Madison Julius Cawein (March 23, 1865 – December 8, 1914) was a poet from Louisville, Kentucky. He was the fifth child of William and Christiana (Stelsly) Cawein. His father made patent medicines from herbs thus, as a child, Cawein became acquainted with and developed a love for local nature.

Vocabulary & words give me joy & a beautiful outlet to create artful expressions of creativity..I’m also a lover of nature & metaphors. I believe nature is our greatest teacher. Using a combination of vocabulary, nature, & metaphor in a variety of writing formats is what I love, from research papers, to public speaking, to story telling & poetry. I typically write in a freestyle format, but am not afraid to venture out & try new styles of poetry. I’ve always loved poetry, & am drawn to poets like Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson & others.

William Cowper (26 November 1731– 25 April 1800) was an English poet and hymnodist. One of the most popular poets of his time, Cowper changed the direction of 18th century nature poetry by writing of everyday life and scenes of the English countryside. In many ways, he was one of the forerunners of Romantic poetry. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called him “the best modern poet”, whilst William Wordsworth particularly admired his poem Yardley-Oak. He was a nephew of the poet Judith Madan.

The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, becomes my endless internal banter of what is right and what is wrong. Basically a stream of consciousness if you will. - or even all the things that have been left unsaid.

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), popularly known as E. E. Cummings, with the abbreviated form of his name often written by others in lowercase letters as e.e. cummings (in the style of some of his poems—see name and capitalization, below), was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. His body of work encompasses approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays and several essays, as well as numerous drawings and paintings. He is remembered as a preeminent voice of 20th century poetry.

I'm a highly intelligent, articulate and well-educated human being with an intuitive but enterprising sense of responsibility and a strong moral compass that instinctively demarcates what's right and wrong. Trust, confidentiality and having the courage, regardless of what I do, to formulate and stand by my own personal convictions are key aspects of my life and, unsurprisingly, are also principal characteristics I attach great importance to and naturally expect from those who want to play a meaningful role in my life. I don't suffer fools gladly, in fact not at all and most definitely haven’t got any interest in or time for egotists, time-wasters, attention seekers or the narcissistic. Furthermore, I’m an adult and in my private and professional lives prefer to deal with genuine adults, so anyone who wants to act childishly and thinks they can have any kind of relationship with me, then you’re wrong! And my advice to you in that regard is to go and enrol in a kindergarten as you'll possibly have better luck there. My website is: www.politicoacademic.blogspot.com and my twitter feed if you're interested is: www.twitter.com/DerAkademiker

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

I am 20. I write to express the ways i feel. I write to show how I see things. I write out of inspiration. I write to write.

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

I have been writing poetry since my teens. Occasionally I have been published here and there. This blog is more fun, I enjoy reading the poems of others. Write On!

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) was an English writer, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic. He has been referred to as the "prince of paradox". Of his writing style, Time observed: "Whenever possible Chesterton made his points with popular sayings, proverbs, allegories—first carefully turning them inside out." Chesterton created the fictional priest-detective Father Brown, and wrote on apologetics. Even some of those who disagree with him have recognised the wide appeal of such works as Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man. Chesterton routinely referred to himself as an "orthodox" Christian, and came to identify this position more and more with Catholicism, eventually converting to Roman Catholicism from high church Anglicanism. Biographers have identified him as a successor to such Victorian authors as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, John Henry Newman and John Ruskin.

I just like to write little humorous poems in my spare time and hope to someday get them in a children's book

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

I am a day dreamer and writing is my passion. My novel trapped in two worlds is available on kindle amazon & published in south africa.

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

I've been writing all my life, since I could read and hold a pen. Its only been in the last couple of years that friends and writing colleagues have encouraged me to submit work for publication. Slowly I've been finding success in getting work recognised in magazines and journals and at spoken word events. I'll post here as regularly as I can, posting poems that are new that I like or have achieved some success. I hope the writing engenders some understanding and encouragement #poetatheart

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to have been buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame during his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which include The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary languages in England were French and Latin. Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London sometime around 1343, though the precise date and location of his birth remain unknown. His father and grandfather were both London vintners; several previous generations had been merchants in Ipswich. (His family name derives from the French chausseur, meaning "shoemaker".)[1] In 1324 John Chaucer, Geoffrey's father, was kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the twelve-year-old boy to her daughter in an attempt to keep property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and the £250 fine levied suggests that the family was financially secure—bourgeois, if not elite.[2] John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, who, in 1349, inherited properties including 24 shops in London from her uncle, Hamo de Copton, who is described in a will dated 3 April 1354 and listed in the City Hustings Roll as "moneyer"; he was said to be moneyer at the Tower of London. In the City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Geoffrey Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer, filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie' . While records concerning the lives of his contemporary poets, William Langland and the Pearl Poet are practically non-existent, since Chaucer was a public servant, his official life is very well documented, with nearly five hundred written items testifying to his career. The first of the "Chaucer Life Records" appears in 1357, in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, when he became the noblewoman's page through his father's connections.[3] She was married to Lionel, Duke of Clarence, the second surviving son of the king, Edward III, and the position brought the teenage Chaucer into the close court circle, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He also worked as a courtier, a diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king, collecting and inventorying scrap metal. In 1359, in the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army. In 1360, he was captured during the siege of Rheims. Edward paid £16 for his ransom, a considerable sum, and Chaucer was released. After this, Chaucer's life is uncertain, but he seems to have travelled in France, Spain, and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps even going on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet. She was a lady-in-waiting to Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (ca. 1396) became the third wife of John of Gaunt. It is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are most commonly cited. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had an illustrious career, as chief butler to four kings, envoy to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas's daughter, Alice, married the Duke of Suffolk. Thomas's great-grandson (Geoffrey's great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed. Geoffrey's other children probably included Elizabeth Chaucy, a nun at Barking Abbey. Agnes, an attendant at Henry IV's coronation; and another son, Lewis Chaucer. Chaucer’s “Treatise on the Astrolabe” was written for Lewis. Chaucer probably studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at this time. He became a member of the royal court of Edward III as a varlet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment. He travelled abroad many times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan. Two other literary stars of the era were in attendance: Jean Froissart and Petrarch. Around this time, Chaucer is believed to have written The Book of the Duchess in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1369. Chaucer travelled to Picardy the next year as part of a military expedition; in 1373 he visited Genoa and Florence. Numerous scholars such as Skeat, Boitani, and Rowland suggested that, on this Italian trip, he came into contact with Petrarch or Boccaccio. They introduced him to medieval Italian poetry, the forms and stories of which he would use later. The purposes of a voyage in 1377 are mysterious, as details within the historical record conflict. Later documents suggest it was a mission, along with Jean Froissart, to arrange a marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess, thereby ending the Hundred Years War. If this was the purpose of their trip, they seem to have been unsuccessful, as no wedding occurred. In 1378, Richard II sent Chaucer as an envoy (secret dispatch) to the Visconti and to Sir John Hawkwood, English condottiere (mercenary leader) in Milan. It has been speculated that it was Hawkwood on whom Chaucer based his character the Knight in the Canterbury Tales, for a description matches that of a fourteenth-century condottiere. A possible indication that his career as a writer was appreciated came when Edward III granted Chaucer "a gallon of wine daily for the rest of his life" for some unspecified task. This was an unusual grant, but given on a day of celebration, St George's Day, 1374, when artistic endeavours were traditionally rewarded, it is assumed to have been another early poetic work. It is not known which, if any, of Chaucer's extant works prompted the reward, but the suggestion of him as poet to a king places him as a precursor to later poets laureate. Chaucer continued to collect the liquid stipend until Richard II came to power, after which it was converted to a monetary grant on 18 April 1378. Chaucer obtained the very substantial job of Comptroller of the Customs for the port of London, which he began on 8 June 1374.[10] He must have been suited for the role as he continued in it for twelve years, a long time in such a post at that time. His life goes undocumented for much of the next ten years, but it is believed that he wrote (or began) most of his famous works during this period. He was mentioned in law papers of 4 May 1380, involved in the raptus of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. What raptus means is unclear, but the incident seems to have been resolved quickly and did not leave a stain on Chaucer's reputation. It is not known if Chaucer was in the city of London at the time of the Peasants' Revolt, but if he was, he would have seen its leaders pass almost directly under his apartment window at Aldgate. While still working as comptroller, Chaucer appears to have moved to Kent, being appointed as one of the commissioners of peace for Kent, at a time when French invasion was a possibility. He is thought to have started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s. He also became a Member of Parliament for Kent in 1386. There is no further reference after this date to Philippa, Chaucer's wife, and she is presumed to have died in 1387. He survived the political upheavals caused by the Lords Appellants, despite the fact that Chaucer knew some of the men executed over the affair quite well. On 12 July 1389, Chaucer was appointed the clerk of the king's works, a sort of foreman organising most of the king's building projects.[12] No major works were begun during his tenure, but he did conduct repairs on Westminster Palace, St. George's Chapel, Windsor, continue building the wharf at the Tower of London, and build the stands for a tournament held in 1390. It may have been a difficult job, but it paid well: two shillings a day, more than three times his salary as a comptroller. Chaucer was also appointed keeper of the lodge at the King’s park in Feckenham, which was a largely honorary appointment.[13] In September 1390, records say that he was robbed, and possibly injured, while conducting the business, and it was shortly after, on 17 June 1391, that he stopped working in this capacity. Almost immediately, on 22 June, he began as Deputy Forester in the royal forest of North Petherton, Somerset. This was no sinecure, with maintenance an important part of the job, although there were many opportunities to derive profit. He was granted an annual pension of twenty pounds by Richard II in 1394.[14] It is believed that Chaucer stopped work on the Canterbury Tales sometime towards the end of this decade. Not long after the overthrow of his patron, Richard II, in 1399, Chaucer's name fades from the historical record. The last few records of his life show his pension renewed by the new king, and his taking of a lease on a residence within the close of Westminster Abbey on 24 December 1399.[15] Although Henry IV renewed the grants assigned to Chaucer by Richard, Chaucer's own The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse hints that the grants might not have been paid. The last mention of Chaucer is on 5 June 1400, when some monies owed to him were paid. He is believed to have died of unknown causes on 25 October 1400, but there is no firm evidence for this date, as it comes from the engraving on his tomb, erected more than one hundred years after his death. There is some speculation—most recently in Terry Jones' book Who Murdered Chaucer? : A Medieval Mystery—that he was murdered by enemies of Richard II or even on the orders of his successor Henry IV, but the case is entirely circumstantial. Chaucer was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, as was his right owing to his status as a tenant of the Abbey's close. In 1556, his remains were transferred to a more ornate tomb, making Chaucer the first writer interred in the area now known as Poets' Corner. Work Chaucer's first major work, The Book of the Duchess, was an elegy for Blanche of Lancaster (who died in 1369). It is possible that this work was commissioned by her husband John of Gaunt, as he granted Chaucer a £10 annuity on 13 June 1374. This would seem to place the writing of The Book of the Duchess between the years 1369 and 1374. Two other early works by Chaucer were Anelida and Arcite and The House of Fame. Chaucer wrote many of his major works in a prolific period when he held the job of customs comptroller for London (1374 to 1386). His Parlement of Foules, The Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde all date from this time. Also it is believed that he started work on The Canterbury Tales in the early 1380s. Chaucer is best known as the writer of The Canterbury Tales, which is a collection of stories told by fictional pilgrims on the road to the cathedral at Canterbury; these tales would help to shape English literature. The Canterbury Tales contrasts with other literature of the period in the naturalism of its narrative, the variety of stories the pilgrims tell and the varied characters who are engaged in the pilgrimage. Many of the stories narrated by the pilgrims seem to fit their individual characters and social standing, although some of the stories seem ill-fitting to their narrators, perhaps as a result of the incomplete state of the work. Chaucer drew on real life for his cast of pilgrims: the innkeeper shares the name of a contemporary keeper of an inn in Southwark, and real-life identities for the Wife of Bath, the Merchant, the Man of Law and the Student have been suggested. The many jobs that Chaucer held in medieval society—page, soldier, messenger, valet, bureaucrat, foreman and administrator—probably exposed him to many of the types of people he depicted in the Tales. He was able to shape their speech and satirise their manners in what was to become popular literature among people of the same types. Chaucer's works are sometimes grouped into first a French period, then an Italian period and finally an English period, with Chaucer being influenced by those countries' literatures in turn. Certainly Troilus and Criseyde is a middle period work with its reliance on the forms of Italian poetry, little known in England at the time, but to which Chaucer was probably exposed during his frequent trips abroad on court business. In addition, its use of a classical subject and its elaborate, courtly language sets it apart as one of his most complete and well-formed works. In Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer draws heavily on his source, Boccaccio, and on the late Latin philosopher Boethius. However, it is The Canterbury Tales, wherein he focuses on English subjects, with bawdy jokes and respected figures often being undercut with humour, that has cemented his reputation. Chaucer also translated such important works as Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy and The Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris (extended by Jean de Meun). However, while many scholars maintain that Chaucer did indeed translate part of the text of Roman de la Rose as The Romaunt of the Rose, others claim that this has been effectively disproved. Many of his other works were very loose translations of, or simply based on, works from continental Europe. It is in this role that Chaucer receives some of his earliest critical praise. Eustache Deschamps wrote a ballade on the great translator and called himself a "nettle in Chaucer's garden of poetry". In 1385 Thomas Usk made glowing mention of Chaucer, and John Gower, Chaucer's main poetic rival of the time, also lauded him. This reference was later edited out of Gower's Confessio Amantis and it has been suggested by some that this was because of ill feeling between them, but it is likely due simply to stylistic concerns. One other significant work of Chaucer's is his Treatise on the Astrolabe, possibly for his own son, that describes the form and use of that instrument in detail and is sometimes cited as the first example of technical writing in the English language. Although much of the text may have come from other sources, the treatise indicates that Chaucer was versed in science in addition to his literary talents. Another scientific work discovered in 1952, Equatorie of the Planetis, has similar language and handwriting compared to some considered to be Chaucer's and it continues many of the ideas from the Astrolabe. Furthermore, it contains an example of early European encryption.[16] The attribution of this work to Chaucer is still uncertain. Selected Works The Canterbury Tales Troilus and Criseyde Treatise on the Astrolabe The Legend of Good Women Parlement of Foules Anelida and Arcite The House of Fame The Book of the Duchess Roman de la Rose Translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy (as Boece) References Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Chaucer

