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George MacDonald

George MacDonald (10 December 1824– 18 September 1905) was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister. He was a pioneering figure in the field of fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll. His writings have been cited as a major literary influence by many notable authors including W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Walter de la Mare, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L’Engle. C. S. Lewis wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his “master”: “Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later,” said Lewis, “I knew that I had crossed a great frontier.” G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Elizabeth Yates wrote of Sir Gibbie, “It moved me the way books did when, as a child, the great gates of literature began to open and first encounters with noble thoughts and utterances were unspeakably thrilling.” Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by MacDonald. Christian author Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) wrote in Christian Disciplines, vol. 1, (pub. 1934) that “it is a striking indication of the trend and shallowness of the modern reading public that George MacDonald’s books have been so neglected”. In addition to his fairy tales, MacDonald wrote several works on Christian apologetics including several that defended his view of Christian Universalism. Early life George MacDonald was born on 10 December 1824 at Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. His father, a farmer, was one of the MacDonalds of Glen Coe, and a direct descendant of one of the families that suffered in the massacre of 1692. The Doric dialect of the Aberdeenshire area appears in the dialogue of some of his non-fantasy novels. MacDonald grew up in the Congregational Church, with an atmosphere of Calvinism. But MacDonald never felt comfortable with some aspects of Calvinist doctrine; indeed, legend has itt that when the doctrine of predestination was first explained to him, he burst into tears (although assured that he was one of the elect). Later novels, such as Robert Falconer and Lilith, show a distaste for the idea that God’s electing love is limited to some and denied to others. MacDonald graduated from the University of Aberdeen, and then went to London, studying at Highbury College for the Congregational ministry. In 1850 he was appointed pastor of Trinity Congregational Church, Arundel, but his sermons (preaching God’s universal love and the possibility that none would, ultimately, fail to unite with God) met with little favour and his salary was cut in half. Later he was engaged in ministerial work in Manchester. He left that because of poor health, and after a short sojourn in Algiers he settled in London and taught for some time at the University of London. MacDonald was also for a time editor of Good Words for the Young, and lectured successfully in the United States during 1872–1873. Work George MacDonald’s best-known works are Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith, all fantasy novels, and fairy tales such as “The Light Princess”, “The Golden Key”, and “The Wise Woman”. “I write, not for children,” he wrote, “but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.” MacDonald also published some volumes of sermons, the pulpit not having proved an unreservedly successful venue. MacDonald also served as a mentor to Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson); it was MacDonald’s advice, and the enthusiastic reception of Alice by MacDonald’s many sons and daughters, that convinced Carroll to submit Alice for publication. Carroll, one of the finest Victorian photographers, also created photographic portraits of several of the MacDonald children. MacDonald was also friends with John Ruskin and served as a go-between in Ruskin’s long courtship with Rose La Touche. MacDonald was acquainted with most of the literary luminaries of the day; a surviving group photograph shows him with Tennyson, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Ruskin, Lewes, and Thackeray. While in America he was a friend of Longfellow and Walt Whitman. In 1877 he was given a civil list pension. From 1879 he and his family moved to Bordighera in a place much loved by British expatriates, the Riviera dei Fiori in Liguria, Italy, almost on the French border. In that locality there also was an Anglican Church, which he attended. Deeply enamoured of the Riviera, he spent there 20 years, writing almost half of his whole literary production, especially the fantasy work. In that Ligurian town MacDonald founded a literary studio named Casa Coraggio (Bravery House), which soon became one of the most renowned cultural centres of that period, well attended by British and Italian travellers, and by locals. In that house representations were often held of classic plays, and readings were given of Dante and Shakespeare. In 1900 he moved into St George’s Wood, Haslemere, a house designed for him by his son, Robert Falconer MacDonald, and the building overseen by his eldest son, Greville MacDonald. He died on 18 September 1905 in Ashtead, (Surrey). He was cremated and his ashes buried in Bordighera, in the English cemetery, along with his wife Louisa and daughters Lilia and Grace. As hinted above, MacDonald’s use of fantasy as a literary medium for exploring the human condition greatly influenced a generation of such notable authors as C. S. Lewis (who featured him as a character in his The Great Divorce), J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. MacDonald’s non-fantasy novels, such as Alec Forbes, had their influence as well; they were among the first realistic Scottish novels, and as such MacDonald has been credited with founding the “kailyard school” of Scottish writing. His son Greville MacDonald became a noted medical specialist, a pioneer of the Peasant Arts movement, and also wrote numerous fairy tales for children. Greville ensured that new editions of his father’s works were published. Another son, Ronald MacDonald, was also a novelist. Ronald’s son, Philip MacDonald, (George MacDonald’s grandson) became a very well known Hollywood screenwriter. Theology MacDonald rejected the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as developed by John Calvin, which argues that Christ has taken the place of sinners and is punished by the wrath of God in their place, believing that in turn it raised serious questions about the character and nature of God. Instead, he taught that Christ had come to save people from their sins, and not from a Divine penalty for their sins. The problem was not the need to appease a wrathful God but the disease of cosmic evil itself. George MacDonald frequently described the Atonement in terms similar to the Christus Victor theory. MacDonald posed the rhetorical question, “Did he not foil and slay evil by letting all the waves and billows of its horrid sea break upon him, go over him, and die without rebound—spend their rage, fall defeated, and cease? Verily, he made atonement!” MacDonald was convinced that God does not punish except to amend, and that the sole end of His greatest anger is the amelioration of the guilty. As the doctor uses fire and steel in certain deep-seated diseases, so God may use hell-fire if necessary to heal the hardened sinner. MacDonald declared, “I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.” MacDonald posed the rhetorical question, “When we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of Him is groundless?” He replied, “No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more.... The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear.” However, true repentance, in the sense of freely chosen moral growth, is essential to this process, and, in MacDonald’s optimistic view, inevitable for all beings (see universal reconciliation). He recognised the theoretical possibility that, bathed in the eschatological divine light, some might perceive right and wrong for what they are but still refuse to be transfigured by operation of God’s fires of love, but he did not think this likely. In this theology of divine punishment, MacDonald stands in opposition to Augustine of Hippo, and in agreement with the Greek Church Fathers Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and St. Gregory of Nyssa, although it is unknown whether MacDonald had a working familiarity with Patristics or Eastern Orthodox Christianity. At least an indirect influence is likely, because F. D. Maurice, who influenced MacDonald, knew the Greek Fathers, especially Clement, very well. MacDonald states his theological views most distinctly in the sermon Justice found in the third volume of Unspoken Sermons. In his introduction to George MacDonald: An Anthology, C. S. Lewis speaks highly of MacDonald’s theology: “This collection, as I have said, was designed not to revive MacDonald’s literary reputation but to spread his religious teaching. Hence most of my extracts are taken from the three volumes of Unspoken Sermons. My own debt to this book is almost as great as one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help—sometimes indispensable help toward the very acceptance of the Christian faith. ... I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.... In making this collection I was discharging a debt of justice. I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation. Honesty drives me to emphasize it.” Bibliography Fantasy * Phantastes: A Fairie Romance for Men and Women (1858) * “Cross Purposes” (1862) * Adela Cathcart (1864), containing “The Light Princess”, “The Shadows”, and other short stories * The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders, Commonly Called “The Second Sight” (1864) * Dealings with the Fairies (1867), containing “The Golden Key”, “The Light Princess”, “The Shadows”, and other short stories * At the Back of the North Wind (1871) * Works of Fancy and Imagination (1871), including Within and Without, “Cross Purposes”, “The Light Princess”, “The Golden Key”, and other works * The Princess and the Goblin (1872) * The Wise Woman: A Parable (1875) (Published also as “The Lost Princess: A Double Story”; or as “A Double Story”.) * The Gifts of the Child Christ and Other Tales (1882; republished as Stephen Archer and Other Tales) * The Day Boy and the Night Girl (1882) * The Princess and Curdie (1883), a sequel to The Princess and the Goblin * The Flight of the Shadow (1891) * Lilith: A Romance (1895) Realistic fiction * David Elginbrod (1863; republished as The Tutor’s First Love), originally published in three volumes * Alec Forbes of Howglen (1865; republished as The Maiden’s Bequest) * Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood (1867) * Guild Court: A London Story (1868) * Robert Falconer (1868; republished as The Musician’s Quest) * The Seaboard Parish (1869), a sequel to Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood * Ranald Bannerman’s Boyhood (1871) * Wilfrid Cumbermede (1871–72) * The Vicar’s Daughter (1871–72), a sequel to Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood and The Seaboard Parish * The History of Gutta Percha Willie, the Working Genius (1873), usually called simply Gutta Percha Willie * Malcolm (1875) * St. George and St. Michael (1876) * Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876; republished as The Curate’s Awakening) * The Marquis of Lossie (1877; republished as The Marquis’ Secret), the second book of Malcolm * Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879; republished as The Lady’s Confession), a sequel to Thomas Wingfold, Curate * Sir Gibbie (1879; republished as The Baronet’s Song) * Mary Marston (1881; republished as A Daughter’s Devotion) * Warlock o’ Glenwarlock (1881; republished as Castle Warlock and The Laird’s Inheritance) * Weighed and Wanting (1882; republished as A Gentlewoman’s Choice) * Donal Grant (1883; republished as The Shepherd’s Castle), a sequel to Sir Gibbie * What’s Mine’s Mine (1886; republished as The Highlander’s Last Song) * Home Again: A Tale (1887; republished as The Poet’s Homecoming) * The Elect Lady (1888; republished as The Landlady’s Master) * A Rough Shaking (1891) * There and Back (1891; republished as The Baron’s Apprenticeship), a sequel to Thomas Wingfold, Curate and Paul Faber, Surgeon * Heather and Snow (1893; republished as The Peasant Girl’s Dream) * Salted with Fire (1896; republished as The Minister’s Restoration) * Far Above Rubies (1898) Poetry * Twelve of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis (1851), privately printed translation of the poetry of Novalis * Within and Without: A Dramatic Poem (1855) * Poems (1857) * “A Hidden Life” and Other Poems (1864) * “The Disciple” and Other Poems (1867) * Exotics: A Translation of the Spiritual Songs of Novalis, the Hymn-book of Luther, and Other Poems from the German and Italian (1876) * Dramatic and Miscellaneous Poems (1876) * Diary of an Old Soul (1880) * A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880), privately printed * The Threefold Cord: Poems by Three Friends (1883), privately printed, with Greville Matheson and John Hill MacDonald * Poems (1887) * The Poetical Works of George MacDonald, 2 Volumes (1893) * Scotch Songs and Ballads (1893) * Rampolli: Growths from a Long-planted Root (1897) Nonfiction * Unspoken Sermons (1867) * England’s Antiphon (1868, 1874) * The Miracles of Our Lord (1870) * Cheerful Words from the Writing of George MacDonald (1880), compiled by E. E. Brown * Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare (1882) * “Preface” (1884) to Letters from Hell (1866) by Valdemar Adolph Thisted * The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke: A Study With the Test of the Folio of 1623 (1885) * Unspoken Sermons, Second Series (1885) * Unspoken Sermons, Third Series (1889) * A Cabinet of Gems, Cut and Polished by Sir Philip Sidney; Now, for the More Radiance, Presented Without Their Setting by George MacDonald (1891) * The Hope of the Gospel (1892) * A Dish of Orts (1893) * Beautiful Thoughts from George MacDonald (1894), compiled by Elizabeth Dougall In popular culture * (Alphabetical by artist) * Christian celtic punk band Ballydowse have a song called “George MacDonald” on their album Out of the Fertile Crescent. The song is both taken from MacDonald’s poem “My Two Geniuses” and liberally quoted from Phantastes. * American classical composer John Craton has utilized several of MacDonald’s stories in his works, including “The Gray Wolf” (in a tone poem of the same name for solo mandolin– 2006) and portions of “The Cruel Painter”, Lilith, and The Light Princess (in Three Tableaux from George MacDonald for mandolin, recorder, and cello– 2011). * Contemporary new-age musician Jeff Johnson wrote a song titled “The Golden Key” based on George MacDonald’s story of the same name. He has also written several other songs inspired by MacDonald and the Inklings. * Jazz pianist and recording artist Ray Lyon has a song on his CD Beginning to See (2007), called “Up The Spiral Stairs”, which features lyrics from MacDonald’s 26 and 27 September devotional readings from the book Diary of an Old Soul. * A verse from The Light Princess is cited in the “Beauty and the Beast” song by Nightwish. * Rock group The Waterboys titled their album Room to Roam (1990) after a passage in MacDonald’s Phantastes, also found in Lilith. The title track of the album comprises a MacDonald poem from the text of Phantastes set to music by the band. The novels Lilith and Phantastes are both named as books in a library, in the title track of another Waterboys album, Universal Hall (2003). (The Waterboys have also quoted from C. S. Lewis in several songs, including “Church Not Made With Hands” and “Further Up, Further In”, confirming the enduring link in modern pop culture between MacDonald and Lewis.) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_MacDonald

A. A. Milne

Alan Alexander “A. A.” Milne (/ˈmɪln/; 18 January 1882– 31 January 1956) was an English author, best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh and for various poems. Milne was a noted writer, primarily as a playwright, before the huge success of Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, joining the British Army in World War I, and was a captain of the British Home Guard in World War II. Biography Alan Alexander Milne was born in Kilburn, London to parents John Vince Milne, who was Scottish, and Sarah Marie Milne (née Heginbotham) and grew up at Henley House School, 6/7 Mortimer Road (now Crescent), Kilburn, a small public school run by his father. One of his teachers was H. G. Wells, who taught there in 1889–90. Milne attended Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied on a mathematics scholarship, graduating with a B.A. in Mathematics in 1903. While there, he edited and wrote for Granta, a student magazine. He collaborated with his brother Kenneth and their articles appeared over the initials AKM. Milne’s work came to the attention of the leading British humour magazine Punch, where Milne was to become a contributor and later an assistant editor. Milne played for the amateur English cricket team the Allahakbarries alongside authors J. M. Barrie and Arthur Conan Doyle. Milne joined the British Army in World War I and served as an officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment and later, after a debilitating illness, the Royal Corps of Signals. He was commissioned into the 4th Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment on 17 February 1915 as a second lieutenant (on probation). His commission was confirmed on 20 December 1915. On 7 July 1916, he was injured while serving in the Battle of the Somme and invalided back to England. Having recuperated, he was recruited into Military Intelligence to write propaganda articles for MI 7b between 1916 and 1918. He was discharged on 14 February 1919, and settled in Mallord Street, Chelsea. He relinquished his commission on 19 February 1920, retaining the rank of lieutenant. After the war, he wrote a denunciation of war titled Peace with Honour (1934), which he retracted somewhat with 1940's War with Honour. During World War II, Milne was one of the most prominent critics of fellow English writer P. G. Wodehouse, who was captured at his country home in France by the Nazis and imprisoned for a year. Wodehouse made radio broadcasts about his internment, which were broadcast from Berlin. Although the light-hearted broadcasts made fun of the Germans, Milne accused Wodehouse of committing an act of near treason by cooperating with his country’s enemy. Wodehouse got some revenge on his former friend (e.g., in The Mating Season) by creating fatuous parodies of the Christopher Robin poems in some of his later stories, and claiming that Milne “was probably jealous of all other writers.... But I loved his stuff.” Milne married Dorothy “Daphne” de Sélincourt in 1913 and their son Christopher Robin Milne was born in 1920. In 1925, A. A. Milne bought a country home, Cotchford Farm, in Hartfield, East Sussex. During World War II, A. A. Milne was Captain of the British Home Guard in Hartfield & Forest Row, insisting on being plain “Mr. Milne” to the members of his platoon. He retired to the farm after a stroke and brain surgery in 1952 left him an invalid, and by August 1953 “he seemed very old and disenchanted”. Milne died in January 1956, aged 74. Literary career 1903 to 1925 After graduating from Cambridge in 1903, A. A. Milne contributed humorous verse and whimsical essays to Punch, joining the staff in 1906 and becoming an assistant editor. During this period he published 18 plays and 3 novels, including the murder mystery The Red House Mystery (1922). His son was born in August 1920 and in 1924 Milne produced a collection of children’s poems When We Were Very Young, which were illustrated by Punch staff cartoonist E. H. Shepard. A collection of short stories for children Gallery of Children, and other stories that became part of the Winnie-the-Pooh books, were first published in 1925. Milne was an early screenwriter for the nascent British film industry, writing four stories filmed in 1920 for the company Minerva Films (founded in 1920 by the actor Leslie Howard and his friend and story editor Adrian Brunel). These were The Bump, starring Aubrey Smith; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms. Some of these films survive in the archives of the British Film Institute. Milne had met Howard when the actor starred in Milne’s play Mr Pim Passes By in London. Looking back on this period (in 1926), Milne observed that when he told his agent that he was going to write a detective story, he was told that what the country wanted from a “Punch humorist” was a humorous story; when two years later he said he was writing nursery rhymes, his agent and publisher were convinced he should write another detective story; and after another two years, he was being told that writing a detective story would be in the worst of taste given the demand for children’s books. He concluded that “the only excuse which I have yet discovered for writing anything is that I want to write it; and I should be as proud to be delivered of a Telephone Directory con amore as I should be ashamed to create a Blank Verse Tragedy at the bidding of others.” 1926 to 1928 Milne is most famous for his two Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin after his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and various characters inspired by his son’s stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh. Christopher Robin Milne’s stuffed bear, originally named “Edward”, was renamed “Winnie-the-Pooh” after a Canadian black bear named Winnie (after Winnipeg), which was used as a military mascot in World War I, and left to London Zoo during the war. “The pooh” comes from a swan called “Pooh”. E. H. Shepard illustrated the original Pooh books, using his own son’s teddy, Growler ("a magnificent bear"), as the model. The rest of Christopher Robin Milne’s toys, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger, were incorporated into A. A. Milne’s stories, and two more characters– Rabbit and Owl– were created by Milne’s imagination. Christopher Robin Milne’s own toys are now under glass in New York where 750,000 people visit them every year. The fictional Hundred Acre Wood of the Pooh stories derives from Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, South East England, where the Pooh stories were set. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest at Cotchford Farm, 51.090°N 0.107°E / 51.090; 0.107, and took his son walking there. E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books. The adult Christopher Robin commented: “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical”. Popular tourist locations at Ashdown Forest include: Galleon’s Lap, The Enchanted Place, the Heffalump Trap and Lone Pine, Eeyore’s Sad and Gloomy Place, and the wooden Pooh Bridge where Pooh and Piglet invented Poohsticks. Not yet known as Pooh, he made his first appearance in a poem, “Teddy Bear”, published in Punch magazine in February 1924. Pooh first appeared in the London Evening News on Christmas Eve, 1925, in a story called “The Wrong Sort Of Bees”. Winnie-the-Pooh was published in 1926, followed by The House at Pooh Corner in 1928. A second collection of nursery rhymes, Now We Are Six, was published in 1927. All three books were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. Milne also published four plays in this period. He also “gallantly stepped forward” to contribute a quarter of the costs of dramatising P. G. Wodehouse’s A Damsel in Distress. The World of Pooh won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1958. 1929 onwards The success of his children’s books was to become a source of considerable annoyance to Milne, whose self-avowed aim was to write whatever he pleased and who had, until then, found a ready audience for each change of direction: he had freed pre-war Punch from its ponderous facetiousness; he had made a considerable reputation as a playwright (like his idol J. M. Barrie) on both sides of the Atlantic; he had produced a witty piece of detective writing in The Red House Mystery (although this was severely criticised by Raymond Chandler for the implausibility of its plot). But once Milne had, in his own words, "said goodbye to all that in 70,000 words" (the approximate length of his four principal children’s books), he had no intention of producing any reworkings lacking in originality, given that one of the sources of inspiration, his son, was growing older. In his literary home, Punch, where the When We Were Very Young verses had first appeared, Methuen continued to publish whatever Milne wrote, including the long poem “The Norman Church” and an assembly of articles entitled Year In, Year Out (which Milne likened to a benefit night for the author). In 1930, Milne adapted Kenneth Grahame’s novel The Wind in the Willows for the stage as Toad of Toad Hall. The title was an implicit admission that such chapters as Chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, could not survive translation to the theatre. A special introduction written by Milne is included in some editions of Grahame’s novel. Legacy and commemoration The rights to A. A. Milne’s Pooh books were left to four beneficiaries: his family, the Royal Literary Fund, Westminster School and the Garrick Club. After Milne’s death in 1956, one week and six days after his 74th birthday, his widow sold her rights to the Pooh characters to Stephen Slesinger, whose widow sold the rights after Slesinger’s death to the Walt Disney Company, which has made many Pooh cartoon movies, a Disney Channel television show, as well as Pooh-related merchandise. In 2001, the other beneficiaries sold their interest in the estate to the Disney Corporation for $350m. Previously Disney had been paying twice-yearly royalties to these beneficiaries. The estate of E. H. Shepard also received a sum in the deal. The copyright on Pooh expires in 2026. In 2008, a collection of original illustrations featuring Winnie-the-Pooh and his animal friends sold for more than £1.2 million at auction in Sotheby’s, London. Forbes magazine ranked Winnie the Pooh the most valuable fictional character in 2002; Winnie the Pooh merchandising products alone had annual sales of more than $5.9 billion. In 2005, Winnie the Pooh generated $6 billion, a figure surpassed by only Mickey Mouse. A memorial plaque in Ashdown Forest, unveiled by Christopher Robin in 1979, commemorates the work of A. A. Milne and Shepard in creating the world of Pooh. Milne once wrote of Ashdown Forest: “In that enchanted place on the top of the forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing”. In 2003, Winnie the Pooh was listed at number 7 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read. In 2006, Winnie the Pooh received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, marking the 80th birthday of Milne’s creation. That same year a UK poll saw Winnie the Pooh voted onto the list of icons of England. Several of Milne’s children’s poems were set to music by the composer Harold Fraser-Simson. His poems have been parodied many times, including with the books When We Were Rather Older and Now We Are Sixty. The 1963 film The King’s Breakfast was based on Milne’s poem of the same name. Religious views Milne did not speak out much on the subject of religion, although he used religious terms to explain his decision, while remaining a pacifist, to join the British Home Guard: “In fighting Hitler”, he wrote, “we are truly fighting the Devil, the Anti-Christ... Hitler was a crusader against God.” His best known comment on the subject was recalled on his death: The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course. He also wrote the poem “Explained”: Works Novels * Lovers in London (1905. Some consider this more of a short story collection; Milne did not like it and considered The Day’s Play as his first book.) * Once on a Time (1917) * Mr. Pim (1921) (A novelisation of his play Mr. Pim Passes By (1919)) * The Red House Mystery (1922) * Two People (1931) (Inside jacket claims this is Milne’s first attempt at a novel.) * Four Days’ Wonder (1933) * Chloe Marr (1946) Non-fiction * Peace With Honour (1934) * It’s Too Late Now: The Autobiography of a Writer (1939) * War With Honour (1940) * War Aims Unlimited (1941) * Year In, Year Out (1952) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) Punch articles * The Day’s Play (1910) * Once A Week (1914) * The Holiday Round (1912) * The Sunny Side (1921) * Those Were the Days (1929) [The four volumes above, compiled] Newspaper articles and book introductions * The Chronicles of Clovis by “Saki” (1911) [Introduction to] * Not That It Matters (1920) * By Way of Introduction (1929) Story collections for children * A Gallery of Children (1925) * Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) (illustrated by Ernest H. Shepard) * The House at Pooh Corner (1928) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) * Short Stories Poetry collections for children * When We Were Very Young (1924) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) * Now We Are Six (1927) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) Story collections * The Secret and other stories (1929) * The Birthday Party (1948) * A Table Near the Band (1950) Poetry * For the Luncheon Interval [poems from Punch] * When We Were Very Young (1924) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) * Now We Are Six (1927) (illustrated by E. H. Shepard) * Behind the Lines (1940) * The Norman Church (1948) * “The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak” Screenplays and plays * Wurzel-Flummery (1917) * Belinda (1918) * The Boy Comes Home (1918) * Make-Believe (1918) (children’s play) * The Camberley Triangle (1919) * Mr. Pim Passes By (1919) * The Red Feathers (1920) * The Bump (1920, Minerva Films), starring Aubrey Smith * Twice Two (1920, Minerva Films) * Five Pound Reward (1920, Minerva Films) * Bookworms (1920, Minerva Films) * The Great Broxopp (1921) * The Dover Road (1921) * The Lucky One (1922) * The Truth About Blayds (1922) * The Artist: A Duologue (1923) * Give Me Yesterday (1923) (a.k.a. Success in the UK) * Ariadne (1924) * The Man in the Bowler Hat: A Terribly Exciting Affair (1924) * To Have the Honour (1924) * Portrait of a Gentleman in Slippers (1926) * Success (1926) * Miss Marlow at Play (1927) * The Fourth Wall or The Perfect Alibi (1928) (later adapted for the film Birds of Prey (1930), directed by Basil Dean) * The Ivory Door (1929) * Toad of Toad Hall (1929) (adaptation of The Wind in the Willows) * Michael and Mary (1930) * Other People’s Lives (1933) (a.k.a. They Don’t Mean Any Harm) * Miss Elizabeth Bennet (1936) [based on Pride and Prejudice] * Sarah Simple (1937) * Gentleman Unknown (1938) * The General Takes Off His Helmet (1939) in The Queen’s Book of the Red Cross * The Ugly Duckling (1941) * Before the Flood (1951). References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._A._Milne

