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Robert Bridges

Robert Seymour Bridges, OM (23 October 1844– 21 April 1930) was Britain’s poet laureate from 1913 to 1930. A doctor by training, he achieved literary fame only late in life. His poems reflect a deep Christian faith, and he is the author of many well-known hymns. It was through Bridges’ efforts that Gerard Manley Hopkins achieved posthumous fame. Personal and professional life Bridges was born in Walmer, Kent, in England, and educated at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He went on to study medicine in London at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, intending to practise until the age of forty and then retire to write poetry. He practised as a casualty physician at his teaching hospital (where he made a series of highly critical remarks about the Victorian medical establishment) and subsequently as a full physician to the Great (later Royal) Northern Hospital. He was also a physician to the Hospital for Sick Children. Lung disease forced him to retire in 1882, and from that point on he devoted himself to writing and literary research. However, Bridges’ literary work started long before his retirement, his first collection of poems having been published in 1873. In 1884 he married Monica Waterhouse, daughter of Alfred Waterhouse R.A., and spent the rest of his life in rural seclusion, first at Yattendon, then at Boars Hill, Berkshire, where he died. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1900. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1913, the only medical graduate to have held the office. He was the father of poet Elizabeth Daryush. Literary work As a poet Bridges stands rather apart from the current of modern English verse, but his work has had great influence in a select circle, by its restraint, purity, precision and delicacy yet strength of expression. It embodies a distinct theory of prosody. Bridges’ faith underpinned much of his work. In the book Milton’s Prosody, he took an empirical approach to examining Milton’s use of blank verse, and developed the controversial theory that Milton’s practice was essentially syllabic. He considered free verse to be too limiting, and explained his position in the essay “Humdrum and Harum-Scarum”. His own efforts to “free” verse resulted in the poems he called “Neo-Miltonic Syllabics”, which were collected in New Verse (1925). The metre of these poems was based on syllables rather than accents, and he used the principle again in the long philosophical poem The Testament of Beauty (1929), for which he received the Order of Merit. His best-known poems, however, are to be found in the two earlier volumes of Shorter Poems (1890, 1894). He also wrote verse plays, with limited success, and literary criticism, including a study of the work of John Keats. Bridges’ poetry was privately printed in the first instance, and was slow in making its way beyond a comparatively small circle of his admirers. His best work is to be found in his Shorter Poems (1890), and a complete edition (to date) of his Poetical Works (6 vols.) was published in 1898-1905. Despite being made poet laureate in 1913, Bridges was never a very well-known poet and only achieved his great popularity shortly before his death with The Testament of Beauty. However, his verse evoked response in many great British composers of the time. Among those to set his poems to music were Hubert Parry, Gustav Holst and later Gerald Finzi. During the First World War, Bridges joined the group of writers assembled by Charles Masterman as part of Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. At Oxford, Bridges became friends with Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is now considered a superior poet but who owes his present fame to Bridges’ efforts in arranging the posthumous publication (1918) of his verse. Bridges received advice from the young phonetician David Abercrombie on the reformed spelling system he was devising for the publication of his collected essays (later published in seven volumes by Oxford University Press, with the help of the distinguished typographer Stanley Morison, who designed the new letters). Thus Robert Bridges contributed to phonetics and he was also a founder member of the Society for Pure English. Hymnody Bridges made an important contribution to hymnody with the publication in 1899 of his Yattendon Hymnal, which he created specifically for musical reasons. This collection of hymns, although not a financial success, became a bridge between the Victorian hymnody of the last half of the 19th century and the modern hymnody of the early 20th century. Bridges wrote and also translated historic hymns, and many of these were included in Songs of Syon (1904) and the later English Hymnal (1906). Several of Bridges’ hymns and translations are still in use today: “Thee will I love, my God and King” “Happy are they that love God” “Rejoice, O land, in God thy might” The Baptist Hymn Book, University Press, Oxford 1962 “Ah, Holy Jesus” (Johann Heermann, 1630) “All My Hope on God Is Founded” (Joachim Neander, c. 1680) “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (Martin Jahn, 1661) “O Gladsome Light” (Phos Hilaron) “O Sacred Head, sore wounded” (Paulus Gerhardt, 1656) “O Splendour of God’s Glory Bright” (Ambrose, 4th century) “When morning gilds the skies” (stanza 3; Katholisches Gesangbuch, 1744) Major works * Dates given are of first publication and significant revisions. Poetry collections * The Growth of Love (1876; 1889; 1898), a sequence of (24; 79; 69) sonnets * Prometheus the Firegiver: A Mask in the Greek Manner (1883) * Eros and Psyche: A Narrative Poem in Twelve Measures (1885; 1894), a story from the Latin of Apuleius * Shorter Poems, Books I–IV (1890) * Shorter Poems, Books I–V (1894) * New Poems (1899) * Demeter: A Mask (1905), performed 1904 * Ibant Obscuri: An Experiment in the Classical Hexameter (1916), with reprint of summary of Stone’s Prosody, accompanied by 'later observations & modifications’ * October and Other Poems (1920) * The Tapestry: Poems (1925), in neo-Miltonic syllabics * New Verse (1926), includes verse of The Tapestry * The Testament of Beauty (1929) Verse drama * Nero (1885), an historical tragedy; called The First Part of Nero subsequent to the publication of Nero: Part II * The Feast of Bacchus (1889); partly translated from the Heauton-Timoroumenos of Terence * Achilles in Scyros (1890), a drama in a mixed manner * Palicio (1890), a romantic drama in five acts in the Elizabethan manner * The Return of Ulysses (1890), a drama in five acts in a mixed manner * The Christian Captives (1890), a tragedy in five acts in a mixed manner; on the same subject as Calderón’s El Principe Constante * The Humours of the Court (1893), a comedy in three acts; founded on Calderón’s El secreto á voces and on Lope de Vega’s El Perro del hortelano * Nero, Part II (1894) Prose * Milton’s Prosody, With a Chapter on Accentual Verse (1893; 1901; 1921), based on essays published in 1887 and 1889 * Keats (1895) * Hymns from the Yattendon Hymnal (1899) * The Spirit of Man (1916) * Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918), edited with notes by R.B. * The Necessity of Poetry (1918) * Collected Essays, Papers, Etc. (1927–36) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bridges

