Lisel Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, on February 8, 1924 and immigrated to America at the age of 15. She won the U.S. National Book Award in 1981 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1997. Her poems are extremely accessible, yet intricate and layered. While at times whimsical and possessing a sly humor, there is an underlying sadness in much of her work.

Louis Untermeyer (October 1, 1885 – December 18, 1977) was an American poet, anthologist, critic, and editor. He was appointed the fourteenth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1961. Untermeyer was born in New York City. He married Jean Starr in 1906. Their son Richard was born in 1907 and died under uncertain circumstances in 1927. After a 1926 divorce, they were reunited in 1929, after which they adopted two sons, Laurence and Joseph. He married the poet Virginia Moore in 1927; their son, John Moore Untermeyer (1928), was renamed John Fitzallen Moore after a painful 1929 divorce. In the 1930s, he divorced Jean Starr Untermeyer and married Esther Antin. This relationship also ended in divorce in 1945. In 1948, he married Bryna Ivens, an editor of Seventeen magazine. Untermeyer was known for his wit and his love of puns. For a while, he held Marxist beliefs, writing for magazines such as The Masses, through which he advocated that the United States stay out of World War I. After the suppression of that magazine by the U.S. government, he joined The Liberator, published by the Workers Party of America. Later he wrote for the independent socialist magazine The New Masses. He was a co-founder of "The Seven Arts," a poetry magazine that is credited for introducing many new poets, including Robert Frost, who became Untermeyer's long-term friend and correspondent. In 1950, Untermeyer was a panelist during the first year of the What's My Line? television quiz program. According to Bennett Cerf, Untermeyer would sign virtually any piece of paper that someone placed in front of him, and Untermeyer inadvertently signed a few Communist proclamations. According to Cerf, Untermeyer was not at all a communist, but he had joined several suspect societies that made him stand out. He was named during the hearings by the House Committee on Un-American Activities investigating communist subversion. The Catholic War Veterans and "right wing organizations" began hounding Mr. Untermeyer. Goodson-Todman, producer of the show, held out against the protests of Untermeyer for some time, but finally war veterans began picketing outside the New York City television studio from which What's My Line? was telecast live. The pressure became too great, and the sponsor Jules Montenier, inventor of Stopette deodorant, said, “After all, I'm paying a lot of money for this. I can't afford to have my product picketed.” At that point, the producers told Untermeyer that he had to leave the television series. The last live telecast on which he appeared was on March 11, 1951, and the mystery guest he questioned while blindfolded was Celeste Holm. The kinescope of this episode has been lost. His exit led to Bennett Cerf becoming a permanent member of the program. The controversy surrounding Untermeyer led to him being blacklisted by the television industry. According to Untermeyer's friend Arthur Miller, Untermeyer became so depressed by his forced departure from What's My Line? that he refused to leave his home in Brooklyn for more than a year, and his wife Bryna answered all incoming phone calls. It was she who eventually told Miller what had happened because Untermeyer would not pick up the phone to talk to him, even though Miller's support of blacklisted writers and radio and television personalities was well-known to Untermeyer and many others. But for more than a year, whenever Miller dialed the Untermeyers' phone number, Bryna "talked obscurely about [her husband Louis] not wanting phone conversations anymore, preferring to wait until we could all get together again," wrote Miller. Miller was a "very infrequent television watcher" in 1951, according to words he used in his 1987 autobiography, and so he did not notice that Bennett Cerf had replaced Untermeyer on the live TV game show. Miller did read New York City newspapers every day, but apparently there was no published report of Untermeyer's disappearance from television, therefore Miller was unaware that anything was wrong until Untermeyer's wife Bryna revealed what it was eventually after they had conversed by phone for more than a year. Louis Untermeyer was the author or editor of close to 100 books, from 1911 until his death. Many of them and his other memorabilia are preserved in a special section of the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Schools used his Modern American and British poetry books widely, and they often introduced college students to poetry. He and Bryna Ivens Untermeyer created a number of books for young people, under the Golden Treasury of Children's Literature. Utermeyer also rounded up contributors for a Modern Masters for Children series published by Crowell-Collier Press in the 1960s--the books were designed to have a vocabulary of 800 words and contributors included Robert Graves, Phylis McGinley, and Shirley Jackson. He lectured on literature for many years, both in the US and other countries. In 1956 the Poetry Society of America awarded Untermeyer a Gold Medal. He also served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1961 until 1963. Poetry collections * The Younger Quire (parodies), Mood Publishing, 1911. * First Love, French, 1911. * Challenge, Century, 1914. * These Times, Holt, 1917. * Including Horace, Harcourt, 1919. * The New Adam, Harcourt, 1920. * Roast Leviathan, Harcourt, 1923, reprinted, Arno, 1975. * (With son, Richard Untermeyer) Poems, privately printed, 1927. * Burning Bush, Harcourt, 1928. * Adirondack Cycle, Random House, 1929. * Food and Drink, Harcourt, 1932. * First Words before Spring, Knopf, 1933. * Selected Poems and Parodies, Harcourt, 1935. * For You with Love (juvenile), Golden Press, 1961. * Long Feud: Selected Poems, Harcourt, 1962. * One and One and One (juvenile), Crowell-Collier, 1962. * This Is Your Day (juvenile), Golden Press, 1964. * Labyrinth of Love, Simon & Schuster, 1965. * Thanks: A Poem (juvenile), Odyssey, 1965. * Thinking of You (juvenile), Golden Press, 1968. * A Friend Indeed, Golden Press, 1968. * You: A Poem, (juvenile), illustrations by Martha Alexander, Golden Press, 1969. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Untermeyer

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

Thomas Campbell (27 July 1777– 15 June 1844) was a Scottish poet chiefly remembered for his sentimental poetry dealing especially with human affairs. A co-founder of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland, he was also one of the initiators of a plan to found what became University College London. In 1799, he wrote “The Pleasures of Hope”, a traditional 18th century didactic poem in heroic couplets. He also produced several stirring patriotic war songs—"Ye Mariners of England", “The Soldier’s Dream”, “Hohenlinden” and in 1801, “The Battle of Mad and Strange Turkish Princes”. Early life Born on High Street, Glasgow in 1777, he was the youngest of the eleven children of Alexander Campbell (1710–1801), son of the 6th and last Laird of Kirnan, Argyll, descended from the MacIver-Campbells. His mother, Margaret (b.1736), was the daughter of Robert Campbell of Craignish and Mary, daughter of Robert Simpson, “a celebrated Royal Armourer”. In about 1737, his father went to Falmouth, Virginia as a merchant in business with his wife’s brother Daniel Campbell, becoming a Tobacco Lord trading between there and Glasgow. They enjoyed a long period of prosperity until he lost his property and their old and respectable firm collapsed in consequence of the American Revolutionary War. Having personally lost nearly £20,000, Campbell’s father was nearly ruined. Several of Thomas’ brothers remained in Virginia, one of whom married a daughter of Patrick Henry. Both his parents were intellectually inclined, his father being a close friend of Thomas Reid (for whom Campbell was named) while his mother was known for her refined taste and love of literature and music. Thomas Campbell was educated at the High School of Glasgow and the University of Glasgow, where he won prizes for classics and verse-writing. He spent the holidays as a tutor in the western Highlands and his poems Glenara and the Ballad of Lord Ullin’s Daughter were written during this time while visiting the Isle of Mull. In 1797, Campbell travelled to Edinburgh to attend lectures on law. He continued to support himself as a tutor and through his writing, aided by Robert Anderson, the editor of the British Poets. Among his contemporaries in Edinburgh were Sir Walter Scott, Lord Henry Brougham, Lord Francis Jeffrey, Thomas Brown, John Leyden and James Grahame. These early days in Edinburgh influenced such works as The Wounded Hussar, The Dirge of Wallace and the Epistle to Three Ladies. Career In 1799, six months after the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge, “The Pleasures of Hope” was published. It is a rhetorical and didactic poem in the taste of his time, and owed much to the fact that it dealt with topics near to men’s hearts, with the French Revolution, the partition of Poland and with negro slavery. Its success was instantaneous, but Campbell was deficient in energy and perseverance and did not follow it up. He went abroad in June 1800 without any very definite aim, visited Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock at Hamburg, and made his way to Regensburg, which was taken by the French three days after his arrival. He found refuge in a Scottish monastery. Some of his best lyrics, “Hohenlinden”, “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Soldier’s Dream”, belong to his German tour. He spent the winter in Altona, where he met an Irish exile, Anthony McCann, whose history suggested The Exile of Erin. He had at that time the intention of writing an epic on Edinburgh to be entitled “The Queen of the North”. On the outbreak of war between Denmark and England he hurried home, the “Battle of the Baltic” being drafted soon after. At Edinburgh he was introduced to the first Lord Minto, who took him in the next year to London as occasional secretary. In June 1803 appeared a new edition of the “Pleasures of Hope”, to which some lyrics were added. In 1803 Campbell married his second cousin, Matilda Sinclair, and settled in London. He was well received in Whig society, especially at Holland House. His prospects, however, were slight when in 1805 he received a government pension of £200. In that year the Campbells removed to Sydenham. Campbell was at this time regularly employed on the Star newspaper, for which he translated the foreign news. In 1809 he published a narrative poem in the Spenserian stanza, Gertrude of Wyoming—referring to the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania and the Wyoming Valley Massacre—with which were printed some of his best lyrics. He was slow and fastidious in composition, and the poem suffered from overelaboration. Francis Jeffrey wrote to the author: “Your timidity or fastidiousness, or some other knavish quality, will not let you give your conceptions glowing, and bold, and powerful, as they present themselves; but you must chasten, and refine, and soften them, forsooth, till half their nature and grandeur is chiselled away from them. Believe me, the world will never know how truly you are a great and original poet till you venture to cast before it some of the rough pearls of your fancy.” In 1812 he delivered a series of lectures on poetry in London at the Royal Institution; and he was urged by Sir Walter Scott to become a candidate for the chair of literature at Edinburgh University. In 1814 he went to Paris, making there the acquaintance of the elder Schlegel, of Baron Cuvier and others. His pecuniary anxieties were relieved in 1815 by a legacy of £4000. He continued to occupy himself with his Specimens of the British Poets, the design of which had been projected years before. The work was published in 1819. It contains on the whole an admirable selection with short lives of the poets, and prefixed to it an essay on poetry containing much valuable criticism. In 1820 he accepted the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine, and in the same year made another tour in Germany. Four years later appeared his “Theodric”, a not very successful poem of domestic life. Later life He took an active share in the foundation of University College London (originally known as London University), visiting Berlin to inquire into the German system of education, and making recommendations which were adopted by Lord Brougham. He was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University (1826–1829) in competition against Sir Walter Scott. Campbell retired from the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine in 1830, and a year later made an unsuccessful venture with The Metropolitan Magazine. He had championed the cause of the Poles in “The Pleasures of Hope”, and the news of the capture of Warsaw by the Russians in 1831 affected him as if it had been the deepest of personal calamities. “Poland preys on my heart night and day,” he wrote in one of his letters, and his sympathy found a practical expression in the foundation in London of the Literary Association of the Friends of Poland. In 1834 he travelled to Paris and Algiers, where he wrote his Letters from the South (printed 1837). The small production of Campbell may be partly explained by his domestic calamities. His wife died in 1828. Of his two sons, one died in infancy and the other became insane. His own health suffered, and he gradually withdrew from public life. He died at Boulogne on 15 June 1844 and was buried on 3 July 1844 Westminster Abbey at Poet’s Corner. Campbell’s other works include a Life of Mrs Siddons (1842), and a narrative poem, “The Pilgrim of Glencoe” (1842). See The Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell (3 vols., 1849), edited by William Beattie, M.D.; Literary Reminiscences and Memoirs of Thomas Campbell (1860), by Cyrus Redding; The Complete Poetical Works Of Thomas Campbell (1860); The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell (1875), in the Aldine Edition of the British Poets, edited by the Rev. V. Alfred Hill, with a sketch of the poet’s life by William Allingham; and the Oxford Edition of the Complete Works of Thomas Campbell (1908), edited by J. Logie Robertson. See also Thomas Campbell by J. Cuthbert Hadden, (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1899, Famous Scots Series), and a selection by Lewis Campbell (1904) for the Golden Treasury Series. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Campbell_(poet)

Margaret Elizabeth Sangster (February 22, 1838 – 1912) was an American poet, author, and editor. She was popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. Sangster was the daughter of John Munson of Ireland and Margaret Chisholm of New York. Her father was in the marble industry in New York City. Margaret and her younger sister Isabell grew up in a very religious household and the two sisters were well educated. Sangster held editorial positions with a number of periodicals including, Hearth and Home, The Christian at Work, Harper's Young People and eventually became an editor at Harper’s Bazaar from 1889 to 1899. Through her work she became acquainted with notable people of her age, including Mark Twain and Helen Keller. Other than Harper’s Bazaar, she contributed to Ladies' Home Journal, Hearth and Home, and the Christian Intelligencer, The Christian Union (later became The Outlook), The Congregationalist and The Christian Herald. Among Sangster's prose works are several volumes of stories for children, and of these, Little Jamie was written when she was seventeen years old. Hours with Girls and Winsome Womanhood were her most popular works. Her volumes of poetry include, Poems of the Household, Home Fairies and Heart Flowers, On the Road Home and Easter Bells. Sangster grew up a devout member of the Dutch Reformed Church and wrote many hymns and sacred texts. These include a setting of the Te Deum Laudamus and a hymn called, Thine is the Power, which gained a fair degree of popularity in its time.[2] In 1902 Sangster wrote the introduction to the book, Happenings in Our Home, a book where a family could record the important events in their lives such as births, deaths, weddings, vacations, and holidays. Sangster spent most of her life in New York and New Jersey. She married George Sangster in 1858 and essentially gave up writing until after his death in 1871. She never remarried and she died in 1912. Her nephew, Charles Chisholm Brainerd, was married to the author Eleanor Hoyt Brainerd.