Thomas Moore

William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served as a Senator of the Irish Free State for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland and educated there and in London. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Biography Early years William Butler Yeats was born at Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland. His father, John Butler Yeats (1839–1922), was a descendant of Jervis Yeats, a Williamite soldier, linen merchant, and well-known painter who died in 1712. Benjamin Yeats, Jervis’s grandson and William’s great-great-grandfather, had in 1773 married Mary Butler of a landed family in County Kildare. Following their marriage, they kept the name Butler. Mary was of the Butler of Neigham (pronounced Nyam) Gowran family, descended from an illegitimate brother of the 8th Earl of Ormond.By his marriage, William’s father John Yeats was studying law but abandoned his studies to study art at Heatherley School of Fine Art in London. His mother, Susan Mary Pollexfen, came from a wealthy merchant family in Sligo, who owned a milling and shipping business. Soon after William’s birth the family relocated to the Pollexfen home at Merville, Sligo to stay with her extended family, and the young poet came to think of the area as his childhood and spiritual home. Its landscape became, over time, both literally and symbolically, his “country of the heart”. So also did its location on the sea; John Yeats stated that “by marriage with a Pollexfen, we have given a tongue to the sea cliffs”. The Butler Yeats family were highly artistic; his brother Jack became an esteemed painter, while his sisters Elizabeth and Susan Mary—known to family and friends as Lollie and Lily—became involved in the Arts and Crafts movement.Yeats was raised a member of the Protestant Ascendancy, which was at the time undergoing a crisis of identity. While his family was broadly supportive of the changes Ireland was experiencing, the nationalist revival of the late 19th century directly disadvantaged his heritage, and informed his outlook for the remainder of his life. In 1997, his biographer R. F. Foster observed that Napoleon’s dictum that to understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty “is manifestly true of W.B.Y.” Yeats’s childhood and young adulthood were shadowed by the power-shift away from the minority Protestant Ascendancy. The 1880s saw the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement; the 1890s saw the momentum of nationalism, while the Catholics became prominent around the turn of the century. These developments had a profound effect on his poetry, and his subsequent explorations of Irish identity had a significant influence on the creation of his country’s biography.In 1867, the family moved to England to aid their father, John, to further his career as an artist. At first the Yeats children were educated at home. Their mother entertained them with stories and Irish folktales. John provided an erratic education in geography and chemistry, and took William on natural history explorations of the nearby Slough countryside. On 26 January 1877, the young poet entered the Godolphin school, which he attended for four years. He did not distinguish himself academically, and an early school report describes his performance as “only fair. Perhaps better in Latin than in any other subject. Very poor in spelling”. Though he had difficulty with mathematics and languages (possibly because he was tone deaf), he was fascinated by biology and zoology. In 1879 the family moved to Bedford Park taking a two-year lease on 8 Woodstock Road. For financial reasons, the family returned to Dublin toward the end of 1880, living at first in the suburbs of Harold’s Cross and later Howth. In October 1881, Yeats resumed his education at Dublin’s Erasmus Smith High School. His father’s studio was nearby and William spent a great deal of time there, where he met many of the city’s artists and writers. During this period he started writing poetry, and, in 1885, the Dublin University Review published Yeats’s first poems, as well as an essay entitled “The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson”. Between 1884 and 1886, William attended the Metropolitan School of Art—now the National College of Art and Design—in Thomas Street. In March 1888 the family moved to 3 Blenheim Road in Bedford Park. The rent on the house was £50 a year.He began writing his first works when he was seventeen; these included a poem—heavily influenced by Percy Bysshe Shelley—that describes a magician who set up a throne in central Asia. Other pieces from this period include a draft of a play about a bishop, a monk, and a woman accused of paganism by local shepherds, as well as love-poems and narrative lyrics on German knights. The early works were both conventional and, according to the critic Charles Johnston, “utterly unIrish”, seeming to come out of a “vast murmurous gloom of dreams”. Although Yeats’s early works drew heavily on Shelley, Edmund Spenser, and on the diction and colouring of pre-Raphaelite verse, he soon turned to Irish mythology and folklore and the writings of William Blake. In later life, Yeats paid tribute to Blake by describing him as one of the “great artificers of God who uttered great truths to a little clan”. In 1891, Yeats published John Sherman and “Dhoya”, one a novella, the other a story. The influence of Oscar Wilde is evident in Yeats’s theory of aesthetics, especially in his stage plays, and runs like a motif through his early works. The theory of masks, developed by Wilde in his polemic The Decay of Lying can clearly be seen in Yeats’s play The Player Queen, while the more sensual characterisation of Salomé, in Wildes play of the same name, provides the template for the changes Yeats made in his later plays, especially in On Baile’s Strand (1904), Deirdre (1907), and his dance play The King of the Great Clock Tower (1934). Young poet The family returned to London in 1887. In March 1890 Yeats joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and with Ernest Rhys co-founded the Rhymers’ Club, a group of London-based poets who met regularly in a Fleet Street tavern to recite their verse. Yeats later sought to mythologize the collective, calling it the “Tragic Generation” in his autobiography, and published two anthologies of the Rhymers’ work, the first one in 1892 and the second one in 1894. He collaborated with Edwin Ellis on the first complete edition of William Blake’s works, in the process rediscovering a forgotten poem, “Vala, or, the Four Zoas”.Yeats had a lifelong interest in mysticism, spiritualism, occultism and astrology. He read extensively on the subjects throughout his life, became a member of the paranormal research organisation “The Ghost Club” (in 1911) and was especially influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. As early as 1892, he wrote: “If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book, nor would The Countess Kathleen ever have come to exist. The mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.” His mystical interests—also inspired by a study of Hinduism, under the Theosophist Mohini Chatterjee, and the occult—formed much of the basis of his late poetry. Some critics disparaged this aspect of Yeats’s work.His first significant poem was “The Island of Statues”, a fantasy work that took Edmund Spenser and Shelley for its poetic models. The piece was serialized in the Dublin University Review. Yeats wished to include it in his first collection, but it was deemed too long, and in fact was never republished in his lifetime. Quinx Books published the poem in complete form for the first time in 2014. His first solo publication was the pamphlet Mosada: A Dramatic Poem (1886), which comprised a print run of 100 copies paid for by his father. This was followed by the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), which arranged a series of verse that dated as far back as the mid-1880s. The long title poem contains, in the words of his biographer R. F. Foster, "obscure Gaelic names, striking repetitions [and] an unremitting rhythm subtly varied as the poem proceeded through its three sections"; “The Wanderings of Oisin” is based on the lyrics of the Fenian Cycle of Irish mythology and displays the influence of both Sir Samuel Ferguson and the Pre-Raphaelite poets. The poem took two years to complete and was one of the few works from this period that he did not disown in his maturity. Oisin introduces what was to become one of his most important themes: the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action. Following the work, Yeats never again attempted another long poem. His other early poems, which are meditations on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects, include Poems (1895), The Secret Rose (1897), and The Wind Among the Reeds (1899). The covers of these volumes were illustrated by Yeats’s friend Althea Gyles.During 1885, Yeats was involved in the formation of the Dublin Hermetic Order. The society held its first meeting on 16 June, with Yeats acting as its chairman. The same year, the Dublin Theosophical lodge was opened in conjunction with Brahmin Mohini Chatterjee, who travelled from the Theosophical Society in London to lecture. Yeats attended his first séance the following year. He later became heavily involved with the Theosophy and with hermeticism, particularly with the eclectic Rosicrucianism of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. During séances held from 1912, a spirit calling itself “Leo Africanus” apparently claimed it was Yeats’s Daemon or anti-self, inspiring some of the speculations in Per Amica Silentia Lunae. He was admitted into the Golden Dawn in March 1890 and took the magical motto Daemon est Deus inversus—translated as 'Devil is God inverted’. He was an active recruiter for the sect’s Isis-Urania Temple, and brought in his uncle George Pollexfen, Maud Gonne, and Florence Farr. Although he reserved a distaste for abstract and dogmatic religions founded around personality cults, he was attracted to the type of people he met at the Golden Dawn. He was involved in the Order’s power struggles, both with Farr and Macgregor Mathers, and was involved when Mathers sent Aleister Crowley to repossess Golden Dawn paraphernalia during the “Battle of Blythe Road”. After the Golden Dawn ceased and splintered into various offshoots, Yeats remained with the Stella Matutina until 1921. Maud Gonne In 1889, Yeats met Maud Gonne, a 23-year-old English heiress and ardent Irish Nationalist. She was eighteen months younger than Yeats and later claimed she met the poet as a “paint-stained art student.” Gonne admired “The Island of Statues” and sought out his acquaintance. Yeats began an obsessive infatuation, and she had a significant and lasting effect on his poetry and his life thereafter. In later years he admitted, "it seems to me that she [Gonne] brought into my life those days—for as yet I saw only what lay upon the surface—the middle of the tint, a sound as of a Burmese gong, an over-powering tumult that had yet many pleasant secondary notes." Yeats’s love was unrequited, in part due to his reluctance to participate in her nationalist activism.In 1891 he visited Gonne in Ireland and proposed marriage, but was rejected. He later admitted that from that point “the troubling of my life began”. Yeats proposed to Gonne three more times: in 1899, 1900 and 1901. She refused each proposal, and in 1903, to his dismay, married the Irish nationalist Major John MacBride. His only other love affair during this period was with Olivia Shakespear, whom he first met in 1894, and parted from in 1897. Yeats derided MacBride in letters and in poetry. He was horrified by Gonne’s marriage, at losing his muse to another man; in addition, her conversion to Catholicism before marriage offended him; Yeats was Protestant/agnostic. He worried his muse would come under the influence of the priests and do their bidding.Gonne’s marriage to MacBride was a disaster. This pleased Yeats, as Gonne began to visit him in London. After the birth of her son, Seán MacBride, in 1904, Gonne and MacBride agreed to end the marriage, although they were unable to agree on the child’s welfare. Despite the use of intermediaries, a divorce case ensued in Paris in 1905. Gonne made a series of allegations against her husband with Yeats as her main 'second’, though he did not attend court or travel to France. A divorce was not granted, for the only accusation that held up in court was that MacBride had been drunk once during the marriage. A separation was granted, with Gonne having custody of the baby and MacBride having visiting rights. Yeats’s friendship with Gonne ended, yet, in Paris in 1908, they finally consummated their relationship. “The long years of fidelity rewarded at last” was how another of his lovers described the event. Yeats was less sentimental and later remarked that “the tragedy of sexual intercourse is the perpetual virginity of the soul.” The relationship did not develop into a new phase after their night together, and soon afterwards Gonne wrote to the poet indicating that despite the physical consummation, they could not continue as they had been: “I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you and dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed and I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too.” By January 1909, Gonne was sending Yeats letters praising the advantage given to artists who abstain from sex. Nearly twenty years later, Yeats recalled the night with Gonne in his poem “A Man Young and Old”: In 1896, Yeats was introduced to Lady Gregory by their mutual friend Edward Martyn. Gregory encouraged Yeats’s nationalism, and convinced him to continue focusing on writing drama. Although he was influenced by French Symbolism, Yeats concentrated on an identifiably Irish content and this inclination was reinforced by his involvement with a new generation of younger and emerging Irish authors. Together with Lady Gregory, Martyn, and other writers including J. M. Synge, Seán O’Casey, and Padraic Colum, Yeats was one of those responsible for the establishment of the “Irish Literary Revival” movement. Apart from these creative writers, much of the impetus for the Revival came from the work of scholarly translators who were aiding in the discovery of both the ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose Love Songs of Connacht was widely admired. Abbey Theatre In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore began the Irish Literary Theatre to present Irish plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager à l’anglais." The group’s manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared, "We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted & imaginative audience trained to listen by its passion for oratory... & that freedom to experiment which is not found in the theatres of England, & without which no new movement in art or literature can succeed."The collective survived for about two years but was not successful. Working with two Irish brothers with theatrical experience, William and Frank Fay, Yeats’s unpaid yet independently wealthy secretary Annie Horniman, and the leading West End actress Florence Farr, the group established the Irish National Theatre Society. Along with Synge, they acquired property in Dublin and on 27 December 1904 opened the Abbey Theatre. Yeats’s play Cathleen ni Houlihan and Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News were featured on the opening night. Yeats remained involved with the Abbey until his death, both as a member of the board and a prolific playwright. In 1902, he helped set up the Dun Emer Press to publish work by writers associated with the Revival. This became the Cuala Press in 1904, and inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement, sought to “find work for Irish hands in the making of beautiful things.” From then until its closure in 1946, the press—which was run by the poet’s sisters—produced over 70 titles; 48 of them books by Yeats himself. Yeats met the American poet Ezra Pound in 1909. Pound had travelled to London at least partly to meet the older man, whom he considered “the only poet worthy of serious study.” From that year until 1916, the two men wintered in the Stone Cottage at Ashdown Forest, with Pound nominally acting as Yeats’s secretary. The relationship got off to a rocky start when Pound arranged for the publication in the magazine Poetry of some of Yeats’s verse with Pound’s own unauthorised alterations. These changes reflected Pound’s distaste for Victorian prosody. A more indirect influence was the scholarship on Japanese Noh plays that Pound had obtained from Ernest Fenollosa’s widow, which provided Yeats with a model for the aristocratic drama he intended to write. The first of his plays modelled on Noh was At the Hawk’s Well, the first draft of which he dictated to Pound in January 1916.The emergence of a nationalist revolutionary movement from the ranks of the mostly Roman Catholic lower-middle and working class made Yeats reassess some of his attitudes. In the refrain of "Easter, 1916" ("All changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born"), Yeats faces his own failure to recognise the merits of the leaders of the Easter Rising, due to his attitude towards their ordinary backgrounds and lives.Yeats was close to Lady Gregory and her home place of Coole Park, Co, Galway. He would often visit and stay there as it was a central meeting place for people who supported the resurgence of Irish literature and cultural traditions. His poem, “The Wild Swans at Coole” was written there, between 1916 and 1917. He wrote prefaces for two books of Irish mythological tales, compiled by Augusta, Lady Gregory: Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902), and Gods and Fighting Men (1904). In the preface of the later he wrote: “One must not expect in these stories the epic lineaments, the many incidents, woven into one great event of, let us say the War for the Brown Bull of Cuailgne, or that of the last gathering at Muirthemne.” Politics Yeats was an Irish Nationalist, who sought a kind of traditional lifestyle articulated through poems such as 'The Fisherman’. However, as his life progressed, he sheltered much of his revolutionary spirit and distanced himself from the intense political landscape until 1922, when he was appointed Senator for the Irish Free State.In the earlier part of his life, Yeats was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Due to the escalating tension of the political scene, Yeats distanced himself from the core political activism in the midst of the Easter Rising, even holding back his poetry inspired by the events until 1920. In the 1930s Yeats was fascinated with the authoritarian, anti-democratic, nationalist movements of Europe, and he composed several marching songs for the right-wing Blueshirts, although they were never used. He was a fierce opponent of individualism and political liberalism, and saw the fascist movements as a triumph of public order and the needs of the national collective over petty individualism. On the other hand, he was also an elitist who abhorred the idea of mob-rule, and saw democracy as a threat to good governance and public order. After the Blueshirt movement began to falter in Ireland, he distanced himself somewhat from his previous views, but maintained a preference for authoritarian and nationalist leadership. D. P. Moran called him a minor poet and “crypto-Protestant conman.” Marriage to Georgie Hyde Lees By 1916, Yeats was 51 years old and determined to marry and produce an heir. His rival John MacBride had been executed for his role in the 1916 Easter Rising, so Yeats hoped that his widow might remarry. His final proposal to Maud Gonne took place in mid-1916. Gonne’s history of revolutionary political activism, as well as a series of personal catastrophes in the previous few years of her life—including chloroform addiction and her troubled marriage to MacBride—made her a potentially unsuitable wife; biographer R. F. Foster has observed that Yeats’s last offer was motivated more by a sense of duty than by a genuine desire to marry her. Yeats proposed in an indifferent manner, with conditions attached, and he both expected and hoped she would turn him down. According to Foster “when he duly asked Maud to marry him, and was duly refused, his thoughts shifted with surprising speed to her daughter.” Iseult Gonne was Maud’s second child with Lucien Millevoye, and at the time was twenty-one years old. She had lived a sad life to this point; conceived as an attempt to reincarnate her short-lived brother, for the first few years of her life she was presented as her mother’s adopted niece. When Maud told her that she was going to marry, Iseult cried and told her mother that she hated MacBride. When Gonne took action to divorce MacBride in 1905, the court heard allegations that he had sexually assaulted Iseult, then eleven. At fifteen, she proposed to Yeats. In 1917, he proposed to Iseult, but was rejected. That September, Yeats proposed to 25-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees (1892–1968), known as George, whom he had met through Olivia Shakespear. Despite warnings from her friends—"George... you can’t. He must be dead"—Hyde-Lees accepted, and the two were married on 20 October. Their marriage was a success, in spite of the age difference, and in spite of Yeats’s feelings of remorse and regret during their honeymoon. The couple went on to have two children, Anne and Michael. Although in later years he had romantic relationships with other women, Georgie herself wrote to her husband “When you are dead, people will talk about your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, for I will remember how proud you were.”During the first years of marriage, they experimented with automatic writing; she contacted a variety of spirits and guides they called “Instructors” while in a trance. The spirits communicated a complex and esoteric system of philosophy and history, which the couple developed into an exposition using geometrical shapes: phases, cones, and gyres. Yeats devoted much time to preparing this material for publication as A Vision (1925). In 1924, he wrote to his publisher T. Werner Laurie, admitting: “I dare say I delude myself in thinking this book my book of books”. Nobel Prize In December 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation”. He was aware of the symbolic value of an Irish winner so soon after Ireland had gained independence, and sought to highlight the fact at each available opportunity. His reply to many of the letters of congratulations sent to him contained the words: “I consider that this honour has come to me less as an individual than as a representative of Irish literature, it is part of Europe’s welcome to the Free State.”Yeats used the occasion of his acceptance lecture at the Royal Academy of Sweden to present himself as a standard-bearer of Irish nationalism and Irish cultural independence. As he remarked, “The theatres of Dublin were empty buildings hired by the English traveling companies, and we wanted Irish plays and Irish players. When we thought of these plays we thought of everything that was romantic and poetical, because the nationalism we had called up—the nationalism every generation had called up in moments of discouragement—was romantic and poetical.” The prize led to a significant increase in the sales of his books, as his publishers Macmillan sought to capitalise on the publicity. For the first time he had money, and he was able to repay not only his own debts, but those of his father. Old age and death By early 1925, Yeats’s health had stabilised, and he had completed most of the writing for A Vision (dated 1925, it actually appeared in January 1926, when he almost immediately started rewriting it for a second version). He had been appointed to the first Irish Senate in 1922, and was re-appointed for a second term in 1925. Early in his tenure, a debate on divorce arose, and Yeats viewed the issue as primarily a confrontation between the emerging Roman Catholic ethos and the Protestant minority. When the Roman Catholic Church weighed in with a blanket refusal to consider their anti position, The Irish Times countered that a measure to outlaw divorce would alienate Protestants and “crystallise” the partition of Ireland. In response, Yeats delivered a series of speeches that attacked the “quixotically impressive” ambitions of the government and clergy, likening their campaign tactics to those of “medieval Spain.” “Marriage is not to us a Sacrament, but, upon the other hand, the love of a man and woman, and the inseparable physical desire, are sacred. This conviction has come to us through ancient philosophy and modern literature, and it seems to us a most sacrilegious thing to persuade two people who hate each other... to live together, and it is to us no remedy to permit them to part if neither can re-marry.” The resulting debate has been described as one of Yeats’s “supreme public moments”, and began his ideological move away from pluralism towards religious confrontation. His language became more forceful; the Jesuit Father Peter Finlay was described by Yeats as a man of “monstrous discourtesy”, and he lamented that, “It is one of the glories of the Church in which I was born that we have put our Bishops in their place in discussions requiring legislation”. During his time in the Senate, Yeats further warned his colleagues: “If you show that this country, southern Ireland, is going to be governed by Roman Catholic ideas and by Catholic ideas alone, you will never get the North... You will put a wedge in the midst of this nation”. He memorably said of his fellow Irish Protestants, “we are no petty people”. In 1924, he chaired a coinage committee charged with selecting a set of designs for the first currency of the Irish Free State. Aware of the symbolic power latent in the imagery of a young state’s currency, he sought a form that was “elegant, racy of the soil, and utterly unpolitical”. When the house finally decided on the artwork of Percy Metcalfe, Yeats was pleased, though he regretted that compromise had led to “lost muscular tension” in the finally depicted images. He retired from the Senate in 1928 because of ill health. Towards the end of his life—and especially after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and Great Depression, which led some to question whether democracy could cope with deep economic difficulty—Yeats seems to have returned to his aristocratic sympathies. During the aftermath of the First World War, he became sceptical about the efficacy of democratic government, and anticipated political reconstruction in Europe through totalitarian rule. His later association with Pound drew him towards Benito Mussolini, for whom he expressed admiration on a number of occasions. He wrote three “marching songs”—never used—for the Irish General Eoin O’Duffy’s Blueshirts. At the age of 69 he was 'rejuvenated’ by the Steinach operation which was performed on 6 April 1934 by Norman Haire. For the last five years of his life Yeats found a new vigour evident from both his poetry and his intimate relations with younger women. During this time, Yeats was involved in a number of romantic affairs with, among others, the poet and actress Margot Ruddock, and the novelist, journalist and sexual radical Ethel Mannin. As in his earlier life, Yeats found erotic adventure conducive to his creative energy, and, despite age and ill-health, he remained a prolific writer. In a letter of 1935, Yeats noted: “I find my present weakness made worse by the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination. If I write poetry it will be unlike anything I have done”. In 1936, he undertook editorship of the Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935.He died at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour, in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939, aged 73. He was buried after a discreet and private funeral at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. Attempts had been made at Roquebrune to dissuade the family from proceeding with the removal of the remains to Ireland due to the uncertainty of their identity. His body had earlier been exhumed and transferred to the ossuary. Yeats and George had often discussed his death, and his express wish was that he be buried quickly in France with a minimum of fuss. According to George, "His actual words were 'If I die bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’." In September 1948, Yeats’s body was moved to the churchyard of St Columba’s Church, Drumcliff, County Sligo, on the Irish Naval Service corvette LÉ Macha. The person in charge of this operation for the Irish Government was Seán MacBride, son of Maud Gonne MacBride, and then Minister of External Affairs. His epitaph is taken from the last lines of “Under Ben Bulben”, one of his final poems: French ambassador Stanislas Ostroróg was involved in returning the remains of the Irish poet from France to Ireland in 1948; in a letter to the European director of the Foreign Ministry in Paris “Ostrorog tells how Yeats’s son Michael sought official help in locating the poet’s remains. Neither Michael Yeats nor Sean MacBride, the Irish foreign minister who organised the ceremony, wanted to know the details of how the remains were collected, Ostrorog notes. He repeatedly urges caution and discretion and says the Irish ambassador in Paris should not be informed.” Yeats’ body was exhumed in 1946 and the remains were moved to on ossuary and mixed with other remains. The French Foreign Ministry authorized Ostrorog to secretly cover the cost of repatriation from his slush fund. Authorities were worried about the fact that the much-loved poet’s remains were thrown into a communal grave, causing embarrassment for both Ireland and France. “Mr Rebouillat, (a) forensic doctor in Roquebrune would be able to reconstitute a skeleton presenting all the characteristics of the deceased.” per a letter from Ostroróg to his superiors. Style Yeats is generally considered one of the twentieth century key English language poets. He was a Symbolist poet, using allusive imagery and symbolic structures throughout his career. He chose words and assembled them so that, in addition to a particular meaning, they suggest abstract thoughts that may seem more significant and resonant. His use of symbols is usually something physical that is both itself and a suggestion of other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities. Unlike other modernists who experimented with free verse, Yeats was a master of the traditional forms. The impact of modernism on his work can be seen in the increasing abandonment of the more conventionally poetic diction of his early work in favour of the more austere language and more direct approach to his themes that increasingly characterises the poetry and plays of his middle period, comprising the volumes In the Seven Woods, Responsibilities and The Green Helmet. His later poetry and plays are written in a more personal vein, and the works written in the last twenty years of his life include mention of his son and daughter, as well as meditations on the experience of growing old. In his poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, he describes the inspiration for these late works: During 1929, he stayed at Thoor Ballylee near Gort in County Galway (where Yeats had his summer home since 1919) for the last time. Much of the remainder of his life was lived outside Ireland, although he did lease Riversdale house in the Dublin suburb of Rathfarnham in 1932. He wrote prolifically through his final years, and published poetry, plays, and prose. In 1938, he attended the Abbey for the final time to see the premiere of his play Purgatory. His Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats was published that same year. In 1913, Yeats wrote the preface for the English translation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offering) for which Tagore received Nobel Prize in literature. While Yeats’s early poetry drew heavily on Irish myth and folklore, his later work was engaged with more contemporary issues, and his style underwent a dramatic transformation. His work can be divided into three general periods. The early poems are lushly pre-Raphaelite in tone, self-consciously ornate, and, at times, according to unsympathetic critics, stilted. Yeats began by writing epic poems such as The Isle of Statues and The Wanderings of Oisin. His other early poems are lyrics on the themes of love or mystical and esoteric subjects. Yeats’s middle period saw him abandon the pre-Raphaelite character of his early work and attempt to turn himself into a Landor-style social ironist.Critics who admire his middle work might characterize it as supple and muscular in its rhythms and sometimes harshly modernist, while others find these poems barren and weak in imaginative power. Yeats’s later work found new imaginative inspiration in the mystical system he began to work out for himself under the influence of spiritualism. In many ways, this poetry is a return to the vision of his earlier work. The opposition between the worldly minded man of the sword and the spiritually minded man of God, the theme of The Wanderings of Oisin, is reproduced in A Dialogue Between Self and Soul.Some critics claim that Yeats spanned the transition from the nineteenth century into twentieth-century modernism in poetry much as Pablo Picasso did in painting while others question whether late Yeats has much in common with modernists of the Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot variety.Modernists read the well-known poem “The Second Coming” as a dirge for the decline of European civilisation, but it also expresses Yeats’s apocalyptic mystical theories, and is shaped by the 1890s. His most important collections of poetry started with The Green Helmet (1910) and Responsibilities (1914). In imagery, Yeats’s poetry became sparer and more powerful as he grew older. The Tower (1928), The Winding Stair (1933), and New Poems (1938) contained some of the most potent images in twentieth-century poetry.Yeats’s mystical inclinations, informed by Hinduism, theosophical beliefs and the occult, provided much of the basis of his late poetry, which some critics have judged as lacking in intellectual credibility. The metaphysics of Yeats’s late works must be read in relation to his system of esoteric fundamentals in A Vision (1925). Legacy Yeats is commemorated in Sligo town by a statue, created in 1989 by sculptor Ronan Gillespie. It was erected outside the Ulster Bank, at the corner of Stephen Street and Markievicz Road, on the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. Yeats had remarked, on receiving his Nobel Prize that the Royal Palace in Stockholm “resembled the Ulster Bank in Sligo”. Across the river is the Yeats Memorial Building, home to the Sligo Yeats Society. References Wikipedia—yeats