Louise Bogan

Louise Bogan (August 11, 1897– February 4, 1970) was an American poet. She was appointed the fourth Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress in 1945. As poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine for nearly 40 years, Bogan played a major role in shaping mainstream poetic sensibilities of the mid-20th Century. The Poetry Foundation notes that Bogan has been called by some critics the most accomplished woman poet of the twentieth century. It further notes that, “Some critics have placed her in a category of brilliant minor poets described as the ”reactionary generation." This group eschewed the prevailing Modernist forms that would come to dominate the literary landscape of the era in favor of more traditional techniques. Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Brett C. Millier named Bogan “one of the finest lyric poets America has produced,” and added that “the fact that she was a woman and that she defended formal, lyric poetry in an age of expansive experimentation made evaluation of her work, until quite recently, somewhat condescending.” Biography Early years Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, Maine, where her father, Daniel Bogan, worked for various paper mills and bottling factories. She spent most of her childhood years with her parents and brother growing up in mill towns in Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, where she and her family lived in working-class hotels and boardinghouses until 1904. With the help of a female benefactor, Bogan was able to attend the Girls’ Latin School for five years, which eventually gave her the opportunity to attend Boston University. In 1916, after only completing her freshman year and giving up a fellowship to Radcliffe, she left the university to marry Curt Alexander, a corporal in the U.S. Army, but their marriage ended in 1918. Bogan moved to New York to pursue a career in writing, and their only daughter, Maidie Alexander, was left under the care of Bogan’s parents. After her first husband’s death in 1920, she left and spent a few years in Vienna, where she explored her loneliness and her new identity in verse. She returned to New York City and published her first book of poetry, Body of This Death: Poems, in 1923, meeting that year the poet and novelist Raymond Holden. They were married by 1925. Four years later, she published her second book of poetry, Dark Summer: Poems, and shortly after was hired as a poetry editor for The New Yorker. She was divorced from Holden in 1937. Career Bogan’s poetic style was unlike that of Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot. Suzanne Clark, an English professor from the University of Oregon, stated that Bogan often refers to her female speakers as “the locus of intemperate, dangerous, antisocial desires.” This coincides with the notion that Bogan brought a different perspective to the traditional viewpoint of women. Not only was it difficult being a female poet in the 1930s and 1940s, but her lower-middle-class Irish background and limited education also brought on much ambivalence and contradiction for Louise Bogan. She even refused to review women poets in her early career and stated, “I have found from bitter experience that one woman poet is at a disadvantage in reviewing another, if the review be not laudatory.” Bogan did not discuss intimate details of her life (and disdained such confessional poets as Robert Lowell and John Berryman). Most of her work was published before 1938. This includes Body of This Death (1923), Dark Summer (1929), and The Sleeping Fury (1937). She also translated works by Ernst Jünger, Goethe, and Jules Renard. Later in Bogan’s life, a volume of her collected works, The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, was published with such poems as “The Dream” and “Women.” In late 1969, shortly before her death, she ended her thirty-eight year career as a reviewer for The New Yorker, stating, “No more pronouncements on lousy verse. No more hidden competition. No more struggling not to be a square.” One of her admirers was W. H. Auden. Her poetry was published in The New Republic, The Nation, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Scribner’s, and Atlantic Monthly. Her Collected Poems: 1923-1953 won her the Bollingen award in 1955 as well as an award from the Academy of American Poets in 1959, and she was the poetry reviewer of The New Yorker from 1931 until 1969, when she retired. She was a strong supporter, as well as a friend, of the poet Theodore Roethke. In a letter to Edmund Wilson, she detailed a raucous affair that she and the yet-unpublished Roethke carried on in 1935, during the time between his expulsion from Lafayette College and his return to Michigan. At the time she seemed little impressed by what she called his “very, very small lyrics”; she seems to have viewed the affair as, at most, a possible source for her own work (see What the Woman Lived: Collected letters of Louise Bogan). On February 4, 1970, Louise Bogan died of a heart attack in New York City. The Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College holds some of her papers. A number of autobiographical pieces were published posthumously in Journey around My Room (1980). Elizabeth Frank’s biography of Louise Bogan, Louise Bogan: A Portrait, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Ruth Anderson’s sound poem I Come Out of Your Sleep (revised and recorded on Sinopah 1997 XI) is constructed from speech sounds in Bogan’s poem “Little Lobelia.” “I cannot believe that the inscrutable universe turns on an axis of suffering; surely the strange beauty of the world must somewhere rest on pure joy!”– Louise Bogan In 1923, Louise Bogan released her first volume of poetry, Body of this Death, containing her poem “Medusa”. Though open to interpretation, “Medusa” is a poem that revolves around the petrification of the speaker who contemplates the concept of time. In the poem, after the speaker bears witness to the apparition of the Gorgon Medusa, the speaker ponders on how nature and life will continue, as “the water will always fall, and will not fall” and “the grass will always be growing for hay” while “I shall stand here like a shadow” and “nothing will ever stir”. While many interpretations of the poem exist, one possible explanation for the bleakness of this poem may revolve around Bogan’s depression and solitude after divorcing from her first husband and living in poverty with a daughter in hand. The idea that one would become petrified and lost in time by Medusa is similar to a feeling of loss and despair as one feels helpless and stuck in a situation where one feels their situation is unchangeable. Brett C. Millier, a Professor of Literature at Middlebury College describes Bogan’s poetry as one where “Betrayal, particularly sexual betrayal, is a constant theme.” At a time where she most likely felt betrayed by her husband and society, Bogan feels like the speaker in “Medusa”, stuck in a dead scene where her eyes could no longer drift away to a better life. Personal life Bogan married twice. In 1916 she married a soldier, Curt Alexander, and had one daughter, but the couple separated before Alexander’s death in 1920. She was married to poet Raymond Holden from July 10, 1925 to 1937. Despite the hardships Bogan encountered during the twenties and thirties, she was able to experience the fascinations of Renaissance painting, sculpture, and ornament. References Modern American Poetry: Louise Bogan (1897-1970) Biography at poets.org The Dream by Louise Bogan Vita: Suzanne Clark Louise Bogan Quotes External links Bogan Papers, Amherst College Archives and Special Collections The Louise Bogan Papers at Washington University in St. Louis Modern American Poetry, critical essays on Bogan’s works Academy of American Poets Works by or about Louise Bogan at Internet Archive Works by Louise Bogan at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Bikbik45

Hello, thank you for taking the time to stop by and to read my poems, what can i say about me? how can i tell you all about me and my life? i don't normally write about me but i can only try! I am 19 years old, and i live in Australia, I still live with my parents, i have 2 dogs, Neo and Pierre, they are my babies don't know what i would do without them! I love music, movies, taking pics, i love photography! I work as a Nanny but i am also a Nurse. My life hasn't been perfect, in fact most of my late childhood or should i say the start of my teen years was a living nightmare, Hence i started poetry, when no one else was there for me Poetry was. I have written poems in my darkest moments, and they got me through. You may be asking what has happened that is so bad, Well, I have PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder) I have suffered depression, anxiety, and so on, Now you will be asking what has happened? When i was 13 i was raped by one of my so called male "best friend" Nobody knew until 18 months later, during the time, i suffered depression really badly, i even tried taking my life, enough of this, The things i have gone though has taught me everything happens for a reason, everything i have been through, made me the person i am today, there is always a light at the end of every dark tunnel. Each of my poems has meanings behind them, each one of them i have experienced something enough to write about it. Every body in this world has a story to tell, this is mine Anyways enough about me, i hope you enjoy reading them. and remember to SMILE :) life is to short.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes

Thomas Lovell Beddoes (30 June 1803– 26 January 1849) was an English poet, dramatist and physician. Biography Born in Clifton, Bristol, England, he was the son of Dr. Thomas Beddoes, a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Anna, sister of Maria Edgeworth. He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Oxford. He published in 1821 The Improvisatore, which he afterwards endeavoured to suppress. His next venture, a blank-verse drama called The Bride’s Tragedy (1822), was published and well reviewed, and won for him the friendship of Barry Cornwall. Beddoes’ work shows a constant preoccupation with death. In 1824, he went to Göttingen to study medicine, motivated by his hope of discovering physical evidence of a human spirit which survives the death of the body. He was expelled, and then went to Würzburg to complete his training. He then wandered about practising his profession, and expounding democratic theories which got him into trouble. He was deported from Bavaria in 1833, and had to leave Zürich, where he had settled, in 1840. He continued to write, but published nothing. He led an itinerant life after leaving Switzerland, returning to England only in 1846, before going back to Germany. He became increasingly disturbed, and committed suicide by poison at Basel, in 1849, at the age of 45. For some time before his death he had been engaged on a drama, Death’s Jest Book, which was published in 1850 with a memoir by his friend, T. F. Kelsall. His Collected Poems were published in 1851. Evaluation Critics have faulted Beddoes as a dramatist. According to Arthur Symons, “of really dramatic power he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a credible situation.” His plots are convoluted, and such was his obsession with the questions posed by death that his characters lack individuation; they all struggle with the same ideas that vexed Beddoes. But his poetry is “full of thought and richness of diction”, in the words of John William Cousin, who praised Beddoes’ short pieces such as “If thou wilt ease thine heart” (from Death’s Jest-Book, Act II) and “If there were dreams to sell” ("Dream-Pedlary") as “masterpieces of intense feeling exquisitely expressed”. Lytton Strachey referred to Beddoes as “the last Elizabethan”, and said that he was distinguished not for his “illuminating views on men and things, or for a philosophy”, but for the quality of his expression. Philip B. Anderson said the lyrics of Death’s Jest Book, exemplified by “Sibylla’s Dirge” and “The Swallow Leaves Her Nest”, are “Beddoes’ best work. These lyrics display a delicacy of form, a voluptuous horror, an imagistic compactness and suggestiveness, and, occasionally, a grotesque comic power that are absolutely unique.” References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Lovell_Beddoes

