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Jorge Eduardo Eielson

Jorge Eduardo Eielson (Lima, 13 de abril de 1924 - Milán, 8 de marzo de 2006) fue un poeta y artista peruano. Hijo de una ciudadana limeña y de un estadounidense de origen escandinavo. Cuando tenía siete años fallece su padre. Desde su juventud manifestó su inclinación hacia distintas formas de arte, incluyendo la literatura, las artes visuales y la música. En 1945 gana el Premio Nacional de Poesía con el poemario Reinos, publicado en la revista Historia dirigida por el historiador nacional Jorge Basadre. Al año siguiente obtiene el III Premio Nacional de Teatro 1948 por una obra titulada Maquillage, parcialmente publicada en la revista Espacio y recientemente publicada en su totalidad en libro. En simultáneo a sus primeros textos literarios realiza sus primeras obras gráficas, exponiendo algunas de estas junto a otros objetos en 1948. Ese año lleva a cabo un viaje a París gracias a una beca del gobierno francés, iniciando con ello una suerte de exilio voluntario de su país, al cual retornaría en muchas, aún cuando cortas oportunidades. Vivió la mayor parte del tiempo en Europa y se asentó en Milán (Italia). Su obra literaria se caracteriza por la búsqueda de la pureza en la expresión, procurando una forma que trascienda las limitaciones de la realidad y del lenguaje. Ello lo llevó a dedicarse además de a las letras, a las artes visuales, entregado a una experimentación vanguardista que le permite un diálogo inédito con algunos aspectos de la cultura precolombina peruana, y tomando particularmente como signo una versión propia del Quipu. Por su trabajo como artista recibió en el Perú el Premio Tecnoquímica en 2004. Al año siguiente participó en el proyecto de arte público Itinerarios del sonido, con una pieza que se presentaba en una parada de autobús en el Paseo del Pintor Rosales, en Madrid. El conjunto de su obra poética se ha editado tres veces con el título Poesía escrita, primero en Lima en 1976, luego México en el año 1989 y posteriormente en Colombia, en 1998. Además, en 2005 la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú elaboró una edición especial con toda su obra poética, sumada a selecciones de sus trabajos en prosa y reproducciones de su creación plástica. Junto con los poetas peruanos Blanca Varela, César Calvo, Antonio Cisneros y Luis Hernández, entre otros, es considerado el poeta peruano que mayor influencia ha dejado en el ámbito de la poesía latinoamericana. Poesía: * Reinos (1945) * Canción y muerte de Rolando (1959) * Mutatis mutandis (1967) * Poesía escrita (1976) * Poesía escrita, 2ª edición (1989) * Noche oscura del cuerpo (1989) * Antología (1996) * Nudos, ed. bilingüe (1997) * Poesía escrita, ed. de Martha Canfield (1998) * Sin título (2000) * Celebración (2001) * Canto visibile (2002) * Nudos (2002) * Arte poética, antología (2005) * Del absoluto amor y otros poemas sin título (2005) * De materia verbalis (2005) * Habitación en Roma, ed. de Martha Canfield (2008) * Pytx (2008) * Habitación en Roma, ed. de Sergio Téllez-Pon (Quimera, México, 2009) * Poeta en Roma (2009) Narrativa: * El cuerpo de Giulia-no (1971) * Primera muerte de María (2002) Teatro: * Acto final (1959) * Maquillage. [Obra en dos actos y un prólogo]. Edición y presentación de Ricardo Silva-Santisteban. Colofón de Jesús Cabel. Lima: Universidad Nacional San Luis Gonzaga – Editorial San Marcos, 2012. 62 pp. (Colección Huarango; 6). ISBN 978-612-302-747-6 [Obra ganadora del III Premio Nacional de Teatro 1948 y estrenada el 25 de mayo de 1950 en el teatro de la Asociación de Artistas Aficionados (AAA), bajo la dirección de Joaquín Roca Rey]. Referencias Wikipedia—http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Eielson

Ingrid Zetterberg De Espinoza

Nací en Lima Perú, y escribo poesía desde los 11 años de edad. Soy cristiana y estoy casada. Tengo cinco hijos y cuatro nietos. Hace años obtuve una Mención de Honor a nivel nacional en el certamen de poesía Manuel González Prada, y posteriormente gané el Primer Puesto a nivel nacional en el concurso de poesía César Vallejo. Ambos certámenes convocados por la Asociación de poetas del Perú. En el año 2,020 quedé entre los 12 finalistas del IX Premio Fernando Rielo de poesía Mística, entre 278 poetas de 28 países. En esta ocasión participe´con mi poemario: "Nacida para adorarte". También me otorgaron el 2do. puesto en el Concurso Internacional JOTABEANDO U.S.A. realizado en Miami - Florida, con mi poema "Tu reir, luz de vida". Así mismo me dieron una Mención de Honor en el concurso Internacional "El mundo suena en Jotabé" realizado en Ecuador, por haber obtenido altas calificaciones con mi obra: "Segaste vidas". En el año 2,021 quedé entre los 12 finalistas del certamen Fernando Rielo de poesía Mística, realizado en España...donde participaron 278 poetas de 28 países. Actualmente estoy registrada en varios foros poéticos de la red, donde ya he ganado más de 250 diplomas entre poemas destacados y concursos ganados....entre ellos el Turpial de Oro en Sociedad Venezolana de artistas internacionales... SVAI y el Laurel de Apolo y La Musa de Venus en Unión Hispanomundial de escritores UHE. Así mismo me obsequiaron el Premio al Talento Poético en el foro Versos Peregrinos. He participado en varias antologías internacionales de habla hispana. También he editado mi primer libro titulado: "Por los bosques del silencio". Toda mi obra está registrada en Safe Creative, en la Cta. Nº 1006080193112

