que se consolidan las formas métricas que allí apuntaban. Inicialmente calificado de precursor y obviado por la crítica de su tiempo, hoy en día existen diferentes estudiosos que lo consideran como la principal creación poética de todo el siglo XIX. En la actualidad, la figura de Rosalía de Castro y sus creaciones literarias continúan siendo objeto de una abundante bibliografía y recibiendo una constante atención crítica, tanto en el territorio español como en el extranjero.4 Es tal la aceptación y el interés que las obras de esta escritora despiertan en el mundo, que en las últimas décadas sus poemas han sido traducidos a idiomas como el francés, el alemán, el ruso y el japonés. Infancia y juventud Nació en la madrugada del 24 de febrero de 1837 en una casa localizada en el margen derecho del Camiño Novo, la antigua vía de entrada a la ciudad de Santiago de Compostela para todos aquellos viajeros procedentes de Pontevedra. Hija natural del sacerdote José Martínez Viojo (1798 - 1871) y María Teresa de la Cruz Castro y Abadía (1804 - 1862), una hidalga soltera de escasos recursos económicos, fue bautizada a las pocas horas de su nacimiento en la Capilla del Hospital Real por el presbítero José Vicente Varela y Montero, con los nombres de María Rosalía Rita y figurando como hija de padres desconocidos. Con frecuencia, los biógrafos de la escritora gallega han ocultado la condición eclesiástica de su padre, así como también trataron de obviar el hecho de que fue registrada como hija de padres desconocidos y que se libró de entrar en la Inclusa al hacerse cargo de ella su madrina María Francisca Martínez, fiel sirviente de la madre de la recién nacida. «En veinte y cuatro de febrero de mil ochocientos treinta y seis, María Francisca Martínez, vecina de San Juan del Campo, fue madrina de una niña que bauticé solemnemente y puse los santos óleos, llamándole María Rosalía Rita, hija de padres incógnitos, cuya niña llevó la madrina, y va sin número por no haber pasado a la Inclusa; y para que así conste, lo firmo.» Acta del bautizo firmada por el presbítero José Vicente Varela y Montero. Hasta cumplir los ocho años, Rosalía se encontró bajo la custodia de su tía paterna Teresa Martínez Viojo en la aldea de Castro de Ortoño, perteneciente al municipio coruñés de Ames. Es en esta época cuando la escritora toma conciencia de la dureza de la vida del labriego gallego, así como también será en esta parte de su vida cuando tenga conocimiento y vivencia del mundo rural propio de Galicia: la lengua, las costumbres, las creencias o las cantigas que tanto influyeron en su obra titulada Cantares Gallegos. Si bien no se conoce con exactitud la fecha en que la madre de Rosalía decide hacerse cargo de ella, se sabe que en torno al año 1850 la joven se traslada a la ciudad de Santiago de Compostela donde vivió junto a esta, aunque ya había convivido con anterioridad con ella en Padrón.Nota 1 Es en esta localidad gallega donde Rosalía recibió la instrucción que por aquel entonces era la más adecuada para una señorita (nociones básicas de dibujo y música), asistiendo de forma habitual a las actividades culturales promovidas por el Liceo de la Juventud junto con personalidades destacadas de la mocedad intelectual compostelana como Manuel Murguía (se duda si fue en este momento cuando conoce a Murguía o posteriormente, en su traslado a Madrid), Eduardo Pondal y Aurelio Aguirre. Todavía en la actualidad es motivo de discusión entre los diferentes críticos la relación que Rosalía mantuvo con Aurelio Aguirre, puesto que a pesar de que se desconoce si existió una relación sentimental entre ambos, la obra del mencionado sí que dejó huella en ciertos poemas de la escritora. Madurez En abril de 1856, Rosalía se trasladó a Madrid junto con la familia de su parienta María Josefa Carmen García-Lugín y Castro, en cuya compañía habitó la planta baja de la casa número 13 de la calle Ballesta. No se conoce con exactitud cuál fue el motivo que llevó a mudarse a la escritora, aunque Catherine Davis creyó posible que este hecho fuese debido al escándalo desencadenado a raíz del Banquete de Conxo, en el que desenvolvieron un papel relevante varios miembros del Liceo, como fueron Aguirre o Pondal. Un año después de llegar a Madrid, Rosalía publicó un folleto de poesías escrito en lengua castellana que recibió el título de La flor, siendo este acogido con simpatía por parte de Manuel Murguía, quien hizo referencia a él en La Iberia. Posiblemente fue en Madrid, y no en el Liceo, donde Rosalía conoció a Murguía, con quien contrajo matrimonio el 10 de octubre de 1858 en la iglesia parroquial de San Ildefonso. Fue un amigo común el que posibilitó que ambos entablasen una relación que finalmente acabó en boda. Respecto de la relación que existió entre la pareja la crítica rosaliana sugiere diversas hipótesis, que van desde idílicos cuadros conyugales hasta posturas más que matizadas, que tomando como referencia escritos atribuidos a la poetisa, dibujan la psicología de una mujer solitaria, carente de felicidad y escéptica ante el amor. Sin embargo, Murguía fue la primera de las personas que animó a Rosalía en su quehacer literario, siendo él el responsable de la publicación de Cantares Gallegos. Tampoco le escatimó ni apoyo social ni intelectual en una época en la que la condición femenina era considerada como minusválida. Al año siguiente de casarse, Rosalía dio a luz en Santiago de Compostela a su primera hija, llamada Alejandra. A esta siguieron Aura (1862), que vino al mundo en el mismo año que feneció la madre de Rosalía; los gemelos Gala y Ovidio (1871); Amara (1873); Adriano Honorato (1875), que falleció a los diecinueve meses al precipitarse desde una mesa, y Valentina (1877), que nació muerta. Todos los hijos de Rosalía de Castro nacieron en Galicia, ya fuese en Lestrove, A Coruña o Santiago de Compostela. El domicilio del matrimonio cambió en múltiples ocasiones, a lo que se añadió una separación del mismo a causa de las actividades profesionales de Murguía y graves problemas económicos derivados tanto de la inestabilidad laboral del mismo como de la parca salud de Rosalía. Todos estos factores configuran un panorama vital que contribuye a explicar la hipersensibilidad y el pesimismo de la escritora. En 1859, el matrimonio estaba residiendo en La Coruña. Luego pasa a Madrid, de donde Rosalía regresa a Santiago (1861) para volver a la capital española. Con posterioridad, existen referencias que permiten afirmar la presencia de la poetisa en Lugo y Santiago, además de algunos viajes que realizó el matrimonio a Extremadura, Andalucía, Castilla La Mancha y Levante. En el mes de septiembre de 1868 se produjo el levantamiento revolucionario español, conocido como La Gloriosa, pasando Murguía de ser secretario de la Junta de Santiago a director del Archivo de Simancas, cargo que ejerció durante dos años. A partir de este momento, la vida de Rosalía se desenvolvió entre Madrid y Simancas, siendo en la ciudad vallisoletana en la que escribió gran parte de las composiciones recogidas en Follas Novas. Es conveniente aclarar que en estos mismos años, es cuando se produjo el encuentro entre Rosalía de Castro y Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. Desde 1871, Rosalía no sale de Galicia. Vivió a partir de este año en las Torres de Lestrove (donde residían sus parientes los Hermida de Castro), en Dodro (La Coruña), en Santiago de Compostela y Padrón, donde prácticamente se instala en 1875. Últimos años Los últimos años de la vida de Rosalía transcurrieron en la comarca de Padrón, lugar en el que se había consumido su infancia, así como buena parte de su juventud. La Casa grande de Arretén, nombre popular con que el que se conocía al pazo en el que había nacido su progenitora, ya no era de la propiedad de la familia, factor que propició que la escritora tuviese que residir en las Torres de Lestrove entre 1879 y 1882 mientras su marido se encargaba de la dirección en Madrid de La Ilustración Gallega y Asturiana. Finalmente, se trasladó junto con su familia a la casa llamada de La Matanza, situada en la parroquia de Iria. Rosalía nunca disfrutó de una buena salud, pareciendo predestinada desde su juventud a una muerte temprana. De hecho, en las pocas cartas que se conservan y que ésta envió a su marido, con frecuencia se alude a las continuas dolencias que la atenazaban. Poco tiempo antes de fallecer, la escritora decidió pasar una temporada a las orillas del mar y por ello se trasladó a Santiago de Carril. Cierto tiempo después regresó al lugar de La Matanza, donde el cáncer de útero que padecía se fue complicando progresivamente desde 1883, mermando cada vez más a la ya de por sí débil salud de la escritora.Nota 2 Tras tres días de agonía falleció al mediodía del miércoles 15 de julio de 1885, en su casa de La Matanza, a consecuencia de una degeneración cancerosa del útero. El cuerpo inánime recibió sepultura al día siguiente en el cementerio de Adina, localizado en Iria Flavia, que curiosamente había sido cantado en una composición de Rosalía de Castro. No obstante, su cadáver fue exhumando el 15 de mayo de 1891 para ser llevado solemnemente a Santiago de Compostela, donde fue nuevamente sepultado en el mausoleo creado específicamente para la escritora por el escultor Jesús Landeira, situado en la capilla de la Visitación del Convento de Santo Domingo de Bonaval, en el presente Panteón de Galegos Ilustres. Resultan especialmente ilustrativas las fidedignas líneas escritas por González Besada sobre los últimos momentos de Rosalía: «...recibió con fervor los Santos Sacramentos, recitando en voz baja sus predilectas oraciones. Encargó a sus hijos quemasen los trabajos literarios que, ordenados y reunidos por ella misma, dejaba sin publicar. Dispuso se la enterrara en el cementerio de Adina, y pidiendo un ramo de pensamientos, la flor de su predilección, no bien se lo acercó a los labios sufrió un ahogo que fue comienzo de su agonía. Delirante, y nublada la vista, dijo a su hija Alejandra: "abre esa ventana que quiero ver el mar", y cerrando sus ojos para siempre, expiró...». Sin embargo, desde Padrón es imposible ver el mar. Por ello resultan enigmáticas estas palabras puestas en boca de una persona para quién el mar fue una perenne tentación de suicidio. Cantares Gallegos Fue en 1863 cuando Manuel Murguía hizo entrega al impresor vigués Juan Compañel del manuscrito rosaliano de Cantares Gallegos, obra iniciadora del Rexurdimento pleno. Para comprender el origen de ésta, hay que tener presentes factores tales como la familiaridad de la poetisa con la música popular, la reivindicación romántica de las culturas tradicionales y de sus manifestaciones populares. Tal fue el éxito alcanzado por la obra que Rosalía de Castro fue invitada a participar en los Juegos Florales de Barcelona, aunque declinó el ofrecimiento. Además, escritores lusos de la generación de 1865, como son Antero de Quental o Teófilo Braga,manifestaron con prontitud su admiración por el libro, para en 1868 ser vertidos al catalán dos de los poemas de éste por parte de Víctor Balaguer. Estructura y voces El libro está enmarcado entre los poemas uno y treinta y seis, siendo prólogo y epílogo respectivamente. Además manifiesta una estructura circular al iniciarse con una composición en la que toma la voz una joven a quién convidan a cantar y al finalizar con la misma voz de la muchacha que se disculpa por su falta de habilidad para cantar las bellezas de Galicia. De este modo, los poemas restantes quedan enmarcados por los que abren y cierran el discurso lírico y transformándose en una recreación de la artista popular que canta personalmente variopintos motivos, aunque en ciertos momentos le cede la voz a determinados tipos populares o incluso permite que en dos poemas hable la misma autora, concretamente en el número 25 y 33. En estos se hace evidente un yo lírico que puede entenderse como un método que Rosalía emplea con la intención de aparecer como un personaje popular más, dejándose patente su pertenencia a la comunidad rural. Temática En Cantares gallegos se encuentran recogidos cuatro núcleos temáticos fundamentales, que son el costumbrismo, el amor, el intimismo y en último lugar, el social-patriotismo. * Temática costumbrista: en un considerable número de composiciones predomina la descripción y la narración para presentar creencias, romerías, devociones o personajes característicos de la cultura popular gallega que Rosalía defendía frente a los estereotipos colonizadores. * Temática socio-patriótica: en este núcleo temático se engloban aquellas composiciones en las que la emigración, el abandono al que Galicia está condenada y la explotación de los gallegos en tierras extranjeras son los motivos a los que se recurre para criticar la situación de un pueblo gallego maltratado y reivindicar unos valores universales de justicia social. * Temática amorosa: Estos poemas nos muestran, desde una óptica popular, la manera de vivir el sentimiento amoroso diferentes personajes del pueblo en distintas circunstancias y situaciones. * Tematica intimista: Se incluyen aquí "Campanas de Bastabales" y "Como chove miúdiño". La voz de la propia autora expresa sus sentimientos. Follas novas En 1880, Rosalía de Castro editó en la capital española el que fue su segundo y último libro de versos en lengua gallega, titulado Follas novas. Muchos de los poemas que componen el libro fueron redactados durante la estancia de la familia en Simancas (1869 - 1870), aunque también existen algunas creaciones literarias que datan de la década de 1870 y que antes de aparecer en el libro ya habían sido publicados en la prensa. El poemario se halla dividido en cinco partes (Vaguedás, Do íntimo, Varia, Da terra e As viuvas dos vivos e as viuvas dos mortos) de extensión variable y que no responden a una planificación previa, sino a una ordenación posterior a la elaboración de los textos. Calificada como la obra más rica y profunda de Rosalía, Follas novas fue y sigue siendo considerada por buena parte de la crítica como el libro de transición entre la poesía colectiva de Cantares gallegos y el radical intimismo de En las orillas del Sar, en el que se da cabida a poemas de corte popular hasta creaciones que tratan el paso del tiempo y la muerte. También se caracteriza por ser una obra que tiene como trasfondo una notable intención social, que se manifiesta en la denuncia que la autora hace de la marginación del sexo femenino, de los niños huérfanos y de los campesinos, especialmente de aquellos que se habían visto en la obligación de emigrar ante las pésimas expectativas económicas del país. Estructura y núcleos temáticos El libro se abre con una dedicatoria de la autora a la Sociedade de beneficiencia dos naturales de Galicia en La Habana, de la que había sido nombrada socia honoraria. A continuación aparece el prólogo de Emilio Castelar, al que sigue un significativo preámbulo de la escritora (titulado Dúas palabras da autora), en el que se explica la característica cohesión existente entre lo personal y lo social, entre los sufrimientos íntimos y las desgracias colectivas, que constituye el eje central del poemario. En este preámbulo, Rosalía pone de manifiesto su intención de no volver a escribir en gallego (cosa que reitera en una carta escrita a Murguía en julio de 1881). Alá van, pois, as Follas novas, que mellor se dirían vellas, porque o son, e últimas, porque pagada xa a deuda en que me parecía estar coa miña terra, difícil é que volva a escribir máis versos na lengua materna. Los núcleos temáticos básicos de Follas novas son dos: por un lado se diferencia un tipo de poesía subjetiva, que se corresponde con los dos primeros apartados en que se estructura el libro (Vaguidades y Do íntimo), donde la autora desenvuelve un discurso existencial pesimista y angustiado. Por otro lado existe una poesía objetiva, correspondiente a los apartados cuarto y quinto (Da terra y As viúvas dos vivos e as viúvas dos mortos), en la que se insiste en el aspecto reivindicativo de lo popular y del hombre gallego, y donde se tratan temas que ya aparecieran en Cantares gallegos, como la emigración y la injusticia social. En el apartado tercero (Varia) coexisten trazas de la poesía objetiva y la subjetiva enseñando el complejo carácter que ofrece la realidad en toda su extensión para servir