EFL teacher, interested in language education, intercultural dialogue and global issues. Very keen on literature and poem writing, in particular.

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

“L'amour n'est pas un feu qu'on renferme dans une âme : Tout nous trahit, la voix, le silence, les yeux; Et les feux mal couverts n'en éclatent que mieux.”Racine Love is not a fire that one encloses in a soul: Everything betrays us, the voice, the silence, the eyes; And poorly covered fires only break out better. ” Racine

Padraic Colum (8 December 1881– 11 January 1972) was an Irish poet, novelist, dramatist, biographer, playwright, children’s author and collector of folklore. He was one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival.

Actions speak louder than words, but are we listening?? Love

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

my life is not completely bad I just love whrighting these sad and very deep poems for some reason but some are very true plus people think i am a strange girl btw you know I had a picture that I drew well it won't let me change it back sadly. I am just looking for a good place To truly express my self in poetry I feel that I can just let all my pain and suffering out.

Bliss Carman FRSC (April 15, 1861– June 8, 1929) was a Canadian poet who lived most of his life in the United States, where he achieved international fame. He was acclaimed as Canada’s poet laureate during his later years. In Canada, Carman is classed as one of the Confederation Poets, a group which also included Charles G.D. Roberts (his cousin), Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. “Of the group, Carman had the surest lyric touch and achieved the widest international recognition. But unlike others, he never attempted to secure his income by novel writing, popular journalism, or non-literary employment. He remained a poet, supplementing his art with critical commentaries on literary ideas, philosophy, and aesthetics.” Life He was born William Bliss Carman in Fredericton, in the Maritime province of New Brunswick. “Bliss” was his mother’s maiden name. He was the great grandson of United Empire Loyalists who fled to Nova Scotia after the American Revolution, settling in New Brunswick (then part of Nova Scotia). His literary roots run deep with an ancestry that includes a mother who was a descendant of Daniel Bliss of Concord, Massachusetts, the great-grandfather of Ralph Waldo Emerson. His sister married the botanist and historian William Francis Ganong. And on his mother’s side he was a first cousin to Charles (later Sir Charles) G. D. Roberts. Education and early career Carman was educated at the Fredericton Collegiate School and the University of New Brunswick (UNB), from which he received a B.A. in 1881. At the Collegiate School he came under the influence of headmaster George Robert Parkin, who gave him a love of classical literature and introduced him to the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne. His first published poem was in the UNB Monthly in 1879. He then spent a year at Oxford and the University of Edinburgh (1882–1883), but returned home to receive his M.A. from UNB in 1884. After the death of his father in January 1885 and his mother in February 1886, Carman enrolled in Harvard University (1886–1887). At Harvard he moved in a literary circle that included American poet Richard Hovey, who would become his close friend and his collaborator on the successful Vagabondia poetry series. Their circle included Herbert Copeland and F. Holland Day, who would later form the Boston publishing firm Copeland & Day that would launch Vagabondia. After Harvard Carman briefly returned to Canada, but was back in Boston by February 1890. “Boston is one of the few places where my critical education and tastes could be of any use to me in earning money,” he wrote. “New York and London are about the only other places.” Unable to find employment in Boston, he moved to New York City and became literary editor of the New York Independent at the grand sum of $20/week. There he could help his Canadian friends get published, in the process “introducing Canadian poets to its readers.” However, Carman was never a good fit at the semi-religious weekly, and he was summarily dismissed in 1892. "Brief stints would follow with Current Literature, Cosmopolitan, The Chap-Book, and The Atlantic Monthly, but after 1895 he would be strictly a contributor to the magazines and newspapers, never an editor in any department.” To make matters worse, Carman’s first book of poetry, 1893's Low Tide on Grand Pré, was not a success; no Canadian company would publish it, and the U.S. edition stiffed when its publisher went bankrupt. Literary success At this low point, Songs of Vagabondia, the first Hovey-Carman collaboration, was published by Copeland & Day in 1894. It was an immediate success. “No one could have been more surprised at the tremendous popularity of these care-free celebrations (the first of the three collections went through seven rapid editions) than the young authors, Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman.” Songs of Vagabondia would ultimately "go through sixteen printings (ranging from 500 to 1000 copies) over the next thirty years. The three Vagabondia volumes that followed fell slightly short of that record, but each went through numerous printings. Carman and Hovey quickly found themselves with a cult following, especially among college students, who responded to the poetry’s anti-materialistic themes, its celebration of individual freedom, and its glorification of comradeship.” The success of Songs of Vagabondia prompted another Boston firm, Stone & Kimball, to reissue Low Tide... and to hire Carman as the editor of its literary journal, The Chapbook. The next year, though, the editor’s job went West (with Stone & Kimball) to Chicago, while Carman opted to remain in Boston. “In Boston in 1895, he worked on a new poetry book, Behind the Arras, which he placed with a prominent Boston publisher (Lamson, Wolffe).... He published two more books of verse with Lamson, Wolffe." He also began writing a weekly column for the Boston Evening Transcript, which ran from 1895 to 1900. In 1896 Carman met Mary Perry King, who became the greatest and longest-lasting female influence in his life. Mrs. King became his patron: “She put pence in his purse, and food in his mouth, when he struck bottom and, what is more, she often put a song on his lips when he despaired, and helped him sell it.” According to Carman’s roommate, Mitchell Kennerley, "On rare occasions they had intimate relations at 10 E. 16 which they always advised me of by leaving a bunch of violets—Mary Perry’s favorite flower—on the pillow of my bed." If he knew of the latter, Dr. King did not object: "He even supported her involvement in the career of Bliss Carman to the extent that the situation developed into something close to a ménage à trois" with the Kings. Through Mrs. King’s influence Carman became an advocate of ‘unitrinianism,’ a philosophy which "drew on the theories of François-Alexandre-Nicolas-Chéri Delsarte to develop a strategy of mind-body-spirit harmonization aimed at undoing the physical, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by urban modernity." This shared belief created a bond between Mrs. King and Carman but estranged him somewhat from his former friends. In 1899 Lamson, Wolffe was taken over by the Boston firm of Small, Maynard & Co., who had also acquired the rights to Low Tide... "The rights to all Carman’s books were now held by one publisher and, in lieu of earnings, Carman took a financial stake in the company. When Small, Maynard failed in 1903, Carman lost all his assets.” Down but not out, Carman signed with another Boston company, L.C. Page, and began to churn out new work. Page published seven books of new Carman poetry between 1902 and 1905. As well, the firm released three books based on Carman’s Transcript columns, and a prose work on unitrinianism, The Making of Personality, that he’d written with Mrs. King. "Page also helped Carman rescue his ‘dream project,’ a deluxe edition of his collected poetry to 1903.... Page acquired distribution rights with the stipulation that the book be sold privately, by subscription. The project failed; Carman was deeply disappointed and became disenchanted with Page, whose grip on Carman’s copyrights would prevent the publication of another collected edition during Carman’s lifetime.” Carman also picked up some needed cash in 1904 as editor-in-chief of the 10-volume project, The World’s Best Poetry. Later years After 1908 Carman lived near the Kings’ New Canaan, Connecticut, estate, “Sunshine”, or in the summer in a cabin near their summer home in the Catskills, “Moonshine.” Between 1908 and 1920, literary taste began to shift, and his fortunes and health declined. “Although not a political activist, Carman during the First World War was a member of the Vigilantes, who supported American entry into the conflict on the Allied side.” By 1920, Carman was impoverished and recovering from a near-fatal attack of tuberculosis. That year he revisited Canada and “began the first of a series of successful and relatively lucrative reading tours, discovering ‘there is nothing worth talking of in book sales compared with reading.’” “'Breathless attention, crowded halls, and a strange, profound enthusiasm such as I never guessed could be,' he reported to a friend. ‘And good thrifty money too. Think of it! An entirely new life for me, and I am the most surprised person in Canada.’” Carman was feted at "a dinner held by the newly-formed Canadian Authors’ Association at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal on 