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1, public lectures across the United States. Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence". Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period. Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality, freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding world. Emerson's "nature" was more philosophical than naturalistic; "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." While his writing style can be seen as somewhat impenetrable, and was thought so even in his own time, Emerson's essays remain among the linchpins of American thinking, and Emerson's work has greatly influenced the thinkers, writers and poets that have followed him. When asked to sum up his work, he said his central doctrine was "the infinitude of the private man.” Early life, family, and education Emerson was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 25, 1803, son of Ruth Haskins and the Rev. William Emerson, a Unitarian minister. He was named after his mother's brother Ralph and the father's great-grandmother Rebecca Waldo. Ralph Waldo was the second of five sons who survived into adulthood; the others were William, Edward, Robert Bulkeley, and Charles. Three other children—Phebe, John Clarke, and Mary Caroline–died in childhood. The young Ralph Waldo Emerson's father died from stomach cancer on May 12, 1811, less than two weeks before Emerson's eighth birthday. Emerson was raised by his mother, with the help of the other women in the family; his aunt Mary Moody Emerson in particular had a profound effect on Emerson. She lived with the family off and on, and maintained a constant correspondence with Emerson until her death in 1863. Emerson's formal schooling began at the Boston Latin School in 1812 when he was nine. In October 1817, at 14, Emerson went to Harvard College and was appointed freshman messenger for the president, requiring Emerson to fetch delinquent students and send messages to faculty. Midway through his junior year, Emerson began keeping a list of books he had read and started a journal in a series of notebooks that would be called "Wide World". He took outside jobs to cover his school expenses, including as a waiter for the Junior Commons and as an occasional teacher working with his uncle Samuel in Waltham, Massachusetts. By his senior year, Emerson decided to go by his middle name, Waldo. Emerson served as Class Poet; as was custom, he presented an original poem on Harvard's Class Day, a month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18. He did not stand out as a student and graduated in the exact middle of his class of 59 people. In 1826, faced with poor health, Emerson went to seek out warmer climates. He first went to Charleston, South Carolina, but found the weather was still too cold. He then went further south, to St. Augustine, Florida, where he took long walks on the beach, and began writing poetry. While in St. Augustine, he made the acquaintance of Prince Achille Murat. Murat, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was only two years his senior; they became extremely good friends and enjoyed one another's company. The two engaged in enlightening discussions on religion, society, philosophy, and government, and Emerson considered Murat an important figure in his intellectual education. While in St. Augustine, Emerson had his first experience of slavery. At one point, he attended a meeting of the Bible Society while there was a slave auction taking place in the yard outside. He wrote, "One ear therefore heard the glad tidings of great joy, whilst the other was regaled with 'Going, gentlemen, going’!” Early career After Harvard, Emerson assisted his brother William in a school for young women established in their mother's house, after he had established his own school in Chelmsford, Massachusetts; when his brother William went to Göttingen to study divinity, Emerson took charge of the school. Over the next several years, Emerson made his living as a schoolmaster, then went to Harvard Divinity School. Emerson's brother Edward, two years younger than he, entered the office of lawyer Daniel Webster, after graduating Harvard first in his class. Edward's physical health began to deteriorate and he soon suffered a mental collapse as well; he was taken to McLean Asylum in June 1828 at age 23. Although he recovered his mental equilibrium, he died in 1834 from apparently longstanding tuberculosis. Another of Emerson's bright and promising younger brothers, Charles, born in 1808, died in 1836, also of tuberculosis, making him the third young person in Emerson's innermost circle to die in a period of a few years. Emerson met his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, in Concord, New Hampshire on Christmas Day, 1827, and married her when she was 18. The couple moved to Boston, with Emerson's mother Ruth moving with them to help take care of Ellen, who was already sick with tuberculosis. Less than two years later, Ellen died at the age of 20 on February 8, 1831, after uttering her last words: "I have not forgot the peace and joy." Emerson was heavily affected by her death and visited her grave in Roxbury daily. In a journal entry dated March 29, 1832, Emerson wrote, "I visited Ellen's tomb & opened the coffin." Boston's Second Church invited Emerson to serve as its junior pastor and he was ordained on January 11, 1829. His initial salary was $1, a year, increasing to $1, in July, but with his church role he took on other responsibilities: he was chaplain to the Massachusetts legislature, and a member of the Boston school committee. His church activities kept him busy, though during this period, facing the imminent death of his wife, he began to doubt his own beliefs. After his wife's death, he began to disagree with the church's methods, writing in his journal in June 1832: "I have sometimes thought that, in order to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the ministry. The profession is antiquated. In an altered age, we worship in the dead forms of our forefathers." His disagreements with church officials over the administration of the Communion service and misgivings about public prayer eventually led to his resignation in 1832. As he wrote, "This mode of commemorating Christ is not suitable to me. That is reason enough why I should abandon it." As one Emerson scholar has pointed out, "Doffing the decent black of the pastor, he was free to choose the gown of the lecturer and teacher, of the thinker not confined within the limits of an institution or a tradition." Emerson toured Europe in 1833 and later wrote of his travels in English Traits (1857). He left aboard the brig Jasper on Christmas Day, 1832, sailing first to Malta. During his European trip, he spent several months in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence and Venice, among other cities. When in Rome, he met with John Stuart Mill, who gave him a letter of recommendation to meet Thomas Carlyle. He went to Switzerland, and had to be dragged by fellow passengers to visit Voltaire's home in Ferney, "protesting all the way upon the unworthiness of his memory." He then went on to Paris, a "loud modern New York of a place,", where he visited the Jardin des Plantes. He was greatly moved by the organization of plants according to Jussieu's system of classification, and the way all such objects were related and connected. As Richardson says, "Emerson's moment of insight into the interconnectedness of things in the Jardin des Plantes was a moment of almost visionary intensity that pointed him away from theology and toward science." Moving north to England, Emerson met William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle in particular was a strong influence on Emerson; Emerson would later serve as an unofficial literary agent in the United States for Carlyle, and in March 1835, he tried to convince Carlyle to come to America to lecture. The two would maintain correspondence until Carlyle's death in 1881. Emerson returned to the United States on October 9, 1833, and lived with his mother in Newton, Massachusetts, until October, 1834, when he moved to Concord, Massachusetts, to live with his step-grandfather Dr. Ezra Ripley at what was later named The Old Manse. Seeing the budding Lyceum movement, which provided lectures on all sorts of topics, Emerson saw a possible career as a lecturer. On November 5, 1833, he made the first of what would eventually be some 1, lectures, discussing The Uses of Natural History in Boston. This was an expanded account of his experience in Paris. In this lecture, he set out some of his important beliefs and the ideas he would later develop in his first published essay Nature: Nature is a language and every new fact one learns is a new word; but it is not a language taken to pieces and dead in the dictionary, but the language put together into a most significant and universal sense. I wish to learn this language, not that I may know a new grammar, but that I may read the great book that is written in that tongue. On January 24, 1835, Emerson wrote a letter to Lydia Jackson proposing marriage. Her acceptance reached him by mail on the 28th. In July 1835, he bought a house on the Cambridge and Concord Turnpike in Concord, Massachusetts which he named "Bush"; it is now open to the public as the Ralph Waldo Emerson House. Emerson quickly became one of the leading citizens in the town. He gave a lecture to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the town of Concord on September 12, 1835. Two days later, he married Lydia Jackson in her home town of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and moved to the new home in Concord together with Emerson's mother on September 15. Emerson quickly changed his wife's name to Lidian, and would call her Queenie, and sometimes Asia, and she called him Mr. Emerson. Their children were Waldo, Ellen, Edith, and Edward Waldo Emerson. Ellen was named for his first wife, at Lidian's suggestion. Emerson was poor when he was at Harvard, and later supported his family for much of his life. He inherited a fair amount of money after his first wife's death, though he had to file a lawsuit against the Tucker family in 1836 to get it. He received $11, in May 1834, and a further $11,. in July 1837. In 1834, he considered that he had an income of $1, a year from the initial payment of the estate, equivalent to what he had earned as a pastor. Literary career and Transcendentalism On September 8, 1836, the day before the publication of Nature, Emerson met with Henry Hedge, George Putnam and George Ripley to plan periodic gatherings of other like-minded intellectuals. This was the beginning of the Transcendental Club, which served as a center for the movement. Its first official meeting was held on September 19, 1836. On September 1, 1837, women attended a meeting of the Transcendental Club for the first time. Emerson invited Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar and Sarah Ripley for dinner at his home before the meeting to ensure that they would be present for the evening get-together. Fuller would prove to be an important figure in Transcendentalism. Emerson anonymously published his first essay, Nature, on September 9, 1836. A year later, on August 31, 1837, Emerson delivered his now-famous Phi Beta Kappa address, "The American Scholar", then known as "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge"; it was renamed for a collection of essays (which included the first general publication of "Nature") in 1849. Friends urged him to publish the talk, and he did so, at his own expense, in an edition of 500 copies, which sold out in a month. In the speech, Emerson declared literary independence in the United States and urged Americans to create a writing style all their own and free from Europe. James Russell Lowell, who was a student at Harvard at the time, called it "an event without former parallel on our literary annals". Another member of the audience, Reverend John Pierce, called it "an apparently incoherent and unintelligible address". In 1837, Emerson befriended Henry David Thoreau. Though they had likely met as early as 1835, in the fall of 1837, Emerson asked Thoreau, "Do you keep a journal?" The question went on to have a lifelong inspiration for Thoreau. Emerson's own journal comes to 16 large volumes, in the definitive Harvard University Press edition published between 1960 and 1982. Some scholars consider the journal to be Emerson's key literary work. In March 1837, Emerson gave a series of lectures on The Philosophy of History at Boston's Masonic Temple. This was the first time he managed a lecture series on his own, and was the beginning of his serious career as a lecturer. The profits from this series of lectures were much larger than when he was paid by an organization to talk, and Emerson continued to manage his own lectures often throughout his lifetime. He would eventually give as many as 80 lectures a year, traveling across the northern part of the United States. He traveled as far as St. Louis, Des Moines, Minneapolis, and California. On July 15, 1838, Emerson was invited to Divinity Hall, Harvard Divinity School for the school's graduation address, which came to be known as his "Divinity School Address". Emerson discounted Biblical miracles and proclaimed that, while Jesus was a great man, he was not God: historical Christianity, he said, had turned Jesus into a "demigod, as the Orientals or the Greeks would describe Osiris or Apollo". His comments outraged the establishment and the general Protestant community. For this, he was denounced as an atheist, and a poisoner of young men's minds. Despite the roar of critics, he made no reply, leaving others to put forward a defense. He was not invited back to speak at Harvard for another thirty years. The Transcendental group began to publish its flagship journal, The Dial, in July 1840. They planned the journal as early as October 1839, but work did not begin until the first week of 1840. George Ripley was its managing editor and Margaret Fuller was its first editor, having been hand-chosen by Emerson after several others had declined the role. Fuller stayed on for about two years and Emerson took over, utilizing the journal to promote talented young writers including Ellery Channing and Thoreau. It was in 1841 that Emerson published Essays, his second book, which included the famous essay, "Self-Reliance". His aunt called it a "strange medley of atheism and false independence", but it gained favorable reviews in London and Paris. This book, and its popular reception, more than any of Emerson's contributions to date laid the groundwork for his international fame. In January 1842 Emerson's first son Waldo died from scarlet fever. Emerson wrote of his grief in the poem "Threnody" ("For this losing is true dying"), and the essay "Experience". That same month, William James was born, and Emerson agreed to be his godfather. Bronson Alcott announced his plans in November 1842 to find "a farm of a hundred acres in excellent condition with good buildings, a good orchard and grounds". Charles Lane purchased a 90-acre (360, m2) farm in Harvard, Massachusetts, in May 1843 for what would become Fruitlands, a community based on Utopian ideals inspired in part by Transcendentalism. The farm would run based on a communal effort, using no animals for labor; its participants would eat no meat and use no wool or leather. Emerson said he felt "sad at heart" for not engaging in the experiment himself. Even so, he did not feel Fruitlands would be a success. "Their whole doctrine is spiritual", he wrote, "but they always end with saying, Give us much land and money". Even Alcott admitted he was not prepared for the difficulty in operating Fruitlands. "None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed. So we fell apart", he wrote. After its failure, Emerson helped buy a farm for Alcott's family in Concord which Alcott named "Hillside". The Dial ceased publication in April 1844; Horace Greeley reported it as an end to the "most original and thoughtful periodical ever published in this country". (An unrelated magazine of the same name would be published in several periods through 1929.) In 1844, Emerson published his second collection of essays, entitled "Essays: Second Series." This collection included "The Poet," "Experience," "Gifts," and an essay entitled "Nature," a different work from the 1836 essay of the same name. Emerson made a living as a popular lecturer in New England and much of the rest of the country. He had begun lecturing in 1833; by the 1850s he was giving as many as 80 per year. He addressed the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge and the Gloucester Lyceum, among others. Emerson spoke on a wide variety of subjects and many of his essays grew out of his lectures. He charged between $10 and $50 for each appearance, bringing him as much as $2, in a typical winter "season". This was more than his earnings from other sources. In some years, he earned as much as $900 for a series of six lectures, and in another, for a winter series of talks in Boston, he netted $1,. He eventually gave some 1, lectures in his lifetime. His earnings allowed him to expand his property, buying 11 acres (45, m2) of land by Walden Pond and a few more acres in a neighboring pine grove. He wrote that he was "landlord and waterlord of 14 acres, more or less". Emerson was introduced to Indian philosophy when reading the works of French philosopher Victor Cousin. In 1845, Emerson's journals show he was reading the Bhagavad Gita and Henry Thomas Colebrooke's Essays on the Vedas. Emerson was strongly influenced by the Vedas, and much of his writing has strong shades of nondualism. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in his essay "The Over-soul”: We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul. From 1847 to 1848, he toured England, Scotland, and Ireland. He also visited Paris between the February Revolution and the bloody June Days. When he arrived, he saw the stumps where trees had been cut down to form barricades in the February riots. On May 21 he stood on the Champ de Mars in the midst of mass celebrations for concord, peace and labor. He wrote in his journal: "At the end of the year we shall take account, & see if the Revolution was worth the trees." In February 1852 Emerson and James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing edited an edition of the works and letters of Margaret Fuller, who had died in 1850. Within a week of her death, her New York editor Horace Greeley suggested to Emerson that a biography of Fuller, to be called Margaret and Her Friends, be prepared quickly "before the interest excited by her sad decease has passed away". Published with the title The Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Fuller's words were heavily censored or rewritten. The three editors were not concerned about accuracy; they believed public interest in Fuller was temporary and that she would not survive as a historical figure. Even so, for a time, it was the best-selling biography of the decade and went through thirteen editions before the end of the century. Walt Whitman published the innovative poetry collection Leaves of Grass in 1855 and sent a copy to Emerson for his opinion. Emerson responded positively, sending a flattering five-page letter as a response. Emerson's approval helped the first edition of Leaves of Grass stir up significant interest and convinced Whitman to issue a second edition shortly thereafter. This edition quoted a phrase from Emerson's letter, printed in gold leaf on the cover: "I Greet You at the Beginning of a Great Career". Emerson took offense that this letter was made public and later became more critical of the work. Civil War years Emerson was staunchly anti-slavery, but he did not appreciate being in the public limelight and was hesitant about lecturing on the subject. He did, however, give a number of lectures during the pre-Civil War years, beginning as early as November, 1837. A number of his friends and family members were more active abolitionists than he, at first, but from 1844 on, he took a more active role in opposing slavery. He gave a number of speeches and lectures, and notably welcomed John Brown to his home during Brown's visits to Concord. He voted for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, but Emerson was disappointed that Lincoln was more concerned about preserving the Union than eliminating slavery outright. Once the American Civil War broke out, Emerson made it clear that he believed in immediate emancipation of the slaves. Around this time, in 1860, Emerson published The Conduct of Life, his final original collection of essays. In this book, Emerson "grappled with some of the thorniest issues of the moment," and "his experience in the abolition ranks is a telling influence in his conclusions. In the book's opening essay, Fate, Emerson wrote, "The question of the times resolved itself into a practical question of the conduct of life. How shall I live?" Emerson visited Washington, D.C, at the end of January, 1862. He gave a public lecture at the Smithsonian on January 31, 1862, and declared: "The South calls slavery an institution... I call it destitution... Emancipation is the demand of civilization". The next day, February 1, his friend Charles Sumner took him to meet Lincoln at the White House. Lincoln was familiar with Emerson's work, having previously seen him lecture. Emerson's misgivings about Lincoln began to soften after this meeting. In 1865, he spoke at a memorial service held for Lincoln in Concord: "Old as history is, and manifold as are its tragedies, I doubt if any death has caused so much pain as this has caused, or will have caused, on its announcement." Emerson also met a number of high-ranking government officials, including Salmon P. Chase, the secretary of the treasury, Edward Bates, the attorney general, Edwin M. Stanton, the secretary of war, Gideon Welles, the secretary of the navy, and William Seward, the secretary of state. On May 6, 1862, Emerson's protégé Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44 and Emerson delivered his eulogy. Emerson would continuously refer to Thoreau as his best friend, despite a falling out that began in 1849 after Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Another friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, died two years after Thoreau in 1864. Emerson served as one of the pallbearers as Hawthorne was buried in Concord, as Emerson wrote, "in a pomp of sunshine and verdure". He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1864. Final years and death Starting in 1867, Emerson's health began declining; he wrote much less in his journals. Beginning as early as the summer of 1871 or in the spring of 1872, Emerson started having memory problems and suffered from aphasia. By the end of the decade, he forgot his own name at times and, when anyone asked how he felt, he responded, "Quite well; I have lost my mental faculties, but am perfectly well". Emerson's Concord home caught fire on July 24, 1872; Emerson called for help from neighbors and, giving up on putting out the flames, all attempted to save as many objects as possible. The fire was put out by Ephraim Bull, Jr., the one-armed son of Ephraim Wales Bull. Donations were collected by friends to help the Emersons rebuild, including $5, gathered by Francis Cabot Lowell, another $10, collected by LeBaron Russell Briggs, and a personal donation of $1, from George Bancroft. Support for shelter was offered as well; though the Emersons ended up staying with family at the Old Manse, invitations came from Anne Lynch Botta, James Elliot Cabot, James Thomas Fields and Annie Adams Fields. The fire marked an end to Emerson's serious lecturing career; from then on, he would lecture only on special occasions and only in front of familiar audiences. While the house was being rebuilt, Emerson took a trip to England, continental Europe, and Egypt. He left on October 23, 1872, along with his daughter Ellen while his wife Lidian spent time at the Old Manse and with friends. Emerson and his daughter Ellen returned to the United States on the ship Olympus along with friend Charles Eliot Norton on April 15, 1873. Emerson's return to Concord was celebrated by the town and school was canceled that day. In late 1874 Emerson published an anthology of poetry called Parnassus, which included poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Julia Caroline Dorr, Jean Ingelow, Lucy Larcom, Jones Very, as well as Thoreau and several others. The anthology was originally prepared as early as the fall of 1871 but was delayed when the publishers asked for revisions. The problems with his memory had become embarrassing to Emerson and he ceased his public appearances by 1879. As Holmes wrote, "Emerson is afraid to trust himself in society much, on account of the failure of his memory and the great difficulty he finds in getting the words he wants. It is painful to witness his embarrassment at times". On April 21, 1882, Emerson was diagnosed with pneumonia. He died on April 27, 1882. Emerson is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts. He was placed in his coffin wearing a white robe given by American sculptor Daniel Chester French. Lifestyle and beliefs Emerson's religious views were often considered radical at the time. He believed that all things are connected to God and, therefore, all things are divine. Critics believed that Emerson was removing the central God figure; as Henry Ware, Jr. said, Emerson was in danger of taking away "the Father of the Universe" and leaving "but a company of children in an orphan asylum". Emerson was partly influenced by German philosophy and Biblical criticism. His views, the basis of Transcendentalism, suggested that God does not have to reveal the truth but that the truth could be intuitively experienced directly from nature. Emerson did not become an ardent abolitionist until 1844, though his journals show he was concerned with slavery beginning in his youth, even dreaming about helping to free slaves. In June 1856, shortly after Charles Sumner, a United States Senator, was beaten for his staunch abolitionist views, Emerson lamented that he himself was not as committed to the cause. He wrote, "There are men who as soon as they are born take a bee-line to the axe of the inquisitor... Wonderful the way in which we are saved by this unfailing supply of the moral element". After Sumner's attack, Emerson began to speak out about slavery. "I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom", he said at a meeting at Concord that summer. Emerson used slavery as an example of a human injustice, especially in his role as a minister. In early 1838, provoked by the murder of an abolitionist publisher from Alton, Illinois named Elijah Parish Lovejoy, Emerson gave his first public antislavery address. As he said, "It is but the other day that the brave Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to live". John Quincy Adams said the mob-murder of Lovejoy "sent a shock as of any earthquake throughout this continent". However, Emerson maintained that reform would be achieved through moral agreement rather than by militant action. By August 1, 1844, at a lecture in Concord, he stated more clearly his support for the abolitionist movement. He stated, "We are indebted mainly to this movement, and to the continuers of it, for the popular discussion of every point of practical ethics". Emerson may have had erotic thoughts about at least one man. During his early years at Harvard, he found himself attracted to a young freshman named Martin Gay about whom he wrote sexually charged poetry. He also had a number of crushes on various women throughout his life, such as Anna Barker and Caroline Sturgis. Legacy As a lecturer and orator, Emerson—nicknamed the Concord Sage—became the leading voice of intellectual culture in the United States. Herman Melville, who had met Emerson in 1849, originally thought he had "a defect in the region of the heart" and a "self-conceit so intensely intellectual that at first one hesitates to call it by its right name", though he later admitted Emerson was "a great man". Theodore Parker, a minister and Transcendentalist, noted Emerson's ability to influence and inspire others: "the brilliant genius of Emerson rose in the winter nights, and hung over Boston, drawing the eyes of ingenuous young people to look up to that great new start, a beauty and a mystery, which charmed for the moment, while it gave also perennial inspiration, as it led them forward along new paths, and towards new hopes". Emerson's work not only influenced his contemporaries, such as Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, but would continue to influence thinkers and writers in the United States and around the world down to the present. Notable thinkers who recognize Emerson's influence include Nietzsche and William James, Emerson's godson. "There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America, though these days he is largely the concern of scholars. Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and William James were all positive Emersonians, while Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James were Emersonians in denial — while they set themselves in opposition to the sage, there was no escaping his influence. To T. S. Eliot, Emerson’s essays were an “encumbrance.” Waldo the Sage was eclipsed from 1914 until 1965, when he returned to shine, after surviving in the work of major American poets like Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane." In his book The American Religion, Harold Bloom repeatedly refers to Emerson as "The prophet of the American Religion," which in the context of the book refers to indigenously American religions such as Mormonism and Christian Science, which arose largely in Emerson's lifetime, but also to Mainline Protestant churches that Bloom says have become in the United States more gnostic than their European counterparts. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom compares Emerson to Michel de Montaigne: "The only equivalent reading experience that I know is to reread endlessly in the notebooks and journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American version of Montaigne." Several of Emerson's poems were included in Bloom's The Best Poems of the English Language, although he wrote that none of the poems are as outstanding as the best of Emerson's essays, which Bloom listed as Self-Reliance, Circles, Experience, and "nearly all of Conduct of Life”. Namesakes * In May 2006, 168 years after Emerson delivered his "Divinity School Address," Harvard Divinity School announced the establishment of the Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Professorship. Harvard has also named a building, Emerson Hall (1900), after him. * Emerson Hill, a neighborhood in the New York City borough of Staten Island, is named for his eldest brother, Judge William Emerson, who resided there from 1837 to 1864. * The Emerson String Quartet, formed in 1976, took their name from Ralph Waldo Emerson. * The Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize is awarded annually to high school students for essays on historical subjects. * Author Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914 – April 16, 1994) was named after Emerson. References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson

José de Espronceda

José Ignacio Javier Oriol Encarnación de Espronceda Delgado (Pajares de la Vega, cerca de Almendralejo, Badajoz, 25 de marzo de 1808 - Madrid, 23 de mayo de 1842), fue un célebre escritor de la época del Romanticismo, considerado como el más destacado poeta romántico español. Nació en Almendralejo (Badajoz) en 1808. Estudió en el colegio de San Mateo de Madrid, donde tuvo como profesor a Alberto Lista, a quien siguió en el colegio fundado por el mismo. A los quince años creó con sus amigos Ventura de la Vega, y Patricio de la Escosura una sociedad secreta a la que llamaron los Numantinos (1823-1825), según decían, para vengar la muerte de Rafael del Riego. En 1823 funda junto a otros alumnos de Alberto Lista la academia del Mirto, para continuar con las enseñanzas del clausurado colegio que Lista fundara (colegio libre de San Mateo).1 Denunciado por sus actividades intelectuales en 1825 fue desterrado a un monasterio de Guadalajara durante cinco años. Posteriormente viajó por Alemania, Bélgica, los Países Bajos, Francia e Inglaterra (donde se enamoró de Teresa Mancha, hija del coronel liberal emigrado Epifanio Mancha) en su condición de exiliado liberal. Participó en las oleadas revolucionarias de 1830 junto con unos antiguos amigos suyos. Poco después Teresa se casaría por orden de su padre con un comerciante llamado Guillermo del Amo; sin embargo se reencontrarían en París en 1833. Con ella regresó a España, junto con otros liberales, gracias a la amnistía declarada tras la muerte del soberano Fernando VII, en 1833. En 1838 Teresa se apartó de Espronceda y poco después murió. A partir de aquí Espronceda se dedicó a la política y al periodismo. Se enroló en la Milicia Nacional llegando a ser Primer Teniente de la Compañía de Cazadores de Madrid. En 1841 es nombrado secretario de la Legación española en La Haya y poco después es elegido diputado progresista en Almería. Fue elegido parlamentario ante las Cortes Generales, en 1842 por el Partido Progresista. Murió a los treinta y cuatro años de garrotillo (difteria) en ese mismo año de 1842, cuando se iba a casar con Bernarda de Beruete. Obra Durante su estancia en el monasterio, y alentado por su maestro, el erudito y poeta sevillano Alberto Lista, comenzó a escribir el poema histórico El Pelayo en octavas reales, que dejó inacabado. Más tarde escribió la novela histórica Sancho Saldaña o el castellano de Cuéllar. En 1840 escribió un tomo de Poesías que tuvo gran éxito y repercusión. Los temas de esta compilación son el placer, la libertad, el amor, el desengaño, la muerte, la patria, la tristeza, la duda, la protesta social, etc. Se considera a Espronceda el poeta romántico español por excelencia a causa de su talante byroniano. En efecto, su poesía presenta ecos de la de Lord Byron, sobre todo en sus dos poemas narrativos más extensos: El estudiante de Salamanca, sobre el tema del seductor donjuanesco, que se puede considerar como un acabado exponente del género romántico leyenda, considerado el mejor poema en su género del siglo XIX, y el incompleto El Diablo Mundo (1841), heterogéneo poema filosófico en donde describe al hombre como un ser de inocencia natural que sufre la realidad social y sus maldades, en el que se incluye el famoso «Canto a Teresa», dedicado a su amante Teresa Mancha, una de las más grandes elegías amorosas. También escribió gran cantidad de poemas cortos que denominó 'Canciones', de entre los que destaca como el más conocido la «Canción del pirata»; también figuran «A Jarifa en una orgía», «El verdugo», «El mendigo», «El reo de muerte» o «Canción del cosaco». Todos estos poemas se inspiran en personajes marginados o excluidos de la sociedad, con lo que por primera vez aparece claramente formulado el tema social en la lírica española. Es también digno de mención el poema «Desesperación», obra que toma un tono catastrófico y gris, característico, de algún modo, de la obra del poeta extremeño. En su «Himno al sol» y en el poema «Óscar y Malvina» Espronceda se acerca también a la poesía de James Macpherson, inventor del vate céltico Ossian. El estilo más cultivado por el autor extremeño es algo amante de los efectos retóricos, pero es flexible e inspirado en sus mejores momentos. Referencias Wikipedia - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_de_Espronceda

José María Eguren

Jose María Eguren (n. Lima, Perú; 7 de julio de 1874 – f. íb.; 19 de abril de 1942) fue un poeta, exalumno del Colegio de la Inmaculada, periodista, escritor, pintor y fotógrafo peruano. Biografía Jose María Eguren creció en medio de grandes penurias económicas. Por su precaria salud, fue débil y enfermizo desde pequeño. De niño y adolescente pasó largas temporadas en el campo, en algunas haciendas de la familia; y esta experiencia inmediata de la naturaleza , que el inquieto muchacho apuraba con curiosidad y fruición fue decisiva en el refinamiento de los sentidos que luego su poesía revelará. Más tarde se traslada a Barranco, a una tranquila villa-balneario junto al mar y próxima a Lima, donde residirá en paz y sosiego absolutos durante más de treinta años. Por los mismos motivos de salud no había podido completar regularmente sus estudios y ahora, en Barranco, compensará esa deficiencia con la lectura voraz de decadentes y simbolistas europeos (principalmente franceses: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Octave Mirbeau, pero también D'Annunzio); de la literatura infantil de los nórdicos Grimm, Andersen; y de los grandes maestros del prerrafaelismo y el esteticismo inglés Ruskin, Rosetti, Wilde, de los cuáles todos dejaron una huella, pero muy asimilada y personal, en su obra de creación y en su pensamiento poético. Se dedicó también, intensa y continuamente a la pintura; y fue un artista plástico de gran interés que concluyó llevando a sus acuarelas y dibujos las figuras y los motivos enigmáticos de su misma poesía. Características del Simbolismo José María Eguren es el unico representante del simbolismo en el Perú. Simbolismo tardío que se desarrollo posterior al Modernismo. La musicalidad: Las palabras valen mas por su aspecto sonoro, que por su contenido semántico. La sugerencia: La palabra no debe denotar sino connotar. El exotismo. La adopción del verso libre. El símbolo Poético. Características de su obra En sus trabajos sugiere ambientes irreales cargados de significaciones, liberando al poema de toda connotación objetiva. Su trabajo tiene gran importancia, ya que se considera como el que inaugura la poesía contemporánea en el Perú. A Eguren se le atribuye uno de los roles más decisivos para la iniciación de la tradición de la poesía moderna peruana, la que después se consolidaría mundialmente con la presencia e influencia que ejerce la profunda e intensa poesía de César Vallejo. Mariátegui dijo de Eguren que "representa en nuestra historia literaria la poesía pura". Su poesía esta desligada de la realidad. Según Mariátegui: representa en nuestra literatura a la poesía pura; porque su poesía no tiene máculas ideológicas, morales, religiosas o costumbristas e ignora lo erótico y lo civil. Con Simbólicas (1911), su primer libro de poesía, inaugura la poesía contemporánea del Perú: "Deja atrás a los melifluos versos románticos y el sonsonete clarinesco del Modernismo. Eligió un vocablo preciso y sugerente, lirismo profundo, lenguaje musical, ensueños, visiones infantiles y alucinatorias. Pero la característica principal (de Simbólicas) la constituye su mundo medieval visto a través de lo gótico. Su poesía vislumbra paisajes funambulescos, castillos almenados, bufones de la edad media, el ambiente gótico y héroes de cuentos de hadas. Su poesía tiene la incoherencia del sueño y la pesadilla. En conclusión, la poesía de Eguren es la prolongación de su infancia. Obras Poesía Primeras ediciones Simbólicas. Lima: Tipografía de La Revista, 1911. La canción de las figuras. Prólogo de Enrique A. Carrillo. Lima: Tipografía y Encuadernación de la Penitenciaría, 1916. Poesías. Incluye: Simbólicas, La canción de las figuras, Sombra y Rondinelas. Lima: Editorial Minerva – Biblioteca Amauta, 1929. [editar]Poemas extensos "Visiones De Enero". Publicado en el Homenaje a la Independencia del Perú, en: revista Mundial, Lima, No. 167, 27 de julio de 1923. Campestre. Introducción y notas de Ricardo Silva-Santisteban. Lima: Ediciones de La Rama Florida, 1969. Antologías Sus mejores poesías. En: Boletín Bibliográfico de la Universidad de San Marcos , Vol. I, No. 15, Lima, Diciembre 1924. Selección de Pedro S. Zulen. Estudio crítico por Enrique Bustamante y Ballivián, pp. 207-224. Poesías. Presentación de Manuel Beltroy. Lima: Compañía de Impresiones y Publicidad – Colección Antología Peruana, 1944. Poesías escogidas. Selección de Manuel Scorza. Prólogo de José Carlos Mariátegui. Lima: Patronato del Libro Peruano, 1957. Antología'. Selección. Prólogo y notas de Julio Ortega. Lima: Editorial Universitaria, [1966]. Primeros poemas: Simbólicas. Anotaciones de Luis Miranda E. Huancayo: Universidad Nacional del Centro del Perú, 1970. Antología poética de José María Eguren. Selección y prólogo de Américo Ferrari. Valencia: Dirección de Cultura de la Universidad de Carabobo, 1972. Antología poética. Nota y selección de Manuel Mejía Valera. México, D. F.: Comunidad Latinoamericana de Escritores, 1974. De Simbólicas a Rondinelas. Antología. Edición de Gema Areta. Madrid: Visor de Poesía, 1992. Obra poética Poesías completas. Presentación de Delfín A. Ludeña. Nota preliminar de Jorge Basadre. Estudio crítico de Manuel Beltroy. Barranco, Lima: Colegio Nacional de Varones José María Eguren, 1952. Poesías completas. Recopilación, prólogo y notas de Estuardo Núñez. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1961. Poesías completas y Prosas selectas. Recopilación, introducción y notas de Estuardo Núñez. Lima: Editorial Universo, 1970. Obra poética completa. Prólogo de Luis Alberto Sánchez. Lima: Editorial Milla Batres, 1974. Obra poética. Motivos. Prólogo, cronología y bibliografía por Ricardo Silva-Santisteban. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho – Colección Clásica No. 228, 2005. El Andarín De La Noche. Obra poética completa. Edición, prólogo y notas de Juan Manuel Bonet. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro Editores – Colección Signos, 2008. Prosa Motivos estéticos. Recopilación, prólogo y notas de Estuardo Núñez. Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, 1959. La sala ambarina. Lima: Ediciones de La Rama Florida, 1969. Poesías completas y Prosas selectas. Recopilación, introducción y notas de Estuardo Núñez. Lima: Editorial Universo, 1970. Motivos. Buenos Aires: Editorial Leviatán – Colección Poesía Mayor No. 14, 1998. Obra poética. Motivos. Prólogo, cronología y bibliografía por Ricardo Silva-Santisteban. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho - Colección Clásica No. 228, 2005. Motivos. Edición, prólogo y notas de Juan Manuel Bonet. Madrid: Huerga y Fierro Editores – Colección Signos Versión Celeste, 2008. Obras completas Obras completas. Edición, prólogo y notas de Ricardo Silva-Santisteban, Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1974. Incluye: Simbólicas, La canción de las figuras, Sombra, Visiones de enero, Rondinelas, Campestre, poemas no recogidos en libro, poemas circunstanciales. [editar]Traducciones a otro idioma Simboliche. A cura di Roberto Paoli. Edición bilingüe. Bolonia: Il Libri di in Forma di Parole/Marietti, 1991. [Prólogo: “Eguren tra elegia e parodia”, pp. 7-37]. Referencias Wikipedia-http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lose_Maria_Eguren