de puente entre la subjetividad de Do íntimo y la objetividad de Da terra. La concepción de la vida La obra poética, en la que el sentimiento constante y predominante es la saudade, nos ofrece una visión desolada del mundo y de la vida. También es reseñable la profundización en el yo que realiza la poetisa y que la lleva al descubrimiento de una saudade ontológica, un sentimiento misterioso e inefable de soledad sin relación con algo concreto, que esta vinculado a la radical orfandad del ser humano. Esta tara existencial que Rosalía analiza desde su propia vivencia, se percibe como el hallazgo final de un proceso en el que la desgracia va marcando su vida por medio del sufrimiento y del dolor, siendo éste último inevitable, como nos lo revela en el poema Unha vez tiven un cravo. Ante esta situación, la única solución es la huida o pérdida absoluta de la conciencia. Toda la visión desolada de la vida se intensifica con la angustia existencial que se deriva de la omnipresencia de un fantasma que atenaza su vida y que se manifiesta de forma especial en el símbolo oscuro, vago y polisémico de la negra sombra. En las orillas del Sar Un año antes del fallecimiento de Rosalía, ésta publicó el que resultó ser su último libro de poemas, titulado En las orillas del Sar escrito íntegramente en lengua castellana. Aún no hay consenso entre la crítica literaria con respecto a la fecha en la que fueron creados los poemas recogidos en este libro. Sin embargo, las palabras de González Besada en su discurso de ingreso a la Real Academia Española marcaron a la crítica posterior, pues según el periódico El Progreso de Pontevedra, afirmaba que las creaciones ahora recogidas "En las orillas del Sar" han visto la luz pública en 1866. Por el momento han sido infructuosas todas las búsquedas del susodicho periódico, por lo que tampoco se puede afirmar que en él se encontrasen plasmadas las poesías rosalianas. Compendio de obras prosísticas * Lieders (en lengua castellana, año 1858): este artículo publicado en El Álbum del Miño (Vigo) constituye el primer escrito en prosa en lengua castellana publicado por Rosalía de Castro, posiblemente como consecuencia de los comentarios favorables de Manuel Murguía y Benito Vicetto con respecto a su introducción en el ámbito poético. * La hija del mar (en lengua castellana, año 1859): su permanencia en Muxía le inspiró la * ambientación de esta obra en prosa,9 que además fue la primera de las novelas de Rosalía. En ella se desenvuelve el tema del temperamento femenino, tratándose de un relato de marcado carácter reivindicativo en el que dos mujeres intentan defender su honra en medio de un ambiente predominantemente femenino. * Flavio (en lengua castellana, año 1861): en esta obra aparece por primera vez el tema del amor desengañado, siendo recurrente en la poesía que cultivó a partir de este momento. Se trata de una novela de la etapa de la juventud de la autora, quién la define como un «ensayo de novela». * El caballero de las botas azules (en lengua castellana, año 1867): considerada por la crítica la más interesante de las novelas de Rosalía y calificada por ésta como un «cuento extraño», constituye una enigmática fantasía satírica en la que la escritora gallega expone un surtido de relatos de corte lírico-fantástico con trazos costumbristas que tiene el objetivo de satirizar tanto la hipocresía como la ignorancia de la sociedad madrileña. Confluyen en su composición elementos provenientes de dos campos, como son la libre imaginación (influencia de E. T. A. Hoffmann) y la sátira realista de costumbres. Hay en Madrid un palacio extenso y magnífico, como los que en otro tiempo levantaba el diablo para encantar a las damas hermosas y andantes caballeros. Vense en él habitaciones que por su elegante coquetería pudieran llamarse nidos de amor, y salones grandes como plazas públicas cuya austera belleza hiela de espanto el corazón y hace crispar los cabellos. Todo allí es agradable y artístico, todo impresiona de una manera extraña produciendo en el ánimo efectos mágicos que no se olvidan jamás. Fragmento del capítulo I de la novela El caballero de las botas azules * Conto gallego (en lengua gallega, año 1864): apareció por primera vez en una publicación periódica en el año 1864, y hasta el descubrimiento de esta edición sólo se tenía conocimiento de la publicación realizada por Manuel de Castro y López en su Almanaque gallego de Buenos Aires, en el año 1923.10 El cuento refiere un motivo tradicional de la literatura misógina en la que dos amigos hacen una apuesta con la intención de demostrar cual de ellos logra seducir a la viúda el mismo día del entierro de su marido. El trazo característico del cuento es la economía narrativa: la trama se centra en el diálogo existente entre los personajes, mientras que la voz narradora limita sus intervenciones hasta lo imprescindible. * Las literatas (en lengua castellana, año 1866). * El cadiceño (en lengua castellana, año 1866): cuento de carácter satírico, en el que ciertos personajes se expresan en castrapo, una variante popular del castellano caracterizada por el uso de vocabulario y de expresiones tomadas del idioma gallego que no existen en castellano. * Ruinas (en lengua castellana, año 1866): es un cuadro de costumbres centrado alrededor de tres tipos humanos, tres habitantes de una pequeña villa, ejemplares por sus valores espirituales, que se sobreponen a su decadencia social. * El primer loco (en lengua castellana, año 1881): es una novela breve, en la que Rosalía obvia la moda realista del momento para retornar a las fórmulas románticas de su etapa más juvenil. * El domingo de ramos (en lengua castellana, año 1881). * Padrón y las inundaciones (en lengua castellana y publicado en La Ilustración Gallega y Asturiana, el 28 de febrero y el 8, 18 y 28 de marzo de 1881). * Costumbres gallegas (en lengua castellana, año 1881): en este artículo, Rosalía critica la costumbre que existía en el litoral gallego de ofrecer una mujer de la familia al marinero recién arribado. Cumple destacar que el escrito fue objeto de críticas muy duras, dentro del territorio gallego. Lengua literaria El idioma que tenían a su disposición los iniciadores del Renacimiento romántico, que eran unos completos desconocedores de los textos medievales, era una lengua dialectal empobrecida, muy erosionado por la lengua oficial y fragmentada en variedades comarcales. No se puede afirmar que Rosalía de Castro escribiese en un dialecto determinado, aunque su elástico sistema de normas linguísticas tenga como base geográfica las hablas de las comarcas bañadas por el Sar y el Ulla, con una clara tendencia al seseo. Como consecuencia de la precaria situación en la que se encontraba la lengua gallega escrita de la época, Rosalía solía emplear vulgarismos (probe en lugar de pobre, espranza en lugar de esperanza y dreito en lugar de dereito son algunos ejemplos), hipergalleguismos (concencia o pacencia son dos ejemplos) y castellanismos (dicha, Dios, conexo...). También son habituales en sus obras las variaciones léxicas (frores, frois, froles o dor, dore, delor) y morfológicas, cuando se adoptando diferentes soluciones para la formación del plural de las palabras agudas. A pesar de todo, a Rosalía le interesa más la vivacidad que la pureza de la lengua gallega que usa para expresarse, lo que deja patente en el prólogo de Cantares gallegos. Es allí donde se dice que a pesar de carecer de gramáticas y de reglas que propiciarán la aparición de errores ortográficos, la autora puso su mayor cuidado en reproducir el verdadero espíritu del pueblo gallego. Importancia y significado de su obra en gallego Con la publicación de Cantares Gallegos en el año 1863 se alcanzó el momento culmen del Rexurdimento de las letras gallegas, así como se marcó un punto de inflexión en la historia de la literatura gallega. Con un elevado ejercicio lingüístico y literario, la escritora prestigió al gallego como lengua literaria (si bien este idioma ya había sido utilizado para la creación literaria, como sucede con la lírica galaicoportuguesa) y reivindicó su uso. Además, por medio de los temas tratados en Cantares Gallegos, Rosalía otorga a su obra un carácter sociopolítico reflejando las duras y pésimas condiciones bajo las que se encontraba la sociedad rural gallega, al mismo tiempo que reivindicaba al gallego frente al castellano, y a Galicia frente a España. Se puede decir que Rosalía pretendió defender y redescubrir a la cultura e identidad gallega, las cuales habían sido obviadas por la ideología centralista estatal. La huella de Cantares Gallegos quedó reflejada tanto en la posterior producción literaria como en el mismo pueblo gallego, que al verse reflejado en la obra rosaliana tomó conciencia de su propia dignidad. El éxito del libro se debió a la extraordinaria conexión que existió entra la escritora y las gentes de su región, llegándose al extremo de que el pueblo llegó a asumir un gran número de poemas y estrofas como versos comunitarios. Con Follas novas Rosalía creó un universo nuevo y extremadamente personal, en el que el puro lirismo intimista alcanza la más alta realización artística, más allá de las vivencias estéticas, en una continua y angustiada pregunta sobre el sentido de la existencia humana. La poesía que se recoge en esta obra revela la conflictividad de un mundo en el que no existen valores eternos y verdades absolutas, y donde el ser humano se encuentra totalmente solo. Es la cosmovisión pesimista y angustiada la que trasluce la crisis de valores de la sociedad capitalista frente a la seguridad de la sociedad patriarcal, que aparece en descomposición por la acción de aquella. Las críticas e influencias posteriores La valoración de la obra rosaliana y la mitificación de la escritora se produjeron tras el fallecimiento de la misma, puesto que a lo largo de su vida esta fue permanentemente menospreciada y marginada, quedando fuera de escritos tan relevantes como La literatura en 1881 de Leopoldo Alas y Armando Palacio Valdés. Fue necesario esperar hasta los modernistas y la generación del 98 para que reconocieran en Rosalía a una creadora afín a su espíritu. Los mayores promotores de Rosalía de Castro fueron los escritores del 98, quienes la dieron a conocer a través de sus escritos en toda la geografía española y en la América hispanohablante, valiéndose de su gran reconocimiento social y de la reedición de muchas de las páginas que fueron escritas por ellos y que versaban sobre la escritora. Principalmente, fueron Azorín y Miguel de Unamuno los más acérrimos valedores de Rosalía, quienes le dedicaron entre 1911 y 1912 un total de seis artículos que versaban sobre la escritora gallega. El resto de literatos noventayochistas no se pronunciaron en favor de Rosalía de Castro, y si lo hicieron fue de una forma muy tenue, como hizo Antonio Machado con una lacónica y tardía observación sobre la poetisa. Destacó también Ramón María del Valle-Inclán, pero en este caso por las duras críticas y juicios negativos que le dedicó a la obra rosaliana, a pesar de ser amigo de su marido, Manuel Murguía, quien se había encargado de la redacción del prólogo de la obra titulada Femeninas, del mismo Valle Inclán. El independiente Juan Ramón Jiménez también se hizo eco de la obra rosaliana, dedicándole todo tipo de elogios y considerándola como la predecesora de la revolución poética iniciada por Rubén Darío. Considerándola una poeta del litoral, al igual que hacía con Bécquer, Jiménez le otorga el calificativo de innovadora y precursora del modernismo español. Día de las Letras Gallegas El 20 de marzo de 1963, tres miembros numerarios de la Real Academia Gallega, concretamente Francisco Fernández del Riego, Manuel Gómez Román y Xesús Ferro Couselo, enviaron una carta al que por aquel entonces ostentaba el cargo de presidente de la institución, Sebastián Martínez Risco, en la que se sometía a consideración de la Junta General la propuesta de celebrar el centenario de la publicación de la obra Cantares Gallegos, de Rosalía de Castro. El 28 de abril, a consecuencia de la propuesta elevada al presidente, tiene lugar una Junta ordinaria en los salones municipales cuyo resultado fue la declaración del Día das Letras Galegas el 17 de mayo de cada año, quedando reflejada tal decisión en la acta de la sesión. Todos sabemos que el libro rosaliano editado en 1863, ha sido la primera obra maestra con la que contó la Literatura Gallega Contemporánea. Su aparición le proporcionó prestigio universal a nuestra habla como instrumento de creación literaria. Representa, pues, un hecho decisivo en la historia del renacimiento cultural de Galicia. Punto primero de la carta Nadie desconoce que el libro tiene una fuerza simbólica extraordinaria. Siendo la muestra más reveladora del nivel cultural de los pueblos, no es de extrañar el afán de esparcirlo y de abrir caminos para ensanchar el ámbito de sus lectores. En el caso de Galicia, ninguna fecha es más ajustada para ensalzar y difundir el libro aquí producido, que la que conmemora la publicación de la obra con la que se formó el prestigio contemporáneo de la Letras Gallegas. Punto quinto de la carta A los dos días de alcanzarse un acuerdo en el seno de la institución, el presidente de la Real Academia Gallega procedió a la comunicación del mismo al Ministerio de Información y Turismo solicitando su permiso para poder llevar a buen término la iniciativa. El 14 de mayo, el delegado provincial del Ministerio al que se había acudido respondió de manera positiva a la propuesta. Así, aquel año de 1963 se honró lo figura de Rosalía por medio de diversos actos que fueron promovidos por la institución académica, teniendo esto como sede principal la ciudad de La Coruña. No obstante, en otras ciudades de toda Galicia también se promovieron distintos homenajes y actos con el objetivo de honrar tanto a la autora como a su obra. Reconocimientos En la actualidad, son varias las instituciones, espacios públicos y bienes de consumo designados con el nombre de Rosalía de Castro, poniendo esto de manifiesto el arraigo social que tiene la figura de la poetisa. De este modo, es posible encontrar centros de educación tanto en la Comunidad Autónoma de Galicia como en el resto de regiones de España, en Rusia o en Uruguay llamados igual que la escritora, a lo que se debe añadir numerosos parques, plazas y calles, asociaciones culturales, premios otorgados a personas íntimamente vinculadas a la lengua gallega y española, bibliotecas, agrupaciones folclóricas, coros musicales e incluso un vino con Denominación de Origen Rías Baixas. Sin embargo, resulta curioso que un avión de la compañía Iberia, así como una aeronave perteneciente a Salvamento Marítimo, hayan sido bautizados igual que la escritora. Obviamente, también son varios los monumentos (placas conmemorativas y esculturas principalmente) dedicados a su figura en diversos países del mundo. Con la emisión del 23 de octubre de 1979 apareció el último de los billetes de 500 pesetas, puesto que este sería substituido en 1987 por monedas de igual valor. El billete se distinguía por presentar en el anverso el retrato de Rosalía de Castro, grabado por Pablo Sampedro Moledo, así como por mostrar en el reverso la Casa-Museo de Rosalía sita en Padrón y unos versos con la caligrafía de su autora, pertenecientes a la obra Follas Novas. De esta forma, Rosalía de Castro se convirtió junto con Isabel la Católica, en el único personaje femenino no alegórico retratado en el anverso de un billete propiamente español. Referencias Wikipedia - https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalía_de_Castro

