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

Dorianne Laux (born January 10, 1952 in Augusta, Maine) is an American poet. Biography Laux worked as a sanatorium cook, a gas station manager, and a maid before receiving a B.A. in English from Mills College in 1988. Laux taught at the University of Oregon. She is a professor at North Carolina State University’s creative writing program, and the MFA in Writing Program at Pacific University. She is also a contributing editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. Her work appeared in American Poetry Review, Five Points, Kenyon Review, Ms., Orion, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Zyzzyva. She has also appeared in online journals such as Web Del Sol. Laux lives in Raleigh, North Carolina with her husband, poet Joseph Millar. She has one daughter.

William Collins (25 December 1721– 12 June 1759) was an English poet. Second in influence only to Thomas Gray, he was an important poet of the middle decades of the 18th century. His lyrical odes mark a turn away from the Augustan poetry of Alexander Pope’s generation and towards the Romantic era which would soon follow. Biography Born in Chichester, Sussex, the son of a hatmaker and former mayor of the town, he was educated at The Prebendal School, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford. While still at the university, he published the Persian Eclogues (1742) which he had begun at school. After graduating in 1743 he was undecided about his future. Failing to obtain a university fellowship, being judged by a military uncle as 'too indolent even for the army’, and having rejected the idea of becoming a clergyman, he settled for a literary career and was supported in London by a small allowance from his cousin, George Payne. There he was befriended by James Thomson and Dr Johnson as well as the actors David Garrick and Samuel Foote. In 1747 he published his collection of Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects on which his subsequent reputation was to rest. The poems are characterized by strong emotional descriptions and the personal relationship to the subject allowed by the ode form. At the time little notice was taken of these poems, which were at odds with the Augustan spirit of the age. With the depression on his lack of success, aggravated by drunkenness, he sank into insanity and in 1754 was confined to McDonald’s Madhouse in Chelsea. From there he moved to the care of a married elder sister in Chichester until his death in 1759, when he was buried in St Andrew’s Church. After the Odes, although he had many projects in his head, none came to fruition. His only other poems were the ode written on Thomson’s death (1749) and the posthumously discovered and unfinished “Ode on the popular superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland”. An intriguing addition, now lost, is the “Ode on the Music of the Grecian Theatre” that he described and proposed sending to the musician William Hayes in 1750. Hayes had just set “The Passions” by Collins to music as an oratorio that was received with some acclaim. This, coupled with the popularity of the Persian Eclogues, a revised version of which was published the year he died, was the closest approach to success that Collins knew. Legacy Following his death, his poems were issued in a collected edition by John Langhorne (1765) and slowly gained more recognition, although never without criticism. While Dr Johnson wrote a sympathetic account of his former friend in Lives of the Poets (1781), he dismissed the poetry as contrived and poorly executed. Charles Dickens was dismissive for other reasons in his novel Great Expectations. There Pip describes his youthful admiration for a recitation of Collins’s The Passions and comments ruefully, 'I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge throwing his blood-stain’d Sword in Thunder down, and taking the War-denouncing Trumpet with a withering Look. It was not with me then, as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of both gentlemen’. Works * Persian Eclogues (1742); these were revised as Oriental Eclogues in 1759. * Verses humbly address’d to Sir Thomas Hanmer on his edition of Shakespeare’s works (1743); republished in a revised edition in 1744, in which “A Song from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline” was included. * Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects (1746) * Ode on the Death of Thomson (1749) * Ode on the Popular Superstitions of the Highlands (written 1750, unpublished until later editions) Editions * Poetical works of William Collins, ed. John Langhorne, originally published in 1765; several editions followed, to which Dr Johnson’s life of Collins was added. * A scholarly edition was published in The Poetical Works of Gray and Collins (ed. Austin Poole) by Oxford University Press in 1926; from the same press there followed the definitive edition of The Works of William Collins (ed. Wendorf & Ryskamp) in 1979. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Collins_(poet)

Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894– March 30, 1967) was an African American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. Early life and education Nathan Pinchback Toomer was born in Washington, D.C. in 1894. His father Nathan Toomer (1839-1906) was a mixed-race freedman, born into slavery in 1839 in Chatham County, Georgia. He, his mother Kit and siblings were sold to John Toomer in Houston County; after his death, they were bought in 1859 from the estate by John’s brother Col. Henry Toomer. Among his siblings was a sister Fannie, who later married a Mr. Colomon. Nathan worked for Henry Toomer as a personal valet and assistant before and after the Civil War, learning the ways of the white upper class and later taking his surname. By 1869 Nathan Toomer had married a mulatto woman named Harriet, and they had four daughters, including Martha, who married Seymour Glover, and Theodosia, who married a Mr. Braswell. By 1870, Nathan Toomer was a farmer and the wealthiest freedman in Hancock County, with $20,000 in real estate and $10,000 in personal property. Harriet Toomer died on August 17, 1891. Nathan Toomer in 1892 married Amanda America Dickson (1849-1893). A mixed-race woman and daughter of a slave, she was raised by her white planter father, David Dickson, and grandmother Elizabeth Dickson. After his death in 1885, she inherited a 15,000-acre plantation and total estate worth $400,000 from him and was described as the “wealthiest colored woman in America.” An agricultural reformer, Dickson and his mother had educated Amanda. In 1866 she married a white paternal first cousin and had two sons by him. Unhappy in the marriage, in 1870 Amanda returned to her father’s house. Later she completed college at Atlanta University. She died in 1893 after about a year of marriage to Toomer. He and her sons struggled over her estate, but ultimately, he received almost nothing. Her father’s will had left the estate to her sons, and she died intestate. In 1893 Toomer married Nina Pinchback (1866-1909), a wealthy young woman of mixed race. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of people of color free before the Civil War. Her father P. B. S. Pinchback was of majority European heritage, from several nationalities, and also of African and Cherokee descent. He served as an officer in the Union Army; he became a Republican politician in Louisiana during the Reconstruction era and was the first African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state when he succeeded Henry C. Warmoth. He was elected to the US Congress and Senate in 1872 and 1873, respectively, but lost challenges by Democrats in Congress. Her mother Nina (Hawthorne) Pinchback was a free woman of color from Tennessee. Both Pinchback and Hawthorne had white fathers and mothers of mixed race. In 1891-1892, with white Democrats establishing Jim Crow laws in Louisiana, the Pinchbacks had moved to Washington, DC, where they were easily part of the mulatto elite. They built a new house off Fourteenth Street, in what developed as a predominantly white, upper-class area of the city. Pinchback was suspicious of the older Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter’s choice for marriage, but ultimately acquiesced. After frequent travels, the senior Nathan Toomer abandoned his wife and son Nathan after the boy was born and returned to Georgia. Nina divorced him and took back her name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents. At that time, angered by her husband’s abandonment, her father insisted they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy’s godfather. The boy also was given a variety of nicknames by various family members. As a child in Washington, Jean Toomer attended segregated black schools. When his mother remarried and they moved to suburban New Rochelle, New York, he attended an all-white school. After his mother’s death in 1909, Toomer returned to Washington to live with his Pinchback grandparents. He graduated from the M Street School, a prestigious academic black high school. Between 1914 and 1917, Toomer attended six institutions of higher education (the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, the University of Chicago, New York University, and the City College of New York) studying agriculture, fitness, biology, sociology, and history, but he never completed a degree. His wide readings among prominent contemporary poets and writers, and the lectures he attended during his college years, shaped the direction of his writing. Career After leaving college, Toomer returned to Washington, DC. He published some short stories and continued writing in the volatile social period following World War I. He worked for some months in a shipyard in 1919, then escaped to middle-class life. Labor strikes and race riots of whites attacking blacks occurred in several major industrial cities during the summer of 1919, which was known as Red Summer. People in the working class were competing after World War I for jobs and housing, and tensions erupted in violence. In Chicago and other places, blacks fought back. At the same time, it was a period of artistic ferment. Toomer devoted several months to the study of Eastern philosophies and continued to be interested in this subject [Needs citation]. Some of his early writing was political, and he published three essays from 1919-1920 in the prominent socialist paper New York Call. His work drew from the socialist and “New Negro” movements of New York. Toomer was reading much new American writing, for instance Waldo Frank’s Our America (1919). In 1919, he adopted Jean Toomer as his literary name, and it was the way he was known for most of his adult life. By his early adult years, Toomer resisted racial classifications and wanted to be identified only as an American. Accurately claiming ancestry among seven ethnic and national groups, he gained experience in both white and “colored” societies, and resisted being classified as a Negro writer, although he grudgingly allowed his publisher of Cane to use that term to increase sales. As Richard Eldridge has noted, Toomer “sought to transcend standard definitions of race. I think he never claimed that he was a white man,” Mr. Eldridge said. “He always claimed that he was a representative of a new, emergent race that was a combination of various races. He averred this virtually throughout his life.” William Andrews has noted he “was one of the first writers to move beyond the idea that any black ancestry makes you black.” In 1921 Toomer took a job for a few months as a principal at a new rural agricultural and industrial school for blacks in Sparta, Georgia. Southern schools were continuing to recruit teachers from the North, although they had also trained generations of teachers since the Civil War. The school was in the center of Hancock County and the Black Belt 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, near where his father had lived. Exploring his father’s roots in Hancock County, Toomer learned that he sometimes passed for white. Seeing the life of rural blacks, accompanied by racial segregation and virtual labor peonage in the Deep South, led Toomer to identify more strongly as an African American and with his father’s past. Several lynchings of black men took place in Georgia during 1921-1922, as whites continued to enforce white supremacy with violence. In 1908 the state had ratified a constitution that disenfranchised most blacks and many poor whites by raising requirements to voter registration. This situation was virtually maintained into the 1960s, when federal legislation was passed to enforce constitutional rights. By Toomer’s time, the state was suffering labor shortages due to thousands of rural blacks leaving in the Great Migration to the North and Midwest. Trying to control their movement, the legislature passed laws to prevent outmigration. It also established high license fees for Northern employers recruiting labor in the state. Planters feared losing their pool of cheap labor. This period was a formative experience for Toomer; he started writing about it while still in Georgia and submitted the long story “Georgia Night” to The Liberator in New York from Hancock County. Cane During Toomer’s time of being the principal of “Sparta Agricultural and Industrial Institute in Georgia, he started stories, sketches, and poems of his experience there which formed the basis for ”Cane". He attributed the success of “Cane” to his African ancestry and his immersion in the black folk culture in rural Georgia. Cane is structured in three parts. The first third of the book is devoted to the black experience in the Southern farmland. The second part of Cane is more urban and concerned with Northern life. The conclusion of the work is a prose piece entitled "Kabnis.“ People would call Toomers “Cane” a mysterious brand of Southern psychological realism that has been matched only in the best work of William Faulkner. Toomer is the first poet to unite folk culture and the elite culture of the white avant-garde. Cane was published by Boni and Liveright in 1923, “Cane” was well received by black and white critics and was reissued in 1969, two years after Toomer’s death. “Cane” was celebrated by well known African American critics and artists, including Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman. Return to New York Toomer returned to New York, where he became friends with Waldo Frank. They had an intense friendship through 1923, and Frank served as his mentor and editor on his novel Cane. Afterward they had strong differences. In 1923, Toomer published the High Modernist novel Cane, in which he used a variety of forms and material inspired by his time in Georgia. It was also an “analysis of class and caste”, with “secrecy and miscegenation as major themes of the first section”. He had conceived it as a short-story cycle, he explores the tragic intersection of female sexuality, black manhood, and industrial modernization in the south (Cane Novel 1923). Toomer acknowledged the influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) as his model, in addition to other influential works of that period. He also appeared to have absorbed The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot and considered him one of the American group of writers he wanted to join, “artists and intellectuals who were engaged in renewing American society at its multi-cultural core.” Many scholars have considered Cane to be Toomer’s best work. A series of poems and short stories about the black experience in America, Cane was hailed by critics and is seen as an important work of both the Harlem Renaissance and Modernism. But Toomer resisted racial classification and did not want to be marketed as a Negro writer. As he wrote to his publisher Horace Liveright, “My racial composition and my position in the world are realities that I alone may determine.” Toomer found it more difficult to get published throughout the 1930s and the Great Depression, as did many authors. In the 1920s, Toomer and Frank were among many Americans who were very interested in the work of the spiritual leader George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff, from the Russian Empire, who had a lecture tour in the United States in 1924. That year, and in 1926 and 1927, Toomer went to France for periods of study with Gurdjieff, who had settled at Fontainebleau. He was a student of Gurdjieff until the mid-1930s. Much of his writing from this period on was related to his spiritual quest and featured allegories. He no longer explored African-American characters. Some scholars have attributed Toomer’s artistic silence to his ambivalence about his identity in a culture based on forcing binary racial distinctions. Marriage and family In 1931 Toomer married the writer Margery Latimer in Wisconsin. During their travels on the West Coast following their marriage, it was covered in sensational terms by a Hearst reporter. An anti-miscegenation scandal broke, incorporating rumors about the commune they had organized earlier that year in Portage, Wisconsin. West Coast and Midwest press outlets were aroused and Time magazine sent a reporter to interview them. Toomer was criticized violently by some for marrying a white woman. Latimer was a respected young writer known for her first two novels and short stories. The following year she died in childbirth in August 1932; he named their only daughter Margery in her memory. In 1934 Toomer married a second time, to Marjorie Content, daughter of a wealthy Jewish stockbroker. Because Toomer was notable as a writer, this marriage also attracted notice. In 1940 the Toomers moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania. There he formally joined the Quakers and began to withdraw from society. Toomer wrote extensively from 1935 to 1940 about relationships between the genders, influenced by his Gurdjieff studies, as well as Jungian psychology. He had fundamentally traditional views about men and women, which he put in symbolic terms. In 1939 Toomer changed his name again, using “Nathan Jean Toomer”, to emphasize that he was male. He may also have been reaching toward his paternal ancestry with it. He usually signed his name N. Jean Toomer, and continued to be called “Jean” by friends. Late writing After Cane was published Toomer began studying the guru George Gurdjieff to reach a higher level of consciousness. He had continued with his spiritual exploration, traveling to India in 1939. Later he studied the psychology developed by Carl Jung, the mystic Edgar Cayce, and the Church of Scientology but reverted to Gurdjieff’s philosophy. Toomer wrote a small amount of fiction in this later period. Mostly he published essays in Quaker publications during these years. He devoted most of his time to serving on Quaker committees for community service and working with high school students. His last literary work published during his lifetime was Blue Meridian, a long poem extolling “the potential of the American race”. He stopped writing for publication after 1950. He continued to write for himself, including several autobiographies and a poetry volume The Wayward and the Seeking. He died in 1967 after several years of poor health. Racial issues Toomer’s appearance was “racially indeterminate”. As noted above, he lived in both black and white societies as he was growing up and during his life. He did not want to be bound by race and claimed to be an American and represent a new mixed culture. Given his wide experiences, he resisted being classified as a Negro writer. But, his most enduring work was Cane, inspired by his time in the rural South and the imaginative exploration of the early world of his absent father. In preparing a new edition of that work, scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Rudolph P. Byrd said in 2010 that, based on their research, they believe that Toomer passed for white at periods in his life even though he never claimed that he was white or black, he simply was an American as far as he was concerned. They note that in the 1920 and 1930 censuses he was classified as white. (At that time, such data was provided by the census taker, often based on an individual’s appearance, economic class, area of residence, neighbors, etc.) He twice had been classified (or registered) as Negro in draft registration in 1917 and 1942. When Toomer married Marjorie Latimer, a white woman, in Wisconsin in 1931, the license noted both as white. Other scholars disagree with Gates’ and Byrd’s interpretation of this documentation, while acknowledging that Toomer tried to stretch racial boundaries. William Andrews said, “If people didn’t ask,” he said, “I expect he didn’t tell.” Legacy and archives Toomer’s papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. When Cane was reprinted in 1969, it was favorably reviewed as a “Black Classic”, leading to a revival of interest in Toomer’s work. Since the late 20th century, collections of Toomer’s poetry and essays have been published, and his Essentials was republished; he self-published it in 1931. It included “Gurdjieffian aphorisms”. 2002, Toomer was elected to the Georgia Hall of Fame. Books by Toomer Cane (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923) ISBN 0-87140-151-7 Problems of Civilization, by Ellsworth Huntington, Whiting Williams, Jean Toomer and others, (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1929) Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1931) An Interpretation of Friends Worship (Philadelphia: Committee on Religious Education of Friends General Conference, 1947) The Flavor of Man (Philadelphia: Young Friends Movement of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1949) The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) ISBN 0-8078-4209-5 The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924, University of Tennessee Press, 2006 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Toomer

Genevieve Taggard (November 28, 1894 Waitsburg, Washington– November 8, 1948 New York City) was an American poet. During the 1930s, sparked in part by the Great Depression, but also largely by her philanthropic upbringing and her commitment to socialism, her poetry began to reflect her political and social views much more prominently. During this time a Guggenheim Fellowship allowed her to spend a year in Majorca, Spain and Antibes, France. The experience of Spain in its time shortly before the Spanish Civil War gave further rise and inspiration to her cause of raising social and political awareness of civil rights issues.