Robert Bloomfield

Robert Bloomfield (3 December 1766– 19 August 1823) was an English labouring class poet whose work is appreciated in the context of other self-educated writers such as Stephen Duck, Mary Collier and John Clare. Life Robert Bloomfield was born of a poor family in the village of Honington, Suffolk. His father was a tailor and died of smallpox when the son was a year old. It was from his mother Elizabeth, who kept the village school, that he received the rudiments of education. Apprenticed at the age of eleven to his mother’s brother-in-law, he worked on a farm which was part of the estate of the Duke of Grafton, his future patron. Four years later, owing to his small and weak stature (in adulthood Bloomfield was just five feet tall) he was sent to London to work as a shoemaker under his elder brother George. One of his early duties was to read the papers aloud while the others in the workshop were working and he became particularly interested in the poetry section of The London Magazine. He had his first poem, “The Village Girl”, published in 1786. When his brother George returned to Suffolk in that year, he set up on his own as a cobbler and in 1790 married Mary Ann Church, by whom he was to have five children. The poem that made his reputation, The Farmer’s Boy, was composed in a garret in Bell Alley, Coleman Street. It was influenced by James Thomson’s poem The Seasons. Bloomfield was able to carry some fifty to a hundred finished lines of it in his head at a time until there was opportunity to write them down. The manuscript was declined by several publishers and was eventually shown by his brother George to Capel Lofft, a radical Suffolk squire of literary tastes, who arranged for its publication with woodcuts by Thomas Bewick in 1800. The success of the poem was remarkable, over 25,000 copies being sold in the next two years. Also reprinted in several American editions, it appeared in German translation in Leipzig, translated into French as Le Valet du Fermier in Paris, and in Italian translation in Milan; there was even a Latin translation of parts of it, De Agricolae Puero, Anglicano Poemate celeberrimo excerptum, et in morem Latini Georgice redditum, by the lively Suffolk vicar William Clubbe. The poem was particularly admired by the Suffolk-born painter John Constable who used couplets from it as tags to two paintings: a 'Ploughing Scene’ (shown at the Royal Academy in 1814) and 'A Harvest Field, Reapers, Gleaners’ (shown at the British Institution in 1817), which he noted as deriving from 'Bloomfield’s poem’. It was also admired by Robert Southey, a Romantic poet and future poet laureate. While this success helped reduce his poverty for a while, it also took him away from his work. As a result, the Duke of Grafton, who lived at Euston Hall near the village of Bloomfield’s birth, settled on him a small annuity of £15 and used his influence to gain him employment in the Seal Office to the King’s Bench Court and then at Somerset House, but he worked in neither for long. Meanwhile, Bloomfield’s reputation was increased by the appearance of his Rural Tales (1802), several poems of which were set to music by his brother Isaac. Another of them, “The Miller’s Maid”, was made an opera by John Davy (1763–1824) in 1804 and formed the basis for a two-act melodrama by John Faucit Saville (1807–1855) in 1821. Other publications by Bloomfield included Good Tidings (written in praise of inoculation at the instigation of Edward Jenner, 1804); Wild Flowers or Pastoral and Local Poetry (1806); and The Banks of the Wye (the poetic journal of a walking tour in the footsteps of Wordsworth, 1811). Unfortunately Vernor and Hood, his publishers, went bankrupt and in 1812 Bloomfield was forced to move from London into a cottage rented to him by a friend in the Bedfordshire village of Shefford. There one of his daughters died in 1814 and his wife became insane. In order to support himself he tried to carry on business as a bookseller but failed, and in his later years was reduced to making Aeolian harps which he sold among his friends. With failing eyesight, his own reason threatened by depression, he died in great poverty on 19 August 1823. In order to pay his debts and cover the funeral expenses, his collection of books and manuscripts, and his household effects, had to be auctioned. Allied to this fund-raising was the publication that year of his drama, Hazlewood Hall, and in the following year of The Remains of Robert Bloomfield, which included writing for children on which he had been working for some years and a selection of his correspondence. Poetry Bloomfield’s poetry invites comparison with that of George Crabbe, who was also a native of Suffolk. Both wrote much in iambic pentameter couplets, both provide descriptions of rural life in its hardest and least inviting forms. Bloomfield, however, is more cheerful in tone and his verse is denser and more vigorous. Here, for instance, is the episode in “The Farmer’s Boy” where Giles chops up turnips to feed the livestock in winter: On GILES, and such as Giles, the labour falls, To strew the frequent load where hunger calls. On driving gales sharp hail indignant flies, And sleet, more irksome still, assails his eyes; Snow clogs his feet; or if no snow is seen, The field with all its juicy store to screen, Deep goes the frost, till every root is found A rolling mass of ice upon the ground. No tender ewe can break her nightly fast, Nor heifer strong begin the cold repast, Till Giles with pond’rous beetle foremost go, And scatt’ring splinters fly at every blow; When pressing round him, eager for the prize, From their mixt breath warm exhalations rise. However, such verse is little varied from that of many of Bloomfield’s contemporaries, such as James Montgomery and Ebenezer Elliot whose names, like his, were well known in their time but are scarcely remembered now. Besides such formal productions, he told many light-hearted stories in octosyllabics, some of which are interesting for their employment of Suffolk dialect words, particularly in “The Horkey”. His work served as an inspiration to John Clare, who began publishing his own rural poetry in 1820 and praised Bloomfield’s highly. Robert’s brother, Nathaniel, also published a collection of poetry in 1803, An Essay on War, in Blank Verse, and Other Poems. Byron commented on the brothers in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (lines 775-86), linking Robert’s name favourably with other poets of humble beginnings such as Burns and Gifford but dismissing Nathaniel’s writing as routine and uninspired. Byron returned to the charge in Hints from Horace with the apostrophe Hark to those lines, narcotically soft, The cobbler-laureats sing to Capel Lofft! (lines 733-4) Although a note makes it clear than Nathaniel is his principal target, he also seems to include 'his brother Bobby’ in the accusation that Lofft 'has spoiled some excellent shoemakers and been accessory to the poetic undoing of many of the industrious poor’. Later Reputation In 1973 Shefford’s secondary school was converted to a middle school (for pupils aged 9–13) and named after the poet. In 2000 the Robert Bloomfield Society was founded to promote awareness of his life and work and has encouraged scholarly publications relating to him. A revised and enlarged selection of his poems was published by Trent Editions in 2007. Recent studies of his poetry evaluate it within its social as well as its literary context. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bloomfield

Francis William Bourdillon

Francis William Bourdillon (22 March 1852 at Runcorn, Cheshire– 13 January 1921 at Buddington, Midhurst) was a British poet and translator. He is known also as bibliophile and scholar. Life Born in Runcorn, Cheshire, he was the eldest son of Rev. Francis Bourdillon, the author, at that time perpetual curate of Runcorn. He was educated at Haileybury College and Worcester College, Oxford, graduating B.A. 1877, M.A. 1882. From 1876 to 1879, he acted as tutor to the sons of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. Later Bourdillon lived in Eastbourne, and near Midhurst, Sussex. His friends included Audrey Boyle (1853/4–1916), later as wife of Hallam Tennyson, 2nd Baron Tennyson known as Audrey Lady Tennyson. Writer Bourdillon is known for his poetry, and in particular for the single short poem “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”. He had many collections published, including Among The Flowers, And Other Poems (1878), Minuscula: lyrics of nature, art and love (1897, siftings of three smaller volumes of verse published anonymously at Oxford in 1891, 1892, and 1894), Gerard and Isabel: a Romance in Form of Cantefable (1921), and also Chryseis, and Preludes and Romances (1908). In 1896 he published Nephelé, a romantic novel. He translated Aucassin et Nicolette as Aucassin and Nicolet (1887), and he wrote the scholarly The Early Editions of the Roman de la Rose (1906) as well as Russia Reborn (1917) and various essays which the Religious Tract Society published. Family Bourdillon married Agnes Smyth, and they lived at Buddington, near Midhurst. They had three children. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_William_Bourdillon