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as for his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism. Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated by some that he suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition as yet unidentified during his lifetime. Coleridge suffered from poor health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction. Early life Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the country town of Ottery St Mary, Devon, England. Samuel's father, the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), was a well-respected vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School at Ottery. He had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by Reverend Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809). Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself. After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles. In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read.” However, Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his schooldays in Biographia Literaria: I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master [...] At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. [...] In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! [...] Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day. Throughout his life, Coleridge idealized his father as pious and innocent, while his relationship with his mother was more problematic. His childhood was characterized by attention seeking, which has been linked to his dependent personality as an adult. He was rarely allowed to return home during the school term, and this distance from his family at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging. He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace." From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade. In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache", perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. Afterwards, he was rumoured to have had a bout of severe depression. His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from Cambridge. Pantisocracy and marriage At the university, he was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey. Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania. In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, but Coleridge's marriage proved unhappy. He grew to detest his wife, whom he only married because of social constraints. He eventually separated from her. Coleridge made plans to establish a journal, The Watchman, to be printed every eight days in order to avoid a weekly newspaper tax. The first issue of the short-lived journal was published in March 1796; it had ceased publication by May of that year. The years 1797 and 1798, during which he lived in what is now known as Coleridge Cottage, in Nether Stowey, Somerset, were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In 1795, Coleridge met poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. (Wordsworth, having visited him and being enchanted by the surroundings, rented Alfoxton Park, a little over three miles [5 km] away.) Besides the Rime of The Ancient Mariner, he composed the symbolic poem Kubla Khan, written—Coleridge himself claimed—as a result of an opium dream, in "a kind of a reverie"; and the first part of the narrative poem Christabel. The writing of Kubla Khan, written about the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his legendary palace at Xanadu, was said to have been interrupted by the arrival of a "Person from Porlock" — an event that has been embellished upon in such varied contexts as science fiction and Nabokov's Lolita. During this period, he also produced his much-praised "conversation" poems This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison, Frost at Midnight, and The Nightingale. In 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which proved to be the starting point for the English romantic movement. Wordsworth may have contributed more poems, but the real star of the collection was Coleridge's first version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It was the longest work and drew more praise and attention than anything else in the volume. In the spring Coleridge temporarily took over for Rev. Joshua Toulmin at Taunton's Mary Street Unitarian Chapel while Rev. Toulmin grieved over the drowning death of his daughter Jane. Poetically commenting on Toulmin's strength, Coleridge wrote in a 1798 letter to John Prior Estlin, "I walked into Taunton (eleven miles) and back again, and performed the divine services for Dr. Toulmin. I suppose you must have heard that his daughter, (Jane, on 15 April 1798) in a melancholy derangement, suffered herself to be swallowed up by the tide on the sea-coast between Sidmouth and Bere [sic] (Beer). These events cut cruelly into the hearts of old men: but the good Dr. Toulmin bears it like the true practical Christian, – there is indeed a tear in his eye, but that eye is lifted up to the Heavenly Father." In the autumn of 1798, Coleridge and Wordsworth left for a stay in Germany; Coleridge soon went his own way and spent much of his time in university towns. During this period, he became interested in German philosophy, especially the transcendental idealism and critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and in the literary criticism of the 18th century dramatist Gotthold Lessing. Coleridge studied German and, after his return to England, translated the dramatic trilogy Wallenstein by the German Classical poet Friedrich Schiller into English. He continued to pioneer these ideas through his own critical writings for the rest of his life (sometimes without attribution), although they were unfamiliar and difficult for a culture dominated by empiricism. In 1799, Coleridge and Wordsworth stayed at Thomas Hutchinson's farm on the Tees at Sockburn, near Darlington. It was at Sockburn that Coleridge wrote his ballad-poem Love, addressed to Sara. The knight mentioned is the mailed figure on the Conyers tomb in ruined Sockburn church. The figure has a wyvern at his feet, a reference to the Sockburn worm slain by Sir John Conyers (and a possible source for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky). The worm was supposedly buried under the rock in the nearby pasture; this was the 'greystone' of Coleridge's first draft, later transformed into a 'mount'. The poem was a direct inspiration for John Keats' famous poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci. Coleridge's early intellectual debts, besides German idealists like Kant and critics like Lessing, were first to William Godwin's Political Justice, especially during his Pantisocratic period, and to David Hartley's Observations on Man, which is the source of the psychology which is found in Frost at Midnight. Hartley argued that one becomes aware of sensory events as impressions, and that "ideas" are derived by noticing similarities and differences between impressions and then by naming them. Connections resulting from the coincidence of impressions create linkages, so that the occurrence of one impression triggers those links and calls up the memory of those ideas with which it is associated (See Dorothy Emmet, "Coleridge and Philosophy"). Coleridge was critical of the literary taste of his contemporaries, and a literary conservative insofar as he was afraid that the lack of taste in the ever growing masses of literate people would mean a continued desecration of literature itself. In 1800, he returned to England and shortly thereafter settled with his family and friends at Keswick in the Lake District of Cumberland to be near Grasmere, where Wordsworth had moved. Soon, however, he was beset by marital problems, illnesses, increased opium dependency, tensions with Wordsworth, and a lack of confidence in his poetic powers, all of which fuelled the composition of Dejection: An Ode and an intensification of his philosophical studies. Later life and increasing drug use In 1804, he travelled to Sicily and Malta, working for a time as Acting Public Secretary of Malta under the Commissioner, Alexander Ball, a task he performed quite successfully. However, he gave this up and returned to England in 1806. Dorothy Wordsworth was shocked at his condition upon his return. From 1807 to 1808, Coleridge returned to Malta and then travelled in Sicily and Italy, in the hope that leaving Britain's damp climate would improve his health and thus enable him to reduce his consumption of opium. Thomas de Quincey alleges in his Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets that it was during this period that Coleridge became a full-blown opium addict, using the drug as a substitute for the lost vigour and creativity of his youth. It has been suggested, however, that this reflects de Quincey's own experiences more than Coleridge's. His opium addiction (he was using as much as two quarts of laudanum a week) now began to take over his life: he separated from his wife Sarah in 1808, quarrelled with Wordsworth in 1810, lost part of his annuity in 1811, and put himself under the care of Dr. Daniel in 1814. In 1809, Coleridge made his second attempt to become a newspaper publisher with the publication of the journal entitled The Friend. It was a weekly publication that, in Coleridge’s typically ambitious style, was written, edited, and published almost entirely single-handedly. Given that Coleridge tended to be highly disorganized and had no head for business, the publication was probably doomed from the start. Coleridge financed the journal by selling over five hundred subscriptions, over two dozen of which were sold to members of Parliament, but in late 1809, publication was crippled by a financial crisis and Coleridge was obliged to approach "Conversation Sharp", Tom Poole and one or two other wealthy friends for an emergency loan in order to continue. The Friend was an eclectic publication that drew upon every corner of Coleridge’s remarkably diverse knowledge of law, philosophy, morals, politics, history, and literary criticism. Although it was often turgid, rambling, and inaccessible to most readers, it ran for 25 issues and was republished in book form a number of times. Years after its initial publication, The Friend became a highly influential work and its effect was felt on writers and philosophers from J.S. Mill to Emerson. Between 1810 and 1820, this "giant among dwarfs", as he was often considered by his contemporaries, gave a series of lectures in London and Bristol – those on Shakespeare renewed interest in the playwright as a model for contemporary writers. Much of Coleridge's reputation as a literary critic is founded on the lectures that he undertook in the winter of 1810–11 which were sponsored by the Philosophical Institution and given at Scot's Corporation Hall off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. These lectures were heralded in the prospectus as "A Course of Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton, in Illustration of the Principles of Poetry." Coleridge's ill-health, opium-addiction problems, and somewhat unstable personality meant that all his lectures were plagued with problems of delays and a general irregularity of quality from one lecture to the next. Furthermore, Coleridge's mind was extremely dynamic and his personality was spasmodic. As a result of these factors, Coleridge often failed to prepare anything but the loosest set of notes for his lectures and regularly entered into extremely long digressions which his audiences found difficult to follow. However, it was the lecture on Hamlet given on 2 January 1812 that was considered the best and has influenced Hamlet studies ever since. Before Coleridge, Hamlet was often denigrated and belittled by critics from Voltaire to Dr. Johnson. Coleridge rescued Hamlet and his thoughts on the play are often still published as supplements to the text. In August 1814, Coleridge was approached by Lord Byron's publisher, John Murray, about the possibility of translating Goethe's classic Faust (1808). Coleridge was regarded by many as the greatest living writer on the demonic and he accepted the commission, only to abandon work on it after six weeks. Until recently, scholars have accepted that Coleridge never returned to the project, despite Goethe's own belief in the 1820s that Coleridge had in fact completed a long translation of the work. In September 2007, Oxford University Press sparked a heated scholarly controversy by publishing an English translation of Goethe's work which purported to be Coleridge's long-lost masterpiece (the text in question first appeared anonymously in 1821). In 1817, Coleridge, with his addiction worsening, his spirits depressed, and his family alienated, took residence in the Highgate homes, then just north of London, of the physician James Gillman, first at South Grove and later at the nearby 3 The Grove. Gillman was partially successful in controlling the poet's addiction. Colerdige remained in Highgate for the rest of his life, and the house became a place of literary pilgrimage of writers including Carlyle and Emerson. In Gillman's home, he finished his major prose work, the Biographia Literaria (1817), a volume composed of 23 chapters of autobiographical notes and dissertations on various subjects, including some incisive literary theory and criticism. He composed much poetry here and had many inspirations — a few of them from opium overdose. Perhaps because he conceived such grand projects, he had difficulty carrying them through to completion, and he berated himself for his "indolence". It is unclear whether his growing use of opium (and the brandy in which it was dissolved) was a symptom or a cause of his growing depression. He published other writings while he was living at the Gillman home, notably Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825), and Church and State (1826). He died in Highgate, London on 25 July 1834 as a result of heart failure compounded by an unknown lung disorder, possibly linked to his use of opium. Coleridge had spent 18 years under the roof of the Gillman family, who built an addition onto their home to accommodate the poet. Carlyle described him at Highgate: "Coleridge sat on the brow of Highgate Hill, in those years, looking down on London and its smoke-tumult, like a sage escaped from the inanity of life`s battle ... The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oak-grove (Mr. Gilman`s house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon." Poetry Despite not enjoying the name recognition or popular acclaim that Wordsworth or Shelley have had, Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilizing common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, and Kubla Khan Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Even those who have never read the Rime have come under its influence: its words have given the English language the metaphor of an albatross around one's neck, the quotation of "water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink" (almost always rendered as "but not a drop to drink"), and the phrase "a sadder and a wiser man" (again, usually rendered as "sadder but wiser man"). The phrase "All creatures great and small" may have been inspired by The Rime: "He prayeth best, who loveth best;/ All things great and small;/ For the dear God who loveth us;/ He made and loveth all."Christabel is known for its musical rhythm, language, and its Gothic tale. Kubla Khan, or, A Vision in a Dream, A Fragment, although shorter, is also widely known. Both Kubla Khan and Christabel have an additional "Romantic" aura because they were never finished. Stopford Brooke characterised both poems as having no rival due to their "exquisite metrical movement" and "imaginative phrasing.” The Conversation poems * The Eolian Harp (1795) * Reflections on having left a Place of Retirement (1795) * This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison (1797) * Frost at Midnight (1798) * Fears in Solitude (1798) * The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) * Dejection: An Ode (1802) * To William Wordsworth (1807) The eight of Coleridge's poems listed above are now often discussed as a group entitled "Conversation poems". The term itself was coined in 1928 by George McLean Harper, who borrowed the subtitle of The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem (1798) to describe the seven other poems as well. The poems are considered by many critics to be among Coleridge's finest verses; thus Harold Bloom has written, "With Dejection, The Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight shows Coleridge at his most impressive." They are also among his most influential poems, as discussed further below. Harper himself considered that the eight poems represented a form of blank verse that is "...more fluent and easy than Milton's, or any that had been written since Milton". In 2006 Robert Koelzer wrote about another aspect of this apparent "easiness", noting that Conversation poems such as "... Coleridge's The Eolian Harp and The Nightingale maintain a middle register of speech, employing an idiomatic language that is capable of being construed as un-symbolic and un-musical: language that lets itself be taken as 'merely talk' rather than rapturous 'song'." The last ten lines of "Frost at Midnight" were chosen by Harper as the "best example of the peculiar kind of blank verse Coleridge had evolved, as natural-seeming as prose, but as exquisitely artistic as the most complicated sonnet." The speaker of the poem is addressing his infant son, asleep by his side: Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, Whether the summer clothe the general earth With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall Heard only in the trances of the blast, Or if the secret ministry of frost Shall hang them up in silent icicles, Quietly shining to the quiet Moon. In 1965, M. H. Abrams wrote a broad description that applies to the Conversation poems: "The speaker begins with a description of the landscape; an aspect or change of aspect in the landscape evokes a varied by integral process of memory, thought, anticipation, and feeling which remains closely intervolved with the outer scene. In the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight, faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an emotional problem. Often the poem rounds itself to end where it began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened understanding which is the result of the intervening meditation." In fact, Abrams was describing both the Conversation poems and later poems influenced by them. Abrams' essay has been called a "touchstone of literary criticism". As Paul Magnuson described it in 2002, "Abrams credited Coleridge with originating what Abrams called the 'greater Romantic lyric', a genre that began with Coleridge's 'Conversation' poems, and included Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey, Shelley's Stanzas Written in Dejection and Keats's Ode to a Nightingale, and was a major influence on more modern lyrics by Matthew Arnold, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and W. H. Auden.” Literary criticism In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth. Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticizes Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are not provoked by the work being studied. Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Norman Furman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to Biographia Literaria, which both he and Furman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism. In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life. Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe’s books and The Mad Monk, among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured." However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance. Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge

John Clare

John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet, the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among the most important 19th-century poets. His biographer Jonathan Bate states that Clare was "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self”. Early life Clare was born in Helpston, six miles to the north of the city of Peterborough. In his life time, the village was in the Soke of Peterborough in Northamptonshire and his memorial calls him "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Helpston now lies in the Peterborough unitary authority of Cambridgeshire. He became an agricultural labourer while still a child; however, he attended school in Glinton church until he was twelve. In his early adult years, Clare became a pot-boy in the Blue Bell public house and fell in love with Mary Joyce; but her father, a prosperous farmer, forbade her to meet him. Subsequently he was a gardener at Burghley House. He enlisted in the militia, tried camp life with Gypsies, and worked in Pickworth as a lime burner in 1817. In the following year he was obliged to accept parish relief. Malnutrition stemming from childhood may be the main culprit behind his 5-foot stature and may have contributed to his poor physical health in later life. Early poems Clare had bought a copy of Thomson's Seasons and began to write poems and sonnets. In an attempt to hold off his parents' eviction from their home, Clare offered his poems to a local bookseller named Edward Drury. Drury sent Clare's poetry to his cousin John Taylor of the publishing firm of Taylor & Hessey, who had published the work of John Keats. Taylor published Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery in 1820. This book was highly praised, and in the next year his Village Minstrel and other Poems were published. Midlife He had married Martha ("Patty") Turner in 1820. An annuity of 15 guineas from the Marquess of Exeter, in whose service he had been, was supplemented by subscription, so that Clare became possessed of £45 annually, a sum far beyond what he had ever earned. Soon, however, his income became insufficient, and in 1823 he was nearly penniless. The Shepherd's Calendar (1827) met with little success, which was not increased by his hawking it himself. As he worked again in the fields his health temporarily improved; but he soon became seriously ill. Earl FitzWilliam presented him with a new cottage and a piece of ground, but Clare could not settle in his new home. Clare was constantly torn between the two worlds of literary London and his often illiterate neighbours; between the need to write poetry and the need for money to feed and clothe his children. His health began to suffer, and he had bouts of severe depression, which became worse after his sixth child was born in 1830 and as his poetry sold less well. In 1832, his friends and his London patrons clubbed together to move the family to a larger cottage with a smallholding in the village of Northborough, not far from Helpston. However, he felt only more alienated. His last work, the Rural Muse (1835), was noticed favourably by Christopher North and other reviewers, but this was not enough to support his wife and seven children. Clare's mental health began to worsen. As his alcohol consumption steadily increased along with his dissatisfaction with his own identity, Clare's behaviour became more erratic. A notable instance of this behaviour was demonstrated in his interruption of a performance of The Merchant of Venice, in which Clare verbally assaulted Shylock. He was becoming a burden to Patty and his family, and in July 1837, on the recommendation of his publishing friend, John Taylor, Clare went of his own volition (accompanied by a friend of Taylor's) to Dr Matthew Allen's private asylum High Beach near Loughton, in Epping Forest. Taylor had assured Clare that he would receive the best medical care. Later life and death During his first few asylum years in Essex (1837–1841), Clare re-wrote famous poems and sonnets by Lord Byron. His own version of Child Harold became a lament for past lost love, and Don Juan, A Poem became an acerbic, misogynistic, sexualised rant redolent of an aging Regency dandy. Clare also took credit for Shakespeare's plays, claiming to be the Renaissance genius himself. "I'm John Clare now," the poet claimed to a newspaper editor, "I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly." In 1841, Clare left the asylum in Essex, to walk home, believing that he was to meet his first love Mary Joyce; Clare was convinced that he was married with children to her and Martha as well. He did not believe her family when they told him she had died accidentally three years earlier in a house fire. He remained free, mostly at home in Northborough, for the five months following, but eventually Patty called the doctors in. Between Christmas and New Year in 1841, Clare was committed to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum (now St Andrew's Hospital). Upon Clare's arrival at the asylum, the accompanying doctor, Fenwick Skrimshire, who had treated Clare since 1820, completed the admission papers. To the enquiry "Was the insanity preceded by any severe or long-continued mental emotion or exertion?", Dr Skrimshire entered: "After years of poetical prosing." He remained here for the rest of his life under the humane regime of Dr Thomas Octavius Prichard, encouraged and helped to write. Here he wrote possibly his most famous poem, I Am. He died on 20 May 1864, in his 71st year. His remains were returned to Helpston for burial in St Botolph’s churchyard. Today, children at the John Clare School, Helpston's primary, parade through the village and place their 'midsummer cushions' around Clare's gravestone (which has the inscriptions "To the Memory of John Clare The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" and "A Poet is Born not Made") on his birthday, in honour of their most famous resident. The thatched cottage where he was born was bought by the John Clare Education & Environment Trust in 2005 and is restoring the cottage to its 18th century state. Poetry In his time, Clare was commonly known as "the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet". Since his formal education was brief, Clare resisted the use of the increasingly standardised English grammar and orthography in his poetry and prose. Many of his poems would come to incorporate terms used locally in his Northamptonshire dialect, such as 'pooty' (snail), 'lady-cow' (ladybird), 'crizzle' (to crisp) and 'throstle' (song thrush). In his early life he struggled to find a place for his poetry in the changing literary fashions of the day. He also felt that he did not belong with other peasants. Clare once wrote "I live here among the ignorant like a lost man in fact like one whom the rest seemes careless of having anything to do with—they hardly dare talk in my company for fear I should mention them in my writings and I find more pleasure in wandering the fields than in musing among my silent neighbours who are insensible to everything but toiling and talking of it and that to no purpose.” It is common to see an absence of punctuation in many of Clare's original writings, although many publishers felt the need to remedy this practice in the majority of his work. Clare argued with his editors about how it should be presented to the public. Clare grew up during a period of massive changes in both town and countryside as the Industrial Revolution swept Europe. Many former agricultural workers, including children, moved away from the countryside to over-crowded cities, following factory work. The Agricultural Revolution saw pastures ploughed up, trees and hedges uprooted, the fens drained and the common land enclosed. This destruction of a centuries-old way of life distressed Clare deeply. His political and social views were predominantly conservative ("I am as far as my politics reaches 'King and Country'—no Innovations in Religion and Government say I."). He refused even to complain about the subordinate position to which English society relegated him, swearing that "with the old dish that was served to my forefathers I am content." His early work delights both in nature and the cycle of the rural year. Poems such as Winter Evening, Haymaking and Wood Pictures in Summer celebrate the beauty of the world and the certainties of rural life, where animals must be fed and crops harvested. Poems such as Little Trotty Wagtail show his sharp observation of wildlife, though The Badger shows his lack of sentiment about the place of animals in the countryside. At this time, he often used poetic forms such as the sonnet and the rhyming couplet. His later poetry tends to be more meditative and use forms similar to the folks songs and ballads of his youth. An example of this is Evening. His knowledge of the natural world went far beyond that of the major Romantic poets. However, poems such as I Am show a metaphysical depth on a par with his contemporary poets and many of his pre-asylum poems deal with intricate play on the nature of linguistics. His 'bird's nest poems', it can be argued, illustrate the self-awareness, and obsession with the creative process that captivated the romantics. Clare was the most influential poet, aside from Wordsworth to practice in an older style. Revival of interest in the twentieth century Clare was relatively forgotten during the later nineteenth century, but interest in his work was revived by Arthur Symons in 1908, Edmund Blunden in 1920 and John and Anne Tibble in their ground-breaking 1935 2-volume edition. Benjamin Britten set some of 'May' from A Shepherd's Calendar in his Spring Symphony of 1948, and included a setting of The Evening Primrose in his Five Flower Songs Copyright to much of his work has been claimed since 1965 by the editor of the Complete Poetry (OUP, 9 vols., 1984–2003), Professor Eric Robinson though these claims were contested. Recent publishers have refused to acknowledge the claim (especially in recent editions from Faber and Carcanet) and it seems the copyright is now defunct. The John Clare Trust purchased Clare Cottage in Helpston in 2005, preserving it for future generations. In May 2007 the Trust gained £1.m of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and commissioned Jefferson Sheard Architects to create the new landscape design and Visitor Centre, including a cafe, shop and exhibition space. The Cottage has been restored using traditional building methods and opened to the public. The largest collection of original Clare manuscripts are housed at Peterborough Museum, where they are available to view by appointment. Since 1993, the John Clare Society of North America has organised an annual session of scholarly papers concerning John Clare at the annual Convention of the Modern Language Association of America. Poetry collections by Clare (chronological) * Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. London, 1820. * The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems. London, 1821. * The Shepherd's Calendar with Village Stories and Other Poems. London, 1827 * The Rural Muse. London, 1835. * Sonnet. London 1841 * First Love * Snow Storm. * The Firetail. * The Badger – Time unknown References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare

Julián del Casal