John Henry Newman Cong. Orat. (21 February 1801– 11 August 1890), also referred to as Cardinal Newman, John Henry Cardinal Newman, and Blessed John Henry Newman, was an important figure in the religious history of England in the 19th century. He was known nationally by the mid-1830s. Originally an evangelical Oxford University academic and priest in the Church of England, Newman then became drawn to the high-church tradition of Anglicanism. He became known as a leader of, and an able polemicist for, the Oxford Movement, an influential and controversial grouping of Anglicans who wished to return to the Church of England many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. In this the movement had some success. However, in 1845 Newman, joined by some but not all of his followers, left the Church of England and his teaching post at Oxford University and was received into the Catholic Church. He was quickly ordained as a priest and continued as an influential religious leader, based in Birmingham. In 1879, he was created a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII in recognition of his services to the cause of the Catholic Church in England. He was instrumental in the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland, which evolved into University College Dublin, today the largest university in Ireland. Newman’s beatification was officially proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI on 19 September 2010 during his visit to the United Kingdom. His canonisation is dependent on the documentation of additional miracles attributed to his intercession. Newman was also a literary figure of note: his major writings including the Tracts for the Times (1833–1841), his autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–66), the Grammar of Assent (1870), and the poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865), which was set to music in 1900 by Edward Elgar. He wrote the popular hymns “Lead, Kindly Light” and “Praise to the Holiest in the Height” (taken from Gerontius). Early life and education Newman was born in the City of London, the eldest of a family of three sons and three daughters. His father, John Newman, was a banker with Ramsbottom, Newman and Company in Lombard Street. His mother, Jemima (née Fourdrinier), was descended from a notable family of Huguenot refugees in England, founded by the engraver, printer and stationer, Paul Fourdrinier. Francis William Newman was a younger brother. His eldest sister, Harriet Elizabeth, married Thomas Mozley, also prominent in the Oxford Movement. The family lived in Southampton Street (now Southampton Place) in Bloomsbury and bought a country retreat in Ham, near Richmond, in the early 1800s. At school in Ealing At the age of seven Newman was sent to Great Ealing School conducted by George Nicholas. There George Huxley, father of Thomas Henry Huxley, taught mathematics, and the classics teacher was Walter Mayers. Newman took no part in the casual school games. He was a great reader of the novels of Walter Scott, then in course of publication, and of Robert Southey. Aged 14, he read sceptical works by Thomas Paine, David Hume and perhaps Voltaire. Evangelical At the age of 15, during his last year at school, Newman was converted, an incident of which he wrote in his Apologia that it was “more certain than that I have hands or feet”. Almost at the same time (March 1816) the bank Ramsbottom, Newman and Co. crashed, though it paid its creditors and his father left to manage a brewery. Mayers, who had himself undergone a conversion in 1814, lent Newman books from the English Calvinist tradition. It was in the autumn of 1816 that Newman “fell under the influence of a definite creed”, and received into his intellect “impressions of dogma, which, through God’s mercy, have never been effaced or obscured”. He became an evangelical Calvinist and held the typical belief that the Pope was the antichrist under the influence of the writings of Thomas Newton, as well as his reading of Joseph Milner’s History of the Church of Christ. Mayers is described as a moderate, Clapham Sect Calvinist, and Newman read William Law as well as William Beveridge in devotional literature. He also read The Force of Truth by Thomas Scott. Although to the end of his life Newman looked back on his conversion to evangelical Christianity in 1816 as the saving of his soul, he gradually shifted away from his early Calvinism. As Eamon Duffy puts it, “He came to see Evangelicalism, with its emphasis on religious feeling and on the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, as a Trojan horse for an undogmatic religious individualism that ignored the Church’s role in the transmission of revealed truth, and that must lead inexorably to subjectivism and skepticism.” At university Newman’s name was entered at Lincoln’s Inn. He was, however, sent shortly to Trinity College, Oxford, where he studied widely. Anxiety to do well in the final schools produced the opposite result; he broke down in the examination, under Thomas Vowler Short, and so graduated as a BA with third-class honours in 1821. Desiring to remain in Oxford, Newman then took private pupils and read for a fellowship at Oriel, then “the acknowledged centre of Oxford intellectualism.” He was elected at Oriel on 12 April 1822. Edward Bouverie Pusey was elected a fellow of the same college in 1823. Anglican priest On 13 June 1824, Newman was made an Anglican deacon in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Ten days later he preached his first sermon in Holy Trinity at Over Worton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire when on a visit to his former teacher, the Reverend Walter Mayers, who had been curate there since 1823. On Trinity Sunday, 29 May 1825, he was ordained a priest in Christ Church Cathedral by the Bishop of Oxford, Edward Legge. He became, at Pusey’s suggestion, curate of St Clement’s Church, Oxford. Here, for two years, he was engaged in parochial work, and wrote articles on Apollonius of Tyana, Cicero and Miracles for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana. Richard Whately and Edward Copleston, Provost of Oriel, were leaders in the group of Oriel Noetics, a group of independently thinking dons with a strong belief in free debate. In 1825, at Whately’s request, Newman became vice-principal of St Alban Hall, but he only held this post for one year. He attributed much of his “mental improvement” and partial conquest of his shyness at this time to Whately. In 1826 Newman returned as tutor of Oriel, and the same year Richard Hurrell Froude, described by Newman as “one of the acutest, cleverest and deepest men” he ever met, was elected fellow there. The two formed a high ideal of the tutorial office as clerical and pastoral rather than secular, which led to tensions in the college. Newman assisted Whately in his popular work Elements of Logic (1826, initially for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana), and from him gained a definite idea of the Christian Church as institution: “... a Divine appointment, and as a substantive body, independent of the State, and endowed with rights, prerogatives and powers of its own”. Newman broke with Whately in 1827 on the occasion of the re-election of Robert Peel as Member of Parliament for the university: Newman opposed Peel on personal grounds. In 1827 Newman was a preacher at Whitehall. Oxford Movement In 1828 Newman supported and secured the election of Edward Hawkins as Provost of Oriel over John Keble. This choice, he later commented, produced the Oxford Movement with all its consequences. In the same year Newman was appointed vicar of St Mary’s University Church, to which the benefice of Littlemore (to the south of the city of Oxford) was attached, and Pusey was made Regius Professor of Hebrew. At this date, though Newman was still nominally associated with the Evangelicals, his views were gradually assuming a higher ecclesiastical tone. George Herring considers that the death of his sister Mary in January had a major impact on Newman. In the middle part of the year he worked to read the Church Fathers thoroughly. While local secretary of the Church Missionary Society, Newman circulated an anonymous letter suggesting a method by which Anglican clergy might practically oust Nonconformists from all control of the society. This resulted in his being dismissed from the post on 8 March 1830; and three months later Newman withdrew from the Bible Society, completing his move away from the Low Church group. In 1831–1832 Newman became the “Select Preacher” before the University. In 1832 his difference with Hawkins as to the “substantially religious nature” of a college tutorship became acute and prompted his resignation. Mediterranean travels In December 1832, Newman went with Hurrell Froude, on account of the latter’s health, for a tour in Southern Europe. On board the mail steamship Hermes they visited Gibraltar, Malta, the Ionian Islands and, subsequently, Sicily, Naples and Rome, where Newman made the acquaintance of Nicholas Wiseman. In a letter home he described Rome as “the most wonderful place on Earth”, but the Roman Catholic Church as “polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous”. During the course of this tour, Newman wrote most of the short poems which a year later were printed in the Lyra Apostolica. From Rome, instead of accompanying the Froudes home in April, Newman returned to Sicily alone. He fell dangerously ill with gastric or typhoid fever at Leonforte, but recovered, with the conviction that God still had work for him to do in England. Newman saw this as his third providential illness. In June 1833 he left Palermo for Marseille in an orange boat, which was becalmed in the Strait of Bonifacio. Here, Newman wrote the verses “Lead, Kindly Light” which later became popular as a hymn. Tracts for the Times Newman was at home again in Oxford on 9 July 1833 and, on 14 July, Keble preached at St Mary’s an assize sermon on “National Apostasy”, which Newman afterwards regarded as the inauguration of the Oxford Movement. In the words of Richard William Church, it was “Keble who inspired, Froude who gave the impetus and Newman who took up the work”; but the first organisation of it was due to Hugh James Rose, editor of the British Magazine, who has been styled “the Cambridge originator of the Oxford Movement”. Rose met Oxford Movement figures on a visit to Oxford looking for magazine contributors, and it was in his rectory house at Hadleigh, Suffolk, that a meeting of High Church clergy was held over 25–26 July (Newman was not present, but Hurrell Froude, Arthur Philip Perceval and William Palmer had gone to visit Rose), at which it was resolved to fight for “the apostolical succession and the integrity of the Prayer Book.” A few weeks later Newman started, apparently on his own initiative, the Tracts for the Times, from which the movement was subsequently named “Tractarian”. Its aim was to secure for the Church of England a definite basis of doctrine and discipline. At the time the state’s financial stance towards the Church of Ireland had raised the spectres of disestablishment, or an exit of High Churchmen. The teaching of the tracts was supplemented by Newman’s Sunday afternoon sermons at St Mary’s, the influence of which, especially over the junior members of the university, was increasingly marked during a period of eight years. In 1835 Pusey joined the movement, which, so far as concerned ritual observances, was later called “Puseyite”. In 1836 the Tractarians appeared as an activist group, in united opposition to the appointment of Renn Dickson Hampden as Regius Professor of Divinity. Hampden’s 1832 Bampton Lectures, in the preparation of which Joseph Blanco White had assisted him, were suspected of heresy; and this suspicion was accentuated by a pamphlet put forth by Newman, Elucidations of Dr Hampden’s Theological Statements. At this date Newman became editor of the British Critic. He also gave courses of lectures in a side chapel of St Mary’s in defence of the via media ("middle way") of Anglicanism between Roman Catholicism and popular Protestantism. Doubts and opposition Newman’s influence in Oxford was supreme about the year 1839. Just then, however, his study of monophysitism caused him to doubt whether Anglican theology was consistent with the principles of ecclesiastical authority which he had come to accept. He read Nicholas Wiseman’s article in the Dublin Review on “The Anglican Claim”, which quoted Augustine of Hippo against the Donatists, “securus judicat orbis terrarum” ("the verdict of the world is conclusive"). Newman later wrote of his reaction: For a mere sentence, the words of St Augustine, struck me with a power which I never had felt from any words before... they were like the ‘Tolle, lege,—Tolle, lege,’ of the child, which converted St Augustine himself. ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum!’ By those great words of the ancient Father, interpreting and summing up the long and varied course of ecclesiastical history, the theology of the Via Media was absolutely pulverised. (Apologia, part 5) After a furore in which the eccentric John Brande Morris preached for him in St Mary’s in September 1839, Newman began to think of moving away from Oxford. One plan that surfaced was to set up a religious community in Littlemore, outside the city of Oxford. Since accepting his post at St. Mary’s, Newman had a chapel (dedicated to Sts. Nicholas and Mary) and school built in the parish’s neglected area. Newman’s mother had laid the foundation stone in 1835, based on a half-acre plot and £100 given by Oriel College. Newman planned to appoint Charles Pourtales Golightly, an Oriel man, as curate at Littlemore in 1836. However, Golightly had taken offence at one of Newman’s sermons, and joined a group of aggressive anti-Catholics. Thus, Isaac Williams became Littlemore’s curate instead, succeeded by John Rouse Bloxam from 1837 to 1840, during which the school opened. William John Copeland acted as curate from 1840. Newman continued as a High Anglican controversialist until 1841, when he published Tract 90, which proved the last of the series. This detailed examination of the Thirty-Nine Articles suggested that their framers directed their negations not against Catholicism’s authorised creed, but only against popular errors and exaggerations. Though this was not altogether new, Archibald Campbell Tait, with three other senior tutors, denounced it as “suggesting and opening a way by which men might violate their solemn engagements to the university.” Other heads of houses and others in authority joined in the alarm. At the request of Richard Bagot, the Bishop of Oxford, the publication of the Tracts came to an end. Retreat to Littlemore Newman also resigned the editorship of the British Critic and was thenceforth, as he later described it, “on his deathbed as regards membership with the Anglican Church”. He now considered the position of Anglicans to be similar to that of the semi-Arians in the Arian controversy. The joint Anglican-Lutheran bishopric set up in Jerusalem was to him further evidence that the Church of England was not apostolic. In 1842 Newman withdrew to Littlemore with a small band of followers, and lived in semi-monastic conditions. The first to join him there was John Dobree Dalgairns. Others were William Lockhart on the advice of Henry Manning, Ambrose St John in 1843, Frederick Oakeley and Albany James Christie in 1845. The group adapted buildings in what is now College Lane, Littlemore, opposite the inn, including stables and a granary for stage coaches. Newman called it “the house of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Littlemore” (now Newman College). This “Anglican monastery” attracted publicity, and much curiosity in Oxford, which Newman tried to downplay, but some nicknamed it Newmanooth (from Maynooth College). Some Newman disciples wrote about English saints, while Newman himself worked to complete an Essay on the development of doctrine. In February 1843, Newman published, as an advertisement in the Oxford Conservative Journal, an anonymous but otherwise formal retractation of all the hard things he had said against Roman Catholicism. Lockhart became the first in the group to convert formally to Catholicism. Newman preached his last Anglican sermon at Littlemore, the valedictory “The parting of friends” on 25 September, and resigned the living of St Mary’s, although he did not leave Littlemore for two more years, until his own formal reception into the Catholic Church. Conversion to Roman Catholicism An interval of two years then elapsed before Newman was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 9 October 1845 by Dominic Barberi, an Italian Passionist, at the college in Littlemore. The personal consequences for Newman of his conversion were great: he suffered broken relationships with family and friends, attitudes to him within his Oxford circle becoming polarised. The effect on the wider Tractarian movement is still debated, since Newman’s leading role is regarded by some scholars as overstated, as is Oxford’s domination of the movement as a whole. Tractarian writings had a wide and continuing circulation after 1845, well beyond the range of personal contacts with the main Oxford figures, and Tractarian clergy continued to be recruited into the Church of England in numbers. Oratorian In February 1846, Newman left Oxford for Oscott, where Bishop Wiseman, then vicar-apostolic of the Midland district, resided; and in October he went to Rome, where he was ordained priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni and awarded the degree of DD by Pope Pius IX. At the close of 1847, Newman returned to England as an Oratorian and resided first at Maryvale (near Old Oscott); then at St Wilfrid’s College, Cheadle; and then at St Anne’s, Alcester Street, Birmingham. Finally he settled at Edgbaston, where spacious premises were built for the community, and where (except for four years in Ireland) he lived a secluded life for nearly forty years. Before the house at Edgbaston was occupied, Newman established the London Oratory, with Father Frederick William Faber as its superior. Lectures on the position of Catholics in England Anti-Catholicism had been central to British culture since the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. According to D.G. Paz, anti-Catholicism was “an integral part of what it meant to be a Victorian”. Popular Protestant feeling ran high at this time, partly in consequence of the Papal Bull Universalis Ecclesiae which re-established the Catholic diocesan hierarchy in England by Pope Pius IX on 29 September 1850. New Episcopal sees were created and Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman was to be the first Archbishop of Westminster. On 7 October, Wiseman announced the Pope’s restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in a pastoral letter From out of the Flaminian Gate: “Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished, and begins anew its course of regularly adjusted action round the centre of unity, the source of jurisdiction, of light and vigour.” Led by The Times and Punch, the British press saw this as being an attempt by the Papacy to claim jurisdiction over England. This was dubbed the “Papal Aggression”. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, wrote a public letter to the Bishop of Durham and denounced this “attempt to impose a foreign yoke upon our minds and consciences”. Russell’s stirring up of anti-Catholicism led to a national outcry. This “No Popery” uproar led to violence with Catholic priests being pelted in the streets and Catholic churches being attacked. Newman was keen for lay people to be at the forefront of any public apologetics: “[Catholics should] make the excuse of this persecution for getting up a great organization, going round the towns giving lectures, or making speeches.” He supported John Capes in the committee he was organising for public lectures in February 1851. Due to ill-health, Capes had to stop them half way through. Newman took the initiative and booked the Birmingham Corn Exchange for a series of public lectures. He decided to make their tone popular and provide cheap off-prints to those who attended. These lectures were his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England and they were delivered weekly, beginning on 30 June and finishing on 1 September 1851. In total there were nine lectures: Protestant view of the Catholic Church Tradition the sustaining power of the Protestant view Fable the basis of the Protestant view True testimony insufficient for the Protestant view Logical inconsistency of the Protestant view Prejudice the life of the Protestant view Assumed principles of the intellectual ground of the Protestant view Ignorance concerning Catholics the protection of the Protestant view Duties of Catholics towards the Protestant view which form the nine chapters of the published book. Following the first edition, a number of paragraphs were removed following the Achilli trial as "they were decided by a jury to constitute a libel, June 24, 1852.” Andrew Nash describes the Lectures as: "an analysis of this [anti-Catholic] ideology, satirising it, demonstrating the false traditions on which it was based and advising Catholics how they should respond to it. They were the first of their kind in English literature.” John Wolffe assesses the Lectures as: “an interesting treatment of the problem of anti-Catholicism from an observer whose partisan commitment did not cause him to slide into mere polemic and who had the advantage of viewing the religious battlefield from both sides of the tortured no man’s land of Littlemore.” The response to the Lectures was split between Catholics and Protestants. Catholics greeted them with enthusiasm. A review in The Rambler, a Catholic periodical, saw them as “furnishing a key to the whole mystery of anti-Catholic hostility and as shewing the special point of attack upon which our controversial energies should be concentrated.” The Protestant response was, predictably, less positive. Archdeacon Julius Hare said that Newman “is determined to say whatever he chooses, in despite of facts and reason”. Wilfred Ward, Newman’s first biographer, describes the Lectures as follows: “We have the very curious spectacle of a grave religious apologist giving rein for the first time at the age of fifty to a sense of rollicking fun and gifts of humorous writing, which if expended on other subjects would naturally have adorned the pages of Thackeray’s Punch.” Ian Ker has raised the profile of Newman’s satire. Ker notes that Newman’s imagery has a “savage, Swiftian flavour” and can be “grotesque in the Dickens manner”. Newman himself described the lectures as his “best written book.” Achilli trial One of the features of English anti-Catholicism was the holding of public meetings at which ex-Catholics, including priests, denounced their former beliefs and gave detailed accounts of the horrors of Catholic life. Giacinto Achilli (1803–1860), an ex-Dominican friar, was one such speaker. In 1833 Achilli, author of Dealings with the inquisition: or, Papal Rome, her priests, and her Jesuits... (1851), had been made Master of Sacred Theology at the College of St. Thomas, the future Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Angelicum. Nash describes Achilli’s journey to England thus: [Achilli] had been imprisoned (in a monastery) by the Inquisition for heresy, he claimed, but actually for a series of sexual offences against under-age young women. He had been “rescued” from the Inquisition by a group of English ultra-Protestants as a hero six months before the Papal Aggression crisis broke. He was received by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, greeted a public meeting at Exeter Hall with a specially written hymn, “Hail Roman prisoner, Hail” and given a chapel in London. His Dealings with the Inquisition was a best seller. In his public lectures, sponsored by the Evangelical Alliance, he professed to the errors of Catholicism and to be a sincere Protestant, and his exciting account of the cruelties of the Inquisition made him a credible and popular anti-Catholic speaker. In July 1850, Cardinal Wiseman wrote a detailed exposé of him in The Dublin Review which listed all of his offences. Newman therefore assumed, after seeking legal advice, that he would be able to repeat the facts in his fifth lecture in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England. In these lectures, Newman denounced various anti-Catholic utterances. These included those of the Maria Monk, the allegation of cells under his own Oratory on Hagley Road, Birmingham and those of Giacinto Achilli. Newman emphasises the importance of responding to Achilli: For how, Brothers of the Oratory, can we possibly believe a man like this [Achilli], in what he says about persons and facts, and conversations, and events, when he is of the stamp of Maria Monk, of Jeffreys, and of Teodore, and of others who have had their hour, and then been dropped by the indignation or the shame of mankind. The section of the lecture that was decided by jury to constitute a libel was: “I have been a Catholic and an infidel; I have been a Roman priest and a hypocrite; I have been a profligate under a cowl. I am that Father Achilli, who as early as 1826, was deprived of my faculty to lecture, for an offence which my superiors did their best to conceal; and who in 1827 had already earned the reputation of a scandalous friar. I am that Achilli, who in the diocese of Viterbo in February, 1831, robbed of her honour a young women of eighteen; who in September 1833, was found guilty of a second such crime, in the case of a person of twenty-eight; and who perpetrated a third in July, 1834, in the case of another aged twenty-four. I am he, who afterwards was found guilty of sins, similar or worse, in other towns of the neighbourhood. I am that son of St. Dominic who is known to have repeated the offence at Capua, in 1834 or 1835; and at Naples again, in 1840, in the case of a child of fi[f]teen. I am he who chose the sacristy of the church for one of these crimes, and Good Friday for another. Look on me, ye mothers of England, a confessor against Popery, for ye 'ne’er may look upon my like again.' I am that veritable priest, who, after all this, began to speak against, not only the Catholic faith, but the moral law, and perverted others by my teaching. I am the Cavaliere Achilli, who then went to Corfu, made the wife of a tailor faithless to her husband, and lived publicly and travelled about with the wife of a chorus-singer. I am that Professor of the Protestant College at Malta, who with two others was dismissed from my post for offences which the authorities cannot get themselves to describe. And now attend to me, such as I am, and you shall see what you shall see about the barbarity and profligacy of the Inquisitors of Rome.” You speak truly, O Achilli, and we cannot answer you a word. You are a Priest; you have been a Friar; you are, it is undeniable, the scandal of Catholicism, and the palmary argument of Protestants, by your extraordinary depravity. You have been, it is true, a profligate, an unbeliever, and a hypocrite. Not many years passed of your conventional life, and you were never in the choir, always in private houses, so that the laity observed you. You were deprived of your professorship, we own it; you were prohibited from preaching and hearing confessions; you were obliged to give hush-money to the father of one of your victims, as we learned from an official document of the Neapolitan Police to be ‘known for habitual incontinency;’ your name came before the civil tribunal at Corfu for your crime of adultery. You have put the crown on your offences, by as long as you could, denying them all; you have professed to seek after truth, when you were ravening after sin.” The libel charge was officially laid against Newman in November. Under English law, Newman needed to prove every single charge he had made against Achilli. Newman requested the documents that Wiseman had used for his article in the Dublin Review but he had mislaid them. He eventually found them but it was too late to prevent the trial. Newman and his defence committee needed to locate the victims and return them to England. A number of the victims were found and Maria Giberne, a friend of Newman, went to Italy to return with them to England. Achilli, on hearing that witnesses were being brought, arranged for the trial to be delayed. This put Newman under great strain as he had been invited to be the founding Rector of the proposed Catholic University in Dublin and was composing and delivering the lectures that would become The Idea of a University. On 21 June 1852, the libel trial started and lasted three days. Despite the evidence of the victims and witnesses, Achilli denied that any of it had happened; the jury believed him and found Newman guilty of libel. The injustice of the verdict was widely recognised: a great blow has been given to the administration of justice in this country, and Roman Catholics will have henceforth only too good reason for asserting that there is no justice for them in matters tending to rouse the Protestant feelings of judges and juries. A second trial was not granted and sentencing was postponed. When sentencing occurred, Newman did not get the prison sentence expected but got a fine of £100 and a long lecture from Judge Coleridge about his moral deterioration since he had become a Catholic. Coleridge later wrote to Keble: It is a very painful matter for us who must hail this libel as false, believing it is in great part true– or at least that it may be. The fine was paid on the spot and while his expenses as defendant amounted to about £14,000, they were paid out a fund organised by this defence committee to which Catholics at home and abroad had contributed; there was £2,000 left over which was spent on the purchase of a small property in Rednal, on the Lickey Hills, with a chapel and cemetery, where Newman was eventually buried. Achilli, despite his victory, was discredited. Newman removed the libellous section of the fifth lecture and replaced them by the inscription: De illis quae sequebantur / posterorum judicium sit– About those things which had followed / let posterity be the judge. Educator In 1854, at the request of the Irish Catholic bishops, Newman went to Dublin as rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, now University College, Dublin. It was during this time that he founded the Literary and Historical Society. After four years, he retired. He published a volume of lectures entitled The Idea of a University, which explained his philosophy of education. Newman believed in a middle way between free thinking and moral authority– one that would respect the rights of knowledge as well as the rights of revelation. His purpose was to build a Catholic university, in a world where the major Catholic universities on the European continent had recently been secularised, and most universities in the English-speaking world were Protestant. For a university to claim legitimacy in the larger world, it would have to support research and publication free from church censorship; however, for a university to be a safe place for the education of Catholic youth, it would have to be a place in which the teachings of the Catholic church were respected and promoted. The University [...] has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it. This philosophy encountered opposition within the Catholic church, at least in Ireland, as evidenced by the opinion of bishop Paul Cullen. In 1854 Cullen wrote a letter to the Vatican’s office Propaganda fide (now called the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples), criticising Newman’s liberal exercise of authority within the new university: The discipline introduced is unsuitable, certainly to this country. The young men are allowed to go out at all hours, to smoke, etc., and there has not been any fixed time for study. All this makes it clear that Father Newman does not give enough attention to details. The University as envisaged by Newman encountered too much opposition to prosper. However, his book did have a wide influence. In 1858, Newman projected a branch house of the Oratory at Oxford; but this project was opposed by Father (later Cardinal) Henry Edward Manning, another influential convert from Anglicanism, and others. It was thought that the creation of a Catholic body within the heart of Oxford was likely to induce Catholics to send their sons to that university, rather than to newly formed Catholic universities. The scheme was abandoned. When Catholics did begin to attend Oxford from the 1860s onwards, a Catholic club was formed and, in 1888, it was renamed the Oxford University Newman Society in recognition of Newman’s efforts on behalf of Catholicism in that university city. The Oxford Oratory was eventually founded over 100 years later in 1993. In 1859, Newman established, in connection with the Birmingham Oratory, a school for the education of the sons of gentlemen along lines similar to those of English public schools. The Oratory School flourished as a boy’s boarding school, dubbed 'The Catholic Eton’. Relationships with other converts Newman had a special concern in the publisher Burns & Oates; the owner, James Burns, had published some of the Tractarians, and Burns had himself converted to Roman Catholicism in 1847. Newman published several books with the company, effectively saving it. There is even a story that Newman’s novel Loss and Gain was written specifically to assist Burns. In 1863, in a response to Thomas William Allies, while agreeing that slavery was bad, Newman would not publicly condemn it as “intrinsically evil” on the grounds that it had been tolerated by St Paul– thus asserting that slavery is “a condition of life ordained by God in the same sense that other conditions of life are”. Newman and Henry Edward Manning both became significant figures in the late 19th-century Roman Catholic Church in England: both were Anglican converts and both were elevated to the dignity of cardinal. In spite of these similarities, in fact there was a lack of sympathy between the two men, who were different in character and experience, and they clashed on a number of issues, in particular the foundation of an Oratory in Oxford. On theological issues, Newman is seen as the more liberal because of his reservations about the declaration of papal infallibility (Manning favoured the formal declaration of the doctrine). George W. E. Russell recorded that: When Newman died there appeared in a monthly magazine a series of very unflattering sketches by one who had lived under his roof. I ventured to ask Cardinal Manning if he had seen these sketches. He replied that he had and thought them very shocking; the writer must have a very unenviable mind, &c., and then, having thus sacrificed to propriety, after a moment’s pause he added: “But if you ask me if they are like poor Newman, I am bound to say– a photograph.” Apologia In 1862 Newman began to prepare autobiographical and other memoranda to vindicate his career. The occasion came when, in January 1864, Charles Kingsley, reviewing James Anthony Froude’s History of England in Macmillan’s Magazine, incidentally asserted that “Father Newman informs us that truth for its own sake need not be, and on the whole ought not to be, a virtue of the Roman clergy.” Edward Lowth Badeley, who had been a close legal adviser to Newman since the Achilli trial, encouraged him to make a robust rebuttal. After some preliminary sparring between the two, in which Kingsley refused to admit any fault, Newman published a pamphlet, Mr Kingsley and Dr Newman: a Correspondence on the Question whether Dr Newman teaches that Truth is no Virtue, (published in 1864 and not reprinted until 1913). The pamphlet has been described as “unsurpassed in the English language for the vigour of its satire”. However, the anger displayed was later, in a letter to Sir William Cope, admitted to have been largely feigned. After the debate went public, Kingsley attempted to defend his assertion in a lengthy pamphlet entitled “What then does Dr Newman mean?”, described by a historian as “one of the most momentous rhetorical and polemical failures of the Victorian age”. In answer to Kingsley, again encouraged by Badeley, Newman published in bi-monthly parts his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, a religious autobiography of abiding interest. Its tone changed the popular estimate of its author, by explaining the convictions which had led him into the Catholic Church. Kingsley’s general accusation against the Catholic clergy is dealt with later in the work; his specific accusations are addressed in an appendix. Newman maintains that English Catholic priests are at least as truthful as English Catholic laymen. Newman published a revision of the series of pamphlets in book form in 1865; in 1913 a combined critical edition, edited by Wilfrid Ward, was published. Later years In 1870, Newman published his Grammar of Assent, a closely reasoned work in which the case for religious belief is maintained by arguments somewhat different from those commonly used by Roman Catholic theologians of the time. In 1877, in the republication of his Anglican works, he added to the two volumes containing his defence of the via media, a long preface in which he criticised and replied to anti-Catholic arguments of his own which were contained in the original works. At the time of the First Vatican Council (1869–1870), Newman was uneasy about the formal definition of the doctrine of papal infallibility, believing that the time was 'inopportune’. In a private letter to his bishop (William Bernard Ullathorne), surreptitiously published, he denounced the “insolent and aggressive faction” that had pushed the matter forward. Newman gave no sign of disapproval when the doctrine was finally defined, but was an advocate of the “principle of minimising”, that included very few papal declarations within the scope of infallibility. Subsequently, in a letter nominally addressed to the Duke of Norfolk when Gladstone accused the Roman Church of having “equally repudiated modern thought and ancient history”, Newman affirmed that he had always believed in the doctrine, and had only feared the deterrent effect of its definition on conversions on account of acknowledged historical difficulties. In this letter, and especially in the postscript to the second edition, Newman answered the charge that he was not at ease within the Catholic Church. Cardinalate In 1878, Newman’s old college elected him an honorary fellow, and he revisited Oxford, after an interval of thirty-two years, on the same day Pope Pius IX died. Pius had mistrusted Newman, but his successor, Pope Leo XIII, was encouraged by the Duke of Norfolk and other English Catholic laymen to make Newman a cardinal, despite the fact that he was neither a bishop nor resident in Rome. Cardinal Manning seems not to have been interested in having Newman become a cardinal, and remained silent when the Pope asked him about it; Bishop Ullathorne, as Newman’s immediate superior, sent word to Pope Leo that he would welcome the honour. The offer was made by Rome in February 1879. Newman accepted the gesture as a vindication of his work, but made two requests: that he not be consecrated a bishop on receiving the cardinalate, as was usual at that time; and that he might remain in Birmingham. Father John Henry Newman was elevated to the rank of cardinal in the Consistory of 12 May 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, who assigned him the Deaconry of San Giorgio al Velabro. Newman while in Rome insisted on the lifelong consistency of his opposition to “liberalism in religion.” Death After an illness, Newman returned to England and lived at the Oratory until his death, making occasional visits to London and chiefly to his old friend, R. W. Church, now Dean of St Paul’s. As a cardinal, Newman published nothing beyond a preface to a work by Arthur Wollaston Hutton on the Anglican ministry (1879) and an article “On the Inspiration of Scripture” in The Nineteenth Century (February 1884). From the latter half of 1886, Newman’s health began to fail, and he celebrated Mass for the last time on Christmas Day in 1889. On 11 August 1890 he died of pneumonia at the Birmingham Oratory. Eight days later his body was buried in the cemetery at Rednal Hill, Birmingham, at the country house of the Oratory. At the time of his death he had been Protodeacon of the Holy Roman Church. In accordance with his express wishes, Newman was buried in the grave of his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John. The pall over the coffin bore the motto that Newman adopted for use as a cardinal, Cor ad cor loquitur ("Heart speaks to heart"), which William Barry, writing in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), traces to Francis de Sales and sees as revealing the secret of Newman’s “eloquence, unaffected, graceful, tender, and penetrating”. Ambrose St. John had become a Roman Catholic at around the same time as Newman, and the two men have a joint memorial stone inscribed with the motto Newman had chosen, Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth"), which Barry traces to Plato’s allegory of the cave. On 27 February 1891, Newman’s estate was probated at £4,206. Remains Newman’s grave was opened on 2 October 2008, with the intention of moving any remains to a tomb inside Birmingham Oratory for their more convenient veneration as relics during Newman’s consideration for sainthood; however, his wooden coffin was found to have disintegrated and no bones were found. A representative of Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory alleged that this was because the coffin was wooden and the burial took place at a damp site. Contemporary sources show that the coffin was covered with a softer type of soil than the clay marl of the grave site. Forensic expert John Hunter, from the University of Birmingham, tested soil samples from near the grave and said that total disappearance of a body was unlikely over that timescale. He said that extreme conditions which could remove bone would also have removed the coffin handles, which were extant. Writer Some of Newman’s short and earlier poems are described by R. H. Hutton as “unequalled for grandeur of outline, purity of taste and radiance of total effect”; while his latest and longest, The Dream of Gerontius, attempts to represent the unseen world along the same lines as Dante. His prose style, especially in his Catholic days, is fresh and vigorous, and is attractive to many who do not sympathise with his conclusions, from the apparent candour with which difficulties are admitted and grappled; while in his private correspondence there is charm. James Joyce had a lifelong admiration for Newman’s writing style, and in a letter to his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver humorously remarked about Newman that “nobody has ever written English prose that can be compared with that of a tiresome footling little Anglican parson who afterwards became a prince of the only true church”. Theologian Around 1830, Newman developed a distinction between natural religion and revealed religion. Revealed religion is the Judeo-Christian revelation which finds its fulfilment in Jesus Christ. Natural religion refers to the knowledge of God and divine things that has been acquired outside the Judeo-Christian revelation. For Newman, this knowledge of God is not the result of unaided reason but of reason aided by grace, and so he speaks of natural religion as containing a revelation, even though it is an incomplete revelation. Newman’s view of natural religion gives rise to passages in his writings in which he appears to sympathise with a broader theology. Both as an Anglican and as a Catholic, he put forward the notion of a universal revelation. As an Anglican, Newman subscribed to this notion in various works, among them the 1830 University Sermon entitled “The Influence of Natural and Revealed Religion Respectively”, the 1833 poem “Heathenism”, and the book The Arians of the Fourth Century, also 1833, where he admits that there was “something true and divinely revealed in every religion”. As a Catholic, he included the idea in A Grammar of Assent: “As far as we know, there never was a time when... revelation was not a revelation continuous and systematic, with distinct representatives and an orderly succession.” Newman held that “freedom from symbols and articles is abstractedly the highest state of Christian communion”, but was “the peculiar privilege of the primitive Church.” In 1877 he allowed that “in a religion that embraces large and separate classes of adherents there always is of necessity to a certain extent an exoteric and an esoteric doctrine.” Character and relationships A recent biography of Newman notes that since his death in 1890 he has suffered almost as much misrepresentation as he did during his lifetime. In the Apologia he had exorcised the phantom which, as he said, “gibbers instead of me”– the phantom of the secret Romanist, corrupting the youth of Oxford, devious and dissimulating. But he raised another phantom– that of the oversensitive, self-absorbed recluse who never did anything but think and write. Unwary readers took the Apologia as autobiography, but it is strictly what Newman called its first parts—"A History of My Religious Opinions". In Newman’s letters and memoranda and those of his friends, a more outgoing and humorous character is revealed. Newman lived in the world of his time, travelling by train as soon as engines were built and rail lines laid, and writing amusing letters about his adventures on railways and ships or during his travels in Scotland and Ireland. He was an indefatigable walker, and as a young don at Oriel he often went out riding with Hurrell Froude and other friends. At Oxford he had an active pastoral life, as an Anglican priest, though nothing of it appears in the Apologia. Later he was active as a Catholic priest. His parishioners at the Oratory, apart from a few professional men and their families, were mainly factory workers, Irish immigrants, and tradespeople. He was a caring pastor, and their recorded reminiscences show that they held him in affection. Newman, who was only a few years younger than Keats and Shelley, was born into the Romantic generation, when Englishmen still wept in moments of emotion. But he lived on into the age of the stiff upper lip, with the result that later generations, hearing of his tears on a visit to his mother’s grave or at the funerals of old friends such as Henry Wilberforce, thought him not only sensitive but melancholy. The “sensitive recluse of legend” had a wide currency, appearing, for instance, in Lytton Strachey’s description, in his famously debunking set of portraits Eminent Victorians, as Newman’s “soft, spectacled, Oxford manner, with its half-effeminate diffidence”. Geoffrey Faber, whose own account of Newman in Oxford Apostles was far from hagiographic, found Strachey’s portrait a distasteful caricature, bearing scant likeness to the Newman of history and designed solely “to tickle the self-conceit of a cynical and beliefless generation”. However, in Strachey’s account the true villain is Cardinal Manning, who is accused of secretly briefing the Press the false story that Newman would turn down the Cardinalate, and who privately said of his late “friend”: “Poor Newman! He was a great hater!”. Strachey was only ten when Newman died and never met him. In contrast to Strachey’s account, James Anthony Froude, Hurrell Froude’s brother, who knew Newman at Oxford, saw him as a Carlylean hero. Compared with Newman, Froude wrote, Keble, Pusey and the other Tractarians “were all but as ciphers, and he the indicating number”. Newman’s face was “remarkably like that of Julius Caesar.... I have often thought of the resemblance, and believed that it extended to the temperament. In both there was an original force of character which refused to be moulded by circumstances, which was to make its own way, and become a power in the world; a clearness of intellectual perception, a disdain for conventionalities, a temper imperious and wilful, but along with it a most attaching gentleness, sweetness, singleness of heart and purpose. Both were formed by nature to command others, both had the faculty of attracting to themselves the passionate devotion of their friends and followers.... For hundreds of young men Credo in Newmannum was the veritable symbol of faith.” Celibacy Newman’s celibacy, which he embraced at the age of 15, also contributed to negative representations of his character, laying him open to what he called “slurs”. To exponents of Muscular Christianity such as Charles Kingsley, celibacy was synonymous with unmanliness. Kingsley, who interpreted the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as expressing a “binary law of man’s being; the want of a complementum, a 'help meet’, without whom it is not good for him to be”, feared and hated vowed sexual abstinence, considering it, in Laura Fasick’s words, “a distinct and separate perversion”. The charge of effeminacy was aimed not just at Newman but at Tractarians and Roman Catholics in general. “In all that school”, wrote Kingsley in 1851, “there is an element of foppery—even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement.” John Cornwell comments that "the notion of Newman’s effeminacy tells us more about the reaction of others to him at the time than [about] any tendency in his own nature.” To many members of the Oxford Movement, Newman included, it was Kingsley’s ideal of domesticity that seemed unmanly. As R. W. Church put it, "To shrink from [celibacy] was a mark of want of strength or intelligence, of an unmanly preference for English home life, of insensibility to the generous devotion and purity of the saints." Defending his decision to remain single, Charles Reding, the hero of Newman’s novel Loss and Gain, argues that “surely the idea of an Apostle, unmarried, pure, in fast and nakedness, and at length a martyr, is a higher idea than that of one of the old Israelites sitting under his vine and fig-tree, full of temporal goods, and surrounded by sons and grandsons?” James Eli Adams remarks that if manliness is equated with physical and psychological toughness, then perhaps “manhood cannot be sustained within domesticity, since the ideal is incompatible with ease.” A “common antagonism to domesticity” links “Tractarian discipline to Carlylean heroism”. Friendships Although Newman’s deepest relationships were with men, he had many affectionate friendships with women. One of the most important was with Maria Giberne, who knew him in his youth and followed him into the Catholic Church. She was a noted beauty, who even at fifty was described by one admirer as “the handsomest woman I ever saw in my life”. A gifted amateur artist, she painted many portraits of Newman at various periods, as well as several of the pictures hanging in the Birmingham Oratory. Newman had a photographic portrait of her in his room and was still corresponding with her into their eighties. Emily Bowles, who first met Newman at Littlemore, was the recipient of some of his most outspoken letters on what he felt to be the mistaken course of the extreme infallibilists and his reasons for not “speaking out” as many begged him to do. When she visited Newman at the Birmingham Oratory in 1861, she was welcomed by him “as only he can welcome”; she would never forget “the brightness that lit up his worn face as he received me at the door, carrying in several packages himself”. Newman also experienced intense male friendships, the first with Richard Hurrell Froude (1803–1836), the longest with Ambrose St John (1815–1875), who shared communitarian life with Newman for 32 years starting in 1843 (when St John was 28). Newman wrote after St John’s death: “I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband’s or a wife’s, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one’s sorrow greater, than mine.” He directed that he be buried in the same grave as St. John: “I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St John’s grave—and I give this as my last, my imperative will.” Newman spelt out his theology of friendship in a sermon he preached on the Feast of St John the Evangelist, traditionally thought to be the same person as the disciple John, “whom Jesus loved”. In the sermon, Newman said: “There have been men before now, who have supposed Christian love was so diffuse as not to admit of concentration upon individuals; so that we ought to love all men equally.... Now I shall maintain here, in opposition to such notions of Christian love, and with our Saviour’s pattern before me, that the best preparation for loving the world at large, and loving it duly and wisely, is to cultivate our intimate friendship and affection towards those who are immediately about us.” For Newman, friendship is an intimation of a greater love, a foretaste of heaven. In friendship, two intimate friends gain a glimpse of the life that awaits them in God. Juan R. Vélez writes that someday Newman “may well earn a new title, that of Doctor amicitiae: Doctor of the Church on Friendship. His biography is a treatise on the human and supernatural virtues that make up friendship.” Issues of sexual identity David Hilliard characterises Geoffrey Faber’s description of Newman, in his 1933 book Oxford Apostles, as a “portrait of Newman as a sublimated homosexual (though the word itself was not used)”. On Newman’s relations with Hurrell Froude, Faber wrote: “Of all his friends Froude filled the deepest place in his heart, and I’m not the first to point out that his occasional notions of marrying definitely ceased with the beginning of his real intimacy with Froude.” However, while Faber’s theory has had considerable popular influence, scholars of the Oxford Movement tend either to dismiss it entirely or to view it with great scepticism, with even scholars specifically concerned with same-sex desire hesitating to endorse it. Ellis Hanson, for instance, writes that Newman and Froude clearly “presented a challenge to Victorian gender norms”, but “Faber’s reading of Newman’s sexlessness and Hurrell Froude’s guilt as evidence of homosexuality” seems “strained”. When John Campbell Shairp combines masculine and feminine imagery in his highly poetic description of Newman’s preaching style at Oxford in the early 1840s, Frederick S. Roden is put in mind of “the late Victorian definition of a male invert, the homosexual: his (Newman’s) homiletics suggest a woman’s soul in a man’s body.” Roden, however, does not argue that Newman was homosexual, seeing him rather– particularly in his professed celibacy– as a “cultural dissident” or “queer”. Roden uses the term “queer” in a very general sense “to include any dissonant behaviours, discourses or claimed identities” in relation to Victorian norms. In this sense, “Victorian Roman and Anglo-Catholicism were culturally queer”. In Newman’s case, Roden writes, “homoaffectivity” (found in heterosexuals and homosexuals alike) “is contained in friendships, in relationships that are not overtly sexual”. In a September 2010 television documentary, “The Trouble with the Pope”, Peter Tatchell discussed Newman’s underlying sexuality, citing his close friendship with Ambrose St John and entries in Newman’s diaries describing their intense love for each other. Alan Bray, however, in his 2003 book The Friend, saw the bond between the two men as “entirely spiritual”, noting that Newman, when speaking of St John, echoes the language of John’s gospel. Shortly after St John’s death, Bray adds, Newman recorded “a conversation between them before St John lost his speech in those final days. He expressed his hope, Newman wrote, that during his whole priestly life he had not committed one mortal sin. For men of their time and culture that statement is definitive.... Newman’s burial with Ambrose St John cannot be detached from his understanding of the place of friendship in Christian belief or its long history.” Bray cites numerous examples of friends being buried together. Newman’s burial with St John was not unusual at the time and did not draw contemporary comment. David Hilliard writes that relationships such as Newman’s with Froude and St John “were not regarded by contemporaries as unnatural.... Nor is it possible, on the basis of passionate words uttered by mid-Victorians, to make a clear distinction between male affection and homosexual feeling. Theirs was a generation prepared to accept romantic friendships between men simply as friendships without sexual significance. Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff upper lip and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable.” Men born in the first decades of the nineteenth century had a capacity, that did not survive into later generations, for intense male friendships. The friendship of Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, immortalised in In Memoriam A.H.H., is a famous example. Less well-known is that of Charles Kingsley and his closest friend at Cambridge, Charles Mansfield. When Ian Ker reissued his biography of Newman in 2009, he added an afterword in which he put forward evidence that Newman was a heterosexual. He cited diary entries from December 1816 in which the 15-year-old Newman wrote about the temptations awaiting him when he returned home from boarding school and met girls at Christmas parties. As an adult, Newman wrote about the deep pain of the “sacrifice” of the life of celibacy. Ker comments: “The only 'sacrifice’ that he could possibly be referring to was that of marriage. And he readily acknowledges that from time to time he continued to feel the natural attraction for marriage that any heterosexual man would.” In 1833, Newman wrote that, despite having “willingly” accepted the call to celibacy, he felt “not the less... the need” of "the sort of interest [sympathy] which a wife takes and none but she– it is a woman’s interest". Influence and legacy Within both the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, Newman’s influence was great in dogma. For the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, Newman’s conversion secured prestige. On Catholics, his influence was mainly in the direction of a broader spirit and of a recognition of the part played by development, in doctrine and in church government. If his teaching on the Church was less widely followed, it was because of doubts as to the thoroughness of his knowledge of history and as to his freedom from bias as a critic. Some hundreds of clergymen influenced by the Oxford Movement, made submission to the Holy See; but a larger number, who also came under its influence, did not accept that belief in the Church necessitated acceptance of the Pope. Tertiary education Newman founded the independent school for boys Catholic University School, Dublin and the Catholic University of Ireland which evolved into University College, Dublin, a college of Ireland’s largest university, the National University of Ireland, which has contributed significantly both intellectually and socially to Ireland. A number of Newman Societies (or Newman Centers in the United States) in Newman’s honour have been established throughout the world, in the mould of the Oxford University Newman Society. They provide pastoral services and ministries to Catholics at non-Catholic universities; at various times this type of “campus ministry” (the distinction and definition being flexible) has been known to Catholics as the Newman Apostolate or “Newman movement”. Additionally, colleges have been named for him in Birmingham, England, Melbourne, Australia, Thodupuzha, India, and Wichita, United States. Newman’s Dublin lecture series The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated is thought to have become “the basis of a characteristic British belief that education should aim at producing generalists rather than narrow specialists, and that non-vocational subjects– in arts or pure science– could train the mind in ways applicable to a wide range of jobs.” Cause for his canonisation In 1991, Newman was proclaimed venerable by Pope John Paul II, after a thorough examination of his life and work by the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints. One miracle was investigated and confirmed by the Vatican, so he was beatified on 19 September 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI. A second miracle is necessary for his canonisation. Works * Anglican period * The Arians of the Fourth Century (1833) * Tracts for the Times (1833–1841) * British Critic (1836–1842) * On the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837) * Lectures on Justification (1838) * Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834–1843) * Select Treatises of St. Athanasius (1842, 1844) * Lives of the English Saints (1843–44) * Essays on Miracles (1826, 1843) * Oxford University Sermons (1843) * Sermons on Subjects of the Day (1843) * Catholic period * Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845) * Retractation of Anti-Catholic Statements (1845) * Loss and Gain (novel– 1848) * Faith and Prejudice and Other Unpublished Sermons (1848–1873; collected 1956) * Discourses to Mixed Congregations (1849) * Difficulties of Anglicans (1850) * The Present Position of Catholics in England (1851) * The Idea of a University (1852 and 1858) * Cathedra Sempiterna (1852) * Callista (novel– 1855) * The Rambler (editor) (1859–1860) * Apologia Pro Vita Sua (religious autobiography– 1864; revised edition, 1865) * Letter to Dr. Pusey (1865) * The Dream of Gerontius (1865) * An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870) * Sermons Preached on Various Occasions (various/1874) * Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875) * Five Letters (1875) * Sermon Notes (1849–1878) * Select Treatises of St. Athanasius (1881) * On the Inspiration of Scripture (1884) * Development of Religious Error (1885) * Other miscellaneous works * Historical Tracts of St. Athanasius (1843) * Essays Critical and Historical (various/1871) * Tracts Theological and Ecclesiastical (various/1871) * Discussions and Arguments (various/1872) * Historical Sketches (various/1872) * Addresses to Cardinal Newman and His Replies, with Biglietto Speech (1879) * Selections * Realizations: Newman’s Own Selection of His Sermons (edited by Vincent Ferrer Blehl, S.J., 1964). Liturgical Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-8146-3290-1 * Mary the Second Eve (compiled by Sister Eileen Breen, F.M.A., 1969). TAN Books, 2009. ISBN 978-0-89555-181-8 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman

Edward Taylor (1642– June 29, 1729) was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician. Early life The son of a non-conformist yeoman farmer, Taylor was born in 1642 at Sketchley, Leicestershire, England. Following restoration of the monarchy and the Act of Uniformity under Charles II, which cost Taylor his teaching position, he immigrated in 1668 to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in America. Early days in America He chronicled his Atlantic crossing and early years in America (from April 26, 1668, to July 5, 1671) in his now-published Diary. He was admitted to Harvard College as a second year student soon after arriving in America and upon graduation in 1671 became pastor and physician at Westfield, on the remote western frontier of Massachusetts, where he remained until his death. Poetry Taylor’s poems, in leather bindings of his own manufacture, survived him, but he had left instructions that his heirs should “never publish any of his writings,” and the poems remained all but forgotten for more than 200 years. In 1937 Thomas H. Johnson discovered a 7,000-page quarto manuscript of Taylor’s poetry in the library of Yale University and published a selection from it in The New England Quarterly. The appearance of these poems, wrote Taylor’s biographer Norman S. Grabo, "established [Taylor] almost at once and without quibble as not only America’s finest colonial poet, but as one of the most striking writers in the whole range of American literature." His most important poems, the first sections of Preparatory Meditations (1682–1725) and God’s Determinations Touching His Elect and the Elects Combat in Their Conversion and Coming up to God in Christ: Together with the Comfortable Effects Thereof (c. 1680), were published shortly after their discovery. His complete poems, however, were not published until 1960. He is the only major American poet to have written in the metaphysical style. Taylor’s poems were an expression of his deeply held religious views, acquired during a strict upbringing and shaped in adulthood by New England Congregationalist Puritans, who developed during the 1630s and 1640s rules far more demanding than those of their co-religionists in England. Alarmed by a perceived lapse in piety, they concluded that professing belief and leading a scandal free life were insufficient for full participation in the local assembly. To become communing participants, “halfway members” were required to relate by testimony some personal experience of God’s saving grace leading to conversion, thus affirming that they were, in their own opinion and that of the church, assured of salvation. This requirement, expressed in the famous Halfway Covenant of 1662, was defended by such prominent churchmen as Increase and Cotton Mather and was readily embraced by Taylor, who became one of its most vocal advocates. Though not for the most part identifiably sectarian, Taylor’s poems nonetheless are marked by a robust spiritual content, characteristically conveyed by means of homely and vivid imagery derived from everyday Puritan surroundings. “Taylor transcended his frontier circumstances,” biographer Grabo observed, “not by leaving them behind, but by transforming them into intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual universals.” Family He was twice married, first to Elizabeth Fitch, by whom he had eight children, five of whom died in childhood, and at her death to Ruth Wyllys, who bore six more children. Taylor himself died on June 29, 1729 in Westfield, Massachusetts. Works * “The Joy of Church Fellowship Rightly Attended” speaks of feelings of joyful acceptance as expressed in the singing of passengers riding in a coach on the way to heaven, accompanied by others, not yet members of the church, on foot. * In “Huswifery,” possibly his best known poem, Taylor speaks of the Christian (specifically puritanical) faith in terms of a spinning wheel and its various components, asking, in the first verse, * Make me, O Lord, thy spinning wheel complete. * Thy Holy Word my distaff make for me. * Make mine affections thy swift flyers neat * And make my soul thy holy spool to be. * My conversation make to be thy reel * And reel the yarn thereon spun of thy wheel. * “Meditation Eight” [even though this is a metaphysical poem] is centered on the concept of God’s being the living bread. * “The Preface to God’s Determination” [By personifying Calvanistic beliefs about life and death] speaks of the Creation, when God “filleted the earth so fine” and “in this Bowling Alley bowld the Sun.” * “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” depicts Satan as a spider weaving a web to entangle man [and in doing so portrays the dance of death], who is saved by the mercy of God. Musical settings * The last stanza of Taylor’s 1685 poem Meditation. Isaiah 63.1. Glorious in his Appareil. was set as an anthem, My lovely one, from Three anthems, Op. 27, by English composer Gerald Finzi in 1946. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Taylor