George Meredith

George Meredith, OM (12 February 1828 – 18 May 1909) was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two years. He read law and was articled as a solicitor, but abandoned that profession for journalism and poetry. He collaborated with Edward Gryffydh Peacock, son of Thomas Love Peacock in publishing a privately circulated literary magazine, the Monthly Observer. He married Edward Peacock's widowed sister Mary Ellen Nicolls in 1849 when he was twenty-one years old and she was twenty-eight. He collected his early writings, first published in periodicals, into Poems, published to some acclaim in 1851. His wife ran off with the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Henry Wallis [1830–1916] in 1858; she died three years later. The collection of "sonnets" entitled Modern Love (1862) came of this experience as did The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, his first "major novel". He married Marie Vulliamy in 1864 and settled in Surrey. He continued writing novels and poetry, often inspired by nature. His writing was characterised by a fascination with imagery and indirect references. He had a keen understanding of comedy and his Essay on Comedy (1877) is still quoted in most discussions of the history of comic theory. In The Egoist, published in 1879, he applies some of his theories of comedy in one of his most enduring novels. Some of his writings, including The Egoist, also highlight the subjugation of women during the Victorian period. During most of his career, he had difficulty achieving popular success. His first truly successful novel was Diana of the Crossways published in 1885. Meredith supplemented his often uncertain writer's income with a job as a publisher's reader. His advice to Chapman and Hall made him influential in the world of letters. His friends in the literary world included, at different times, William and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Leslie Stephen, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Gissing and J. M. Barrie. His contemporary Sir Arthur Conan Doyle paid him homage in the short-story The Boscombe Valley Mystery, when Sherlock Holmes says to Dr. Watson during the discussion of the case, "And now let us talk about George Meredith, if you please, and we shall leave all minor matters until to-morrow." Oscar Wilde, in his dialogue The Decay of Lying, implies that Meredith, along with Balzac, is his favourite novelist, saying "Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning". In 1868 he was introduced to Thomas Hardy by Frederick Chapman of Chapman & Hall the publishers. Hardy had submitted his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady. Meredith advised Hardy not to publish his book as it would be attacked by reviewers and destroy his hopes of becoming a novelist. Meredith felt the book was too bitter a satire on the rich and counselled Hardy to put it aside and write another 'with a purely artistic purpose' and more of a plot. Meredith spoke from experience; his first big novel, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, was judged so shocking that Mudie's circulating library had cancelled an order of 300 copies. Hardy continued to try and publish the novel: however it remained unpublished, though he clearly took Meredith's advice seriously. Before his death, Meredith was honoured from many quarters: he succeeded Lord Tennyson as president of the Society of Authors; in 1905 he was appointed to the Order of Merit by King Edward VII. In 1909, he died at his home in Box Hill, Surrey. Works Essays * Essay on Comedy (1877) Novels * The Shaving of Shagpat (1856) * Farina (1857) * The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) * Evan Harrington (1861) * Emilia in England (1864), republished as Sandra Belloni in 1887 * Rhoda Fleming (1865) * Vittoria (1867) * The Adventures of Harry Richmond (1871) * Beauchamp's Career (1875) * The House on the Beach (1877) * The Case of General Ople and Lady Camper (1877) * The Tale of Chloe (1879) * The Egoist (1879) * The Tragic Comedians (1880) * Diana of the Crossways (1885) * One of our Conquerors (1891) * Lord Ormont and his Aminta (1894) * The Amazing Marriage (1895) * Celt and Saxon (1910) Poetry * Poems (1851) * Modern Love (1862) * Poems and Lyrics of the Joy of Earth (1883) * The Woods of Westermain (1883) * A Faith on Trial (1885) * Ballads and Poems of Tragic Life (1887) * A Reading of Earth (1888) * The Empty Purse (1892) * Odes in Contribution to the Song of French History(1898) * A Reading of Life (1901) * Last Poems (1909) * Lucifer in Starlight * The Lark Ascending (the inspiration for Vaughan Williams' instrumental work The Lark Ascending). References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Meredith

Edgar Lee Masters

Edgar Lee Masters (August 23, 1868– March 5, 1950) was an American attorney, poet, biographer, and dramatist. He is the author of Spoon River Anthology, The New Star Chamber and Other Essays, Songs and Satires, The Great Valley, The Serpent in the Wilderness An Obscure Tale, The Spleen, Mark Twain: A Portrait, Lincoln: The Man, and Illinois Poems. In all, Masters published twelve plays, twenty-one books of poetry, six novels and six biographies, including those of Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Vachel Lindsay, and Walt Whitman. Life and career Born in Garnett, Kansas to attorney Hardin Wallace Masters and Emma J. Dexter, his father had briefly moved to set up a law practice, then soon moved back to his paternal grandparents’ farm near Petersburg in Menard County, Illinois. In 1880 they moved to Lewistown, Illinois, where he attended high school and had his first publication in the Chicago Daily News. The culture around Lewistown, in addition to the town’s cemetery at Oak Hill, and the nearby Spoon River were the inspirations for many of his works, most notably Spoon River Anthology, his most famous and acclaimed work. He attended Knox Academy in 1889–90, a now defunct preparatory program run by Knox College, but was forced to leave due to his family’s inability to finance his education. After working in his father’s law office, he was admitted to the Illinois bar and moved to Chicago, where he established a law partnership in 1893 with the law firm of Kickham Scanlan. He married twice. In 1898 he married Helen M. Jenkins, the daughter of Robert Edwin Jenkins, a lawyer in Chicago, and had three children. During his law partnership with Clarence Darrow from 1903 to 1908, Masters defended the poor. In 1911 he started his own law firm, despite three years of unrest (1908–11) caused by extramarital affairs and an argument with Darrow. Two of his children followed him with literary careers. His daughter Marcia pursued poetry, while his son Hilary Masters became a novelist. Hilary and his half-brother Hardin wrote a memoir of their father. Masters died at a nursing home on March 5, 1950, in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, age 81. He is buried in Oakland cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois. His epitaph includes his poem, “To-morrow is My Birthday” from Toward the Gulf (1918): Good friends, let’s to the fields…After a little walk and by your pardon, I think I’ll sleep, there is no sweeter thing.Nor fate more blessed than to sleep. I am a dream out of a blessed sleep-Let’s walk, and hear the lark. Family history Edgar’s father was Hardin Wallace Masters, whose father was Squire Davis Masters, whose father was Thomas Masters, whose father was Hillery Masters, the son of Robert Masters (born c. 1715, Prince George’s County, Maryland, the son of William W. Masters and wife Mary Veatch Masters). Edgar Lee Masters wrote in his autobiography, Across Spoon River (1936), that his ancestor Hillery Masters was the son of “Knotteley” Masters, but family genealogies show that Hillery and Notley Masters were, in fact, brothers. Poetry Masters first published his early poems and essays under the pseudonym Dexter Wallace (after his mother’s maiden name and his father’s middle name) until the year 1903, when he joined the law firm of Clarence Darrow. Masters began developing as a notable American poet in 1914, when he began a series of poems (this time under the pseudonym Webster Ford) about his childhood experiences in Western Illinois, which appeared in Reedy’s Mirror, a St. Louis publication. In 1915 the series was bound into a volume and re-titled Spoon River Anthology. Years later, he wrote a memorable and invaluable account of the book’s background and genesis, his working methods and influences, as well as its reception by the critics, favorable and hostile, in an autobiographical article notable for its human warmth and general interest. Although he never matched the success of his Spoon River Anthology, he did publish several other volumes of poems including Book of Verses in 1898, Songs and Sonnets in 1910, The Great Valley in 1916, Song and Satires in 1916, The Open Sea in 1921, The New Spoon River in 1924, Lee in 1926, Jack Kelso in 1928, Lichee Nuts in 1930, Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma in 1930, Godbey, sequel to Jack Kelso in 1931, The Serpent in the Wilderness in 1933, Richmond in 1934, Invisible Landscapes in 1935, The Golden Fleece of California in 1936, Poems of People in 1936, The New World in 1937, More People in 1939, Illinois Poems in 1941, and Along the Illinois in 1942. Lincoln: the Man In 1931 Masters published the biography Lincoln: the Man, which demythologizes Abraham Lincoln, portraying him as a tool of bankers wanting a new Bank of the United States, “that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and keep their adherence to the government”, and advocates “a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone”. He claimed the Whig Party led by Lincoln’s mentor Henry Clay “had no platform to announce because its principles were plunder and nothing else.” Quotations from the book: “The political history of America has been written for the most part by those who were unfriendly to the theory of a confederated republic, or who did not understand it. It has been written by devotees of the protective principle [tariff], by centralists, and to a large degree by New England.” “For in six weeks he was to inaugurate a war without the American people having anything to say about it. He was to call for and send troops into the South, and thus stir that psychology of hate and fear from which a people cannot extricate themselves, though knowing and saying that the war was started by usurpation. Did he mean that he would bow to the American people when the law was laid down by their courts, through which alone the law be interpreted as the Constitutional voice of the people? No, he did not mean that; because when Taney decided that Lincoln had no power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, Lincoln flouted and trampled the decision of the court.” “The War between the States demonstrated that salvation is not of the Jews, but of the Greeks. The World War added to this proof; for Wilson did many things that Lincoln did, and with Lincoln as authority for doing them. Perhaps it will happen again that a few men, deciding what is a cause of war, and what is necessary to its successful prosecution, may, as Lincoln and Wilson did, seal the lips of discussion and shackle the press; but no less the ideal of a just state, which has founded itself in reason and in free speech, will remain.” Notable works Poetry * A Book of Verses (1898) * Songs and Sonnets (1910) * Spoon River Anthology (1915) * Songs and Satires (1916) * Fiddler Jones (1916) * The Great Valley (New York: Macmillan Co., 1916) * Toward the Gulf (New York: Macmillan Co., 1918) * Starved Rock (New York: Macmillan Co., 1919) * Jack Kelso: A Dramatic Poem (1920) * Domesday Book (New York: Macmillan Co., 1920) * The Open Sea (New York: Macmillan Co., 1921) * The New Spoon River (New York: Macmillan Co., 1924) * Selected Poems (1925) * Lichee-Nut Poems (American Mercury, Jan. 1925) * Lee: A Dramatic Poem (1926) * Godbey: A Dramatic Poem (1931), sequel to Jack Kelso (1920) * The Serpent in the Wilderness (1933) * Richmond: A Dramatic Poem (1934) * Invisible Landscapes (1935) * Poems of People (1936) * The Golden Fleece of California (1936) (poetic narrative) * The New World (1937) * More People (1939) * Illinois Poems (1941) * Along the Illinois (1942) * Silence (1946) * George Gray * Many Soldiers * The Unknown Biographies * Children of the Market Place: A Fictitious Autobiography (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922). Life of Stephen Douglas. * Levy Mayer and the New Industrial Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927). Chicago attorney Levy Mayer (1858-1922). * Lincoln: The Man (1931) * Vachel Lindsay: A Poet in America (1935) * Across Spoon River: An Autobiography (memoir) (1936) * Whitman (1937) * Mark Twain: A Portrait (1938) Books * The New Star Chamber and Other Essays (1904) * The Blood of the Prophets (1905) (play) * Althea (1907) (play) * The Trifler (1908) (play) * Mitch Miller (novel) (1920) * Skeeters Kirby (novel) (1923) * The Nuptial Flight (novel) (1923) * Kit O’Brien (novel) (1927) * The Fate of the Jury: An Epilogue to Domesday Book (1929) * Gettysburg, Manila, Acoma: Three Plays (1930) * The Tale of Chicago (1933) * The Tide of Time (novel) (1937) * The Sangamon (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1942, 1988) Awards & honors Masters was awarded the Mark Twain Silver Medal in 1936, the Poetry Society of America medal in 1941, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1942, and the Shelly Memorial Award in 1944. In 2014, he was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Lee_Masters

James McIntyre

James McIntyre (baptised 25 May 1828– 31 March 1906), called The Cheese Poet, was a Canadian poet. McIntyre was born in Forres, Scotland and came to Canada in 1841 at the age of 14. He worked as a hired hand to begin with, performing pioneer chores that formed the basis of a number of his works. Later, he settled in St. Catharines, Ontario, where he dealt in furniture. There he married and had a daughter and son. He later moved to Ingersoll, Ontario, then a town of 5,000 on the banks of the Thames in Oxford County, the heart of Canadian dairy country at the time. He opened a furniture factory on the river as well as a store which sold furniture, along with such items as pianos and coffins. He was well loved in the community, from which he often received aid in hard times, due in part to his poesy and oratorical skills—he was called on to speak at every kind of social gathering in Ingersoll. The region seems to have inspired him, and it was in celebration of the proud history of Canada, the natural beauty and industry of the region, and especially (as noted above) its cheese, that the majority of his oeuvre was written. The ancient poets ne’er did dream That Canada was land of cream, They ne’er imagined it could flow In this cold land of ice and snow, Where everything did solid freeze They ne’er hoped or looked for cheese. from “Oxford Cheese Ode” [1] McIntyre was uninhibited by minor shortcomings—such as his lack of literary skills. The Toronto Globe ran his pieces as comic relief, and the New York Tribune expressed amusement, but their mockery did not dampen his enthusiasm. He is assumed to have continued writing until his death, in 1906. He published two volumes of poetry: Musings on the Canadian Thames (1884); Poems of James McIntyre (1889). McIntyre was forgotten after his death for a number of years, until his work was rediscovered and reprinted by William Arthur Deacon—literary editor of the Toronto Mail and Empire and its successor the Globe and Mail—in his book The Four Jameses (1927). In recent years a volume of his work, Oh! Queen of Cheese: Selections from James McIntyre, the Cheese Poet (ed. Roy A Abramson; Toronto: Cherry Tree, 1979) collected his poems together with a variety of cheese recipes and anecdotes. However, the greatest boost to his fame probably came from a number of his poems being anthologized in the collection Very Bad Poetry, edited by Ross and Kathryn Petras (Vintage, 1997). This included his masterpiece and possibly best-known poem, "Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing Over 7,000 Pounds," written about an actual cheese produced in Ingersoll in 1866 and sent to exhibitions in Toronto, New York, and Britain: We have seen thee, Queen of Cheese, Lying quietly at your ease, Gently fanned by evening breeze; Thy fair form no flies dare seize. All gaily dressed, soon you’ll go To the provincial show, To be admired by many a beau In the city of Toronto. from “Ode on the Mammoth Cheese” [2] An annual poetry contest is held in Ingersoll, Ontario, to honour McIntyre. The contest is sponsored by The Ingersoll Times and the Corporation of the Town of Ingersoll, and includes a cheese-themed poetry competition. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McIntyre_(poet)

William Topaz McGonagall

William Topaz McGonagall (March 1825 – 29 September 1902) was a Scottish weaver, doggerel poet and actor. He won notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work. He wrote about 200 poems, including his notorious "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitations from his work and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his verse remain popular, with several volumes available today. McGonagall has been acclaimed as the worst poet in British history. The chief criticisms are that he is deaf to poetic metaphor and unable to scan correctly. McGonagall's fame stems from the humorous effects these shortcomings generate in his work. The inappropriate rhythms, weak vocabulary, and ill-advised imagery combine to make his work amongst the most unintentionally amusing dramatic poetry in the English language. His work is in a long tradition of narrative ballads and verse written and published about great events and tragedies, and widely circulated among the local population as handbills. In an age before radio and television, their voice was one way of communicating important news to an avid public. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_McGonagall

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery OBE (November 30, 1874– April 24, 1942), publicly known as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. The book was an immediate success. The central character, Anne Shirley, an orphaned girl, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. Most of the novels were set in Prince Edward Island, and locations within Canada’s smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site—namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park. She was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935. Montgomery’s work, diaries and letters have been read and studied by scholars and readers worldwide. Early life Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) in Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Her mother Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery died of tuberculosis when Maud was 21 months old. Stricken with grief over his wife’s death, Hugh John Montgomery gave custody to Montgomery’s maternal grandparents. Later he moved to Prince Albert, North-West Territories (now Prince Albert, Saskatchewan) when Montgomery was seven. She went to live with her maternal grandparents, Alexander Marquis Macneill and Lucy Woolner Macneill, in the nearby community of Cavendish and was raised by them in a strict and unforgiving manner. Montgomery’s early life in Cavendish was very lonely. Despite having relatives nearby, much of her childhood was spent alone. Montgomery credits this time of her life, in which she created many imaginary friends and worlds to cope with her loneliness, with developing her creativity. Montgomery completed her early education in Cavendish with the exception of one year (1890–1891) during which time she was in Prince Albert with her father and her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae. In November 1890, while in Prince Albert, Montgomery’s first work, a poem entitled “On Cape LeForce,” was published in the Charlottetown paper, The Daily Patriot. She was as excited about this as she was about her return to her beloved Prince Edward Island in 1891. The return to Cavendish was a great relief to her. Her time in Prince Albert was unhappy, for she did not get along with her stepmother and because by, “... Maud’s account, her father’s marriage was not a happy one.” In 1893, following the completion of her grade school education in Cavendish, she attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, and obtained a teacher’s license. She completed the two-year program in one year. In 1895 and 1896, she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Writing career, romantic interests, and family life Published books and suitors Upon leaving Dalhousie, Montgomery worked as a teacher in various Prince Edward Island schools. Though she did not enjoy teaching, it afforded her time to write. Beginning in 1897, she began to have her short stories published in magazines and newspapers. Montgomery was prolific and had over 100 stories published from 1897 to 1907. During her teaching years, Montgomery had numerous love interests. As a highly fashionable young woman, she enjoyed “slim, good looks” and won the attention of several young men. In 1889, at 14, Montgomery began a relationship with a Cavendish boy named Nate Lockhart. To Montgomery, the relationship was merely a humorous and witty friendship. It ended abruptly when Montgomery refused his marriage proposal. The early 1890s brought unwelcome advances from John A. Mustard and Will Pritchard. Mustard, her teacher, quickly became her suitor; he tried to impress her with his knowledge of religious matters. His best topics of conversation were his thoughts on Predestination and “other dry points of theology”, which held little appeal for Montgomery. During the period when Mustard’s interest became more pronounced, Montgomery found a new interest in Will Pritchard, the brother of her friend Laura Pritchard. This friendship was more amiable but, again, he felt more for Montgomery than she did for him. When Pritchard sought to take their friendship further, Montgomery resisted. Montgomery refused both marriage proposals; the former was too narrow-minded, and the latter was merely a good chum. She ended the period of flirtation when she moved to Prince Edward Island. However, she and Pritchard did continue to correspond for over six years, until Pritchard caught influenza and died in 1897. In 1897, Montgomery accepted the proposal of Edwin Simpson, who was a student in French River near Cavendish. Montgomery wrote that she accepted his proposal out of a desire for “love and protection” and because she felt her prospects were rather low. While teaching in Lower Bedeque, she had a brief but passionate romantic attachment to Herman Leard, a member of the family with which she boarded. In 1898, after much unhappiness and disillusionment, Montgomery broke off her engagement to Simpson. Montgomery no longer sought romantic love. In 1898, Montgomery moved back to Cavendish to live with her widowed grandmother. For a nine-month period between 1901 and 1902, she worked in Halifax as a substitute proofreader for the newspapers Morning Chronicle and The Daily Echo. Montgomery was inspired to write her first books during this time on Prince Edward Island. Until her grandmother’s death in March 1911, Montgomery stayed in Cavendish to take care of her. This coincided with a period of considerable income from her publications. Although she enjoyed this income, she was aware that “marriage was a necessary choice for women in Canada.” Marriage and family In 1908, Montgomery published her first book, Anne of Green Gables. An immediate success, it established Montgomery’s career, and she would write and publish material (Including numerous sequels to Anne) continuously for the rest of her life. Shortly after her grandmother’s death in 1911, she married Ewen (spelled in her notes and letters as “Ewan”) Macdonald (1870–1943), a Presbyterian minister, and they moved to Ontario where he had taken the position of minister of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church, Leaskdale in present-day Uxbridge Township, also affiliated with the congregation in nearby Zephyr. Montgomery wrote her next eleven books from the Leaskdale manse. The structure was subsequently sold by the congregation and is now the Lucy Maud Montgomery Leaskdale Manse Museum. The Macdonalds had three sons; the second was stillborn. The great increase of Montgomery’s writings in Leaskdale is the result of her need to escape the hardships of real life. Montgomery underwent several periods of depression while trying to cope with the duties of motherhood and church life and with her husband’s attacks of religious melancholia (endogenous major depressive disorder) and deteriorating health: "For a woman who had given the world so much joy, [life] was mostly an unhappy one." For much of her life, writing was her one great solace. Also, during this time, Montgomery was engaged in a series of "acrimonious, expensive, and trying lawsuits with the publisher L.C. Page, that dragged on until she finally won in 1929.” Montgomery stopped writing about Anne in about 1920, writing in her journal that she had tired of the character. She preferred instead to create books about other young, female characters, feeling that her strength was writing about characters who were either very young or very old. Other series written by Montgomery include the “Emily” and “Pat” books, which, while successful, did not reach the same level of public acceptance as the “Anne” volumes. She also wrote a number of stand-alone novels, which were also generally successful, if not as successful as her Anne books. Later life In 1926, the family moved into the Norval Presbyterian Charge, in present-day Halton Hills, Ontario, where today the Lucy Maud Montgomery Memorial Garden can be seen from Highway 7. In 1935, upon her husband’s retirement, Montgomery moved to Swansea, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, buying a house which she named Journey’s End, situated on Riverside Drive along the east bank of the Humber River. Montgomery continued to write, and (in addition to writing other material) returned to writing about Anne after a 15-year hiatus, filling in previously unexplored gaps in the chronology she had developed for the character. She published Anne of Windy Poplars in 1936 and Anne of Ingleside in 1939. Jane of Lantern Hill, a non-Anne novel, was also composed around this time and published in 1937. In the last year of her life, Montgomery completed what she intended to be a ninth book featuring Anne, titled The Blythes Are Quoted. It included fifteen short stories (many of which were previously published) that she revised to include Anne and her family as mainly peripheral characters; forty-one poems (most of which were previously published) that she attributed to Anne and to her son Walter, who died as a soldier in the Great War; and vignettes featuring the Blythe family members discussing the poems. The book was delivered to Montgomery’s publisher on the day of her death, but for reasons unexplained, the publisher declined to issue the book at the time. Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre speculates that the book’s dark tone and anti-war message (Anne speaks very bitterly of WWI in one passage) may have made the volume unsuitable to publish in the midst of the second world war. An abridged version of this book, which shortened and reorganized the stories and omitted all the vignettes and all but one of the poems, was published as a collection of short stories called The Road to Yesterday in 1974, more than 30 years after the original work had been submitted. A complete edition of The Blythes Are Quoted, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, was finally published in its entirety by Viking Canada in October 2009, more than 67 years after it was composed. Death Montgomery died on April 24, 1942. A note was found beside her bed, reading, in part, “I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.” Montgomery died from coronary thrombosis in Toronto. However, it was revealed by her granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, in September 2008 that Montgomery suffered from depression– possibly as a result of caring for her mentally ill husband for decades– and may have taken her own life via a drug overdose. But, there is another point of view. According to Mary Rubio, who wrote a biography of Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (2008), the message may have been intended to be a journal entry as part of a journal that can no longer be found, rather than a simple suicide note. During her lifetime, Montgomery published 20 novels, over 500 short stories, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. Aware of her fame, by 1920 Montgomery began editing and recopying her journals, presenting her life as she wanted it remembered. In doing so certain episodes were changed or omitted. She was buried at the Cavendish Community Cemetery in Cavendish following her wake in the Green Gables farmhouse and funeral in the local Presbyterian church. Legacy Collections The L. M. Montgomery Institute, founded in 1993, at the University of Prince Edward Island, promotes scholarly inquiry into the life, works, culture, and influence of L. M. Montgomery and coordinates most of the research and conferences surrounding her work. The Montgomery Institute collection consists of novels, manuscripts, texts, letters, photographs, sound recordings and artifacts and other Montgomery ephemera. Her major collections are archived at the University of Guelph. The first biography of Montgomery was The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery (1975), written by Mollie Gillen. Dr. Gillen also discovered over 40 of Montgomery’s letters to her pen-friend George Boyd MacMillan in Scotland and used them as the basis for her work. Beginning in the 1980s, her complete journals, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, were published by the Oxford University Press. From 1988–95, editor Rea Wilmshurst collected and published numerous short stories by Montgomery. Most of her essays, along with interviews with Montgomery, commentary on her work, and coverage of her death and funeral, appear in Benjamin Lefebvre’s The L. M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print (2013). Despite the fact that Montgomery published over twenty books, “she never felt she achieved her one 'great’ book”. Her readership, however, has always found her characters and stories to be among the best in fiction. Mark Twain said Montgomery’s Anne was “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice". Montgomery was honoured by being the first female in Canada to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and by being invested in the Order of the British Empire in 1935. However, her fame was not limited to Canadian audiences. Anne of Green Gables became a success worldwide. For example, every year, thousands of Japanese tourists “make a pilgrimage to a green-gabled Victorian farmhouse in the town of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island”. In 2012, the original novel Anne of Green Gables was ranked number nine among all-time best children’s novels in a survey published by School Library Journal, a monthly with primarily U.S. audience. The British public ranked it number 41 among all novels in The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey to determine the “nation’s best-loved novel”. Landmarked places Montgomery’s home of Leaskdale Manse in Ontario, and the area surrounding Green Gables and her Cavendish home in Prince Edward Island, have both been designated National Historic Sites. Montgomery herself was designated a Person of National Historic Significance by the Government of Canada in 1943. Bala’s Museum in Bala, Ontario, is a house museum established in 1992. Officially it is “Bala’s Museum with Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery”, for Montgomery and her family stayed in the boarding house during a July 1922 holiday that inspired her novel The Blue Castle (1926). The museum hosts some events pertaining to Montgomery or her fiction, including re-enactment of the holiday visit. Honours and awards Montgomery was honoured by Britain’s King George V as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE), as there were no Canadian orders, decorations or medals for civilians until the 1970s. Montgomery was named a National Historic Person in 1943 by the Canadian federal government. Her Ontario residence was designated a National Historic Site (NHS) in 1997 (Leaskdale Manse NHS), while the place that inspired her famous novels, Green Gables, was designated “L. M. Montgomery’s Cavendish NHS” in 2004. On May 15, 1975, the Post Office Department issued a stamp to “Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables” designed by Peter Swan and typographed by Bernard N. J. Reilander. The 8¢ stamps are perforated 13 and were printed by Ashton-Potter Limited. A pair of stamps was issued in 2008 by Canada Post, marking the centennial of the publication of Montgomery’s classic first novel. The City of Toronto named a park for her (Lucy Maud Montgomery Park) and in 1983 placed a historical marker there near the house where she lived from 1935 until her death in 1942. On November 30, 2015 (her 141st birthday), Google honoured Lucy Maud Montgomery with a Google Doodle published in twelve countries.