Gilberto Owen Estrada

Gilberto Owen Estrada, (El Rosario, Sinaloa, 13 de mayo de 1904- Filadelfia, 1952) fue un poeta mexicano. Ocupó cargos diplomáticos diversos. Fue autor de Desvelo (1923, editado de manera póstuma), La llama fría (1925), Novela como nube (1926), Línea (1930) y Perseo vencido (1948). Estudios Nació el 13 de mayo de 1904 en el pueblo sinaloense de Rosario, de donde partió con su madre y su media hermana a Toluca, capital del Estado de México. Tras estudiar en el Instituto Científico y Literario de esta ciudad, se trasladó a la ciudad de México para continuar sus estudios en la Escuela Nacional Preparatoria mientras trabajaba en la oficina de la presidencia. En las aulas preparatorias conoció a Jorge Cuesta y juntos frecuentaron los círculos literarios de la capital, principalmente el de Enrique González Martínez, al lado de otros jóvenes escritores como Xavier Villaurrutia, Salvador Novo y Jaime Torres Bodet. Bajo la influencia simbolista de González Martínez y Juan Ramón Jiménez, Owen y Villaurrutia escribieron sus primeros libros de poemas (Desvelo y Reflejos, respectivamente) y fueron colaboradores de la revista La Falange --que dirigía Torres Bodet--, de Ulises que fundaron con Jorge Cuesta, y de la que dio nombre y directriz a su grupo, Contemporáneos (1928-1931) [vid. Los contemporáneos], dirigida por el propio Torres Bodet y Bernardo Ortiz de Montellano. Escritor y dramaturgo En 1925 Owen escribió La llama fría, que publicada por el diario El Universal, fue la primera de las novelas líricas con las que el grupo experimentó la prosa poética, en un franco desafío a la estética realista que comenzaba a imponer la novela de la Revolución mexicana. Con Novo, Celestino Gorostiza, Villaurrutia y los pintores Manuel Rodríguez Lozano y Carlos Lazo, fundó --al amparo económico de Antonieta Rivas Mercado-- el Teatro Ulises, en el cual tradujo, dirigió y actuó obras de autores europeos modernos en un afán de divulgar la estética vanguardista con la que estaban comprometidos. Diplomático Luego de publicar Novela como nube, en 1928 se marchó a Nueva York como escritor de la embajada mexicana, y se relacionó con artistas de la vanguardia europea y latinoamericana residentes en esa ciudad, como Federico García Lorca. Escribió un guion de cine para su amigo el cineasta Emilio Amero y recuperó los poemas cubistas que conforman Línea, que había desechado a su salida de México y que Alfonso Reyes publicó en Buenos Aires, al lado de obras de Macedonio Fernández y Jorge Luis Borges. Viajó por Canadá y sirvió en los consulados de Detroit y Filadelfia antes de ser mandado a Perú. En ese país Owen conoció a Luis Alberto Sánchez Sánchez y comenzó a interesarse por la estética marxista que abandonó más tarde sin publicar nada de sus búsquedas, para regresar a la estética vanguardista. Se sabe que existió un proyecto de publicar un libro junto con Martín Adán, titulado Dos poemas de odio, pero no se llevó a cabo. En 1931 participó en las jornadas electorales a favor del APRA, que terminaron con el encarcelamiento de Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre y la represión de Trujillo. Para alejarlo de la política peruana, el gobierno mexicano lo mandó a Guayaquil, Ecuador, en 1932, con la misión de abrir un consulado. Pero una vez ahí, no solamente recibió a los apristas peruanos exiliados, sino que se hizo amigo de Benjamín Carrión, el líder del naciente Partido Socialista Ecuatoriano y fue separado del servicio exterior por intervenir en la política de un país extranjero. Con sus propios medios y ayudado por sus amigos, marchó a Colombia, donde trabajó como maestro y periodista, y continuó involucrado en la política y en la vida cultural. Alejado del APRA y de las ideas marxistas, en 1935 se casó con Cecilia Salazar Roldán, hija del general conservador Víctor Manuel Salazar, pero su matrimonio duró muy poco. Trabó amistad con poetas y pintores colombianos, como Aurelio Arturo y Fernando Charry Lara, quien lo recuerda dedicado a traducir cables periodísticos y a esparcir su conocimiento de la literatura inglesa. En 1942, regresó a México, en donde era un desconocido debido a su larga ausencia y a su escasa obra. Reintegrado al servicio exterior, fue cónsul en Filadelfia donde falleció en 1952. Tenía 48 años y estaba ciego debido a su larga adicción al alcohol. Publicada en 1948 en una edición muy limitada, su obra mayor, Perseo vencido llamó la atención de la crítica muchos años después, gracias a los ensayos de Tomás Segovia y al trabajo de recopilación de Josefina Procopio. En 1953 la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México editó Poesía y prosa, en ese momento la más completa edición de su obra, preparada por Procopio bajo supervisión del propio Owen, quien había muerto poco antes de su publicación. En 1979 el Fondo de Cultura Económica lanzó sus Obras, edición basada en la de 1953, pero con agregados y modificaciones. Desde entonces Owen es considerado uno de los poetas mexicanos más importantes del siglo XX, y los estudios sobre su obra se han multiplicado. Obra La mayor importancia de Gilberto Owen radica en su libro de 1948, Perseo vencido, el cual consta de tres partes: el "Madrigal por Medusa", que da título al volumen; la serie de poemas Simbad el varado, bitácora de febrero; y el breve Libro de Ruth. Se trata de un libro escrito durante aproximadamente 18 años, que ha sido interpretado de muy diversas maneras y que narra poéticamente la aventura espiritual de un enamorado, el intento de purificación y el fracaso del amor y de la poesía. Fuertemente influido por Rimbaud, T. S. Eliot y la estética vanguardista, Owen no dejó atrás su original formación barroca y construyó una obra llena de referencias cultas, cuyas claves esotéricas van siendo poco a poco descubiertas mientras se descubren también que muchos de los datos de su biografía son invenciones y metáforas del propio Gilberto Owen. Referencias Wikipedia - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilberto_Owen

Marriott Edgar

Marriott Edgar (1880–1951), born George Marriott Edgar in Kirkcudbright, Scotland, was a poet, scriptwriter and comedian best known for writing many of the monologues performed by Stanley Holloway, particularly the 'Albert’ series. In total he wrote sixteen monologues for Stanley Holloway, whilst Holloway himself wrote only five. Family background Edgar’s parents were Jennifer née Taylor, a native of Dundee, and Richard Horatio Marriott Edgar (1847–1894), only son of Alice Marriott (1824–1900), proprietress of the Marriott family theatre troupe. Richard was born in Manchester, Lancashire, near Christmas 1847 as Richard Horatio Marriott; both his two sisters, Adeline Marriott (b. 1853) and Grace Marriott (b. 1858) were also born in Lancashire. Later all three children chose to take the surname of their mother’s husband, Robert Edgar, whom she married in 1856. Richard and Jenny married in March 1875, with Richard being unaware that he had fathered an illegitimate namesake son, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace, with widowed actress Mrs Mary Jane “Polly” Richards, after a brief sexual encounter. Polly had invented an obligation in London to hide her pregnancy and give birth in secret on 1 April 1875, almost a month after Richard and Jenny married. This son became the famous journalist, novelist, playwright and screenplay writer Edgar Wallace. Richard and Jenny Taylor’s children were Alice Marriott Edgar (b. 1876, London), twins Richard and Jennifer Marriott Edgar (b. 1878, London), after whose births the family moved to Scotland where George was born, then returning to London where Joseph Marriott Edgar was born in 1884 and Adeline Alice Edgar in 1886. Early career Little is recorded of George Marriott Edgar’s early career, but he was talented performer, poet and writer. His first real successes began after he had been in the cast of The Co-Optimists and worked with Stanley Holloway. At the start of the 1930s they went to Hollywood, where Edgar– who had dropped his first name for the professional appellation Marriott Edgar– met his famous half-brother. Monologues Holloway was already enjoying some success with the monologue format, with such classics as Sam, Pick Oop Tha’ Musket. Edgar asked him if he had heard a story about a couple who had taken their son to the zoo, only to see the lad eaten by a lion. Holloway had indeed heard the story, and shortly afterwards Edgar supplied him with a script. The Lion and Albert became one of Holloway’s most popular pieces, one of many he recorded beginning in 1930. The lion of the poem is named “Wallace”, which was the name of the first African lion to be bred in Britain, living from 1812 until 1838, and his name became a popular one for lions. Edgar gave the poem the titleThe Lion and Albert but some later performances and re-publications used the form Albert and the Lion. The nearby pub also uses the latter form. The monologues were designed to be spoken rhythmically, with piano accompaniment which in many cases was also composed by Edgar. The texts were published by Francis, Day & Hunter during the 1930s in three collections. All were illustrated by John Hassall, many of whose lively images also became classics. Edgar’s compositions were Albert 'Arold and Others– performed by Stanley Holloway and Marriott Edgar * The Lion and Albert: Albert swallowed by a lion in the menagerie of Blackpool Tower * Runcorn Ferry (Tuppence per Person per Trip), set in Runcorn * Three Ha’pence a Foot, featuring an argument with Noah * The Battle of Hastings, an account of the Battle of Hastings * Marksman Sam, featuring Stanley Holloway’s creation Sam Small * Albert and the 'Eadsman, set in the Tower of London * The Return of Albert (Albert Comes Back), sequel to The Lion and Albert * Goalkeeper Joe, set in Wigan * Gunner Joe, at the Battle of Trafalgar * The Jubilee Sov’rin, the awkward loss of a sovereign commemorating Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee * The Magna Charter, the signing of Magna Carta * Little Aggie, an elephant Albert and Balbus and Samuel Small– written and performed by Marriott Edgar * Sam’s Medal (not written by Edgar) * The 'Ole in the Ark, a necessary repair to Noah’s Ark * Sam’s Racehorse, an unfortunate purchase * George and the Dragon, an unhelpful pub landlady * The Recumbent Posture, a linguistic misunderstanding * The Channel Swimmer, an attempt on the English Channel * Asparagus, a cautionary tale * Uppards, a Lancashire version of Longfellow’s famous poem Excelsior * Joe Ramsbottom, a farmer and the squire * Burghers of Calais, retelling the story of the Burghers of Calais * Balbus (The Great Wall of China), a fantasy based on the Latin text-book example: “Balbus built a wall” * Jonah and the Grampus, the story of Jonah Normans and Saxons and Such– some Ancient History * Canute the Great 1017–1035, about Cnut the Great * William Rufus 1087–1100, about William II of England * Queen Matilda 1100–1135, about Empress Matilda * The Fair Rosamond 1154–1189, about Rosamund Clifford * Richard Cœur-de-Lion 1189–1199, about Richard I of England * Henry the Seventh 1485–1509, about Henry VII of England * The Lion and Albert and The Return of Albert have been translated into German under the titles Der Löwe und Albert and Albert kommt wieder, na klar! respectively. Film scriptwriting Between 1936 and 1944 Edgar worked for Gainsborough Pictures as a scriptwriter for a number of British films, all comedies except The Ghost Train, such as Marriage and family In 1904 in Brentford he married Mildred Williams. They had a son, Hindle (1905–1985) who was an actor. Edgar died in Battle, East Sussex, 5 May 1951. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriott_Edgar