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1 April 1647– 26 July 1680), was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II’s Restoration court. The Restoration reacted against the “spiritual authoritarianism” of the Puritan era. Rochester was the embodiment of the new era, and he is as well known for his rakish lifestyle as his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died at the age of 33 from venereal disease. Rochester’s contemporary Andrew Marvell described him as “the best English satirist,” and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. His poetry, despite being widely censored during the Victorian era, enjoyed a revival from the 1920s onwards, with notable champions including Graham Greene and Ezra Pound. The critic Vivian de Sola Pinto linked Rochester’s libertinism to Hobbesian materialism. During his lifetime, he was best known for A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, and it remains among his best known works today. Life Upbringing and teens John Wilmot was born at Ditchley House in Oxfordshire on 1 April 1647. His father, Henry, Viscount Wilmot would be created Earl of Rochester in 1652 for his military service to Charles II during the King’s exile under the Commonwealth. Paul Davis describes Henry as "a Cavalier legend, a dashing bon viveur and war-hero who single-handedly engineered the future Charles II’s escape to the Continent (including the famous concealment in an oak tree) after the disastrous battle of Worcester in 1651". His mother, Anne St. John, was a strong-willed Puritan from a noble Wiltshire family. From the age of seven, Rochester was privately tutored, two years later attending the grammar school in nearby Burford. His father died in 1658, and John Wilmot inherited the title of the Earl of Rochester in April of that year. In January 1660, Rochester was admitted as a Fellow commoner to Wadham College, Oxford, a new and comparatively poor college. Whilst there, it is said, the 13-year-old “grew debauched”. In September 1661 he was awarded an honorary M.A. by the newly elected Chancellor of the university, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, a family friend. As an act of gratitude towards the son of Henry Wilmot, Charles II conferred on Rochester an annual pension of £500. In November 1661 Charles sent Rochester on a three year Grand Tour of France and Italy, and appointed the physician Andrew Balfour as his governor. This exposed him to an unusual degree to European (especially French) writing and thought. In 1664 Rochester returned to London, and made his formal début at the Restoration court on Christmas Day. It has been suggested by a number of scholars that the King took a paternal role in Rochester’s life. Charles II suggested a marriage between Rochester and the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Malet. Her wealth-hungry relatives opposed marriage to the impoverished Rochester, who conspired with his mother to abduct the young Countess. Samuel Pepys described the attempted abduction in his diary on 28 May 1665: Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs. Mallett, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at White Hall with Mrs. Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and foot men, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no successe [sic]) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry, and the Lord sent to the Tower. 18-year-old Rochester spent three weeks in the Tower, and was only released after he wrote a penitent apology to the King. Rochester attempted to redeem himself by volunteering for the navy in the Second Dutch War in the winter of 1665, serving under the Earl of Sandwich. His courage at the Battle of Vågen, serving onboard the ship of Thomas Teddeman, made him a war hero. Pleased with his conduct, Charles appointed Rochester a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in March 1666, which granted him prime lodgings in Whitehall and a pension of £1,000 a year. The role encompassed, one week in every four, Rochester helping the King to dress and undress, serve his meals when dining in private, and sleeping at the foot of the King’s bed. In the summer of 1666, Rochester returned to sea, serving under Edward Spragge. He again showed extraordinary courage in battle. Upon returning from sea, Rochester resumed his courtship of Elizabeth Malet. Defying her family’s wishes, Malet eloped with Rochester again in January 1667, and they were married at the Knightsbridge chapel. In October 1667, the monarch granted Rochester special licence to enter the House of Lords early, despite being seven months underage. The act was an attempt by the King to bolster his number of supporters among the Lords. Teenage actress Nell Gwyn “almost certainly” took him as her lover; she was later to become the mistress of Charles II. Gwyn remained a lifelong friend and political associate, and her relationship with the King gave Rochester influence and status within the Court. 20s and last years Rochester’s life was divided between domesticity in the country and a riotous existence at court, where he was renowned for drunkenness, vivacious conversation, and “extravagant frolics” as part of the Merry Gang (as Andrew Marvell described them). The Merry Gang flourished for about 15 years after 1665 and included Henry Jermyn; Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset; John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave; Henry Killigrew; Sir Charles Sedley; the playwrights William Wycherley and George Etherege; and George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Gilbert Burnet wrote of him that, "For five years together he was continually Drunk... [and] not... perfectly Master of himself... [which] led him to... do many wild and unaccountable things." In 1669 he committed treason by boxing the ears of Thomas Killigrew in sight of the monarch and was banned from the court, although the King soon called for his return. In 1673, Rochester began to train Elizabeth Barry as an actress. She went on to become the most famous actress of her age. He took her as his mistress in 1675. The relationship lasted for around five years, and produced a daughter, before descending into acrimony after Rochester began to resent her success. Rochester wrote afterwards, "With what face can I incline/To damn you to be only mine?... Live up to thy might mind/And be the mistress of mankind". When the King’s advisor and friend of Rochester, George Villiers lost power in 1673, Rochester’s standing fell as well. At the Christmas festivities at Whitehall of that year, Rochester delivered a satire to Charles II, “In the Isle of Britain”– which criticized the King for being obsessed with sex at the expense of his kingdom. Charles’ reaction to this satirical portrayal resulted in Rochester’s exile from the court until February. During this time Rochester dwelt at his estate in Adderbury. Despite this, in February 1674, after much petitioning by Rochester, the King appointed him Ranger of Woodstock Park. In June 1675 “Lord Rochester in a frolick after a rant did... beat downe the dyill (i.e. sundial) which stood in the middle of the Privie Garding, which was esteemed the rarest in Europ”. John Aubrey learned what Rochester said on this occasion when he came in from his “revells” with Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, and Fleetwood Sheppard to see the object: “'What... doest thou stand here to fuck time?' Dash they fell to worke”. It has been speculated that the comment refers not to the dial itself, which was not phallic in appearance, but a painting of the King next to the dial that featured his phallic sceptre. Rochester fled the court again. Rochester fell into disfavour again in 1676. During a late-night scuffle with the night watch, one of Rochester’s companions was killed by a pike-thrust. Rochester was reported to have fled the scene of the incident, and his standing with the monarch reached an all time low. Following this incident, Rochester briefly fled to Tower Hill, where he impersonated a mountebank “Doctor Bendo”. Under this persona, he claimed skill in treating “barrenness” (infertility), and other gynecological disorders. Gilbert Burnet wryly noted that Rochester’s practice was “not without success”, implying his intercession of himself as surreptitious sperm donor. On occasion, Rochester also assumed the role of the grave and matronly Mrs. Bendo, presumably so that he could inspect young women privately without arousing their husbands’ suspicions. Death By the age of 33, Rochester was dying, from what is usually described as the effects of syphilis, gonorrhea, or other venereal diseases, combined with the effects of alcoholism. Carol Richards has disputed this, arguing that it is more likely that he died of renal failure due to chronic nephritis as a result of suffering from Bright’s disease. His mother had him attended in his final weeks by her religious associates, particularly Gilbert Burnet, later Bishop of Salisbury. After hearing of Burnet’s departure from his side, Rochester muttered his last words; “Has my friend left me? then I shall die shortly”. In the early morning of 26 July 1680, Rochester died “without a shudder or a sound”. He was buried at Spelsbury Church in Oxfordshire. A deathbed renunciation of libertinism was published and promulgated as the conversion of a prodigal son. Because the first published account of this story appears in Burnet’s own writings, its accuracy has been disputed by some scholars, who accuse Burnet with having shaped the account of Rochester’s denunciation of libertinism to enhance his own reputation. Works * Three major critical editions of Rochester in the twentieth century have taken very different approaches to authenticating and organizing his canon. David Vieth’s 1968 edition adopts a heavily biographical organization, modernizing spellings and heading the sections of his book “Prentice Work”, “Early Maturity”, “Tragic Maturity”, and “Disillusionment and Death”. Keith Walker’s 1984 edition takes a genre-based approach, returning to the older spellings and accidentals in an effort to present documents closer to those a seventeenth century audience would have received. Harold Love’s Oxford University Press edition of 1999, now the scholarly standard, notes the variorum history conscientiously, but arranges works in genre sections ordered from the private to the public. Scholarship has identified approximately 75 authentic Rochester poems. * Rochester’s poetic work varies widely in form, genre, and content. He was part of a “mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease”, who continued to produce their poetry in manuscripts, rather than in publication. As a consequence, some of Rochester’s work deals with topical concerns, such as satires of courtly affairs in libels, to parodies of the styles of his contemporaries, such as Sir Carr Scroope. He is also notable for his impromptus, one of which is a teasing epitaph of King Charles II: * We have a pretty witty king, * And whose word no man relies on, * He never said a foolish thing, * And never did a wise one” * to which Charles supposedly said “that’s true, for my words are my own, but my actions are those of my ministers”. * Rochester’s poetry displays a range of learning and influences. These included imitations of Malherbe, Ronsard, and Boileau. He also translated or adapted from classical authors such as Petronius, Lucretius, Ovid, Anacreon, Horace, and Seneca. * Rochester’s writings were at once admired and infamous. A Satyr Against Mankind (1675), one of the few poems he published (in a broadside in 1679) is a scathing denunciation of rationalism and optimism that contrasts human perfidy with animal wisdom. * The majority of his poetry was not published under his name until after his death. Because most of his poems circulated only in manuscript form during his lifetime, it is likely that much of his writing does not survive. Burnet claimed that Rochester’s conversion experience led him to ask that “all his profane and lewd writings” be burned; it is unclear how much, if any, of Rochester’s writing was destroyed. * Rochester was also interested in the theatre. In addition to an interest in actresses, he wrote an adaptation of Fletcher’s Valentinian (1685), a scene for Sir Robert Howard’s The Conquest of China, a prologue to Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco (1673), and epilogues to Sir Francis Fane’s Love in the Dark (1675), Charles Davenant’s Circe, a Tragedy (1677). The best-known dramatic work attributed to Rochester, Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, has never been successfully proven to be written by him. Posthumous printings of Sodom, however, gave rise to prosecutions for obscenity, and were destroyed. On 16 December 2004 one of the few surviving copies of Sodom was sold by Sotheby’s for £45,600. * Rochester’s letters to his wife and to his friend Henry Savile show an admirable mastery of easy, colloquial prose. Reception and influence * Rochester was the model for a number of rake heroes in plays of the period, such as Don John in Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675) and Dorimant in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676). Meanwhile he was eulogised by his contemporaries such as Aphra Behn and Andrew Marvell, who described him as “the only man in England that had the true vein of satire”. Daniel Defoe quoted him in Moll Flanders, and discussed him in other works. Voltaire, who spoke of Rochester as “the man of genius, the great poet”, admired his satire for its “energy and fire” and translated some lines into French to “display the shining imagination his lordship only could boast”. * By the 1750s, Rochester’s reputation suffered as the liberality of the Restoration era subsided; Samuel Johnson characterised him as a worthless and dissolute rake. Horace Walpole described him as “a man whom the muses were fond to inspire but ashamed to avow”. Despite this general disdain for Rochester, William Hazlitt commented that his “verses cut and sparkle like diamonds” while his “epigrams were the bitterest, the least laboured, and the truest, that ever were written”. Referring to Rochester’s perspective, Hazlitt wrote that “his contempt for everything that others respect almost amounts to sublimity”. Meanwhile, Goethe quoted A Satyr against Reason and Mankind in English in his Autobiography. Despite this, Rochester’s work was largely ignored throughout the Victorian era. * Rochester’s reputation would not begin to revive until the 1920s. Ezra Pound, in his ABC of Reading, compared Rochester’s poetry favourably to better known figures such as Alexander Pope and John Milton. Graham Greene characterised Rochester as a “spoiled Puritan”. Although F. R. Leavis argued that “Rochester is not a great poet of any kind”, William Empson admired him. More recently, Germaine Greer has questioned the validity of the appraisal of Rochester as a drunken rake, and hailed the sensitivity of some of his lyrics. * Rochester was listed #6 in Time Out’s "Top 30 chart of London’s most erotic writers". Tom Morris, the associate director, of the National Theatre said ‘Rochester reminds me of an unhinged poacher, moving noiselessly through the night and shooting every convention that moves. Bishop Burnett, who coached him to an implausible death-bed repentance, said that he was unable to express any feeling without oaths and obscenities. He seemed like a punk in a frock coat. But once the straw dolls have been slain, Rochester celebrates in a sexual landscape all of his own.’ In popular culture * A play, The Libertine (1994), was written by Stephen Jeffreys, and staged by the Royal Court Theatre. The 2004 film The Libertine, based on Jeffreys’ play, starred Johnny Depp as Rochester, Samantha Morton as Elizabeth Barry, John Malkovich as King Charles II and Rosamund Pike as Elizabeth Malet. Michael Nyman set to music an excerpt of Rochester’s poem, “Signor Dildo” for the film. * Rochester is the central character in Anna Lieff Saxby’s 1996 erotic novella 'No Paradise But Pleasure’ References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilmot,_2nd_Earl_of_Rochester