28 October 1921 where he was crowned Canada’s Poet Laureate with a wreath of maple leaves.” The tours of Canada continued, and by 1925 Carman had finally acquired a Canadian publisher. "McClelland & Stewart (Toronto) issued a collection of selected earlier verses and became his main publisher. They benefited from Carman’s popularity and his revered position in Canadian literature, but no one could convince L.C. Page to relinquish its copyrights. An edition of collected poetry was published only after Carman’s death, due greatly to the persistence of his literary executor, Lorne Pierce.” During the 1920s, Carman was a member of the Halifax literary and social set, The Song Fishermen. In 1927 he edited The Oxford Book of American Verse. Carman died of a brain hemorrhage at the age of 68 in New Canaan, and was cremated in New Canaan. “It took two months, and the influence of New Brunswick’s Premier J.B.M. Baxter and Canadian Prime Minister W.L.M. King, for Carman’s ashes to be returned to Fredericton.” “His ashes were buried in Forest Hill Cemetery, Fredericton, and a national memorial service was held at the Anglican cathedral there.” Twenty-five years later, on May 13, 1954, a scarlet maple tree was planted at his gravesite, to grant his request in his 1892 poem “The Grave-Tree”: Let me have a scarlet maple For the grave-tree at my head, With the quiet sun behind it, In the years when I am dead. Writing Low Tide on Grand Pré As a student at Harvard, Carman “was heavily influenced by Royce, whose spiritualistic idealism, combined with the transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson, lies centrally in the background of his first major poem, ”Low Tide on Grand Pré" written in the summer and winter of 1886." “Low Tide...” was published in the Spring, 1887 Atlantic Monthly, giving Carman a literary reputation while still at Harvard. It was also included in the 1889 anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion. Literary critic Desmond Pacey considered “Low Tide...” to be “the most nearly perfect single poem to come out of Canada. It will withstand any amount of critical scrutiny.” “Low Tide...” served as the title poem for Carman’s first book. “The poems in this volume have been collected with reference to their similarity of tone,” Carman wrote in his preface; a nostalgic tone of pervading loss and melancholy. Three outstanding examples are “The Eavesdropper,” “In Apple Time” and “Wayfaring.” However, “none can equal the artistry of the title poem. What is more, although Carman would publish over thirty other volumes during his lifetime, none of them contains anything that surpasses this poem he wrote when he was barely twenty-five years old.” Vagabondia Carman rose to prominence in the 1890s, a decade the poetry of which anthologist Louis Untermeyer has called marked by “a cheerless evasion, a humorous unconcern; its most representative craftsmen were, with four exceptions, the writers of light verse.” The first two of those four exceptions were Richard Hovey and Bliss Carman. For Untermeyer: "The poetry of this period... is dead because it detached itself from the world.... But... revolt openly declared itself with the publication of Songs from Vagabondia (1894), More Songs from Vagabondia (1896), and Last Songs from Vagabondia (1900).... It was the heartiness, the gypsy jollity, the rush of high spirits, that conquered. Readers of the Vagabondia books were swept along by their speed faster than by their philosophy.” Even modernists loved Vagabondia. In the "October, 1912 issue of the London Poetry Review, Ezra Pound noted that he had ‘greatly enjoyed The Songs of Vagabondia by Mr. Bliss Carman and the late Richard Hovey.’” Carman’s most famous poem from the first volume is arguably “The Joys of the Open Road.” More Songs... contains “A Vagabond Song,” once familiar to a generation of Canadians. "Canadian youngsters who were in grade seven anytime between the mid-1930s and the 1950s were probably exposed to... 'A Vagabond Song’ [which] appeared in The Canada Book of Prose and Verse, Book One, the school reader that was used in nearly every province" (and was edited by Lorne Pierce). In 1912 Carman would publish Echoes from Vagabondia as a solo work. (Hovey had died in 1900). More of a remembrance book than part of the set, it has a distinct elegiac tone. It contains the lyric “The Flute of Spring”. Behind the Arras With Behind the Arras (1895), Carman continued his practice of “bringing together poems that were ‘in the same key.’ Whereas Low Tide on Grand Pré is elegiacal and melancholy, Songs from Vagabondia is mostly light and jaunty, while Behind the Arras is philosophical and heavy.” “Behind the Arras” the poem is a long meditation that uses the speaker’s house and its many rooms as a symbol of life and its choices. The poem does not succeed: “there are so many asides that the allegory is lost along with any point the poet hoped to make.” Ballad of Lost Haven In keeping with the “same key” idea, Carman’s Ballad of Lost Haven (1897) was a collection of poetry about the sea. Its notable poems include the macabre sea shanty, The Gravedigger. By the Aurelian Wall “By the Aurelian Wall” is Carman’s elegy to John Keats. It served as the title poem of his 1898 collection, a book of formal elegies. In the last poem in the book, “The Grave-Tree,” Carman writes about his own death. The Pipes of Pan “Pan, the goat-god, traditionally associated with poetry and with the fusion of the earthly and the divine, becomes Carman’s organizing symbol in the five volumes issued between 1902 and 1905" under the above title. Under the influence of Mrs. King, Carman had begun to write in both prose and poetry about the ideas of ‘unitrinianism,’ "a strategy of mind-body-spirit harmonization aimed at undoing the physical, psychological, and spiritual damage caused by urban modernity... therapeutic ideas [which] resulted in the five volumes of verse assembled in Pipes of Pan." The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) calls the series “a collection that contains many superb lyrics but, overall, evinces the dangers of a soporific aesthetic.” The 'superb lyrics’ include the much-anthologized “The Dead Faun” from Volume I, From the Book of Myths; “From the Green Book of the Bards”, the title poem of Volume II; “Lord of My Heart’s Elation” from the same volume; and many of the erotic poems of Volume III, Songs of the Sea Children (such as LIX “I loved you when the tide of prayer”). As a whole, though, the Pan series shows (perhaps more than any other work) the truth of Northrop Frye’s 1954 observation that Carman “badly needs a skillful and sympathetic selection.” Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics There were no such problems with Carman’s next book. Perhaps because of the underlying concept, Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (1904) has a structure and unity that helps make it what has been called Carman’s “finest volume of poetry.” Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, who was included in the Greek canon of nine lyric poets. Most of her poetry, which was well-known and greatly admired throughout antiquity, has been lost, but her reputation has endured, supported by the surviving fragments of some of her poems. Carman’s method, as Charles G.D. Roberts saw it in his Introduction to the book,"apparently, has been to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable flavor of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by the fluidity and freedom of purely original work." It was a daunting task, as Roberts admits: “It is as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of Polyclitus or Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon which to build.” Yet, on the whole, Carman succeeded. “Written more or less contemporaneously with the love poems in Songs of the Sea Children, the Sappho reconstructions continue the amorous theme from a feminine point of view. Nevertheless, the feelings ascribed to Sappho are pure Carman in their sensitive and elegiac melancholy.” Virtually all of the lyrics are of high quality; some often-quoted are XXIII ("I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago,"), LIV ("How soon will all my lovely days be over"), LXXIV ("If death be good"), LXXXII ("Over the roofs the honey-coloured moon"). “Next to Low Tide on Grand Pré, Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics seems to be the collection that continues to find the most favour among Carman’s critics. D.M.R. Bentley, for example, calls it ‘undoubtedly one of the most attractive, engaging and satisfying works of any of the Confederation poets.’” Bentley argued that "the brief, crisp lyrics of the Sappho volume almost certainly contributed to the aesthetic and practice of Imagism. Later work In his review of 1954's Selected Poems of Bliss Carman, literary critic Northrop Frye compared Carman and the other Confederation Poets to the Group of Seven: “Like the later painters, these poets were lyrical in tone and romantic in attitude; like the painters, they sought for the most part uninhabited landscape.” But Frye added: “The lyrical response to landscape is by itself, however, a kind of emotional photography, and like other forms of photography is occasional and epigrammatic.... Hence the lyric poet, after he has run his gamut of impressions, must die young, develop a more intellectualized attitude, or start repeating himself. Carman’s meeting of this challenge was only partly successful.” It is true that Carman had begun to repeat himself after Sappho. "Much of Carman’s writing in poetry and prose during the decade preceding World War I is as repetitive as the title of Echoes from Vagabondia (1912) intimates" says