Alan Seeger (22 June 1888– 4 July 1916) was an American poet who fought and died in World War I during the Battle of the Somme serving in the French Foreign Legion. Seeger was the uncle of American folk singer Pete Seeger, and was a classmate of T.S. Eliot at Harvard. He is most well known for having authored the poem, I Have a Rendezvous with Death, a favorite of President John F. Kennedy. A statue modeled after Seeger is found on the monument honoring fallen Americans who volunteered for France during the war, located at the Place des États-Unis, Paris. He is sometimes called the “American Rupert Brooke.” Early life Born in New York on June 22, 1888, Seeger moved with his family to Staten Island at the age of one and remained there until the age of 10. In 1900, his family moved to Mexico for two years, which influenced the imagery of some of his poetry. His brother Charles Seeger, a noted pacifist and musicologist, was the father of the American folk singers Peter “Pete” Seeger, Mike Seeger, and Margaret “Peggy” Seeger. Seeger entered Harvard in 1906 after attending several elite preparatory schools, including Hackley School. Writing At Harvard, he edited and wrote for the Harvard Monthly. Among his friends there (and afterward) was the American Communist John Reed, though the two had differing ideological views, and his Harvard class also included T.S. Eliot and Walter Lippmann, among others. After graduating in 1910, he moved to Greenwich Village for two years, where he wrote poetry and enjoyed the life of a young bohemian. During his time in Greenwich Village, he attended soirées at the Mlles. Petitpas’ boardinghouse (319 West 29th Street), where the presiding genius was the artist and sage John Butler Yeats, father of the poet William Butler Yeats. Having moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris to continue his seemingly itinerant intellectual lifestyle, on August 24, 1914, Seeger joined the French Foreign Legion so that he could fight for the Allies in World War I (the United States did not enter the war until 1917). Death He was killed in action at Belloy-en-Santerre on July 4, 1916, famously cheering on his fellow soldiers in a successful charge after being hit several times by machine gun fire. Poetry Seeger’s poetry was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in December 1916 with a 46-page introduction by William Archer. Poems, a collection of his works, was relatively unsuccessful, due, according to Eric Homberger, to its lofty idealism and language, qualities out of fashion in the early decades of the 20th century. Poems was reviewed in The Egoist, where the critic—T. S. Eliot, Seeger’s classmate at Harvard—commented that, Seeger was serious about his work and spent pains over it. The work is well done, and so much out of date as to be almost a positive quality. It is high-flown, heavily decorated and solemn, but its solemnity is thorough going, not a mere literary formality. Alan Seeger, as one who knew him can attest, lived his whole life on this plane, with impeccable poetic dignity; everything about him was in keeping. One of his more famous poems was I Have a Rendezvous with Death, published posthumously. A recurrent theme in both his poetic works and his personal writings was his desire for his life to end gloriously at an early age. This particular poem, according to the JFK Library, “was one of John F. Kennedy’s favorite poems and he often asked his wife (Jacqueline) to recite it.” Memorials On 4 July 1923, the President of the French Council of State, Raymond Poincaré, dedicated a monument in the Place des États-Unis to the Americans who had volunteered to fight in World War I in the service of France. The monument, in the form of a bronze statue on a plinth, executed by Jean Boucher, had been financed through a public subscription. Boucher had used a photograph of Seeger as his inspiration, and Seeger’s name can be found, among those of 23 others who had fallen in the ranks of the French Foreign Legion, on the back of the plinth. Also, on either side of the base of the statue, are two excerpts from Seeger’s “Ode in Memory of the American Volunteers Fallen for France”, a poem written shortly before his death on 4 July 1916. Seeger intended that his words should be read in Paris on 30 May of that year, at an observance of the American holiday, Decoration Day (later known as Memorial Day): They did not pursue worldly rewards; they wanted nothing more than to live without regret, brothers pledged to the honor implicit in living one’s own life and dying one’s own death. Hail, brothers! Goodbye to you, the exalted dead! To you, we owe two debts of gratitude forever: the glory of having died for France, and the homage due to you in our memories. Alan Seeger Natural Area, in central Pennsylvania, was named by Colonel Henry Shoemaker. It is unknown if Alan Seeger had any connection to the area or why Shoemaker chose to memorialize the poet. The area is known for its virgin trees. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Seeger

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

John Winston Lennon (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English singer and songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as a co-founder of the Beatles, the most commercially successful band in the history of popular music. With fellow member Paul McCartney, he formed a celebrated songwriting partnership.

George Essex Evans (18 June 1863– 10 November 1909) was an Australian poet. Evans suffered from increasing deafness as he grew older, and this may be the reason why he was thought to be a secretive, quiet man. Initially he earned a living by working as a teacher at a private school, but eventually became an Agricultural Editor of The Queenslander.

Gerald Massey (29 May 1828 – 29 October 1907) was an English poet and writer on Spiritualism and Ancient Egypt. Early life Massey was born near Tring, Hertfordshire in England to poor parents. When little more than a child, he was made to work hard in a silk factory, which he afterward deserted for the equally laborious occupation of straw plaiting. These early years were rendered gloomy by much distress and deprivation, against which the young man strove with increasing spirit and virility, educating himself in his spare time, and gradually cultivating his innate taste for literary work. He was attracted by the movement known as Christian Socialism, into which he threw himself with whole-hearted vigour, and so became associated with Frederick Denison Maurice and Charles Kingsley. Later life From about 1870 onwards, Massey became increasingly interested in Egyptology and the similarities that exist between ancient Egyptian mythology and the Gospel stories. He studied the extensive Egyptian records housed in the Assyrian and Egyptology section of the British Museum in London where he worked closely with the curator, Dr. Samuel Birch, and other leading Egyptologists of his day, even learning hieroglyphics at the time the Temple of Horus at Edfu was first being excavated. Writing career Massey's first public appearance as a writer was in connection with a journal called the Spirit of Freedom, of which he became editor, and he was only twenty-two when he published his first volume of poems, Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (1850). These he followed in rapid succession with The Ballad of Babe Christabel (1854), War Waits (1855), Havelock's March (1860), and A Tale of Eternity (1869). In 1889, Massey published a two-volume collection of his poems called My Lyrical Life. He also published works dealing with Spiritualism, the study of Shakespeare's sonnets (1872 and 1890), and theological speculation. It is generally understood that he was the original of George Eliot's Felix Holt.[1] Massey's poetry has a certain rough and vigorous element of sincerity and strength which easily accounts for its popularity at the time of its production. He treated the theme of Sir Richard Grenville before Tennyson thought of using it, with much force and vitality. Indeed, Tennyson's own praise of Massey's work is still its best eulogy, for the Laureate found in him a poet of fine lyrical impulse, and of a rich half-Oriental imagination. The inspiration of his poetry is a combination of his vast knowledge based on travels, research and experiences; he was a patriotic humanist to the core. His poem "The Merry, Merry May" was set to music in 1894 by the composer Cyril Rootham and then in a popular song by composer Christabel Baxendale. In regard to Ancient Egypt, Massey first published The Book of the Beginnings, followed by The Natural Genesis. His most prolific work is Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World, published shortly before his death. Massey was a believer in spiritual evolution; he opined that Darwin's theory of evolution was incomplete without spiritualism: The theory contains only one half the explanation of man's origins and needs spiritualism to carry it through and complete it. For while this ascent on the physical side has been progressing through myriads of ages, the Divine descent has also been going on – man being spiritually an incarnation from the Divine as well as a human development from the animal creation. The cause of the development is spiritual. Mr. Darwin's theory does not in the least militate against ours – we think it necessitates it; he simply does not deal with our side of the subject. He can not go lower than the dust of the earth for the matter of life; and for us, the main interest of our origin must lie in the spiritual domain. Assertions about Jesus and Horus One of the more important aspects of Massey's writings were his assertions that there were parallels between Jesus and the Egyptian god Horus, primarily contained in book The Natural Genesis first published in 1883. Massey, for example, argued in the book his belief that: both Horus and Jesus were born of virgins on 25 December, raised men from the dead (Massey speculates that the biblical Lazarus, raised from the dead by Jesus, has a parallel in El-Asar-Us, a title of Osiris), died by crucifixion and were resurrected three days later.[5] These assertions have influenced various later writers such as Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Tom Harpur, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Dorothy M. Murdock.[6][7][unreliable source?] Like Godfrey Higgins a half-century earlier, Massey believed that Western religions had mythical roots. The human mind has long suffered an eclipse and been darkened and dwarfed in the shadow of ideas the real meaning of which has been lost to moderns. Myths and allegories whose significance was once unfolded in the Mysteries have been adopted in ignorance and reissued as real truths directly and divinely vouchsafed to humanity for the first and only time! The early religions had their myths interpreted. We have ours misinterpreted. And a great deal of what has been imposed on us as God’s own true and sole revelation to us is a mass of inverted myths. Christian ignorance notwithstanding, the Gnostic Jesus is the Egyptian Horus who was continued by the various sects of gnostics under both the names of Horus and of Jesus. In the gnostic iconography of the Roman Catacombs child-Horus reappears as the mummy-babe who wears the solar disc. The royal Horus is represented in the cloak of royalty, and the phallic emblem found there witnesses to Jesus being Horus of the resurrection. Criticism Christian theologian W. Ward Gasque, a Ph.D. from Harvard and Manchester University, sent emails to twenty Egyptologists that he considered leaders of the field – including Kenneth Kitchen of the University of Liverpool and Ron Leprohan of the University of Toronto – in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, Germany and Austria to verify academic support for some of these assertions. His primary targets were Tom Harpur, Alvin Boyd Kuhn and the Christ myth theory, and only indirectly Massey. Ten out of twenty responded, but most were not named. According to Gasque, Massey's work, which draws comparisons between the Judeo-Christian religion and the Egyptian religion, is not considered significant in the field of modern Egyptology and is not mentioned in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt or similar reference works of modern Egyptology. Gasque reports that those who responded were unanimous in dismissing the proposed etymologies for Jesus and Christ, and one unspecified Egyptologist referred to Alvin Boyd Kuhn's comparison as "fringe nonsense."[11][unreliable source?] However, Harpur's response to Gasque quotes leading contemporary Egyptologist Erik Hornung that there are parallels between Christianity and ancient Egypt, as do the writings of biblical expert Thomas L. Thompson. Theologian Stanley E. Porter has pointed out that Massey's analogies include a number of errors, for example Massey stated that 25 December as the date of birth of Jesus was selected based on the birth of Horus, but the New Testament does not include any reference to the date or season of the birth of Jesus. The earliest known source recognizing 25 December as the date of birth of Jesus is by Hippolytus of Rome, written around the beginning of the 3rd century, based on the assumption that the conception of Jesus took place at the Spring equinox. Hippolytus placed the equinox on 25 March and then added 9 months to get 25 December, thus establishing the date for festivals. The Roman Chronography of 354 then included an early reference to the celebration of a Nativity feast in December, as of the fourth century. Porter states that Massey's serious historical errors often render his works nonsensical, for example Massey states that the biblical references to Herod the Great were based on the myth of "Herrut" the evil hydra serpent, while the existence of Herod the Great can be well established without reliance on Christian sources. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Massey