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (born March 24, 1919) is an American poet, painter, liberal activist, and the co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, he is best known for A Coney Island of the Mind (1958), a collection of poems that has been translated into nine languages, with sales of more than one million copies. Early life Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919 in Bronxville, New York. His mother, Albertine Mendes-Monsanto (born in Lyon, France) was of French/Portuguese Sephardic heritage. His father, Carlo Ferlinghetti, was born in Chiari, a small town in the province of Brescia, Italy on March 14, 1872. He immigrated to the United States in 1894, was naturalized in 1896, and worked as an auctioneer in Little Italy, of New York City. At some unknown point, Carlo Ferlinghetti shortened the family name to "Ferling," and Lawrence would not learn of his original family name until 1942, when he had to provide a birth certificate to join the U.S. Navy. Although he used "Ferling" for his earliest published work, Ferlinghetti reverted to the original Italian "Ferlinghetti" in 1955, when publishing his first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World. Ferlinghetti's father died six months before he was born, and his mother was committed to an asylum shortly after his birth. He was raised by his French aunt Emily, the former wife of Ludovico Monsanto, an uncle of his mother from the Virgin Islands, who taught Spanish at the U.S. Naval Academy. Emily took Ferlinghetti to Strasbourg, France, where they lived during his first five years of his life, Ferlinghetti was raised speaking French as his first language. After their return to the U.S., Ferlinghetti was placed in an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York while Emily looked for employment. She eventually was hired as a French governess for the daughter of Presley Eugene Bisland and his wife, Anna Lawrence Bisland, in Bronxville, New York, the latter being the daughter of the founder of Sarah Lawrence College, William Van Duzer Lawrence. They resided at the Plashbourne Estate. In 1926, Ferlinghetti was left in the care of the Bislands. He later attended various schools including Riverdale Country School, Bronxville Public School, and Mount Hermon School (now Northfield Mount Hermon School). During these years, Ferlinghetti became an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. He attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. His entry to the world of journalism was writing sports for The Daily Tar Heel, and he published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine, for which Thomas Wolfe had written. World War II In the summer of 1941, he lived with two college mates on Little Whale Boat Island in Casco Bay, Maine, lobster fishing, and raking moss from rocks to be sold in Portland, Maine, for pharmaceutical use. This experience gave him a love of the sea, a theme that runs through much of his poetry. After the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ferlinghetti enrolled in midshipmen’s school in Chicago, and in 1942 shipped out as junior officer on J. P. Morgan III's yacht, which had been refitted to patrol for submarines off the East Coast. Next, Ferlinghetti was assigned to the Ambrose Lightship outside New York harbor, to identify all incoming ships. In 1943 and 1944, he served as an officer on three U.S. Navy subchasers used as convoy escorts. As commander of the submarine chaser USS SC1308, he was at the Normandy invasion as part of the anti-submarine screen around the beaches. After VE Day, the Navy transferred him to the Pacific Theater, where he served as navigator of the troop ship USS Selinur. Six weeks after the atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki, he visited the ruins of the city, an experience that turned him into a lifelong pacifist. Columbia University and The Sorbonne After the war, he worked briefly in the mailroom at Time magazine, in Manhattan. The G.I. Bill then enabled him to enroll in the graduate school of Columbia University. Among his professors there were Babette Deutsch, Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and Mark Van Doren. In those years he was reading modern literature, and has said that at that time, he was influenced particularly by Shakespeare, Marlowe, the Romantic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and James Joyce, as well as American poets Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, and American novelists Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. He earned a master's degree in English literature in 1947 with a thesis on John Ruskin and the British painter J. M. W. Turner. From Columbia, he went to Paris to continue his studies and lived in the city between 1947 and 1951, earning a Doctorat de l’Université de Paris, with a "mention très honorable." His two theses were on the city as a symbol in modern poetry and on the nature of Gothic. He met his future wife, Selden Kirby-Smith, granddaughter of Edmund Kirby-Smith, in 1946 aboard a ship en route to France. They both were heading to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. Kirby-Smith went by the name Kirby. San Francisco – City Lights Books After marrying in 1951 in Duval County, Florida, they settled in San Francisco in 1953, where he taught French in an adult education program, painted, and wrote art criticism. His first translations, of poems by the French surrealist Jacques Prévert, were published by Peter D. Martin in his popular culture magazine City Lights. In 1953, Ferlinghetti and Martin founded City Lights Bookstore, the first all-paperbound bookshop in the country. Two years later, after the departure of Martin, Ferlinghetti launched the publishing wing of City Lights with his own first book of poems, Pictures of the Gone World, the first number in the Pocket Poets Series. This volume was followed by books by Kenneth Rexroth, Kenneth Patchen, Marie Ponsot, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, William Carlos Williams, and Gregory Corso. Although City Lights Publishers is best known for its publication of Beat Generation writers, Ferlinghetti never intended to publish the Beats exclusively, and the press has always maintained a strong international list. City Lights Publishers expanded its list from poetry to include prose, including novels, biography, memoirs, essays, and cultural studies. In 1972, City Lights published a collection of short stories by Charles Bukowski, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (since republished in two volumes, Tales of Ordinary Madness and The Most Beautiful Woman in Town). Subsequently it took over publication of Bukowski's collection of "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" columns for Open City from the pornography publisher Essex House in the early 1970s. Since then, it has published a sequel to Notes and a book of ephemera by Bukowski. Other prose works include Neal Cassady's memoir The First Third, Edie Kerouac-Parker's memoir of her life with Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs's The Yage Letters to Allen Ginsberg, and other ephemera. It has also published political books by prominent authors, including Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, and Howard Zinn. Books published in translation include such authors as Georges Bataille, Bertolt Brecht, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Howl trial The fourth number in the Pocket Poets Series was Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Ferlinghetti was in attendance at the now-famous Six Gallery reading where Ginsberg first performed Howl publicly. The next day Ferlinghetti wired Ginsberg: "I greet you at the beginning of a great literary career," subsequently offering to publish his work. The book was seized in 1956 by the San Francisco police. Ferlinghetti and Shig Murao, the bookstore manager who had sold the book to the police, were arrested on obscenity charges. After charges against Murao were dropped, Ferlinghetti, defended by Jake Ehrlich and the American Civil Liberties Union, stood trial in San Francisco Municipal court. The publicity generated by the trial drew national attention to San Francisco Renaissance and Beat movement writers. Ferlinghetti had the support of prestigious literary and academic figures, and, at the end of a long trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn found Howl not obscene, and acquitted him in October 1957. The landmark First Amendment case established a key legal precedent for the publication of other controversial literary work with redeeming social importance. In 2010, Andrew Rogers portrayed Ferlinghetti in the film Howl. Beat writers Although in style and theme, Ferlinghetti’s own writing is very unlike that of the original New York Beat circle, he had important associations with the Beat writers, who made City Lights Bookstore their headquarters when they were in San Francisco. He often has claimed that he was not a Beat, but a bohemian of an earlier generation. A married war veteran and a bookstore proprietor, he did not share the high (or low) life of the Beats on the road. Jack Kerouac wrote Ferlinghetti into the character “Lorenzo Monsanto” in his autobiographical novel, Big Sur (1962), the story of Kerouac’s stay (with the Cassadys, the McClures, Lenore Kandel, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen) at Ferlinghetti’s cabin in the wild coastal region of Big Sur. Kerouac depicts the Ferlinghetti figure as a generous and good-humored host, in the midst of Dionysian revels and breakdowns. Over the years Ferlinghetti published work by many of the Beats, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, Diane diPrima, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Gary Snyder. He was Ginsberg’s publisher for more than thirty years. When the Indian poets of the Hungryalists literary movement were arrested in 1964 at Kolkata, Ferlinghetti introduced the Hungryalist poets to Western readers through the initial issues of City Lights Journal. Political engagement Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and he sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore. A critic of U.S. foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war. While Ferlinghetti has expressed that he is "an anarchist at heart," he concedes that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pure anarchism to be lived practically. Hence he espouses what can be achieved by Scandinavian-style democratic socialism. Ferlinghetti's work challenges the definition of art and the artist’s role in the world. He urged poets to be engaged in the political and cultural life of the country. As he writes in Populist Manifesto: "Poets, come out of your closets, Open your windows, open your doors, You have been holed up too long in your closed worlds... Poetry should transport the public/to higher places/than other wheels can carry it..." On January 14, 1967, he was a featured presenter at the Gathering of the tribes "Human Be-In," which drew tens of thousands of people and launched San Francisco's "Summer of Love." In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Ferlinghetti was instrumental in bringing poetry out of the academy and back into the public sphere with public poetry readings. With Ginsberg and other progressive writers, he took part in events that focused on such political issues as the Cuban revolution, the nuclear arms race, farm-worker organizing, the murder of Salvador Allende, the Vietnam War, May ’68 in Paris, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico. He read not only to audiences in the United States, but widely in Europe and Latin America. Many of his writings grew from travels in France, Italy, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Nicaragua, and the Czech Republic. In March 2012, he added his support to the movement to save the Gold Dust Lounge, a historic Gold Rush-era bar in San Francisco, which lost its lease in Union Square. Painting Ferlinghetti began painting while in Paris in 1948. In San Francisco, he occupied a studio at 9 Mission Street on the Embarcadero in the 1950s that he inherited from Hassel Smith, and subsequently passed on to the artist Howard Hack. He admired the New York abstract expressionists, and his first work exhibits their influence. A more figurative style is apparent in his later work. Ferlinghetti’s paintings have been shown at various museums around the world, from solo shows at the Butler Institute of American Art to Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. He has been associated with the international Fluxus movement through the Archivio Francesco Conz in Verona. In San Francisco, his work may be seen regularly at the George Krevsky Gallery. In 2009 Ferlinghetti became a member of the Honour Committee of the Italian artistic literary movement IMMAGINE&POESIA, founded under the patronage of Aeronwy Thomas. A retrospective of Ferlinghetti's artwork, 60 years of painting, was staged in Rome and Reggio Calabria in 2010. Jack Kerouac Alley In 1987, he was the initiator of the transformation of Jack Kerouac Alley, located at the side of his shop. He presented his idea to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors calling for repavement and renewal. Since 1991, young volunteers from the Adopt-An-Alleyway Youth Empowerment Project – a program run by the Chinatown Community Development Center – have maintained the good condition of the alley, which is a bridge between Chinatown and North Beach. Awards He has received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles Times’ Robert Kirsch Award, the BABRA Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters, and the ACLU Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award. He won the Premio Taormino in 1973, and since then has been awarded the Premio Camaiore, the Premio Flaiano, the Premio Cavour, among other honors in Italy. Ferlinghetti was named San Francisco’s Poet Laureate in August 1998 and served for two years. In 2003 he was awarded the Robert Frost Memorial Medal, the Author’s Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, and he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003. The National Book Foundation honored him with the inaugural Literarian Award (2005), given for outstanding service to the American literary community. In 2007 he was named Commandeur, French Order of Arts and Letters. In 2012, Ferlinghetti received the Douglas MacAgy Distinguished Achievement Award from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 2012, Ferlinghetti was awarded the inaugural Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club. After learning that the government of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a partial sponsor of the €50,000 prize, he declined to accept the award. In declining, Ferlinghetti cited his opposition to the "right wing regime" of Prime Minister Orban, and his opinion that the ruling Hungarian government under Mr. Orban is curtailing civil liberties and freedom of speech for the people of Hungary. In popular culture The Italian band Timoria dedicated the song "Ferlinghetti Blues" (from the album El Topo Grand Hotel) to the poet, where Ferlinghetti recites one of his poems. Recordings of Ferlinghetti reading want ads, as featured on radio station KPFA in 1957, were recorded by Henry Jacobs and are featured on the Meat Beat Manifesto album 'At the Center'. Ferlinghetti gave Canadian punk band Propagandhi permission to use his painting The Unfinished Flag of the United States, which features a map of the world painted in the stars and stripes, as the cover of their 2001 release Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes. Before this, the same painting was used for the cover of Michael Parenti's 1995 book, Against Empire, which was published by City Lights. Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band's final performance. Entitled The Last Waltz, this concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as a documentary which included Ferlinghetti's recitation. Julio Cortázar, in his Rayuela (Hopscotch) (1963) references a poem by Ferlinghetti in Chapter 121. He appears as himself in the 2006 comedy film The Darwin Awards. Bob Dylan used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill", from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd. Cyndi Lauper was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink. Seamus McNally's 2007 filmed adaptation of Jacques Prévert's "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird" uses Ferlinghetti's English translation as it's narrative text. The Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps's 2008 marching show was entitled "Constantly Risking Absurdity", with movements entitled after various lines in Ferlinghetti's poem. The corps took second place at the Drum Corps International Finals. Aztec Two-Step is an American folk-rock band formed by Rex Fowler and Neal Shulman at a chance meeting on open stage at a Boston coffee house, the Stone Phoenix, in 1971. The band was named after a line from the poem "A Coney Island of the Mind" by Ferlinghetti. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place...") in the song "The World Is" on its 2002 album New World Disorder. In 2011, Ferlinghetti contributed two of his poems to the celebration of the 150th Anniversary of Italian unification: Song of the Third World War and Old Italians Dying inspired the artists of the exhibition Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Italy 150 held in Turin, Italy (May–June 2011). Christopher Felver made the 2013 documentary on Ferlinghetti, Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder. Ferlinghetti prefers association football to American football. References Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Ferlinghetti

Arthur Hugh Clough (1 January 1819 – 13 November 1861) was an English poet, an educationalist, and the devoted assistant to ground-breaking nurse Florence Nightingale. He was the brother of suffragist Anne Clough, who became principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. He was born in Liverpool to James Butler Clough, a cotton merchant of Welsh descent, and Anne Perfect, from Pontefract in Yorkshire. In 1822 the family moved to the United States, and Clough’s early childhood was spent mainly in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1828 Clough and his older brother Charles returned to England to attend school in Chester.