Julián del Casal Por: José Martí Aquel nombre tan bello que al pie de los versos tristes y joyantes parecía invención romántica más que realidad, no es ya el nombre de un vivo. Aquel fino espíritu, aquel cariño medroso y tierno, aquella ideal peregrinación, aquel melancólico amor a la hermosura ausente de su tierra nativa, porque las letras sólo pueden ser enlutadas o hetairas en un país sin libertad, ya no son más que un puñado de versos, impresos en papel infeliz, como dicen que fue la vida del poeta. De la beldad vivía prendida su alma; del cristal tallado y de la levedad japonesa; del color del ajenjo y de las rosas del jardín; de mujeres de perla, con ornamentos de plata labrada; y él, como Cellini, ponía en un salero a Júpiter. Aborrecía lo falso y pomposo. Murió, de su cuerpo endeble, o del pesar de vivir, con la fantasía elegante y enamorada, en un pueblo servil y deforme. De él se puede decir que, pagado del arte, por gustar del de Francia tan de cerca, le tomó la poesía nula, y de desgano falso e innecesario, con que los orífices del verso parisiense entretuvieron estos años últimos el vacío ideal de su época transitoria. En el mundo, si se le lleva con dignidad, hay aún poesía para mucho; todo es el valor moral con que se encare y dome la injusticia aparente de la vida; mientras haya un bien que hacer, un derecho que defender, un libro sano y fuerte que leer, un rincón de monte, una mujer buena, un verdadero amigo, tendrá vigor el corazón sensible para amar y loar lo bello y ordenado de la vida, odiosa a veces por la brutal maldad con que suelen afearla la venganza y la codicia. El sello de la grandeza es ese triunfo. De Antonio Pérez es esta verdad: «Sólo los grandes estómagos digieren venenos». Por toda nuestra América era Julián del Casal muy conocido y amado, y ya se oirán los elogios y las tristezas. Y es que en América está ya en flor la gente nueva, que pide peso a la prosa y condición al verso, y quiere trabajo y realidad en la política y en la literatura. Lo hinchado cansó, y la política hueca y rudimentaria, y aquella falsa lozanía de las letras que recuerda los perros aventados del loco de Cervantes. Es como una familia en América esta generación literaria, que principió por el rebusco imitado, y está ya en la elegancia suelta y concisa, y en la expresión artística y sincera, breve y tallada, del sentimiento personal y del juicio criollo y directo. El verso, para estos trabajadores, ha de ir sonando y volando. El verso, hijo de la emoción, ha de ser fino y profundo, como una nota de arpa. No se ha de decir lo raro, sino el instante raro de la emoción noble o graciosa.-Y ese verso, con aplauso y cariño de los americanos, era el que trabajaba Julián del Casal. Y luego, había otra razón para que lo amasen; y fue la poesía doliente y caprichosa que le vino de Francia con la rima excelsa, paró por ser en él la expresión natural del poco apego que artista tan delicado había de sentir por aquel país de sus entrañas, donde la conciencia oculta o confesa de la general humillación trae a todo el mundo como acorralado, o como antifaz, sin gusto ni poder para la franqueza y las gracias del alma. La poesía vive de honra. Murió el pobre poeta, y no lo llegamos a conocer. ¡Así vamos todos, en esa pobre tierra nuestra, partidos en dos, con nuestras energías regadas por el mundo, viviendo sin persona en los pueblos ajenos, y con la persona extraña sentada en los sillones de nuestro pueblo propio !Nos agriamos en vez de amarnos. Nos encelamos en vez de abrir vía juntos. Nos queremos como por entre las rejas de una prisión. ¡En verdad que es tiempo de acabar! Ya Julián del Casal acabó, joven y triste. Quedan sus versos. La América lo quiere, por fino y por sincero. Las mujeres lo lloran. Julián del Casal, florece en la estación de mayo Por: Juanita Conejero Nació en Cuba y desde aquel día 7 de noviembre de 1863, cual difícil le fue andar, y para olvidar todas sus tristezas se refugió en el arte, persiguiendo como él decía fantásticas visiones. Julián del Casal, “aquel nombre tan bello” al decir de Martí, aquel poeta con el que no pudo nunca hablar, pero que era “muy conocido y amado en toda América” y del que predijo: “ya se oirán los elogios y las tristezas” y “es que en América, está en flor la gente nueva que pide peso a la prosa y condición al verso”. Así escribía el Apóstol, en Patria, Nueva York, un 31 de octubre de 1893 en ocasión de la muerte de aquel cubano, que gustaba de la poesía “doliente y caprichosa” de Francia con la rima excelsa y que fue capaz de asumirla, con la elegancia de su personal sentimiento y su directa cubanía. Sólo vivió treinta años. Hace ciento veinte años publicó Hojas al Viento su primer libro, en él, la influencia de los románticos y del parnasianismo francés. Mucho leía el gran Casal, mucho respetaba las formas métricas tradicionales, pero al ponerse en contacto con las últimas innovaciones francesas de su época y sobre todo cuando profundizó en la obra de Baudelaire y de Verlaine, este caudal poético enriqueció su verso y su prosa. Para Martí, no había dudas, que el verso de Julián era hijo de la emoción y fino y profundo, como una nota de arpa. En un artículo publicado en La Habana Elegante, y suscrito por Enrique Hernández Miyares, se expresa: “Julián de Casal es mi hermano de ideales…..él es un poeta sin tacha y sin miedo como se decía de los caballeros de la Edad Media. Ha impreso su libro Hojas al Viento y “ya está”, como él dice. Como todo si el libro gusta y la edición se vende, ya veremos pompa en la alcobita de Julián, donde hay mayólica en los estantes, libros hasta en los percheros y se ve la efigie del Santo Padre al lado de la de Sarah Bernhardt”. Dedica Casal este primer libro a quién considera su venerado maestro: Ricardo del Monte. ¡Oh hermosa Primavera! ¿Por qué escondes tu canto virginal a mis sentidos? ¿dónde estás que te llamo y no respondes, no respondes jamás a mis gemidos? Yo también en los campos de mi vida siento el invierno lóbrego y sombrío. ¡Mi alma es una floresta destruida! ¡Yo también en el alma tengo frío! En poco tiempo publicó su segundo libro Nieve. Mucho más visible en sus versos la influencia francesa sobre todo de Laconte de Lisle. Para Lezama Lima, los diez sonetos que también componen este libro “es una de las mejores colecciones de sonetos que puede mostrar nuestra literatura”. Después Bustos y Rimas, del cual Julián sólo pudo revisar las primeras pruebas. Era lo más logrado de su producción. Esas rimas según Lezama encierran “sus más secretas apetencias; sus inquietudes de hombre logran predominar sobre las influencias anteriores. En el último poema “Cuerpo y alma”, aúna su perdurable devoción por Baudelaire, los tormentos a que fue sometida su existencia atenaceada por la rebelión de los sentidos y por los más castos deseos, deseando ”que la alondra no viva junto al tigre y que la rosa no viva junto al cerdo”. El primer gran golpe de su vida, la muerte de la madre a los cinco años. Después, años más tarde, su soneto “A mi madre”, un clásico de la literatura cubana. Estudia en el Colegio de Belén. Matricula Derecho y abandona la carrera. En 1885 muere el padre. Ya escribe, y algo ha publicado, es muy joven. La Habana Elegante el ilustrado Semanario le abre las puertas. Escribe artículos sobre La Sociedad de la Habana. Uno de ellos sobre el general Sabás Marín y la familia, le cuesta el puesto en la Intendencia General de Hacienda. Su situación económica se hace muy difícil. Amigos lo ayudan, lo rodean, Nicolás Azcárate, Ramón Meza, Aurelio Mitjans, Manuel de la Cruz, Enrique Hernández Miyares y otros. La salud no lo acompaña. Reservad los laureles de la fama para aquellos que fueron mis hermanos; yo, cual fruto caído de la rama, aguardo los famélicos gusanos. Se hace colaborador de diversos periódicos y revistas de la época. Tradujo poemas de Baudelaire. Deseaba tanto ir a París. Sólo un solar le queda de la herencia paterna. Lo vende y nada más puede visitar España. Allí conoce a Salvador Rueda y a Francisco A. de Icaza. Allí también recuerda sus lecturas de los clásicos españoles de su adolescencia. Ya sentía la ola Modernista que tenía sus raíces espirituales en la gran patria francesa. Para Verlaine, Casal tenia a sólo veinticinco años un talento sólido y fresco. Se adentra el cubano en la lectura de parnasianos y simbolistas. Le inspiran poemas, Gautier, Coopèe, y tantos otros, y Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Vigny y Hugo. Siente cada momento, el calor de sus amigos de la Patria y comparte en las Tertulias y allí conoce a los hermanos Uhrbach que fueron sus primeros discípulos y sufre la temprana muerte, a sólo diecinueve años, de Juana Borrero, con la que había establecido una bella relación, inmortalizada en la virgen triste de sus versos. Como expresó el inolvidable Cintio Vitier, la casa de Borrero en Puentes Grandes, llegó a ser el centro del modernismo naciente en Cuba hasta la muerte de Casal. También El Fígaro recibe sus colaboraciones, y Casal, conoce a Darío y entre los dos grandes creadores nace fiel amistad que se traduce en intercambio de poemas y cartas. Para Julián, era tesoro aquel poema El Clavicordio de la Abuela que Darío le dedica, cuando el cubano le entrega sus hermosas Páginas de la Vida. Yo soy como esas plantas que ignota mano siembra un día en el surco por donde marcha, ya para que la que la anime luz de verano, ya para que la hiele frío de escarcha. Llevado por el soplo del torbellino, que cada día a extraño suelo me arroja, entre las rudas zarzas de mi camino, si no dejo un capullo, dejo una hoja. En 1892, el general Antonio Maceo, le dedicó un retrato escrito con su puño y letra y el poeta le escribe un soneto al héroe de nuestras luchas libertarias. ¡Cuántos hermosos recuerdos debió haber guardado de Casal su hermana doña Carmela viuda de Peláez, madre de la entrañable pintora cubana Amelia Peláez! El 21 de octubre de 1893, muere Julián del Casal en casa de su amigo el doctor Lucas de los Santos Lamadrid. De sobremesa, la rotura de un aneurisma. No faltó ni uno sólo de sus amigos al sepelio. Mas si queréis guardar mis pobres restos, grabad sobre mi tumba estas palabras: ¡Amó sólo en el mundo la Belleza! ¡Que encuentre ahora la Verdad su alma”! El Festival Internacional de Poesía de la Habana ya anuncia su programa para este mayo florido. Poetas de distintas partes nos visitarán. De nuestra América, se inundan nuestros espacios. Julián del Casal vuelve con sus Hojas al Viento, con su Nieve y con sus Bustos y Rimas, vuelve el trovador de las rarezas y de las amarguras humanas, de cuerpo endeble pero de fino espíritu y alma de palmera grande y solitaria, y hallará en el Arte “sonando y volando las dichas ignoradas”, el suspiro inenarrable de su reveladora poética, que florecerá una vez más, en todas las regiones donde es más hermosa la luna y vuelan, como él diría, los alciones sobre el mar. Referencias Juanita Conejero - www.cubarte.cult.cu/periodico/print/articulo/14910.htmll Damisela - www.damisela.com/literatura/pais/cuba/autores/delcasal/index.htm Por: Mirta Aguirre «Angustia y evasión de Julián del Casal» tituló hace años José Antonio Portuondo a un breve análisis del poeta. Poetas devotos de Casal, lastimados por ello, han dicho que era «muy cómodo hablar de evasión, de escapismo y otros términos análogos que puso de moda la crítica marxista». En realidad, no es cómodo evadirse, cuando de veras induce a ello, como sucedía con el autor de Nieve, una gran amargura vital; cuando de veras se tiene, como poseyó Julián del Casal, una gran honradez artística y humana. Tampoco es cómodo, frente a una personalidad bondadosa y tan límpida como la de Casal, frente a un artista de tanta significación como la suya en nuestra poesía, verse en la obligación de señalar debilidades y deficiencias. Pero lo cierto es que Casal se evadía, lo cierto es que se escapaba de mirar la realidad frente a frente. Y lo cierto es que, aunque incómodo, eso tiene que decirse. Puede comprenderse, puede explicarse; pero no debe callarse. Y mucho menos aplaudirse, Casal —o Baudelaire— y la burguesía eran incompatibles. Casal y el régimencolonial lo eran también. Eso hay que anotárselo. Pero generalizada la actitud a lo Julián del Casal, ¿habría tenido lugar el Noventa y Cinco? El poeta murió en 1893. De haber vivido, no habría sido imposible que, baudelerinamente,[sic] tomara el camino insurrecto. Pero, al desaparecer antes, quedaron en pie las japonerías, los ojos que para celebrar el Almendares pensaban en el Rhin, el admirador de los tintes y postizos, el hombre que sólo sentía ansias de aniquilarse, el poeta de «Nihilismo» y «Recuerdo de la infancia», cuya idea de la poesía puede encontrarse en párrafos como el escrito con motivo de Fornaris: El poeta moderno no es un patriota, como Quintana o Mickiewicz, que sólo lamenta los males de la patria y encamina los pueblos a las revoluciones; ni un soñador como Lamartine perdido en el azul; ni un didáctico como Virgilio o Delille, que pone su talento poético al servicio de las artes inferiores; ni un moralista como Milanés entre nosotros, que trata de refrenar en verso los vicios sociales; sino un neurótico sublime, como Baudelaire o Swinburne [...] [...] Alucinado, neurótico, desesperado, blasfemo, nihilista, era a su vez Julián del Casal. «Juzgándote vencido por nada luchas», escribió él de sí mismo en alguna ocasión. No obstante, escribió también el soneto famoso a Maceo. Y escribió «La perla», contra la anexión de Cuba a los Estados Unidos; y escribió el soneto a los estudiantes fusilados en 1871 y dejó en sus prosas muy agudas denuncias de nuestra existencia bajo el yugo español y sátiras que lo hicieron temible para la aristocracia colonial. Era un poeta cautivado por cuanto centelleara y pudiera deshacerse en chispas, quizás porque la luz es lo más transparente, lo más impalpable que percibimos y él era un atormentado por el peso de su cuerpo y un sediento de la pureza. Era un enfermo y poseía sensibilidad de enfermo. [...] Su sensibilidad y el modo de ver la vida que ella contribuía forjarle, nos son ajenas y distantes. No podemos compartirlas, pero, en sus circunstancias, podemos comprenderlas. Y eso es lo que podemos ofrecer hoy nosotros a Julián del Casal, a quien todo le fuera negado ayer, por haber ganado para Cuba, en las letras de su tiempo, un honroso lugar. Referencias http://www.habanaelegante.com/ Spring_Summer_2012/Hojas_Aguirre.html

Lewis Carroll

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies in many parts of the world (including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand) dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life. Antecedents Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. His mother's name was Frances Jane Lutwidge. The elder of these sons – yet another Charles Dodgson – was Carroll's father. He reverted to the other family tradition and took holy orders. He went to Westminster School, and then to Christ Church, Oxford. He was mathematically gifted and won a double first degree, which could have been the prelude to a brilliant academic career. Instead he married his first cousin in 1827 and became a country parson. Dodgson was born in the little parsonage of Daresbury in Cheshire near the towns of Warrington and Runcorn, the eldest boy but already the third child of the four-and-a-half-year-old marriage. Eight more children were to follow. When Charles was 11, his father was given the living of Croft-on-Tees in North Yorkshire, and the whole family moved to the spacious rectory. This remained their home for the next twenty-five years. Young Charles' father was an active and highly conservative cleric of the Church of England who later became the Archdeacon of Richmond and involved himself, sometimes influentially, in the intense religious disputes that were dividing the church. He was High Church, inclining to Anglo-Catholicism, an admirer of John Henry Newman and the Tractarian movement, and did his best to instill such views in his children. Young Charles was to develop an ambiguous relationship with his father's values and with the Church of England as a whole. Education Home life During his early youth, Dodgson was educated at home. His "reading lists" preserved in the family archives testify to a precocious intellect: at the age of seven the child was reading The Pilgrim's Progress. He also suffered from a stammer – a condition shared by most of his siblings – that often influenced his social life throughout his years. At age twelve he was sent to Richmond Grammar School (now part of Richmond School) at nearby Richmond. Rugby In 1846, young Dodgson moved on to Rugby School, where he was evidently less happy, for as he wrote some years after leaving the place: I cannot say ... that any earthly considerations would induce me to go through my three years again ... I can honestly say that if I could have been ... secure from annoyance at night, the hardships of the daily life would have been comparative trifles to bear. Scholastically, though, he excelled with apparent ease. "I have not had a more promising boy at his age since I came to Rugby", observed R.B. Mayor, then Mathematics master. Oxford He left Rugby at the end of 1849 and matriculated at Oxford in May 1850 as a member of his father's old college, Christ Church. After waiting for rooms in college to become available, he went into residence in January 1851. He had been at Oxford only two days when he received a summons home. His mother had died of "inflammation of the brain" – perhaps meningitis or a stroke – at the age of forty-seven. His early academic career veered between high promise and irresistible distraction. He did not always work hard, but was exceptionally gifted and achievement came easily to him. In 1852 he obtained first-class honours in Mathematics Moderations, and was shortly thereafter nominated to a Studentship by his father's old friend, Canon Edward Pusey. In 1854 he obtained first-class honours in the Final Honours School of Mathematics, graduating Bachelor of Arts. He remained at Christ Church studying and teaching, but the next year he failed an important scholarship through his self-confessed inability to apply himself to study. Even so, his talent as a