George Eliot

Mary Ann Evans (22 November 1819– 22 December 1880; alternatively “Mary Anne” or “Marian”), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot’s life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years. Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language. Life Early life and education Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England. She was the second child of Robert Evans (1773–1849) and Christiana Evans (née Pearson, 1788–1836), the daughter of a local mill-owner. Mary Ann’s name was sometimes shortened to Marian. Her full siblings were Christiana, known as Chrissey (1814–59), Isaac (1816–1890), and twin brothers who survived a few days in March 1821. She also had a half-brother, Robert (1802–64), and half-sister, Fanny (1805–82), from her father’s previous marriage to Harriet Poynton (?1780–1809). Robert Evans, of Welsh ancestry, was the manager of the Arbury Hall Estate for the Newdigate family in Warwickshire, and Mary Ann was born on the estate at South Farm. In early 1820 the family moved to a house named Griff House, between Nuneaton and Bedworth. The young Evans was obviously intelligent and a voracious reader. Because she was not considered physically beautiful, and thus not thought to have much chance of marriage, and because of her intelligence, her father invested in an education not often afforded women. From ages five to nine, she boarded with her sister Chrissey at Miss Latham’s school in Attleborough, from ages nine to thirteen at Mrs. Wallington’s school in Nuneaton, and from ages thirteen to sixteen at Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry. At Mrs. Wallington’s school, she was taught by the evangelical Maria Lewis—to whom her earliest surviving letters are addressed. In the religious atmosphere of the Miss Franklin’s school, Evans was exposed to a quiet, disciplined belief opposed to evangelicalism. After age sixteen, Evans had little formal education. Thanks to her father’s important role on the estate, she was allowed access to the library of Arbury Hall, which greatly aided her self-education and breadth of learning. Her classical education left its mark; Christopher Stray has observed that “George Eliot’s novels draw heavily on Greek literature (only one of her books can be printed correctly without the use of a Greek typeface), and her themes are often influenced by Greek tragedy”. Her frequent visits to the estate also allowed her to contrast the wealth in which the local landowner lived with the lives of the often much poorer people on the estate, and different lives lived in parallel would reappear in many of her works. The other important early influence in her life was religion. She was brought up within a low church Anglican family, but at that time the Midlands was an area with a growing number of religious dissenters. Move to Coventry In 1836 her mother died and Evans (then 16) returned home to act as housekeeper, but she continued correspondence with her tutor Maria Lewis. When she was 21, her brother Isaac married and took over the family home, so Evans and her father moved to Foleshill near Coventry. The closeness to Coventry society brought new influences, most notably those of Charles and Cara Bray. Charles Bray had become rich as a ribbon manufacturer and had used his wealth in the building of schools and in other philanthropic causes. Evans, who had been struggling with religious doubts for some time, became intimate friends with the progressive, free-thinking Brays, whose “Rosehill” home was a haven for people who held and debated radical views. The people whom the young woman met at the Brays’ house included Robert Owen, Herbert Spencer, Harriet Martineau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Through this society Evans was introduced to more liberal theologies and to writers such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, who cast doubt on the literal truth of Biblical stories. In fact, her first major literary work was an English translation of Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846), which she completed after it had been left incomplete by another member of the “Rosehill Circle”. As a product of their friendship, Bray published some of Evans’s earliest writing, such as reviews, in his newspaper the Coventry Herald and Observer. When Evans began to question her religious faith, her father threatened to throw her out of the house, but his threat was not carried out. Instead, she respectfully attended church and continued to keep house for him until his death in 1849, when she was 30. Five days after her father’s funeral, she travelled to Switzerland with the Brays. She decided to stay on in Geneva alone, living first on the lake at Plongeon (near the present-day United Nations buildings) and then on the second floor of a house owned by her friends François and Juliet d’Albert Durade on the rue de Chanoines (now the rue de la Pelisserie). She commented happily that, “one feels in a downy nest high up in a good old tree”. Her stay is commemorated by a plaque on the building. While residing there, she read avidly and took long walks in the beautiful Swiss countryside, which was a great inspiration to her. François Durade painted her portrait there as well. Move to London and editorship of the Westminster Review On her return to England the following year (1850), she moved to London with the intent of becoming a writer, and she began referring to herself as Marian Evans. She stayed at the house of John Chapman, the radical publisher whom she had met earlier at Rosehill and who had published her Strauss translation. Chapman had recently purchased the campaigning, left-wing journal The Westminster Review, and Evans became its assistant editor in 1851. Although Chapman was officially the editor, it was Evans who did most of the work of producing the journal, contributing many essays and reviews beginning with the January 1852 issue and continuing until the end of her employment at the Review in the first half of 1854. Women writers were common at the time, but Evans’s role as the female editor of a literary magazine was quite unusual. She was not considered to be a beautiful or even an attractive woman. According to Henry James: She had a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth and a chin and jawbone qui n’en finissent pas... Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes, steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes, behold me in love with this great horse-faced bluestocking. During this period, she formed a number of embarrassing, unreciprocated emotional attachments, including one with Chapman (who was married but lived with both his wife and his mistress), and another with Herbert Spencer. Relationship with George Lewes The philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817–78) met Evans in 1851, and by 1854 they had decided to live together. Lewes was already married to Agnes Jervis. They had an open marriage, and in addition to the three children they had together, Agnes also had four children by Thornton Leigh Hunt. Because Lewes allowed himself to be falsely named as the father on the birth certificates of Jervis’s illegitimate children, he was considered to be complicit in adultery, and therefore he was not legally able to divorce her. In July 1854, Lewes and Evans travelled to Weimar and Berlin together for the purpose of research. Before going to Germany, Evans continued her theological work with a translation of Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and while abroad she wrote essays and worked on her translation of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics, which she completed in 1856, but which was not published in her lifetime. The trip to Germany also served as a honeymoon for Evans and Lewes, and they now considered themselves married, with Evans calling herself Mary Ann Evans Lewes, and referring to Lewes as her husband. It was not unusual for men and women in Victorian society to have affairs; Charles Bray, John Chapman, Friedrich Engels, and Wilkie Collins all had extra-marital relationships, though they were much more discreet than Lewes and Evans were. It was this lack of discretion and their public admission of the relationship which created accusations of polygamy and earned them the moral disapproval of English society . First publication While continuing to contribute pieces to the Westminster Review, Evans resolved to become a novelist, and she set out a manifesto for herself in one of her last essays for the Review, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (1856). The essay criticised the trivial and ridiculous plots of contemporary fiction by women. In other essays, she praised the realism of novels that were being written in Europe at the time, and it became clear in her subsequent fiction that she placed an emphasis on realistic storytelling. She also adopted a nom-de-plume, the one for which she would become known: George Eliot. This pen-name was said by some to be an homage to George Lewes. In addition to adopting his first name, the last name, Eliot, could possibly have been a code for “to L—I owe it”. In 1857, when she was 37, “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”, the first of the Scenes of Clerical Life, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine and, along with the other Scenes, it was well received (it was published in book form early in 1858). Her first complete novel, published in 1859, was Adam Bede; it was an instant success, but it prompted intense interest in who this new author might be. Scenes of Clerical Life was widely believed to have been written by a country parson or perhaps the wife of a parson. With the release of the incredibly popular Adam Bede, speculation increased, and there was even a pretender to the authorship, one Joseph Liggins. In the end, the real George Eliot stepped forward: Marian Evans Lewes admitted she was the author. The revelations about Eliot’s private life surprised and shocked many of her admiring readers, but this did not affect her popularity as a novelist. Eliot’s relationship with Lewes afforded her the encouragement and stability she so badly needed to write fiction, and to ease her self-doubt, but it would be some time before they were accepted into polite society. Acceptance was finally confirmed in 1877 when they were introduced to Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria. The queen herself was an avid reader of all of George Eliot’s novels and was so impressed with Adam Bede that she commissioned the artist Edward Henry Corbould to paint scenes from the book. After the success of Adam Bede, Eliot continued to write popular novels for the next fifteen years. Within a year of completing Adam Bede, she finished The Mill on the Floss, dedicating the manuscript: "To my beloved husband, George Henry Lewes, I give this MS. of my third book, written in the sixth year of our life together, at Holly Lodge, South Field, Wandsworth, and finished 21 March 1860.” Her last novel was Daniel Deronda, published in 1876, after which she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey. By this time Lewes’s health was failing, and he died two years later, on 30 November 1878. Eliot spent the next two years editing Lewes’s final work, Life and Mind, for publication, and she found solace and companionship with John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent whose mother had recently died. Marriage to John Cross and death On 16 May 1880 Eliot courted controversy once more by marrying John Cross, a man twenty years her junior, and again changing her name, this time to Mary Anne Cross. The legal marriage at least pleased her brother Isaac, who had broken off relations with her when she had begun to live with Lewes, but now sent congratulations. While the couple was honeymooning in Venice, Cross, in a fit of depression, jumped from the hotel balcony into the Grand Canal. He survived, and the newlyweds returned to England. They moved to a new house in Chelsea, but Eliot fell ill with a throat infection. This, coupled with the kidney disease she had been afflicted with for several years, led to her death on 22 December 1880 at the age of 61. Eliot was not buried in Westminster Abbey because of her denial of the Christian faith and her “irregular” though monogamous life with Lewes. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery (East), Highgate, London, in the area reserved for religious dissenters and agnostics, beside the love of her life, George Henry Lewes. In 1980, on the centenary of her death, a memorial stone was established for her in the Poets’ Corner. Several buildings in her birthplace of Nuneaton are named after her or titles of her novels. These include The George Eliot School (previously George Eliot Community School) and Middlemarch Junior School. In 1948, Nuneaton Emergency Hospital was renamed George Eliot Hospital in her honour. George Eliot Road, in Foleshill, Coventry was also named in her honour. A statue of Eliot is in Newdegate Street, Nuneaton, and Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery has a display of artifacts related to her. Literary assessment Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch, in which she presents the stories of a number of denizens of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832; the novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters in Westminster Review in 1856. Readers in the Victorian era particularly praised her books for their depictions of rural society, for which she drew on her own early experiences, and she shared with Wordsworth the belief that there was much interest and importance in the mundane details of ordinary country lives. Eliot did not, however, confine herself to her bucolic roots. Romola, a historical novel set in late 15th century Florence and touching on the lives of several real persons such as the priest Girolamo Savonarola, displays her wider reading and interests. In The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot made a foray into verse, creating a work whose initial popularity has not endured. Working as a translator, Eliot was exposed to German texts of religious, social, and moral philosophy such as Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity, and Spinoza’s Ethics. Elements from these works show up in her fiction, much of which is written with her trademark sense of agnostic humanism. She had taken particular notice of Feuerbach’s conception of Christianity, positing that the faith’s understanding of the nature of the divine rested ultimately in the nature of humanity projected onto a divine figure. An example of this understanding appears in her novel Romola, in which Eliot’s protagonist has been said to display a “surprisingly modern readiness to interpret religious language in humanist or secular ethical terms.” Though Eliot herself was not religious, she held some respect toward religious tradition and its ability to allow society to maintain a sense of social order and morality. Eliot was knowledgeable in regards to religion, while simultaneously remaining critical of it. The religious elements in her fiction also owe much to her upbringing, with the experiences of Maggie Tulliver from The Mill on the Floss sharing many similarities with the young Mary Ann Evans’s own development. When Silas Marner is persuaded that his alienation from the church means also his alienation from society, the author’s life is again mirrored with her refusal to attend church. She was at her most autobiographical in Looking Backwards, part of her final printed work Impressions of Theophrastus Such. By the time of Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s sales were falling off, and she faded from public view to some degree. This was not helped by the biography written by her husband after her death, which portrayed a wonderful, almost saintly, woman totally at odds with the scandalous life people knew she had led. In the 20th century she was championed by a new breed of critics, most notably by Virginia Woolf, who called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. Twentieth-century literary critic Harold Bloom placed Eliot among the greatest Western writers of all time. The various film and television adaptations of Eliot’s books have re-introduced her to the wider reading public. Works Novels * Adam Bede, 1859 * The Mill on the Floss, 1860 * Silas Marner, 1861 * Romola, 1863 * Felix Holt, the Radical, 1866 * Middlemarch, 1871–72 * Daniel Deronda, 1876 Poetry * Agatha, 1869 * Brother and Sister, 1869 * Armgart, 1871 * Stradivarius, 1873 * The Legend of Jubal, 1874 * I Grant You Ample Leave, 1874 * Arion, 1874 * A Minor Prophet, 1874 * A College Breakfast Party, 1879 * The Death of Moses, 1879 * From a London Drawing Room * Count That Day Lost Other * Digital facsimile of manuscript “Quarry for Middlemarch”, MS Lowell 13, Houghton Library, Harvard University * Translation of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) Volume 2 by David Strauss, 1846 * Translation of Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity) by Ludwig Feuerbach, 1854 * “Three Months in Weimar”, 1855 * “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”, 1856 * “The Natural History of German Life”, 1856 * Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857 * The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton * Mr Gilfil’s Love Story * Janet’s Repentance * The Lifted Veil, 1859 * Brother Jacob, 1864 * “The Influence of Rationalism”, 1865 * Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 1879 * Review of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters in Westminster Review April 1856. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eliot