the DCB. What had made his poetry so remarkable at the beginning– that every new book was completely new– was gone. However, Carman’s career was by no means over. He "published four other collections of new poetry during his lifetime and two more were ready for publication at the time of his death: The Rough Rider, and Other Poems (1908), A Painter’s Holiday, and Other Poems (1911), April Airs (1916), Far Horizons (1925), Sanctuary (1929), and Wild Garden (1929). James Cappon’s comment on Far Horizons applies almost equally to the other five volumes: ‘There is nothing new in its poetic quality which has the sweet sadness of age rehearsing old tunes with an art which is now very smooth though with less vivacity than it used to have.’” Not only did Carman continue to write, but he continued to write fine poems: poems such as “The Old Grey Wall” (April Airs), the Wilfred Campbell-ish “Rivers of Canada” (Far Horizons), “The Ghost-yard of the Goldenrod” and “The Ships of Saint John” (Later Poems, 1926), and “The Winter Scene” (Sanctuary: The “Sunshine House” sonnets). The best of these have the same nostalgic air of melancholy and loss with which Carman began in “Low Tide...,” but now even more poignant as the poet approached his own death. Recognition In 1906 Carman received honorary degrees from UNB and McGill University. He was elected a corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1925. The Society awarded him its Lorne Pierce Gold Medal in 1928. He was awarded a medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1929. In 1945, Carman was recognized as a Person of National Historic Significance by the government of Canada. Carman is honored by a sculpture erected on the UNB campus in 1947, which portrays him with fellow poets Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Francis Joseph Sherman. There is a middle school named after him in Fredericton, New Brunswick (Bliss Carman Middle School). There is also a school named after him in Toronto, Ontario. “Bliss Carman Heights” (an extension of the Skyline Acres subdivision) is a subdivision located in Fredericton, New Brunswick overlooking the Saint John River. It consists of Essex Street, Gloucester Crescent, Reading Street, Ascot Court, and Ascot Drive. An extension of the Bliss Carman Heights subdivision is named “Poet’s Hill” and consists of Bliss Carman Drive, Poets Lane and Windflower Court (named for one of Carman’s poems of the same name). In October 1916, American composer Leo Sowerby was inspired to write his best-known organ piece, “Comes Autumn Time,” after reading Carman’s poem, “Autumn,” in the Literature section of the Sunday Edition of the Chicago Tribune on October 16 of that year. Publications Poetry collections * Low Tide on Grand Pre: A Book Of Lyrics. New York: Charles L. Webster. 1893. - Low Tide on Grand Pré: A Book of Lyrics at Google Books * Carman, Bliss; Hovey, Richard (1894). Songs From Vagabondia. Tom B. Meteyard, Illus. Boston: Copeland & Day. – Songs from Vagabondia at Google Books– A Vagabondia Songs (2013 Reprint) at Google Books * A Seamark: A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: Copeland & Day. 1895. - A Seamark: A Threnody for Robert Louis Stevenson at Google Books * Behind The Arras: A Book Of The Unseen. Tom B. Meteyard, Illus. Boston: Lamson, Wolffe. 1895. * Ballads of Lost Haven: A Book Of The Sea. Boston: Lamson, Wolffe. 1897. * By The Aurelian Wall: And Other Elegies. Boston: Lamson, Wolffe. 1898. * Carman, Bliss; Hovey, Richard (1896). More Songs From Vagabondia. Tom B. Meteyard, Illus. Boston: Copeland & Day. – More Songs from Vagabondia at Google Books– A Vagabondia Songs (2013 Reprint) at Google Books * A Winter Holiday. Boston: Small, Maynard. 1899. * Carman, Bliss; Hovey, Richard (1901). Last Songs From Vagabondia. Tom B. Meteyard, Illus. Boston: Small, Maynard. – Last Songs from Vagabondia at Google Books– A Vagabondia Songs (2013 Reprint) at Google Books * Ballads and Lyrics. London: A.H. Bullen. 1902. * Ode on the Coronation of King Edward. Boston: L.C. Page. 1902. * Pipes Of Pan: From the Book of Myths. Boston: L.C. Page. 1902. - Pipes Of Pan: From the Book of Myths at Google Books * Pipes Of Pan: From the Green Book of the Bards. Boston: L.C. Page. 1903. - Pipes Of Pan: From the Green Book of the Bards at Google Books * Pipes Of Pan: Songs of the Sea Children. Boston: L.C. Page. 1904. - Pipes Of Pan: Songs of the Sea Children at Google Books * Pipes Of Pan: Songs From a Northern Garden. Boston: L.C. Page. 1904. - Pipes Of Pan: Songs From a Northern Garden at Google Books * Pipes Of Pan: From the Book of Valentines. Boston: L.C. Page. 1905. - Pipes Of Pan: From the Book of Valentines at Google Books * Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics. Intro. by Charles G.D. Roberts. Boston: L.C. Page. 1904. * Poems. (London: Chiswick P, 1905). * The Rough Rider: And Other Poems. New York: M. Kennerley. 1909. * A Painter’s Holiday, and Other Poems. New York: F.F. Sherman. 1911. * Echoes From Vagabondia. Boston: Small, Maynard. 1912. * April Airs: A Book Of New England Lyrics. Boston: Small, Maynard. 1916. * Carman, Bliss; King, Mary Perry (1918). The Man of The Marne: And Other Poems. New Canaan, Connecticut: Ponus Press. * The Vengeance of Noel Brassard: A Tale of the Acadian Expulsion (PDF). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The University Press. 1919. * Far Horizons. Boston: Small, Maynard and Company. 1925. - Far Horizons at Google Books * Later Poems. Toronto: McClelland & Steward. 1926. * Sanctuary: Sunshine House Sonnets. Whitman Bailey, Illus. Toronto: McClelland & Steward. 1929. * Wild Garden. Toronto: McClelland & Steward. 1929. * Bliss Carman’s Poems. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1931. - Bliss Carman’s Poems at Google Books * Pierce, Lorne, ed. (1954). The Selected Poems Of Bliss Carman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. * A Vision Of Sappho. Toronto: Canadiana House. 1968. * The Poems of Bliss Carman. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1976. ISBN 978-0-7710-9509-2. * Souster, Raymond; Lochhead, Douglas, eds. (1985). Windflower: Poems Of Bliss Carman. Ottawa: Tecumseh. ISBN 978-0-919662-07-0. Drama * Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King. Daughters of Dawn: A Lyrical Pageant of Series of Historical Scenes for Presentation With Music and Dancing. (New York: M. Kennerley, 1913). * Bliss Carman and Mary Perry King. Earth Deities: And Other Rhythmic Masques. (New York: M. Kennerley, 1914). Prose collections * The Kinship Of Nature. Boston: L. C. Page. 1904. * The Poetry Of Life. Boston: L. C. Page. 1905. - The poetry of life (1906 ed.) at Google Books * The Friendship of Art. Boston: L. C. Page. 1908. - The Friendship of Art (Scholar’s Choice ed.). ISBN 978-1-2981-9930-0. * The Making of Personality. Boston: L. C. Page. 1908. - The Making of Personality at Google Books * Talks on Poetry and Life; Being a Series of Five Lectures Delivered Before the University of Toronto, December 1925 (Speech). transcribed by Blanche Hume. 1926. * Pierce, Lorne, ed. (1931). Bliss Carman’s Scrap-Book: A Table Of Contents. Toronto: Ryerson. * Gundy, H. Pearson, ed. (1982). Letters of Bliss Carman. Kingston, Ontario: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Edited * The World’s Best Poetry (10 volumes). New York: The University Society. 1904. - The World’s best poetry, Volume 1 at Google Books * The Oxford Book of American Verse (U.S. ed.). New York: Albert & Charles Boni. 1927. * Carman, Bliss; Pierce, Lorne, eds. (1935). Our Canadian Literature: Representative Verse, English and French. Toronto: Ryerson. Archive * Bliss Carman Papers, 1889–1927 (2 linear ft.) are housed in the Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Stanford University Libraries Sources * "Bliss Carman’s Letters To Margaret Lawrence, 1927-1929". Post-Confederation Poetry: Texts And Contexts. Ed. D.M.R. Bentley. London: Canadian Poetry P, 1995. * Bliss Carman: A Reappraisal. Ed. Gerald Lynch. Ottawa: University Of Ottawa Press, 1990. * Letters of Bliss Carman. Ed. H. Pearson Gundy. Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University P, 1981. * Hugh McPherson. The Literary Reputation Of Bliss Carman: A Study In The Development Of Canadian Taste In Poetry. 1950. * Muriel Miller. Bliss Carman, A Portrait. Toronto: Ryerson, 1935. * Muriel Miller. Bliss Carman: Quest And Revolt. St. John’s, Nfld.: Jesperson P, 1985. * Donald G Stephens. Bliss Carman. 1966. * Donald G. Stephens. The Influence Of English Poets Upon The Poetry Of Bliss Carman. 1955. * Margaret A. Stewart. Bliss Carman: Poet, Philosopher, Teacher. 1976. Further reading * Robert Gibbs, “Voice and Persona in Carman and Roberts,” in Atlantic Provinces Literature Colloquium Papers [ed. by Kenneth MacKinnon] (1977) * Nelson-McDermott, C. (Fall–Winter 1990). “Passionate Beauty: Carman’s Sappho Poems”. Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews (Canadian Poetry Press) 27: 40–45. * Malcolm Ross, “A Strange Aesthetic Ferment,” Canadian Literature, 68-69 (Spring-Summer 1976) * John Robert Sorfleet, "Transcendentalist, Mystic, Evolutionary Idealist: Bliss Carman 1886-1894," in Colony and Confederation [ed. George Woodcock](1974) * Thomas B. Vincent, “Bliss Carman: A Life in Literary Publishing,” Historical Perspectives on Canadian Publishing, McMaster.ca. Web. * Symons, Arthur (Fall–Winter 1995). Ware, Tracy, ed. “Arthur Symons’ Reviews of Bliss Carman”. Canadian Poetry: Studies/Documents/Reviews (Canadian Poetry Press) 37: 100–113. * Terry Whalen, Canadian Writers and Their Work: Volume Two [ed. Robert Lecker, Ellen Quigley, & Jack David] (1983) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_Carman