William Stanley Merwin (born September 30, 1927) is an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin’s unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, Merwin’s writing influence derived from his interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in Hawaii, he writes prolifically and is dedicated to the restoration of the islands’ rainforests. Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009), the National Book Award for Poetry (2005) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan. Following his receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2009, Merwin is recognized as one of the principal contributors to poetry in the early 21st century. Early life W. S. Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. He grew up on the corner of Fourth Street and New York Avenue in Union City, New Jersey until 1936, when his family moved to Scranton, Pennsylvania. As a child, he was enamored of the natural world, sometimes finding himself talking to the large tree in his back yard. He was also fascinated with things that he saw as links to the past, such as the building behind his home that had once been a barn that housed a horse and carriage. At the age of five he started writing hymns for his father, who was a Presbyterian minister. Career After attending Princeton University, Merwin married his first wife, Dorothy Jeanne Ferry, and moved to Spain. During his stay there, while visiting the renowned poet Robert Graves at his homestead on the island of Majorca, he served as tutor to Graves’s son. There, he met Dido Milroy—fifteen years older than he—with whom he collaborated on a play and whom he later married and lived with in London. In 1956, Merwin moved to Boston for a fellowship at the Poets’ Theater. He returned to London where he was friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. In 1968, Merwin moved to New York City, separating from his wife who stayed at their home in France. In the late 1970s, Merwin moved to Hawaii and eventually was divorced from Dido Milroy. He married Paula Schwartz in 1983. In 1952 Merwin’s first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. W. H. Auden selected the work for that distinction. Later, in 1971 Auden and Merwin would exchange harsh words in the pages of The New York Review of Books. Merwin had published “On Being Awarded the Pulitzer Prize” in the June 3, 1971, issue of The New York Review of Books outlining his objections to the Vietnam War and stating that he was donating his prize money to the draft resistance movement. From 1956 to 1957 Merwin was also playwright-in-residence at the Poet’s Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he became poetry editor at The Nation in 1962. Besides being a prolific poet (he has published over fifteen volumes of his works), he is also a respected translator of Spanish, French, Latin and Italian poetry (including Dante’s Purgatorio) as well as poetry from Sanskrit, Yiddish, Middle English, Japanese and Quechua. He also served as selector of poems of the late American poet Craig Arnold (1967–2009). Merwin is probably best known for his poetry about the Vietnam War, and can be included among the canon of Vietnam War-era poets which includes such luminaries as Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich; Denise Levertov; Robert Lowell; Allen Ginsberg and Yusef Komunyakaa. In 1998, Merwin wrote Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, an ambitious novel-in-verse about Hawaiʻi in history and legend. Merwin’s early subjects were frequently tied to mythological or legendary themes, while many of his poems featured animals. A volume called The Drunk in the Furnace (1960) marked a change for Merwin, in that he began to write in a much more autobiographical way. The title-poem is about Orpheus, seen as an old drunk. 'Where he gets his spirits / it’s a mystery’, Merwin writes; 'But the stuff keeps him musical’. Another poem of this period—'Odysseus’—reworks the traditional theme in a way that plays off poems by Stevens and Graves on the same topic. In the 1960s, Merwin lived in a small apartment in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and began to experiment boldly with metrical irregularity. His poems became much less tidy and controlled. He played with the forms of indirect narration typical of this period, a self-conscious experimentation explained in an essay called 'On Open Form’ (1969). The Lice (1967) and The Carrier of Ladders (1970) remain his most influential volumes. These poems often used legendary subjects (as in 'The Hydra’ or 'The Judgment of Paris’) to explore highly personal themes. In Merwin’s later volumes—such as The Compass Flower (1977), Opening the Hand (1983), and The Rain in the Trees (1988)—one sees him transforming earlier themes in fresh ways, developing an almost Zen-like indirection. His latest poems are densely imagistic, dream-like, and full of praise for the natural world. He has lived in Hawaii since the 1970s. Migration: New and Selected Poems won the 2005 National Book Award for poetry. A lifelong friend of James Wright, Merwin wrote an elegy to him that appears in the 2008 volume From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. The Shadow of Sirius, published in 2008 by Copper Canyon Press, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. In June 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan. He is the subject of the 2014 documentary film Even Though the Whole World Is Burning. Merwin appeared in the PBS documentary “The Buddha,” released in 2010. He had moved to Hawaii to study with the Zen Buddhist master Robert Aitkin in 1976. Personal life Today, Merwin lives on a former pineapple plantation built atop a dormant volcano on the northeast coast of Maui. Awards * Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" or "[year] in literature" article: * 1952: Yale Younger Poets Prize for A Mask for Janus * 1954: Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry * 1956: Rockefeller Fellowship * 1957: National Institute of Arts and Letters grant * 1957: Playwrighting Bursary, Arts Council of Great Britain * 1961: Rabinowitz Foundation Grant * 1962: Bess Hokin Prize, Poetry magazine * 1964/1965: Ford Foundation Grant * 1966: Chapelbrook Foundation Fellowship * 1967: Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, Poetry magazine * 1969: PEN Translation Prize for Selected Translations 1948-1968 * 1969: Rockefeller Foundation Grant * 1971: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Carrier of Ladders (published in 1971) * 1973: Academy of American Poets Fellowship * 1974: Shelley Memorial Award * 1979: Bollingen Prize for Poetry, Yale University Library * 1987: Governor’s Award for Literature of the state of Hawaii * 1990: Maurice English Poetry Award * 1993: The Tanning Prize for mastery in the art of poetry * 1993: Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Travels * 1994: Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award * 1998: Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded by The Poetry Foundation * 1999: Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a jointly-held position with Rita Dove and Louise Glück * 2005: National Book Award for Poetry for Migration: New and Selected Poems * 2004: Golden Wreath Award of the Struga Poetry Evenings Festival in Macedonia * 2004: Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award * 2008: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement * 2009: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Shadow of Sirius (published in 2008) * 2010: Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement * 2010: United States Poet Laureate * 2013: The Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award Other accolades * Merwin’s former home town of Union City, New Jersey honored him in 2006 by renaming a local street near his former home W.S. Merwin Way. Bibliography * * Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" or "[year] in literature" article: Poetry - collections * * 1952: A Mask for Janus, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press; awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, 1952 (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975) * 1954: The Dancing Bears, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975) * 1956: Green with Beasts, New York: Knopf (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975) * 1960: The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Macmillan (reprinted as part of The First Four Books of Poems, 1975) * 1963: The Moving Target, New York: Atheneum * 1966: Collected Poems, New York: Atheneum * 1967: The Lice, New York: Atheneum * 1969: Animae, San Francisco: Kayak * 1970: The Carrier of Ladders, New York: Atheneum;—winner of the Pulitzer Prize * 1970: Signs, illustrated by A. D. Moore; Iowa City, Iowa: Stone Wall Press * 1973: Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment, New York: Atheneum * 1975: The First Four Books of Poems, containing A Mask for Janus, The Dancing Bears, Green with Beasts, and The Drunk in the Furnace, New York: Atheneum; (reprinted in 2000, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press) * 1977: The Compass Flower, New York: Atheneum * 1978: Feathers From the Hill, Iowa City, Iowa: Windhover * 1982: Finding the Islands, San Francisco: North Point Press * 1983: Opening the Hand, New York: Atheneum * 1988: The Rain in the Trees, New York: Knopf * 1988: Selected Poems, New York: Atheneum * 1993: The Second Four Books of Poems, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press * 1993: Travels: Poems, New York: Knopf winner of the 1993 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize * 1996: The Vixen: Poems, New York: Knopf * 1997: Flower and Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press * 1998: The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative, a “novel-in-verse” New York: Knopf * 1999: The River Sound: Poems, New York: Knopf * 2001: The Pupil, New York: Knopf * 2005: Migration: New and Selected Poems, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press—winner of the National Book Award for Poetry * 2005: Present Company, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press * 2008: The Shadow of Sirius, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press—winner of the Pulitzer Prize * 2013: The Collected Poems of W. S. Merwin, New York: Library of America * 2014: The Moon Before Morning, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press Poems * Prose * * 1970: The Miner’s Pale Children, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 1994, New York: Holt) * 1977: Houses and Travellers, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 1994, New York: Holt) * Regions of Memory * 1982: Unframed Originals: Recollections * 1992: The Lost Uplands: Stories of Southwest France, New York: Knopf * 2002: The Mays of Ventadorn, National Geographic Directions Series; Washington: National Geographic * 2004: The Ends of the Earth, essays, Washington: Shoemaker & Hoard * 2005: Summer Doorways: A Memoir * 2007: The Book of Fables, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press Plays * * 1956: Darkling Child (with Dido Milroy), produced this year * 1957: Favor Island, produced this year at Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts (broadcast in 1958 by Third Programme, British Broadcasting Corporation) * 1961: The Gilded West, produced this year at Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, England Translations * * 1959: The Poem of the Cid, London: Dent (American edition, 1962, New York: New American Library) * 1960: The Satires of Persius, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press * 1961: Some Spanish Ballads, London: Abelard (American edition: Spanish Ballads, 1961, New York: Doubleday Anchor) * 1962: The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes: His Fortunes and Adversities, a Spanish novella; New York: Doubleday Anchor * 1963: The Song of Roland * 1969: Selected Translations, 1948 - 1968, New York: Atheneum; winner of the PEN Translation Prize * 1969: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, poems by Pablo Neruda; London: Jonathan Cape (reprinted in 2004 with an introduction by Christina Garcia, New York: Penguin Books) * 1969: Products of the Perfected Civilization, Selected Writings of Chamfort, also author of the introduction; New York: Macmillan * 1969: Voices: Selected Writings of Antonio Porchia, Chicago: Follett (reprinted in 1988 and 2003, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press) * 1969: Transparence of the World, poems by Jean Follain, New York: Atheneum (reprinted in 2003, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press) * 1971: “Eight Quechua Poems”, The Hudson Review * 1973: Asian Figures, New York: Atheneum * 1974: Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems (with Clarence Brown), New York: Oxford University Press (reprinted in 2004 as The Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam, New York: New York Review of Books) * 1977: Sanskrit Love Poetry (with J. Moussaieff Masson), New York: Columbia University Press (published in 1981 as Peacock’s Egg: Love Poems from Ancient India, San Francisco: North Point Press) * 1977: Vertical Poetry, poems by Roberto Juarroz; San Francisco: Kayak (reprinted in 1988; San Francisco: North Point Press) * 1978: Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis (with George E. Dimock, Jr.), New York: Oxford University Press * 1979: Selected Translations, 1968-1978, New York: Atheneum * 1981: Robert the Devil, an anonymous French play; with an introduction by the translator; Iowa City, Iowa: Windhover * 1985: Four French Plays, including Robert the Devil; The Rival of His Master and Turcaret by Alain-René Lesage; and The False Confessions by Pierre de Marivaux; New York: Atheneum * 1985: From the Spanish Morning, consisting of Spanash Ballads by Lope de Rueda and Eufemia: The Life of Lazarillo de Torres (originally translated in Tulane Drama Review, December 1958); New York: Atheneum * 1989: Sun at Midnight, poems by Musō Soseki (with Soiku Shigematsu) * 1996: Pieces of Shadow: Selected Poems of Jaime Sabines * 1998: East Window: The Asian Translations, translated poems from earlier collections, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press * 2000: Purgatorio from The Divine Comedy of Dante; New York: Knopf * 2005: Gawain and the Green Knight, a New Verse Translation, New York: Knopf * 2013: Selected Translations, translated poems from 1948 - 2010, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press * 2013: Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press (with Takako Lento) * 2013: Sun At Midnight, poems by Muso Soseki, Port Townsend, Washington: Copper Canyon Press (with Soiku Shigematsu) (updated and reissued) Editor * * 1961: West Wind: Supplement of American Poetry, London: Poetry Book Society * 1996: Lament for the Makers: A Memorial Anthology (compiler), Washington: Counterpoint Other sources * * The Union City Reporter March 12, 2006. Archives * * Merwin’s literary papers are held at The Rare Book & Manuscript Library (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). The collection, which is open to researchers, consists of some 5,500 archival items and 450 printed books. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Merwin

Edwin Muir (15 May 1887– 3 January 1959) was an Orcadian poet, novelist and translator, born on a farm in Deerness. He is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations, and for his extensive translations of Franz Kafka’s works with his wife Willa Muir.

Frederick George Scott (7 April 1861– 19 January 1944) was a Canadian poet and author, known as the Poet of the Laurentians. He is sometimes associated with Canada’s Confederation Poets, a group that included Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, and Duncan Campbell Scott. Scott published 13 books of Christian and patriotic poetry. Scott was a British imperialist who wrote many hymns to the British Empire—eulogizing his country’s roles in the Boer Wars and World War I. Many of his poems use the natural world symbolically to convey deeper spiritual meaning. Frederick George Scott was the father of poet F. R. Scott.

Thomas Carew (pronounced as “Carey”) (1595 – 22 March 1640) was an English poet, among the ‘Cavalier’ group of Caroline poets. Biography He was the son of Sir Matthew Carew, master in chancery, and his wife Alice, daughter of Sir John Rivers, Lord Mayor of the City of London and widow of Ingpen. The poet was probably the third of the eleven children of his parents, and was born in West Wickham in London, in the early part of 1595; he was thirteen years old in June 1608, when he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford. He took his degree of B.A. early in 1611 and proceeded to study at the Middle Temple. Two years later his father complained to Sir Dudley Carleton that he was not doing well. He was therefore sent to Italy as a member of Sir Dudley’s household and, when the ambassador returned from Venice, he seems to have kept Thomas Carew with him, for he was working as secretary to Carleton, at the Hague, early in 1616. However, he was dismissed in the autumn of that year for levity and slander; he had great difficulty in finding another job. In August 1618 his father died and Carew entered the service of Edward Herbert, Baron Herbert of Cherbury, in whose train he travelled to France in March 1619, and it is believed that he remained with Herbert until his return to England, at the close of his diplomatic missions, in April 1624. Carew “followed the court before he was of it,” not receiving the definite commitment of the Chamber until 1628. According to a probably apocryphal story, while Carew held this office he displayed his tact and presence of mind by stumbling and extinguishing the candle he was holding to light Charles I into the queen’s chamber, because he saw that Lord St Albans had his arm round her majesty’s neck. The king suspected nothing, and the queen heaped favours on the poet. Probably in 1630 Carew was made “server” or taster-in-ordinary to the king. To this period may be attributed his close friendships with Sir John Suckling, Ben Jonson and Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon; the latter described Carew as “a person of pleasant and facetious wit.” John Donne, whose celebrity as a court-preacher lasted until his death in 1631, exercised a powerful if not entirely healthy influence over the genius of Carew. In February 1633 a masque by the latter, Coelum Britanicum, was acted in the Banqueting House at Whitehall, and was printed in 1634. The close of Carew’s life is absolutely obscure. It was long supposed that he died in 1639, and this has been thought to be confirmed by the fact that the first edition of his Poems, published in 1640, seems to have a posthumous character. But Clarendon tells us that “after fifty years of life spent with less severity and exactness than it ought to have been, he died with the greatest remorse for that licence”. If Carew was more than fifty years of age, he must have died during or after 1645, and in fact there were final additions made to his Poems in the third edition of 1651. Walton tells us that Carew in his last illness, being afflicted with the horrors, sent in great haste to “the ever-memorable” John Hales (1584–1656); Hales “told him he should have his prayers, but would by no means give him then either the sacrament or absolution.” Assessment Carew’s poems are sensuous lyrics. They open to us, in his own phrase, “a mine of rich and pregnant fancy.” His metrical style was influenced by Jonson and his imagery by Donne, for whom he had an almost servile admiration. Carew had a lucidity and directness of lyrical utterance unknown to Donne. It is perhaps his greatest distinction that he is the earliest of the Cavalier song-writers by profession, of whom John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, was a later example, poets who turned the disreputable incidents of an idle court-life into poetry which was often of the rarest delicacy and the purest melody and colour. The longest of Carew’s poems, “A Rapture,” would be more widely appreciated if the rich flow of its imagination were restrained by greater reticence of taste. A testimonial to his posterity is that he was analyzed by 19th century critics such as Charles Neaves, who even two centuries later found Carew on the sensuous border of propriety. Critical reception Carew has long been recognized as a notable figure in English literary history. His earliest critics—chiefly other poets—evidently knew his work from the many manuscripts that circulated. Among many others, two of the most celebrated writers of the age, Sir John Suckling and William Davenant, paid tribute to Carew, playfully admiring his poetic craftsmanship. Carew’s reputation, however, experienced a slow but steady decline during the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite some interest in Carew in subsequent years, not until the twentieth century did critics offer a reexamination of Carew’s place in English literary history. F. R. Leavis wrote in 1936: “Carew, it seems to me, has claims to more distinction than he is commonly accorded; more than he is accorded by the bracket that, in common acceptance, links him with Lovelace and Suckling.” More recently, Carew’s place among the Cavalier Poets has been examined, as have his poetic affinities with Ben Jonson and John Donne; “A Rapture” has been scrutinized as both biography and fantasy; the funerary poetry has been studied as a subgenre; evidence of Carew’s views concerning political hierarchy has been found in his occasional verse; and love and courtship have been probed as themes in the “Celia” poems. By the end of the twentieth century, Carew has been recognized as an important poet representative of his time and a master lyricist. According to Edmund Gosse, “Carew’s poems, at their best, are brilliant lyrics of the purely sensuous order.” Major poetry Poems. By Thomas Carew, Esquire is a collection of lyrics, songs, pastorals, poetic dialogues, elegies, addresses, and occasional poems. Most of the pieces are fairly short—the longest, “A Rapture,” is 166 lines, and well over half are under 50 lines. The subjects are various: a number of poems treat love, lovemaking, and feminine beauty. Several of the poems, including “An Elegie upon the death of the Deane of Pauls, Dr. Iohn Donne” are memorial tributes; others, notably “To Saxham,” celebrate country-house life; and a few record such events as the successful production of a play ("To my worthy Friend, M. D’Avenant, upon his Excellent Play, The Iust Italian") or the marriage of friends ("On the Marriage of T. K. and C. C. the Morning Stormie"). Many of the songs and love poems are addressed to the still-unidentified “Celia,” a woman who was evidently Carew’s lover for years. The poems to Celia treat the urgency of courtship, making much of the carpe diem theme. Others commend Celia through simile, conceit, and cliché. The physical pleasures of love are likewise celebrated: “A Rapture” graphically documents a sexual encounter through analogy, euphemism, and paradox, while “Loves Courtship” responds to the early passing of virginity. A number of Carew’s poems are concerned with the nature of poetry itself. His elegy on John Donne has been praised as both a masterpiece of criticism and a remarkably perceptive analysis of the metaphysical qualities of Donne’s literary work. English poet and playwright Ben Jonson is the subject of another piece of critical verse, “To Ben. Iohnson, Upon Occasion of His Ode of Defiance Annext to His Play of The New Inne.” This poem, like the elegy on Donne, is concerned with both the style and substance of the author’s literary works as well as with personal qualities of the author himself. Among Carew’s occasional, public verse are his addresses to ladies of fashion, commendations of the nobility, and laments for the passing of friends or public figures, such as Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden. Bibliography * Thomas Carew (1810). A selection from the poetical works of Thomas Carew [ed. by J. Fry.]. * Thomas Carew (1824). The works of Thomas Carew: reprinted from the original edition of MDCXL (1640). Printed for W. and C. Tait. * Thomas Carew (1870). The Poems of Thomas Carew: Sewer in Ordinary to Charles I. and a Gentleman of His Privy Chamber. Roxburghe Library. pp. 242–. * Thomas Carew (1893). The poems and masque of Thomas Carew...: With an introductory memoir, an appendix of unauthenticated poems from mss., notes, and a table of first lines. Reeves and Turner. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Carew