David Ignatow (February 7, 1914– November 17, 1997) was an American poet. Life David Ignatow was born in Brooklyn on February 7, 1914, and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He died on November 17, 1997, at his home in East Hampton, New York. His papers are held at University of California, San Diego. Ignatow began his professional career as a businessman. After committing wholly to poetry, Ignatow worked as an editor of American Poetry Review, Analytic, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Chelsea Magazine, and as poetry editor of The Nation. He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College, City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987. Awards * Ignatow’s many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award “for a lifetime of creative effort.” He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America. Bibliography * Living Is What I Wanted: Last Poems (BOA Editions, 1999) * At My Ease: Uncollected Poems of the Fifties and Sixties (1998) * I Have a Name (1996) * The End Game and Other Stories (1996) * Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (1994) * Despite the Plainness of the Day: Love Poems (1991) * Shadowing the Ground (1991) * New and Collected Poems, 1970-1985 (1986) * Leaving the Door Open (1984) * Whisper the Earth (1981) * Conversations (1980) * Sunlight (1979) * Tread the Dark (1978) * Selected Poems (1975) * Facing the Tree (1975) * Poems: 1934-1969 (1970) * Rescue the Dead (1968) * Earth Hard: Selected Poems (1968) * Figures of the Human (1964) * Say Pardon (1962) * The Gentle Weightlifter (1955) * Poems (1948) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ignatow

Joseph Seamon Cotter Sr. (February 2, 1861– March 14, 1949) was a poet, writer, playwright, and community leader raised in Louisville, Kentucky (but born in Nelson County, Kentucky). Cotter was one of the earliest African-American playwrights to be published. He was known as “Kentucky’s first Negro poet with real creative ability.” Born at the start of the American Civil War, raised in poverty with no formal education until the age of 22, and living through a time of monumental change, Cotter also became an educator and an advocate of black education. Personal life Cotter grew up in a family of mixed racial heritage. His father, Michael J. Cotter, was a white man of Scots-Irish ancestry, and his mother, Martha Vaughn, was a freeborn black of mixed heritage (one of several children born to an African slave mother and an English-Cherokee father). On July 22, 1891, Cotter married Maria F. Cox, a fellow teacher, with whom he had four children: Leonidas, Florence, Olivia, and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr (a distinguished poet-playwright in his own merit). Education After completing the third grade, Cotter dropped out to help support his family. Cotter worked in manual labor and various odd jobs until the age of 22, where he joined the first and newly created Louisville night school for black students. Cotter attended night school for ten months, earning his high school diploma and teaching credentials. According to Metzger (1989): “There is little specific information about either the extent of Cotter’s education—it seems certain that he never attended college or completed a degree-granting program—or his professional life as an educator. Although some writers had felt that Cotter must have attended college, his love of writing and of literature might just have well stemmed from the many books that his mother had read to him as a child. And although Cotter’s contributions to black education are now seen as extremely important, at the time he was working, few details of such work were preserved for later study. What is now certain is that Cotter became a respected writer, although when he first began to write is not clear.” Career in education Once becoming qualified to teach, Cotter got his first job in the Cloverport Public School system. The conditions at Cloverport were extremely poor. Cotter made the best of teaching children in a small one-roomed school house with dirt flooring and no heating. This marked the start of Cotter’s long dedication to the education of black children and a commitment to his community. After two years teaching at Cloverport, Cotter taught at a nearby private school before moving to the Louisville Public School system two years later. His first job within the Louisville Public School system was at Western Colored School, which was located in an all-black neighborhood. Here Cotter would teach for the next four years, from 1889 to 1893. Attesting to his belief in black education, in 1893 Cotter founded the Paul Lawrence Dunbar School, named after the poet and friend Paul Laurence Dunbar. Cotter served as principal of this black high school until 1911, whereupon he took the position of principal at Samuel Coleridge-Taylor School and held the post until 1942. Along with his 53-year career as an educator, Cotter worked for racial advancement with many local and national organizations, including Louisville Colored Orphans Home Society, Kentucky Educational Association, Author’s League, Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and NAACP. Literary contributions Cotter’s literary contributions include nine published works. Among these works are 4 volumes of poetry: A Rhyming (1895); Links of Friendship (1898); A White Song and a Black One (1909); and Collected Poems (1938). Cotter’s other publications include: Sequel to “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and Other Poems (1939), a collection of poetry and prose; Negroes and Others at Work and Play (1947); Caleb, the Degenerate; A Play in Four Acts: A Study of the Types, Customs, and Needs of the American Negro (1903); and 2 collections of prose, Negro Tales (1912), and Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of Colored Parkland or “Little Africa,” Louisville, Ky., 1891–1916 (1934). Cotter also often contributed to periodicals such as the Louisville Courier-Journal (from 1884), National Baptist Magazine (1894–1908), Voice of the Negro (1904–07), Southern Teachers Advocate (Kentucky; 1905-6), and Alexander’s Magazine (1909). According to William S. Ward, "…[Cotter’s] writings have never won him high recognition, but he has fared rather well at the hands of black historians." Cotter’s writing is known to utilize both dialect and standard English to advocate race advancement, “to be gained by a mixture of race pride, humility, hard work, education, and a positive, optimistic outlook.” Historian Joan R. Sherman also notes that a common theme seen in Cotter’s writing, from his earliest poems to The Negro’s Ten Commandments (1947), is that "he consistently advocated this gospel: (5) Read not thyself out of toiling with the hands, and toil not thyself out of reading; for reading makes one akin to the ox. Therefore he who simply dreams is dying, and he who dreams not is already dead. (7) Learn thou the worth of a dollar and how to keep it from damning thee. (9) Socially thou shalt go no nearer thy brother than he comes to thee. Aversion in him should slay the thought of advance in thee. (10) If thou hast a mind to live by being honest, industrious, frugal and self-sacrificing, remain in the South where thou shalt surely reap thy character’s worth; but if thou hast a mind to die through sloth, ignorance and folly, get thee far from it, for the burden of burying such is becoming intolerable.” Bibliography * Cotter, Joseph S. A Rhyming. Louisville, Ky.: New South Publishing, Co., 1895. 32 pp. Copy: DLC * Cotter, Joseph S. Links of Friendship. Louisville, Ky.: Bradley & Gilbert Co., 1898. 64 pp. 54 poems. Portrait. Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch. * Cotter, Joseph S. Caleb, the Degenerate; A Play in Four Acts: A Study of the Types, Customs, and Needs of the American Negro. Louisville, Ky.: Bradley & Gilbert Co., 1903. 57 pp. Portrait. *Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch copy inscribed by Cotter to the Rev. Edward Everett Hale. * Cotter, Joseph S. Negro Tales. New York: Cosmopolitan Press, 1912. 148 pp. 17 tales. Copies: DHU, NNsch. * Cotter, Joseph S. A White Song and a Black One. Louisville, Ky.: Bradley & Gilbert Co., 1909. 64 pp. 48 poems. Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch copy inscribed: “With compliments of Joseph S. Cotter.” * Cotter, Joseph S. Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Founding of Colored Parkland or “Little Africa” Louisville, Ky., 1801–1916. 1934. Louisville, Ky.: I. Willis Cole Publishing Co., 1934. Copy: DHU. * Cotter, Joseph S. Collected Poems. New York: Henry Harrison, 1938. 78 pp. 73 poems. Portrait. Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch * Cotter, Joseph S. Sequel to “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and Other Poems. New York: Henry Harrison, 1939. 93 pp. 69 poems. Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch. Copies: DHU, DLC, NN, NNSch * Cotter, Joseph S. Negroes and Others at Work and Play. New York: Paebar Co., 1947. 63 pp. 7 poems, aphorisms, tales, sketches, plays, songs. Further reading * Brooks, A. Russell. “Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr.,” In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 50: 62–70. * Hatch, James V., ed. Black Theatre, U.S.A.: Forty-Five Plays by Black Americans. New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1974. * Kerlin, Robert T. “A Poet from Bardstown.” South Atlantic Quarterly 20 (July 1921) 213-21. * Shockley, Ann Allen. “Joseph S. Cotter, Sr.: Biographical Sketch of a Black Louisville Bard,” College Language Association Journal 18 (March 1975), 327–340. * Townsend, John Wilson. “Kentucky’s Dunbar: Joseph Seamon Cotter.” In Lore of the Meadowland, 23–26. Lexington, Ky.: J.L. Richardson, 1911. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Seamon_Cotter,_Sr.

Lorine Faith Niedecker (English: pronounced Needecker) (May 12, 1903 – December 31, 1970) was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets. She is widely credited for demonstrating how an Objectivist poetic could handle the personal as subject matter. Niedecker was born on Black Hawk Island near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin to Theresa (Daisy) Kunz and Henry Niedecker and lived most of her life in rural isolation. She grew up surrounded by the sights and sounds of the river until she moved to Fort Atkinson to attend school. This world of birds, trees, water and marsh was to inform her poetry for the rest of her life. On graduating from high school in 1922, she went to Beloit College to study literature but left after two years because her father was no longer able to pay her tuition. She devoted herself to caring for her ailing deaf mother, who was deeply depressed by her husband's flagrant affair with a neighbor woman. Niedecker married Frank Hartwig in 1928 but this relationship lasted only two years. Hartwig's fledgling road construction business foundered during the onset of the Great Depression while Lorine lost her job at the Fort Atkinson Library. The two separated in 1930 but were not legally divorced until 1942. Early writings Niedecker's earliest poetry was marked by her reading of the Imagists, whose work she greatly admired and of surrealism. In 1931, she read the Objectivist issue of Poetry. She was fascinated by what she saw and immediately wrote to Louis Zukofsky, who had edited the issue, sending him her latest poems. This was the beginning of what proved to be a most important relationship for her development as a poet. Zukofsky suggested sending them to Poetry, where they were accepted for publication. Suddenly, Niedecker found herself in direct contact with the American poetic avant-garde. Near the end of 1933, Niedecker visited Zukofsky in New York City for the first time and became pregnant with his child. He insisted that she have an abortion, which she did, although they remained friends and continued to carry on a mutually beneficial correspondence following Niedecker's return to Fort Atkinson. From the mid 1930s, Niedecker moved away from surrealism and started writing poems that engaged more directly with social and political realities and on her own immediate rural surroundings. Her first book, New Goose (1946), collected many of these poems. Neglect Niedecker was not to publish another book for fifteen years. In 1949, she began work on a poem sequence called For Paul, named for Zukofsky's son. Unfortunately, Zukofsky was uncomfortable with what he viewed as the overly personal and intrusive nature of the content of the 72 poems she eventually collected under this title and discouraged publication. Partly because of her geographical isolation, even magazine publication was not easily available and in 1955 she claimed that she had published work only six times in the previous ten years. Late flowering The 1960s saw a revival of interest in Niedecker's work. Wild Hawthorn Press and Fulcrum Press, both British-based, published books and magazine publication became regular. She was also befriended by a number of poets, including Cid Corman, Basil Bunting and several younger British and US poets who were interested in reclaiming the modernist heritage. Her books published in the last few decades of her life included My Friend Tree, T & G: The Collected Poems, 1936–1966, North Central, and My Life By Water. Encouraged by this interest, Niedecker started writing again. She had previously earned her living scrubbing hospital floors in Fort Atkinson, "reading proof" at a local magazine, renting cottages and living in near-poverty for years. However, her marriage in May 1963 to Albert Millen, an industrial painter at Ladish Drop Forge on Milwaukee's south side, brought financial stability back into her life. When Millen retired in 1968, the couple moved back to Blackhawk Island, taking up residence in a small cottage Lorine had built on property she inherited from her father. Niedecker died in 1970 from a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving behind several unpublished typescripts. Many other Niedecker papers were burned by Millen, who said he did so at Niedecker's request. Her name was added to her parents' headstone which uses the original spelling of the family name, Neidecker. Lorine had her name changed to the Niedecker spelling when she was in her twenties. The primary Niedecker archives are in the Dwight Foster Public Library (which inherited Niedecker's personal library) and the Hoard Museum in Fort Atkinson (which holds a collection of Niedecker's papers, as preserved and donated by her neighbor and close friend, Gail Roub). Niedecker's comprehensive Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy, were published by the University of California Press in 2002. A centennial celebration of Niedecker's life and work, held in Milwaukee and Fort Atkinson in 2003, included treks to her two Rock River-edged homes on Black Hawk Island and symposium sessions including presentations by scholars and poets. Corman, Niedecker's literary executor who lived most of his creative life in Japan, made his last appearance in the United States during this event.

Galway Kinnell (February 1, 1927 – October 28, 2014) was an American poet. For his 1982 Selected Poems he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and split the National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright. From 1989 to 1993 he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont. An admitted follower of Walt Whitman, Kinnell rejects the idea of seeking fulfillment by escaping into the imaginary world. His best-loved and most anthologized poems are "St. Francis and the Sow" and "After Making Love We Hear Footsteps". Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Kinnell said that as a youth he was turned on to poetry by Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson, drawn to both the musical appeal of their poetry and the idea that they led solitary lives. The allure of the language spoke to what he describes as the homogeneous feel of his hometown, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. He has also described himself as an introvert during his childhood. Kinnell studied at Princeton University, graduating in 1948 alongside friend and fellow poet W.S. Merwin. He received his master of arts degree from the University of Rochester. He traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. During the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States caught his attention. Upon returning to the US, he joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Hammond, Louisiana. This effort got him arrested. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. Kinnell draws upon both his involvement with the civil rights movement and his experiences protesting against the Vietnam War in his book-long poem The Book of Nightmares. From 1989 to 1993 he was poet laureate for the state of Vermont. Kinnell was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University and a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. As of 2011 he was retired and resided at his home in Vermont until his death in October of 2014 from leukemia. Work While much of Kinnell's work seems to deal with social issues, it is by no means confined to one subject. Some critics have pointed to the spiritual dimensions of his poetry, as well as the nature imagery present throughout his work. “The Fundamental Project of Technology” deals with all three of those elements, creating an eerie, chant-like and surreal exploration of the horrors atomic weapons inflict on humanity and nature. Sometimes Kinnell utilizes simple and brutal images (“Lieutenant! / This corpse will not stop burning!” from “The Dead Shall be Raised Incorruptible”) to address his anger at the destructiveness of humanity, informed by Kinnell’s activism and love of nature. There’s also a certain sadness in all of the horror—“Nobody would write poetry if the world seemed perfect.” There’s also optimism and beauty in his quiet, ponderous language, especially in the large role animals and children have in his later work (“Other animals are angels. Human babies are angels”), evident in poems such as “Daybreak” and “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”. In addition to his works of poetry and his translations, Kinnell published one novel (Black Light, 1966) and one children's book (How the Alligator Missed Breakfast, 1982). Kinnell wrote two elegies for his close friend, the poet James Wright, upon the latter's death in 1980. They appear in From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright. References Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Kinnell