Stephen Vincent Benet

Stephen Vincent Benét /bᵻˈneɪ/ (July 22, 1898– March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937). In 2009, The Library of America selected Benét’s story “The King of the Cats” (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub. Life and career Early life Benét was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to James Walker Benét, a colonel in the United States Army, and his wife. His grandfather and namesake was a Minorcan descendant born in St. Augustine, Florida, who led the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps, 1874–1891, with the rank of brigadier general; he was a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served in the American Civil War. The younger Benét’s paternal uncle, Laurence Vincent Benét, a graduate of Yale, was an ensign in the United States Navy during the Spanish–American War and later manufactured the French-Hotchkiss machine gun. At about age ten, Benét was sent to the Hitchcock Military Academy. He graduated from The Albany Academy in Albany, New York and Yale University, where he was “the power behind the Yale Lit”, according to Thornton Wilder, a fellow member of the Elizabethan Club. He also edited and contributed light verse to campus humor magazine The Yale Record. Benét published his first book at age 17. He was awarded an M.A. in English upon submission of his third volume of poetry in lieu of a thesis. Benét was also a part-time contributor for the early Time magazine. In 1920-1921 he went to France on a Yale traveling fellowship. There he met Rosemary Carr, whom he married in Chicago in November 1921. Carr was also a writer and poet, and they collaborated on some works. Man of letters Benét helped solidify the place of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and the Yale University Press during his decade-long judgeship of the competition. Benét published the first volumes of James Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Jeremy Ingalls, and Margaret Walker. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1931. Benét’s fantasy short story about a devil, The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936) won an O. Henry Award. He furnished the material for Scratch, a one-act opera by Douglas Moore. The story was filmed in 1941 and shown originally under the title All That Money Can Buy. Benét also wrote a sequel, Daniel Webster and the Sea Serpent, in which the man Daniel Webster encounters the Leviathan of biblical legend. Young Benét lived in a home (commonly referred to as Benét House), in Augusta, Georgia. Part of Augusta College (now Georgia Regents University), it was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Benet House, now on the Summerville Campus of Georgia Regents University, was originally part of the Augusta Arsenal. Benet’s father, Col James Walker Benet, along with his wife and daughter, lived in this house while he was the commanding officer of the Augusta Arsenal from approximately August 1911 to February 1919. Stephen Vincent Benet would have visited his parents while they were resident. The local newspaper considered it newsworthy enough to congratulate Benet on winning the Maysfield Prize for best undergraduate poem while Benet attended Yale.(Augusta Chronicle 1/21/1917 p. 21) Benet House was the name assigned to the building when it became the property of Augusta College. Once the residence of the college president, it now serves as space for administrative offices. Benet House was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971. Death and legacy Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943, at the age of 44 and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington, Connecticut, where he had owned the historic Amos Palmer House. On April 17, 1943, NBC broadcast a special tribute to the life and works of Benét, which included a performance by Helen Hayes. He was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1944 for Western Star, an unfinished narrative poem on the settling of the United States. The title of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a history of Native Americans in the American West in the late nineteenth century, is taken from the final phrase of Benét’s poem “American Names”. The full quotation, "I shall not be there/I shall rise and pass/Bury my heart at Wounded Knee," appears at the beginning of Brown’s book. Benet’s poem is not about the plight of Native Americans, and Benet would have been unlikely to approve of the author’s tendentious approach. Wounded Knee, a village on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in Oglala Lakota County, South Dakota, was the location of the last major confrontation between the U.S. Army and Native Americans. The event is known formally as the Wounded Knee Massacre, as more than 150 Sioux men, women, and children who were largely unarmed were killed that day. He adapted the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine Women into the story “The Sobbin’ Women”. It was adapted as the movie musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. His play John Brown’s Body was staged on Broadway in 1953, in a three-person dramatic reading featuring Tyrone Power, Judith Anderson, and Raymond Massey, and directed by Charles Laughton. The book of the same name was included in Life Magazine’s list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924–1944. Benét fathered three children: Thomas, Stephanie, and Rachel. His brother, William Rose Benét, was a poet, anthologist and critic who is largely remembered for his desk reference Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia (1948). His sister Laura Benét was also an author. Selected works * Five Men and Pompey, a series of dramatic portraits, Poetry, 1915 * The Drug-Shop, or, Endymion in Edmonstoun (Yale University Prize Poem), 1917 * Young Adventure: A book of Poems, 1918 * Heavens and Earth, 1920 * The Beginnings of Wisdom: A Novel, 1921 * Young People’s Pride: A Novel, 1922 * Jean Huguenot: A Novel, 1923 * The Ballad of William Sycamore: A Poem, 1923 * King David: A two-hundred-line ballad in six parts, 1923 * Nerves, 1924 (A play, with John Farrar) * That Awful Mrs. Eaton, 1924 (A play, with John Farrar) * Tiger Joy: A Book of Poems, 1925 * The Mountain Whippoorwill: How Hill-Billy Jim Won the Great Fiddler’s Prize: A Poem., 1925 * Spanish Bayonet, 1926 * John Brown’s Body, 1928 * The Barefoot Saint: A Short Story, 1929 * The Litter of Rose Leaves: A Short Story, 1930 * Abraham Lincoln, 1930 (screenplay with Gerrit Lloyd) * Ballads and Poems, 1915–1930, 1931 * A Book of Americans, 1933 (with Rosemary Carr Benét, his wife) * James Shore’s Daughter: A Novel, 1934 * The Burning City, 1936 (includes 'Litany for Dictatorships’) * The Magic of Poetry and the Poet’s Art, 1936 * By the Waters of Babylon, 1937 * The Headless Horseman: one-act play, 1937 * Thirteen O’Clock, 1937 * Johnny Pye and the Fool Killer: A Short Story, 1938 * Tales Before Midnight: Collection of Short Stories, 1939 * The Ballad of the Duke’s Mercy, 1939 * Elementals, 1940–41 (broadcast) * Freedom’s Hard-Bought Thing, 1941 (broadcast) * Listen to the People, 1941 * A Summons to the Free, 1941 * Cheers for Miss Bishop, 1941 (screenplay with Adelaide Heilbron, Sheridan Gibney) * Selected Works, 1942 (2 vols.) * Short Stories, 1942 * Nightmare at Noon: Short Poem, 1942 (in The Treasury Star Parade, ed. by William A. Bacher) * A Child is Born, 1942 (broadcast) * They Burned the Books, 1942 * They Burned the Books, 1942 (broadcast) * These works were published posthumously: * Western Star, 1943 (unfinished) * Twenty Five Short Stories, 1943 * America, 1944 * O’Halloran’s Luck and Other Short Stories, 1944 * We Stand United, 1945 (radio scripts) * The Bishop’s Beggar, 1946 * The Last Circle, 1946 * Selected Stories, 1947 * From the Earth to the Moon, 1958 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Vincent_Benét

James Beattie

James Beattie FRSE (/ˈbiːti/; 25 October 1735– 18 August 1803) was a Scottish poet, moralist and philosopher. Life James Beattie was born the son of a shopkeeper and small farmer at Laurencekirk in the Mearns, and educated at Marischal College (later part of Aberdeen University), graduating in 1753. In 1760, he was appointed Professor of moral philosophy there as a result of the interest of his intimate friend, Robert Arbuthnot of Haddo. In the following year he published a volume of poems, The Judgment of Paris (1765), which attracted attention. The two works, however, which brought him most fame were An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, and his poem of The Minstrel. The Essay, intended as an answer to David Hume, had great immediate success, and led to an introduction to the King, a pension of £200, and the degree of LL.D. from Oxford. The first book of The Minstrel was published in 1771 and the second in 1774, and constitutes his true title to remembrance, winning him the praise of Samuel Johnson. It contains much beautiful descriptive writing. Beattie was prominent in arguing against the institution of slavery, notably in his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) and Elements of Moral Science. Beattie was an amateur cellist and member of the Aberdeen Musical Society. He considered questions of music philosophy in his essay On Poetry and Music (written 1762, published 1776), which was republished several times and translated into French in 1798. His poem “The Hermit” was set to music by Tommaso Giordani (1778). Beattie was co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. Beattie underwent much domestic sorrow in the death of his wife, Mary Dunn, whom he had married in 1767, and two promising sons, which broke down his own health and spirits. He died in Aberdeen in 1803 and is buried there in St Nicholas’ Churchyard. Recognition A biographical sketch, An Account of the Life of James Beattie, LL.D., was published in 1804 by Alexander Bower. The poet Robert Burns informed Mrs Frances Dunlop in a letter that the idea of using Coila as the name of his poetic muse first came to him from Beattie’s use of a muse named 'Scota’ in his Scots language poem of 1768 titled To Mr Alexander at Lochlee. Beattie is one of the sixteen Scottish poets and writers depicted on the Scott Monument on Princes Street in Edinburgh. He appears on the left side of the east face. Works * Original Poems and Translations (1760) * The Judgement of Paris (1765) * Poems on Several Subjects (1766) * An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth (1770) * The Minstrel; or, The Progress of Genius (1771/2) two volumes * Essays, on the nature and immutability of truth in opposition to sophistry and scepticism. On poetry and music as they affect the mind. On laughter and ludicrous composition. On the utility of classical learning (1776) * Essays on Poetry (1778) * Scoticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing (1779) * Poems on several occasions (1780) * Dissertations Moral and Critical (1783) * The Evidence of the Christian Religion Briefly and Plainly Stated (1786) 2 vols. * The theory of language. Part I. Of the origin and general nature of speech. Part II. Of universal grammar (1788) * Elements of Moral Science (1790–1793) two volumes * The Poetical Works of James Beattie (1831) edited by A. Dyce * The poetical works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer (1868) edited by Charles Cowden Clarke * James Beattie’s Day-Book, 1773-1778 (1948) edited by R. S. Walker * James Beattie’s Diary (1948) edited by R. S. Walker References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Beattie_(poet)