As a perpetual and chronic daydreamer I've always enjoyed the art of summoning emotion with written word. But it wasn't until recently that I was stricken by a very sudden, and equally deep, passion for writing poetry. It seems that we make good companions so I suppose we'll continue to occupy one another for a while longer... As a writer, I hope to publish a book of poems in the future. More importantly, I hope to paint a unique picture, stir emotion, or raise a few questions within my readers. If I can accomplish this, I have certainly achieved my goal and consider it a job well done. As a reader, I hope to experience literature that is capable of delivering me from this reality to place me within the realm of another, thereby offering a temporary escape from a world that is mine. I hope to discover phrases that might cause my perception to shift into something unfamiliar. Reaching the outer limits of my mind to the birthplace of epiphany. And if not, I simply wish to learn something new to me... Thank you for taking the time to read my thoughts, and feel free to leave some of your own . After all, feedback is fuel for inspiration... And now... A QUOTE: “Fortune comes a crawlin', calliope woman, spinning that curious sense of your own.” ~ ~ Jerry Garcia

Harry Crosby (June 4, 1898– December 10, 1929) was an American heir, bon vivant, poet, and publisher who for some epitomized the Lost Generation in American literature. He was the son of one of the richest banking families in New England, a Boston Brahmin, and the nephew of Jane Norton Grew, the wife of financier J. P. Morgan, Jr.. As such, he was heir to a portion of a substantial family fortune. He was a volunteer in the American Field Service during World War I, and later served in the U.S. Ambulance Corps. He narrowly escaped with his life. Profoundly affected by his experience in World War I, Crosby vowed to live life on his own terms and abandoned all pretense of living the expected life of a privileged Bostonian. He had his father’s eye for women, and in 1920 met Mrs. Richard Peabody (née Mary Phelps Jacob), six years his senior. They had sex within two weeks, and their open affair was the source of scandal and gossip among blue-blood Boston. Mary (or Polly as she was called) divorced her alcoholic husband and to her family’s dismay married Crosby. Two days later they left for Europe, where they devoted themselves to art and poetry. Both enjoyed a decadent lifestyle, drinking, smoking opium regularly, traveling frequently, and having an open marriage. Crosby maintained a coterie of young ladies that he frequently bedded, and wrote and published poetry that dwelled on the symbolism of the sun and explored themes of death and suicide. Crosby’s life in Paris was at the crossroads of early 20th century Paris literary and cultural life. He numbered among his friends some of the most famous individuals of the early 20th century, including Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1927 Polly took the name Caresse, and she and Crosby founded the Black Sun Press. It was the first to publish works by a number of struggling authors who later became famous, including James Joyce, Kay Boyle, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, René Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound. Crosby died scandalously at age 31 as part of a murder–suicide or suicide pact. Early life Harry Crosby (born Henry Sturgis Crosby—his parents Stephen Van Rensslaer Crosby and Henrietta Marion Grew later changed his middle name to “Grew”) was born in Boston’s exclusive Back Bay neighborhood. He was the product of generations of blue-blood Americans, descended from the Van Rensselaers, Morgans, and Grews. His uncle was J. Pierpont Morgan, one of the richest men in America at that time. His father’s mother was the great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton. Also among Harry’s ancestors were Revolutionary War General Philip Schuyler and William Floyd, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He had one sibling, a sister, Katherine Schuyler Crosby, nicknamed Kitsa, who was born in 1901. They moved shortly after his birth to an estate that had, among other things, a dance floor that could accommodate 150 people. His parents instilled in him a love for poetry. He would toss water bombs off the upper stories of the house onto unsuspecting guests. The family spent its summers on the North Shore of Massachusetts at a second home in Manchester, about 25 miles (40 km) from Boston. His religious, affectionate mother loved nature and was one of the founders of the Garden Club of America. His father, a banker, relived his days as a college football star through his Ivy League and Boston society connections. As a child, he attended the exclusive Noble and Greenough School. In 1913, when he was 14 years old, his parents decided it was time to send him to Boston’s foremost prep school, St. Mark’s School, which he graduated from in 1917. World War I At age 19, like many young men of upper-crust American society, Crosby volunteered to serve in the American Ambulance Service in France. A number of writers whose works he would later publish also served in the ambulance corps, including Ernest Hemingway and Malcolm Cowley. He arrived in France on July 7, 1917. When America officially entered the War, the American Ambulance Service corp was integrated into the U. S. Army Ambulance Corps and Crosby enlisted. During the Battle of Verdun he was very close to the front, and ferried wounded soldiers from the front lines to rear areas for three days without relief. On November 22, 1917, as Crosby and his best friend, Way “Spud” Spaulding, and another friend, Ben Weeden, were transporting several wounded soldiers to a medical aid station, Crosby’s Ambulance 741 was hit by an artillery shell that landed 10 feet (3.0 m) away, sending shrapnel ripping through the vehicle, completely destroying it. Miraculously, Crosby was unhurt, but Spaulding, following close behind in another ambulance, was struck in the chest by shrapnel. Crosby and Weeden were able to transport him to a hospital. After leaving Spaulding at the hospital in Beaulieu and returning to the aid station, Crosby was seen running in circles, lap after lap, without apparent purpose. Crosby declared later that that was the night he changed from a boy to a man. From that moment on he never feared death. Spaulding was in intensive care for three months and was released from the hospital after six months. Crosby wrote many letters home during the two years he was in France. Originally convinced that God had “ordained the war” to cleanse the world, his early reports home were good-spirited. Over time, however, he began to describe with an obsessive, perverse delight the horror of trench warfare and awful scenes of dead and dying soldiers. I saw the most gruesome sight I’ve ever seen. Lying on a blood stained brancard was a man—not older than twenty I afterwards ascertained—suffering the agonies of hell. His whole right cheek was completely shot away so you could see all the insides of his face. He had no jaws, teeth, or lips left. His nose was plastered in. Blood was streaming all over. Under his eyes the skin was just dead blue.... It took us an hour driving between two or three miles per hour to get him to his destination. Of course he couldn’t yell as his mouth or what was left of it was a mere mass of pulp. For a while I was afraid our ambulance was to be turned into a hearse, but he was still alive when we got him there. Of course in typical French fashion the doctors held their usual debate of questioning whether it was the right hospital or where his papers were. On August 23–25, 1918, during a battle near Orme, his section (Section Sanitaire 641, attached to the 120th French Division) evacuated more than 2000 wounded and was cited for bravery in the field while under heavy German bombardment. Crosby became in 1919 one of the youngest Americans to be awarded the Croix de guerre. Harry was happy to finally have a medal to prove his valor and wrote home, “Oh Boy!!!!!! won THE CROIX DE GUERRE. Thank God.” When the Armistice was signed, Crosby, like every other soldier, was anxious to go home, but waited for more than a month for orders. He wrote his mother, asking her to get “Uncle Jack” J.P. Morgan to intervene on his behalf. During the war, J.P. Morgan & Company had loaned $1.5 billion dollars (about $20.67 billion in today’s dollars) to the Allies to fight against the Germans. On March 21, 1919, Crosby left Brest for Boston via Philadelphia and arrived home a hero. Attends Harvard After returning from World War I, Crosby attended Harvard in the spring of 1919 under an accelerated program for veterans. He took 19 courses, six in French (which he read and spoke fluently) and six in English literature. The remainder of his courses were in fine arts, music, Spanish, and social ethics. Taking his studies very lightly, he thought he was going to fail, and paid a knowledgeable man who was familiar with what questions would be asked on the exams to tutor him. He graduated with a BA in 1921. But he yearned to escape the rigidity of everyday life in Boston. His experience in France made it unbearable to live among what he called “dreary, drearier, dreariest Boston” and to put up with “Boston virgins who are brought up among sexless surroundings, who wear canvas drawers and flat-heeled shoes.” He wanted to escape “the horrors of Boston and particularly of Boston virgins.” Any sense of propriety was wiped out by a lust for living in the moment, forgetting all risks and possible consequences. Meets