William Cosmo Monkhouse (18 March 1840– 20 July 1901) was an English poet and critic. He was born in London. His father, Cyril John Monkhouse, was a solicitor; his mother’s maiden name was Delafosse. He was educated at St Paul’s School, quitting it at seventeen to enter the board of trade as a junior supplementary clerk, from which grade he rose eventually to be the assistant-secretary to the finance department of the office. In 1870–71 he visited South America in connection with the hospital accommodation for seamen at Valparaíso, Chile, and other ports; and he served on different departmental committees, notably that of 1894–96 on the Mercantile Marine Fund. He was twice married: first, to Laura, daughter of James Keymer of Dartford; and, secondly, to Leonora Eliza, daughter of Commander Blount, R.N.

Stephen Vincent Benét (July 22, 1898– March 13, 1943) was an American author, poet, short story writer, and novelist. Benét is best known for his book-length narrative poem of the American Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1929, and for two short stories, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936) and “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937). In 2009, The Library of America selected Benét’s story “The King of the Cats” (1929) for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American Fantastic Tales, edited by Peter Straub.

Archie Randolph Ammons (February 18, 1926– February 25, 2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. Preface Ammons wrote about humanity’s relationship to nature in alternately comic and solemn tones. His poetry often addresses religious and philosophical matters and scenes involving nature, almost in a Transcendental fashion. According to reviewer Daniel Hoffman, his work “is founded on an implied Emersonian division of experience into Nature and the Soul,” adding that it "sometimes consciously echo[es] familiar lines from Emerson, Whitman and [Emily] Dickinson.” Life Ammons grew up on a tobacco farm near Whiteville, North Carolina, in the southeastern part of the state. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, stationed on board the U.S.S. Gunason, a battleship escort. After the war, Ammons attended Wake Forest University, majoring in biology. Graduating in 1949, he served as a principal and teacher at Hattaras Elementary School later that year and also married Phyllis Plumbo. He received an M.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1964, Ammons joined the faculty of Cornell University, eventually becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of English and Poet in Residence. He retired from Cornell in 1998. Ammons had been a longtime resident of the South Jersey communities of Northfield, Ocean City and Millville, when he wrote Corsons Inlet in 1962. Awards * During the five decades of his poetic career, Ammons was the recipient of many awards and citations. Among his major honors are the 1973 and 1993 U.S. National Book Awards (for Collected Poems, 1951-1971 and for Garbage); the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets (1998); and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, the year the award was established. A school in Miami, Florida, was named after him. * Ammons’s other awards include a 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for A Coast of Trees; a 1993 Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for Garbage; the 1971 Bollingen Prize for Sphere; the Poetry Society of America’s Robert Frost Medal; the Ruth Lilly Prize; and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. Poetic style * Ammons often writes in two– or three-line stanzas. Poet David Lehman notes a resemblance between Ammons’s terza libre (unrhymed three-line stanzas) and the terza rima of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind.” Lines are strongly enjambed. * Some of Ammons’s poems are very short, one or two lines only, a form known as monostich (effectively, including the title, a kind of couplet), while others (for example, the book-length poems Sphere and Tape for the Turn of the Year) are hundreds of lines long, and sometimes composed on adding-machine tape or other continuous strips of paper. His National Book Award-winning volume Garbage is a long poem consisting of “a single extended sentence, divided into eighteen sections, arranged in couplets”. Ammons’s long poems tend to derive multiple strands from a single image. * Many readers and critics have noted Ammons’s idiosyncratic approach to punctuation. Lehman has written that Ammons “bears out T. S. Eliot’s observation that poetry is a 'system of punctuation’.” Instead of periods, some poems end with an ellipsis; others have no terminal punctuation at all. The colon is an Ammons “signature”; he uses it “as an all-purpose punctuation mark.” * The colon permits him to stress the linkage between clauses and to postpone closure indefinitely.... When I asked Archie about his use of colons, he said that when he started writing poetry, he couldn’t write if he thought “it was going to be important,” so he wrote "on the back of used mimeographed paper my wife brought home, and I used small [lowercase] letters and colons, which were democratic, and meant that there would be something before and after [every phrase] and the writing would be a kind of continuous stream." * According to critic Stephen Burt, in many poems Ammons combines three types of diction: * A “normal” range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature (“vast,” “summon,” “universal”). * A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up (“dibbles”), and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems (“blip”). * The Greek– and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences (“millimeter,” “information of actions / summarized”), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics. * Such a mixture is nearly unique, Burt says; these three modes are “almost never found together outside his poems”. Works * * Poetry * Ommateum, with Doxology. Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1955. * Expressions of Sea Level. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1964. * Corsons Inlet. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1965. Reprinted by Norton, 1967. ISBN 0-393-04463-7 * Tape for the Turn of the Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1965. Reprinted by Norton, 1972. ISBN 0-393-00659-X * Northfield Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1966. * Selected Poems. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1968. * Uplands. New York: Norton, 1970. ISBN 0-393-04322-3 * Briefings: Poems Small and Easy. New York: Norton, 1971. ISBN 0-393-04326-6 * Collected Poems, 1951-1971. New York: Norton, 1972. ISBN 0-393-04241-3—winner of the National Book Award * Sphere: The Form of a Motion. New York: Norton, 1974. ISBN 0-393-04388-6—winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry * Diversifications. New York: Norton, 1975. ISBN 0-393-04414-9 * The Selected Poems: 1951-1977. New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-04465-3 * Highgate Road. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1977. * The Snow Poems . New York: Norton, 1977. ISBN 0-393-04467-X * Selected Longer Poems. New York: Norton, 1980. ISBN 0-393-01297-2 * A Coast of Trees. New York: Norton, 1981. ISBN 0-393-01447-9—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Worldly Hopes. New York: Norton, 1982. ISBN 0-393-01518-1 * Lake Effect Country. New York: Norton, 1983. ISBN 0-393-01702-8 * The Selected Poems: Expanded Edition. New York: Norton, 1986. ISBN 0-393-02411-3 * Sumerian Vistas. New York: Norton, 1987. ISBN 0-393-02468-7 * The Really Short Poems. New York: Norton, 1991. ISBN 0-393-02870-4 * Garbage. New York: Norton, 1993. ISBN 0-393-03542-5—winner of the National Book Award * The North Carolina Poems. Alex Albright, ed. Rocky Mount, NC: NC Wesleyan College P, 1994. ISBN 0-933598-51-3 * Brink Road.New York: Norton, 1996. ISBN 0-393-03958-7 * Glare. New York: Norton, 1997. ISBN 0-393-04096-8 * Bosh and Flapdoodle: Poems. New York: Norton, 2005. ISBN 0-393-05952-9 * Selected Poems. David Lehman, ed. New York: Library of America, 2006. ISBN 1-931082-93-6 * The North Carolina Poems. New, expanded edition. Frankfort, KY: Broadstone Books, 2010. ISBN 978-0-9802117-2-6 * The Mule Poems. Fountain, NC: R. A. Fountain, 2010. ISBN 0-9842102-0-2 (chapbook) * Prose * Set in Motion: Essays, Interviews, and Dialogues (1996) * An Image for Longing: Selected Letters and Journals of A.R. Ammons, 1951-1974. Ed. Kevin McGuirk. Victoria, BC: ELS Editions, 2014. ISBN 978-1550584561 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._R._Ammons

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

Oliver Goldsmith (10 November 1728– 4 April 1774) was an Irish novelist, playwright and poet, who is best known for his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his plays The Good-Natur’d Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773). He is thought to have written the classic children’s tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765). Biography Goldsmith’s birth date and year are not known with certainty. According to the Library of Congress authority file, he told a biographer that he was born on 10 November 1728. The location of his birthplace is also uncertain. He was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at the Smith Hill House in the diocese of Elphin, County Roscommon where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school, and where Oliver studied. When Goldsmith was two years old, his father was appointed the rector of the parish of “Kilkenny West” in County Westmeath. The family moved to the parsonage at Lissoy, between Athlone and Ballymahon, and continued to live there until his father’s death in 1747. In 1744 Goldsmith went up to Trinity College, Dublin. His tutor was Theaker Wilder. Neglecting his studies in theology and law, he fell to the bottom of his class. In 1747, along with four other undergraduates, he was expelled for a riot in which they attempted to storm the Marshalsea Prison. He was graduated in 1749 as a Bachelor of Arts, but without the discipline or distinction that might have gained him entry to a profession in the church or the law; his education seemed to have given him mainly a taste for fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs and playing the flute. He lived for a short time with his mother, tried various professions without success, studied medicine desultorily at the University of Edinburgh from 1752 to 1755, and set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France, Switzerland and Northern Italy, living by his wits (busking with his flute). He settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary’s assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith produced a massive output as a hack writer for the publishers of London, but his few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of “The Club”. There, through fellow Club member Edmund Burke, he made the acquaintance of Sir George Savile, who would later arrange a job for him at Thornhill Grammar School. The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet inspired idiot. During this period he used the pseudonym “James Willington” (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe. Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship. At some point around this time he worked at Thornhill Grammar School, later basing Squire Thornhill (in the Vicar of Wakefield) on his benefactor Sir George Savile and certainly spending time with eminent scientist Rev. John Mitchell, who he probably knew from London. Mitchell, sorely missed good company, which Goldsmith naturally provided in spades.Thomas De Quincey wrote of him 'All the motion of Goldsmith’s nature moved in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle’. His premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church in London. The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". There is a monument to him in the centre of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson. Works * See The Vicar of Wakefield, The Good-Natur’d Man, The Traveller, and She Stoops to Conquer. The Citizen of the World * In 1760 Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the title The Citizen of the World. Purportedly written by a Chinese traveller in England by the name of Lien Chi, they used this fictional outsider’s perspective to comment ironically and at times moralistically on British society and manners. It was inspired by the earlier essay series Persian Letters by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. The Hermit * Goldsmith wrote this romantic ballad of precisely 160 lines in 1765. The hero and heroine are Edwin, a youth without wealth or power, and Angelina, the daughter of a lord “beside the Tyne.” Angelina spurns many wooers, but refuses to make plain her love for young Edwin. “Quite dejected with my scorn,” Edwin disappears and becomes a hermit. One day, Angelina turns up at his cell in boy’s clothes and, not recognising him, tells him her story. Edwin then reveals his true identity, and the lovers never part again. The poem is notable for its interesting portrayal of a hermit, who is fond of the natural world and his wilderness solitude but maintains a gentle, sympathetic demeanor toward other people. In keeping with eremitical tradition, however, Edwin the Hermit claims to "spurn the [opposite] sex." This poem appears under the title of “A Ballad” sung by the character of Mr. Burchell in Chapter 8 of Goldsmith’s novel, The Vicar of Wakefield. The Deserted Village * In the 1760s Goldsmith witnessed the demolition of an ancient village and destruction of its farms to clear land to become a wealthy man’s garden. His poem The Deserted Village, published in 1770, expresses a fear that the destruction of villages and the conversion of land from productive agriculture to ornamental landscape gardens would ruin the peasantry. Other works * The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith (ed) Austin Dobson, 1887, kindle ebook March 2011 ASIN B004TP31VM * The ironic poem, An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog was published in 1766. * A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774) * Goldsmith is also thought to have written the classic children’s tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. Memorials concerning Oliver Goldsmith * Goldsmith lived in Kingsbury, now in North-West London between 1771 and 1774 and Oliver Goldsmith Primary School and Goldsmith Lane there are named after him. * The Oliver Goldsmith Summer School is held every June Bank Holiday at Ballymahon with poetry and creative readings being held at Goldsmith’s birthplace in nearby Pallas, Forgney. * In the play Marx in Soho by Howard Zinn, Marx makes a reference to Goldsmiths’ poem, The Deserted Village. * A statue of him by JH Foley stands at the Front Arch of Trinity College, Dublin (see image). * A statue of him stands in a limestone cell at the ruin of his birthplace in Pallas, Forgney, Ballymahon, County Longford. The statue is a copy of the Foley statue that stands outside Trinity college Dublin and is the focus point of the annual Oliver Goldsmith Summer School. * His name has been given to a new lecture theatre and student accommodation on the Trinity College campus: Goldsmith Hall. * Somerset Maugham used the last line from An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog in his novel The Painted Veil (1925). The character Walter Fane’s last words are The dog it was that died. * Auburn, Alabama, and Auburn University were named for the first line in Goldsmith’s poem: “Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.” Auburn is still referred to as the ‘loveliest village on the plain.’ * There is a statue in Ballymahon County Longford outside the town library by Irish Sculptor Éamonn O’ Doherty (1939 - 2011)which was unveiled in 1999. * London Underground locomotive number 16 (used on the Metropolitan line of the London Underground until 1962) was named Oliver Goldsmith. * Longford based band Goldsmith are named after the famous writer. * Athlone Institute of Technology library is named the Goldsmith Library In popular culture * Two characters in the 1951 comedy The Lavender Hill Mob quote the same line from Goldsmith’s poem “The Traveller”– a subtle joke, because the film’s plot involves the recasting of stolen gold. * During the opening credits of the SKY One adaptation of Sir Terry Pratchett’s Christmas story “The Hogfather”, a portrait of Goldsmith is shown as part of a hall of memorials to those “exhumed” by the “Ankh-Morpork Assassins’ Guild”. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Goldsmith