Robert Bly

Robert Bly (born December 23, 1926) is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men’s movement. His most commercially successful book to date was Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a key text of the mythopoetic men’s movement, which spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list. He won the 1968 National Book Award for Poetry for his book The Light Around the Body. Life Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving two years. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard University, joining the later famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, including Donald Hall, Will Morgan, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Harold Brodkey, George Plimpton and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York. Beginning in 1954, Bly spent two years at the University of Iowa at the Iowa Writers Workshop, completing a master’s degree in fine arts, along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956, he received a Fulbright Grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there, he found not only his relatives, but became acquainted with the work of a number of major poets whose work was barely known in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Antonio Machado, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl, Rumi, Hafez, Kabir, Mirabai, and Harry Martinson. Bly determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States. The Fifties, The Sixties, and The Seventies introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation. He also published essays on American poets. During this time, Bly lived on a farm in Minnesota, with his wife and children. His first marriage was to award-winning short story novelist Carol Bly. They had four children, including Mary Bly—a best-selling novelist and Literature Professor at Fordham University as of 2011—and they divorced in 1979. Since 1980 Bly has been married to the former Ruth Counsell; by that marriage he had a stepdaughter and stepson, although the stepson died in a pedestrian–train incident. Career Bly’s early collection of poems, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was published in 1962, and its plain, imagistic style had considerable influence on American verse of the next two decades. The following year, he published “A Wrong Turning in American Poetry”, an essay in which he argued that the vast majority of American poetry from 1917 to 1963 was lacking in soul and “inwardness” as a result of a focus on impersonality and an objectifying, intellectual view of the world that Bly believed was instigated by the Modernists and formed the aesthetic of most post-World War II American poetry. He criticized the influence of American-born Modernists like Eliot, Pound, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams and argued that American poetry needed to model itself on the more inward-looking work of European and South American poets like Pablo Neruda, César Vallejo, Juan Ramón Jiménez, Antonio Machado, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In 1966, Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and went on to lead much of the opposition to that war among writers. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the war. In his speech accepting the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he announced that he would be contributing the $1000 prize to draft resistance organizations. During the sixties he was of great help to the Bengali Hungryalist poets who faced anti-establishment trial at Kolkata, India. Bly became one of the most important of American protest poets during the Vietnam War; his 1970 poem “The Teeth Mother Naked At Last,” later collected in his collection Sleepers Joining Hands (1973) is a major contribution to this poetry. During the 1970s, he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 1980s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingéd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau, The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow. In 1975, he organized the first annual Great Mother Conference. Throughout the ten-day event, poetry, music, and dance were utilized to examine human consciousness. The conference has been held annually through 2015 in Nobleboro Maine. In the beginning one of its major themes was the goddess or “Great Mother” as she has been known throughout human history. Much of Bly’s 1973 book of poems “Sleepers Joining Hands” is concerned with this theme. In the context of the Vietnam War, a focus on the divine feminine was seen as urgent and necessary. Since that time, the Conference has expanded to consider a wide variety of poetic, mythological, and fairy tale traditions. In the ’80s and ’90s there was much discussion among the conference community about the changes contemporary men were (and are) going through; “the New Father” was then added to the Conference title, in recognition of this and in order to keep the Conference as inclusive as possible. Perhaps his most famous work is Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages and is credited with starting the Mythopoetic men’s movement in the United States. Bly frequently conducts workshops for men with James Hillman, Michael J. Meade, and others, as well as workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He maintains a friendly correspondence with Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run With the Wolves. Bly wrote The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine with Marion Woodman. Bly was the University of Minnesota Library’s 2002 Distinguished Writer. He received the McKnight Foundation’s Distinguished Artist Award in 2000, and the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2002. He has published more than 40 collections of poetry, edited many others, and published translations of poetry and prose from such languages as Swedish, Norwegian, German, Spanish, Persian and Urdu. His book The Night Abraham Called to the Stars was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. He also edited the prestigious Best American Poetry 1999 (Scribners). In 2006 the University of Minnesota purchased Bly’s archive, which contained more than 80,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts; a journal spanning nearly 50 years; notebooks of his “morning poems”; drafts of translations; hundreds of audio and videotapes, and correspondence with many writers such as James Wright, Donald Hall and James Dickey. The archive is housed at Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota campus. The university paid $775,000 from school funds and private donors. In February 2008, Bly was named Minnesota’s first poet laureate. In that year he also contributed a poem and an Afterword to From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. In February 2013, he was awarded the Robert Frost Medal, a lifetime achievement recognition given by the Poetry Society of America. Thought and the Men’s Movement Much of Bly’s writing focuses on what he saw as the particularly troubled situation in which many males find themselves today. He understood this to be a result of, among other things, the decline of traditional fathering which left young boys unguided through the stages of life leading to maturity. He claimed that in contrast with women who are better informed by their bodies (notably by the beginning and end of their menstrual cycle), men need to be actively guided out of boyhood and into manhood by their elders. Pre-modern cultures had elaborate myths, often enacted as rites of passage, as well as “men’s societies” where older men would teach young boys about these gender-specific issues. As modern fathers have become increasingly absent, this knowledge is no longer being passed down the generations, resulting in what he referred to as a Sibling Society. The “Absence of the Father” is a recurrent theme in Bly’s work and many of the phenomena of depression, juvenile delinquency and lack of leadership in business and politics are linked to it. Bly therefore sees today’s men as half-adults, trapped between boyhood and maturity, in a state where they find it hard to become responsible in their work as well as leaders in their communities. Eventually they might become weak or absent fathers themselves which will lead this behaviour to be passed down to their children. In his book The Sibling Society (1997), Bly argues that a society formed of such men is inherently problematic as it lacks creativity and a deep sense of empathy. The image of half-adults is further reinforced by popular culture which often portrays fathers as naive, overweight and almost always emotionally co-dependent. Historically this represents a recent shift from a traditional patriarchal model and Bly believes that women rushed to fill the gap that was formed through the various youth movements during the 1960s, enhancing men’s emotional capacities and helping them to connect with women’s age-old pain of repression. It has however also led to the creation of “soft males” which lacked the outwardly directed strength to revitalize the community with assertiveness and a certain warrior strength. In Bly’s view, a potential solution lies in the rediscovery of the meanings hidden in traditional myths and fairytales as well as works of poetry. He researched and collected myths that concern male maturity, often originating from the Grimms’ Fairy Tales and published them in various books, Iron John being the best known example. In contrast to the continual pursuit of higher achievements, that is constantly taught to young men today, the theme of spiritual descent (often being referred to by its Greek term κατάβασις) which is to be found in many of these myths, is presented as a necessary step for coming in contact with the deeper aspects of the masculine self and achieving its full potential. This is often presented as hero, often during the middle of his quest, going underground to pass a period of solitude and sorrow in semi-bestial mode. Bly notices that a cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a man’s life, in the absence of which, many men today go into a depression and alcoholism as they subconsciously try to emulate this innate ritual. Bly was influenced by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung who developed the theory of archetypes, as the discrete structures of the Psyche which emerge as images in both art and myths. The Powerful King, the Evil Witch and the Beautiful Maiden are, according to Jung, imprints of the collective unconscious and Bly wrote extensively about their meaning and relations to modern life. As an example and in accordance with Jung, he considered the Witch to be that part of the male psyche upon which the negative and destructive side of a woman is imprinted and which first developed during infancy to store the imperfections of one’s own mother’s. As a consequence, the Witch’s symbols are essentially inverted motherly symbols, where the loving act of cooking is transformed into the brewing of evil potions and knitting clothes takes the form of spider’s web. The feeding process is also reversed, with the child now in danger of being eaten to feed the body of the Witch rather than being fed by the mother’s own body. In that respect, the Witch is a mark of arrested development on the part of the man as it guards against feminine realities that the his psyche is not yet able to incorporate fully. Fairy tales according to this interpretation mostly describe internal battles laid out in externally, where the hero saves his future bride by killing a witch, as in “The Drummer” (Grimms tale 193). This particular concept is expanded in Bly’s 1989 talk “The Human Shadow” and the book it presented. Works References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bly