mathematician won him the Christ Church Mathematical Lectureship in 1855, which he continued to hold for the next twenty-six years. Despite early unhappiness, Dodgson was to remain at Christ Church, in various capacities, until his death. Character and appearance Health challenges The young adult Charles Dodgson was about six feet tall, slender, and had curling brown hair and blue or grey eyes (depending on the account). He was described in later life as somewhat asymmetrical, and as carrying himself rather stiffly and awkwardly, though this may be on account of a knee injury sustained in middle age. As a very young child, he suffered a fever that left him deaf in one ear. At the age of seventeen, he suffered a severe attack of whooping cough, which was probably responsible for his chronically weak chest in later life. Another defect he carried into adulthood was what he referred to as his "hesitation", a stammer he acquired in early childhood and which plagued him throughout his life. The stammer has always been a potent part of the conceptions of Dodgson; it is part of the belief that he stammered only in adult company and was free and fluent with children, but there is no evidence to support this idea. Many children of his acquaintance remembered the stammer while many adults failed to notice it. Dodgson himself seems to have been far more acutely aware of it than most people he met; it is said he caricatured himself as the Dodo in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, referring to his difficulty in pronouncing his last name, but this is one of the many "facts" often-repeated, for which no firsthand evidence remains. He did indeed refer to himself as the dodo, but that this was a reference to his stammer is simply speculation. Although Dodgson's stammer troubled him, it was never so debilitating that it prevented him from applying his other personal qualities to do well in society. At a time when people commonly devised their own amusements and when singing and recitation were required social skills, the young Dodgson was well-equipped to be an engaging entertainer. He reportedly could sing tolerably well and was not afraid to do so before an audience. He was adept at mimicry and storytelling, and was reputedly quite good at charades. Social connections In the interim between his early published writing and the success of the Alice books, Dodgson began to move in the Pre-Raphaelite social circle. He first met John Ruskin in 1857 and became friendly with him. He developed a close relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his family, and also knew William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Arthur Hughes, among other artists. He also knew the fairy-tale author George MacDonald well – it was the enthusiastic reception of Alice by the young MacDonald children that convinced him to submit the work for publication. Politics, religion and philosophy In broad terms, Dodgson has traditionally been regarded as politically, religiously, and personally conservative. Martin Gardner labels Dodgson as a Tory who was "awed by lords and inclined to be snobbish towards inferiors." The Revd W. Tuckwell, in his Reminiscences of Oxford (1900), regarded him as "austere, shy, precise, absorbed in mathematical reverie, watchfully tenacious of his dignity, stiffly conservative in political, theological, social theory, his life mapped out in squares like Alice's landscape." However, Dodgson also expressed interest in philosophies and religions that seem at odds with this assessment. For example, he was a founding member of the Society for Psychical Research. It has been argued by the proponents of the 'Carroll Myth' that these factors require a reconsideration of Gardner's diagnosis, and that perhaps, Dodgson's true outlook was more complex than previously believed (see 'the Carroll Myth' below). Dodgson wrote some studies of various philosophical arguments. In 1895, he developed a philosophical regressus-argument on deductive reasoning in his article "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", which appeared in one of the early volumes of the philosophical journal Mind. The article was reprinted in the same journal a hundred years later, in 1995, with a subsequent article by Simon Blackburn titled Practical Tortoise Raising. Artistic activities Literature From a young age, Dodgson wrote poetry and short stories, both contributing heavily to the family magazine Mischmasch and later sending them to various magazines, enjoying moderate success. Between 1854 and 1856, his work appeared in the national publications, The Comic Times and The Train, as well as smaller magazines like the Whitby Gazette and the Oxford Critic. Most of this output was humorous, sometimes satirical, but his standards and ambitions were exacting. "I do not think I have yet written anything worthy of real publication (in which I do not include the Whitby Gazette or the Oxonian Advertiser), but I do not despair of doing so some day," he wrote in July 1855. Sometime after 1850, he did write puppet plays for his siblings' entertainment, of which one has survived, La Guida di Bragia. In 1856 he published his first piece of work under the name that would make him famous. A romantic poem called "Solitude" appeared in The Train under the authorship of "Lewis Carroll." This pseudonym was a play on his real name; Lewis was the anglicised form of Ludovicus, which was the Latin for Lutwidge, and Carroll an Irish surname similar to the Latin name Carolus, from which the name Charles comes. Alice In the same year, 1856, a new Dean, Henry Liddell, arrived at Christ Church, bringing with him his young family, all of whom would figure largely in Dodgson's life and, over the following years, greatly influence his writing career. Dodgson became close friends with Liddell's wife, Lorina, and their children, particularly the three sisters: Lorina, Edith and Alice Liddell. He was for many years widely assumed to have derived his own "Alice" from Alice Liddell. This was given some apparent substance by the fact the acrostic poem at the end of Through the Looking Glass spells out her name, and that there are many superficial references to her hidden in the text of both books. It has been pointed out that Dodgson himself repeatedly denied in later life that his "little heroine" was based on any real child, and frequently dedicated his works to girls of his acquaintance, adding their names in acrostic poems at the beginning of the text. Gertrude Chataway's name appears in this form at the beginning of The Hunting of the Snark, and no one has ever suggested this means any of the characters in the narrative are based on her. Though information is scarce (Dodgson's diaries for the years 1858–1862 are missing), it does seem clear that his friendship with the Liddell family was an important part of his life in the late 1850s, and he grew into the habit of taking the children (first the boy, Harry, and later the three girls) on rowing trips accompanied by an adult friend to nearby Nuneham Courtenay or Godstow. It was on one such expedition, on 4 July 1862, that Dodgson invented the outline of the story that eventually became his first and largest commercial success. Having told the story and been begged by Alice Liddell to write it down, Dodgson eventually (after much delay) presented her with a handwritten, illustrated manuscript entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground in November 1864. Before this, the family of friend and mentor George MacDonald read Dodgson's incomplete manuscript, and the enthusiasm of the MacDonald children encouraged Dodgson to seek publication. In 1863, he had taken the unfinished manuscript to Macmillan the publisher, who liked it immediately. After the possible alternative titles Alice Among the Fairies and Alice's Golden Hour were rejected, the work was finally published as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in 1865 under the Lewis Carroll pen-name, which Dodgson had first used some nine years earlier. The illustrations this time were by Sir John Tenniel; Dodgson evidently thought that a published book would need the skills of a professional artist. The overwhelming commercial success of the first Alice book changed Dodgson's life in many ways. The fame of his alter ego "Lewis Carroll" soon spread around the world. He was inundated with fan mail and with sometimes unwanted attention. Indeed, according to one popular story, Queen Victoria herself enjoyed Alice In Wonderland so much that she suggested he dedicate his next book to her, and was accordingly presented with his next work, a scholarly mathematical volume entitled An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. Dodgson himself vehemently denied this story, commenting "...It is utterly false in every particular: nothing even resembling it has occurred"; and it is unlikely for other reasons: as T.B. Strong comments in a Times article, "It would have been clean contrary to all his practice to identify [the] author of Alice with the author of his mathematical works". He also began earning quite substantial sums of money but continued with his seemingly disliked post at Christ Church. Late in 1871, a sequel – Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There – was published. (The title page of the first edition erroneously gives "1872" as the date of publication.) Its somewhat darker mood possibly reflects the changes in Dodgson's life. His father had recently died (1868), plunging him into a depression that lasted some years. The Hunting of the Snark In 1876, Dodgson produced his last great work, The Hunting of the Snark, a fantastical "nonsense" poem, exploring the adventures of a bizarre crew of tradesmen, and one beaver, who set off to find the eponymous creature. The painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti reputedly became convinced the poem was about him. Photography In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography, first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey. He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years. A recent study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls, though this may be a highly distorted figure as approximately 60% of his original photographic portfolio is now missing, so any firm conclusions are difficult. Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, and trees. His pictures of children were taken with a parent in attendance and many of the pictures were taken in the Liddell garden, because natural sunlight was required for good exposures. He also found photography to be a useful entrée into higher social circles. During the most productive part of his career, he made portraits of notable sitters such as John Everett Millais, Ellen Terry, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Julia Margaret Cameron, Michael Faraday and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Dodgson abruptly ceased photography in 1880. Over 24 years, he had completely mastered the medium, set up his own studio on the roof of Tom Quad, and created around 3, images. Fewer than 1, have survived time and deliberate destruction. He reported that he stopped taking photographs because keeping his studio working was difficult (he used the wet collodion process) and commercial photographers (who started using the dry plate process in the 1870s) took pictures more quickly. With the advent of Modernism, tastes changed, and his photography was forgotten from around 1920 until the 1960s. Inventions To promote letter writing, Dodgson invented The Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case in 1889. This was a cloth-backed folder with twelve slots, two marked for inserting the then most commonly used penny stamp, and one each for the other current denominations to one shilling. The folder was then put into a slip case decorated with a picture of Alice on the front and the Cheshire Cat on the back. All could be conveniently carried in a pocket or purse. When issued it also included a copy of Carroll's pamphletted lecture, Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing. Reconstructed nyctograph, with scale demonstrated by a 5 euro cent. Another invention is a writing tablet called the nyctograph for use at night that allowed for note-taking in the dark; thus eliminating the trouble of getting out of bed and striking a light when one wakes with an idea. The device consisted of a gridded card with sixteen squares and system of symbols representing an alphabet of Dodgson's design, using letter shapes similar to the Graffiti writing system on a Palm device. Among the games he devised outside of logic there are a number of word games, including an early version of what today is known as Scrabble. He also appears to have invented, or at least certainly popularised, the Word Ladder (or "doublet" as it was known at first); a form of brain-teaser that is still popular today: the game of changing one word into another by altering one letter at a time, each successive change always resulting in a genuine word. For instance, CAT is transformed into DOG by the following steps: CAT, COT, DOT, DOG. Other items include a rule for finding the day of the week for any date; a means for justifying right margins on a typewriter; a steering device for a velociam (a type of tricycle); new systems of parliamentary representation; more nearly fair elimination rules for tennis tournaments; a new sort of postal money order; rules for reckoning postage; rules for a win in betting; rules for dividing a number by various divisors; a cardboard scale for the college common room he worked in later in life, which, held next to a glass, ensured the right amount of liqueur for the price paid; a double-sided adhesive strip for things like the fastening of envelopes or mounting things in books; a device for helping a bedridden invalid to read from a book placed sideways; and at least two ciphers for cryptography. Mathematical work Within the academic discipline of mathematics, Dodgson worked primarily in the fields of geometry, matrix algebra, mathematical logic and recreational mathematics, producing nearly a dozen books under his real name. Dodgson also developed new ideas in the study of elections (e.g., Dodgson's method) and committees; some of this work was not published until well after his death. He worked as a mathematics tutor at Oxford, an occupation that gave him some financial security. Later years Over the remaining twenty years of his life, throughout his growing wealth and fame, his existence remained little changed. He continued to teach at Christ Church until 1881, and remained in residence there until his death. His last novel, the two-volume Sylvie and Bruno, was published in 1889 and 1893 respectively. It achieved nowhere near the success of the Alice books. Its intricacy was apparently not appreciated by contemporary readers. The reviews and its sales, only 13, copies, were disappointing. The only occasion on which (as far as is known) he travelled abroad was a trip to Russia in 1867 as an ecclesiastical together with the Reverend Henry Liddon. He recounts the travel in his "Russian Journal", which was first commercially published in 1935. On his way to Russia and back Lewis Carroll also saw different cities in Belgium, Germany, the partitioned Poland, and France. He died on 14 January 1898 at his sisters' home, "The Chestnuts" in Guildford, of pneumonia following influenza. He was two weeks away from turning 66 years old. He is buried in Guildford at the Mount Cemetery. Controversies and mysteries "Carroll Myth” Since 1999 a group of scholars, notably Karoline Leach, Hugues Lebailly and Sherry L. Ackerman, John Tufail, Douglas Nickel and others, argue that what Leach terms the "Carroll Myth" has wildly distorted biographical perception of his life and his work. Leach's book, In the Shadow of the Dreamchild, raised a considerable amount of controversy. In brief the claim is that: * In general terms Dodgson's life has been simplified and 'infantilised' by a combination of inaccurate biography and the longstanding unavailability of key evidence, which allowed legends to proliferate unchecked. * By the time the evidence did become available the 'mythic' image of the man had become so embedded in scholastic and popular thinking it remained unquestioned, despite the fact the evidence failed to support it. * If the evidence is examined dispassionately it shows many of the most famous legends about the man (e.g. his 'paedophilia', and his exclusive adoration of small girls) are untrue, or at least grossly simplified. In more detail, Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child-photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers, including Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, made them as a matter of course. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards, implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time. Leach's reappraisal of Dodgson focused in particular on his controversial sexuality. She argues that the allegations of paedophilia rose initially from a misunderstanding of Victorian morals, as well as the mistaken idea, fostered by Dodgson's various biographers, that he had no interest in adult women. She termed the traditional image of Dodgson "the Carroll Myth". She drew attention to the large amounts of evidence in his diaries and letters that he was also keenly interested in adult women, married and single, and enjoyed several scandalous (by the social standards of his time) relationships with them. She also pointed to the fact that many of those he described as "child-friends" were girls in their late teens and even twenties. She argues that suggestions of paedophilia evolved only many years after his death, when his well-meaning family had suppressed all evidence of his relationships with women in an effort to preserve his reputation, thus giving a false impression of a man interested only in little girls. Similarly, Leach traces the claim that many of Carroll's female friendships ended when the girls reached the age of 14 to a 1932 biography by Langford Reed. The concept of the Carroll Myth has produced polarised reactions from Carroll scholars. In 2004 Contrariwise, the Association for new Lewis Carroll studies. was established, and those such as Carolyn Sigler and Cristopher Hollingsworth have joined the ranks of those calling for a major reassessment. But the concept of the Myth has been opposed by some leading Carroll scholars, in particular Morton N. Cohen and Martin Gardner (their comments, and those of more positive reviewers, can be found on Karoline Leach's own page). Biographer Jenny Woolf, while agreeing that Carroll's image has been comprehensively misrepresented in the past, believes that this can be attributed partly to Carroll's own behaviour and in particular his tendency to self-caricature in later life. Ordination Dodgson had been groomed for the ordained ministry in the Anglican Church from a very early age and was expected, as a condition of his residency at Christ Church, to take holy orders within four years of obtaining his master's degree. He delayed the process for some time but eventually took deacon's orders on 22 December 1861. But when the time came a year later to progress to priestly orders, Dodgson appealed to the dean for permission not to proceed. This was against college rules and initially Dean Liddell told him he would have to consult the college ruling body, which would almost undoubtedly have resulted in his being expelled. For unknown reasons, Dean Liddell changed his mind overnight and permitted Dodgson to remain at the college in defiance of the rules. Uniquely amongst senior students of his time Dodgson never became a priest. There is currently no conclusive evidence about why Dodgson rejected the priesthood. Some have suggested his stammer made him reluctant to take the step, because he was afraid of having to preach. Wilson quotes letters by Dodgson describing difficulty in reading lessons and prayers rather than preaching in his own words. But Dodgson did indeed preach in later life, even though not in priest's orders, so it seems unlikely his impediment was a major factor affecting his choice. Wilson also points out that the then Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who ordained Dodgson, had strong views against clergy going to the theatre, one of Dodgson's great interests. Others have suggested that he was having serious doubts about Anglicanism. He was interested in minority forms of Christianity (he was an admirer of F.D. Maurice) and "alternative" religions (theosophy). Dodgson became deeply troubled by an unexplained sense of sin and guilt at this time (the early 1860s) and frequently expressed the view in his diaries that he was a "vile and worthless" sinner, unworthy of the priesthood, and this sense of sin and unworthiness may well have affected his decision to abandon being ordained to the priesthood. Missing diaries At least four complete volumes and around seven pages of text are missing from Dodgson's 13 diaries. The loss of the volumes remains unexplained; the pages have been deliberately removed by an unknown hand. Most scholars assume the diary material was removed by family members in the interests of preserving the family name, but this has not been proven. Except for one page, the period of his diaries from which material is missing is between 1853 and 1863 (when Dodgson was 21–31 years old). This was a period when Dodgson began suffering great mental and spiritual anguish and confessing to an overwhelming sense of his own sin. This was also the period of time when he composed his extensive love poetry, leading to speculation that the poems may have been autobiographical. Many theories have been put forward to explain the missing material. A popular explanation for one particular missing page (27 June 1863) is that it might have been torn out to conceal a proposal of marriage on that day by Dodgson to the 11-year-old Alice Liddell; there has never been any evidence to suggest this was so, and a paper discovered by Karoline Leach in the Dodgson family archive in 1996 offers some evidence to the contrary. This paper, known as the "cut pages in diary document", was compiled by various members of Carroll's family after his death. Part of it may have been written at the time the pages were destroyed, though this is unclear. The document offers a brief summary of two diary pages that are now missing, including the one for 27 June 1863. The summary for this page states that Mrs. Liddell told Dodgson there was gossip circulating about him and the Liddell family's governess, as well as about his relationship with "Ina", presumably Alice's older sister, Lorina Liddell. The "break" with the Liddell family that occurred soon after was presumably in response to this gossip. An alternative interpretation has been made regarding Carroll's rumoured involvement with "Ina": Lorina was also the name of Alice Liddell's mother. What is deemed most crucial and surprising is that the document seems to imply Dodgson's break with the family was not connected with Alice at all. Until a primary source is discovered, the events of 27 June 1863 remain inconclusive. Migraine and epilepsy In his diary for 1880, Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of 'moving fortifications' that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome. Unfortunately there is no clear evidence to show whether this was his first experience of migraine per se, or if he may have previously suffered the far more common form of migraine without aura, although the latter seems most likely, given the fact that migraine most commonly develops in the teens or early adulthood. Another form of migraine aura, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, has been named after Dodgson's little heroine, because its manifestation can resemble the sudden size-changes in the book. Also known as micropsia and macropsia, it is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a golf ball. Some authors have suggested that Dodgson may have suffered from this type of aura, and used it as an inspiration in his work, but there is no evidence that he did. Dodgson also suffered two attacks in which he lost consciousness. He was diagnosed by three different doctors; a Dr. Morshead, Dr. Brooks, and Dr. Stedman, believed the attack and a consequent attack to be an "epileptiform" seizure (initially thought to be fainting, but Brooks changed his mind). Some have concluded from this he was a lifetime sufferer of this condition, but there is no evidence of this in his diaries beyond the diagnosis of the two attacks already mentioned. Some authors, in particular Sadi Ranson, have suggested Carroll may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy in which consciousness is not always completely lost, but altered, and in which the symptoms mimic many of the same experiences as Alice in Wonderland. Carroll had at least one incidence in which he suffered full loss of consciousness and awoke with a bloody nose, which he recorded in his diary and noted that the episode left him not feeling himself for "quite sometime afterward". This attack was diagnosed as possibly "epileptiform" and Carroll himself later wrote of his "seizures" in the same diary. Most of the standard diagnostic tests of today were not available in the nineteenth century. Recently, Dr Yvonne Hart, consultant neurologist at the Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, considered Dodgson's symptoms. Her conclusion, quoted in Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll, is that Dodgson very likely had migraine, and may have had epilepsy, but she emphasises that she would have considerable doubt about making a diagnosis of epilepsy without further information. Suggestions of paedophilia Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (Dodgson's nephew and biographer) wrote: And now as to the secondary causes which attracted him to children. First, I think children appealed to him because he was pre-eminently a teacher, and he saw in their unspoiled minds the best material for him to work upon. In later years one of his favourite recreations was to lecture at schools on logic; he used to give personal attention to each of his pupils, and one can well imagine with what eager anticipation the children would have looked forward to the visits of a schoolmaster who knew how to make even the dullest subjects interesting and amusing. Despite comments like this, Dodgson's friendships with young girls and psychological readings of his work – especially his photographs of nude or semi-nude girls – have all led to speculation that he was a paedophile. This possibility has underpinned numerous modern interpretations of his life and work, particularly Dennis Potter's play Alice and his screenplay for the motion picture, Dreamchild, Robert Wilson's Alice, and a number of recent biographies, including Michael Bakewell's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1996), Donald Thomas's Lewis Carroll: A Portrait with Background (1995), and Morton N. Cohen's Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1995). All of these works more or less unequivocally assume that Dodgson was a paedophile, albeit a repressed and celibate one. Cohen claims Dodgson's "sexual energies sought unconventional outlets", and further writes: We cannot know to what extent sexual urges lay behind Charles's preference for drawing and photographing children in the nude. He contended the preference was entirely aesthetic. But given his emotional attachment to children as well as his aesthetic appreciation of their forms, his assertion that his interest was strictly artistic is naïve. He probably felt more than he dared acknowledge, even to himself. Cohen notes that Dodgson "apparently convinced many of his friends that his attachment to the nude female child form was free of any eroticism", but adds that "later generations look beneath the surface" (p. 229). Cohen and other biographers argue that Dodgson may have wanted to marry the 11-year-old Alice Liddell, and that this was the cause of the unexplained "break" with the family in June 1863. There has never been significant evidence to support the idea, however, and the 1996 discovery of the "cut pages in diary document" (see above) seems to make it highly probable that the 1863 "break" had nothing to do with Alice, but was perhaps connected with rumours involving her older sister Lorina (born 11 May 1849, so she would have been 14 at the time), her governess, or her mother who was also nicknamed "Ina". Some writers, e.g., Derek Hudson and Roger Lancelyn Green, stop short of identifying Dodgson as a paedophile, but concur that he had a passion for small female children and next to no interest in the adult world. The basis for Dodgson's interest in female children has been challenged in the last ten years by several writers and scholars (see the 'Carroll Myth' above). Literary works * La Guida di Bragia, a Ballad Opera for the Marionette Theatre (around 1850) * A Tangled Tale * Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) * Facts * Rhyme? And Reason? (also published as Phantasmagoria) * Pillow Problems * Sylvie and Bruno * Sylvie and Bruno Concluded * The Hunting of the Snark (1876) * Three Sunsets and Other Poems * Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (includes "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter") (1871) * What the Tortoise Said to Achilles Mathematical works * A Syllabus of Plane Algebraic Geometry (1860) * The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically (1858 and 1868) * An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, With Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraic Equations * Euclid and his Modern Rivals (1879), both literary and mathematical in style * Symbolic Logic Part I * Symbolic Logic Part II (published posthumously) * The Alphabet Cipher (1868) * The Game of Logic * Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection * Curiosa Mathematica I (1888) * Curiosa Mathematica II (1892) * The Theory of Committees and Elections, collected, edited, analysed, and published in 1958, by Duncan Black References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Carroll

Classgord53

I have loved poetry for a number of years but in past 10 years have started to write my own but still a beginner in learning the craft.My favourate poets are Emily Dickinson,William Blake, Robert Frost, Katherine Mansfield and Christina Rossetti. I also like to read ( historical, biographical, Christian), listen to classical music but also like other types of music, watching films on DVD. I am 60 and have been happily married for 24 years to Christine and love to regular attend church, watch films and enjoy the countryside together. MY TESTIMONY I am a Christian and have been for over 30 years, so here's my story. First of all I was adopted at six months of age and have had a severe stammer all of my life although not particularly bad before starting school. I met my first wife Jean when I was in mid 20s, Jean was a Christian who attended the Salvation Army where I first heard the gospel and believed it but only in my head. After a series of decisions made for Jesus which proved to be flawed and false but I started to read the Bible but I was still not willing to accept the gospel offer of salvation. Jean and I got married in 1981 and after less than a year of marriage Jean died suddenly, on that evening of Jean's passing I prayed for God to forgive me of my sins and received Christ becoming a new creature in Christ. Some nine years later having met Christine we got married in 1990 and have been very happily married for 24 years. God has been faithful to us in many ways directing, leading and guiding us in all His ways. We always think on Jeremiah Ch. 29 v. 11-14 which God has used so often in our lives together in giving us a future and a hope in Him for God knows the plans He has for us all. God has been helpful to me so often to fight through my stammer and been able to accept my situation helping me and reminding me so often His love overcomes all things. My favourate text is Hebrews Ch. 13 v.6. 'The Lord is my helper; I will not fear; what can man do to me?’ In august, 2012 I had been made redundant but have great peace in my heart the the Lord Jesus is with me and surrounding me in His love and wisdom for the future and great assurance of His will for me.