Linda Pastan (born May 27, 1932 in New York) is an American poet of Jewish background. From 1991–1995 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. She is known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships. Her most recent collections of poetry include Insomnia, Traveling Light, and Queen of a Rainy Country. Life Pastan has published at least 12 books of poetry and a number of essays. Her awards include the Dylan Thomas Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (Poetry Society of America), the Bess Hokin Prize (Poetry Magazine), the 1986 Maurice English Poetry Award (for A Fraction of Darkness), the Charity Randall Citation of the International Poetry Forum, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She also received the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumnae Award. Two of her collections of poems were nominated for the National Book Award and one for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Family As of 2011, she lives in Potomac, Maryland with her husband Ira Pastan, an accomplished physician and researcher. She is the mother of novelist Rachel Pastan; Washington, D.C. chef and restaurateur Peter Pastan; and Atlanta nephrologist Stephen Pastan.

In 1920, Barbara Guest was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. She attended the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Berkeley, from which she graduated in 1943. Early in her career, she was known predominantly as a writer of the New York School, a group of poets that included John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. The New York School represented a rejection of the dominant school of confessional poetry and was deeply influenced by the action painters of the 1950s and 1960s, particularly Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Larry Rivers. Throughout the 1950s, Guest worked as a writer for Art News magazine, and she has continued to write articles and reviews for many art magazines. The tension between the lyrical (or musical) and the graphic (or material) is a defining feature of her work, and her poetry often utilizes space as a way to draw attention to language. Guest has published numerous collections of poetry, among them The Red Gaze (Wesleyan University Press, 2005); Miniatures and Other Poems (2002), Symbiosis (1999), Defensive Rapture (1994), Fair Realism (1989), Musicality (1988), The Nude (1986), Quilts (1980), and Biography (1980). She is also the author of several plays and a novel, Seeking Air (1978). Her honors include the Robert Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America, the Longwood Award, a San Francisco State award for poetry, the Lawrence Lipton Award for Literature, the Columbia Book Award, and a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts. She lived in Berkeley, California. Guest died on February 15, 2006. A Selected Bibliography Poetry The Blue Stairs (1968) Moscow Mansions (1973) Biography (1980) The Nude (1986) Musicality (1988) Fair Realism (1989) Defensive Rapture (1994) Symbiosis (1999) Miniatures and Other Poems (2002) The Red Gaze (2005) Prose Seeking Air (1978) The Confetti Trees (1999) Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature (1999) Plays The Ladies Choice (1953) The Office (1963) Port (1965)

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (23 September 1861– 25 August 1907) was a British novelist and poet who also wrote essays and reviews. She taught at the London Working Women’s College for twelve years from 1895 to 1907. She wrote poetry under the pseudonym Anodos, taken from George MacDonald; other influences on her were Richard Watson Dixon and Christina Rossetti. Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, described her poems as ‘wonderously beautiful… but mystical rather and enigmatic’. She published five novels, the best known of those being The King with Two Faces.

Kathleen Jessie Raine CBE (14 June 1908– 6 July 2003) was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founder member of the Temenos Academy. Life Kathleen Raine was born in Ilford, Essex (now part of London). Her mother was from Scotland and her father was born in Wingate, County Durham. The couple had met as students at Armstrong College in Newcastle upon Tyne. Raine spent part of World War I, 'a few short years’, with her Aunty Peggy Black at the Manse in Great Bavington Northumberland. She commented, “I loved everything about it.” For her it was an idyllic world and is the declared foundation of all her poetry. Raine always remembered Northumberland as Eden: “In Northumberland I knew myself in my own place; and I never 'adjusted’ myself to any other or forgot what I had so briefly but clearly seen and understood and experienced.” This period is described in the first book of her autobiography, Farewell Happy Fields (1973). Raine noted that poetry was deeply ingrained in the daily lives of her maternal ancestors: "On my mother’s side I inherited Scotland’s songs and ballads…sung or recited by my mother, aunts and grandmothers, who had learnt it from their mothers and grandmothers… Poetry was the very essence of life." Raine heard and read the Bible daily at home and at school, coming to know much of it by heart. Her father was an English master at County High School in Ilford. He had studied the poetry of Wordsworth for his M.Litt thesis and had a passion for Shakespeare and Raine saw many Shakespearean plays as a child. From her father she gained a love of etymology and the literary aspect of poetry, the counterpart to her immersion in the poetic oral traditions. She wrote that for her poetry was "not something invented but given…Brought up as I was in a household where poets were so regarded it naturally became my ambition to be a poet". She confided her ambition to her father who was sceptical of the plan. “To my father” she wrote “poets belonged to a higher world, to another plane; to say one wished to become a poet was to him something like saying one wished to write the fifth gospel”. Her mother encouraged Raine’s poetry from babyhood. Raine was educated at County High School, Ilford, and then read natural sciences, including botany and zoology, on an Exhibition at Girton College, Cambridge, receiving her master’s degree in 1929. While in Cambridge she met Jacob Bronowski, William Empson, Humphrey Jennings and Malcolm Lowry. In later life she was a friend and colleague of the kabbalist author and teacher, Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi. Raine married Hugh Sykes Davies in 1930. She left Davies for Charles Madge and they had two children together, but their marriage also broke up. She also held an unrequited passion for Gavin Maxwell. The title of Maxwell’s most famous book Ring of Bright Water, subsequently made into a film of the same name starring Virginia McKenna, was taken from a line in Raine’s poem “The Marriage of Psyche”. The relationship with Maxwell ended in 1956 when Raine lost his pet otter, Mijbil, indirectly causing the animal’s death. Raine held herself responsible, not only for losing Mijbil but for a curse she had uttered shortly beforehand, frustrated by Maxwell’s homosexuality: “Let Gavin suffer in this place as I am suffering now.” Raine blamed herself thereafter for all Maxwell’s misfortunes, beginning with Mijbil’s death and ending with the cancer from which he died in 1969. From 1939 to 1941, Raine and her children shared a house at 49a Wordsworth Street in Penrith with Janet Adam Smith and Michael Roberts and later lived in Martindale. She was a friend of Winifred Nicholson. Raine’s two children were Anna Hopwell Madge (born 1934) and James Wolf Madge (1936–2006). In 1959, James married Jennifer Alliston, the daughter of Raine’s friend, architect and town planner Jane Drew with architect James Alliston. Drew was a direct descendant of the neoplatonist Thomas Taylor whom Raine studied and wrote about. Thus a link was made between Raine and Taylor by the two children of her son’s marriage. At the time of her death, following an accident, Raine resided in London.

Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts, KCMG FRSC (January 10, 1860– November 26, 1943) was a Canadian poet and prose writer who is known as the Father of Canadian Poetry. He was “almost the first Canadian author to obtain worldwide reputation and influence; he was also a tireless promoter and encourager of Canadian literature. He published numerous works on Canadian exploration and natural history, verse, travel books, and fiction.” “At his death he was regarded as Canada’s leading man of letters.” Besides his own body of work, Roberts is also called the “Father of Canadian Poetry” because he served as an inspiration and a source of assistance for other Canadian poets of his time. Roberts, his cousin Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman and Duncan Campbell Scott are known as the Confederation Poets. Life Roberts was born in Douglas, New Brunswick in 1860, the eldest child of Emma Wetmore Bliss and Rev. George Goodridge Roberts (an Anglican priest). Rev. Roberts was rector of Fredericton and canon of Christ Church Cathedral, New Brunswick. Charles’s brother Theodore Goodridge Roberts and sister, Jane Elizabeth Gostwycke Roberts, would also become authors. Between the ages of 8 months and 14 years, Roberts was raised in the parish of Westcock, New Brunswick, near Sackville, by the Tantramar Marshes. He was homeschooled, “mostly by his father, who was proficient in Greek, Latin and French.” He published his first writing, three articles in The Colonial Farmer, at 12 years of age. After the family moved to Fredericton in 1873, Roberts attended Fredericton Collegiate School from 1874 to 1876, and then the University of New Brunswick (UNB), earning his B.A. in 1879 and M.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. Roberts was principal of Chatham High School in Chatham, New Brunswick, from 1879 to 1881, and of York Street School in Fredericton from 1881 to 1883. In Chatham he met and befriended Edmund Collins, editor of the Chatham Star and the future biographer of Sir John A. Macdonald. Early Canadian career Roberts first published poetry in the Canadian Illustrated News of March 30, 1878, and by 1879 he had placed two poems in the prestigious American magazine, Scribner’s. In 1880, Roberts published his first book of poetry, Orion and Other Poems. Thanks in part to his industry in sending out complimentary review copies, there were many positive reviews. Rose-Belford’s Canadian Monthly proclaimed: “Here is a writer whose power and originality it is impossible to deny—here is a book of which any literature might be proud.” The Montreal Gazette predicted that Roberts would “confer merited fame on himself and lasting honour on his country.” As well, “several American periodicals reviewed it favourably, including the New York Independent, which described it as ‘a little book of choice things, with the indifferent things well weeded out.’” On December 29, 1880, Roberts married Mary Fenety, who would bear him five children. The biography by Roberts’s friend Edmund Collins, The Life and Times of Sir John A. Macdonald, was published in 1883. The book was a huge success, going through eight printings. It contained a long chapter on “Thought and Literature in Canada,” which devoted 15 pages to Roberts, quoting liberally from Orion. “Beyond any comparison,” Collins declared, “our greatest Canadian poet is Mr. Charles G.D. Roberts.” “Edmund Collins is probably responsible for the early acceptance of Charles G.D. Roberts as Canada’s foremost poet.” From 1883 to 1884, Roberts was in Toronto, Ontario, working as the editor of Goldwin Smith’s short-lived literary magazine, The Week. “Roberts lasted only five months at The Week before resigning in frustration from overwork and clashes with Smith.” In 1885, Roberts became a professor at the University of King’s College in Windsor, Nova Scotia. In 1886, his second book, In Divers Tones, was published by a Boston publisher. "Over the next six years, in addition to his academic duties, Roberts published more than thirty poems in numerous American periodicals, but mostly in The Independent while Bliss Carman was on its editorial staff. During the same period, he published almost an equal number of stories, primarily for juvenile readers, in periodicals like The Youth’s Companion. He also edited Poems of Wild Life (1888), completed a 270-page Canadian Guide Book (1891), wrote about a dozen articles on a variety of topics, and gave lectures in various centres from Halifax to New York.” Roberts was asked to edit the anthology, Songs of the Great Dominion, but that position eventually went to W.D. Lighthall. Lighthall included a generous selection of Roberts’s work, and echoed Collins’s assessment of six years earlier: “The foremost name in Canadian song at the present day is that of Charles George Douglas Roberts.” Roberts resigned from King’s College in 1895, when his request for a leave of absence was turned down. Determined to make a living from his pen, in 1896 “he published his first novel, The Forge in the Forest,... his fourth collection of poetry, The Book of the Native,... his first book of nature-stories, Earth’s Enigmas,... and a book of adventure stories for boys, Around the Campfire.” Move to New York In 1897, Roberts left Canada, as well as his wife and children, for New York City so that he may work free-lance. Between 1897 and 1898, he worked for The Illustrated American as an associate editor. In New York, Roberts wrote in many different genres, but found that "his most successful prose genre was the animal story, in which he drew upon his early experience in the wilds of the Maritimes. He published over a dozen such volumes between Earth’s Enigmas (1896) and Eyes of the Wilderness (1933).... Roberts is remembered for creating in the animal story, along with Ernest Thompson Seton, the one native Canadian art form.” Roberts also wrote historical romances and novels. "Barbara Ladd (1902) begins with a girl escaping from an uncongenial aunt in New England in 1769; it sold 80,000 copies in the US alone." He also wrote descriptive text for guide books, such as Picturesque Canada and The Land of Evangeline and Gateways Thither for Nova Scotia’s Dominion Atlantic Railway. Roberts famously became involved in a literary debate known as the nature fakers controversy after John Burroughs denounced his popular animal stories, and those of other writers, in a 1903 article for Atlantic Monthly. The controversy lasted for nearly six years and included important American environmental and political figures of the day, including President Theodore Roosevelt. Europe and return to Canada In 1907, Roberts moved to Europe. First living in Paris, he moved to Munich in 1910, and in 1912 to London, where he lived until 1925. During World War I he enlisted with the British Army as a trooper, eventually becoming a captain and a cadet trainer in England. After the war he joined the Canadian War Records Office in London. Roberts returned to Canada in 1925 which “led to a renewed production of verse.” During the late 1920s he was a member of the Halifax literary and social set, The Song Fishermen. He married his second wife Joan Montgomery on October 28, 1943, at the age of 83, but became ill and died shortly thereafter in Toronto. The funeral was held in Toronto, but his ashes were returned to Fredericton, where he was interred in Forest Hill Cemetery. Poetry Orion and Other Poems Roberts’s first book, Orion and Other Poems (1880), was a vanity book for which he had to "pay an advance of $300, most of which he borrowed from George E. Fenety, the Queen’s Printer for New Brunswick, soon to become his father-in-law." Orion was “a collection of juvenilia, written while the poet was still a teenager.” In 1958, the critic Desmond Pacey wrote that “when we remind ourselves that it was published when the poet was twenty... we realize that it is a remarkable performance. It is imitative, naively romantic, defective in diction, the poetry of books rather than life itself, but it is facile, clever, and occasionally distinctly beautiful.... It is the work of an apprentice, who is quite frankly serving under a sequence of masters from whom he hopes to learn his art.” In Divers Tones The title of Roberts’s second book, In Divers Tones "aptly describes the hodgepodge of its contents. The selections vary greatly, not only in style and subject matter, but also in quality.... Among those written between 1883 and 1886... there is evidence of a maturing talent. In fact, it might be argued that at least three of these poems, ‘The Tantramar Revisited,’ ‘The Sower,’ and 'The Potato Harvest,” were never surpassed by any of his subsequent verse.” Songs of the Common Day By the time of Songs of the Common Day, and Ave! (1893), Roberts "had reached the height of his poetic powers.... It is the sonnet sequence of Songs of the Common Day that has established Roberts’ reputation as a landscape poet.... Evidence of the Tantramar setting occurs in lines like “How sombre slope these acres to the sea’ ('The Furrow”), 'These marshes pale and meadows by the sea’ ('The Salt Flats’), and 'My fields of Tantramar in summer-time’ ('The Pea-Fields’). The descriptions are full of evocative details.” Middle period After Roberts turned to free-lance writing in 1895, “Financial pressure forced him to turn his main attention to fiction.” He published two more books of poetry by 1898, but managed only two more in the following 30 years. “As their titles often indicate, the numerous seasonal poems in The Book of the Native (1897) were written with an eye on the monthly requirements of the magazines: ‘The Brook in February,’ ‘An April Adoration,’ ‘July,’ and ‘An August Woodroad.’ Roberts “is generally at his best in the poems in which he depicts these seasonal stages of nature with the palette of a realistic landscape painter.” However, the book also “signalled a shift in his poetic oeuvre away from descriptive, technically tight Romantic verses to more mystical lyrics.” “Most of the nature poetry in Roberts’s New York Nocturnes and Other Poems (1898) was written before he moved to New York. It belongs to a period of upheaval, desperation and overwork, which may at least partly account for its disappointing slackness.... Even ‘The Solitary Woodsman,’ much anthologized and frequently praised, is a series of unremarkable images made tedious by fifty-two lines of irritating rhythm and rhyme.... Roberts seldom looks at New York with the eye of a painter, and never captures its essence with the effectiveness he displays in his best pictures of rural landscape.... Instead of turning an inquiring eye upon urban conditions, he is inclined to retreat from “'he city’s fume and stress’ and 'clamour’ ('The Ideal’).". The first and title section of The Book of the Rose (1903) was a collection of love poetry. "Roberts handling of the symbol sounds artificial at best and sometimes downright fatuous.... Although most of the poems in the second section are unimpressive, there are a few exceptions. “Heat in the City,” noteworthy for being the best poem he ever wrote about city life, effectively evokes the distress and despair of the tenement-dwellers.... The final poem in the book, “The Aim,” is remarkable for its frank self-analysis.” “New Poems, a slim volume published in 1919, shows the drop in both the quantity and quality of Roberts’ poetry during his European years. At least half of the pieces had been written before he left America, some as early as 1903.” Later poems Roberts’s "return to Canada in 1925 led to a renewed production of verse with The Vagrant of Time (1927) and The Iceberg and Other Poems (1934)." Literary critic Desmond Pacey calls this period “the Indian summer of his poetic career”. “Among the best of the new poems” in The Vagrant of Time "is the one with this inspired opening line: ‘Spring breaks in foam along the blackthorn bough.’ In another love poem, ‘In the Night Watches,’ written in 1926, his command of free verse is natural and unstrained, unlike the laboured language and forced rhymes of his earlier love poetry. Its synthesis of lonely wilderness setting with feelings of separation and longing is harmonious and poignant.” “Most critics rank ”The Iceberg" (265 lines), the title poem of the new collection" published in 1934, "as one of Roberts’ outstanding achievements. It is almost as ambitious as ‘Ave!’ in conception; its cold, unemotional images are as apt and precise in their detached way as the warmly-remembered descriptions in ‘Tantramar Revisited.’ Animal stories The Canadian Encyclopedia says that “Roberts is remembered for creating in the animal story, along with Ernest Thompson Seton, the one native Canadian art form.” A typical Roberts animal story is “The Truce”. In his introduction to The Kindred of the Wild (1902), Roberts called the animal story "a potent emancipator. It frees us for a little from the world of shop-worn utilities, and from the mean tenement of self of which we do well to grow weary. It helps us to return to nature, without requiring that we at the same time return to barbarism. It leads us back to the old kinship of earth, without asking us to relinquish by way of toll any part of the wisdom of the ages, any fine essential of the ‘large result of time.’ (Kindred 28)” Critical interest in Roberts’s animal stories "emerged in the 1960s and 70s in the growth of what we now know as Canadian Literary Studies.... But these critics tended as a group to see in the animal stories a masked reference to Canadian nationhood: James Polk 'attempts to subsume the animal genre entirely within the identity crisis of an emerging nation […seeing] the sympathetic stance of Seton and Roberts towards the sometimes brutal fate of the “lives of the hunted” as a larger political allegory for Canada’s “victim” status as an American satellite. (Sandlos 74)'” Margaret Atwood devotes a chapter of her 1971 critical study Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature to animal stories, where she states the same thesis: "the stories are told from the point of view of the animal. That’s the key: English animal stories are about the ‘social relations,’ American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. (qtd. in Sandlos 74; emphasis in original).” Recognition Charles G. D Roberts was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1893. Roberts was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1898. He was awarded an honorary LLD from UNB in 1906, and an honorary doctorate from Mount Allison University in 1942. For his contributions to Canadian literature, Roberts was awarded the Royal Society of Canada’s first Lorne Pierce Medal in 1926. On June 3, 1935, Roberts was one of three Canadians on King George V’s honour list to receive a knighthood (Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George). Roberts was honoured by a sculpture erected in 1947 on the UNB campus, portraying him with Bliss Carman and fellow poet Francis Joseph Sherman. “In the 1980s,—a hundred years after his first volumes appeared—a major Roberts revival took place, producing monographs, a complete edition of his poems, a new biography, a collection of his letters, etc. A Roberts Symposium at Mount Allison University (1982) and another at the University of Ottawa (1983) included several scholarly reappraisals of his poetry.” Roberts was declared a Person of National Historic Significance in 1945, and a monument to him was erected by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada in Westcock in 2005. Publications Poetry * Orion, and Other Poems. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1880. ; also: “Orion, and Other Poems”. Canadian Poetry Press. ; Orion, and Other Poems at Google Books * In Divers Tones. Boston, Massachusetts: D. Lothrop and Company. 1886. ; also: “In Divers Tones”. Canadian Poetry Press. ; In Divers Tones at Google Books * AVE! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary. Toronto: Williamson, 1892. * Songs of the Common Day and, AVE! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary. Toronto, Ontario: William Briggs. 1893. ; Songs of the Common Day and, AVE! An Ode for the Shelley Centenary at Google Books * The Book of the Native. Toronto, Ontario: Copp Clark. 1896. * New York Nocturnes and Other Poems. Boston, Massachusetts: Lamson Wolffe. 1898. * Poems. New York: Silver, Burdett, 1901. * The Book of the Rose. Boston, Massachusetts: L. C. Page & Company. 1903. ; The Book of the Rose at Google Books * New Poems. London: Constable. 1919. * The Sweet o’ the Year and Other Poems. Toronto, Ontario: Ryerson. 1925. ; The Sweet o’ the Year and Other Poems at Google Books * The Vagrant of Time. Toronto, Ontario: Ryerson. 1927. ; The Vagrant of Time at Google Books * The Iceberg and Other Poems Selected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. 1934. * Selected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Toronto, Ontario: Ryerson. 1936. * Flying Colours. Miami, Florida: Granger Books. 1942. * Pacey, Desmond, ed. (1955). The Selected Poems of Charles G.D. Roberts. Toronto, Ontario: Ryerson. * Keith, W.J., ed. (1974). Selected Poetry and Critical Prose. Toronto, Ontario: University of Toronto Press. * Pacey, Desmond; Adams, Graham, eds. (1985). Collected Poems of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Wolfville, Nova Scotia: Wombat Press. Fiction * The Raid from Beauséjour and How the Carter Boys Lifted the Mortgage. New York: Hunt & Eaton. 1894. ; The Raid from Beausejour and How the Carter Boys Lifted the Mortgage at Google Books * Reube Dare’s Shad Boat: A Tale of the Tide Country. New York: Hunt & Eaton. 1895. ; Reube Dare’s Shad Boat - A Tale of the Tide Country at Google Books * Around the Campfire. Toronto: Musson Book Co. 1896. * Earth’s Enigmas. Boston: Lamson, Wolffe. 1896. ; Earth’s Enigmas: A Volume of Stories at Google Books * The Forge in the Forest. Boston: Lamson, Wolffe. 1896. * By the Marshes of Minas. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company. 1900. * A Sister to Evangeline. Boston: Silver, Burdett and Company. 1900. * The Feet of the Furtive. London: Ward, Lock & Co. 1900. * The Heart of the Ancient Wood. Boston: L. C. Page & Company. 1902. * The Haunters of the Silences: A Book of Animal Life. London: Thomas Nelson. 1900. * Barbara Ladd. Boston: The Page Company. 1902. * The Kindred of the Wild. Boston: The Page Company. 1902. ; The Kindred of the Wild: A Book of Animal Life at Google Books * The Prisoner of Mademoiselle: A Love Story. Boston: L.C. Page. 1904. * The Watchers of the Trails. Toronto: Copp Clark. 1904. * Red Fox. Boston: L. C. Page & Company. 1905. * The Watchers of the Campfire. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1906. * The Heart That Knows. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1906. * The Cruise of the Yacht “Dido”: A Tale of the Tide Country. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1906. * The Little People of the Sycamore. Charles Livingston Bull illus. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1906. * The Return to the Trails. Charles Livingston Bull illus. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1906. * In the Deep of the Snow. New York: T.Y. Crowell. 1907. * The Young Acadian Boston. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1907. * The Haunters of the Silences. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1907. * The House in the Water. Boston: L.C. Page & Company. 1908. * The Backwoodsmen. New York: Macmillan. 1909. * Kings in Exile. New York: Macmillan. 1910. * Neighbours Unknown. London: Ward, Lock & Co. 1910. * More Kindred of the Wild. London: Ward, Lock & Co. 1911. * Babes of the Wild. Warwick Reynolds, illus. London: Cassell. 1912. * Children of the Wild. Paul Bramson, illus. New York: Macmillan. 1913. * A Balkan Prince. London: Everett & Co. 1913. * Hoof and Claw (reprint ed.). New York: Macmillan. 1920 [1914]. * The Secret Trails. New York: Macmillan. 1916. * The Ledge on Bald Face. London: Ward, Lock, & Co. 1918. * In the Morning of Time. New York: Frederick A. Stokes. 1919. * Wisdom of the Wilderness. Read Books. 2013 [1923]. ISBN 978-1-4733-0956-2. * They Who Walk in the Wilds. Read Books. 2013 [1924]. ISBN 978-1-4733-1140-4. * Eyes of the Wilderness. New York: Macmillan. 1933. * Further Animal Stories. Dent. 1935. * The Last Barrier and Other Stories. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart. 1970. * Ware, Martin, ed. (1992). The Vagrants of the Barren and Other Stories of Charles G.D. Roberts. Ottawa, Ontario: Tecumseh. ISBN 978-0-9196-6235-3. Non-fiction * A History of Canada. Boston, Massachusetts: The Page Company. 1897. * The Canadian Guide-Book: The Tourist’s and Sportsman’s Guide to Eastern Canada and Newfoundland. New York: D. Appleton 1891. * Discoveries and Explorations in the Century. London: Linscott. 1906. * Canada in Flanders (1918)– non-fiction Edited * Poems of Wild Life. London: W. Scott, 1888. * Canada Speaks of Britain and Other Poems of the War. Toronto: Ryerson, 1941. Papers * Sir Charles G. D. Roberts papers. Charles George Douglas Roberts; Linda Dumbleton; Rose Mary Gibson. Kingston: Queen’s University Archives, {c.1983}. * The Collected Letters of Sir Charles G.D. Roberts. Fredericton, NB: Goose Lane, 1989. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_G._D._Roberts