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, PC KC (/ˈbeɪkən/; 22 January 1561– 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author. He served both as Attorney General and as Lord Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. Bacon has been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only upon inductive and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could be achieved by use of a skeptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading themselves. While his own practical ideas about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a skeptical methodology makes Bacon the father of scientific method. This marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and methodology today. Bacon was generally neglected at court by Queen Elizabeth, but after the accession of King James I in 1603, Bacon was knighted. He was later created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621. Because he had no heirs, both titles became extinct upon his death in 1626, at 65 years of age. Bacon died of pneumonia, with one account by John Aubrey stating that he had contracted the condition while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat. Biography Early life Francis Bacon was born on 22 January 1561 at York House near the Strand in London, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon by his second wife, Anne (Cooke) Bacon, the daughter of the noted humanist Anthony Cooke. His mother’s sister was married to William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley, making Burghley Bacon’s uncle. Biographers believe that Bacon was educated at home in his early years owing to poor health, which would plague him throughout his life. He received tuition from John Walsall, a graduate of Oxford with a strong leaning toward Puritanism. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, on 5 April 1573 at the age of 12, living for three years there, together with his older brother Anthony Bacon under the personal tutelage of Dr John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury. Bacon’s education was conducted largely in Latin and followed the medieval curriculum. He was also educated at the University of Poitiers. It was at Cambridge that he first met Queen Elizabeth, who was impressed by his precocious intellect, and was accustomed to calling him “The young lord keeper”. His studies brought him to the belief that the methods and results of science as then practised were erroneous. His reverence for Aristotle conflicted with his rejection of Aristotelian philosophy, which seemed to him barren, disputatious and wrong in its objectives. On 27 June 1576, he and Anthony entered de societate magistrorum at Gray’s Inn. A few months later, Francis went abroad with Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador at Paris, while Anthony continued his studies at home. The state of government and society in France under Henry III afforded him valuable political instruction. For the next three years he visited Blois, Poitiers, Tours, Italy, and Spain. During his travels, Bacon studied language, statecraft, and civil law while performing routine diplomatic tasks. On at least one occasion he delivered diplomatic letters to England for Walsingham, Burghley, and Leicester, as well as for the queen. The sudden death of his father in February 1579 prompted Bacon to return to England. Sir Nicholas had laid up a considerable sum of money to purchase an estate for his youngest son, but he died before doing so, and Francis was left with only a fifth of that money. Having borrowed money, Bacon got into debt. To support himself, he took up his residence in law at Gray’s Inn in 1579, his income being supplemented by a grant from his mother Lady Anne of the manor of Marks near Romford in Essex, which generated a rent of £46. Parliamentarian Bacon stated that he had three goals: to uncover truth, to serve his country, and to serve his church. He sought to further these ends by seeking a prestigious post. In 1580, through his uncle, Lord Burghley, he applied for a post at court that might enable him to pursue a life of learning, but his application failed. For two years he worked quietly at Gray’s Inn, until he was admitted as an outer barrister in 1582. His parliamentary career began when he was elected MP for Bossiney, Cornwall, in a by-election (similar to a special election in the US) in 1581. In 1584 he took his seat in parliament for Melcombe in Dorset, and in 1586 for Taunton. At this time, he began to write on the condition of parties in the church, as well as on the topic of philosophical reform in the lost tract Temporis Partus Maximus. Yet he failed to gain a position that he thought would lead him to success. He showed signs of sympathy to Puritanism, attending the sermons of the Puritan chaplain of Gray’s Inn and accompanying his mother to the Temple Church to hear Walter Travers. This led to the publication of his earliest surviving tract, which criticised the English church’s suppression of the Puritan clergy. In the Parliament of 1586, he openly urged execution for the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots. About this time, he again approached his powerful uncle for help; this move was followed by his rapid progress at the bar. He became a bencher in 1586 and was elected a Reader in 1587, delivering his first set of lectures in Lent the following year. In 1589, he received the valuable appointment of reversion to the Clerkship of the Star Chamber, although he did not formally take office until 1608; the post was worth £1,600 a year. In 1588 he became MP for Liverpool and then for Middlesex in 1593. He later sat three times for Ipswich (1597, 1601, 1604) and once for Cambridge University (1614). He became known as a liberal-minded reformer, eager to amend and simplify the law. Though a friend of the crown, he opposed feudal privileges and dictatorial powers. He spoke against religious persecution. He struck at the House of Lords in its usurpation of the Money Bills. He advocated for the union of England and Scotland, which made him a significant influence toward the consolidation of the United Kingdom; and he later would advocate for the integration of Ireland into the Union. Closer constitutional ties, he believed, would bring greater peace and strength to these countries. Attorney General Bacon soon became acquainted with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s favourite. By 1591 he acted as the earl’s confidential adviser. In 1592 he was commissioned to write a tract in response to the Jesuit Robert Parson’s anti-government polemic, which he titled Certain observations made upon a libel, identifying England with the ideals of democratic Athens against the belligerence of Spain. Bacon took his third parliamentary seat for Middlesex when in February 1593 Elizabeth summoned Parliament to investigate a Roman Catholic plot against her. Bacon’s opposition to a bill that would levy triple subsidies in half the usual time offended the Queen: opponents accused him of seeking popularity, and for a time the Court excluded him from favour. When the office of Attorney General fell vacant in 1594, Lord Essex’s influence was not enough to secure the position for Bacon and it was given to Sir Edward Coke. Likewise, Bacon failed to secure the lesser office of Solicitor General in 1595, the Queen pointedly snubbing him by appointing Sir Thomas Fleming instead. To console him for these disappointments, Essex presented him with a property at Twickenham, which Bacon subsequently sold for £1,800. In 1596 Bacon became Queen’s Counsel, but missed the appointment of Master of the Rolls. During the next few years, his financial situation remained embarrassing. His friends could find no public office for him, and a scheme for retrieving his position by a marriage with the wealthy and young widow Lady Elizabeth Hatton failed after she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to Sir Edward Coke, a further spark of enmity between the men. In 1598 Bacon was arrested for debt. Afterward, however, his standing in the Queen’s eyes improved. Gradually, Bacon earned the standing of one of the learned counsels, though he had no commission or warrant, and received no salary. His relationship with the Queen further improved when he severed ties with Essex—a shrewd move, as Essex would be executed for treason in 1601. With others, Bacon was appointed to investigate the charges against Essex. A number of Essex’s followers confessed that Essex had planned a rebellion against the Queen. Bacon was subsequently a part of the legal team headed by the Attorney General Sir Edward Coke at Essex’s treason trial. After the execution, the Queen ordered Bacon to write the official government account of the trial, which was later published as A DECLARATION of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Majestie and her Kingdoms... after Bacon’s first draft was heavily edited by the Queen and her ministers. According to his personal secretary and chaplain, William Rawley, as a judge Bacon was always tender-hearted, “looking upon the examples with the eye of severity, but upon the person with the eye of pity and compassion”. And also that “he was free from malice”, “no revenger of injuries”, and “no defamer of any man”. James I comes to the throne The succession of James I brought Bacon into greater favour. He was knighted in 1603. In another shrewd move, Bacon wrote his Apologies in defence of his proceedings in the case of Essex, as Essex had favoured James to succeed to the throne. The following year, during the course of the uneventful first parliament session, Bacon married Alice Barnham. In June 1607 he was at last rewarded with the office of solicitor general. The following year, he began working as the Clerkship of the Star Chamber. Despite a generous income, old debts still could not be paid. He sought further promotion and wealth by supporting King James and his arbitrary policies. In 1610 the fourth session of James’s first parliament met. Despite Bacon’s advice to him, James and the Commons found themselves at odds over royal prerogatives and the king’s embarrassing extravagance. The House was finally dissolved in February 1611. Throughout this period Bacon managed to stay in the favour of the king while retaining the confidence of the Commons. In 1613 Bacon was finally appointed attorney general, after advising the king to shuffle judicial appointments. As attorney general, Bacon, by his zealous efforts—which included torture—to obtain the conviction of Edmund Peacham for treason, raised legal controversies of high constitutional importance; and successfully prosecuted Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, and his wife, Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, for murder in 1616. The so-called Prince’s Parliament of April 1614 objected to Bacon’s presence in the seat for Cambridge and to the various royal plans that Bacon had supported. Although he was allowed to stay, parliament passed a law that forbade the attorney general to sit in parliament. His influence over the king had evidently inspired resentment or apprehension in many of his peers. Bacon, however, continued to receive the King’s favour, which led to his appointment in March 1617 as temporary Regent of England (for a period of a month), and in 1618 as Lord Chancellor. On 12 July 1618 the king created Bacon Baron Verulam, of Verulam, in the Peerage of England; he then became known as Francis, Lord Verulam. Bacon continued to use his influence with the king to mediate between the throne and Parliament, and in this capacity he was further elevated in the same peerage, as Viscount St Alban, on 27 January 1621. Lord Chancellor and public disgrace Bacon’s public career ended in disgrace in 1621. After he fell into debt, a parliamentary committee on the administration of the law charged him with 23 separate counts of corruption. His lifelong enemy, Sir Edward Coke, who had instigated these accusations, was one of those appointed to prepare the charges against the chancellor. To the lords, who sent a committee to enquire whether a confession was really his, he replied, “My lords, it is my act, my hand, and my heart; I beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed.” He was sentenced to a fine of £40,000 and committed to the Tower of London at the king’s pleasure; the imprisonment lasted only a few days and the fine was remitted by the king. More seriously, parliament declared Bacon incapable of holding future office or sitting in parliament. He narrowly escaped undergoing degradation, which would have stripped him of his titles of nobility. Subsequently, the disgraced viscount devoted himself to study and writing. There seems little doubt that Bacon had accepted gifts from litigants, but this was an accepted custom of the time and not necessarily evidence of deeply corrupt behaviour. While acknowledging that his conduct had been lax, he countered that he had never allowed gifts to influence his judgement and, indeed, he had on occasion given a verdict against those who had paid him. He even had an interview with King James in which he assured: The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order... I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King He also wrote the following to Buckingham: My mind is calm, for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants; but Job himself, or whoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark and accusation is the game. The true reason for his acknowledgement of guilt is the subject of debate, but some authors speculate that it may have been prompted by his sickness, or by a view that through his fame and the greatness of his office he would be spared harsh punishment. He may even have been blackmailed, with a threat to charge him with sodomy, into confession. The British jurist Basil Montagu wrote in Bacon’s defence, concerning the episode of his public disgrace: Bacon has been accused of servility, of dissimulation, of various base motives, and their filthy brood of base actions, all unworthy of his high birth, and incompatible with his great wisdom, and the estimation in which he was held by the noblest spirits of the age. It is true that there were men in his own time, and will be men in all times, who are better pleased to count spots in the sun than to rejoice in its glorious brightness. Such men have openly libelled him, like Dewes and Weldon, whose falsehoods were detected as soon as uttered, or have fastened upon certain ceremonious compliments and dedications, the fashion of his day, as a sample of his servility, passing over his noble letters to the Queen, his lofty contempt for the Lord Keeper Puckering, his open dealing with Sir Robert Cecil, and with others, who, powerful when he was nothing, might have blighted his opening fortunes for ever, forgetting his advocacy of the rights of the people in the face of the court, and the true and honest counsels, always given by him, in times of great difficulty, both to Elizabeth and her successor. When was a “base sycophant” loved and honoured by piety such as that of Herbert, Tennison, and Rawley, by noble spirits like Hobbes, Ben Jonson, and Selden, or followed to the grave, and beyond it, with devoted affection such as that of Sir Thomas Meautys. Personal life When he was 36, Bacon courted Elizabeth Hatton, a young widow of 20. Reportedly, she broke off their relationship upon accepting marriage to a wealthier man, Bacon’s rival, Edward Coke. Years later, Bacon still wrote of his regret that