Claude McKay

Festus Claudius “Claude” McKay (September 15, 1889– May 22, 1948) was a Jamaican-American writer and poet, who was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance. He wrote four novels: Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo (1929), Banana Bottom (1933), and in 1941 a manuscript called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem that has not yet been published. McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His 1922 poetry collection, Harlem Shadows, was among the first books published during the Harlem Renaissance. His Selected Poems was published posthumously, in 1953. McKay was attracted to communism in his early life, but he always asserted that he never became an official member of the Communist Party USA. However, some scholars dispute the claim that he was not a communist at that time, noting his close ties to active members, his attendance at communist-led events, and his months-long stay in the Soviet Union in 1922–23, which he wrote about very favorably. He gradually became disillusioned with communism, however, and by the mid-1930s, had begun to write negatively about it. Early life Claude McKay was born in Nairne Castle near James Hill, Clarendon, Jamaica. He was the youngest child of Thomas Francis McKay and Hannah Ann Elizabeth Edwards, well-to-do farmers who had enough property to qualify to vote. Thomas McKay’s parents were of Ashanti descent, like many other black Jamaicans. Claude recounted that his parents would share stories of Ashanti customs with him. At the age of four years, McKay started basic school at the church that he attended. At the age of seven, he was sent to live with his oldest brother, Uriah Theodore, a teacher, to be given the best education available. While living with this brother, McKay became an avid reader of classical and British literature, as well as philosophy, science and theology. He started writing poetry at the age of 10. In 1906, McKay became apprenticed to a carriage and cabinet maker known as Old Brenga, staying in his apprenticeship for about two years. During that time, in 1907, McKay met a man named Walter Jekyll, who became a mentor and an inspiration for him and encouraged him to concentrate on his writing. Jekyll convinced McKay to write in his native dialect and even later set some of McKay’s verses to music. Jekyll helped McKay publish his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. These were the first poems published in Jamaican Patois (dialect of mainly English words and African structure). McKay’s next volume, Constab Ballads (1912), was based on his experiences of joining the constabulary for a brief period in 1911. Career in the United States McKay left for the U.S. in 1912 to attend Tuskegee Institute. McKay was shocked by the intense racism he encountered when he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where many public facilities were segregated, which inspired him to write more poetry. At Tuskegee, he disliked the “semi-military, machine-like existence there” and quickly left to study at Kansas State University. At Kansas State, he read W. E. B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk, which had a major impact on him and stirred his political involvement. But despite superior academic performance, in 1914 McKay decided he did not want to be an agronomist and moved to New York, where he married his childhood sweetheart Eulalie Lewars. McKay published two poems in 1917 in The Seven Arts under the pseudonym Eli Edwards while working as a waiter on the railways. In 1919, he met Crystal and Max Eastman, who produced The Liberator (where McKay would serve as co-executive editor until 1922). It was here, as the co-editor of The Liberator, that he published one of his most famous poems, “If We Must Die”, during the “Red Summer”, a period of intense racial violence against black people in Anglo-American societies. The poem was reportedly later quoted by Winston Churchill during World War II. McKay became involved with a group of black radicals who were unhappy both with Marcus Garvey’s nationalism and the middle-class reformist NAACP. These included other Caribbean writers such as Cyril Briggs, Richard B. Moore, and Wilfrid Domingo. They fought for black self-determination within the context of socialist revolution. Together they founded the semi-secret revolutionary organization, the African Blood Brotherhood. Hubert Harrison had asked McKay to write for Garvey’s Negro World, but only a few copies of the paper have survived from this period, none of which contain any articles by McKay. McKay soon left for London, England. In London McKay arrived in London in autumn 1919. He used to frequent a soldier’s club in Drury Lane and the International Socialist Club in Shoreditch. A militant atheist, he also joined the Rationalist Press Association. It was during this period that McKay’s commitment to socialism deepened and he read Marx assiduously. At the International Socialist Club, McKay met Shapurji Saklatvala, A. J. Cook, Guy Aldred, Jack Tanner, Arthur McManus, William Gallacher, Sylvia Pankhurst and George Lansbury. He was soon invited to write for Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1920, the Daily Herald, a socialist paper published by George Lansbury, included a racist article written by E. D. Morel. Entitled “Black Scourge in Europe: Sexual Horror Let Loose by France on the Rhine”, it insinuated gross hypersexuality on black people in general, but Lansbury refused to print McKay’s response. This response then appeared in Workers’ Dreadnought. This started his regular involvement with Workers’ Dreadnought and the Workers’ Socialist Federation, a Council Communist group active in the East End and which had a majority of women involved in it at all levels of the organization. He became a paid journalist for the paper; some people claim he was the first black journalist in Britain. He attended the Communist Unity Conference that established the Communist Party of Great Britain. At this time he also had some of his poetry published in the Cambridge Magazine, edited by C. K. Ogden. When Sylvia Pankhurst was arrested under the Defense of the Realm Act for publishing articles “calculated and likely to cause sedition amongst His Majesty’s forces, in the Navy, and among the civilian population,” McKay had his rooms searched. He is likely to have been the author of “The Yellow Peril and the Dockers” attributed to “Leon Lopez”, which was one of the articles cited by the government in its case against Workers’ Dreadnought. In Russia From November 1922 to June 1923, he visited the Soviet Union and attended the fourth congress of the Communist International in Moscow. There, he met many leading Bolsheviks including Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin and Karl Radek. Claude McKay details his experience in Russia in the essay “Soviet Russia and the Negro” published in the December 1923 issue of The Crisis magazine. McKay wrote the manuscripts for a book of essays called Negroes in America and three stories published as Lynching in America, both of which appeared first in Russian and were re-translated into English; McKay’s original English manuscripts have been lost. When Russia was under the rule of communists led by Lenin he was invited to Russia during the reconstruction of the country. Home to Harlem and other works In 1928, McKay published his most famous novel, Home to Harlem, which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe. McKay’s novel gained a substantial readership, especially with people who wanted to know more about the intense, and sometimes shocking, details of Harlem nightlife. His novel was an attempt to capture the energetic and intense spirit of the “uprooted black vagabonds.” Home to Harlem was a work in which McKay looked among the common people for a distinctive black identity. Despite this, the book drew fire from one of McKay’s heroes, W. E. B. Du Bois. To Du Bois, the novel’s frank depictions of sexuality and the nightlife in Harlem only appealed to the "prurient demand[s]" of white readers and publishers looking for portrayals of black “licentiousness.” As Du Bois said, “Home to Harlem... for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath.” Modern critics now dismiss this criticism from Du Bois, who was more concerned with using art as propaganda in the struggle for African-American political liberation than in the value of art to showcase the truth about the lives of black people. McKay’s other novels were Banjo (1929), and Banana Bottom (1933). Banjo was noted in part for its portrayal of how the French treated people from its sub-Saharan African colonies, as the novel centers on black seamen in Marseilles. Aimé Césaire stated that in Banjo, blacks were described truthfully and without “inhibition or prejudice”. Banana Bottom was McKay’s third novel. The book is said to follow a principal theme of a black individual in search of establishing a cultural identity in a white society. The book discusses underlying racial and cultural tensions. McKay also authored a collection of short stories, Gingertown (1932), two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home (1937) and My Green Hills of Jamaica (published posthumously in 1979), and a non-fiction, socio-historical treatise entitled Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). His collection Selected Poems (1953) was published posthumously and included a Foreword by John Dewey. McKay became an American citizen in 1940. Becoming disillusioned with communism, McKay embraced the social teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, to which he converted in 1944. He died from a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 58. Legacy In 1977, the government of Jamaica named Claude McKay the national poet and posthumously awarded him the Order of Jamaica for his contribution to literature. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Claude McKay on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans. He is regarded as the “foremost left-wing black intellectual of his age” and his work heavily influenced a generation of black authors including James Baldwin and Richard Wright. Awards Jamaican Institute of Arts and Sciences, Musgrave Medal, 1912, for two volumes of poetry, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads. Harmon Foundation Award for distinguished literary achievement, NAACP, 1929, for Harlem Shadows and Home to Harlem. James Weldon Johnson Literary Guild Award, 1937. Order of Jamaica, 1977. Selected bibliography Poetry collections * Songs of Jamaica (1912) * Constab Ballads (1912) * Spring in New Hampshire and Other Poems (1920) * Harlem Shadows (1922) * The Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1953) Fiction * Home to Harlem (1928) * Banjo (1929) * Banana Bottom (1933) * Gingertown (1932) Non-fiction * A Long Way from Home (1937) * My Green Hills of Jamaica (1979) * Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) Unknown manuscript * A previously unknown manuscript of a 1941 novel by McKay was authenticated in 2012. The manuscript, Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, was discovered by Jean-Christophe Cloutier in the Samuel Roth Papers, a previously untouched university archive at Columbia University, in 2009. The novel centers on the ideas and events that animated Harlem on the cusp of World War II (such as Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia). Working in collaboration, Professor Cloutier and Professor Brent Hayes Edwards successfully authenticated the manuscript, and have received permission from the McKay estate to publish the novel, a satire set in 1936, with an introduction about how it was found and its provenance verified. Sources * James, Winston (2001), A Fierce Hatred of Injustice: Claude McKay’s Jamaica and His Poetry of Rebellion, London: Verso. ISBN 978-1859847404. * James, Winston (2003), "Becoming the People’s Poet: Claude McKay’s Jamaican Years, 1889-1912," in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, March 2003, No. 13, pp. 17–45. * Long, Richard A., Afro-American Writing: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry, Penn State Press, 1985. ISBN 0-271-00376-6 Chicago Defender articles * “Claude McKay, African Poet, Made Co-Editor”, The Chicago Defender (National edition)(1921–1267), April 2, 1921; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Defender (1910-1975). * “Claude McKay, noted, Poet, Author, Once Idol of Russia, Dies Here”, The Chicago Defender (1921–1967), May 29, 1948. * “McKay Going to Russia”, The Chicago Defender (National edition)(1921–1967), August 19, 1922. * “Claude McKay by James Weldon Johnson”, The Chicago Defender (National edition)(1921–1267), March 3, 1928. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_McKay

Adrian Mitchell

Adrian Mitchell (24 October 1932– 20 December 2008) was an English poet, novelist and playwright. A former journalist, he became a noted figure on the British Left. For almost half a century he was the foremost poet of the country’s anti-Bomb movement. The critic Kenneth Tynan called him “the British Mayakovsky”. Mitchell sought in his work to counteract the implications of his own assertion that, “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” In a National Poetry Day poll in 2005 his poem “Human Beings” was voted the one most people would like to see launched into space. In 2002 he was nominated, semi-seriously, Britain’s “Shadow Poet Laureate”. Mitchell was for some years poetry editor of the New Statesman, and was the first to publish an interview with the Beatles. His work for the Royal Shakespeare Company included Peter Brook’s US and the English version of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade. Ever inspired by the example of his own favourite poet and precursor William Blake, about whom he wrote the acclaimed Tyger for the National Theatre, his often angry output swirled from anarchistic anti-war satire, through love poetry to, increasingly, stories and poems for children. He also wrote librettos. The Poetry Archive identified his creative yield as hugely prolific. The Times said that Mitchell’s had been a “forthright voice often laced with tenderness.” His poems on such topics as nuclear war, Vietnam, prisons and racism had become “part of the folklore of the Left. His work was often read and sung at demonstrations and rallies.” Biography Early life and career Adrian Mitchell was born near Hampstead Heath, North London. His mother, Kathleen Fabian, was a Fröbel-trained nursery school teacher and his father, Jock Mitchell, a research chemist from Cupar in Fife. He was educated at Monkton Combe School in Bath. He then went to Greenways School, at Ashton Gifford House in Wiltshire, run at the time by a friend of his mother. This, said Mitchell, was “a school in Heaven, where my first play, The Animals’ Brains Trust, was staged when I was nine to my great satisfaction.” His schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey’s School, after which he did his National Service in the RAF. He commented that this “confirmed (his) natural pacificism”. He went on to study English at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was taught by J. R. R. Tolkien’s son. He became chairman of the university’s poetry society and the literary editor of Isis magazine. On graduating Mitchell got a job as a reporter on the Oxford Mail and, later, at the Evening Standard in London. “Inheriting enough money to live on for a year, I wrote my first novel and my first TV play. Soon afterwards I became a freelance journalist, writing about pop music for the Daily Mail and TV for the pre-tabloid Sun and the Sunday Times. I quit journalism in the mid-Sixties and since then have been a free-falling poet, playwright and writer of stories.” Career Mitchell gave frequent public readings, particularly for left-wing causes. Satire was his speciality. Commissioned to write a poem about Prince Charles and his special relationship (as Prince of Wales) with the people of Wales, his measured response was short and to the point: “Royalty is a neurosis. Get well soon.” In “Loose Leaf Poem”, from Ride the Nightmare, he wrote: My brain socialist My heart anarchist My eyes pacifist My blood revolutionary Mitchell was in the habit of stipulating in any preface to his collections: “None of the work in this book is to be used in connection with any examination whatsoever.” His best-known poem, “To Whom It May Concern”, was his bitterly sarcastic reaction to the televised horrors of the Vietnam War. The poem begins: I was run over by the truth one day. Ever since the accident I’ve walked this way So stick my legs in plaster Tell me lies about Vietnam He first read it to thousands of nuclear disarmament protesters who, having marched through central London on CND’s first new format one-day Easter March, finally crammed into Trafalgar Square on the afternoon of Easter Day 1964. As Mitchell delivered his lines from the pavement in front of the National Gallery, angry demonstrators in the square below scuffled with police. In 1972 he confronted then-prime minister Edward Heath about germ warfare and the war in Northern Ireland. He was later responsible for the well-respected stage adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a production of the Royal Shakespeare Company that premiered in November 1998. Over the years he updated the poem to take into account recent events. “He never let up. Most calls—'Can you do this one, Adrian?'—were answered, 'Sure, I’ll be there.' His reading of 'Tell Me Lies’ at a City Hall benefit just before the 2003 invasion of Iraq was electrifying. Of course, he couldn’t stop that war, but he performed as if he could.” One Remembrance Sunday he laid the Peace Pledge Union’s White Poppy wreath on the Cenotaph in Whitehall. On one International Conscientious Objectors’ Day he read a poem at the ceremony at the Conscientious Objectors Commemorative Stone in Tavistock Square in London. Fellow writers could be effusive in their tributes. John Berger said that, “Against the present British state he opposes a kind of revolutionary populism, bawdiness, wit and the tenderness sometimes to be found between animals.” Angela Carter once wrote that he was “a joyous, acrid and demotic tumbling lyricist Pied Piper, determinedly singing us away from catastrophe.” Ted Hughes: “In the world of verse for children, nobody has produced more surprising verse or more genuinely inspired fun than Adrian Mitchell.” Mitchell died at the age of 76 in a North London hospital from a suspected heart attack. For two months he had been suffering from pneumonia. Two days earlier he had completed what turned out to be his last poem, “My Literary Career So Far”. He intended it as a Christmas gift to “all the friends, family and animals he loved”. “Adrian”, said fellow-poet Michael Rosen, “was a socialist and a pacifist who believed, like William Blake, that everything human was holy. That’s to say he celebrated a love of life with the same fervour that he attacked those who crushed life. He did this through his poetry, his plays, his song lyrics and his own performances. Through this huge body of work, he was able to raise the spirits of his audiences, in turn exciting, inspiring, saddening and enthusing them.... He has sung, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems in every kind of place imaginable, urging us to love our lives, love our minds and bodies and to fight against tyranny, oppression and exploitation.” In 2009 Frances Lincoln Children’s Books published an adaptation of Ovid: Shapeshifters: tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, written by Mitchell and illustrated by Alan Lee. Family Mitchell is survived by his wife, the actress Celia Hewitt, whose bookshop, Ripping Yarns, is in Highgate, and their two daughters Sasha and Beattie. He also has two sons and a daughter from his previous marriage to Maureen Bush: Briony, Alistair and Danny. There are nine grandchildren: Robin, Arthur, Charlotte, Natasha, Zoe, Caitlin, Annie, Lola and Lilly. Selected bibliography * If You See Me Comin′ (Jonathan Cape, 1962) * Poems (Jonathan Cape, 1964; 978-0224608732) * Out Loud (Cape Goliard, 1968) * Ride the Nightmare (Cape, 1971; ISBN 978-0224005630) * Tyger: A Celebration Based on the Life and Works of William Blake (Cape, 1971; ISBN 978-0224006521) * The Apeman Cometh (Cape, 1975; ISBN 978-0224011471) * Man Friday, novel (Futura, 1975; ISBN 978-0860072744) * For Beauty Douglas: Collected Poems 1953–79, illus. Ralph Steadman (Allison & Busby, 1981; ISBN 978-0850313994) * On the Beach at Cambridge: New Poems (Allison and Busby, 1984; ISBN 978-0850315639) * Nothingmas Day, illus. John Lawrence (Allison & Busby, 1984; ISBN 978-0850315325) * Love Songs of World War Three: Collected Stage Lyrics (Allison and Busby, 1988; ISBN 978-0850319910) * All My Own Stuff, illus. Frances Lloyd (Simon & Schuster, 1991; ISBN 978-0750004466) * Adrian Mitchell’s Greatest Hits– The Top Forty, illus. Ralph Steadman (Bloodaxe Books, 1991; ISBN 978-1852241643) * Blue Coffee: Poems 1985–1996 (Bloodaxe, 1996; 1997 reprint, ISBN 978-1852243623) * Heart on the Left: Poems 1953–1984 (Bloodaxe, 1997; ISBN 978-1852244255) * Balloon Lagoon and Other Magic Islands of Poetry, illus. Tony Ross (Orchard Books, 1997; ISBN 978-1860396595) * Nobody Rides the Unicorn, illus. Stephen Lambert (Corgi Children’s, new edn 2000; ISBN 978-0552546171) * All Shook Up: Poems 1997–2000 (Bloodaxe, 2000; ISBN 978-1852245139) * The Shadow Knows: Poems 2001–2004 (Bloodaxe, 2004) * Tell Me Lies: Poems 2005–2008, illus. Ralph Steadman (Bloodaxe, 2009; ISBN 978-1852248437) * Umpteen Pockets, illus. Tony Ross (Orchard Books, 2009; ISBN 978-1408303634) * Daft as a Doughnut (Orchard Books, 2009; ISBN 978-1408308073) * Shapeshifters: Tales from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, illus. Alan Lee (Frances Lincoln, 2009; ISBN 978-1845075361) * Come on Everybody: Poems 1953–2008 (Bloodaxe, 2012; ISBN 978-1852249465) Awards * * 1961 Eric Gregory Award * 1966 PEN Translation Prize * 1971 Tokyo Festival Television Film Award * 2005 CLPE Poetry Award (shortlist) for Daft as a Doughnut References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Mitchell

John Edward Masefield

John Edward Masefield (1 June 1878 – 12 May 1967) was an English poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. He is remembered as the author of the classic children's novels The Midnight Folk and The Box of Delights, and poems, including "The Everlasting Mercy" and "Sea-Fever". Early life Masefield was born in Ledbury in Herefordshire, to Caroline and George Masefield, a solicitor. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was only six, and he went to live with his aunt. His father died soon after following a mental breakdown. After an unhappy education at the King's School in Warwick (now known as Warwick School), where he was a boarder between 1888 and 1891, he left to board the HMS Conway, both to train for a life at sea, and to break his addiction to reading, of which his aunt thought little. He spent several years aboard this ship and found that he could spend much of his time reading and writing. It was aboard the Conway that Masefield's love for story-telling grew. While on the ship, he listened to the stories told about sea lore. He continued to read, and felt that he was to become a writer and story teller himself. In 1894, Masefield boarded the Gilcruix, destined for Chile - this first voyage bringing him the experience of sea sickness. He recorded his experiences while sailing through the extreme weather, his journal entries reflecting a delight in seeing flying fish, porpoises, and birds, and was awed by the beauty of nature, including a rare sighting of a nocturnal rainbow on his voyage. On reaching Chile, Masefield suffered from sunstroke and was hospitalized. He eventually returned home to England as a passenger aboard a steam ship. In 1895, Masefield returned to sea on a windjammer destined for New York City. However, the urge to become a writer and the hopelessness of life as a sailor overtook him, and in New York, he deserted ship. He lived as a vagrant for several months, before returning to New York City, he did many odd jobs, finding work as an assistant to a bar keeper. Sometime around Christmas in 1895, Masefield read the December 1895 edition of Truth, a New York periodical, which contained the poem "The Piper of Arll" by Duncan Campbell Scott. Ten years later, Masefield wrote to Scott to tell him what reading that poem had meant to him: "I had never (till that time) cared very much for poetry, but your poem impressed me deeply, and set me on fire. Since then poetry has been the one deep influence in my life, and to my love of poetry I owe all my friends, and the position I now hold." For the next two years, Masefield was employed in a carpet factory, where long hours were expected and conditions were far from ideal. He purchased up to 20 books a week, and devoured both modern and classical literature. His interests at this time were diverse and his reading included works by George du Maurier, Dumas, Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Dickens, Kipling, and R. L. Stevenson. Chaucer also became very important to him during this time, as well as poetry by Keats and Shelley. He eventually returned home to England in 1897 as a passenger aboard a steam ship. When Masefield was 23, he met his future wife, Constance Crommelin, who was 35. Educated in classics and English Literature, and a mathematics teacher, Constance was a match for Masefield despite the difference in age. The couple had two children (Judith, born in 1904, and Lewis, in 1910). By the time he was 24, Masefield's poems were being published in periodicals and his first collected works, Salt-Water Ballads (1902) was published, the poem "Sea-Fever" appearing in this book. Masefield then wrote the novels, Captain Margaret (1908) and Multitude and Solitude (1909). In 1911, after a long drought of poem writing, he composed "The Everlasting Mercy", the first of his narrative poems, and within the next year, Masefield had produced two more, "The Widow in the Bye Street" and "Dauber". As a result, Masefield became widely known to the public and was praised by critics, and in 1912, he was awarded the annual Edmond de Polignac prize. World War I to appointment as Poet Laureate When World War I began, though old enough to be exempted from military service, Masefield joined the staff of a British hospital for French soldiers, Hôpital Temporaire d'Arc-en-Barrois, Haute-Marne, France, serving briefly in 1915 as a hospital orderly, later publishing his own account of his experiences. After returning home, Masefield was invited to the United States on a three month lecture tour. Although Masefield's primary purpose was to lecture on English Literature, a secondary purpose was to collect information on the mood and views of Americans regarding the war in Europe. When he returned to England, he submitted a report to the British Foreign Office, and suggested that he be allowed to write a book about the failure of the allied efforts in the Dardanelles, which possibly could be used in the US in order to counter what he thought was German propaganda there. As a result, Masefield wrote Gallipoli. This work was a success, encouraging the British people, and lifting them somewhat from the disappointment they had felt as a result of the Allied losses in the Dardanelles. Due to the success of his wartime writings, Masefield met with the head of British Military Intelligence in France and was asked to write an account of the Battle of the Somme. Although Masefield had grand ideas for his book, he was denied access to the official records, and therefore, what was to be his preface to the book was published as "The Old Front Line", a description of the geography of the Somme area. In 1918, Masefield returned to America on his second lecture tour. Masefield spent much of his time speaking and lecturing to American soldiers waiting to be sent to Europe. These speaking engagements were very successful, and on one occasion, a battalion of all black soldiers danced and sang for him after his talk. During this tour, he matured as a public speaker and realized his ability to touch the emotions of his audience with his style of speaking, learning to speak publicly with his own heart, rather than from dry scripted speeches. Towards the end of his trip, both Yale and Harvard Universities conferred honorary Doctorates of Letters on him. Masefield entered the 1920s as an accomplished and respected writer. His family was able to settle on Boar's Hill, a somewhat rural setting not far from Oxford, and Masefield took up beekeeping, goat-herding and poultry-keeping. He continued to meet with success, the 1923 edition of "Collected Poems" selling approximately 80,000 copies. He produced three poems early in this decade. The first was Reynard The Fox, a poem that has been critically compared with works of Geoffrey Chaucer. This was followed by Right Royal and King Cole, poems where the relationship of humanity and nature emphasized. While Reynard is the best known of these, all met with acclaim. After King Cole Masefield turned away from the long poem and back to the novel, and from 1924 till the Second World War published twelve novels, which vary from stories of the sea (The Bird of Dawning, Victorious Troy) to social novels about modern England (The Hawbucks, The Square Peg), and from tales of an imaginary land in Central America (Sard Harker, Odtaa) to fantasies for children (The Midnight Folk, The Box of Delights). This variety in genre testifies most impressively to the breadth of his imagination, though it probably reduced his sales (which remained very respectable, however), since most readers of novels like knowing what to expect from their favourite authors. In this same period he wrote a large number of dramatic pieces. Most of these were based on Christian themes, and Masefield, to his amazement, encountered a ban on the performance of plays on biblical subjects that went back to the Reformation and had been revived a generation earlier to prevent production of Oscar Wilde's Salome. However, a compromise was reached, and in 1928 his "The Coming of Christ" was the first play to be performed in an English Cathedral since the Middle Ages. In 1921, Masefield received an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from Oxford University, and in 1923, organized the Oxford Recitations, an annual contest whose purpose was "to discover good speakers of verse and to encourage ‘the beautiful speaking of poetry.’" The Recitations were seen as a success given the numbers of contest applicants, the promotion of natural speech in poetical recitations, and the number of people learning how to listen to poetry. Masefield began to question however, whether the Recitations should continue as a contest, believing that the event should become more of a festival. In 1929, Masefield broke with the contest concept, and the Recitations came to an end. Later years and death In 1930, on the death of Robert Bridges, a new Poet Laureate was needed. Many felt that Rudyard Kipling was a likely choice, however, upon the recommendation of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, King George V appointed Masefield, who remained in office until his death in 1967. The only person to hold the office for a longer period was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. On his appointment The Times newspaper said of him: ... his poetry could touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life. Although the requirements of Poet Laureate had changed, and those in the office were rarely required to write verse for special occasions, Masefield took his appointment seriously and produced a large quantity of verse. Poems composed in his official capacity were sent to The Times. Masefield's modesty was shown by his inclusion of a stamped envelope with each submission so that his composition could be returned if it were found unacceptable for publication. Masefield was commissioned to write a poem to be set to music by the Master of the King's Musick, Sir Edward Elgar and performed at the unveiling of the Queen Alexandra Memorial by the King on 8 June 1932. This was the ode "So many true Princesses who have gone". After his appointment, Masefield was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V and many honorary degrees from British universities, in 1937 being elected as President of the Society of Authors. Masefield encouraged the continued development of English literature and poetry, and began the annual awarding of the Royal Medals for Poetry for a first or second published edition of poetry by a poet under the age of 35. Additionally, his speaking engagements were calling him further away, often on much longer tours, yet he still produced significant amounts of work in a wide variety of genres. To those he had already used he now added autobiography, producing New Chum, In the Mill, and So Long to Learn. Some critics judged Masefield to be an even finer writer of prose than of verse. It was not until about the age of 70 that Masefield slowed his pace due to illness. In 1960, Constance died at 93, after a long illness. Although her death was heartrending, he had spent a tiring year watching the woman he loved die. He continued his duties as Poet Laureate; In Glad Thanksgiving, his last book, was published when he was 88 years old. In late 1966, Masefield developed gangrene in his ankle. This spread to his leg, and he died of the infection on 12 May 1967. According to his wishes, he was cremated and his ashes placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Later, the following verse was discovered, written by Masefield, addressed to his "Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns": Let no religious rite be done or read In any place for me when I am dead, But burn my body into ash, and scatter The ash in secret into running water, Or on the windy down, and let none see; And then thank God that there's an end of me. The Masefield Centre at Warwick School, which Masefield attended, and a high school in Ledbury, Herefordshire have been named in his honour. In 1977, Folkways Records released an album of his poetry, including some read by Masefield himself. Art song settings Many of Masefield's short poems were set as art songs by British composers of the time. Best known by far is John Ireland's "Sea Fever", the lasting popularity of which belies any mismatch between the urgency of the language and the slow, swung melody. Frederick Keel crafted several songs drawn from the Salt-Water Ballads and elsewhere. Of these, "Trade Winds" was particularly popular in its day, despite the tongue-twisting challenges the text presents to the singer. Keel's defiant setting of "Tomorrow", written while interned at Ruhleben during World War I, was frequently programmed at the BBC Proms after the war. Another memorable wartime composition is Ivor Gurney's climactic declamation of "By a bierside", a setting quickly set down in 1916 during a brief spell behind the lines. References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Masefield