Facundo Cabral

Rodolfo Enrique Cabral, de nombres artísticos Indio Gasparino -en sus comienzos- y Facundo Cabral (La Plata, 22 de mayo de 1937 - Guatemala, 9 de julio de 2011) fue un cantautor, escritor y filósofo argentino. Se caracterizó por sus composiciones de trova y sus monólogos con anécdotas personales, parábolas, crítica social para promover la autorealización, el despertar de la conciencia y la reflexión espiritual. Infancia Un día antes de su nacimiento, su padre se fue del hogar. Él, su esposa y sus otros siete hijos vivían en casa del abuelo paterno de Facundo Cabral, quien expulsó al resto de la familia. De modo, que Cabral, afirmó varios años más tarde que su nacimiento se produciría en una calle de la ciudad de La Plata.2 Sus primeros años los pasó en Berisso, localidad adyacente a La Plata. Posteriormente, la madre de Cabral y sus hijos emigraron hacia Tierra del Fuego, en el sur de Argentina. A la edad de 9 años, escapó de su hogar y estuvo desaparecido cuatro meses. Su propósito inicial era llegar hasta Buenos Aires para conocer al entonces presidente argentino Juan Domingo Perón, ya que tenía la referencia de que el mandatario "le daba trabajo a los pobres". Después de una larga travesía, transportado por diferentes personas, al llegar a la ciudad capital, un vendedor de la "Feria Franca" le dio la dirección de la Casa Rosada; mas aquel señor le dijo enseguida: "Es muy difícil que te atienda, porque los presidentes suelen ser gente ocupada; pero yo leí en el diario que mañana 19 de noviembre va a ir a La Plata porque es el aniversario de la ciudad. Andate ahí." Así que se fue a La Plata, durmió al costado de la catedral, y al día siguiente Facundo Cabral, siendo apenas un niño, logró burlar el cerco policial alrededor del mandatario y su esposa, Eva Duarte. Cuando un policía lo agarró para retirarlo, el presidente, que estaba saludando hacia ese lado le dijo al policía: "Déjelo venir" e hizo parar su auto descapotable que tenía un estribo al que Facundo se subió de inmediato y conversó con ambos. -¿Quería decirme algo?- le habría preguntado el presidente. -Sí, ¿Hay trabajo?- respondió Facundo. En un reportaje en los años 90, confesó que Eva Perón, en ese momento diría la primer "frase ética", que el escucharía en su vida, y que lo acompañaría por siempre: "Por fin, alguien que pide trabajo y no limosna" Gracias a esta conversación, logró que su madre obtuviera empleo y el resto de la familia se trasladara a la ciudad de Tandil.[cita requerida] Facundo Cabral tuvo una infancia dura y desprotegida; se convirtió en un marginal al punto de ser encerrado en un reformatorio pues se había convertido en alcohólico desde los nueve años de edad. Escapa y luego cae preso a los 14 años por su carácter violento. En la cárcel, un sacerdote jesuita de nombre Simón fue quien le enseñó a leer y escribir, lo puso en contacto con la literatura universal y lo impulsó a realizar sus estudios de educación primaria y secundaria, los cuales, llevó a cabo en tres años, en lugar de los doce que era el período normal en Argentina. Un año antes de salir de la cárcel, Cabral escapó de la prisión, aunque recibió aún ayuda del sacerdote. Gracias a un vagabundo, Cabral conoce la religión, aunque declarándose librepensador, sin pertenecer a iglesia alguna. Poco después, se iniciaría como músico y cantante en el medio artístico. Trayectoria artística Cabral citaría así sus inicios en el medio musical: "Empecé a cantar con los paisanos, con la familia Techeiro, en Tandil. El 24 de febrero de 1954, un vagabundo me recitó el sermón de la montaña y descubrí que estaba naciendo. Corrí a escribir una canción de cuna, Vuele bajo, y empezó todo." En 1959, ya tocaba la guitarra y cantaba música folklórica, admiraba a Atahualpa Yupanqui y a José Larralde, se trasladó a Mar del Plata, ciudad balnearia argentina, y solicitó trabajo en un hotel; el dueño lo vio con su guitarra y le dio la oportunidad de cantar. Así comenzó su carrera dedicada a la música; su primer nombre artístico fue El Indio Gasparino. Sus primeras grabaciones no tuvieron mayor repercusión. Luego se presentó con su apellido verdadero. En 1970, grabó No soy de aquí ni soy de allá que consagró su éxito. Empezó a ser conocido en el mundo, grabó en nueve idiomas con cantantes de la talla de Alberto Cortez, Julio Iglesias, Pedro Vargas o Neil Diamond entre otros. Exilio y retorno Durante la última Dictadura Argentina (1976-1983), era ya considerado un cantautor de protesta, lo que lo obliga a abandonar Argentina en 1976. Se radicó en México, donde continuó componiendo y haciendo presentaciones. Se estima que recorrió 165 países. En 1984, regresó a Argentina con su nombre consagrado. Ofreció un recital en el Estadio Luna Park. Siguió por Mar del Plata. En 1987, hizo una presentación en el estadio de fútbol de Ferrocarril Oeste, en Buenos Aires, con capacidad para treinta y cinco mil personas. El 5 de mayo de 1994, comenzó una gira internacional. Se presentó en conciertos junto a Alberto Cortez en “Lo Cortez no quita lo Cabral” uniendo humor y poesía con las canciones que hicieron famosos a ambos intérpretes. En enero de 1996, ambos actuaban en la ciudad de Mar del Plata, cuando Alberto Cortez debió ser operado debido a una obstrucción en la carótida, así que Cabral continuó con la gira de la cual se hizo una grabación. Ya casi invidente, él mismo resumió en una nota: "Fue mudo hasta los 9 años, analfabeto hasta los 14, enviudó trágicamente a los 40 y conoció a su padre a los 46. El más pagano de los predicadores cumple 70 años y repasa su vida desde la habitación de hotel que eligió como última morada". Muerte Sus últimos conciertos los realizó en una gira en Centroamérica. Se presentó en la Ciudad de Guatemala el martes 5 de julio de 2011 en el Expocenter del Grand Tikal Futura Hotel, a las veinte horas donde para despedirse expresó lo siguiente: “ya le di las gracias a ustedes; las daré en Quetzaltenango, y después que sea lo que Dios quiera, porque Él sabe lo que hace”. El jueves 7 se presentó en el que sería su último concierto, en el Teatro Roma de la ciudad de Quetzaltenango, el cual cerró interpretando la canción No soy de aquí, ni soy de allá. Fue asesinado el 9 de julio de 2011 alrededor de las 5:20 am, en Ciudad de Guatemala, víctima de un atentado aparentemente dirigido al empresario Henry Fariña el cual conducía al cantautor y a su representante al Aeropuerto Internacional La Aurora desde el hotel donde se hospedaba, para continuar en Nicaragua con su gira de presentaciones. El atentado fue perpetrado por varios sicarios que se dirigían en tres vehículos y armados con fusiles de asalto en el Boulevard Liberación de dicha ciudad quedando únicamente herido el empresario y fallecido el cantautor. Pensamiento espiritual, estético y político Influido en lo espiritual por Jesús, Lao-Tsé, Chuang Tzu, Osho, Krishnamurti, Gautama Buda, Arthur Schopenhauer, Juan el Bautista, San Francisco de Asís, Gandhi y La Madre Teresa de Calcuta, predicó el Misticismo, la desaparición del Ego y la auto-realización global de la Conciencia humana. En literatura tuvo admiración por Jorge Luis Borges con quien también mantuvo conversaciones filosóficas y por Walt Whitman. Este rumbo de observación espiritual, inconformista, se imprimió en su carrera como cantautor que tomó el rumbo de la crítica social sin abandonar su habitual sentido del humor. No se conoce que Cabral haya tenido participación militante en movimiento político alguno, aunque por muchos años abogó por el pacifismo como forma de solucionar conflictos autodefiniéndose como "violentamente pacifista" y "vagabundo firstclass", se identificó en sus últimos años con una especie de anarquismo filosófico y contemplativo. Reconocimientos No existe una lista documentada de sus reconocimientos discográficos, ya que Cabral al no tener una vivienda propia, sino que vivía en cuartos de hoteles, en los últimos años de su vida, decidió entregárselos a un conductor de taxis, conocido suyo, quien los coleccionaba. Sin embargo se reseñan los siguientes: Ciudadano ilustre de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Por el voto unánime de la Legislatura porteña y merced a "su gran trayectoria en la escena musical nacional e internacional y por su infatigable labor como mensajero de paz y unidad de los pueblos del mundo". Por 41 votos a favor y ninguno contra, la Legislatura porteña convirtió ley un proyecto de la diputada del PRO, Silvia Majdalani, que declara Ciudadano Ilustre de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires al cantautor Facundo Cabral. Según el artículo 1°, la legisladora afirma que hizo la presentación, no solo porque el trovador posee una "vastísima trayectoria en la escena musical nacional e internacional", sino por "su infatigable labor como mensajero de paz y unidad de los pueblos del mundo". En reconocimiento a su constante llamado a la paz y al amor, la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (Unesco) lo declaró “Mensajero Mundial de la Paz” (1996). De hecho, el presidente Oscar Arias Sánchez de Costa Rica, lo propuso para el Premio Nobel de la Paz. Miembro honorario de Amnistía Internacional. Memorándum de su muerte en los premios Grammys del año 2012 Discografía La siguiente es una lista incompleta de su extensa discografía DVD y libros la Web de Facundo Cabral * El Carnaval Del Mundo, * Ferrocabral (1984, Universal music) en vivo. * Pateando tachos; en vivo en Estadio Chico, de Quilmes (1984) * Cabralgando, en vivo (1985) * Entre Dios y el Diablo (1986) * Hombre de siempre... * El profeta de Gibran * Gracias a la vida * Sentires * Reflexiones * Este es un nuevo día * El oficio de cantor (1993) * Secreto (1992) * Recuerdos de oro * Época de oro * Mi Vida con Waldo de los Ríos, * El Mundo Estaba Tranquilo Cuando Yo Nací, * No estás deprimido, estás distraído (2005, Audiolibro) * Cantar sólo cantar / Cabral sólo Cabral, volúmenes 1 y 2 (2006) * "Bicentenario" (2010) Con Alberto Cortéz * Lo Cortez no quita lo Cabral, Vol. 1 en vivo (1994) ("No soy de aquí..", juntos) * Lo Cortez no quita lo Cabral, Vol. 2 en vivo (1995) ("No soy de aquí..", Video) * Cortezías y Cabralidades - Vol I y II (1998) Con Andrés Jiménez * América canta en vivo (1998) Obra literaria De su obra literaria, Cabral mencionó en alguna ocasión que había escrito alrededor de 22 libros "sin títulos y sin autor", que eran considerados por él como textos manuscritos que se editaban y se imprimían, de los cuales existen traducciones en chino mandarín o japonés.22 Por ello, la siguiente es una lista incompleta de sus obras en el campo literario. * Paraíso a la deriva * Conversaciones con Facundo Cabral * Mi Abuela y yo * Salmos * Borges y yo * Ayer soñé que podía y hoy puedo * Cuaderno de Facundo * No estás deprimido, estás distraído. * Los papeles de Cabral Referencias Wikipedia - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facundo_Cabral




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