the marriage to Hatton had not taken place. At the age of 45, Bacon married Alice Barnham, the 14-year-old daughter of a well-connected London alderman and MP. Bacon wrote two sonnets proclaiming his love for Alice. The first was written during his courtship and the second on his wedding day, 10 May 1606. When Bacon was appointed lord chancellor, “by special Warrant of the King”, Lady Bacon was given precedence over all other Court ladies. Reports of increasing friction in his marriage to Alice appeared, with speculation that some of this may have been due to financial resources not being as readily available to her as she had been accustomed to. Alice was reportedly interested in fame and fortune, and when reserves of money were no longer available there were complaints about where all the money was going. Alice Chambers Bunten wrote in her Life of Alice Barnham that, upon their descent into debt, she actually went on trips to ask for financial favours and assistance from their circle of friends. Bacon disinherited her upon discovering her secret romantic relationship with Sir John Underhill. He rewrote his will, which had previously been very generous—leaving her lands, goods, and income—revoking it all. Bacon’s personal secretary and chaplain, William Rawley, however, wrote in his biography of Bacon that his marriage was one of “much conjugal love and respect”, mentioning a robe of honour that he gave to Alice and which “she wore unto her dying day, being twenty years and more after his death”. The well-connected antiquary John Aubrey noted in his Brief Lives concerning Bacon, “He was a Pederast. His Ganimeds and Favourites tooke Bribes”, biographers continue to debate Bacon’s sexual inclinations and the precise nature of his personal relationships. Some authors believe that despite his marriage, Bacon was primarily attracted to men. Forker, for example, has explored the “historically documentable sexual preferences” of both King James and Bacon, and concluded they were all oriented to “masculine love”, a contemporary term that “seems to have been used exclusively to refer to the sexual preference of men for members of their own gender.” The Jacobean antiquarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes implied there had been a question of bringing him to trial for buggery, which his brother Anthony Bacon had also been charged with. This conclusion has been disputed by others, who point to lack of consistent evidence, and consider the sources to be more open to interpretation. In his “New Atlantis”, Bacon describes his utopian island as being “the chastest nation under heaven”, in which there was no prostitution or adultery, and further saying that “as for masculine love, they have no touch of it”. Death On 9 April 1626, Bacon died of pneumonia while at Arundel mansion at Highgate outside London. An influential account of the circumstances of his death was given by John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, with Aubrey stating he contracted pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat. Aubrey has been criticised for his evident credulousness in this and other works; on the other hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, Bacon’s fellow-philosopher and friend. Aubrey’s vivid account, which portrays Bacon as a martyr to experimental scientific method, had him journeying to Highgate through the snow with the King’s physician when he is suddenly inspired by the possibility of using the snow to preserve meat: “They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach and went into a poor woman’s house at the bottom of Highgate hill, and bought a fowl, and made the woman exenterate it.” After stuffing the fowl with snow, Bacon contracted a fatal case of pneumonia. Some people, including Aubrey, consider these two contiguous, possibly coincidental events as related and causative of his death: "The Snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his Lodging... but went to the Earle of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where they put him into... a damp bed that had not been layn-in... which gave him such a cold that in 2 or 3 days as I remember Mr Hobbes told me, he died of Suffocation.” Being unwittingly on his deathbed, the philosopher wrote his last letter to his absent host and friend Lord Arundel: My very good Lord,—I was likely to have had the fortune of Caius Plinius the elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment about the burning of Mount Vesuvius; for I was also desirous to try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well; but in the journey between London and Highgate, I was taken with such a fit of casting as I know not whether it were the Stone, or some surfeit or cold, or indeed a touch of them all three. But when I came to your Lordship’s House, I was not able to go back, and therefore was forced to take up my lodging here, where your housekeeper is very careful and diligent about me, which I assure myself your Lordship will not only pardon towards him, but think the better of him for it. For indeed your Lordship’s House was happy to me, and I kiss your noble hands for the welcome which I am sure you give me to it. I know how unfit it is for me to write with any other hand than mine own, but by my troth my fingers are so disjointed with sickness that I cannot steadily hold a pen. Another account appears in a biography by William Rawley, Bacon’s personal secretary and chaplain: He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then celebrated for our Saviour’s resurrection, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl of Arundel’s house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before; God so ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation. At the news of his death, over 30 great minds collected together their eulogies of him, which were then later published in Latin. He left personal assets of about £7,000 and lands that realised £6,000 when sold. His debts amounted to more than £23,000, equivalent to more than £3m at current value. Philosophy and works Francis Bacon’s philosophy is displayed in the vast and varied writings he left, which might be divided into three great branches: Scientific works– in which his ideas for an universal reform of knowledge into scientific methodology and the improvement of mankind’s state using the Scientific method are presented. Religious and literary works– in which he presents his moral philosophy and theological meditations. Juridical works– in which his reforms in English Law are proposed. Influence Science Bacon’s seminal work Novum Organum was influential in the 1630s and 1650s among scholars, in particular Sir Thomas Browne, who in his encyclopaedia Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–72) frequently adheres to a Baconian approach to his scientific enquiries. During the Restoration, Bacon was commonly invoked as a guiding spirit of the Royal Society founded under Charles II in 1660. During the 18th-century French Enlightenment, Bacon’s non-metaphysical approach to science became more influential than the dualism of his French contemporary Descartes, and was associated with criticism of the ancien regime. In 1733 Voltaire introduced him to a French audience as the “father” of the scientific method, an understanding which had become widespread by the 1750s. In the 19th century his emphasis on induction was revived and developed by William Whewell, among others. He has been reputed as the “Father of Experimental Philosophy”. He also wrote a long treatise on Medicine, History of Life and Death, with natural and experimental observations for the prolongation of life. One of his biographers, the historian William Hepworth Dixon, states: “Bacon’s influence in the modern world is so great that every man who rides in a train, sends a telegram, follows a steam plough, sits in an easy chair, crosses the channel or the Atlantic, eats a good dinner, enjoys a beautiful garden, or undergoes a painless surgical operation, owes him something.” In 1902 Hugo von Hofmannsthal published a fictional letter addressed to Bacon and dated 1603, about a writer who is experiencing a crisis of language. Known as The Lord Chandos Letter, it has been proposed that Bacon was identified as its recipient as having laid the foundation for the work of scientists such as Ernst Mach, notable both for his academic distinction in the history and philosophy of the inductive sciences, and for his own contributions to physics. North America Bacon played a leading role in establishing the British colonies in North America, especially in Virginia, the Carolinas and Newfoundland in northeastern Canada. His government report on “The Virginia Colony” was submitted in 1609. In 1610 Bacon and his associates received a charter from the king to form the Tresurer and the Companye of Adventurers and planter of the Cittye of London and Bristoll for the Collonye or plantacon in Newfoundland, and sent John Guy to found a colony there. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, wrote: “Bacon, Locke and Newton. I consider them as the three greatest men that have ever lived, without any exception, and as having laid the foundation of those superstructures which have been raised in the Physical and Moral sciences”. In 1910 Newfoundland issued a postage stamp to commemorate Bacon’s role in establishing the colony. The stamp describes Bacon as "the guiding spirit in Colonization Schemes in 1610". Moreover, some scholars believe he was largely responsible for the drafting, in 1609 and 1612, of two charters of government for the Virginia Colony. William Hepworth Dixon considered that Bacon’s name could be included in the list of Founders of the United States. Law Although few of his proposals for law reform were adopted during his lifetime, his legal legacy was considered by the magazine New Scientist in 1961 as having influenced the drafting of the Napoleonic Code as well as the law reforms introduced by 19th-century British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel. The historian William Hepworth Dixon had referred to the Napoleonic Code as “the sole embodiment of Bacon’s thought”, saying that Bacon’s legal work “has had more success abroad than it has found at home”, and that in France “it has blossomed and come into fruit”. Harvey Wheeler attributed to Bacon, in Francis Bacon’s Verulamium—the Common Law Template of The Modern in English Science and Culture, the creation of these distinguishing features of the modern common law system: using cases as repositories of evidence about the “unwritten law”; determining the relevance of precedents by exclusionary principles of evidence and logic; treating opposing legal briefs as adversarial hypotheses about the application of the “unwritten law” to a new set of facts. As late as the 18th century some juries still declared the law rather than the facts, but already before the end of the 17th century Sir Matthew Hale explained modern common law adjudication procedure and acknowledged Bacon as the inventor of the process of discovering unwritten laws from the evidences of their applications. The method combined empiricism and inductivism in a new way that was to imprint its signature on many of the distinctive features of modern English society. Paul H. Kocher writes that Bacon is considered by some jurists to be the father of modern Jurisprudence. Bacon is commemorated with a statue in Gray’s Inn, South Square in London where he received his legal training, and where he was elected Treasurer of the Inn in 1608. James McClellan, a political scientist from the University of Virginia, considered Bacon to have had “a great following” in the American colonies. More recent scholarship on Bacon’s jurisprudence has focused on his advocating torture as a legal recourse for the crown. Bacon himself was not a stranger to the torture chamber: in his various legal capacities in both Elizabeth I’s and James I’s reigns, Bacon was listed as a commissioner on five torture warrants. In 1613(?), in a letter addressed to King James I on the question of torture’s place within English law, Bacon identifies the scope of torture: a means to further the investigation of threats to the state: “In the cases of treasons, torture is used for discovery, and not for evidence.” For Bacon, torture was not a punitive measure, an intended form of state repression, but instead offered a modus operandi for the government agent tasked with uncovering acts of treason. Historical debates Bacon and Shakespeare The Baconian hypothesis of Shakespearean authorship, first proposed in the mid-19th century, contends that Francis Bacon wrote some or even all of the plays conventionally attributed to William Shakespeare. Occult hypotheses Francis Bacon often gathered with the men at Gray’s Inn to discuss politics and philosophy, and to try out various theatrical scenes that he admitted writing. Bacon’s alleged connection to the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons has been widely discussed by authors and scholars in many books. However, others, including Daphne du Maurier in her biography of Bacon, have argued that there is no substantive evidence to support claims of involvement with the Rosicrucians. Frances Yates does not make the claim that Bacon was a Rosicrucian, but presents evidence that he was nevertheless involved in some of the more closed intellectual movements of his day. She argues that Bacon’s movement for the advancement of learning was closely connected with the German Rosicrucian movement, while Bacon’s New Atlantis portrays a land ruled by Rosicrucians. He apparently saw his own movement for the advancement of learning to be in conformity with Rosicrucian ideals. The link between Bacon’s work and the Rosicrucians ideals which Yates allegedly found was the conformity of the purposes expressed by the Rosicrucian Manifestos and Bacon’s plan of a “Great Instauration”, for the two were calling for a reformation of both “divine and human understanding”, as well as both had in view the purpose of mankind’s return to the “state before the Fall”. Another major link is said to be the resemblance between Bacon’s New Atlantis and the German Rosicrucian Johann Valentin Andreae’s Description of the Republic of Christianopolis (1619). Andreae describes a utopic island in which Christian theosophy and applied science ruled, and in which the spiritual fulfillment and intellectual activity constituted the primary goals of each individual, the scientific pursuits being the highest intellectual calling—linked to the achievement of spiritual perfection. Andreae’s island also depicts a great advancement in technology, with many industries separated in different zones which supplied the population’s needs—which shows great resemblance to Bacon’s scientific methods and purposes. The Rosicrucian organisation AMORC claims that Bacon was the “Imperator” (leader) of the Rosicrucian Order in both England and the European continent, and would have directed it during his lifetime. Bacon’s influence can also be seen on a variety of religious and spiritual authors, and on groups that have utilised his writings in their own belief systems. Bibliography * Some of the more notable works by Bacon are: * Essays (1st edition 1597) * The Advancement and Proficience of Learning Divine and Human (1605) * Essays (2nd edition– 38 essays, 1612) * Novum Organum Scientiarum ('New Method’, 1620) * Essays, or Counsels Civil and Moral (3rd/final edition– 58 essays, 1625) * New Atlantis (1627) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon

Gamaliel Bradford

Gamaliel Bradford (October 9, 1863– April 11, 1932) was an American biographer, critic, poet, and dramatist. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the sixth of seven men called Gamaliel Bradford in unbroken succession, of whom the first, Gamaliel Bradford, was a great-grandson of Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony. Bradford attended Harvard University briefly with the class of 1886, then continued his education with a private tutor, but is said to have been educated “mainly by ill-health and a vagrant imagination.” As an adult, Bradford lived in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The building and student newspaper for the Wellesley High School (where Sylvia Plath received her secondary school education) were named after Gamaliel Bradford. The town changed the name of the building to Wellesley High School, but the newspaper maintains Bradford’s name. In his day Bradford was regarded as the “Dean of American Biographers.” He is acknowledged as the American pioneer of the psychographic form of written biographies, after the style developed by Lytton Strachey. Despite suffering poor health during most of his life, Bradford wrote 114 biographies over a period of 20 years. Bibliography * A Pageant of Life (poetry) * A Prophet of Joy (poetry) * Shadow Verses (poetry) * Unmade in Heaven (drama) * Lee, the American * American Portraits, 1875-1900 * Union Portraits * Confederate Portraits, 1914. * Portraits of Women * Portraits of American Women * Saints and Sinners * A Naturalist of Souls: Studies in Psychography * Life and I (autobiography) * Elizabethan Women, 1936. Articles * “Government in the United States,” The Contemporary Review, Vol. XLVIII, July/December 1885. * “Municipal Government,” Scribners, October 1887. * “Journalism and Permanence,” The North American Review, August 1915. * “A Confederate Pepys,” The American Mercury, December 1925. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamaliel_Bradford_(biographer)

Christopher Brennan

Christopher John Brennan (1 November 1870– 5 October 1932) was an Australian poet and scholar. Biography Brennan was born in Sydney, to Christopher Brennan (d. 1919), a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann née Carroll (d. 1924), both Irish immigrants. His education took place at two schools in Sydney: he first attended St Aloysius’ College, and after gaining a scholarship from Patrick Moran, he boarded at St Ignatius’ College, Riverview. Brennan entered the University of Sydney in 1888, taking up studies in the Classics, and won a travelling scholarship to Berlin. There he met his future wife, Anna Elisabeth Werth; there, also, he encountered the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. About this time, he decided to become a poet. In 1893 Brennan’s article “On the Manuscripts of Aeschylus” appeared in the Journal of Philology, Brennan began forming a theory about the descent of Aeschylus’ extant manuscripts in 1888. Returning to Australia, Brennan took up a position as a cataloguer in the public library, before being given a position at the University of Sydney. In 1914, he produced his major work, Poems: 1913. After Brennan’s marriage broke up in 1922, he went to live with Violet Singer, the 'Vie’ of his later poems, and, as a result of both his divorce and increasing drunkenness, he was removed from his position at the University in June 1925. The death of Singer in an accident left him distraught, and he spent most of his remaining years in poverty. Brennan died in 1932 from cancer. Legacy Brennan influenced Australian writers of his own generation and many who succeeded him, including R. D. Fitzgerald, A.D. Hope, Judith Wright and James McAuley. In remembrance, the Fellowship of Australian Writers established the Christopher Brennan Award which is presented annually to an Australian poet, recognising a lifetime achievement in poetry. Brennan Hall and Library at St John’s College within the University of Sydney, the Christopher Brennan building in the University’s Arts Faculty, and the main library at Saint Ignatius’ College, Riverview are named in his honour. Bibliography * Sir Roger de Coverley, Selections from The Spectator (Sydney: Turner and Henderson, 1892). Edited with: A. B. Piddington. * XVIII Poems: Being the First Collection of Verse and Prose (Sydney: privately stylographed, 1897). * XXI Poems: MDCCCXCIII-MDCCCXCVII: Towards the Source (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1897). * Fact and Idea (Sydney: Govt. Printer, 1899). * From Blake to Arnold: Selections from English Poetry, 1783–1853 (London: Macmillan, 1900). Edited with: J. P. Pickburn & J. Le Gay Brereton. * A Mask (Sydney: Sydney U. Women’s College, 1913). With: J. Le Gay Brereton. * Poems (Sydney: G. B. Philip and Son, 1914). * Passages for Translation into French and German (London: Oxford University Press, 1914). Compiled with: G. G. Nicholson. * A Chant of Doom: and Other Verses (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1918). * Twenty Three Poems (Sydney: Australian Limited Editions Society, 1938). * The Burden of Tyre (Sydney: Harry F. Chaplin, 1953). * The Verse of Christopher Brennan ed. by A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1960). * The Prose of Christopher Brennan ed. by A. R. Chisholm and J. J. Quinn (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962). * Selected Poems of Christopher Brennan (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1965). Ed. by: A. R. Chisholm. * Selected Poems of Christopher Brennan (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1973). Ed. by: G. A. Wilkes. * Prose-Verse-Poster-Algebraic-Symbolico-Riddle Musicopoematographoscope & Pocket Musicopoematographoscope (Erskineville, NSW: Hale and Iremonger, 1981). Ed. by: Axel Clark. * Christopher Brennan ed. by Terry Sturm (St. Lucia, Qld: U. of Queensland Press, 1984). * 13 Poems (Pearl Beach, NSW: Escutcheon Press, 1987). Ed. by: R. E. Summers. * Interludes: Six Poems (Pearl Beach, NSW: Escutcheon Press, 1991). * Christopher Brennan: Introduction suivie de 12 poèmes– textes et traductions– avec commentaires ([S.l.]: L’Harmattan, 2005). Ed. and trans.: Simone Kadi. * The Autumnal Glory of Valvins: Christopher Brennan on Mallarmé (Banora Point: Wind and Wave Press, 2007). Ed. by: Phillip A. Ellis. * Like a Dream of Stone: Selected Verse Translations by Christopher Brennan (Banora Point: Wind and Wave Press, 2007). Ed. by: Phillip A. Ellis. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Brennan




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