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (baptized 26 May 1689– 21 August 1762) was an English aristocrat, letter writer and poet. Lady Mary is today chiefly remembered for her letters, particularly her letters from travels to the Ottoman Empire, as wife to the British ambassador to Turkey, which have been described by Billie Melman as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient”. Aside from her writing, Lady Mary is also known for introducing and advocating for smallpox inoculation to Britain after her return from Turkey. Her writings usually address and challenge the hindering contemporary social attitudes towards women and their intellectual and social growth. Early life and education Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Pierrepont, was born in May 1689; her baptism took place on 26 May, at a few days old, at St. Paul’s Church in Covent Garden. She was the eldest child of Evelyn Pierrepont, 1st Duke of Kingston-upon-Hull, and his first wife, Mary (Fielding) Pierrepont. Her mother had three more children, two girls and a boy, before dying in October 1692. The children were raised by their Pierrepont grandmother until Mary was nine years old. Lady Mary was then passed to the care of her father upon her grandmother’s death. She began her education in her father’s home. Family holdings were extensive, including Thoresby Hall and Holme Pierrepont Hall in Nottinghamshire, and a house in West Dean in Wiltshire. To supplement the instruction of a despised governess, Lady Mary used the library in her father’s mansion, Thoresby Hall in Nottinghamshire, to “steal” her education, teaching herself Latin, a language reserved for men at the time. By 1705, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Mary Pierrepont had written two albums filled with poetry, a brief epistolary novel, and a prose-and-verse romance modeled after Aphra Behn’s Voyage to the Isle of Love (1684). She also corresponded with two bishops, Thomas Tenison and Gilbert Burnet. Marriage and embassy to Ottoman Empire By 1710 Lady Mary had two possible suitors to choose from: Edward Wortley Montagu and Clotworthy Skeffington. Lady Mary corresponded with Edward Wortley Montagu via letters from 28 March 1710 to 2 May 1711. After May 1711 there was a break in contact between Lady Mary and Edward Wortley Montagu. Mary’s father, now Marquess of Dorchester, rejected Wortley Montagu as a prospect because he refused to entail his estate on a possible heir. Her father pressured her to marry Clotworthy Skeffington, heir to an Irish peerage. In order to avoid marriage to Skeffington, she eloped with Wortley. The marriage license is dated 17 August 1712, the marriage probably took place on 23 August 1712. The early years of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s married life were spent in the country. She had a son, Edward Wortley Montagu the younger, on 16 May 1713, in London. A couple of months later, on 1 July 1713 Lady Mary’s brother, aged twenty, died of smallpox and left behind two children. On 13 October 1714, her husband accepted post as Junior Commissioner of Treasury. When Lady Mary joined him in London, her wit and beauty soon made her a prominent figure at court. She was among the society of George I and the Prince of Wales, and counted amongst her friends Molly Skerritt, Lady Walpole, John, Lord Hervey, Mary Astell, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Alexander Pope, John Gay, and Abbé Antonio Conti. In December 1715, Lady Mary contracted smallpox. She survived, but while she was ill someone circulated the satirical “court eclogues” she had been writing. One of the poems was read as an attack on Caroline, Princess of Wales, in spite of the fact that the “attack” was voiced by a character who was herself heavily satirized. In 1716, Edward Wortley Montagu was appointed Ambassador at Istanbul. In August 1716, Lady Mary accompanied him to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople and Istanbul. He was recalled in 1717, but they remained at Istanbul until 1718. While away from England, the Wortley Montagu’s had a daughter on 19 January 1718, who would grow up to be Mary, Countess of Bute. After an unsuccessful delegation between Austria and Turkey/Ottoman Empire, they set sail for England via the Mediterranean, and reached London on 2 October 1718. The story of this voyage and of her observations of Eastern life is told in Letters from Turkey, a series of lively letters full of graphic descriptions; Letters is often credited as being an inspiration for subsequent female travelers/writers, as well as for much Orientalist art. During her visit she was sincerely charmed by the beauty and hospitality of the Ottoman women she encountered, and she recorded her experiences in a Turkish bath. She also recorded a particularly amusing incident in which a group of Turkish women at a bath in Sofia, horrified by the sight of the stays she was wearing, exclaimed that "the husbands in England were much worse than in the East, for [they] tied up their wives in little boxes, the shape of their bodies". Lady Mary wrote about misconceptions previous travelers, specifically male travelers, had recorded about the religion, traditions and the treatment of women in the Ottoman Empire. Her gender and class status provided her with access to female spaces, that were closed off to males. Her personal interactions with Ottoman women enabled her to provide a more accurate account of Turkish women, their dress, habits, traditions, limitations and liberties. Lady Mary returned to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as variolation. Ottoman smallpox inoculation Lady Mary Wortley Montagu defied convention most memorably by introducing smallpox inoculation to Western medicine after witnessing it during her travels and stay in the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman Empire, she visited the women in their segregated zenanas, making friends and learning about Turkish customs. There she witnessed the practice of inoculation against smallpox—variolation—which she called engrafting, and wrote home about it a number of her letters. Variolation used live smallpox virus in the pus taken from a smallpox blister in a mild case of the disease and introduced it into scratched skin of a previously uninfected person to promote immunity to the disease. Lady Mary’s brother had died of smallpox in 1713 and her own famous beauty had been marred by a bout with the disease in 1715. Lady Mary was eager to spare her children, thus, in March 1718 she had her nearly five-year-old son inoculated with the help of Embassy surgeon Charles Maitland. On her return to London, she enthusiastically promoted the procedure, but encountered a great deal of resistance from the medical establishment, because it was an Oriental folk treatment process. In April 1721, when a smallpox epidemic struck England, she had her daughter inoculated by Charles Maitland, the same physician who had inoculated her son at the Embassy in Turkey, and publicized the event. This was the first such operation done in Britain. She persuaded Princess Caroline to test the treatment. In August 1721, seven prisoners at Newgate Prison awaiting execution were offered the chance to undergo variolation instead of execution: they all survived and were released. Controversy over smallpox inoculation intensified, however, Caroline, Princess of Wales was convinced. The Princess’s two daughters were successfully inoculated in April 1722 by French-born surgeon Claudiius Amyand. In response to the general fear of inoculation, Lady Mary, under a pseudonym, wrote and published an article describing and advocating in favor of inoculation in September 1722. In later years, Edward Jenner, who was 13 years old when Lady Mary died, developed the much safer technique of vaccination using cowpox instead of smallpox. As vaccination gained acceptance, variolation gradually fell out of favor. Later years After returning to England, Lady Mary took less interest in court compared to her earlier years. Instead she was more focused on the upbringing of her children, reading, writing and editing her travel letters—which she then chose not to publish. Before starting for the East Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had met Alexander Pope, and during her Embassy travels with her husband, they wrote each other a series of letters. While Pope may have been fascinated by her wit and elegance, Lady Mary’s replies to his letters reveal that she was not equally smitten. Very few letters passed between them after Lady Mary’s return to England, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement. In 1728, Pope attacked Lady Mary in his Dunciad inaugurating a decade in which most of his publications made some sort of allegation against her. Lady Mary went through a series of trials with her children. In 1726 and 1727, Lady Mary’s son ran away from Westminster School several times. He was entrusted to a tutor with strict orders to keep young Edward Montagu abroad. In later years her son managed to return to England without permission and continued to have a strained relationship with both his parents. In August 1736, Lady Mary’s daughter, married John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, despite her parent’s disapproval of the match. The same year Lady Mary met and fell in love with Francesco Algarotti, Count Algarotti, competing with an equally smitten John Hervey for the Count’s affections. Lady Mary wrote many letters to Algarotti in English and in French after his departure from England in September 1736. In July 1739 Lady Mary departed England ostensibly for health reasons declaring her intentions to winter in the south of France. In reality, she left to visit and live with Algarotti in Venice. Their relationship ended in 1741 after Lady Mary and Algarotti were both on diplomatic mission in Turin. Lady Mary stayed abroad and traveled extensively. After traveling to Venice, Florence, Rome, Genoa and Geneva, she finally settled in Avignon in 1742. She left Avignon in 1746 for Brescia, where she fell ill and stayed for nearly a decade, leaving for Lovere in 1754. After August 1756, she resided in Venice and Padua and saw Algarotti again in November. Lady Mary exchanged letters with her daughter, Lady Bute, discussing topics such as philosophy, literature, and the education of girls, as well as conveying details of her geographical and social surroundings. Lady Mary received news of her husband Edward Wortley Montagu’s death in 1761 and left Venice for England. En route to London, she handed her Embassy Letters to the Rev. Benjamin Sowden of Rotterdam, for safe keeping and “to be dispos’d of as he thinks proper”. Lady Mary reached London in January 1762, and died in the year of her return, on 21 August 1762. Important works and literary place Although Lady Mary Wortley Montagu is now best known for her Embassy Letters, she wrote poetry and essays as well. A number of Lady Mary’s poems and essays were printed in her lifetime, either without or with her permission, in newspapers, in miscellanies, and independently. Montagu did not intend to publish her poetry, but it did circulate widely, in manuscript, among members of her own social circle. Lady Mary was highly suspicious of any idealizing literary language. She wrote most often in heroic couplets, a serious poetic form to employ, and, according to Susan Staves,"excelled at “answer poems.”. Some of her widely anthologized poems include “Constantinople” and “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband.” “Constantinople,” written January 1718, is a beautiful poem in heroic couplets describing Britain and Turkey through human history, and representing the state of mind “of knaves, coxcombs, the mob, and party zealous—all characteristic of the London of her time.”. “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to her Husband,” written 1724, stages a letter from Mrs. Yonge to her libertine husband and exposes the social double standard which led to the shaming and distress of Mrs. Yonge after her divorce. In 1737 and 1738, Lady Mary published anonymously a political periodical called the Nonsense of Common-Sense, supporting the Robert Walpole government (the title was a reference to a journal of the liberal opposition entitled Common Sense). She wrote six Town Eclogues. She wrote notable letters describing her travels through Europe and the Ottoman Empire; these appeared after her death in three volumes. Lady Mary corresponded with Anne Wortley and wrote courtship letters to her future husband Edward Wortley Montagu, as well as love letters to Francesco Algarotti. She corresponded with notable writers, intellectuals and aristocrats of her day. She wrote gossip letters and letters berating the vagaries of fashionable people to her sister, Lady Mar, and exchanged intellectual letters with her adult daughter, Lady Bute. Although, not published during her lifetime, her letters from Turkey were clearly intended for print. She revised them extensively and gave a transcript to the Rev. Benjamin Sowden in Rotterdam in 1761. During the twentieth century Lady Mary’s letters were edited separately from her essays, poems and plays. Montagu’s Turkish letters were to prove an inspiration to later generations of European women travelers and writers. In particular, Montagu staked a claim to the authority of women’s writing, due to their ability to access private homes and female-only spaces where men were not permitted. The title of her published letters refers to “Sources that Have Been Inaccessible to Other Travellers”. The letters themselves frequently draw attention to the fact that they present a different (and, Montagu asserts, more accurate) description than that provided by previous (male) travelers: “You will perhaps be surpriz’d at an Account so different from what you have been entertaind with by the common Voyage-writers who are very fond of speaking of what they don’t know.”. Montagu provides an intimate description of the women’s bathhouse in Sofia, in which she derides male descriptions of the bathhouse as a site for unnatural sexual practices, instead insisting that it was “the Women’s coffee house, where all the news of the Town is told, Scandal invented, etc”. However, Montagu’s detailed descriptions of nude Oriental beauties provided inspiration for male artists such as Ingres, who restored the explicitly erotic content that Montagu had denied. In general, Montagu dismisses the quality of European travel literature of the 18th century as nothing more than "trite observations…superficial…[of] boys [who] only remember where they met with the best wine or the prettyest women.". Montagu’s Turkish letters were frequently cited by imperial women travelers, more than a century after her journey. Such writers cited Montagu’s assertion that women travelers could gain an intimate view of Turkish life that was not available to their male counterparts. However, they also added corrections or elaborations to her observations. In 1739 a book was printed by an unknown author under the pseudonym “Sophia, a person of quality”, titled Woman not Inferior to Man. This book is often attributed to Lady Mary. Her Letters and Works were published in 1837. Montagu’s octogenarian granddaughter Lady Louisa Stuart contributed to this, anonymously, an introductory essay called Biographical Anecdotes of Lady M. W. Montagu, from which it was clear that Stuart was troubled by her grandmother’s focus on sexual intrigues and did not see Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Account of the Court of George I at his Accession as history. However, Montagu’s historical observations, both in the “Anecdotes” and the “Turkish Embassy Letters,” prove quite accurate when put in context. Despite the availability of her work in print and the revival efforts of Feminist scholars, the complexity and brilliance of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s extensive body of work has not yet been recognized to the fullest.