Mrs. Richard Peabody Crosby’s mother invited Mrs. Richard Rogers Peabody (née Mary Phelps Jacob) to chaperone Crosby and some of his friends at a picnic on July 4, 1920, including dinner and a trip to the amusement park at Nantasket Beach. During dinner, Crosby never spoke to the girl on his left, breaking decorum. By some accounts, Crosby fell in love with the buxom Mrs. Peabody in about two hours, confessing his love for her in the Tunnel of Love at the amusement park. Two weeks later they went to church together in Manchester-by-the-Sea and spent the night together. Their public relationship was a scandal among blue-blood Boston. She was 28, six years older than Crosby, with two small children, and married. No matter what Crosby tried, Polly would not divorce Richard and marry him. Crosby took a job in Boston at the Shawmut National Bank, a job he disliked, and took the train to visit Polly in New York. In May 1921, when Polly would not respond to his demands, Crosby threatened suicide if Polly did not marry him. Polly’s husband Richard Peabody was in and out of sanitariums several times fighting alcoholism. In June 1921, she formally separated from him. Later that winter, Polly accepted weekend visits from Crosby, who would take the midnight train home to Boston afterward. In December, Polly’s husband Richard offered to divorce her, and in February 1922, their marriage was legally ended. After eight months at the Shawmut National Bank, Crosby got drunk for six days and resigned on March 14, 1922. Polly intervened with Crosby’s uncle, J. P. Morgan, Jr., who agreed to provide a position for Crosby in Paris at Morgan, Harjes et Cie. Crosby already spoke and read fluent French and moved to Paris in May. Polly preceded him there, but when Harry had ongoing trysts with other women, she returned to the United States in July, angry and jealous. On September 2, 1922, Crosby proposed to Polly via transatlantic cable, and the next day bribed his way aboard the Aquitania for New York which made a weekly six-day express run to New York. Polly and Harry marry On September 9, 1922, Crosby and Polly were married in the Municipal Building in New York City, and two days later they re-boarded the RMS Aquitania and moved with her children to Paris, France. There they joined the Lost Generation of expatriate Americans disillusioned by the loss of life in World War I and the moral and social values of their parents’ generation. Crosby continued his work at Morgan, Harjes et Cie, the Morgan family’s bank in Paris. They found an apartment at 12, Quai d’Orléans overlooking the Seine, on the exclusive Île Saint-Louis, and Polly would don her red bathing suit and row Crosby down the Seine in his dark business suit, formal hat, umbrella and briefcase to the Place de la Concorde where he would walk the last few blocks to the bank on Place Vendôme. As she rowed back home, Polly, who was well endowed, would enjoy whistles, jeers and waves from workmen. She said the exercise was good for her breasts. Crosby barely tolerated Polly’s children. After their first year in Paris, her eight-year-old son Billy was shipped off to Le Rosay, an elite boarding school in Gstaad. At the end of 1923, Crosby quit Morgan, Harjes et Cie and devoted himself to the life of a poet, and later, publisher. Polly would attempt to create a family Christmas each year, if only in a hotel, but Crosby regularly boycotted these events, making it clear that he would be looking for flirtations instead. Life as expatriates Both of them were attracted to the bohemian lifestyle of the artists gathering in Montparnasse. Even by the wild standards of Paris in the 1920s, Crosby was in a league of his own. The couple lived a hedonistic and decadent life, including an open marriage and numerous affairs. Crosby was a gambler and a womanizer; he drank “oceans of champagne” and used opium, cocaine, and hashish. They wrote a mutual suicide pact, and carried cremation instructions with them. Polly and Crosby purchased their first race horse in June 1924, and then two more in April 1925. At the end of 1924, Crosby persuaded Polly to formally change her first name to Caresse, as he felt Polly was too prim and proper for his wife. They briefly considered Clytoris before deciding on Caresse. Crosby suggesting that her new name “begin with a C to go with Crosby and it must form a cross with mine.” The two names intersected at right angles at the common “R,” “the Crosby cross.” In 1924, they rented an apartment in the Faubourg St. Germain for six months from Princess Marthe Bibesco, a friend of Crosby’s cousin Walter Berry, for fifty thousand francs (the equivalent of $2,200, about $30,377 in today’s dollars). When they moved in, they brought with them “two maids and a cook, a governess, and a chauffeur.” His inheritance, multiplied by the favorable exchange rate the American dollar enjoyed in postwar Europe, allowed them to indulge in an extravagant expatriate lifestyle. Crosby’s trust fund provided them with US$12,000 a year (or $165,372 in today’s dollars). Still, Crosby repeatedly overdrew his account at State Street Trust in Boston and at Morgan, Harjes, in Paris, which in blue-blood Boston was like writing graffiti on the front door of a church. During 1929, Crosby wired his sensible, reserved father, an investment banker, several times asking him to put more money from his inheritance into his account. In January, he asked his father to sell $4,000 ($55,124 today) worth “to make up for past extravagances in New York” In May, he noted in his diary that he had sold another $4,000 worth of stock “to enjoy life when you can”. In mid-July, drunk on sherry cobblers, he sent a cable to his father, who was not pleased by it: PLEASE SELL $10,000 WORTH OF STOCK. WE HAVE DECIDED TO LIVE A MAD AND EXTRAVAGANT LIFE His father complied but not without rebuking his son for his spendthrift ways. Lifestyle The couple became known for hosting small dinner parties from their giant bed in their palatial townhouse on Île Saint-Louis, and afterward everyone was invited to enjoy their huge bathtub together, taking advantage of iced bottles of champagne near at hand. They took extended traveling tours. In January 1925 they traveled to North Africa where they first smoked opium, a habit to which they would return again and again. Crosby had tattoos on the soles of his feet—a cross on one and a pagan sun symbol on the other. On November 19, 1925, Crosby and Polly rented a fashionable apartment on 19, Rue de Lille which they remained in for the rest of their time in Paris. Crosby developed an obsessive fascination with imagery centering on the sun. His poetry and journals often focused on the sun, a symbol to him of perfection, enthusiasm, freedom, heat, and destruction. Crosby claimed to be a “sun worshiper in love with death.” He often added a doodle of a “black sun” to his signature which also included an arrow, jutting upward from the “y” in Crosby’s last name and aiming toward the center of the sun’s circle: “a phallic thrust received by a welcoming erogenous zone.” Crosby met Ernest Hemingway on a skiing trip to Gstaad in 1926. In July 1927 Crosby and Hemingway visited Pamplona for the running of the bulls. Crosby wrote of Hemingway that “H. could drink us under the table.” Harry and Caresse published the Paris edition of Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring. In early 1928 they traveled to the Middle East, visiting a number of countries. In late 1928 they secured a 20-year lease on a medieval mill outside of Paris in Ermenonville, France, for living quarters, which they named “Le Moulin du Soleil” ("The Mill of the Sun"). It had three old stone buildings, no electricity or telephone, and a single bathroom. The Crosbys added a racing course on which to play donkey polo and a small swimming pool. The millstream had slowed to a trickle. Inside the mill, Caresse converted the old washrooms and cellars into a large kitchen. The ground floor of the central mill tower served as a dining room, where guests sat on logs cut from the neighboring woods. The mill also contained a solid brass marine cannon that was rolled out for special guests, who were announced with a loud report. A whitewashed wall near the stairway served as a guest book. It was signed by many guests who included D. H. Lawrence, Douglas Fairbanks, the future George VI, and Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler’s future wife. They hosted wild parties at the mill, including drunken polo on donkeys, and entertained famous guests like Salvador Dalí. Henry wrote in his journal: Mobs for luncheon—poets and painters and pederasts and divorcées and Christ knows who and there was a great signing of names on the wall at the foot of the stairs and a firing off of the cannon and bottle after bottle of red wine and Kay Boyle made fun of Hart Crane and he was angry and flung The American Caravan into the fire because it contained a story of Kay Boyle’s (he forgot it had a poem of his in it) and there was a tempest of drinking and polo harra burra on the donkeys. and [sic] an uproar and a confusion so that it was difficult to do my work. Crosby would spend hours sunbathing naked atop the mill’s turret. Contrary to fashion of the day, he would not wear a hat. He often wore a black carnation in his lapel, and was known to color his finger– and toenails. Crosby once hired four horse-drawn carriages and raced them through the Paris streets. He would frequently drop in at Drosso where he would smoke opium. He would stay away from home for days. Crosby experimented with photography and saw the medium as a viable art form