Sir Henry Wotton (/ˈwʊtən/; 30 March 1568– December 1639) was an English author, diplomat and politician who sat in the House of Commons in 1614 and 1625. He is often quoted as saying, “An ambassador is an honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for the good of his country.” (Wotton said that when on a mission in Augsburg, in 1604.) Life The son of Thomas Wotton (1521–1587) and his second wife, Elionora Finch, Henry was the youngest brother of Edward Wotton, 1st Baron Wotton, and grandnephew of the diplomat Nicholas Wotton. Henry was born at Bocton Hall in the parish of Bocton or Boughton Malherbe, Kent. He was educated at Winchester College and at New College, Oxford, where he matriculated on 5 June 1584, alongside John Hoskins. Two years later he moved to Queen’s College, graduating in 1588. At Oxford he was the friend of Albericus Gentilis, then professor of Civil Law, and of John Donne. During his residence at Queen’s he wrote a play, Tancredo, which has not survived, but his chief interests appear to have been scientific. In qualifying for his M.A. degree he read three lectures De oculo, and to the end of his life he continued to interest himself in physical experiments His father, Thomas Wotton, died in 1587, leaving Henry only a hundred marks a year. About 1589 Wotton went abroad, with a view probably to preparation for a diplomatic career, and his travels appear to have lasted for about six years. At Altdorf he met Edward, Lord Zouch, to whom he later addressed a series of letters (1590–1593) which contain much political and other news, and provide a record of the journey. He travelled by way of Vienna and Venice to Rome, and in 1593 spent some time at Geneva in the house of Isaac Casaubon, to whom he contracted a considerable debt. He returned to England in 1594, and in the next year was admitted to the Middle Temple. While abroad he had from time to time provided Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, with information, and he now definitely entered his service as one of his agents or secretaries. It was his duty to supply intelligence of affairs in Transylvania, Poland, Italy and Germany. He served as Essex’s secretary in Ireland from 15 April 1599 until 4 September 1599. Wotton was not, like his unfortunate fellow-secretary, Henry Cuffe, who was hanged at Tyburn in 1601, directly involved in Essex’s downfall, but he thought it prudent to leave England, and within sixteen hours of his patron’s apprehension he was safe in France, whence he travelled to Venice and Rome. In 1602 he was living at Florence, and a plot to murder James VI of Scotland having come to the ears of the grand-duke of Tuscany, Wotton was entrusted with letters to warn the king of the danger, and with Italian antidotes against poison. As “Ottavio Baldi” he travelled to Scotland by way of Norway. He was well received by James, and remained three months at the Scottish court, retaining his Italian incognito. He then returned to Florence, but on receiving the news of James’s accession hurried to England. James knighted him, and offered him the embassy at Madrid or Paris; but Wotton, knowing that both these offices involved ruinous expense, desired rather to represent James at Venice. He left London in 1604 accompanied by Sir Albertus Morton, his half-nephew, as secretary, and William Bedell, the author of an Irish translation of the Bible, as chaplain. Wotton spent most of the next twenty years, with two breaks (1612–16 and 1619–21), at Venice. He helped the Doge in his resistance to ecclesiastical aggression, and was closely associated with Paolo Sarpi, whose history of the Council of Trent was sent to King James as fast as it was written. Wotton had offended the scholar Caspar Schoppe, who had been a fellow student at Altdorf. In 1611 Schoppe wrote a scurrilous book against James entitled Ecclesiasticus, in which he fastened on Wotton a saying which he had incautiously written in a friend’s album years before. It was the famous definition of an ambassador as an “honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country” (Legatus est vir bonus peregre missus ad mentiendum rei publicae causa). It should be noticed that the original Latin form of the epigram did not admit of the double meaning. This was adduced as an example of the morals of James and his servants, and brought Wotton into temporary disgrace. Wotton was at the time on leave in England, and made two formal defences of himself, one a personal attack on his accuser addressed to Marcus Welser of Strassburg, and the other privately to the king. He obtained no diplomatic employment for some time, but seems to have finally won back the royal favour by his parliamentary support in for James’s claim to impose arbitrary taxes on merchandise. In 1614 he was elected Member of Parliament for Appleby in the Addled Parliament. He was sent to the Hague and in 1616 he returned to Venice. In 1620 he was sent on a special embassy to Ferdinand II at Vienna, to do what he could on behalf of James’s daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia. Wotton’s devotion to this princess, expressed in his exquisite verses beginning “You meaner beauties of the night,” was sincere and unchanging. At his departure the emperor presented him with a valuable jewel, which Wotton received with due respect, but before leaving the city he gave it to his hostess, because, he said, he would accept no gifts from the enemy of the Bohemian queen. After a third term of service in Venice he returned to London early in 1624 and in July he was installed as provost of Eton College. This office did not resolve his financial problems, and he was on one occasion arrested for debt. In 1625 he was elected MP for Sandwich. In 1627 he received a pension of £200, and in 1630 this was raised to £500 on the understanding that he should write a history of England. He did not neglect the duties of his provostship, and was happy in being able to entertain his friends lavishly. His most constant associates were Izaak Walton and John Hales. A bend in the Thames below the Playing Fields, known as “Black Potts,” is still pointed out as the spot where Wotton and Walton fished in company. He died at the beginning of December 1639 and was buried in the chapel of Eton College. Works * Of 25 poems printed in Reliquiae Wottonianae 15 are Wotton’s. Of those, two are well known, O his Mistris, the Queen of Bohemia," and The Character of a Happy Life.” * During his lifetime he published two works: The Elements of Architecture (1624), which is a free translation of de Architectura by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, executed during his time in Venice; and a Latin prose address to the king on his return from Scotland (1633). Wotton shares authorship of the quote “Well building hath three conditions: firmness, commodity, and delight,” with Vitruvius, from whose de Architectura Wotton translated the phrase; some have termed his Elements a paraphrase rather than a true translation, and the quote is often attributed to Vitruvius. * In 1651 appeared the Reliquiae Wottonianiae, with Izaak Walton’s Life. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Wotton