Jim Morrison

James Douglas “Jim” Morrison (December 8, 1943– July 3, 1971) was an American singer, songwriter, and poet, best remembered as the lead singer of The Doors. As a result of his lyrics, wild personality, performances, and the dramatic circumstances surrounding his life and death, Morrison is regarded by critics and fans as one of the most iconic and influential frontmen in rock music history. In the later part of the 20th century, his fame endured as one of the popular culture’s most rebellious and oft-displayed icons, representing the generation gap and youth counterculture. He was also well known for improvising spoken word poetry passages while the band played live. Morrison was ranked number 47 on Rolling Stone’s list of the "100 Greatest Singers of All Time", and number 22 on Classic Rock magazine’s "50 Greatest Singers In Rock". Ray Manzarek, who co-founded the Doors with him, said Morrison “embodied hippie counterculture rebellion”. Morrison was sometimes referred to by other nicknames, such as “Lizard King” and “King of Orgasmic Rock”. Morrison developed an alcohol dependency during the 1960s, which at times affected his performances on stage. He died at the age of 27 in Paris, possibly from an accidental heroin overdose. As no autopsy was performed, the exact cause of Morrison’s death is still disputed. Morrison is interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery in eastern Paris. Early years James Douglas Morrison was born in Melbourne, Florida, the son of Clara Virginia (née Clarke) and Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison, USN, who commanded US naval forces during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the pretext for the US invasion of South Vietnam in 1965. Morrison had a sister, Anne Robin, who was born in 1947 in Albuquerque, New Mexico; and a brother, Andrew Lee Morrison, who was born in 1948 in Los Altos, California. His ancestors were Scottish, Irish, and English. In 1947, Morrison, then four years old, allegedly witnessed a car accident in the desert, in which a family of Native Americans were injured and possibly killed. He referred to this incident in the Doors’ song “Peace Frog” on the 1970 album Morrison Hotel, as well as in the spoken word performances “Dawn’s Highway” and “Ghost Song” on the posthumous 1978 album An American Prayer. Morrison believed this incident to be the most formative event of his life, and made repeated references to it in the imagery in his songs, poems, and interviews. His family does not recall this incident happening in the way he told it. According to the Morrison biography No One Here Gets Out Alive, Morrison’s family did drive past a car accident on an Indian reservation when he was a child, and he was very upset by it. The book The Doors, written by the remaining members of the Doors, explains how different Morrison’s account of the incident was from that of his father. This book quotes his father as saying, "We went by several Indians. It did make an impression on him [the young James]. He always thought about that crying Indian." This is contrasted sharply with Morrison’s tale of “Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to death.” In the same book, his sister is quoted as saying, “He enjoyed telling that story and exaggerating it. He said he saw a dead Indian by the side of the road, and I don’t even know if that’s true.” Raised a military brat, Morrison’s family moved often. He spent part of his childhood in San Diego. He completed third grade at a Fairfax County Elementary School Fairfax County, Virginia. His father was stationed at NAS Kingsville in 1952, he attended Charles H. Flato Elementary School in Kingsville, Texas. He continued at St. John’s Methodist School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and then Longfellow School Sixth Grade Graduation Program from San Diego, California. In 1957, Morrison attended Alameda High School in Alameda, California. He graduated from George Washington High School, now George Washington Middle School, in Alexandria, Virginia in June 1961. Cass Elliot also attended high school there, that same year. Morrison read widely and voraciously—being particularly inspired by the writings of philosophers and poets. He was influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, whose views on aesthetics, morality, and the Apollonian and Dionysian duality would appear in his conversation, poetry and songs. He read Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans”. He read the works of the French Symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud, whose style would later influence the form of Morrison’s short prose poems. He was also influenced by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Charles Baudelaire, Molière, Franz Kafka, Honoré de Balzac and Jean Cocteau, along with most of the French existentialist philosophers. His senior-year English teacher said, “Jim read as much and probably more than any student in class, but everything he read was so offbeat I had another teacher (who was going to the Library of Congress) check to see if the books Jim was reporting on actually existed. I suspected he was making them up, as they were English books on sixteenth– and seventeenth-century demonology. I’d never heard of them, but they existed, and I’m convinced from the paper he wrote that he read them, and the Library of Congress would’ve been the only source.” Morrison went to live with his paternal grandparents in Clearwater, Florida, where he attended classes at St. Petersburg College (then known as a junior college). In 1962, he transferred to Florida State University (FSU) in Tallahassee, where he appeared in a school recruitment film. While attending FSU, Morrison was arrested for a prank following a home football game. In January 1964, Morrison moved to Los Angeles to attend the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Shortly thereafter on August 2, 1964, Morrison’s father, George Stephen Morrison, commanded a carrier division of the United States fleet during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, which resulted in the United States’ rapid escalation of the Vietnam War. At UCLA, Morrison enrolled in Jack Hirschman’s class on Antonin Artaud in the Comparative Literature program within the UCLA English Department. Artaud’s brand of surrealist theatre had a profound impact on Morrison’s dark poetic sensibility of cinematic theatricality. Morrison completed his undergraduate degree at UCLA’s film school within the Theater Arts department of the College of Fine Arts in 1965. At the time of graduation ceremony, he went to Venice, and his diploma was mailed to his mother at Coronado. He made several short films while attending UCLA. First Love, the first of these films, made with Morrison’s classmate and roommate Max Schwartz, was released to the public when it appeared in a documentary about the film Obscura. During these years, while living in Venice Beach, he became friends with writers at the Los Angeles Free Press, for which he advocated until his death in 1971. He conducted a lengthy and in-depth interview with Bob Chorush and Andy Kent, both working for the Free Press at the time (approximately December 6–8, 1970), and was planning on visiting the headquarters of the busy newspaper shortly before leaving for Paris. The Doors In the summer of 1965, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree from the UCLA film school, Morrison led a bohemian lifestyle in Venice Beach. Living on the rooftop of a building inhabited by his old UCLA cinematography friend, Dennis Jakobs, he wrote the lyrics of many of the early songs the Doors would later perform live and record on albums, the most notable being “Moonlight Drive” and “Hello, I Love You”. According to Jakobs, he lived on canned beans and LSD for several months. Morrison and fellow UCLA student, Ray Manzarek, were the first two members of the Doors, forming the group during that summer. They had met months earlier as cinematography students. The now-legendary story claims that Manzarek was lying on the beach at Venice one day, where he accidentally encountered Morrison. He was impressed with Morrison’s poetic lyrics, claiming that they were “rock group” material. Subsequently, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore joined. Krieger auditioned at Densmore’s recommendation and was then added to the lineup. All three musicians shared a common interest in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s meditation practices at the time, attending scheduled classes, but Morrison was not involved in this series of classes, claiming later that he “did not meditate.” The Doors took their name from the title of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception (a reference to the unlocking of doors of perception through psychedelic drug use). Huxley’s own title was a quotation from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake wrote: “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” Although Morrison was known as the lyricist of the group, Krieger also made significant lyrical contributions, writing or co-writing some of the group’s biggest hits, including “Light My Fire”, “Love Me Two Times”, “Love Her Madly”, and “Touch Me”. On the other hand, Morrison, who didn’t write most songs using an instrument, would come up with vocal melodies for his own lyrics, with the other band members contributing chords and rhythm. Morrison did not play an instrument live (except for maracas and tambourine for most shows, and harmonica on a few occasions) or in the studio (excluding maracas, tambourine, handclaps, and whistling). However, he did play the grand piano on “Orange County Suite” and a Moog synthesizer on “Strange Days”. In June 1966, Morrison and the Doors were the opening act at the Whisky a Go Go in the last week of the residency of Van Morrison’s band Them. Van’s influence on Jim’s developing stage performance was later noted by John Densmore in his book Riders On The Storm: “Jim Morrison learned quickly from his near-namesake’s stagecraft, his apparent recklessness, his air of subdued menace, the way he would improvise poetry to a rock beat, even his habit of crouching down by the bass drum during instrumental breaks.” On the final night, the two Morrisons and their two bands jammed together on “Gloria”. In November 1966, Morrison and the Doors produced a promotional film for “Break on Through (To the Other Side)”, which was their first single release. The film featured the four members of the group playing the song on a darkened set with alternating views and close-ups of the performers while Morrison lip-synched the lyrics. Morrison and the Doors continued to make short music films, including “The Unknown Soldier”, “Moonlight Drive”, and “People Are Strange”. The Doors achieved national recognition after signing with Elektra Records in 1967. The single “Light My Fire” spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in July/August 1967. This was a far cry from the Doors playing warm up for Simon and Garfunkel and playing at a high school as they did in Connecticut that same year. Later, the Doors appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, a popular Sunday night variety series that had introduced the Beatles and Elvis Presley to the United States. Ed Sullivan requested two songs from the Doors for the show, “People Are Strange” and “Light My Fire”. Sullivan’s censors insisted that the Doors change the lyrics of the song “Light My Fire” from “Girl we couldn’t get much higher” to “Girl we couldn’t get much better” for the television viewers; this was reportedly due to what was perceived as a reference to drugs in the original lyrics. After giving assurances of compliance to the producer in the dressing room, the band agreed, “we’re not changing a word,” and proceeded to sing the song with the original lyrics. Sullivan was not happy and he refused to shake hands with Morrison or any other band member after their performance. Sullivan had a show producer tell the band that they would never appear on The Ed Sullivan Show again. Morrison reportedly said to the producer, in a defiant tone, “Hey man. We just 'did’ the Sullivan Show!” By the release of their second album, Strange Days, the Doors had become one of the most popular rock bands in the United States. Their blend of blues and dark psychedelic rock included a number of original songs and distinctive cover versions, such as their rendition of “Alabama Song”, from Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s opera, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. The band also performed a number of extended concept works, including the songs “The End”, “When the Music’s Over”, and “Celebration of the Lizard”. In 1966, photographer Joel Brodsky took a series of black-and-white photos of Morrison, in a photo shoot known as “The Young Lion” photo session. These photographs are considered among the most iconic images of Jim Morrison and are frequently used as covers for compilation albums, books, and other memorabilia of the Doors and Morrison. In late 1967 at an infamous concert in New Haven, Connecticut, he was arrested on stage, an incident that further added to his mystique and emphasized his rebellious image. In 1968, the Doors released their third studio album, Waiting for the Sun. The band performed on July 5 at the Hollywood Bowl, this performance became famous with the DVD: Live at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s also this year that the band played, for the first time, in Europe. Their fourth album, The Soft Parade, was released in 1969. It was the first album where the individual band members were given credit on the inner sleeve for the songs they had written. Previously, each song on their albums had been credited simply to “the Doors”. On September 6 and 7, 1968, the Doors played four performances at the Roundhouse, London, England with Jefferson Airplane which were filmed by Granada for a television documentary The Doors are Open directed by John Sheppard. Around this time, Morrison—who had long been a heavy drinker—started showing up for recording sessions visibly inebriated. He was also frequently late for live performances. By early 1969, the formerly svelte singer had gained weight, grown a beard and mustache, and had begun dressing more casually—abandoning the leather pants and concho belts for slacks, jeans and T-shirts. During a concert of March 1, 1969 at the Dinner Key Auditorium in Miami, Morrison attempted to spark a riot in the audience. He failed, but a warrant for his arrest was issued by the Dade County Police department three days later for indecent exposure. Consequently, many of the Doors’ scheduled concerts were canceled. In September 1970, Morrison was convicted of indecent exposure and profanity. Morrison, who attended the sentencing “in a wool jacket adorned with Indian designs”, silently listened as he was sentenced for six months in prison and had to pay a $500 fine. Morrison remained free on a $50,000 bond. At the sentencing, Judge Murray Goodman told Morrison that he was a “person graced with a talent” admired by many of his peers. In 2007 Florida Governor Charlie Crist suggested the possibility of a posthumous pardon for Morrison, which was announced as successful on December 9, 2010. Drummer John Densmore denied Morrison ever exposed himself on stage that night. Following The Soft Parade, the Doors released Morrison Hotel. After a lengthy break the group reconvened in October 1970 to record what would become their final album with Morrison, titled L.A. Woman. Shortly after the recording sessions for the album began, producer Paul A. Rothchild—who had overseen all of their previous recordings—left the project. Engineer Bruce Botnick took over as producer. Poetry and film Morrison began writing in earnest during his adolescence. At UCLA he studied the related fields of theater, film, and cinematography. He self-published two separate volumes of his poetry in 1969, titled The Lords / Notes on Vision and The New Creatures. The Lords consists primarily of brief descriptions of places, people, events and Morrison’s thoughts on cinema. The New Creatures verses are more poetic in structure, feel and appearance. These two books were later combined into a single volume titled The Lords and The New Creatures. These were the only writings published during Morrison’s lifetime. Morrison befriended Beat poet Michael McClure, who wrote the afterword for Danny Sugerman’s biography of Morrison, No One Here Gets Out Alive. McClure and Morrison reportedly collaborated on a number of unmade film projects, including a film version of McClure’s infamous play The Beard, in which Morrison would have played Billy the Kid. After his death, a further two volumes of Morrison’s poetry were published. The contents of the books were selected and arranged by Morrison’s friend, photographer Frank Lisciandro, and girlfriend Pamela Courson’s parents, who owned the rights to his poetry. The Lost Writings of Jim Morrison Volume I is titled Wilderness, and, upon its release in 1988, became an instant New York Times Bestseller. Volume II, The American Night, released in 1990, was also a success. Morrison recorded his own poetry in a professional sound studio on two separate occasions. The first was in March 1969 in Los Angeles and the second was on December 8, 1970. The latter recording session was attended by Morrison’s personal friends and included a variety of sketch pieces. Some of the segments from the 1969 session were issued on the bootleg album The Lost Paris Tapes and were later used as part of the Doors’ An American Prayer album, released in 1978. The album reached No. 54 on the music charts. Some poetry recorded from the December 1970 session remains unreleased to this day and is in the possession of the Courson family. Morrison’s best-known but seldom seen cinematic endeavor is HWY: An American Pastoral, a project he started in 1969. Morrison financed the venture and formed his own production company in order to maintain complete control of the project. Paul Ferrara, Frank Lisciandro and Babe Hill assisted with the project. Morrison played the main character, a hitchhiker turned killer/car thief. Morrison asked his friend, composer/pianist Fred Myrow, to select the soundtrack for the film. Personal life Morrison’s family Morrison’s early life was the semi-nomadic existence typical of military families. Jerry Hopkins recorded Morrison’s brother, Andy, explaining that his parents had determined never to use physical corporal punishment such as spanking on their children. They instead instilled discipline and levied punishment by the military tradition known as dressing down. This consisted of yelling at and berating the children until they were reduced to tears and acknowledged their failings. Once Morrison graduated from UCLA, he broke off most contact with his family. By the time Morrison’s music ascended to the top of the charts (in 1967) he had not been in communication with his family for more than a year and falsely claimed that his parents and siblings were dead (or claiming, as it has been widely misreported, that he was an only child). This misinformation was published as part of the materials distributed with the Doors’ self-titled debut album. Admiral Morrison was not supportive of his son’s career choice in music. One day, an acquaintance brought over a record thought to have Jim on the cover. The record was the Doors’ self-titled debut. The young man played the record for Morrison’s father and family. Upon hearing the record, Morrison’s father wrote him a letter telling him “to give up any idea of singing or any connection with a music group because of what I consider to be a complete lack of talent in this direction.” In a letter to the Florida Probation and Parole Commission District Office dated October 2, 1970, Morrison’s father acknowledged the breakdown in family communications as the result of an argument over his assessment of his son’s musical talents. He said he could not blame his son for being reluctant to initiate contact and that he was proud of him nonetheless. Morrison spoke fondly of his Irish and Scottish ancestry and was inspired by Celtic mythology in his poetry and songs. Celtic Family Magazine revealed in their 2016 Spring Issue his Morrison clan was originally from the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, while his Irish side, the Clelland clan whom married into the Morrison line were from County Down, Ireland. Relationships Morrison’s first major love affair was with Mary Werbelow, whom he met on the beach in Florida. The relationship lasted several years inspiring many of the songs on the first two Doors albums including the 11-minute ballad “The End” which Ray Manzarek said was originally “a short goodbye love song to Mary” calling her “Jim’s first love”. Werbelow has remained out of view to rock historians with one exception, a 2005 interview in the St. Petersburg Times where she said Morrison spoke to her before a photo shoot for the Doors’ fourth album and told her the first three albums were about her. Morrison spent nearly the entirety of his adult life with a woman named Pamela Courson after meeting while both attended university. They met before he gained fame or fortune and she encouraged him to develop his poetry. At times, Courson used the surname “Morrison” with his apparent consent, or at least lack of concern. She was buried as Pamela Susan Morrison. After Courson’s death in 1974, and after her parents petitioned the court for inheritance of Morrison’s estate, the probate court in California decided that she and Morrison had once had what qualified as a common-law marriage, despite neither having applied for such status while they were living and common-law marriage not being recognized in California. Morrison’s will lists him as “an unmarried person” but listed Courson as the sole heir. They had previously obtained marriage licenses in Colorado in 1967 and in Los Angeles in 1968. The Doors’ keyboardist Ray Manzarek described Courson as Morrison’s “other half”. Morrison spoke to Courson through his lyrics and his poetry and dedicated his published poetry book The New Creatures to her. Songs like “Love Street”, “Queen of the Highway”, “Blue Sunday", and “Indian Summer” as well as many of his poems were said to be written about her. Morrison also reportedly regularly had sex with fans ("groupies") such as Pamela Des Barres and Josépha Karcz, who wrote a novel about their night together, and had numerous short flings with other musicians, as well as writers and photographers involved in the music business. They included Nico, the singer associated with the Velvet Underground, a one-night stand with singer Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane, an on-again, off-again relationship with 16 Magazine’s Gloria Stavers as well as an alleged alcohol-fueled encounter with Janis Joplin. Nico also wanted to marry Morrison and they cut their thumbs in the desert with a knife and let their blood mingle. Nico said, “We exchanged blood. I carry his blood inside me.” David Crosby said many years later Morrison treated Joplin meanly at a party at the Calabasas, California, home of John Davidson while Davidson was out of town. She reportedly hit him over the head with a bottle of whiskey in retaliation during a fight in front of witnesses. In 1965, Judy Huddleston met Morrison and claimed she had a four-year on-and-off relationship with him that she chronicled in her book Love Him Madly: An Intimate Memoir of Jim Morrison and an out-of-print book called This is the End My Only Friend: Living & Dying with Jim Morrison, which was updated as Like He Was God. In 1970, Morrison participated in a Celtic Pagan handfasting ceremony with rock critic author Patricia Kennealy. The couple signed a document declaring themselves wed, but none of the necessary paperwork for a legal marriage was filed with the state. Kennealy discussed her experiences with Morrison in her autobiography Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison. In an interview reported in the book Rock Wives, Kennealy reveals that she and Jim Morrison were wed, sort of, in a witch ceremony in 1970, but that he turned “really cold” when Kennealy became pregnant—maybe, she speculates, because he had "20 paternity suits pending against him." She was asked if Morrison took the ceremony seriously and she answered “probably not too seriously”. In July 1971, Janet Erwin documented in her journal having dated Morrison during the last few weeks before he traveled to Paris. She wrote the essay “Your Ballroom Days Are Over.” On a couple of their nights together there were strong aftershocks from the 1971 San Fernando earthquake; one aftershock measured 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale. At the time of Morrison’s death there were at least three paternity actions pending against him, although no claims were made against his estate by any of the putative paternity claimants. One persistent claim of paternity came from Cliff Morrison. Pamela Des Barres later said in her autobiography I’m With The Band: Confessions of a Groupie that Morrison “turned out to be very much a one-woman man”, referring to his relationship with Pamela Courson. Death Morrison joined Courson in Paris in March 1971, at an apartment he had rented on the rue Beautreillis (in the 4th arrondissement of Paris on the Right Bank). In letters he described going for long walks through the city, alone. During this time, Morrison shaved his beard and lost some of the weight he had gained in the previous months. Morrison died on July 3, 1971 at age 27. In the official account of his death, he was found in a Paris apartment bathtub (at 17–19 rue Beautreillis, 4th arrondissement) by Courson. The official cause of death was listed as “heart failure”, although no autopsy was performed. The absence of an autopsy left many questions regarding the cause of Morrison’s death. In Wonderland Avenue, Danny Sugerman discussed his encounter with Courson after she returned to the United States. According to Sugerman’s account, Courson stated that Morrison had died of an accidental heroin overdose, having snorted what he believed to be cocaine. Sugerman added that Courson had given numerous contradictory versions of Morrison’s death, saying at times that she had killed Morrison, or that his death was her fault. Courson’s story of Morrison’s unintentional ingestion of heroin, resulting in an accidental overdose, is supported by the confession of Alain Ronay, who has written that Morrison died of a hemorrhage after snorting Courson’s heroin, and that Courson nodded off instead of phoning for medical help, leaving Morrison alone and bleeding to death. Ronay confessed in an article in Paris that he then helped cover up the circumstances of Morrison’s death, and that there was no autopsy– the normal procedure when a young person dies suddenly– due to the medical examiner being bribed. In the epilogue of No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins and Sugerman write that Ronay and Agnès Varda say Courson lied to the police who responded to the death scene, and later in her deposition, telling them Morrison never took drugs. She also claimed that she was Morrison’s cousin. In the epilogue to No One Here Gets Out Alive, Hopkins says that 20 years after Morrison’s death, Ronay and Varda broke their silence and gave this account “they arrived at the house shortly after Morrison’s death and Courson said that she and Morrison had taken heroin after a night of drinking. Morrison had been coughing badly, had gone to take a bath, and vomited blood.” Courson said that he appeared to recover and that she then went to sleep. When she awoke sometime later Morrison was unresponsive, so she called local friends. Hopkins and Sugerman also claim that Morrison had asthma and was suffering from a respiratory condition involving a chronic cough and vomiting blood on the night of his death. This theory is partially supported in The Doors (written by the remaining members of the band) in which they claim Morrison had been coughing up blood for nearly two months in Paris, but none of the members of the Doors were in Paris with Morrison in the months prior to his death. No other friends have reported witnessing Morrison coughing. According to a Madame Colinette, who was at Père Lachaise Cemetery mourning the recent loss of her husband, she witnessed Morrison’s funeral. The ceremony was “pitiful,” with several of the attendants muttering a few words, throwing a few flowers over the casket, then leaving quickly and hastily within minutes as if their lives depended upon it. Those who attended included Alain Ronay, Agnès Varda, Bill Siddons (manager), Courson, and Robin Wertle (Morrison’s Canadian private secretary at the time for a few months). In the first version of No One Here Gets Out Alive, published in 1980, Sugerman and Hopkins gave some credence to the rumor that Morrison may not have died at all, calling the fake death theory “not as far-fetched as it might seem”. This theory led to considerable distress for Morrison’s loved ones over the years, notably when fans would stalk them, searching for evidence of Morrison’s whereabouts. No proof of any kind has ever been offered to substantiate Sugerman’s suggestion that Morrison was still alive. In 1995, a new epilogue was added to Sugerman’s and Hopkins’s book, giving new facts about Morrison’s death and discounting the fake death theory saying “As time passed, some of Jim and Pamela [Courson]'s friends began to talk about what they knew, and although everything they said pointed irrefutably to Jim’s demise, there remained and probably always will be those who refuse to believe that Jim is dead and those who will not allow him to rest in peace.” In 2007, Sam Bernett, a former manager of the Rock 'n’ Roll Circus nightclub, released a (French) book titled “The End: Jim Morrison”, alleging that Morrison overdosed on heroin in his nightclub. He claims that Morrison went to the club to buy heroin for Courson, used some himself and died in the bathroom, and that his body was then moved by Patrick Chauvel, who corroborates the move, along with two unidentified drug dealers, nicknamed ‘Le Chinois’ and ‘Le Petit Robert’ out the back of the Nightclub so as to prevent a scandal and then bundled into a taxi with the two dealers, which then drove to Morrison’s rue Beautrellis apartment. Apart from Chauvel, one of the other patrons at the club who state that they helped move Morrison was interviewed in the documentary Rock Poet: Jim Morrison (2010). According to Bernett, the heroin was ultimately supplied by the aristocrat Jean de Breiteuil. In 2014, Marianne Faithfull claimed that her boyfriend, de Breiteuil, received a late-night phone call and he alone rushed over to Morrison’s apartment on the day of his death. Near the end of an 1986 audio interview, with radio host Roger Steffens and Doors drummer John Densmore. Steffens recounts that he had been told two days after Morrison’s death, by a shaking Marianne Faithfull and her lover Jean de Breiteuil in Marrakesh of the details of Morrison’s demise, with both Faithfull and Breiteuil having been in Morrison’s apartment after his return from the nightclub and seeing him dead in the bathroom, a scene which motivated them to quickly flee the country, flying to Tangier the next day and then on to Marrakesh, where Steffens happened to be living in 1971. Faithfull would consistently decline to comment on this thereafter until 2014. Steffens remarked that he found it amazing how Faithfull had never publicly discussed the tragedy from 1971 up to the time of recording, 1986. As early as the 1990s, Cameron Watson, an American working as a DJ in Paris at that time, would give the account that while working in the Parisian nightclub La Bulle in July 1971, two “well dressed” drug dealers arrived in the early morning hours at the club and told him that Jim Morrison had just died, Watson then announced this to the few remaining patrons at the club, the first public announcement of his demise and which contributed to the growth of the local parisian rumors. Paris Journal After his death, a notebook of poetry written by Morrison was recovered entitled Paris Journal which amongst other personal details, contains the allegorical foretelling of a man who will be left grieving and having to abandon his belongings, due to a police investigation into a death connected to the Chinese opium trade. Weeping, he left his pad on orders from police & furnishings hauled away, all records & momentos, & reporters calculating tears & curses for the press: “I hope the Chinese junkies get you” & they will for the [opium] poppy rules the world. The concluding stanzas of this poem end with conveying a disappointment for someone who he had an intimate relationship with and a further invocation of Billy/the killer Hitchhiker, a common character in Morrison’s body of work. This is my poem for you, Great flowing funky flower’d beast, Great perfumed wreck of hell... Someone new in your knickers & who would that be? You know, You know more, than you let on... Tell them you came & saw & look’d into my eyes & saw the shadow of the guard receding, Thoughts in time & out of season The Hitchiker stood by the side of the road & levelled his thumb in the calm calculus of reason. In 2013 another of Morrison’s notebooks from Paris, found alongside the Paris Journal in the same box, known as the 127 Fascination box, sold for $250,000. at auction. This box of personal belongings similarly contained a home movie of Pamela Courson, the only film so far recovered, to be shot by Morrison. The box also housed a number of older notebooks and journals and may have potentially included the “Steno Pad” and falsely titled “The Lost Paris Tapes” if they had not been separated from the primary collection and sold by Philippe Dalecky with this promotional title. This tape was later determined by avid listeners to be largely of Jomo & The Smoothies recordings of Morrison, friends and producer Paul Rothchild loose jamming in Los Angeles well before 1971. Grave site Morrison was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, one of the city’s most visited tourist attractions. The grave had no official marker until French officials placed a shield over it, which was stolen in 1973. The grave was listed in the cemetery directory with Morrison’s name incorrectly rearranged as “Douglas James Morrison.” In 1981, Croatian sculptor Mladen Mikulin voluntarily placed a bust of his own design and a new gravestone with Morrison’s name at the grave to commemorate the 10th anniversary of his death; the bust was defaced through the years by cemetery vandals and later stolen in 1988. Mikulin made another bust of Morrison in 1989, and a bronze portrait of him in 2001; neither piece is at the gravesite. In the early 1990s, Morrison’s father, George Stephen Morrison, after consulting with E. Nicholas Genovese, professor of classics and humanities, San Diego State University, placed a flat stone on the grave. The bronze plaque thereon bears the Greek inscription: ΚΑΤΑ ΤΟΝ ΔΑΙΜΟΝΑ ΕΑΥΤΟΥ, literally meaning “according to his own daemon, i.e., guiding spirit,” to convey the sentiment “True to Himself.” Artistic influences As a naval family the Morrisons relocated frequently. Consequently, Morrison’s early education was routinely disrupted as he moved from school to school. Nonetheless he was drawn to the study of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy and psychology, among other fields. Biographers have consistently pointed to a number of writers and philosophers who influenced Morrison’s thinking and, perhaps, his behavior. While still in his teens Morrison discovered the work of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He was also drawn to the poetry of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud. Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac also had a strong influence on Morrison’s outlook and manner of expression; Morrison was eager to experience the life described in Kerouac’s On the Road. He was similarly drawn to the work of French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Céline’s book, Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (Journey to the End of the Night) and Blake’s Auguries of Innocence both echo through one of Morrison’s early songs, “End of the Night”. Morrison later met and befriended Michael McClure, a well known beat poet. McClure had enjoyed Morrison’s lyrics but was even more impressed by his poetry and encouraged him to further develop his craft. Morrison’s vision of performance was colored by the works of 20th-century French playwright Antonin Artaud (author of Theater and its Double) and by Julian Beck’s Living Theater. Other works relating to religion, mysticism, ancient myth and symbolism were of lasting interest, particularly Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. James Frazer’s The Golden Bough also became a source of inspiration and is reflected in the title and lyrics of the song “Not to Touch the Earth”. Morrison was particularly attracted to the myths and religions of Native American cultures. While he was still in school, his family moved to New Mexico where he got to see some of the places and artifacts important to the American Southwest Indigenous cultures. These interests appear to be the source of many references to creatures and places such as lizards, snakes, deserts and “ancient lakes” that appear in his songs and poetry. His interpretation and imagination of the practices of Native American ceremonial people (which, based on his readings, he referred to by the anthropological but inaccurate term “shamans”) influenced his stage routine, notably in seeking trance states and vision through dancing to the point of exhaustion. In particular, Morrison’s poem “The Ghost Song” was inspired by his readings about the Native American Ghost Dance. Jim Morrison’s vocal influences included Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, which is evident in his own baritone crooning style used in several of the Doors’ songs and in the 1981 documentary The Doors: A Tribute to Jim Morrison, producer Paul Rothchild refers his first impression of Morrison as being a “Rock and Roll Bing Crosby”. It is mentioned within the pages of No One Here Gets Out Alive by Danny Sugerman, that Morrison as a teenager was such a fan of Presley’s music that he demanded people be quiet when Elvis was on the radio. The Frank Sinatra influence is mentioned in the pages of The Doors, The Illustrated History also by Sugerman, where Frank Sinatra is listed on Morrison’s Band Bio as being his favorite singer. Reference to this can also be found in a Rolling Stone article about Jim Morrison, regarding the Top 100 rock singers of all time. Legacy Musical Morrison was, and continues to be, one of the most popular and influential singer-songwriters and iconic front men in rock history. To this day Morrison is widely regarded as the prototypical rock-star: surly, sexy, scandalous, and mysterious. The leather pants he was fond of wearing both onstage and off have since become stereotyped as rock-star apparel. In 2011, a Rolling Stone readers’ pick placed Jim Morrison in fifth place of the magazine’s “Best Lead Singers of All Time”. Iggy and the Stooges are said to have formed after lead singer Iggy Pop was inspired by Morrison while attending a Doors concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of Pop’s most popular songs, “The Passenger”, is said to be based on one of Morrison’s poems. After Morrison’s death, Pop was considered as a replacement lead singer for the Doors; the surviving Doors gave him some of Morrison’s belongings and hired him as a vocalist for a series of shows. Wallace Fowlie, professor emeritus of French literature at Duke University, wrote Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, subtitled “The Rebel as Poet– A Memoir”. In this he recounts his surprise at receiving a fan letter from Morrison who, in 1968, thanked him for his latest translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s verse into English. “I don’t read French easily”, he wrote, “...your book travels around with me.” Fowlie went on to give lectures on numerous campuses comparing the lives, philosophies and poetry of Morrison and Rimbaud. The book The Doors by the remaining Doors quotes Morrison’s close friend Frank Lisciandro as saying that too many people took a remark of Morrison’s that he was interested in revolt, disorder, and chaos “to mean that he was an anarchist, a revolutionary, or, worse yet, a nihilist. Hardly anyone noticed that Jim was paraphrasing Rimbaud and the Surrealist poets.” Layne Staley, the vocalist of Alice in Chains, Eddie Vedder, the vocalist of Pearl Jam, Scott Weiland, the vocalist of Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver, Julian Casablancas of the Strokes, James LaBrie of Dream Theater, as well as Scott Stapp of Creed and Ville Valo of H.I.M., have all said that Morrison was their biggest influence and inspiration. Stone Temple Pilots and Velvet Revolver have both covered “Roadhouse Blues” by the Doors. Weiland also filled in for Morrison to perform “Break On Through (To The Other Side)” with the rest of the Doors. Stapp filled in for Morrison for “Light My Fire”, “Riders on the Storm” and “Roadhouse Blues” on VH1 Storytellers. Creed performed their version of “Roadhouse Blues” with Robby Krieger for the 1999 Woodstock Festival. Morrison’s recital of his poem “Bird Of Prey” can be heard throughout the song “Sunset” by Fatboy Slim. Rock band Bon Jovi featured Morrison’s grave in their “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” video clip. The band Radiohead mentions Jim Morrison in their song “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, stating “I wanna be wanna be wanna be Jim Morrison”. Alice Cooper in the liner notes of the album Killer stated that the song “Desperado” is about Jim Morrison. The leather pants of U2's Bono’s “The Fly” persona for the Achtung Baby era and subsequent Zoo TV Tour is attributed to Jim Morrison. On their 2008 album The Hawk Is Howling In 2012 electronic music producer Skrillex released “Breakn’ a Sweat” which contained vocals from an interview with Jim Morrison. In popular culture In June 2013, a new fossil analysis revealed a lizard, one of the largest ever known that lived on Myanmar, was given the moniker Barbaturex morrisoni in honor of Morrison. “This is a king lizard, and he was the lizard king, so it just fit,” said Jason Head, a paleontologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The animated television show The Simpsons has made numerous references to Morrison, including Krusty the Klown singing Break On Through ("I Love Lisa", Season 4); Otto Mann telling Homer that “me and the admiral do not get along” (a reference to Morrison and his estranged father, Rear Admiral George Stephen Morrison ("The Otto Show", Season 3)); mention of Morrison’s grave ("The Devil Wears Nada", Season 21). Another reference, “I am the lizard queen!” Is bellowed by Lisa Simpson at the end of her encounter with psychedelic theme-ride river water at Duff Gardens ("Selma’s Choice", Season 4). In another episode, Morrison himself was visually depicted in the form of a hallucination had by Homer Simpson when he was forming a rock band ("Covercraft", Season 26) In Stephen King’s The Stand, Stu Redman tells a friend about his encounter with Jim Morrison long after Morrison’s supposed death, late at night at a lonely Texas gas station in the 1980s. Discography Books By Morrison * The Lords and the New Creatures (1969). 1985 edition: ISBN 0-7119-0552-5 * An American Prayer (1970) privately printed by Western Lithographers. (Unauthorized edition also published in 1983, Zeppelin Publishing Company, ISBN 0-915628-46-5. The authenticity of the unauthorized edition has been disputed.) * Arden lointain, edition bilingue (1988), trad. de l’américain et présenté par Sabine Prudent et Werner Reimann. [Paris]: C. Bourgois. 157 p. N.B.: Original texts in English, with French translations, on facing pages. ISBN 2-267-00560-3 * Wilderness: The Lost Writings Of Jim Morrison (1988). 1990 edition: ISBN 0-14-011910-8 * The American Night: The Writings of Jim Morrison (1990). 1991 edition: ISBN 0-670-83772-5 About Morrison * Linda Ashcroft, Wild Child: Life with Jim Morrison, (1997) ISBN 1-56025-249-9 * Lester Bangs, “Jim Morrison: Bozo Dionysus a Decade Later” in Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader, John Morthland, ed. Anchor Press (2003) ISBN 0-375-71367-0 * Stephen Davis, Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend, (2004) ISBN 1-59240-064-7 * John Densmore, Riders on the Storm: My Life With Jim Morrison and the Doors (1991) ISBN 0-385-30447-1 * Dave DiMartino, Moonlight Drive (1995) ISBN 1-886894-21-3 * Steven Erkel, "The Poet Behind the Doors: Jim Morrison’s Poetry and the 1960s Countercultural Movement" (2011) * Wallace Fowlie, Rimbaud and Jim Morrison (1994) ISBN 0-8223-1442-8 * Jerry Hopkins, The Lizard King: The Essential Jim Morrison (1995) ISBN 0-684-81866-3 * Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, No One Here Gets Out Alive (1980) ISBN 0-85965-138-X * Mike Jahn, “Jim Morrison and the Doors” (1969)Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 71-84745 * Dylan Jones, Jim Morrison: Dark Star, (1990) ISBN 0-7475-0951-4 * Patricia Kennealy, Strange Days: My Life With and Without Jim Morrison (1992) ISBN 0-525-93419-7 * Gerry Kirstein, “Some Are Born to Endless Night: Jim Morrison, Visions of Apocalypse and Transcendence” (2012) ISBN 1451558066 * Frank Lisciandro, Morrison: A Feast of Friends (1991) ISBN 0-446-39276-6, Morrison—Un festin entre amis (1996) (French) * Frank Lisciandro, Jim Morrison: An Hour For Magic (A Photojournal) (1982) ISBN 0-85965-246-7, James Douglas Morrison (2005) (French) * Ray Manzarek, Light My Fire (1998) ISBN 0-446-60228-0. First by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman (1981) * Peter Jan Margry, The Pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s Grave at Père Lachaise Cemetery: The Social Construction of Sacred Space. In idem (ed.), Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World. New Itineraries into the Sacred. Amsterdam University Press, 2008, p. 145–173. * Thanasis Michos, The Poetry of James Douglas Morrison (2001) ISBN 960-7748-23-9 (Greek) * Daveth Milton, We Want The World: Jim Morrison, The Living Theatre, and the FBI, (2012) ISBN 978-0957051188 * Mark Opsasnick, The Lizard King Was Here: The Life and Times of Jim Morrison in Alexandria, Virginia (2006) ISBN 1-4257-1330-0 * James Riordan & Jerry Prochnicky, Break on through: The Life and Death of Jim Morrison (1991) ISBN 0-688-11915-8 * Adriana Rubio, Jim Morrison: Ceremony... Exploring the Shaman Possession (2005) ISBN * Howard Sounes. 27: A History of the 27 Club Through the Lives of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse, Boston: Da Capo Press, 2013. ISBN 0-306-82168-0. * The Doors (remaining members Ray Manzarek, Robby Krieger, John Densmore) with Ben Fong-Torres, The Doors (2006) ISBN 1-4013-0303-X * Mick Wall, “Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre: A Biography of the Doors”, (2014) Films Films by Morrison * HWY: An American Pastoral Documentaries featuring Morrison Films about The Doors * The Doors (1991), A film by director Oliver Stone, starring Val Kilmer as Morrison and with cameos by Krieger and Densmore. Kilmer’s performance was praised by some critics. Ray Manzarek, The Doors’ keyboardist, harshly criticized Stone’s portrayal of Morrison, and noted that numerous events depicted in the movie were pure fiction. David Crosby on an album by CPR wrote and recorded a song about the movie with the lyric: “And I have seen that movie– and it wasn’t like that.” References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Morrison