Jaime Jaramillo Escobar

'Jaime Jaramillo Escobar (Pueblorrico, 1932) es un poeta colombiano. Co-fundó con Gonzalo Arango y otros escritores el nadaísmo, movimiento de índole contestataria que cambió la percepción de la literatura y el arte colombianos a mediados de los años 60. Su propia obra se caracteriza por la ironía, el sarcasmo, los juegos paródicos del lenguaje popular, la irreverencia y el tono sentencioso con el que satiriza la sociedad y sus instituciones. Poeta antioqueño (Pueblorrico, mayo 25 de 1932). Jaime Jaramillo Escobar vivió su infancia y juventud en varios pueblos antioqueños, especialmente en Altamira y Andes, donde fue compañero de Gonzalo Arango. Cuando, en 1958, su antiguo condiscípulo de colegio encendió los primeros fuegos del nadaísmo en Medellín, Jaramillo Escobar, quien a la sazón vivía en Cali, decidió sumarse al movimiento, encubriendo su verdadero nombre bajo el seudónimo X-504: La X es también para preguntar quién soy. Es una interrogación. El desconocido que te interroga. El que pasa por tus manos sin darse a conocer y se va después de haberte dado todo, menos su nombre. Soy el nombre falso de la verdad [...] X-504, número de presidiario [... J X-504 existe para que Jaime Jaramillo Escobar pueda vivir libremente, sin el peso de la literatura y de la admiración, explica Jaramillo Escobar. En contraposición con el carácter incendiario y revulsivo del nadaísmo, la discreción de X-504, paradójicamente, resultaba casi escandalosa. Gonzalo Arango lo describió como el más raro de los nadaístas, pues paga religiosamente el arriendo el último día de mes, gira cheques con fondos, usa chaleco, todas las mañanas a las 8 en punto le da los "buenos días" al patrón, etc. . No obstante, el poeta más parco del nadaísmo terminaría siendo reconocido como el mejor de todos. El premio Cassius Clay de poesía nadaísta que obtuvo en 1967 con su libro Los poemas de la ofensa, así lo demuestra. Este libro, junto con Los elementos del desastre, de Alvaro Mutis, Morada al sur, de Aurelio Arturo y Baladas, de Mario Rivero, es considerado como lo más logrado de la poesía colombiana escrita entre 1950 y 1975. En los 44 poemas que conforman el libro, Jaramillo Escobar despliega los rasgos característicos de su escritura: poemas extensos dispuestos en frases a manera de versículos; adopción de un tono sentencioso propio de tradiciones épicas y bíblicas, matizado con humor e ironía; y, sobre todo, un contrapunto exultante entre las grandes y colectivas cosas con las pequeñas y personales: Os preocupáis demasiado de que vuestra casa esté limpia, y de que vuestros negocios estén sucios. Lo importante es mantenerse ocupado todo el día, porque no sabéis qué hacer con el tiempo libre. Y por eso vivís inventando cosas permanentemente. Pero yo os digo: Hay que hacer esta noche una fiesta privada en casa de cada cual, porque hoy es víspera de la muerte. Apuráos ("Comentario de la muerte"). X-504 ha publicado, además, Sombrero de ahogado (1984) y Poemas de tierra caliente (1985), con los que ganó, respectivamente, los Premios Nacionales de Poesía Eduardo Cote Lamus y Universidad de Antioquia, en 1983. En su antología Selecta (1987), incluye poemas de dos libros inéditos: Poesía revelada y Poesía pública [Ver tomo 4, Literatura, "El nadaísmo", pp. 271-274].g JOHN JAIRO GALÁN En la actualidad dirige un taller de poesía en la Biblioteca Pública Piloto de Medellín. Obras publicadas * Poemas de la Ofensa (1968). * Extracto de poesía (1982). * Sombrero de Ahogado (1983). * Poemas de tierra caliente (1985). * Selecta (Antología,1987). * Alheña y Azúmbar (1988). * Poemas principales. Editorial Pre-Textos. 2000. * El ensayo en Antioquia (2003). * Barba Jacob para hechizados (ensayo, 2005). * Método fácil y rápido para ser poeta. Editorial Pre-Textos. 2011. Premios * Premio nadaísta de poesía Cassius Clay, 1967 * Premio nacional de poesía Eduardo Cote Lamus, 1983 * Premio nacional de poesía Universidad de Antioquia, 1983 Ha recibido numerosos homenajes y su obra ha sido profusamente antologada, estudiada y difundida en distintos libros, revistas, periódicos y medios audiovisuales. Por más de dos décadas ha ejercido como maestro tallerista de jóvenes poetas en la Biblioteca Pública Piloto de Medellín. referencias Wikipedia-http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaime_Jaramillo_Escobar

Vicente Espinel

Vicente Gómez Martínez Espinel (Ronda, 28 de diciembre de 1550 - Madrid, 4 de febrero de 1624) fue un escritor y músico español del Siglo de Oro. A partir de sus Diversas rimas de 1591, transformó la estructura de la décima, estrofa conocida también como espinela en su homenaje. En la música se hizo famoso por dar a la guitarra su quinta cuerda, añadiendo una cuerda más aguda - llamada mi agudo o prima - a las cuatro existentes en aquel momento. Hijo de Francisco Gómez, que procedía de las Asturias de Santillana, en la actual Cantabria, y de su legítima esposa Juana Martínez, estudió sus primeras letras y música en Ronda con el bachiller Juan Cansino y se matriculó en la Universidad de Salamanca, donde aparece registrado los cursos de 1571 y 1572 con el nombre de Vicente Martínez Espinel, tomando el segundo apellido de su padre. Se sostuvo dando clases de canto, «antes dadas que pagadas», y contempló el proceso inquisitorial contra fray Luis de León. Volvió a su tierra, como él mismo confiesa, «caminando a la apostólica». En ese mismo año de 1572 unos tíos suyos le concedieron una capellanía que habían fundado, por consejo del trinitario fray Rodrigo de Arce. Con el favor de este religioso pudo volver a Salamanca, donde se hizo amigo de personajes tan importantes como Luis de Vargas, Manrique, los dos Argensolas, Pedro Liñán de Riaza, Marco Antonio de la Vega, Luis de Góngora, Luis Gálvez de Montalvo y otros muchos más, y su música le abrió las puertas de los palacios del marqués de Tarifa, de los Alba y los Girones. Asistió a la casa de la noble señora doña Agustina de Torres, con quien se reunían los mejores músicos de entonces: Matute, Lara, Julio, Castilla etcétera. Vivió algún tiempo en Zaragoza con Lupercio y Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola. Intentó entonces la carrera militar y fue soldado y, en Valladolid, de 1574 a 1577, fue escudero del Conde de Lemos; estuvo a punto de acompañarlo cuando éste marchó junto al rey don Sebastián a la infausta campaña de África que terminó con la batalla de Alcazarquivir; pero se quedó en Sevilla viviendo con disipación entre lupanares y figones, acompañado de su inseparable guitarra. Esa vida disipada y bastante al margen de la ley hizo que el marqués de Algaba, que por entonces le protegía, le retirara esa protección y Espinel tuvo entonces que esconderse de la justicia y se acogió a sagrado. El marqués de Denia le sacó de allí y le mandó a Italia para servir a Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y Sotomayor, duque de Medina Sidonia, nombrado para gobernar Milán; pero le apresaron los corsarios berberiscos y estuvo esclavizado en Argel hasta que le sacaron de allí los genoveses; desembarcó en Génova en 1573 y poco después marchó a Flandes, yendo a parar al ejército de Alejandro Farnesio cuando se aprestaba al asalto de Mastrique. Allí encontró a su tío Hernando de Toledo, a quien dirigió una bellísima Égloga que canta sus amores con doña Antonia de Calatayud en Salamanca y Sevilla. Volvió a Milán con Octavio de Gonzaga y durante tres años recorrió toda la Lombardía, ya como soldado, ya como músico de la casa de don Antonio de Londoño. Hastiado del oficio de la pica y cansado de su vida transeúnte, obtuvo un beneficio en Roma (1587), donde le apreciaron ser «buen latino y buen cantor de canto llano». Murieron sus padres y volvió a España desembarcando en Málaga, donde era obispo su amigo Francisco Pacheco de Córdoba. Por entonces escribió su «Canción a su patria» y la Epístola al obispo malagueño, poemas de arrepentimiento por su revuelta vida que le hicieron ganar el derecho a ordenarse sacerdote. Marchó a Madrid con esa idea, y lo hizo efectivamente en 1589, el mismo año en que retoma sus estudios, estudiando moral en Ronda, cantando misa en Málaga y logrando un beneficio en esta ciudad; se gradúa en Granada de Bachiller en Artes en 1589. En 1591 puso un sustituto en la capellanía del Hospital Real de Santa Bárbara en Ronda y marchó a Madrid, donde en ese mismo año publica sus Rimas, que había censurado en 1587 Alonso de Ercilla, quien las alabó como «de las mejores de España». En 1596 le quitaron su beneficio a causa de su conducta y vida desarregladas en la Corte. En 1599 se gradúa como Maestro de Artes en la Universidad de Alcalá y toma posesión como capellán del Obispo de Plasencia en Madrid, puesto que don Fadrique Vargas Manrique le tenía reservado con 30.000 maravedíes anuales de emolumentos y el cargo aparejado de maestro de música, con 12.000 maravedíes más, cargos en los que estuvo hasta su muerte. En Madrid, fuera de pertenecer a la famosa cofradía de escritores e intelectuales del Santísimo Sacramento, perteneció a la Academia Poética que protegía Félix Arias Girón, y acudió al certamen literario organizado en 1622 con motivo de la canonización de San Isidro. Era un escritor y músico muy respetado: Cervantes, Lope de Vega, etcétera lo admiraban. Murió en Madrid el 4 de febrero de 1624 siendo Capellán Mayor y maestro de música de la capilla del Obispo de Plasencia, de la parroquia de San Andrés, y está enterrado en la bóveda de esa misma iglesia. Obra Publicó en 1591 una compilación de su obra poética, el ya citado volumen Diversas rimas. El libro recorre (a ello responde el título) casi toda la métrica de entonces, ensayando todas las estrofas posibles, incluida la llamada décima, en una modalidad especial denominada, en homenaje al propio autor, considerado su inventor, décima espinela o espinela simplemente; consiste en una agrupación de dos quintillas con esta estructura fija: abbaaccddc. Samuel Gili Gaya (1892-1976), gran estudioso del autor, explicó que no fue el primero en usar esa combinación (ya lo hicieron Juan de Mal Lara y otros); «lo que hizo fue perfeccionarla, dotándola de unidad y ligereza; su prestigio contribuyó a divulgarla y a ponerla de moda». Como humanista tradujo, además, la Epistola ad Pisones de Horacio, más conocida como Arte poética. Sin embargo, se encuentran poemas sueltos suyos dispersos en otras obras, siguiendo la movida trayectoria del autor. Hay algunas tempranas en el Cancionero de López Maldonado (1586) o en las Flores de poetas ilustres de Pedro Espinosa; otras alaban libros, como el Guzmán de Alfarache de Mateo Alemán (1599), el Peregrino indiano de Saavedra Guzmán, el Modo de pelear a la jineta de Simón de Villalobos y otras obras de Gaspar de Villagrá, Gonzalo Céspedes y Meneses, fray Hernando de Camargo, Pérez del Barrio, etcétera. Censuró, asimismo, más de ochenta libros; en efecto, parecer ser que fue una persona sumamente amable y accesible, abierta con todo el mundo. El editor Juan de la Cuesta publicó en 1618 su novela picaresca, provista de muchos elementos autobiográficos, Relaciones de la vida del escudero Marcos de Obregón. Al momento y en ese mismo año se imprimieron dos ediciones piratas en Barcelona, las de Jerónimo Margarit y Sebastián de Cormellas, y aun se hizo una traducción al francés también en ese año por parte de Vital de Audiguier, señor de la Menor (Povergue) (París: Petitpas), edición que más tarde inspirará el Gil Blas de Santillana de Alain René Lesage. Todavía se reimprimió en España dos veces más el libro: Pedro Gómez de Pastrana costeó en Sevilla en 1641, y la quinta, de 1657, fue dedicada en Madrid por el impresor Gregorio Rodríguez al Sr. D. Juan Bautista Berardo, Tesorero general del Real Consejo de las Indias. Se trata de una narración más ágil que la de Mateo Alemán y, si bien no prescinde el autor de moralizar, lo hace de forma que no enfada ni empalaga como el sevillano. La versión inglesa fue realizada por Algernon Langton (Londres, 1816), la alemana la hizo Ludwig von Tieck (Breslau, 1827). En España se reimprimió más veces: 1744, 1804, 1863, 1868, 1881 (de J. Pérez de Guzmán); 1922 (edición de Samuel Gili Gaya), 1944 (de Valbuena, para Madrid: Aguilar), 1970 (edición crítica e introducción de María Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, para Madrid: Castalia), etcétera. Espinel tuvo entre sus discípulos a Lope de Vega, quien siempre tuvo palabras de elogio para él, ya sea por ejemplo en El laurel de Apolo, donde le llama «único poeta latino y castellano de estos tiempos», o en el prólogo a La viuda valenciana, donde le llama «padre de la música»; le dedicó un soneto y la comedia El caballero de Illescas (1602). Fue también amigo de Cervantes, quien lo menciona en el Canto de Calíope, así como de Góngora (cuyas poesías contribuyó a publicar) y Quevedo. Como músico se le atribuye el haber añadido una quinta cuerda a la vihuela, pero eso es discutible, ya que Bermudo, en 1544, menciona ya la guitarra de cinco cuerdas. Referencias Wikipedia - http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicente_Espinel