Amelia Opie, née Alderson (12 November 1769– 2 December 1853), was an English author who published numerous novels in the Romantic Period of the early 19th century, through 1828. Opie was also a leading abolitionist in Norwich, England. Life and work Amelia Alderson was the daughter of James Alderson, a physician, and Amelia Briggs of Norwich, England. She was a cousin of notable judge Edward Hall Alderson, with whom she corresponded throughout her life, and also a cousin of notable artist Henry Perronet Briggs. Miss Alderson had inherited radical principles and was an ardent admirer of John Horne Tooke. She was close to activists John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Marriage and family In 1798 Alderson married John Opie, the painter. The nine years of her married life before her husband’s death were happy, although her husband did not share her love of society. With his encouragement, in 1801 she completed a novel entitled Father and Daughter, which showed genuine fancy and pathos. Writing career Amelia Opie published regularly after that. Her volume of Poems, published in 1802 went through six editions, and was followed by The Warrior’s Return and other poems in 1808. More novels followed: Adeline Mowbray (1804), Simple Tales (1806), Temper (1812), Tales of Real Life (1813), Valentine’s Eve (1816), Tales of the Heart (1818), and Madeline (1822). Opie wrote The dangers of Coquetry at age 18. Her novel Father and Daughter (1801) is about misled virtue and family reconciliation. Encouraged by her husband to continue writing, she published Adeline Mowbray (1804), an exploration of women’s education, marriage, and abolition of slavery. The novel is noted in particular for engaging the history of Opie’s former friend Mary Wollstonecraft, whose relationship with the American Gilbert Imlay outside marriage, and later marriage to the philosopher William Godwin caused some scandal. Godwin had previously argued against marriage as an institution by which women were owned as property, but when Wollstonecraft became pregnant, they married despite his prior principles. In the novel, Adeline early on becomes involved with a philosopher who takes a principled stand against marriage, only to be convinced to marry a West Indian Landowner against her better judgment. The novel also engages abolitionist sentiment, in the story of a mixed-race woman and her family whom Adeline saves from poverty at some expense to herself. Amelia Opie divided her time between London and Norwich. She was a friend of writers Sir Walter Scott, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Madame de Stael. In 1825, following the death of her father who objected, she joined the Society of Friends through the influence of Joseph John Gurney and his sisters who were longtime friends and neighbors in Norwich. The rest of her life was spent mostly in travelling and working at charity, though she published an anti-slavery poem, The Black Man’s Lament in 1826 and a volume of devotional poems, Lays for the Dead in 1834. Opie worked with Anna Gurney to create a Ladies Anti-Slavery Society in Norwich. Opie went to World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 where she one of the few women who was included in the commemorative painting. Even late in life, Opie maintained connections with writers, for instance receiving George Borrow as a guest. After a visit to Cromer, a seaside resort on the North Norfolk coast, she caught a chill and retired to her bedroom. A year later on 2 December 1853, she died at Norwich and was said to retain her vivacity to the last. She was buried at the Gildencroft Quaker Cemetery, Norwich. An somewhat sanitized biography of her, A Life, by Miss C.L. Brightwell, was published in 1854.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a Scottish physician and writer who is most noted for his fictional stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. He is also known for writing the fictional adventures of a second character he invented, Professor Challenger, and for popularising the mystery of the Mary Celeste. He was a prolific writer whose other works include fantasy and science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction, and historical novels. Early life Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was born on 22 May 1859 at 11 Picardy Place, Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was born in England but of Irish descent, and his mother, born Mary Foley, was Irish. They married in 1855. In 1864 the family dispersed due to Charles's growing alcoholism and the children were temporarily housed across Edinburgh. In 1867, the family came together again and lived in squalid tenement flats at 3 Sciennes Place. Supported by wealthy uncles, Doyle was sent to the Roman Catholic Jesuit preparatory school Hodder Place, Stonyhurst, at the age of nine (1868–70). He then went on to Stonyhurst College until 1875. From 1875 to 1876, he was educated at the Jesuit school Stella Matutina in Feldkirch, Austria. Despite attending a Jesuit school, he would later reject the Catholic religion and become an agnostic. From 1876 to 1881 he studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, including a period working in the town of Aston (now a district of Birmingham) and in Sheffield, as well as in Shropshire at Ruyton-XI-Towns. While studying, Doyle began writing short stories. His earliest extant fiction, "The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe", was unsuccessfully submitted to Blackwood's Magazine. His first published piece "The Mystery of Sasassa Valley", a story set in South Africa, was printed in Chambers's Edinburgh Journal on 6 September 1879. On 20 September 1879, he published his first non-fiction article, "Gelsemium as a Poison" in the British Medical Journal. Following his studies at university, Doyle was employed as a doctor on the Greenland whaler Hope of Peterhead, in 1880, and, after his graduation, as a ship's surgeon on the SS Mayumba during a voyage to the West African coast, in 1881. He completed his doctorate on the subject of tabes dorsalis in 1885. Doyle's father died in 1893, in the Crichton Royal, Dumfries, after many years of psychiatric illness. Name Although Doyle is often referred to as "Conan Doyle", whether this should be considered a compound surname is uncertain. The entry in which his baptism is recorded in the register of St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, gives "Arthur Ignatius Conan" as his Christian names, and simply "Doyle" as his surname. It also names Michael Conan as his godfather. The cataloguers of the British Library and the Library of Congress treat "Doyle" alone as his surname. Steven Doyle, editor of the Baker Street Journal, has written "Conan was Arthur's middle name. Shortly after he graduated from high school he began using Conan as a sort of surname. But technically his last name is simply "Doyle". When knighted he was gazetted as Doyle, not under the compound Conan Doyle. Nevertheless, the actual use of a compound surname is demonstrated by the fact that Doyle's second wife was known as "Jean Conan Doyle" rather than "Jean Doyle”. Writing career In 1882 he joined former classmate George Turnavine Budd as his partner at a medical practice in Plymouth, but their relationship proved difficult, and Doyle soon left to set up an independent practice. Arriving in Portsmouth in June of that year with less than £10 (£900 today) to his name, he set up a medical practice at 1 Bush Villas in Elm Grove, Southsea. The practice was initially not very successful. While waiting for patients, Doyle again began writing stories and composed his first novels, The Mystery of Cloomber, not published until 1888, and the unfinished Narrative of John Smith, which would go unpublished until 2011. He amassed a portfolio of short stories including "The Captain of the Pole-Star" and "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement", both inspired by Doyle's time at sea, the latter of which popularised the mystery of the Mary Celeste and added fictional details such as the perfect condition of the ship (which had actually taken on water by the time it was discovered) and its boats remaining on board (the one boat was in fact missing) that have come to dominate popular accounts of the incident. Doyle struggled to find a publisher for his work. His first significant piece, A Study in Scarlet, was taken by Ward Lock & Co on 20 November 1886, giving Doyle £25 for all rights to the story. The piece appeared later that year in the Beeton's Christmas Annual and received good reviews in The Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald. The story featured the first appearance of Watson and Sherlock Holmes, partially modelled after his former university teacher Joseph Bell. Doyle wrote to him, "It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes ... [R]ound the centre of deduction and inference and observation which I have heard you inculcate I have tried to build up a man." Robert Louis Stevenson was able, even in faraway Samoa, to recognise the strong similarity between Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes: "[M]y compliments on your very ingenious and very interesting adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ... [C]an this be my old friend Joe Bell?" Other authors sometimes suggest additional influences—for instance, the famous Edgar Allan Poe character C. Auguste Dupin. A sequel to A Study in Scarlet was commissioned and The Sign of the Four appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in February 1890, under agreement with the Ward Lock company. Doyle felt grievously exploited by Ward Lock as an author new to the publishing world and he left them. Short stories featuring Sherlock Holmes were published in the Strand Magazine. Doyle first began to write for the 'Strand' from his home at 2 Upper Wimpole Street, now marked by a memorial plaque. In this period, however, Holmes was not his sole subject and in 1893, he collaborated with J.M. Barrie on the libretto of Jane Annie Death Doyle was found clutching his chest in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in Crowborough, East Sussex, on 7 July 1930. He died of a heart attack at the age of 71. His last words were directed toward his wife: "You are wonderful." At the time of his death, there was some controversy concerning his burial place, as he was avowedly not a Christian, considering himself a Spiritualist. He was first buried on 11 July 1930 in Windlesham rose garden. He was later reinterred together with his wife in Minstead churchyard in the New Forest, Hampshire. Carved wooden tablets to his memory and to the memory of his wife are held privately and are inaccessible to the public. That inscription reads, "Blade straight / Steel true / Arthur Conan Doyle / Born May 22nd 1859 / Passed On 7th July 1930." The epitaph on his gravestone in the churchyard reads, in part: "Steel true/Blade straight/Arthur Conan Doyle/Knight/Patriot, Physician, and man of letters". Undershaw, the home near Hindhead, Haslemere, south of London, that Doyle had built and lived in between October 1897 and September 1907, was a hotel and restaurant from 1924 until 2004. It was then bought by a developer and stood empty while conservationists and Doyle fans fought to preserve it. In 2012 the High Court ruled that the redevelopment permission be quashed because proper procedure had not been followed. A statue honours Doyle at Crowborough Cross in Crowborough, where he lived for 23 years. There is also a statue of Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place, Edinburgh, close to the house where Doyle was born. References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle

Kenneth Patchen (December 13, 1911– January 8, 1972) was an American poet and novelist. He experimented with different forms of writing and incorporated painting, drawing, and jazz music into his works, which were often compared with those of William Blake and Walt Whitman. Patchen’s biographer wrote that he “developed in his fabulous fables, love poems, and picture poems a deep yet modern mythology that conveys a sense of compassionate wonder amidst the world’s violence.” Along with his friend and peer Kenneth Rexroth, he was a central influence over the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation. Life Early years Patchen was born in Niles, Ohio. His father Wayne made his living in the nearby steel mills of Youngstown which Patchen would reference in his poems “The Orange Bears” and "May I Ask You A Question, Mr. Youngstown Sheet & Tube?" Patchen kept a diary from the age of twelve and read Dante, Homer, Burns, Shakespeare and Melville. I remember you would put daisies On the windowsill at night and in The morning they'd be so covered with soot You couldn't tell what they were anymore. — from "The Orange Bears", Red Wine and Yellow Hair (1949) His family included his mother Eva, his sisters Ruth, Magel, Eunice, and Kathleen, and his brother Hugh. In 1926, while Patchen was still a teenager, his younger sister Kathleen was struck and killed by an automobile. Her death deeply affected him and he would later pay tribute to her in his 1948 poem “In Memory of Kathleen.” Patchen first began to develop his interest in literature and poetry while he was in high school, and the New York Times published his first poem while he was still in college. He attended Alexander Meiklejohn’s Experimental College (which was part of the University of Wisconsin), in Madison, Wisconsin, for one year, starting in 1929. Patchen had a football scholarship there but had to drop out when he injured his back. After leaving school, Patchen travelled across the country, taking itinerant jobs in such places as Arkansas, Louisiana and Georgia. Marriage Next, Patchen moved to the East Coast, living in New York City and Boston. While in Boston, in 1933, he met Miriam (néeOikemus) at a friend’s Christmas party. At the time, Miriam was a college freshman at Massachusetts State College in Amherst. The two kept in touch and Patchen started sending her the first of many love poems. They soon fell in love and decided to get married. First Patchen took her to meet his parents in Youngstown, then they got married on June 28, 1934, in nearby Sharon, Pennsylvania. During the 1930s the couple moved frequently between New York City’s Greenwich Village and California, as Patchen struggled to make a living as a writer. Despite his constant struggle, his strong relationship with Miriam supported him and would continue to support him through the hardships that plagued him for most of his adult life. The couple moved to a cottage in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1947. Then in 1951, a few years after befriending the West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth, the Patchens moved to the West Coast, living first in San Francisco, and then moving to Palo Alto in 1957. Health problems In 1937, while trying to fix a friend’s car, Patchen suffered a permanent spinal injury which was to give him extreme pain, to varying degrees, for the rest of his life and which required multiple surgical procedures. In a letter to a friend from 1960, Patchen explained, "In 1956 a spinal fusion [operation] (second of two operations) gave me relief and mobility (& for the first time I was able to go about giving readings, and so on.” By this point, he and his wife had moved from San Francisco to Palo Alto to be closer to the Palo Alto Clinic where both Miriam and Kenneth were receiving treatment. Then, in 1959, Patchen notes in the letter quoted above, that another surgery at the Presbyterian Medical Center of San Francisco ended in disaster. He writes, "During [a] surgical procedure for my throat, and while under complete anesthesia, I suffered another slipped disc." Though he was heavily sedated during the procedure, Patchen suspected that he had been dropped at some point during the procedure (though he couldn’t prove it). Tragically, the mishap left Patchen in considerably more pain and disabled for the rest of his life. In 1963, he sued his surgeon for medical malpractice and lost. Politics Throughout his life-time Patchen was a fervent pacifist, as he made clear in much of his work. He was strongly opposed to United States involvement in World War II. In his own words: “I speak for a generation born in one war and doomed to die in another.” This controversial view, coupled with his physical immobilization, may have prevented wider recognition or success beyond what some consider a “cult” following. Final years Patchen lived out the final years of his life with his wife in their modest home in Palo Alto where Patchen created many of his distinctive painted poems, produced while confined to his bed after his disastrous 1959 surgery inadvertently damaged his spine. He died in Palo Alto on January 8, 1972. His wife, Miriam, died 28 years later, in March 2000, also in Palo Alto. Career Writing Patchen’s first book of poetry, Before the Brave, was published by Random House in 1936. His earliest collections of poetry were his most political and led to his being championed, in the 1930s, as a “Proletariat Poet”. This description, which Patchen rejected, never stuck since his work varied widely in subject, style and form. As his career progressed, Patchen continued to push himself into more and more experimental styles and forms, developing, along with writers such as Langston Hughes and Kenneth Rexroth, what came to be known as jazz poetry. He also experimented with his childlike “painted poems,” many of which were to be published posthumously in the 1984 collection What Shall We Do Without Us. After the appearance of his first book, he and Miriam traveled to the Southwest, moving on to Hollywood in 1938 where he tried, unsuccessfully, writing film scripts and worked for the WPA. His next book of poems First Will and Testament drew the attention of James Laughlin, then launching New Directions Publishing as a student at Harvard. Laughlin’s decision to publish Patchen’s work started a relationship that would last for the remainder of both men’s careers. For a short time, in 1939, Patchen even took an office job working for New Directions. In addition to their professional relationship, Patchen and Laughlin also became good friends. Patchen pioneered “the drawing-and-poem form” as well as the painting-and-poem form and produced over a thousand “painted books”, special copies of his own works with original paintings on the covers. His many hundreds of drawings and paintings have been described as being reminiscent of Blake and Klee. During the course of a long and varied career, he also tried his hand at writing experimental novels such as The Journal of Albion Moonlight and The Memoirs of A Shy Pornographer, as well as the radio play The City Wears A Slouch Hat. Patchen’s Collected Poems was first published in 1969, just a few years prior to his death. Peers One of Patchen’s biggest literary supporters was the novelist Henry Miller who wrote a long essay on Patchen, entitled Patchen: Man of Anger and Light in 1946. In this essay, Miller wrote, “Patchen’s pacifism is closely tied to what he sees as the loss of innocence in society, the corrupted human spirit, and is often expressed with animals. Such is the case with the forbidding ‘The Lions of Fire Shall Have Their Hunting.’” Patchen also had a close, lifelong friendship with the poet E.E. Cummings that began when they were both living in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Patchen was also close peers with the West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth who shared Patchen’s anti-war radicalism as well as his interest in combining poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. The two poets began to correspond in the late 40s and in the 1950s. Rexroth encouraged the Patchens to move to San Francisco in the early 1950s. For a record of his correspondence with fellow writers and artists, see Allen Frost’s Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen from Bottom Dog Press. Influence Later, in the 1950s, Patchen became a major influence on the younger beat poets including Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Miriam Patchen recalled some of these young poets, including Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure, making special visits to the Patchens’ home in San Francisco to pay their respects. However, once the Beats’ popularity grew, Patchen disliked being associated with them and was highly critical of their glorification of drug use and what he perceived to be a strong desire for media attention and fame. Patchen referred to “Ginsberg and Co.” and the media hype surrounding them as a “freak show.” Awards * = * In 1936, soon after the release of his first book, Patchen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1944, he won the Ohioana Award for his book Cloth of the Tempest. He received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1954, and in 1967, he received a $10,000 grant for his contribution to American literature from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities. Musical collaborations and recordings * In 1942 Patchen collaborated with the composer John Cage on the radio play The City Wears A Slouch Hat. In the 1950s Patchen collaborated with jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, reading his poetry with Mingus’ group, although no known recordings of the collaboration exist. * In the late 1950s Moe Asch of Folkways Records recorded Patchen reading his poetry and excerpts from one of his novels. These recordings were released as Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada (1959), Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960), Kenneth Patchen Reads His Love Poems (1961), and The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1972). Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada (1959) was recorded in Vancouver the same week as a live performance for CBC Radio. The original record included a mimeographed pamphlet featuring poems and credits for the jazz group who played on the record, the Allan Neil Quartet. It was subsequently re-released on CD by the Locust Music label in 2004. * In 1964–65, the English composer David Bedford set an extract from Patchen’s 1948 poem “In Memory of Kathleen” to classical music for the piece A Dream of the Lost Seven Stars. * In November 2004 the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet presented A Homage to Kenneth Patchen at the Chicago Humanities Festival with Mike Pearson reading from The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen. A recording was released on the German jazzwerkstatt label entitled Be Music, Night in 2006. Musicians in the performance included Peter Brötzmann– clarinets, alto and tenor saxes; Mats Gustafsson– baritone sax and bass clarinet; Ken Vandermark– baritone sax and clarinet; Joe McPhee– trumpet and alto sax; Jeb Bishop– trombone; Fred Lonberg-Holm– cello; Kent Kessler– bass; Paal Nilssen-Love and Michael Zerang– drums. In 1984 Brötzmann had recorded a solo dedication to Patchen for FMP titled 14 Love Poems, a collection of short unaccompanied reed pieces that mirror textures and cadences found in the poet’s own love poems. * On January 21, 2008, El Records released the record Rebel Poets in America, which included poetry readings with jazz accompaniment by both Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, including such Patchen classics as “The Murder of Two Men by a Young Kid Wearing Lemon Colored Gloves” and “I Went To The City.” Patchen made these recordings in collaboration with the musician Allyn Ferguson who composed and arranged jazz accompaniment for each individual poem and also led the jazz ensemble. * In October 2011 The Claudia Quintet, with guest vocalists Kurt Elling and Theo Bleckmann, released an album on Cuneiform Records of Patchen’s poetry set to music written by Claudia leader John Hollenbeck. Critical response * Patchen’s work has received little attention from academic critics. However, a few scholars have published critical books on Patchen, including Raymond Nelson, Herbert P. Hogue, and Larry R. Smith. Also, a collection of essays on Patchen’s work was edited by Richard Morgan for the book Kenneth Patchen: A Collection of Essays (1977). * One can also find notable book reviews that provide a reasonably accurate gauge of the public response to Patchen’s work when it was initially published. For instance, Patchen biographer Larry Smith notes that "[the] initial reception to Patchen’s First Will & Testament was positive and strong." Smith notes that a reviewer from The New Republic compared the book to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The book was also praised in reviews by Louis Untermeyer and John Peale Bishop. However, the book did receive a notably negative review by Delmore Schwartz in Partisan Review. Following this first negative review, Schwartz would remain one of Patchen’s fiercest critics. * In response to Patchen’s novel The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), prior to its publication, Henry Miller praised the work in the long essay Patchen: Man of Anger and Light which was published in book form in 1946. Also prior to the book’s publication, Delmore Schwartz read the manuscript and claimed to be so offended by the controversial anti-war stance in the book that he persuaded Patchen’s publisher, New Directions, against publishing it. This forced Patchen to self-publish the book by subscription. Post-publication, the book’s supporters included Miller, Robert Duncan, and James Laughlin; its detractors included Schwartz, Edmund Wilson, and Anaïs Nin. Despite receiving a favorable review from William Carlos Williams in 1942, the novel’s highly experimental style, limited release, and anti-war stance would guarantee it a very limited audience. * In 1943, Patchen’s Cloth of the Tempest received largely negative reviews. One reviewer even accused Patchen of being “naive,” a common criticism aimed at his work, particularly regarding his fervent, pacifistic beliefs. * In the 1950s, Patchen received praise from the jazz critic Ralph Gleason for his jazz-poetry readings with the Chamber Jazz Sextet at the Blackhawk Club in San Francisco. Gleason wrote, "I think [Patchen’s reading] technique presents the possibilities of an entire new medium of expression―a combination of jazz and poetry that would take nothing away from either form but would create something entirely new." When Patchen recorded his jazz-poetry readings, one of the resulting albums drew praise from the poet John Ciardi who wrote that “Patchen’s poetry is in many ways a natural for jazz accompaniment. Its subject and its tone are close to those of jazz.” * In 1958, Patchen’s Selected Poems and his book When We Were Here Together received significant praise from the reviewer Frederick Eckman in Poetry. Eckman favorably compared Patchen’s work to that of the poet William Blake and singled out the poems “Street Corner College,” “Do the Dead Know What Time It Is?,” “The Origin of Baseball,” “Fog,” and “The Character of Love Seen As A Search for the Lost” as some of Patchen’s best pieces. He also called When We Were Here Together “a beautiful book, inside and out.” However, in the very same issue of Poetry, the reviewer Robert Beum wrote a brief, negative review of Patchen’s book Hurrah for Anything, calling the book dull and clichéd. * Patchen’s most important volume, The Collected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, first published in 1968 received largely positive reviews. One reviewer from The New York Times called the book “a remarkable volume” and compared Patchen’s work to Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, and even to the Bible. And in another review, the poet David Meltzer called Patchen “one of America’s great poet-prophets” and called his body of work “visionary art for our time and for Eternity.” Like the Times review, Meltzer also compared Patchen’s work to Walt Whitman and the Bible in addition to William Blake. Legacy * Although he did not achieve widespread fame during his lifetime, a small but dedicated following of fans and scholars continue to celebrate Patchen’s art. The University of California, Santa Cruz, hosts an archive of Patchen’s work entitled “Patchenobilia,” and many bookstores around the San Francisco Bay Area, Patchen’s final home, continue to host jazz and poetry events which include his works. * Between 1987 and 1991 there were Kenneth Patchen Festivals, celebrating his work, in Warren, Ohio, which encompasses the town of Niles where Patchen was born and grew up. These festivals were sponsored by the Trumbull Art Gallery in collaboration with the University of California, Santa Cruz. In honor of Patchen, the town of Niles also renamed the little street where he was born to “Patchen Avenue.” * In 2011, Kelly’s Cove Press published Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, edited by Patchen’s friend Jonathan Clark, in celebration of the centenary of Patchen’s birth. * In April 2012, Allen Frost published the Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen, which included 336 pages of letters between Patchen and James Laughlin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Henry Miller, Amos Wilder, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe and E.E. Cummings. * In 2014 Jonathan Clark released a full color collection of Kenneth Patchen photos and art in An Astonished Eye: The Art of Kenneth Patchen, from Artichoke Press and the University of Rochester Library. Bibliography * * Before the Brave, (Random House) 1936 * First Will and Testament (Norfolk, CT: New Directions) 1939 (800 copies) * The Journal of Albion Moonlight, (Self-published) 1941, (New Directions) 1961 * The Dark Kingdom, (New York: Harriss & Givens) 1942 * The Teeth Of The Lion, (New Directions) 1942 * Cloth of the Tempest, (Harper and Brothers) 1943 * The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer, (New Directions) 1945 * An Astonished Eye Looks Out of the Air, (Untide Press) 1945 * Outlaw of the Lowest Planet, (London: Grey Walls Press) 1946 * The Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen, (New Directions) 1946 * Sleepers Awake, (New York: Padell Book Co) 1946 * Panels for the Walls of Heaven, (Berkeley, CA: Bern Porter/Gillick Press) 1946 * Pictures of Life and Death, (New York: Padell Book Co) 1946 * They Keep Riding Down All the Time, (New York: Padell Book Co) 1946 * CCCLXXIV Poems, (New York: Padell Book Co) 1948 * Red Wine and Yellow Hair, (New Directions) 1949 * Fables and Other Little Tales, (Karlsruhe Baden: Jonathan Williams) 1953 * Poems of Humor and Protest, (San Francisco: City Lights Books) 1954 * The Famous Boating Party, (New Directions) 1954 * Hurrah for Anything, (New Directions) 1957 * When We Were Here Together, (New Directions) 1957 * Selected Poems, (New Directions) 1957 * The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, (San Francisco: City Lights Books) 1960 * Because It Is, (New Directions) 1960 * Hallelujah Anyway, (New Directions) 1966 * But Even So (picture poems), (New Directions) 1968 * Selected Poems (London: Jonathan Cape), 1968 * Collected Poems, (New Directions) 1969 * Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces, (New Directions) 1970 * Wonderings, (New Directions) 1971 * In Quest of Candlelighters, (New Directions) 1972 * Nothing has changed (Artichoke Press) 1975 * The Argument of Innocence, (Oakland CA: Scrimshaw Press) 1976 * Patchen’s Lost Plays, (Santa Barbara, CA: Capra Press) 1977 * Still Another Pelican in the Breadbox, (Youngstown, OH: Pig Iron Press) 1980 * What Shall We Do Without Us, (picture poems) (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books 1984 * Awash with Roses: Collected Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen, (Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press) 1999. ISBN 978-0-933087-21-7 * We Meet, (New Directions) 2008. 978-0-811217-58-3 * The Walking-Away World, (New Directions) 2008. ISBN 0-8112-1757-4 * Kenneth Patchen: A Centennial Selection, Jonathan Clark (ed) (Kelly’s Cove Press) 2011. ISBN 978-1-61364-453-9 * Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Patchen, Allen Frost (ed) (Huron, OH: Bottom Dog Press), 2012. ISBN 978-1-933964-54-6 Discography * * Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen: Read by the Author, 1959, Folkways Records, FW09717 (cover artwork by Jackson Pollock) * Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada– with the Alan Neil Quartet, 1959, Folkways Records, FW09718 * Kenneth Patchen Reads His Love Poems, 1961, Folkways Records, FW09719 * The Journal of Albion Moonlight, 1972, Folkways Records, FW09716 * Rebel Poets of America, 2008, (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti) El Records/Cherry Red Records (recorded 1957) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Patchen

Bryan Waller Procter (pseud. Barry Cornwall) (21 November 1787 – 5 October 1874) was an English poet. Born at Leeds, Yorkshire, he was educated at Harrow School, where he had for contemporaries Lord Byron and Robert Peel. On leaving school he was placed in the office of a solicitor at Calne, Wiltshire, remaining there until about 1807, when he returned to London to study law. By the death of his father in 1816 he became possessed of a small property, and soon after entered into partnership with a solicitor; but in 1820 the partnership was dissolved, and he began to write under the pseudonym of “Barry Cornwall”.

Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in 1913, Robert Hayden was raised in the poor neighborhood in Detroit called Paradise Valley. He had an emotionally tumultuous childhood and was shuttled between the home of his parents and that of a foster family, who lived next door. Because of impaired vision, he was unable to participate in sports, but was able to spend his time reading. In 1932, he graduated from high school and, with the help of a scholarship, attended Detroit City College (later Wayne State University). Hayden published his first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, in 1940, at the age of 27. He enrolled in a graduate English Literature program at the University of Michigan where he studied with W. H. Auden. Auden became an influential critical guide in the development of Hayden's writing. Hayden admired the work of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wiley, Carl Sandburg, and Hart Crane, as well as the poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Jean Toomer. He had an interest in African-American history and explored his concerns about race in his writing. Hayden's poetry gained international recognition in the 1960s and he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, in 1966 for his book Ballad of Remembrance. Explaining the trajectory of Hayden's career, the poet William Meredith wrote: "Hayden declared himself, at considerable cost in popularity, an American poet rather than a black poet, when for a time there was posited an unreconcilable difference between the two roles. There is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of black America, but he would not relinquish the title of American writer for any narrower identity." In 1975, Hayden received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and in 1976, he became the first black American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (later called the Poet Laureate). He died in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1980. References Poets.org - www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/196

Muriel Stuart (1885, Norbury, South London– 18 December 1967), born Muriel Stuart Irwin, was a poet, the daughter of a Scottish barrister. She was particularly concerned with the topic of sexual politics, though she first wrote poems about World War I. She later gave up poetry writing; her later publications are on gardening. She was hailed by Hugh MacDiarmid as the best woman poet of the Scottish Renaissance although she was Scottish only by family origin and lived all her life in England. Despite this, his comment led to her inclusion in many Scottish anthologies. Thomas Hardy described her poetry as “superlatively good”. Like other female poets of her era, she reflects the weight of social expectations on women and the experience of post-war spinsterhood. Her most famous poem, “In the Orchard”, is entirely dialogues and in no kind of verse form, which makes it innovative for its time. She does use rhyme: a mixture of half-rhyme and rhyming couplets (a, b, a, b form). Other famous poems of hers are “The Seed Shop”, “The Fools” and “Man and his Makers”. She married twice, the second time to the publisher Alfred William Board. Later in life she stopped publishing poetry and wrote books on gardening: Fool’s Garden (1936) was a best-seller and Gardener’s Nightcap has been reprinted by Persephone Books.