Edwin Morgan

Edwin George Morgan (27 April 1920 – 17 August 2010) was a Scottish poet and translator who was associated with the Scottish Renaissance. He is widely recognised as one of the foremost Scottish poets of the 20th century. In 1999, Morgan was made the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. In 2004, he was named as the first Scottish national poet: The Scots Makar. Life and career Morgan was born in Glasgow and grew up in Rutherglen. His parents were Presbyterian. As a child he was not surrounded by books, nor did he have any literary acquaintances. Schoolmates labelled him a swot. He convinced his parents to finance his membership of several book clubs in Glasgow. The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) was a “revelation” to him, he later said. Morgan entered the University of Glasgow in 1937. It was at university that he studied French and Russian, while self-educating in “a good bit of Italian and German” as well. After interrupting his studies to serve in World War II as a non-combatant conscientious objector with the Royal Army Medical Corps, Morgan graduated in 1947 and became a lecturer at the University. He worked there until his retirement as a full professor in 1980. Morgan described ‘CHANGE RULES!’ as 'the supreme graffito’, whose liberating double-take suggests both a lifelong commitment to formal experimentation and his radically democratic left-wing political perspectives. From traditional sonnet to blank verse, from epic seriousness to camp and ludic nonsense; and whether engaged in time-travelling space fantasies or exploring contemporary developments in physics and technology, the range of Morgan’s voices is a defining attribute. Morgan first outlined his sexuality in Nothing Not Giving Messages: Reflections on his Work and Life (1990). He had written many famous love poems, among them “Strawberries” and “The Unspoken”, in which the love object was not gendered; this was partly because of legal problems at the time but also out of a desire to universalise them, as he made clear in an interview with Marshall Walker. At the opening of the Glasgow LGBT Centre in 1995, he read a poem he had written for the occasion, and presented it to the Centre as a gift. In 2002, he became the patron of Our Story Scotland. At the Opening of the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh on 9 October 2004, Liz Lochhead read a poem written especially for the occasion by Morgan, titled “Poem for the Opening of the Scottish Parliament”. She was announced as Morgan’s successor as Scots Makar in January 2011. Near the end of his life, Morgan reached a new audience after collaborating with the Scottish band Idlewild on their album The Remote Part. In the closing moments of the album’s final track "In Remote Part/ Scottish Fiction", he recites a poem, “Scottish Fiction”, written specifically for the song. In 2007, Morgan contributed two poems to the compilation Ballads of the Book, for which a range of Scottish writers created poems to be made into songs by Scottish musicians. Morgan’s songs “The Good Years” and “The Weight of Years” were performed by Karine Polwart and Idlewild respectively. Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney "[paid] formal homage" during a 2005 visit. In later life Morgan was cared for at a residential home as his health worsened. He published a collection in April 2010, months before his death, titled Dreams and Other Nightmares to mark his 90th birthday. Up until his death, he was the last survivor of the canonical 'Big Seven’ (the others being Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Garioch, Norman MacCaig, Iain Crichton Smith, George Mackay Brown, and Sorley MacLean). On 17 August 2010, Edwin Morgan died of pneumonia in Glasgow, Scotland, at the age of 90. The Scottish Poetry Library made the announcement in the morning. Tributes came from, among others, politicians Alex Salmond and Iain Gray, as well as Carol Ann Duffy, the UK Poet Laureate. Testamentary provisions First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond’s leader’s speech to the Scottish National Party Conference at Inverness on 22 October 2011 referred to Morgan’s bequest of £918,000 to the party in his will as “transformational”. The next day it was announced that all of the bequest would be used for the party’s independence referendum campaign. Morgan also left £45,000 to a number of friends, former colleagues and charity organisations and set aside another £1 million for the creation of an annual award scheme for young poets in Scotland. Poetry Morgan worked in a wide range of forms and styles, from the sonnet to concrete poetry. His Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He has also translated from a wide range of languages, including Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Old English (Beowulf). Many of these are collected in Rites of Passage. Selected Translations (1976). His 1952 translation of Beowulf has become a standard translation in America. Morgan was also influenced by the American beat poets, with their simple, accessible ideas and language being prominent features in his work. In 1968 Morgan wrote a poem entitled Starlings In George Square. This poem could be read as a comment on society’s reluctance to accept the integration of different races. Other people have also considered it to be about the Russian Revolution in which “Starling” could be a reference to “Stalin”. Other notable poems include: The Death of Marilyn Monroe (1962) – an outpouring of emotion after the death of one of the world’s most talented women. The Billy Boys (1968) – flashback of the gang warfare in Glasgow led by Billy Fullerton in the Thirties. Glasgow 5 March 1971 – robbery by two youths by pushing an unsuspecting couple through a shop window on Sauchiehall Street In the Snackbar – concise description of an encounter with a disabled pensioner in a Glasgow restaurant. A Good Year for Death (26 September 1977) – a description of five famous people from the world of popular culture who died in 1977 Poem for the Opening of the Scottish Parliament – which was read by Liz Lochhead at the opening ceremony because he was too ill. (9 October 2004) Books Awards and honours * 1972 PEN Memorial Medal (Hungary) * 1982 OBE * 1983 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award for Poems of Thirty Years * 1985 Soros Translation Award (New York) * 1998 Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year for Virtual and Other Realities * 2000 Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry * 2001 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize for Jean Racine: Phaedra * 2002 The Saltire Society’s Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun award for notable service to Scotland * 2003 Jackie Forster Memorial Award for Culture * 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award for Literature, from the Saltire Society and the Scottish Arts Council * 2007 T. S. Eliot Prize for A Book of Lives. * 2008 Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Morgan_(poet)

Marianne Moore

Born near St. Louis, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore was raised in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. After her grandfather's death, in 1894, Moore and her family stayed with other relatives, and in 1896 they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909. Following graduation, Moore studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College, and from 1911 to 1915 she was employed as a school teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. In 1918, Moore and her mother moved to New York City, and in 1921, she became an assistant at the New York Public Library. She began to meet other poets, such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and to contribute to the Dial, a prestigious literary magazine. She served as acting editor of the Dial from 1925 to 1929. Along with the work of such other members of the Imagist movement as Ezra Pound, Williams, and H. D., Moore's poems were published in the Egoist, an English magazine, beginning in 1915. In 1921, H.D. published Moore's first book, Poems, without her knowledge. Moore was widely recognized for her work; among her many honors were the Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise, capable of suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single, compact image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos Williams wrote about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular: "So that in looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great events." She was particularly fond of animals, and much of her imagery is drawn from the natural world. She was also a great fan of professional baseball and an admirer of Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the liner notes to his record, I Am the Greatest! Deeply attached to her mother, she lived with her until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. Marianne Moore died in New York City in 1972. Poetry Collected Poems (1951) Like a Bulwark (1956) Nevertheless (1944) O to Be a Dragon (1959) Observations (1924) Poems (1921) Selected Poems (1935) Tell Me, Tell Me (1966) The Arctic Fox (1964) The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967) The Pangolin and Other Verse (1936) What Are Years? (1941) Prose A Marianne Moore Reader (1961) Predilections (1955) The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (1987)

William Meredith

William Meredith was born in New York City on January 9, 1919. He attended the Lenox School in Massachusetts and in 1940 graduated from Princeton University with an A.B. in English, Magna Cum Laude. His senior thesis was on the work of Robert Frost, a major influence for Meredith throughout his career. He worked briefly as a reporter for The New York Times before joining the U.S. Army Air Force in 1941. In 1942 he served as a carrier pilot for the U.S. Navy, achieving the rank of lieutenant. During his service, Meredith's first book of poems, Love Letter from an Impossible Land (1944), was chosen by Archibald MacLeish for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. For the next few years he taught English at Princeton University as Woodrow Wilson Fellow in Writing and Resident Fellow in Creative Writing while still in the U.S. Navy Reserves. In 1948, his second collection, Ships and Other Figures was published. Meredith then taught briefly as Associate professor of English at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu before returning to the Navy as a pilot in the Korean War. During his service, he achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander and recieved two Air Medals. During this time, Meredith continued to focus on his poetry, and for several years after his return to the States, he divided his time between teaching and writing. An opera critic, dramatist, translator, editor, and public servant, Meredith was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1964. Since then, he has published several books of poetry, including Effort at Speech (TriQuarterly Books, 1997), for which he won the National Book Award; Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems (1987), which won both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Cheer (1980); Hazard, the Painter (1975); and Earth Walk: New and Selected Poems (1970). Meredith also edited Poets of Bulgaria (1986) and Shelley: Selected Poems (1962), and translated Alcools: Poems 1989-1913 by Guillaume Apollinaire (1964). A selection of William Meredith's prose, including memoirs, critical essays, reviews, and an interview, has been published as Poems Are Hard to Read (1991). According to the poet Edward Hirsch, "[Meredith] has looked generously and hard at our common human world. He doesn't slight the disasterous, the 'umpteen kinds of trouble' he has seen—accountability weighs heavily in his poems—but his work reverberates with old-fashioned terms such as fairness, morale, cheerfulness, joy and happiness." Meredith's honors include the Loines Award and a grant from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the International Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry, a grant and senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Rockefeller Foundation grants. He was a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980 and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1963 until 1987. Meredith began to suffer from expressive aphasia after a stroke in 1983. This means that he has lost the ability to express himself at will. As the poet Michael Collier explains in his foreword to Meredith's most recent publication, Effort at Speech: "Trapped, as it were, inside his body, which has profoundly betrayed him, for the past decade and a half Meredith has remained occupied with the poet's struggle—the struggle to speak." For several years, he divided his time between Uncasville, Connecticut and Bulgaria, where he was granted honorary citizenship, with Richard Harteis, by decree of President Zhelev ini 1996. Meredith died on May 30, 2007, at the age of 88, at Lawrence & Memorial Hospital in New London, CT. References Poets.org - www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/121

Katherine Mansfield

Kathleen Mansfield Murry (14 October 1888– 9 January 1923) was a prominent New Zealand modernist short story writer who was born and brought up in colonial New Zealand and wrote under the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. At 19, Mansfield left New Zealand and settled in the United Kingdom, where she became a friend of modernist writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. In 1917 she was diagnosed with extrapulmonary tuberculosis, which led to her death at the age of 34. Biography Early life Mansfield was born Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp in 1888 into a socially prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. Her father was a banker and she was a cousin of the author Countess Elizabeth von Arnim. She had two older sisters, a younger sister and a younger brother, born in 1894. Her father, Harold Beauchamp, became the chairman of the Bank of New Zealand and was knighted. Her grandfather was Arthur Beauchamp, who briefly represented the Picton electorate in Parliament. In 1893 the Mansfield family moved from Thorndon to Karori, where Mansfield spent the happiest years of her childhood. She used some of her memories of this time as an inspiration for the “Prelude” story. Her first published stories appeared in the High School Reporter and the Wellington Girls’ High School magazine (the family returned to Wellington proper in 1898), in 1898 and 1899. In 1902 she became enamoured of a cellist, Arnold Trowell, although the feelings were largely unreciprocated. Mansfield herself was an accomplished cellist, having received lessons from Trowell’s father. Mansfield wrote in her journals of feeling alienated in New Zealand, and of how she had become disillusioned because of the repression of the Māori people. Māori characters are often portrayed in a sympathetic or positive light in her later stories, such as “How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped”. In 1903 she moved to London, where she attended Queen’s College along with her sisters. Mansfield recommenced playing the cello, an occupation that she believed she would take up professionally, but she also began contributing to the college newspaper with such dedication that she eventually became its editor. She was particularly interested in the works of the French Symbolists and Oscar Wilde, and she was appreciated among her peers for her vivacious and charismatic approach to life and work. She met fellow writer Ida Baker (also known as Lesley Moore), a South African, at the college, and they became lifelong friends. Mansfield did not become involved in much political activity when she lived in London. For example, she did not actively support the suffragette movement in the UK (women in New Zealand had gained the right to vote in 1893). Mansfield travelled in continental Europe between 1903 and 1906, staying mainly in Belgium and Germany. After finishing her schooling in England, she returned to New Zealand in 1906, and only then began to write short stories. She had several works published in the Native Companion (Australia), her first paid writing work, and by this time she had her heart set on becoming a professional writer. It was also the first occasion on which she used the pseudonym “K. Mansfield”. She rapidly wearied of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle and of her family, and two years later headed again for London. Her father sent her an annual allowance of 100 pounds for the rest of her life. In later years she expressed both admiration and disdain for New Zealand in her journals, but she was never able to return there because of her tuberculosis. Mansfield had two romantic relationships with women that are notable for their pre-eminence in her journal entries. She continued to have male lovers, and attempted to repress her feelings at certain times. Her first same-gender romantic relationship was with Maata Mahupuku (sometimes known as Martha Grace), a wealthy young Māori woman whom she had first met at Miss Swainson’s school in Wellington, and then again in London in 1906. In June 1907 she wrote: “I want Maata—I want her as I have had her—terribly. This is unclean I know but true.” She often referred to Maata as Carlotta. She wrote about Maata in several short stories. Maata married in 1907 but it is claimed that she sent money to Mansfield in London. The second relationship, with Edith Kathleen Bendall, took place from 1906 to 1908. Mansfield also professed her adoration for her in her journals. Return to London Back in London in 1908, Mansfield quickly fell into a bohemian way of life. She published only one story and one poem during her first 15 months there. Mansfield sought out the Trowell family for companionship, and while Arnold was involved with another woman Mansfield embarked on a passionate affair with his brother, Garnet. By early 1909 she had become pregnant by Garnet, though Trowell’s parents disapproved of the relationship and the two broke up. She hastily entered into a marriage with George Bowden, a singing teacher 11 years older than she; they were married on 2 March, but she left him the same evening, before the marriage could be consummated. After a brief reunion with Garnet, Mansfield’s mother, Annie Beauchamp, arrived in 1909. She blamed the breakdown of the marriage to Bowden on a lesbian relationship between Mansfield and Baker, and she quickly had her daughter despatched to the spa town of Bad Wörishofen in Bavaria, Germany. Mansfield miscarried after attempting to lift a suitcase on top of a cupboard. It is not known whether her mother knew of this miscarriage when she left shortly after arriving in Germany, but she cut Mansfield out of her will. Mansfield’s time in Bavaria had a significant effect on her literary outlook. In particular, she was introduced to the works of Anton Chekhov. She returned to London in January 1910. She then published more than a dozen articles in A.R. Orage’s socialist magazine The New Age, and became a friend and lover of Beatrice Hastings, who lived with Orage. Her experiences of Germany formed the foundation of her first published collection, In a German Pension, (1911), which she later described as “immature”. Meeting Murry Soon afterwards Mansfield submitted a lightweight story to a new avant-garde magazine called Rhythm. The piece was rejected by the magazine’s editor, John Middleton Murry, who requested something darker. Mansfield responded with “The Woman at the Store”, a tale of murder and mental illness. Mansfield was inspired at this time by Fauvism. In 1911 Mansfield and Murry began a relationship that culminated in their marriage in 1918, although she left him twice, in 1911 and 1913. In October 1912 the publisher of Rhythm, Charles Granville (sometimes known as Stephen Swift), absconded to Europe and left Murry responsible for the debts the magazine had accumulated. Mansfield pledged her father’s allowance towards the magazine, but it was discontinued, being reorganised as The Blue Review in 1913 and folding after three issues. Mansfield and Murry were persuaded by their friend Gilbert Cannan to rent a cottage next to his windmill in Cholesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1913, in an attempt to alleviate Mansfield’s ill health. In January 1914 the couple moved to Paris, in the hope that a change of setting would make writing easier for both of them. Mansfield wrote only one story during her time there ("Something Childish But Very Natural") before Murry was recalled to London to declare bankruptcy. In 1914 Mansfield had a brief affair with the French writer Francis Carco. Her visit to him in Paris in February 1915 is retold in one of her short stories, “An Indiscreet Journey”. Mansfield’s life and work were changed by the death in 1915 of her beloved younger brother, Leslie Heron “Chummie” Beauchamp, as a New Zealand soldier in France. She began to take refuge in nostalgic reminiscences of their childhood in New Zealand. In a poem describing a dream she had shortly after his death, she wrote By the remembered stream my brother stands Waiting for me with berries in his hands... “These are my body. Sister, take and eat.” At the beginning of 1917 Mansfield and Murry separated, although he continued to visit her at her new apartment. Baker, whom Mansfield often called, with a mixture of affection and disdain, her “wife”, moved in with her shortly afterwards. Mansfield entered into her most prolific period of writing after 1916, which began with several stories, including “Mr Reginald Peacock’s Day” and “A Dill Pickle”, being published in The New Age. Woolf and her husband, Leonard, who had recently set up Hogarth Press, approached her for a story, and Mansfield presented “Prelude”, which she had begun writing in 1915 as “The Aloe”. The story depicts a family of New Zealanders moving house. In December 1917 Mansfield was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Rejecting the idea of staying in a sanatorium on the grounds that it would cut her off from writing, she moved abroad to avoid the English winter. She stayed at a half-deserted and cold hotel in Bandol, France, where she became depressed but continued to produce stories, including "Je ne parle pas français". “Bliss”, the story that lent its name to her second collection of stories in 1920, was also published in 1918. Her health continued to deteriorate and she had her first lung haemorrhage in March. By April Mansfield’s divorce from Bowden had been finalised, and she and Murry married, only to part again two weeks later. They came together again, however, and in March 1919 Murry became editor of Athenaeum, for which Mansfield wrote more than 100 book reviews, collected posthumously as Novels and Novelists. During the winter of 1918–19 she and Baker stayed in a villa in San Remo, Italy. Their relationship came under strain during this period, and after she wrote to Murry to express her feelings of depression he stayed over Christmas. Although her relationship with Murry became increasingly distant after 1918 and the two often lived apart, this intervention of his spurred her on, and she wrote “The Man Without a Temperament”, the story of an ill wife and her long-suffering husband. Mansfield followed her first collection of short stories, Bliss (1920), with another collection The Garden Party, published in 1922. Final years Mansfield spent her last years seeking increasingly unorthodox cures for her tuberculosis. In February 1922 she consulted the Russian physician Ivan Manoukhin, whose “revolutionary” treatment, which consisted of bombarding her spleen with X-rays, caused Mansfield to develop heat flashes and numbness in her legs. In October 1922 Mansfield moved to Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France, where she was put under the care of Olgivanna Lazovitch Hinzenburg (who later married Frank Lloyd Wright). As a guest rather than a pupil of Gurdjieff, Mansfield was not required to take part in the rigorous routine of the Institute, but she spent much of her time there with her mentor, Alfred Richard Orage and her last letters inform Murry of her attempts to apply some of Gurdjieff’s teachings to her own life. Mansfield suffered a fatal pulmonary haemorrhage in January 1923, after running up a flight of stairs. She died on 9 January and was buried in a cemetery in Avon. Mansfield was a prolific writer in the final years of her life. Much of her work remained unpublished at her death, and Murry took on the task of editing and publishing it in two additional volumes of short stories (The Dove’s Nest in 1923 and Something Childish in 1924), a volume of Poems, The Aloe, Novels and Novelists, and collections of her letters and journals. Legacy The following high schools in New Zealand have a house named after her: Rangitoto College, Westlake Girls’ High School, Macleans College all in Auckland, Tauranga Girls’ College in Tauranga, Wellington Girls’ College in Wellington, Rangiora High School in North Canterbury and Southland Girls’ High School in Invercargill. She has been honoured at Karori Normal School in Wellington which has a stone monument dedicated to her with a plaque commemorating her work and her time at the school. She has also been recognised at Samuel Marsden Collegiate School (previously Fitzherbert Tce School) with a painting and award in her name. There is a Park dedicated to her in Thorndon, Wellington. A street in Menton, France, where she lived and wrote, is named after her and a Fellowship is offered annually to enable a New Zealand writer to work at her former home, the Villa Isola Bella. New Zealand’s pre-eminent short story competition is also named in her honour. She was the subject of the 1973 BBC miniseries A Picture of Katherine Mansfield starring Vanessa Redgrave. The six-part series included adaptations of Mansfield’s life and of her short stories. In 2011, a biopic film titled “Bliss”, was made of her early beginnings as a writer in New Zealand, played by Kate Elliott and featured on the TVNZ TV-movie series “Sunday Theatre” that aired on 28 August 2011.