William Empson

Sir William Empson (27 September 1906– 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930. Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, “not least because they are the funniest”. Education Empson was the son of Arthur Reginald Empson of Yokefleet Hall, Yorkshire. His mother was Laura, daughter of Richard Mickelthwait, JP, of Ardsley House, Yorkshire. He was a first cousin of the twins David and Richard Atcherley. Empson first discovered his great skill and interest in mathematics at his preparatory school. He won an entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where he excelled as a student and received what he later described as “a ripping education” in spite of the rather rough and abusive milieu of the school: a longstanding tradition of physical force, especially among the students, figured prominently in life at such schools. In 1925 Empson won a scholarship to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics, gaining a first for his Part I but a disappointing upper-second for his Part II. He then went on to pursue a second degree in English, and at the end of the first year he was offered a Bye Fellowship. His supervisor in Mathematics, the father of the mathematician and philosopher Frank P. Ramsey, expressed regret at Empson’s decision to pursue English rather than Mathematics, since it was a discipline for which Empson showed great talent. I. A. Richards, the director of studies in English, recalled the genesis of Empson’s first major work, Seven Types of Ambiguity, composed when Empson was not yet 22 and published when he was 24: At about his third visit he brought up the games of interpretation which Laura Riding and Robert Graves had been playing [in A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927] with the unpunctuated form of ‘The expense of spirit in a waste of shame.’ Taking the sonnet as a conjuror takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of lively rabbits from it and ended by 'You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?' This was a Godsend to a Director of Studies, so I said, 'You’d better go off and do it, hadn’t you?’ But disaster struck when a servant found condoms among Empson’s possessions and claimed to have caught him in flagrante delicto with a woman. As a result, not only did he have his scholarship revoked, but his name was struck from the college records, he lost his prospects of a fellowship and he was banished from the city. Career After his banishment from Cambridge Empson supported himself for a brief period as a freelance critic and journalist, living in Bloomsbury until 1930, when he signed a three-year contract to teach in Japan after his tutor Richards had failed to find him a post teaching in China. He returned to England in the mid-1930s only to depart again after receiving a three-year contract to teach at Peking University. Upon his arrival he discovered that, because of the Japanese invasion of China, he no longer had a post. He joined the exodus of the university’s staff, with little more than a typewriter and a suitcase, and ended up in Kunming, with Lianda (Southwest Associated University), the school created there by students and professors who were refugees from the war in the North. He arrived back in England in January 1939. He worked for a year on the daily Digest of foreign broadcasts and in 1941 met George Orwell, at that time the Indian Editor of the BBC Eastern Service, on a six-week course at what was called the Liars’ School of the BBC. They remained friends, but Empson recalled one clash: “At that time the Government had put into action a scheme for keeping up the birth-rate during the war by making it in various ways convenient to have babies, for mothers going out to work; government nurseries were available after the first month, I think, and there were extra eggs and other goodies on the rations. My wife and I took advantage of this plan to have two children. I was saying to George one evening after dinner what a pleasure it was to cooperate with so enlightened a plan when, to my horror, I saw the familiar look of settled loathing come over his face. Rich swine boasting over our privileges, that was what we had become ...”. Just after the war Empson returned to China. He taught at Peking University, befriending a young David Hawkes, who later became a noted sinologist and chair of Chinese at Oxford University. Then, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he taught a summer course for the intensive study of literature at the Kenyon School of English at Kenyon College in Ohio. According to Newsweek, “The roster of instructors was enough to pop the eyes of any major in English.” In addition to Empson the faculty included Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Jacques Barzun, Eric Bentley, Cleanth Brooks, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Mizener, Allen Tate and Yvor Winters. In 1953 Empson was Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London, for a year. He then became head of the English Department at the University of Sheffield until his retirement in 1972. He was knighted in 1979, the same year his old college, Magdalene, awarded him an honorary fellowship some 50 years after his expulsion. Professor Sir William Empson died in 1984. Critical focus Empson’s critical work is largely concerned with early and pre-modern works in the English literary canon. He was a significant scholar of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare) and Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 2: The Drama). He published a monograph, Faustus and the Censor, on the subject of censorship and the authoritative version of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. He was also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell. Occasionally Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as well as the poems of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce’s Ulysses. Literary criticism Empson was styled a “critic of genius” by Frank Kermode, who qualified his praise by identifying willfully perverse readings of certain authors. Harold Bloom has stated that Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him because of their force and eccentricity. Empson’s bluntness led to controversy both during his life and after his death, and a reputation in part also as a “licensed buffoon” (Empson’s own phrase). Style, method and influence Empson is today best known for his literary criticism, and in particular his analysis of the use of language in poetical works: his own poems are arguably undervalued, although they were admired by and influenced English poets in the 1950s. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was an acquaintance at Cambridge, but Empson consistently denied any previous or direct influence on his work. Empson’s best-known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, mines the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature. Empson’s studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion and argumentation in various literary works, applying a technique of textual criticism so influential that often Empson’s contributions to certain domains of literary scholarship remain significant, though they may no longer be recognized as his. The universal recognition of the difficulty and complexity (indeed, ambiguity) of Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 94" ("They that have power ..."), for instance, is traceable to Empson’s analysis in Some Versions of Pastoral. Empson’s study of "Sonnet 94" goes some way towards explaining the high esteem in which the sonnet is now held (often being reckoned as among the finest sonnets), as well as the technique of criticism and interpretation that has thus reckoned it. Empson’s technique of teasing a rich variety of interpretations from poetic literature does not, however, exhaustively characterize his critical practice. He was also very interested in the human or experiential reality to be discovered in great works of literature, as is manifest, for instance, in his discussion of the fortunes of the notion of proletarian literature in Some Versions of Pastoral. His commitment to unravelling or articulating the experiential truth or reality in literature permitted him unusual avenues to explore sociopolitical ideas in literature in a vein very different from contemporary Marxist critics or scholars of New Historicism. Thus, for instance, Empson remarks in the first few pages of Some Versions of Pastoral that: Gray’s Elegy is an odd case of poetry with latent political ideas: Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark, unfathomed caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen And waste its sweetness on the desert air. What this means, as the context makes clear, is that eighteenth century England had no scholarship system or carrière ouverte aux talents. This is stated as pathetic, but the reader is put into a mood in which one would not try to alter it.... By comparing the social arrangement to Nature he makes it seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved.... The tone of melancholy claims that the poet understands the considerations opposed to aristocracy, though he judges against them; the truism of the reflections in the churchyard, the universality and impersonality this gives to the style, claim as if by comparison that we ought to accept the injustice of society as we do the inevitability of death. Empson goes on to deliver his political verdict with a psychological suggestion: Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem, and this seems partly because they feel there is a cheat in the implied politics; the “bourgeois” themselves do not like literature to have too much “bourgeois ideology”. Empson also made remarks reminiscent of Dr Samuel Johnson in their pained insistence: And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society could prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. And anything of value must accept this because it must not prostitute itself; its strength is to be prepared to waste itself, if it does not get its opportunity. A statement of this is certainly non-political because it is true in any society, and yet nearly all the great poetic statements of it are in a way “bourgeois”, like this one; they suggest to readers, though they do not say, that for the poor man things cannot be improved even in degree. Despite the complexity of Empson’s critical methods and attitude, his work, in particular Seven Types of Ambiguity, had a significant impact on the New Criticism, a school of criticism that directed particular attention to close reading of texts, among whose adherents may be numbered F. R. Leavis (whose critical approach was, however, already well developed before Empson appeared on the scene - he had been teaching at Cambridge since 1925), although Empson could scarcely be described as an adherent or exponent of such a school or, indeed, of any critical school at all. Indeed, Empson consistently ridiculed, both outrightly in words and implicitly in practice, the doctrine of the intentional fallacy formulated by William K. Wimsatt, an influential New Critic. Indeed, Empson’s distaste for New Criticism could manifest itself in a distinctively dismissive and brusque wit, as when he described New Criticism (which he ironically labelled “the new rigour”) as a “campaign to make poetry as dull as possible” (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy, p. 122). Similarly, both the title and the content of one of Empson’s volumes of critical papers, Using Biography, show a patent and polemical disregard for the teachings of New Critics as much as for those of Roland Barthes and postmodern literary theories predicated upon, if not merely influenced by, the notion of the Death of the Author, despite the fact that some scholars regard Empson as a progenitor of certain of these currents of criticism, which vexed Empson. As Frank Kermode stated: Now and again somebody like Christopher Norris may, in a pious moment, attempt to “recuperate” a particularly brilliant old-style reputation by claiming its owner as a New New Critic avant la lettre - Empson in this case, now to be thought of as having, in his “great theoretical summa,” The Structure of Complex Words, anticipated deconstruction. The grumpy old man repudiated this notion with his habitual scorn, calling the work of Derrida (or, as he preferred to call him, “Nerrida”) “very disgusting”(Kermode, Pleasure, Change, and the Canon) Milton’s God Empson’s Milton’s God is often described as a sustained attack on Christianity and a defence of Milton’s attempt to “justify the ways of God to man” in Paradise Lost. Empson argues that precisely the inconsistencies and complexities adduced by critics as evidence of the poem’s badness in fact function in quite the opposite manner. What the poem brings out is the difficulty faced by anyone in encountering and submitting to the will of God and, indeed, the great clash between the authority of such a deity and the determinate desires and needs of human beings: the poem is not good in spite of but especially because of its moral confusions, which ought to be clear in your mind when you are feeling its power. I think it horrible and wonderful; I regard it as like Aztec or Benin sculpture, or to come nearer home the novels of Kafka, and am rather suspicious of any critic who claims not to feel anything so obvious. (Milton’s God (1965), p. 13) Empson writes that it is precisely Milton’s great sensitivity and faithfulness to the Scriptures, in spite of their apparent madness, that generates such a controversial picture of God. Empson reckons that it requires a mind of astonishing integrity to, in the words of Blake, be of the Devil’s party without knowing it: [Milton] is struggling to make his God appear less wicked, as he tells us he will at the start (l. 25), and does succeed in making him noticeably less wicked than the traditional Christian one; though, after all, owing to his loyalty to the sacred text and the penetration with which he make its story real to us, his modern critics still feel, in a puzzled way, that there is something badly wrong about it all. That this searching goes on in Paradise Lost, I submit, is the chief source of its fascination and poignancy... (Milton’s God (1965), p. 11) Empson portrays Paradise Lost as the product of a poet of astonishingly powerful and imaginative sensibilities and great intellect who had invested much of himself in the poem. Despite its lack of influence, certain critics view Milton’s God as by far the best sustained work of criticism on the poem by a 20th-century critic. Harold Bloom includes it as one of the few critical works worthy of canonical status in his The Western Canon (where it is also the only critical work concerned solely with a single piece of literature). Verse Empson’s poems are clever, learned, dry, aethereal and technically virtuosic, not wholly dissimilar to his critical work. His high regard for the metaphysical poet John Donne is to be seen in many places within his work, tempered with his appreciation of Buddhist thinking, an occasional tendency to satire and a larger awareness of intellectual trends. He wrote very few poems and stopped publishing poems almost entirely after 1940. His Complete Poems [edited by John Haffenden, his biographer] is 512 pages long, with over 300 pages of notes. In reviewing this work Frank Kermode commended Empson as a “most noteworthy poet” and chose it as International Book of the Year for The Times Literary Supplement. Quotations From “Proletarian Literature” in Some Versions of Pastoral: As for propaganda, some very good work has been that; most authors want their point of view to be convincing. Pope said that even the Aeneid was a “political puff”; its dreamy, impersonal, universal melancholy was a calculated support for Augustus. Of course to decide on an author’s purpose, conscious or unconscious, is very difficult. Good writing is not done unless there are serious forces at work; and it is not permanent unless it works for readers with opinions different from the author’s. On the other hand, the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying; a Tory audience subjected to Tory propaganda of the same intensity would be extremely bored. From “They That Have Power” in Some Versions of Pastoral: (regarding Sonnet 94): If this was Shakespeare’s only surviving work, it would still be clear, supposing one knew about the other Elizabethans, that it involves somehow their feelings about the Machiavellian, the wicked plotter who is exciting and civilized and somehow right about life; which seems an important though rather secret element in the romance that Shakespeare extracted from his patron. ...poets, who tend to make in their lives a situation they have already written about. ...that curious trick of pastoral which for extreme courtly flattery - perhaps to give self-respect to both poet and patron, to show that the poet is not ignorantly easy to impress, nor the patron to flatter - writes about the poorest people; and those jazz songs which give an intense effect of luxury and silk underwear by pretending to be about slaves naked in the fields. The business of interpretation is obviously very complicated. Literary uses of the problem of free-will and necessity, for example, may be noticed to give curiously bad arguments and I should think get their strength from keeping you in doubt between the two methods. Thus Hardy is fond of showing us an unusually stupid person subjected to very unusually bad luck, and then a moral is drawn, not merely by inference but by solemn assertion, that we are all in the same boat as this person whose story is striking precisely because it is unusual. The effect may be very grand, but to make an otherwise logical reader accept the process must depend on giving him obscure reasons for wishing it so. It is clear at any rate that this grand notion of the inadequacy of life, so various in its means of expression, so reliable a bass note in the arts, needs to be counted as a possible territory of the pastoral. From “Milton and Bentley” in Some Versions of Pastoral: Surely Bentley was right to be surprised at finding Faunus haunting the bower [Paradise Lost ll. 705 - 707], a ghost crying in the cold of Paradise, and the lusts of Pan sacred even in comparison to Eden. There is a Vergilian quality in the lines, haunting indeed, a pathos not mentioned because it is the whole of the story. I suppose that in Satan determining to destroy the innocent happiness of Eden, for the highest political motives, without hatred, not without tears, we may find some echo of the Elizabethan fulness of life that Milton as a poet abandoned, and as a Puritan helped to destroy. On Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night from Some Versions of Pastoral: Voyage au Bout de la Nuit... is not to be placed quickly either as pastoral or proletarian; it is partly the 'underdog’ theme and partly social criticism. The two main characters have no voice or trust in their society and no sympathy with those who have; it is this, not cowardice or poverty or low class, which the war drives home to them, and from then on they have a straightforward inferiority complex; the theme becomes their struggle with it as private individuals.... Life may be black and mad in the second half but Bardamu is not, and he gets to the real end of the night as critic and spectator. This change is masked by unity of style and by a humility which will not allow that one can claim to be sane while living as part of such a world, but it is in the second half that we get Bardamu speaking as Celine in criticism of it. What is attacked may perhaps be summed up as the death-wishes generated by the herds of a machine society, and he is not speaking as 'spokesman of the proletariat’ or with any sympathy for a communist one. ...before claiming the book as proletarian literature you have to separate off the author (in the phrase that Radek used) as a man ripe for fascism. From “The Variants for the Byzantium Poems” in Using Biography: ...she appears to end her penultimate chapter ‘Was Yeats a Christian?’ with the sentiment that he must have been pretty Christian if he could stay friends with Ezra Pound. From “Ulysses: Joyce’s Intentions” in Using Biography: When I was young, literary critics often rejoiced that the hypocrisy of the Victorians had been discredited, or expressed confidence that the operation would soon be complete. So far from that, it has returned in a peculiarly stifling form to take possession of critics of Eng. Lit.; Mr Pecksniff has become the patron saint of many of my colleagues. As so often, the deformity is the result of severe pressure between forces in themselves good. The study of English authors of the past is now centred in the universities, and yet there must be no censorship - no work of admitted literary merit may be hidden from the learners. Somehow we must save poor Teacher’s face, and protect him from the indignant or jeering students, local authorities or parents. It thus came to be tacitly agreed that a dead author usually hated what he described, hated it as much as we do, even, and wanted his book to shame everybody out of being so nasty ever again. This is often called fearless or unflinching criticism, and one of its ill effects is to make the young people regard all literature as a terrific nag or scold. Independently of this, a strong drive has been going on to recover the children for orthodox or traditional religious beliefs;... and when you understand all that, you may just be able to understand how they manage to present James Joyce as a man devoted to the God who was satisfied by the crucifixion. The concordat was reached over his dead body. Bibliography * Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) * Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) * The Structure of Complex Words (1951) * Milton’s God (1961) * Using Biography (1985) * Essays on Shakespeare (1986) * Faustus and the Censor (1987) * Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 1, Donne and the New Philosophy (1993) * Essays on Renaissance Literature: Volume 2, The Drama (1994) * Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture (1987) * The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew: Essays, Memoirs and Interviews (1996). * The Complete Poems of William Empson - ed. Haffenden * The Royal Beasts and Other Works - London: Chatto & Windus, 1986. Selected books about Empson * Frank Day, Sir William Empson: An Annotated Bibliography, London: Garland, 1984. ISBN 0-8240-9207-4 * Philip and Averil Gardner, The God Approached: A Commentary on the Poems of William Empson, London: Chatto & Windus, 1978. ISBN 0-7011-2213-7 * John Haffenden, William Empson, Vol. 1: Among the Mandarins, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-927659-5 * John Haffenden, William Empson, Vol. 2: Against the Christians, Oxford University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-19-953992-8 * Christopher Norris and Nigel Mapp, ed., William Empson: The Critical Achievement, Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-35386-6 Notes and references External links * “William Empson’s Fixated Faith”: an article in The Times Literary Supplement by Eric Griffiths, 24 October 2007 * “The Savage Life”: Sir Frank Kermode reviews vol. 1 of John Haffenden’s biography of William Empson from London Review of Books * “Pleasure, Change, and the Canon”: Sir Frank Kermode’s Tanner Lectures on Human Values at The University of Utah References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Empson

Rolando Escardó

Rolando Escardó. Poeta camagüeyano. Fundador en su provincia del Grupo Los Nuevos y del Grupo Yarabey. Se le recuerda además por su vinculación a actividades revolucionarias en la clandestinidad. Nació en Camagüey el 7 de marzo de 1925. Estudió la enseñanza primaria en su ciudad natal, donde transcurrieron sus primeros años de juventud. Su educación fue autodidacta. Trayectoria literaria Fundó en su provincia el Grupo Los Nuevos, que publicó una selección de versos de Martí (1953). En 1958 fundó el Grupo Yarabey. Durante sus prácticas revolucionarias en la clandestinidad, fue perseguido y sufrió prisión. Luego, en 1958, tuvo que abandonar el país y establecerse en Mérida, Yucatán. Después del Triunfo de la Revolución regresó a Cuba y fue designado teniente del Ejército Rebelde. Además, fue jefe de Zona de Desarrollo Agrario y organizó cooperativas de carboneros en la Ciénaga de Zapata. Practicó la espeleología. Poemas suysos aparecen en Ciclón y Lunes de Revolución. Muerte Cuando organizaba el Primer Encuentro Nacional de Poetas en 1960, que debía celebrarse en Camagüey, para recaudar fondos que propiciarían la compra de un avión de combate para defender la Revolución Cubana, un accidente automovilístico terminó con su vida. Con posterioridad a su muerte apareció publicado su poemario Jardín de piedras. Bibliografía activa Jardín de piedras en Islas. Santa Clara, 3 (3): 147-154, may.-ago, 1961). Libro de Rolando. Poesía. Pról. de Virgilio Piñera, La Habana, Eds. R. 1961. Las Ráfagas. (Poemas). Pról. de Samuel Feijóo. Santa Clara, Universidad Central de Las Villas, 1961. Referencias ecured.cu/index.php/Rolando_Escardó

Max Ehrmann

Max Ehrmann (September 26, 1872 – September 9, 1945) was an American writer, poet, and attorney from Terre Haute, Indiana, widely known for his 1927 prose poem "Desiderata" (Latin: "things desired"). He often wrote on spiritual themes. Education Ehrmann was of German descent; both his parents emigrated from Bavaria in the 1840s. Young Ehrmann was educated at the Terre Haute Fourth District School and the German Methodist Church. He received a degree in English from DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, which he attended from 1890 to 1894. While there, he was a member of Delta Tau Delta's Beta Beta chapter and was editor of the school newspaper, Depauw Weekly. Ehrmann then studied philosophy and law at Harvard University, where he was editor of Delta Tau Delta's national magazine The Rainbow, circa 1896. Professional life Ehrmann returned to his hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana in 1898 to practice law. He was a deputy state's attorney in Vigo County, Indiana for two years. Subsequently, he worked in his family's meatpacking business and in the overalls manufacturing industry (Ehrmann Manufacturing Co.) At age 40, Ehrmann left the business to write. At age 54, he wrote Desiderata, which achieved fame only after his death. Legacy Ehrmann was awarded Doctor of Letters honorary degree from DePauw University in about 1937. He was also elected to the Delta Tau Delta Distinguished Service Chapter, the fraternity's highest alumni award. Ehrmann died in 1945. He is buried in Highland Lawn Cemetery in Terre Haute, Indiana. In 2010 the city honored Ehrmann with a life-size bronze statue by sculptor Bill Wolfe. He is depicted sitting on a downtown bench, pen in hand, with a notebook in his lap. "Desiderata" is engraved on a plaque that resides next to the statue and lines from the poem are embedded in the walkway. The sculpture is in the collection of Art Spaces, Inc. – Wabash Valley Outdoor Sculpture Collection. Art Spaces also holds an annual Max Ehrmann Poetry Competition. References Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Ehrmann




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