before it was widely accepted as such. In 1929, he met Henri Cartier-Bresson in Le Bourget, where Cartier-Bresson’s air squadron commandant had placed him under house arrest for hunting without a license. Crosby persuaded the officer to release Cartier-Bresson into his custody for a few days. The two men had an interest in photography, and Henry presented Henri with his first camera. They spent their time together taking and printing pictures at Crosby’s home, Le Moulin du Soleil. Cartier-Bresson was attracted to Caresse and began a sexual relationship with her that lasted until 1931, two years after Harry’s suicide. Crosby also learned to fly solo in November, 1929 when the aeroplane was so new that its spelling had not been agreed upon. Extra-marital relationships In 1923, shortly after their arrival in Paris, Caresse introduced Crosby to her friend Constance Coolidge, also a Boston Brahmin, an American expatriate. She was the niece of Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, and had been married to American diplomat Ray Atherton. Constance didn’t care what others thought about her. She loved anything risky and was addicted to gambling. Crosby nicknamed her the “Lady of the Golden Horse.” Crosby immediately began a sexual relationship with her that continued for several months. Harry rationalized their affair, telling Constance, “One should follow every instinct no matter where it leads.” In the fall of 1923, Caresse could not put up with their affair any longer and left for London. Harry told Constance the Caresse he could not meet Caresses’ demand that he “love her more than anyone in the world. This is absolutely impossible.” But Crosby would not leave Caresse, nor did Constance ask this of him. But when Constance received a letter from Caresse who confessed that her affair with her husband had made her “very miserable”, Constance wrote Harry and told him she would not see him any more. Harry was devastated by her decision. "Your letter was bar none the worst blow I have ever received. [...] I wouldn’t leave her under any circumstances nor as you say would you ever marry me." But the three remained friends, and on October 1, 1924 Constance married the Count Pierre de Jumilhac, although the marriage only lasted 5 years. In Morocco during one of their trips to North Africa, Crosby and Caresse took a 13-year-old dancing girl named Zora to bed with them. His seductive abilities became legendary in some social circles in Paris, and he engaged in a series of ongoing affairs, maintaining relationships with a variety of beautiful and doting young women. In July 1925, he met a fourteen-year-old girl named “Nubile.” He slept with a 13-year-old Berber girl in North Africa and a young Arab boy in Jerusalem. His wildness was in full flower during the drunken orgies of the annual Four Arts Balls (Bal des Quatz’ Arts). In July 1927, he turned 10 live snakes loose on the dance floor. He wrote in his diary about it later: I remember two strong young men stark naked wrestling on the floor for the honor of dancing with a young girl... and I remember a mad student drinking champagne out of a skull which he had pilfered front my Library as I had pilfered it a year ago from the Catacombs... and in a corner I watched two savages making love... and beside me sitting on the floor a plump woman with bare breasts absorbed in the passion of giving milk to one of the snakes! One year, Caresse showed up topless riding a baby elephant and wearing a turquoise wig. The motif for the ball that year was Inca, and Crosby dressed for the occasion, covering himself in red ocher and wearing nothing but a loincloth and a necklace of dead pigeons. Embracing the open sexuality offered by Crosby and his wife Caresse, Henri Cartier-Bresson fell into an intense sexual relationship with her that lasted until 1931. Black Sun Press In April, 1927, they founded an English language publishing company, first called Éditions Narcisse, after their black whippet, Narcisse Noir. They used the press as an avenue to publish their own poetry in small editions of finely made, hard-bound volumes. They printed limited quantities of meticulously produced, hand-manufactured books, printed on high-quality paper. Publishing in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s put the company at the crossroads of many American writers who were living abroad. In 1928, as Éditions Narcisse, they printed a limited edition of 300 numbered copies of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe with illustrations by Alastair. In 1928, they found they enjoyed the reception their initial works received, and decided to expand the press to serve other authors, renaming the company the Black Sun Press, following on Crosby’s obsession on the symbolism of the sun. The press rapidly gained notice for publishing beautifully bound, typographically flawless editions of unusual books. They took exquisite care with the books they published, choosing the finest papers and inks. They published early works of a number of writers before they were well known, including James Joyce’s Tales Told of Shem and Shaun (which was later integrated into Finnegans Wake). They published Kay Boyle’s first book-length work, Short Stores, in 1929. and works by Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Archibald MacLeish, Ernest Hemingway, Laurence Sterne, and Eugene Jolas. The Black Sun Press evolved into one of the most important small presses in Paris in the 1920s. After Crosby died in a suicide pact with one of his many lovers, Caresse Crosby continued publishing into the 1940s. The Fire Princess On July 9, 1928, Crosby met 20-year-old Josephine Noyes Rotch, the daughter of Arthur and Helen Ludington Rotch in Boston. Ten years his junior, they met while she was shopping in Venice at the Lido for her wedding trousseau. She had belonged to the Vincent Club and the Junior League and graduated from Lee School before she had attended Bryn Mawr. After only two years at Bryn Mawr she left because she planned to marry Albert Bigelow. "She was dark and intense... since the season of her coming out in 1926-7, she had been known around Boston as fast, a 'bad egg’...with a good deal of sex appeal.” They met for sex as often as her eight days in Venice would allow. He would later call her the “Youngest Princess of the Sun” and the “Fire Princess.” She was also from a prominent Boston family that first settled in Provincetown on Cape Cod in 1690. Josephine would inspire Crosby’s next collection of poems which he dedicated to her, titled Transit of Venus. In a letter dated July 24, 1928, Crosby detailed the affair to his mother, in whom he had always confided: I am having an affair with a girl I met (not introduced) at the Lido. She is twenty and has charm and is called Josephine. I like girls when they are very young before they have any minds. Josephine and Crosby had an ongoing affair until June 21, 1929, when she married Albert Smith Bigelow. Their affair was over—until August, when Josephine contacted Crosby and they rekindled the affair as her husband became a first year graduate student of architecture at Harvard. Unlike his wife Caresse, Josephine was quarrelsome and prone to fits of jealousy. She bombarded Crosby with half incoherent cables and letters, anxious to set the date for their next tryst. Visit to United States On November 20, 1929, the Crosbys returned to the United States aboard the RMS Mauretania for a visit and the Harvard-Yale football game. Crosby and Josephine met and traveled to Detroit where they checked into the expensive ($12 a day—about $165 today) Book-Cadillac Hotel as Mr. and Mrs Harry Crane. For four days they took meals in their room, smoked opium, and had sex. On December 7, 1929, the lovers returned to New York where Josephine said she was going to return to Boston and her husband. Crosby’s friend Hart Crane threw a party that evening to celebrate his completion after seven years of his poem, The Bridge. The Black Sun Press was scheduled to publish it the next week, and he wanted to bid Crosby and Caresse bon voyage, since they were due to sail back to France the next week. Among the guests present were Margaret Robson, Malcolm Cowley, Walker Evans, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams. The party went on until nearly dawn. Crosby and Caresse made plans to see Crane again before they left for Europe on December 10 to attend the popular Broadway play Berkeley Square. On December 9 Josephine, who instead of returning to Boston had stayed with one of her bridesmaids in New York, sent a 36-line poem to Harry Crosby, who was staying with Caresse at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel. The last line of the poem read: Death is our marriage. On the same day, Harry Crosby wrote his final entry in his journal: One is not in love unless one desires to die with one’s beloved. There is only one happiness it is to love and to be loved. Murder and suicide On the evening of the play, December 10, 1929, Caresse, Crosby’s mother Henrietta Grew, and Hart Crane met for dinner before the play, but Crosby was a no-show. It was unlike him to worry Caresse needlessly. She called their friend Stanley Mortimer at his mother’s apartment, whose studio Crosby was known to use for his trysts. He agreed to check his studio. Mortimer had to enlist help to break open the locked door and found Crosby and Josephine’s bodies. Crosby was in bed with a .25 caliber bullet hole in his right temple next to Josephine, who had a matching hole in her left temple, in what appeared to be a suicide pact. Crosby was still clutching the Belgian automatic