Julia Ann Moore

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

Andrew Marvell

Andrew Marvell (31 March 1621– 16 August 1678) was an English metaphysical poet, satirist and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1659 and 1678. During the Commonwealth period he was a colleague and friend of John Milton. His poems range from the love-song “To His Coy Mistress”, to evocations of an aristocratic country house and garden in “Upon Appleton House” and “The Garden”, the political address “An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”, and the later personal and political satires “Flecknoe” and “The Character of Holland”. Early life Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, East Riding of Yorkshire, near the city of Kingston upon Hull, the son of a Church of England clergyman also named Andrew Marvell. The family moved to Hull when his father was appointed Lecturer at Holy Trinity Church there, and Marvell was educated at Hull Grammar School. A secondary school in the city, the Andrew Marvell Business and Enterprise College, is now named after him. At the age of 13, Marvell attended Trinity College, Cambridge and eventually received a BA degree. A portrait of Marvell attributed to Godfrey Kneller hangs in Trinity College’s collection. Afterwards, from the middle of 1642 onwards, Marvell probably travelled in continental Europe. He may well have served as a tutor for an aristocrat on the Grand Tour, but the facts are not clear on this point. While England was embroiled in the civil war, Marvell seems to have remained on the continent until 1647. It is not known exactly where his travels took him, except that he was in Rome in 1645 and Milton later reported that Marvell had mastered four languages, including French, Italian and Spanish. First poems and Marvell’s time at Nun Appleton Marvell’s first poems, which were written in Latin and Greek and published when he was still at Cambridge, lamented a visitation of the plague and celebrated the birth of a child to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria. He only belatedly became sympathetic to the successive regimes during the Interregnum after Charles I’s execution on 30 January 1649. His “Horatian Ode”, a political poem dated to early 1650, responds with lament to the regicide even as it praises Oliver Cromwell’s return from Ireland. Circa 1650–52, Marvell served as tutor to the daughter of the Lord General Thomas Fairfax, who had recently relinquished command of the Parliamentary army to Cromwell. He lived during that time at Nun Appleton Hall, near York, where he continued to write poetry. One poem, “Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax”, uses a description of the estate as a way of exploring Fairfax’s and Marvell’s own situation in a time of war and political change. Probably the best-known poem he wrote at this time is “To His Coy Mistress”. Anglo-Dutch War and employment as Latin secretary During the period of increasing tensions leading up to the First Anglo-Dutch War of 1653, Marvell wrote the satirical “Character of Holland,” repeating the then current stereotype of the Dutch as “drunken and profane”: "This indigested vomit of the Sea,/ Fell to the Dutch by Just Propriety.” He became a tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, in 1653, and moved to live with his pupil at the house of John Oxenbridge in Eton. Oxenbridge had made two trips to Bermuda, and it is thought that this inspired Marvell to write his poem Bermudas. He also wrote several poems in praise of Cromwell, who was by this time Lord Protector of England. In 1656 Marvell and Dutton travelled to France, to visit the Protestant Academy of Saumur. In 1657, Marvell joined Milton, who by that time had lost his sight, in service as Latin secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State at a salary of £200 a year, which represented financial security at that time. Oliver Cromwell died in 1658. He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. In 1659 Marvell was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull in the Third Protectorate Parliament. He was paid a rate of 6 shillings, 8 pence per day during sittings of parliament, a financial support derived from the contributions of his constituency. He was re-elected MP for Hull in 1660 for the Convention Parliament. After the Restoration The monarchy was restored to Charles II in 1660. Marvell avoided punishment for his own co-operation with republicanism, and he helped convince the government of Charles II not to execute John Milton for his antimonarchical writings and revolutionary activities. The closeness of the relationship between the two former colleagues is indicated by the fact that Marvell contributed an eloquent prefatory poem, entitled “On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost”, to the second edition of Milton’s epic Paradise Lost. According to a biographer: “Skilled in the arts of self-preservation, he was not a toady.” In 1661 Marvell was re-elected MP for Hull in the Cavalier Parliament. He eventually came to write several long and bitterly satirical verses against the corruption of the court. Although circulated in manuscript form, some finding anonymous publication in print, they were too politically sensitive and thus dangerous to be published under his name until well after his death. Marvell took up opposition to the 'court party’, and satirised them anonymously. In his longest verse satire, Last Instructions to a Painter, written in 1667, Marvell responded to the political corruption that had contributed to English failures during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. The poem did not find print publication until after the Revolution of 1688–9. The poem instructs an imaginary painter how to picture the state without a proper navy to defend them, led by men without intelligence or courage, a corrupt and dissolute court, and dishonest officials. Of another such satire, Samuel Pepys, himself a government official, commented in his diary, “Here I met with a fourth Advice to a Painter upon the coming in of the Dutch and the End of the War, that made my heart ake to read, it being too sharp and so true.” From 1659 until his death in 1678, Marvell was serving as London agent for the Hull Trinity House, a shipmasters’ guild. He went on two missions to the continent, one to the Dutch Republic and the other encompassing Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. He spent some time living in a cottage on Highgate Hill in north London, where his time in the area is recorded by a bronze plaque that bears the following inscription: Four feet below this spot is the stone step, formerly the entrance to the cottage in which lived Andrew Marvell, poet, wit, and satirist; colleague with John Milton in the foreign or Latin secretaryship during the Commonwealth; and for about twenty years M.P. for Hull. Born at Winestead, Yorkshire, 31st March, 1621, died in London, 18th August, 1678, and buried in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. This memorial is placed here by the London County Council, December, 1898. A floral sundial in the nearby Lauderdale House bears an inscription quoting lines from of his poem “The Garden”. He died suddenly in 1678, while in attendance at a popular meeting of his old constituents at Hull. His health had previously been remarkably good; and it was supposed by many that he was poisoned by some of his political or clerical enemies. Marvell was buried in the church of St Giles in the Fields in central London. His monument, erected by his grateful constituency, bears the following inscription: Near this place lyeth the body of Andrew Marvell, Esq., a man so endowed by Nature, so improved by Education, Study, and Travel, so consummated by Experience, that, joining the peculiar graces of Wit and Learning, with a singular penetration and strength of judgment; and exercising all these in the whole course of his life, with an unutterable steadiness in the ways of Virtue, he became the ornament and example of his age, beloved by good men, feared by bad, admired by all, though imitated by few; and scarce paralleled by any. But a Tombstone can neither contain his character, nor is Marble necessary to transmit it to posterity; it is engraved in the minds of this generation, and will be always legible in his inimitable writings, nevertheless. He having served twenty years successfully in Parliament, and that with such Wisdom, Dexterity, and Courage, as becomes a true Patriot, the town of Kingston-upon-Hull, from whence he was deputed to that Assembly, lamenting in his death the public loss, have erected this Monument of their Grief and their Gratitude, 1688. It may be noted that his epitaph pays more tribute to his political career than his poetry. Prose works Marvell also wrote anonymous prose satires criticizing the monarchy and Catholicism, defending Puritan dissenters, and denouncing censorship. The Rehearsal Transpros’d, an attack on Samuel Parker, was published in two parts in 1672 and 1673. In 1676, Mr. Smirke; or The Divine in Mode, a work critical of intolerance within the Church of England, was published together with a “Short Historical Essay, concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions, in matters of Religion.” Marvell’s pamphlet An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England, published in late 1677, alleged that: “There has now for diverse Years, a design been carried on, to change the Lawfull Government of England into an Absolute Tyranny, and to convert the established Protestant Religion into down-right Popery”. John Kenyon described it as “one of the most influential pamphlets of the decade” and G. M. Trevelyan called it: “A fine pamphlet, which throws light on causes provocative of the formation of the Whig party”. A 1678 work published anonymously ("by a Protestant") in defense of John Howe against the attack of his fellow-dissenter, the severe Calvinist Thomas Danson, is also probably by Marvell. Its full title is Remarks upon a late disingenuous discourse, writ by one T.D. under the pretence de causa Dei, and of answering Mr. John Howe’s letter and postscript of God’s prescience, &c., affirming, as the Protestant docrine, that GOd doth by efficacious influence universally move and determine men to all their actions, even to those that are most wicked. Views Although Marvell became a Parliamentarian, he was not a Puritan. He had flirted briefly with Catholicism as a youth, and was described in his thirties (on the Saumur visit) as “a notable English Italo-Machiavellian”. During his lifetime, his prose satires were much better known than his verse. Vincent Palmieri noted that Marvell is sometimes known as the “British Aristides” for his incorruptible integrity in life and poverty at death. Many of his poems were not published until 1681, three years after his death, from a collection owned by Mary Palmer, his housekeeper. After Marvell’s death she laid dubious claim to having been his wife, from the time of a secret marriage in 1667. Marvell’s poetic style T. S. Eliot wrote of Marvell’s style that 'It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’. He also identified Marvell and the metaphysical school with the 'dissociation of sensibility’ that occurred in 17th-century English literature; Eliot described this trend as 'something which... happened to the mind of England... it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet’. Poets increasingly developed a self-conscious relationship to tradition, which took the form of a new emphasis on craftsmanship of expression and an idiosyncratic freedom in allusions to Classical and Biblical sources. Marvell’s most celebrated lyric, “To His Coy Mistress”, combines an old poetic conceit (the persuasion of the speaker’s lover by means of a carpe diem philosophy) with Marvell’s typically vibrant imagery and easy command of rhyming couplets. Other works incorporate topical satire and religious themes. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marvell

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell of Glenlair FRS FRSE (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. His most prominent achievement was formulating classical electromagnetic theory. This unites all previously unrelated observations, experiments, and equations of electricity, magnetism, and optics into a consistent theory. Maxwell's equations demonstrate that electricity, magnetism and light are all manifestations of the same phenomenon, namely the electromagnetic field. Subsequently, all other classic laws or equations of these disciplines became simplified cases of Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's achievements concerning electromagnetism have been called the "second great unification in physics", after the first one realised by Isaac Newton. Maxwell demonstrated that electric and magnetic fields travel through space in the form of waves and at the constant speed of light. In 1865, Maxwell published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. It was with this that he first proposed that light was in fact undulations in the same medium that is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena. His work in producing a unified model of electromagnetism is one of the greatest advances in physics. Maxwell also helped develop the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution, which is a statistical means of describing aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. These two discoveries helped usher in the era of modern physics, laying the foundation for such fields as special relativity and quantum mechanics. Maxwell is also known for presenting the first durable colour photograph in 1861 and for his foundational work on the rigidity of rod-and-joint frameworks like those in many bridges. Maxwell is considered by many physicists to be the 19th-century scientist having the greatest influence on 20th-century physics. His contributions to the science are considered by many to be of the same magnitude as those of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. In the millennium poll—a survey of the 100 most prominent physicists—Maxwell was voted the third greatest physicist of all time, behind only Newton and Einstein. On the centennial of Maxwell's birthday, Einstein himself described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton." Einstein kept a photograph of Maxwell on his study wall, alongside pictures of Michael Faraday and Newton. Early life, 1831–39 James Clerk Maxwell was born 13 June 1831 at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, to John Clerk, an advocate, and Frances Cay. Maxwell's father was a man of comfortable means, of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Midlothian, holders of the baronetcy of Clerk of Penicuik; his brother being the 6th Baronet. James was the first cousin of notable 19th century artist Jemima Blackburn. He had been born John Clerk, adding the surname Maxwell to his own after he inherited a country estate in Middlebie, Kirkcudbrightshire from connections to the Maxwell family, themselves members of the peerage. Maxwell's parents did not meet and marry until they were well into their thirties, unusual for the time. Moreover, his mother was nearly 40 years old when James was born. They had had one earlier child, a daughter, Elizabeth, who died in infancy. They named their only surviving child James, a name that had sufficed not only for his grandfather, but also many of his other ancestors. When Maxwell was young his family moved to Glenlair House, which his parents had built on the 1500 acre (6. km2) Middlebie estate. All indications suggest that Maxwell had maintained an unquenchable curiosity from an early age. By the age of three, everything that moved, shone, or made a noise drew the question: "what's the go o' that?". In a passage added to a letter from his father to his sister-in-law Jane Cay in 1834, his mother described this innate sense of inquisitiveness: "He is a very happy man, and has improved much since the weather got moderate; he has great work with doors, locks, keys, etc., and "show me how it doos" is never out of his mouth. He also investigates the hidden course of streams and bell-wires, the way the water gets from the pond through the wall...” Education, 1839–47 Recognising the potential of the young boy, his mother Frances took responsibility for James' early education, which in the Victorian era was largely the job of the woman of the house. She was however taken ill with abdominal cancer, and after an unsuccessful operation, died in December 1839 when Maxwell was only eight. James' education was then overseen by John Maxwell and his sister-in-law Jane, both of whom played pivotal roles in the life of Maxwell. His formal schooling began unsuccessfully under the guidance of a sixteen-year-old hired tutor. Little is known about the young man John Maxwell hired to instruct his son, except that he treated the younger boy harshly, chiding him for being slow and wayward. John Maxwell dismissed the tutor in November 1841, and after considerable thought, sent James to the prestigious Edinburgh Academy. He lodged during term times at the house of his aunt Isabella. During this time his passion for drawing was encouraged by his older cousin Jemima, who was herself a talented artist. The ten-year-old Maxwell, having been raised in isolation on his father's countryside estate, did not fit in well at school. The first year had been full, obliging him to join the second year with classmates a year his senior. His mannerisms and Galloway accent struck the other boys as rustic, and his having arrived on his first day of school wearing a pair of homemade shoes and a tunic, earned him the unkind nickname of "Daftie". Maxwell, however, never seemed to have resented the epithet, bearing it without complaint for many years. Social isolation at the Academy ended when he met Lewis Campbell and Peter Guthrie Tait, two boys of a similar age who were to become notable scholars later in life. They would remain lifetime friends. Maxwell was fascinated by geometry at an early age, rediscovering the regular polyhedron before any formal instruction. Much of his talent however, went overlooked, and despite winning the school's scripture biography prize in his second year his academic work remained unnoticed until, at the age of 13, he won the school's mathematical medal and first prize for both English and poetry. Maxwell’s interests ranged far beyond the school syllabus, and he did not pay particular attention to examination performance. He wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 14. In it he described a mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine, and the properties of ellipses, Cartesian ovals, and related curves with more than two foci. His work, Oval Curves, was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh by James Forbes, who was a professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh University. Maxwell was deemed too young for the work presented. The work was not entirely original, since Descartes had also examined the properties of such multifocal curves in the seventeenth century, but Maxwell had simplified their construction. Edinburgh University, 1847–50 Maxwell left the Academy in 1847 at the age of 16 and began attending classes at the University of Edinburgh. Having had the opportunity to attend the University of Cambridge after his first term Maxwell instead decided to complete the full course of his undergraduate studies at Edinburgh. The academic staff of Edinburgh University included some highly regarded names, and Maxwell's first year tutors included Sir William Hamilton, who lectured him on logic and metaphysics, Philip Kelland on mathematics, and James Forbes on natural philosophy. Maxwell did not find his classes at Edinburgh University very demanding, and was therefore able to immerse himself in private study during free time at the university, and particularly when back home at Glenlair. There he would experiment with improvised chemical, electric, and magnetic apparatuses, but his chief concerns regarded the properties of polarized light. He constructed shaped blocks of gelatine, subjected them to various stresses, and with a pair of polarizing prisms given to him by the famous scientist William Nicol he would view the coloured fringes which had developed within the jelly. Through this practice Maxwell discovered photoelasticity, which is a means of determining the stress distribution within physical structures. Maxwell contributed two papers for the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh at the age of 18. One of these, On the equilibrium of elastic solids, laid the foundation for an important discovery later in his life, which was the temporary double refraction produced in viscous liquids by shear stress. His other paper was titled Rolling curves, and just as with the paper Oval Curves that he had written at the Edinburgh Academy, Maxwell was again considered too young to stand at the rostrum and present it himself. The paper was delivered to the Royal Society by his tutor Kelland instead. University of Cambridge, 1850–56 In October 1850, already an accomplished mathematician, Maxwell left Scotland for the University of Cambridge. He initially attended Peterhouse, but before the end of his first term transferred to Trinity College, where he believed it would be easier to obtain a fellowship. At Trinity, he was elected to the elite secret society known as the Cambridge Apostles. In November 1851, Maxwell studied under William Hopkins, whose success in nurturing mathematical genius had earned him the nickname of "senior wrangler-maker". A considerable part of Maxwell's translation of his equations regarding electromagnetism was accomplished during his time at Trinity. In 1854, Maxwell graduated from Trinity with a degree in mathematics. He scored second highest in the final examination, coming behind Edward Routh, and thereby earning himself the title of Second Wrangler. He was later declared equal with Routh, however, in the more exacting ordeal of the Smith's Prize examination. Immediately after earning his degree, Maxwell read a novel paper to the Cambridge Philosophical Society entitled On the transformation of surfaces by bending. This is one of the few purely mathematical papers he had written, and it demonstrated Maxwell's growing stature as a mathematician. Maxwell decided to remain at Trinity after graduating and applied for a fellowship, which was a process that he could expect to take a couple of years. Buoyed by his success as a research student, he would be free, aside from some tutoring and examining duties, to pursue scientific interests at his own leisure. The nature and perception of colour was one such interest, and had begun at Edinburgh University while he was a student of Forbes. Maxwell took the coloured spinning tops invented by Forbes, and was able to demonstrate that white light would result from a mixture of red, green and blue light. His paper, Experiments on colour, laid out the principles of colour combination, and was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in March 1855. Fortunately for Maxwell this time it would be he himself who delivered his lecture. Maxwell was made a fellow of Trinity on 10 October 1855, sooner than was the norm, and was asked to prepare lectures on hydrostatics and optics, and to set examination papers. However, the following February he was urged by Forbes to apply for the newly vacant Chair of Natural Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen. His father assisted him in the task of preparing the necessary references, but he would die on 2 April, at Glenlair before either knew the result of Maxwell's candidacy. Maxwell nevertheless accepted the professorship at Aberdeen, leaving Cambridge in November 1856. Aberdeen University, 1856–60 The 25-year-old Maxwell was a decade and a half younger than any other professor at Marischal, but engaged himself with his new responsibilities as head of department, devising the syllabus and preparing lectures. He committed himself to lecturing 15 hours a week, including a weekly pro bono lecture to the local working men's college. He lived in Aberdeen during the six months of the academic year, and spent the summers at Glenlair, which he had inherited from his father. His mind was focused on a problem that had eluded scientists for two hundred years: the nature of Saturn's rings. It was unknown how they could remain stable without breaking up, drifting away or crashing into Saturn. The problem took on a particular resonance at this time as St John's College, Cambridge had chosen it as the topic for the 1857 Adams Prize. Maxwell devoted two years to studying the problem, proving that a regular solid ring could not be stable, and a fluid ring would be forced by wave action to break up into blobs. Since neither was observed, Maxwell concluded that the rings must comprise numerous small particles he called "brick-bats", each independently orbiting Saturn. Maxwell was awarded the £130 Adams Prize in 1859 for his essay On the stability of Saturn's rings; he was the only entrant to have made enough headway to submit an entry. His work was so detailed and convincing that when George Biddell Airy read it he commented "It is one of the most remarkable applications of mathematics to physics that I have ever seen." It was considered the final word on the issue until direct observations by the Voyager flybys of the 1980s confirmed Maxwell's prediction. Maxwell would also go on to disprove mathematically the nebular hypothesis (which stated that the solar system formed through the progressive condensation of a purely gaseous nebula), forcing the theory to account for additional portions of small solid particles. In 1857 Maxwell befriended the Reverend Daniel Dewar, who was the Principal of Marischal, and through him met Dewar's daughter, Katherine Mary Dewar. They were engaged in February 1858 and married in Aberdeen on 2 June 1858. On the marriage record, Maxwell is listed as Professor of Natural Philosophy in Mareschal College, Aberdeen. Seven years Maxwell's senior, comparatively little is known of Katherine although it is known that she helped in his lab and worked on experiments in viscosity. Maxwell's biographer and friend Campbell adopted an uncharacteristic reticence on the subject of Katherine, though describing their married life as "one of unexampled devotion". In 1860, Marischal College merged with the neighbouring King's College to form the University of Aberdeen. There was no room for two professors of Natural Philosophy, and Maxwell, despite his scientific reputation, found himself laid off. He was unsuccessful in applying for Forbes' recently vacated chair at Edinburgh, the post instead going to Tait. Maxwell was granted the Chair of Natural Philosophy at King's College London instead. After recovering from a near-fatal bout of smallpox in the summer of 1860, Maxwell headed south to London with his wife Katherine. King's College London, 1860–65 Maxwell's time at King's was probably the most productive of his career. He was awarded the Royal Society's Rumford Medal in 1860 for his work on colour, and was later elected to the Society in 1861. This period of his life would see him display the world's first light-fast colour photograph, further develop his ideas on the viscosity of gases, and propose a system of defining physical quantities—now known as dimensional analysis. Maxwell would often attend lectures at the Royal Institution, where he came into regular contact with Michael Faraday. The relationship between the two men could not be described as close, as Faraday was 40 years Maxwell's senior and showed signs of senility. They nevertheless maintained a strong respect for each other's talents. This time is especially known for the advances Maxwell made in the fields of electricity and magnetism. He had examined the nature of both electric and magnetic fields in his two-part paper On physical lines of force, published in 1861, in which he had provided a conceptual model for electromagnetic induction, consisting of tiny spinning cells of magnetic flux. Two more parts later added to the paper were published in early 1862. In the first of these he discussed the nature of electrostatics and displacement current. The final part dealt with the rotation of the plane of polarization of light in a magnetic field, a phenomenon discovered by Faraday and now known as the Faraday effect. Later years In 1865, Maxwell resigned the chair at King's College London and returned to Glenlair with Katherine. He wrote a textbook entitled Theory of Heat (1871), and an elementary treatise, Matter and Motion (1876). Maxwell was also the first to make explicit use of dimensional analysis, in 1871. In 1871, he became the first Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. Maxwell was put in charge of the development of the Cavendish Laboratory. He supervised every step in the progress of the building and of the purchase of the very valuable collection of apparatus paid for by its generous founder, the 7th Duke of Devonshire (chancellor of the university, and one of its most distinguished alumni). One of Maxwell's last great contributions to science was the editing (with copious original notes) of the electrical researches of Henry Cavendish, from which it appeared that Cavendish researched, amongst other things, such questions as the mean density of the earth and the composition of water. He died in Cambridge of abdominal cancer on 5 November 1879 at the age of 48. His mother had died at the same age of the same type of cancer. Maxwell is buried at Parton Kirk, near Castle Douglas in Galloway, Scotland. The extended biography The Life of James Clerk Maxwell, by his former schoolfellow and lifelong friend Professor Lewis Campbell, was published in 1882. His collected works, including the series of articles on the properties of matter, such as "Atom", "Attraction", "Capillary action", "Diffusion", "Ether", etc., were issued in two volumes by the Cambridge University Press in 1890. Personality As a great lover of Scottish poetry, Maxwell memorised poems and wrote his own. The best known is Rigid Body Sings, closely based on Comin' Through the Rye by Robert Burns, which he apparently used to sing while accompanying himself on a guitar. It has the opening lines Gin a body meet a body Flyin' through the air. Gin a body hit a body, Will it fly? And where? A collection of his poems was published by his friend Lewis Campbell in 1882. Many appreciations of Maxwell remark upon his remarkable intellectual qualities being matched by social awkwardness. Ivan Tolstoy, author of one of Maxwell's biographies, has noted the frequency with which scientists writing short biographies of Maxwell omit the subject of his Christianity. He was an evangelical Presbyterian, and in his later years became an Elder of the Church of Scotland. Maxwell's religious beliefs and related activities have been the focus of several peer-reviewed and well-referenced papers. Attending both Church of Scotland (his father's denomination) and Episcopalian (his mother's denomination) services as a child, Maxwell later underwent an evangelical conversion in April 1853, which committed him to an anti-positivist position. Contributions Electromagnetism Maxwell had studied and commented on the field of electricity and magnetism as early as 1855/6 when "On Faraday's lines of force" was read to the Cambridge Philosophical Society. The paper presented a simplified model of Faraday's work, and how the two phenomena were related. He reduced all of the current knowledge into a linked set of differential equations with 20 equations in 20 variables. This work was later published as "On physical lines of force" in March 1861. Around 1862, while lecturing at King's College, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He considered this to be more than just a coincidence, and commented "We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena." Working on the problem further, Maxwell showed that the equations predict the existence of waves of oscillating electric and magnetic fields that travel through empty space at a speed that could be predicted from simple electrical experiments; using the data available at the time, Maxwell obtained a velocity of 310,, m/s. In his 1864 paper "A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field", Maxwell wrote, "The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws". His famous equations, in their modern form of four partial differential equations, first appeared in fully developed form in his textbook A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism in 1873. Most of this work was done by Maxwell at Glenlair during the period between holding his London post and his taking up the Cavendish chair. Maxwell expressed electromagnetism in the algebra of quaternions and made the electromagnetic potential the centerpiece of his theory. In 1881 Oliver Heaviside replaced Maxwell’s electromagnetic potential field by ‘force fields’ as the centerpiece of electromagnetic theory. Heaviside reduced the complexity of Maxwell’s theory down to four differential equations, known now collectively as Maxwell's Laws or Maxwell's equations. According to Heaviside, the electromagnetic potential field was arbitrary and needed to be "murdered". However, the use of scalar and vector potentials is now standard in the solution of Maxwell's equations. A few years later there was a great debate between Heaviside and Peter Guthrie Tait about the relative merits of vector analysis and quaternions. The result was the realization that there was no need for the greater physical insights provided by quaternions if the theory was purely local, and vector analysis became commonplace. Maxwell was proven correct, and his quantitative connection between light and electromagnetism is considered one of the great accomplishments of 19th century mathematical physics. Maxwell also introduced the concept of the electromagnetic field in comparison to force lines that Faraday discovered. By understanding the propagation of electromagnetism as a field emitted by active particles, Maxwell could advance his work on light. At that time, Maxwell believed that the propagation of light required a medium for the waves, dubbed the luminiferous aether. Over time, the existence of such a medium, permeating all space and yet apparently undetectable by mechanical means, proved more and more difficult to reconcile with experiments such as the Michelson–Morley experiment. Moreover, it seemed to require an absolute frame of reference in which the equations were valid, with the distasteful result that the equations changed form for a moving observer. These difficulties inspired Albert Einstein to formulate the theory of special relativity, and in the process Einstein dispensed with the requirement of a luminiferous aether. Colour analysis Maxwell contributed to the field of optics and the study of colour vision, creating the foundation for practical colour photography. From 1855 to 1872, he published at intervals a series of valuable investigations concerning the perception of colour, colour-blindness and colour theory, for the earlier of which the Royal Society awarded him the Rumford Medal. The instruments which he devised for these investigations were simple and convenient to use. For example, Maxwell's discs were used to compare a variable mixture of three primary colours with a sample colour by observing the spinning "colour top." In the course of his 1855 paper on the perception of colour, Maxwell proposed that if three black-and-white photographs of a scene were taken through red, green and violet filters, and transparent prints of the images were projected onto a screen using three projectors equipped with similar filters, when superimposed on the screen the result would be perceived by the human eye as a complete reproduction of all the colours in the scene. During an 1861 Royal Institution lecture on colour theory, Maxwell presented the world's first demonstration of colour photography by this principle of three-colour analysis and synthesis, the basis of nearly all subsequent photochemical and electronic methods of colour photography. Thomas Sutton, inventor of the single-lens reflex camera, did the actual picture-taking. He photographed a tartan ribbon three times, through red, green and blue filters. He also made a fourth exposure through a yellow filter, but according to Maxwell's account this was not used in the demonstration. Because Sutton's photographic plates were in fact insensitive to red and barely sensitive to green, the results of this pioneering experiment were far from perfect. It was remarked in the published account of the lecture that "if the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue," it "would have been a truly-coloured image of the riband. By finding photographic materials more sensitive to the less refrangible rays, the representation of the colours of objects might be greatly improved." Researchers in 1961 concluded that the seemingly impossible partial success of the red-filtered exposure was due to ultraviolet light. Some red dyes strongly reflect it, the red filter used does not entirely block it, and Sutton's plates were sensitive to it. The demonstration was not of a print or transparency containing tangible colouring matter, but of colour which was photographically recorded from nature and reproduced by the same additive colour synthesis principle now used by all common types of colour video displays. Maxwell's purpose was not to present a method of colour photography, but to illustrate the basis of human colour perception and to show that the correct additive primaries are not red, yellow and blue, as was then taught, but red, green and blue. The three photographic plates now reside in a small museum at 14 India Street, Edinburgh, the house where Maxwell was born. Kinetic theory and thermodynamics Maxwell also investigated the kinetic theory of gases. Originating with Daniel Bernoulli, this theory was advanced by the successive labours of John Herapath, John James Waterston, James Joule, and particularly Rudolf Clausius, to such an extent as to put its general accuracy beyond a doubt; but it received enormous development from Maxwell, who in this field appeared as an experimenter (on the laws of gaseous friction) as well as a mathematician. In 1866, he formulated statistically, independently of Ludwig Boltzmann, the Maxwell–Boltzmann kinetic theory of gases. His formula, called the Maxwell distribution, gives the fraction of gas molecules moving at a specified velocity at any given temperature. In the kinetic theory, temperatures and heat involve only molecular movement. This approach generalized the previously established laws of thermodynamics and explained existing observations and experiments in a better way than had been achieved previously. Maxwell's work on thermodynamics led him to devise the Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) that came to be known as Maxwell's demon. In 1871, he established Maxwell's thermodynamic relations, which are statements of equality among the second derivatives of the thermodynamic potentials with respect to different thermodynamic variables. In 1874, he constructed a plaster thermodynamic visualisation as a way of exploring phase transitions, based on the American scientist Josiah Willard Gibbs's graphical thermodynamics papers. Control theory Maxwell published a famous paper "On governors" in the Proceedings of Royal Society, vol. 16 (1867–1868). This paper is quite frequently considered a classical paper of the early days of control theory. Here governors refer to the governor or the centrifugal governor used in steam engines. References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Clerk_Maxwell




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