pistol in one hand, Josephine in the other. The steamship tickets he had bought that morning for the return to Europe with Caresse were in his pocket. The coroner also found in his pocket a cable from Josephine addressed to Crosby on the Mauretania before they arrived in New York: “CABLE GEORGE WHEN YOU ARRIVE AND WHERE I CAN TELEPHONE YOU IMMEDIATELY. I AM IMPATIENT.” A second cable from another girl simply said, “YES.” A picture of Zora, the 13-year-old girl he had sex with in Egypt, was reportedly found in his wallet. The coroner reported that Crosby’s toenails were painted red, and that he had a Christian cross tattooed on the sole of one foot and a pagan icon representing the sun on the other. The coroner concluded that Josephine had died at least two hours before Crosby. There was no suicide note, and newspapers ran sensational articles for days about the murder or suicide pact—they could not decide which. Crosby’s wedding ring was found crushed on the floor, not on his finger, where he always promised Caresse it would remain. Caresse refused to witness the carnage and begged Archibald MacLeish, who was in town from his farm, to take charge. While waiting for the doctors to finish their examination, MacLeish wondered if Crosby’s literary aspirations hadn’t contributed to his death. As I sat there looking at his corpse, seating myself where I wouldn’t have to see the horrible hole in back of his ear, I kept saying to him: you poor, damned, dumb bastard. He was the most literary man I ever met, despite the fact that he’d not yet become what you’d call a Writer. I never met anyone who was so imbued with literature; he was drowned in it. I think I’m close to deciding literature is the one thing never to be taken seriously... Crosby’s suicide, along with Hart Crane’s suicide two-and-a-half years later, were cited by later writers as emblematic of the Lost Generation. Scandal follows The next day the headlines revealed all: Tragedy and Disgrace. As Josephine had died at least two hours before Crosby, and there was no suicide note, newspapers ran articles for many days speculating about the murder or suicide pact. The New York Times front page blared, “COUPLE SHOT DEAD IN ARTISTS’ HOTEL; Suicide Compact Is Indicated Between Henry Grew Crosby and Harvard Man’s Wife. BUT MOTIVE IS UNKNOWN. He Was Socially Prominent in Boston—Bodies Found in Friend’s Suite.” The New York newspapers decided it was a murder-suicide. Gretchen Powell had lunch with Crosby the day of his death. Her memory of the luncheon supported the notion that Josephine was one of Crosby’s many passing fancies. She related that Crosby had told her “the Rotch girl was pestering him; he was exasperated; she had threatened to kill herself in the lobby of the Savoy-Plaza if he didn’t meet her at once.” The deaths polarized the several prominent families affected. The Rotch family considered Josephine’s death to be murder. Josephine’s erstwhile husband Albert Bigelow blamed Crosby for “seducing his wife and murdering her because he couldn’t have her.” Crosby’s poetry possibly gave the best clue to his motives. Death was “the hand that opens the door to our cage the home we instinctively fly to.” His death mortified proper society. Crosby’s biographer Wolff wrote, He had meant to do it; it was no mistake; it was not a joke. If anything of Harry Crosby commands respect, perhaps even awe, it was the unswerving character of his intention. He killed himself not from weariness or despair, but from conviction, and however irrational, or even ignoble, this conviction may have been, he held fast to it as to a principle. He killed himself on behalf of the idea of killing himself. Crosby’s death, given the macabre circumstances under which it occurred, scandalized Boston’s Back Bay society. Legacy Crosby as a poet was never more than a minor literary figure while he lived, and was remembered more for his scandalous suicide over his creative efforts. He has greater importance as a co-founder of the Black Sun Press, which Caresse continued to operate after his death. She also established, with Jacques Porel, a side venture, Crosby Continental Editions, that published paperback books by Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Dorothy Parker, among others. The paperback books did not sell well, and Crosby Continental closed in 1933. The Black Sun Press, however, continued publishing into the 1950s. The Black Sun Press produced finely crafted books in small editions, including works by, among others, D. H. Lawrence, Archibald MacLeish, James Joyce, Kay Boyle, and Hart Crane. Crosby’s friend Hart Crane committed suicide less than two years later. Malcolm Cowley, whom Crosby had published, wrote in his 1934 book Exile’s Return, that the death of “Harry Crosby becomes a symbol” of the rise and fall of the Jazz Age. He recited the excesses typified by Crosby’s extravagant lifestyle as evidence of the shallowness of society during that era. When he edited and reissued the book in 1951, he softened his opinion of Crosby somewhat. “I had written at length about the life of Harry Crosby, who I scarcely know,” he wrote, “in order to avoid discussing the more recent death of Hart Crane, whom I know so well that I couldn’t bear to write about him.” In 1931, Caresse also published Torchbearer, a collection of his poetry with an afterward by Ezra Pound, and Aphrodite in Flight, a seventy-five paragraph-long prose-poem and how-to manual for lovers that compared making love to a woman to flying planes. Caresse published a boxed set of Crosby’s work titled Collected poems of Harry Crosby containing Chariot of the Sun with D. H. Lawrence’s intro, Transit of Venus with T. S. Eliot’s intro, Sleeping Together with Stuart Gilbert’s intro and Torchbearer in 1931. It was hand-set in dorique type; only 50 copies were printed. During 1931 and 1932, Caresse collaborated with Harry’s mother Henrietta to publish letters he’d written to his family while serving in France from the summer of 1917 until he returned home in 1919. Henrietta added a chronology and brief preface to the letters. The book War Letters was published in a unnumbered edition of 125 copies. As of 2015, a leather-bound edition of the book was priced from $2,000 to $3,500. Caresse Crosby edited and published Crosby’s diaries and papers. She wrote and published Poems for Harry Crosby in 1931. She also published and translated some of the works of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker among others. The Black Sun Press enjoyed the greatest longevity among the several expatriate presses founded in Paris during the 1920s. Through 1936, it published nearly three times as many titles as did Edward Titus through his Black Manikin Press. Books printed by the Black Sun Press are valued by collectors. Each book was hand-designed, beautifully printed, and illustrated with elegant typeface. A rare volume published by the Black Sun press of Hart Crane’s book-length poem The Bridge, including photos by Walker Evans, was sold by Christie’s in 2009 for US$21,250. In 2009, Neil Pearson, an antiquarian books expert, said that "A Black Sun book is the literary equivalent of a Braque or a Picasso painting—except it’s a few thousand pounds, not 20 million.” A new collection of Harry Crosby’s poetry, Ladders to the Sun: Poems by Harry Crosby was published by Soul Bay Press in April 2010. In 2004, Fine Line Features optioned Andrea Berloff’s first screenplay "Harry & Caresse." Lasse Hallström was initially attached to direct and Leslie Holleran was attached as a producer. Works * Sonnets for Caresse. (1925) Paris, Herbert Clarke. * Sonnets for Caresse. (1926) 2nd Edition. Paris, Herbert Clarke. * Sonnets for Caresse. (1926) 3rd Edition. Paris, Albert Messein. * Sonnets for Caresse. (1927) 4th Edition. Paris, Editions Narcisse. * Red Skeletons. (1927) Paris, Editions Narcisse. * Hindu Love Manual (1928) 20 copies * Chariot of the Sun. (1928) Paris, At the Sign of the Sundial. * Shadows of the Sun. (1928) Paris, Black Sun Press. * Transit of Venus. Volume 1 .(1928) Paris, Black Sun Press. * Transit of Venus. Volume 2. (1929) Paris, Black Sun Press. 1929 (500 copies printed) * Mad Queen. (1929) Paris, Black Sun Press. * Shadows of the Sun-Series Two. (1929) Paris, Black Sun Press. * The Sun. (1929) Paris, Black Sun Press. * Sleeping Together. (1929) Paris, Black Sun Press. (500 copies printed) * A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy Laurence Sterne, (1929) Paris, illus. by Polia Chentoff 400 copies * Shadows of the Sun-Series Three. (1930) Paris, Black Sun Press. * Aphrodite in Flight: Being Some Observations on the Aerodynamics of Love. (1930 Paris, Black Sun Press. * Collected Poems of Harry Crosby. (4 Volumes). (1931–32) Paris, Black Sun Press. * War Letters. Preface by Henrietta Crosby. (1932) Paris, Black Sun Press. 125 unnumbered copies. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Crosby

Simple sweet person that puts their thoughts and feelings down so I don't Keep them bottled up

Leonard Norman Cohen (21 September 1934 – 10 November 2016) was a Canadian Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and novelist. His work often explores religion, isolation, sexuality, and personal relationships. Cohen has been inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also a Companion of the Order of Canada, the nation's highest civilian honour. In 2011, Cohen received a Prince of Asturias Award for literature. Cohen's writing process, as he told an interviewer in 1998, is “like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it”.

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