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic who is generally regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian period and the creator of some of the world's most memorable fictional characters. During his lifetime Dickens' works enjoyed unprecedented popularity and fame, but it was in the twentieth century that his literary genius was fully recognized by critics and scholars. His novels and short stories continue to enjoy an enduring popularity among the general reading public. Born in Portsmouth, England, Dickens left school to work in a factory after his father was thrown into debtors' prison. Though he had little formal education, his early impoverishment drove him to succeed. He edited a weekly journal for 20 years, wrote 15 novels and hundreds of short stories and non-fiction articles, lectured and performed extensively, was an indefatigable letter writer, and campaigned vigorously for children's rights, education, and other social reforms. Dickens rocketed to fame with the 1836 serial publication of The Pickwick Papers. Within a few years he had become an international literary celebrity, celebrated for his humour, satire, and keen observation of character and society. His novels, most published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication. The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience's reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback. For example, when his wife's chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens went on to improve the character with positive lineaments. Fagin in Oliver Twist apparently mirrors the famous fence, Ikey Solomon; His caricature of Leigh Hunt in the figure of Mr Skimpole in Bleak House was likewise toned down on advice from some of his friends, as they read episodes: In the same novel, both Lawrence Boythorne and Mooney the beadle are drawn from real life – Boythorne from Walter Savage Landor) and Mooney from a certain 'Looney', a beadle at Salisbury Square. Though his plots were carefully constructed, Dickens would often weave in elements harvested from topical events into his narratives. Masses of the illiterate poor chipped in ha'pennies to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers. Dickens was regarded as the 'literary colossus' of his age. His 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, is one of the most influential works ever written, and it remains popular and continues to inspire adaptations in every artistic genre. His creative genius has been praised by fellow writers—from Leo Tolstoy to G. K. Chesterton and George Orwell—for its realism, comedy, prose style, unique characterisations, and social criticism. On the other hand Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Virginia Woolf complained of a lack of psychological depth, loose writing, and a vein of saccharine sentimentalism. Early years Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, at Landport in Portsea, the second of eight children to John and Elizabeth Dickens. His father was a clerk in the Navy Pay Office and was temporarily on duty in the district. Very soon after the birth of Charles the family moved to Norfolk Street, Bloomsbury, and then, when he was four, to Chatham, Kent, where he spent his formative years until the age of 11. His early years seem to have been idyllic, though he thought himself a "very small and not-over-particularly-taken-care-of boy". Charles spent time outdoors, but also read voraciously, especially the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. He retained poignant memories of childhood, helped by a near-photographic memory of the people and events, which he used in his writing. His father's brief period as a clerk in the Navy Pay Office afforded him a few years of private education, first at a dame-school, and then at a school run by William Giles, a dissenter, in Chatham. This period came to an abrupt end when, because of financial difficulties, the Dickens family moved from Kent to Camden Town in London in 1822. Prone to living beyond his means, John Dickens was eventually imprisoned in the Marshalsea debtors' prison in Southwark London in 1824. Shortly afterwards, his wife and the youngest children joined him there, as was the practice at the time. Charles, then 12 years old, was boarded with Elizabeth Roylance, a family friend, in Camden Town. Mrs. Roylance was "a reduced [impoverished] old lady, long known to our family", whom Dickens later immortalised, "with a few alterations and embellishments", as "Mrs. Pipchin", in Dombey and Son. Later, he lived in a back-attic in the house of an agent for the Insolvent Court, Archibald Russell, "a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman ... with a quiet old wife" and lame son, in Lant Street in The Borough. They provided the inspiration for the Garlands in The Old Curiosity Shop. On Sundays—with his sister Frances, free from her studies at the Royal Academy of Music—he spent the day at the Marshalsea. Dickens would later use the prison as a setting in Little Dorrit. To pay for his board and to help his family, Dickens was forced to leave school and work ten-hour days at Warren's Blacking Warehouse, on Hungerford Stairs, near the present Charing Cross railway station, where he earned six shillings a week pasting labels on pots of boot blacking. The strenuous and often cruel working conditions deeply impressed Dickens and later influenced his fiction and essays, becoming the foundation of his interest in the reform of socio-economic and labour conditions, the rigors of which he believed were unfairly borne by the poor. He would later write that he wondered "how I could have been so easily cast away at such an age" As he recalled to John Forster (from The Life of Charles Dickens): The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and a paper cap, on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty of using his name, long afterwards, in Oliver Twist. After only a few months in Marshalsea, John Dickens's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Dickens, died and bequeathed him the sum of £450. On the expectation of this legacy, Dickens was granted release from prison. Under the Insolvent Debtors Act, Dickens arranged for payment of his creditors, and he and his family left Marshalsea, for the home of Mrs. Roylance. Although Dickens eventually attended the Wellington House Academy in North London, his mother Elizabeth Dickens did not immediately remove him from the boot-blacking factory. The incident may have done much to confirm Dickens's view that a father should rule the family, a mother find her proper sphere inside the home. "I never afterwards forgot, I never shall forget, I never can forget, that my mother was warm for my being sent back". His mother's failure to request his return was no doubt a factor in his dissatisfied attitude towards women. Righteous anger stemming from his own situation and the conditions under which working-class people lived became major themes of his works, and it was this unhappy period in his youth to which he alluded in his favourite, and most autobiographical, novel, David Copperfield: "I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven!" The Wellington House Academy was not a good school. "Much of the haphazard, desultory teaching, poor discipline punctuated by the headmaster's sadistic brutality, the seedy ushers and general run-down atmosphere, are embodied in Mr. Creakle's Establishment in David Copperfield." Dickens worked at the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray's Inn, as a junior clerk from May 1827 to November 1828. Then, having learned Gurney's system of shorthand in his spare time, he left to become a freelance reporter. A distant relative, Thomas Charlton, was a freelance reporter at Doctors' Commons, and Dickens was able to share his box there to report the legal proceedings for nearly four years. This education was to inform works such as Nicholas Nickleby, Dombey and Son, and especially Bleak House—whose vivid portrayal of the machinations and bureaucracy of the legal system did much to enlighten the general public and served as a vehicle for dissemination of Dickens's own views regarding, particularly, the heavy burden on the poor who were forced by circumstances to "go to law". In 1830, Dickens met his first love, Maria Beadnell, thought to have been the model for the character Dora in David Copperfield. Maria's parents disapproved of the courtship and effectively ended the relationship by sending her to school in Paris. Journalism and early novels In 1832, at age 20, Dickens was energetic, full of good humour, enjoyed mimicry and popular entertainment, and lacked a clear sense of what he wanted to become, yet knowing he wanted to be famous. He was drawn to the theatre and landed an acting audition a Covent Garden, for which he prepared meticulously but which he missed because of a cold, ending his aspirations for a career on the stage. A year later he submitted his first story, A Dinner at Poplar Walk to the London periodical, Monthly Magazine. He rented rooms at Furnival's Inn becoming a political journalist, reporting on parliamentary debate and travelling across Britain to cover election campaigns for the Morning Chronicle. His journalism, in the form of sketches in periodicals, formed his first collection of pieces Sketches by Boz—Boz being a family nickname he employed as a pseudonym for some years—published in 1836. He continued to contribute to and edit journals throughout his literary career. The success of these sketches led to a proposal from publishers Chapman and Hall for Dickens to supply text to match Robert Seymour's engraved illustrations in a monthly letterpress. Seymour committed suicide after the second instalment and Dickens, who wanted to write a connected series or sketches, hired "Phiz" to provide the engravings (which were reduced from four to two per instalment) to enhance the story. The resulting story was the The Pickwick Papers with the final instalment selling 40,000 copies. In November 1836 Dickens accepted the job of editor of Bentley's Miscellany, a position he held for three years, until he fell out with the owner. In 1836 as he finished the last instalments of The Pickwick Papers he began writing the beginning instalments of Oliver Twist—writing as many as 90 pages a month—while continuing work on Bentley's, writing four plays, the production of which he oversaw. Oliver Twist, published in 1838, became one of Dicken's better known stories, with dialogue that transferred well to the stage (most likely because he was writing stage plays at the same time) and more importantly, it was the first Victorian with a child protagonist. On 2 April 1836, after a one year engagement during which he wrote The Pickwick Papers, he married Catherine Thomson Hogarth (1816–1879), the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle. After a brief honeymoon in Chalk, Kent, they returned to lodgings at Furnival's Inn. The first of ten children, Charley, was born in January 1837, and a few months later the family set up home in Bloomsbury at 48 Doughty Street, London, (on which Charles had a three year lease at £80 a year) from 25 March 1837 until December 1839. Dickens's younger brother Frederick and Catherine's 17-year-old sister Mary moved in with them. Dickens became very attached to Mary, and she died in his arms after a brief illness in 1837. Dickens idealised her and is thought to have drawn on memories of her for his later descriptions of Rose Maylie, Little Nell and Florence Dombey. He grief was so great that he was unable to make the deadline for the June instalment of Pickwick Papers and had to cancel the Oliver Twist instalment that month as well. At the same time, his success as a novelist continued, Nicholas Nickleby (1838–39), The Old Curiosity Shop and, finally, Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty as part of the Master Humphrey's Clock series (1840–41)—all published in monthly instalments before being made into books. First visit to the United States In 1842, Dickens and his wife made his first trip to the United States and Canada. At this time Georgina Hogarth, another sister of Catherine, joined the Dickens household, now living at Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone, to care for the young family they had left behind. She remained with them as housekeeper, organiser, adviser and friend until Dickens's death in 1870. He described his impressions in a travelogue entitled American Notes for General Circulation. Some of the episodes in Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) also drew on these first-hand experiences. Dickens includes in Notes a powerful condemnation of slavery, which he had attacked as early as The Pickwick Papers, correlating the emancipation of the poor in England with the abolition of slavery abroad. During his visit, Dickens spent a month in New York City, giving lectures and raising the question of international copyright laws and the pirating of his work in America. He persuaded twenty five writers, headed by Washington Irving to sign a petition for him to take to congress, but the press were generally hostile to this saying that he should be grateful for his popularity and that it was mercenary to complain about his work being pirated. In the early 1840 Dickens showed an interest in Unitarian Christianity, although he never strayed from his attachment to popular lay Anglicanism. Soon after his return to England, Dickens began work on the first of his Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, written in 1843, which was followed by The Chimes in 1844 and The Cricket on the Hearth in 1845. Of these A Christmas Carol was most popular and, tapping in to an old tradition, did much promote a renewed enthusiasm for the joys of Christmas in Britain and America. The seeds for the story were planted in Dickens's mind during a trip to Manchester to witness conditions of the manufacturing workers there. This, along with scenes he had recently witnessed at the Field Lane Ragged School, caused Dickens to resolve to "strike a sledge hammer blow" for the poor. As the idea for the story took shape and the writing began in earnest, Dickens became engrossed in the book. He wrote that as the tale unfolded he "wept and laughed, and wept again" as he "walked about the black streets of London fifteen or twenty miles many a night when all sober folks had gone to bed." After living briefly abroad in Italy (1844) Dickens travelled to Switzerland (1846); it was here he began work on Dombey and Son (1846–48). This and David Copperfield (1849–50) mark a significant artistic break in Dickens's career as his novels became more serious in theme and more carefully planned than his early works. Philanthropy In May 1846 Angela Burdett Coutts, heir to the Coutts banking fortune, approached Dickens about setting up a home for the redemption of fallen women from the working class. Coutts envisioned a home that would replace the punitive regimes of existing institutions with a reformative environment conducive to education and proficiency in domestic household chores. After initially resisting, Dickens eventually founded the home, named "Urania Cottage", in the Lime Grove section of Shepherds Bush, which he was to manage for ten years, setting the house rules and reviewing the accounts and interviewing prospective residents. Emigration and marriage were central to Dickens' agenda for the women on leaving Urania Cottage, from which it is estimated that about 100 women graduated between 1847 and 1859. Middle years In late November 1851, Dickens moved into Tavistock House where he would write Bleak House (1852), Hard Times (1854) and Little Dorrit (1857). It was here he indulged in the amateur theatricals which are described in Forster's "Life". In 1856, the income he was earning from his writing allowed him to buy Gad's Hill Place in Higham, Kent. As a child, Dickens had walked past the house and dreamed of living in it. The area was also the scene of some of the events of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 and this literary connection pleased him. In 1857, Dickens hired professional actresses for the play The Frozen Deep, which he and his protégé Wilkie Collins had written. Dickens fell deeply in love with one of the actresses, Ellen Ternan, which was to last the rest of his life. Dickens was 45 and Ternan 18 when he made the decision, which went strongly against Victorian convention, to separate from his wife, Catherine, in 1858—divorce was still unthinkable for someone as famous as he was. When Catherine left, never to see her husband again, she took with her one child, leaving the other children to be raised by her sister Georgina who chose to stay at Gad's Hill. During this period, whilst pondering about giving public readings for his own profit, Dickens was approached by Great Ormond Street Hospital to help it survive its first major financial crisis through a charitable appeal. His 'Drooping Buds’ essay in Household Words earlier in 3 April 1852 was considered by the hospital’s founders to have been the catalyst for the hospital’s success. Dickens, whose philanthropy was well-known, was asked by his friend, the hospital's founder Charles West, to preside and he threw himself into the task, heart and soul. Dickens' public readings secured sufficient funds for an endowment to put the hospital on a sound financial footing — one of February 9, 1858 alone raised £3,000. After separating from Catherine, Dickens undertook a series of hugely popular and remunerative reading tours which, together with his journalism, were to absorb most of his creative energies for the next decade, in which he was to write only two more novels. His first reading tour, lasting from April 1858 to February 1859, consisted of 129 appearances in 49 different towns throughout England, Scotland and Ireland.[63] Dickens' continued fascination with the theatrical world was written into the theatre scenes in Nicholas Nickleby, but more importantly he found an outlet in public readings. In 1866, he undertook a series of public readings in England and Scotland, with more the following year in England and Ireland. Major works, A Tale of Two Cities (1859); and Great Expectations (1861) soon followed and would prove resounding successes. During this time he was also the publisher and editor of, and a major contributor to, the journals Household Words (1850–1859) and All the Year Round (1858–1870). In early September 1860, in a field behind Gad's Hill, Dickens made a great bonfire of almost his entire correspondence—only those letters on business matters were spared. Since Ellen Ternan also destroyed all of his letters to her, the extent of the affair between the two remains speculative. In the 1930s, Thomas Wright recounted that Ternan had unburdened herself with a Canon Benham, and gave currency to rumours they had been lovers. That the two had a son who died in infancy was alleged by Dickens' daughter, Kate Perugini, whom Gladys Storey had interviewed before her death in 1929, and published her account in Dickens and Daughter, although no contemporary evidence exists. On his death, Dickens settled an annuity on Ternan which made her a financially independent woman. Claire Tomalin's book, The Invisible Woman, argues that Ternan lived with Dickens secretly for the last 13 years of his life. The book was subsequently turned into a play, Little Nell, by Simon Gray. In the same period, Dickens furthered his interest in the paranormal, becoming one of the early members of The Ghost Club. Last years On 9 June 1865, while returning from Paris with Ternan, Dickens was involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. The first seven carriages of the train plunged off a cast iron bridge under repair. The only first-class carriage to remain on the track was the one in which Dickens was travelling. Before rescuers arrived, Dickens tended and comforted the wounded and the dying with a flask of brandy and a hat refreshed with water and saved some lives. Before leaving, he remembered the unfinished manuscript for Our Mutual Friend, and he returned to his carriage to retrieve it. Dickens later used this experience as material for his short ghost story, "The Signal-Man", in which the central character has a premonition of his own death in a rail crash. He also based the story on several previous rail accidents, such as the Clayton Tunnel rail crash of 1861. Dickens managed to avoid an appearance at the inquest to avoid disclosing that he had been travelling with Ternan and her mother, which would have caused a scandal. Although physically unharmed, Dickens never really recovered from the trauma of the Staplehurst crash, and his normally prolific writing shrank to completing Our Mutual Friend and starting the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Second visit to the United States On 9 November 1867, Dickens sailed from Liverpool for his second American reading tour. Landing at Boston, he devoted the rest of the month to a round of dinners with such notables as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his American publisher James Thomas Fields. In early December, the readings began—he was to 76 readings, netting £19,000, from December 1867 to April 1868 and Dickens spent the month shuttling between Boston and New York, where alone he gave 22 readings at Steinway Hall for this period. Although he had started to suffer from what he called the "true American catarrh", he kept to a schedule that would have challenged a much younger man, even managing to squeeze in some sleighing in Central Park. . During his travels, he saw a significant change in the people and the circumstances of America. His final appearance was at a banquet the American Press held in his honour at Delmonico's on 18 April, when he promised never to denounce America again. By the end of the tour, the author could hardly manage solid food, subsisting on champagne and eggs beaten in sherry. On 23 April, he boarded his ship to return to Britain, barely escaping a Federal Tax Lien against the proceeds of his lecture tour. Farewell readings Between 1868 and 1869, Dickens gave a series of "farewell readings" in England, Scotland, and Ireland, beginning on the 6th October. He managed, of a contracted 100 readings, to deliver 75 in the provinces, with a further 12 in London. As he pressed on he was affected by giddiness and fits of paralysis and collapsed on 22 April 1869, at Preston in Lancashire, and on doctor's advice, the tour was cancelled. After further provincial readings were cancelled, he began work on his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It was fashionable in the 1860s to 'do the slums' and, in company, Dickens visited opium dens in Shadwell, where he witnessed an elderly addict known as "Laskar Sal", who formed the model for the "Opium Sal" subsequently featured in his mystery novel, Edwin Drood. When he had regained sufficient strength, Dickens arranged, with medical approval, for a final series of readings at least partially to make up to his sponsors what they had lost due to his illness. There were to be 12 performances, running between 11 January and 15 March 1870, the last taking place at 8:00 pm at St. James's Hall in London. Although in grave health by this time, he read A Christmas Carol and The Trial from Pickwick. On 2 May, he made his last public appearance at a Royal Academy Banquet in the presence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, paying a special tribute to the passing of his friend, illustrator Daniel Maclise. Death On 8 June 1870, Dickens suffered another stroke at his home, after a full day's work on Edwin Drood. He never regained consciousness, and the next day, on 9 June, five years to the day after the Staplehurst rail crash (9 June 1865), he died at Gad's Hill Place. Contrary to his wish to be buried at Rochester Cathedral "in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and strictly private manner," he was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. A printed epitaph circulated at the time of the funeral reads: "To the Memory of Charles Dickens (England's most popular author) who died at his residence, Higham, near Rochester, Kent, 9 June 1870, aged 58 years. He was a sympathiser with the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world." His last words were: "On the ground", in response to his daughter Georgina's request that he lie down. On Sunday, 19 June 1870, five days after Dickens was buried in the Abbey, Dean Arthur Penrhyn Stanley delivered a memorial elegy, lauding "the genial and loving humorist whom we now mourn", for showing by his own example "that even in dealing with the darkest scenes and the most degraded characters, genius could still be clean, and mirth could be innocent." Pointing to the fresh flowers that adorned the novelist's grave, Stanley assured those present that "the spot would thenceforth be a sacred one with both the New World and the Old, as that of the representative of literature, not of this island only, but of all who speak our English tongue." Literary style Dickens loved the style of the 18th century picaresque novels which he found in abundance on his father's shelves. According to Ackroyd, other than these, perhaps the most important literary influence on him was derived from the fables of The Arabian Nights. His writing style is marked by a profuse linguistic creativity. Satire, flourishing in his gift for caricature is his forte. An early reviewer compared him to Hogarth for his keen practical sense of the ludicrous side of life, though his acclaimed mastery of varieties of class idiom may in fact mirror the conventions of contemporary popular theatre. Dickens worked intensively on developing arresting names for his characters that would reverberate with associations for his readers, and assist the development of motifs in the storyline, giving what one critic calls an "allegorical impetus" to the novels' meanings. To cite one of numerous examples, the name Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield conjures up twin allusions to "murder" and stony coldness. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism. His satires of British aristocratic snobbery—he calls one character the "Noble Refrigerator"—are often popular. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. The author worked closely with his illustrators, supplying them with a summary of the work at the outset and thus ensuring that his characters and settings were exactly how he envisioned them. He would brief the illustrator on plans for each month's instalment so that work could begin before he wrote them. Marcus Stone, illustrator of Our Mutual Friend, recalled that the author was always "ready to describe down to the minutest details the personal characteristics, and ... life-history of the creations of his fancy." Characters Dickens's biographer Claire Tomalin regards him as the greatest creator of character in English fiction after Shakespeare. Dickensian characters, especially so because of their typically whimsical names, are amongst the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit, Oliver Twist, The Artful Dodger, Fagin, Bill Sikes, Pip, Miss Havisham, Charles Darnay, David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber, Abel Magwitch, Daniel Quilp, Samuel Pickwick, Wackford Squeers, Uriah Heep are so well known as to be part and parcel of British culture, and in some cases have passed into ordinary language: a scrooge, for example, is a miser. His characters were often so memorable that they took on a life of their own outside his books. Gamp became a slang expression for an umbrella from the character Mrs. Gamp and Pickwickian, Pecksniffian, and Gradgrind all entered dictionaries due to Dickens's original portraits of such characters who were quixotic, hypocritical, or vapidly factual. Many were drawn from real life: Mrs Nickleby is based on his mother, though she didn't recognize herself in the portrait, just as Mr Micawber is constructed from aspects of his father's 'rhetorical exuberance': Harold Skimpole in Bleak House, is based on James Henry Leigh Hunt: his wife's dwarfish chiropodist recognized herself in Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield. Perhaps Dickens' impressions on his meeting with Hans Christian Andersen informed the delineation of Uriah Heep. Virginia Woolf maintained that "we remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens" as he produces "characters who exist not in detail, not accurately or exactly, but abundantly in a cluster of wild yet extraordinarily revealing remarks." One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work. Autobiographical elements Authors frequently draw their portraits of characters from people they've known in real life. David Copperfield is regarded as strongly autobiographical. The scenes in Bleak House of interminable court cases and legal arguments reflect Dickens's experiences as law clerk and court reporter, and in particular his direct experience of the law's procedural delay during 1844 when he sued publishers in Chancery for breach of copyright. Dickens's own father was sent to prison for debt, and this became a common theme in many of his books, with the detailed depiction of life in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit resulting from Dickens's own experiences of the institution. Lucy Stroughill, a childhood sweetheart may have affected several of Dickens' portraits of girls such as Little Em'ly in David Copperfield and Lucie Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens may have drawn on his childhood experiences, but he was also ashamed of them and would not reveal that this was where he gathered his realistic accounts of squalor. Very few knew the details of his early life until six years after his death when John Forster published a biography on which Dickens had collaborated. Even figures based on real people can, at the same time, represent at the same time elements of the writer's own personality. Though Skimpole brutally sends up Leigh Hunt, some critics have detected in his portrait features of Dickens' own character, which he sought to exorcise by self-parody. Episodic writing Most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. When The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialized, American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. Another important impact of Dickens's episodic writing style resulted from his exposure to the opinions of his readers and friends. His friend Forster had a significant hand, reviewing his drafts, that went beyond matters of punctation. He toned down melodramatic and sensationalist exaggerations, cut long passages, (such as the episode of Quilp's drowning in The Old Curiosity Shop), and made suggestions about plot and character. It was he who suggested that Charley Bates should be redeemed in Oliver Twist. Dickens had not thought of killing Little Nell, and it was Forster who advised him to entertain this possibility as necessary to his conception of the heroine. Social commentary Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. In a New York address, he expressed his belief that, "Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen" Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime: it destroyed middle class polemics about criminals, making any pretence to ignorance about what poverty entailed impossible spurred the clearing of the actual London slum, Jacob's Island, that was the basis of the story. In addition, with the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates", inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House and Little Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus: the interminable lawsuits of the Court of Chancery that destroyed people's lives in Bleak House and a dual attack in Little Dorrit on inefficient, corrupt patent offices and unregulated market speculation. Literary techniques Dickens is often described as using 'idealised' characters and highly sentimental scenes to contrast with his caricatures and the ugly social truths he reveals. The story of Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) was received as extraordinarily moving by contemporary readers but viewed as ludicrously sentimental by Oscar Wilde. "You would need to have a heart of stone", he declared in one of his famous witticisms, "not to laugh at the death of little Nell."[104] G. K. Chesterton, stating that "It is not the death of little Nell, but the life of little Nell, that I object to", argued that the maudlin effect of his description of her life owed much to the gregarious nature of Dickens' grief, his 'despotic' use of pedople's feelings to move them to tears in works like this. In Oliver Twist Dickens provides readers with an idealised portrait of a boy so inherently and unrealistically 'good' that his values are never subverted by either brutal orphanages or coerced involvement in a gang of young pickpockets. While later novels also centre on idealised characters (Esther Summerson in Bleak House and Amy Dorrit in Little Dorrit), this idealism serves only to highlight Dickens's goal of poignant social commentary. Many of his novels are concerned with social realism, focusing on mechanisms of social control that direct people's lives (for instance, factory networks in Hard Times and hypocritical exclusionary class codes in Our Mutual Friend).[citation needed] Dickens' fiction, reflecting what he believed to be true of his own life, scintillates with coincidences. Oliver Twist turns out to be the lost nephew of the upper class family that randomly rescues him from the dangers of the pickpocket group). Such coincidences are a staple of 18th-century picaresque novels, such as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones that Dickens enjoyed reading as a youth. Reception Dickens was the most popular novelist of his time, and remains one of the best known and most read of English authors. His works have never gone out of print and have been adapted continuously for the screen since the invention of cinema, with at least 200 motion pictures and TV adaptations based on Dickens's works documented. Many of his works were adapted for the stage during his own lifetime and as early as 1913, a silent film of The Pickwick Papers was made. Among fellow writers, Dickens has been both lionized and mocked. Leo Tolstoy, G.K, Chesterton and George Orwell praised his realism, comic voice, prose fluency, and genius for satiric caricature, as well as his passionate advocacy on behalf of children and the poor. On the other hand, Oscar Wilde generally disparaged his depiction of character, whiloe admiring his gift for caricature; Henry James denied him a premier position, calling him, "the greatest of superficial novelists": Dickens failed to endow his characters with psychological depth and the novels, "loose baggy monsters" betrayed a "cavalier organisation"; Virginia Woolf had a love-hate relationship with his works, finding his novels "mesmerizing" while reproving him for his sentimentalism and a commonplace style. It is likely that A Christmas Carol stands as his best-known story, with frequent new adaptations. It is also the most-filmed of Dickens's stories, with many versions dating from the early years of cinema. According to the historian Ronald Hutton, the current state of the observance of Christmas is largely the result of a mid-Victorian revival of the holiday spearheaded by A Christmas Carol. Dickens catalysed the emerging Christmas as a family-centred festival of generosity, in contrast to the dwindling community-based and church-centred observations, as new middle-class expectations arose. Its archetypal figures (Scrooge, Tiny Tim, the Christmas ghosts) entered into Western cultural consciousness. A prominent phrase from the tale, 'Merry Christmas', was popularised following the appearance of the story. The term Scrooge became a synonym for miser, and his dismissive put-down exclamation 'Bah! Humbug!' likewise gained currency as an idiom. Novelist William Makepeace Thackeray called the book "a national benefit, and to every man and woman who reads it a personal kindness". At a time when Britain was the major economic and political power of the world, Dickens highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society. Through his journalism he campaigned on specific issues—such as sanitation and the workhouse—but his fiction probably demonstrated its greatest prowess in changing public opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and oppression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that not only allowed such abuses to exist, but flourished as a result. His most strident indictment of this condition is in Hard Times (1854), Dickens's only novel-length treatment of the industrial working class. In this work, he uses both vitriol and satire to illustrate how this marginalised social stratum was termed "Hands" by the factory owners; that is, not really "people" but rather only appendages of the machines that they operated. His writings inspired others, in particular journalists and political figures, to address such problems of class oppression. For example, the prison scenes in The Pickwick Papers are claimed to have been influential in having the Fleet Prison shut down. Karl Marx asserted that Dickens" ... issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together" George Bernard Shaw even remarked that Great Expectations was more seditious than Marx's own Das Kapital. The exceptional popularity of his novels, even those with socially oppositional themes (Bleak House, 1853; Little Dorrit, 1857; Our Mutual Friend, 1865) underscored not only his almost preternatural ability to create compelling storylines and unforgettable characters, but also ensured that the Victorian public confronted issues of social justice that had commonly been ignored. It has been argued that his technique of flooding his narratives with an 'unruly superfluity of material' that, in the gradual dénouement, yields up an unsuspected order, influenced the organisation of Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species. His fiction, with often vivid descriptions of life in 19th-century England, has inaccurately and anachronistically come to symbolise on a global level Victorian society (1837 – 1901) as uniformly "Dickensian", when in fact, his novels' time scope spanned from the 1770s to the 1860s. In the decade following his death in 1870, a more intense degree of socially and philosophically pessimistic perspectives invested British fiction; such themes stood in marked contrast to the religious faith that ultimately held together even the bleakest of Dickens's novels. Dickens clearly influenced later Victorian novelists such as Thomas Hardy and George Gissing; their works display a greater willingness to confront and challenge the Victorian institution of religion. They also portray characters caught up by social forces (primarily via lower-class conditions), but they usually steered them to tragic ends beyond their control. Influence and legacy Museums and festivals celebrating Dickens's life and works exist in many places with which Dickens was associated, such as the Charles Dickens Birthplace Museum in Portsmouth, the house in which he was born. The original manuscripts of many of his novels, as well as printers' proofs, first editions, and illustrations from the collection of Dickens' friend John Forster are held at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dickens's will stipulated that no memorial be erected in his honour. The only life-size bronze statue of Dickens, cast in 1891 by Francis Edwin Elwell, can be found in Clark Park in the Spruce Hill neighbourhood of Philadelphia. Dickens was commemorated on the Series E £10 note issued by the Bank of England that was in circulation in the UK between 1992 and 2003. His portrait appeared on the reverse of the note accompanied by a scene from The Pickwick Papers. A theme park, Dickens World, standing in part on the site of the former naval dockyard where Dickens's father once worked in the Navy Pay Office, opened in Chatham in 2007, and to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens in 2012, the Museum of London will the UK's first major exhibition on the author in 40 years. In the UK survey entitled The Big Read carried out by the BBC in 2003, five of Dickens's books were named in the Top 100. Notable works * Charles Dickens published over a dozen major novels, a large number of short stories (including a number of Christmas-themed stories), a handful of plays, and several non-fiction books. Dickens's novels were initially serialised in weekly and monthly magazines, then reprinted in standard book formats. Novels * The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (Monthly serial, April 1836 to November 1837)[125] * The Adventures of Oliver Twist (Monthly serial in Bentley's Miscellany, February 1837 to April 1839) * The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (Monthly serial, April 1838 to October 1839) * The Old Curiosity Shop (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 25 April 1840, to 6 February 1841) * Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty (Weekly serial in Master Humphrey's Clock, 13 February 1841, to 27 November 1841) The Christmas books: * A Christmas Carol (1843) * The Chimes (1844) * The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) * The Battle of Life (1846) * The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848) * The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (Monthly serial, January 1843 to July 1844) * Dombey and Son (Monthly serial, October 1846 to April 1848) * David Copperfield (Monthly serial, May 1849 to November 1850) * Bleak House (Monthly serial, March 1852 to September 1853) * Hard Times: For These Times (Weekly serial in Household Words, 1 April 1854, to 12 August 1854) * Little Dorrit (Monthly serial, December 1855 to June 1857) * A Tale of Two Cities (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 30 April 1859, to 26 November 1859) * Great Expectations (Weekly serial in All the Year Round, 1 December 1860 to 3 August 1861) * Our Mutual Friend (Monthly serial, May 1864 to November 1865) * The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Monthly serial, April 1870 to September 1870. Only six of twelve planned numbers completed) Short story collections * Sketches by Boz (1836) * The Mudfog Papers (1837) in Bentley's Miscellany magazine * Reprinted Pieces (1861) * The Uncommercial Traveller (1860–1869) * Christmas numbers of Household Words magazine: * What Christmas Is, as We Grow Older (1851) * A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1852) * Another Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire (1853) *The Seven Poor Travellers (1854) * The Holly-Tree Inn (1855) * The Wreck of the "Golden Mary" (1856) * The Perils of Certain English Prisoners (1857) * A House to Let (1858) * Christmas numbers of All the Year Round magazine: * The Haunted House (1859) * A Message from the Sea (1860) * Tom Tiddler's Ground (1861) * Somebody's Luggage (1862) * Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings (1863) * Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy (1864) * Doctor Marigold's Prescriptions (1865) * Mugby Junction (1866) * No Thoroughfare (1867) Selected non-fiction, poetry, and plays * The Village Coquettes (Plays, 1836) * The Fine Old English Gentleman (poetry, 1841) * Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838) * American Notes: For General Circulation (1842) * Pictures from Italy (1846) * The Life of Our Lord: As written for his children (1849) * A Child's History of England (1853) * The Frozen Deep (play, 1857) * Speeches, Letters and Sayings (1870) References Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens

Carolyn Forché (born April 28, 1950) is an American poet, editor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received awards for her literary work. Biography Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan to Michael Joseph and Louise Nada Blackford Sidlosky. Forché earned a Bachelor of Arts (B.A) in Creative Writing at Michigan State University in 1972, and MFA at Bowling Green State University in 1974. She taught at a number of universities, including Bowling Green State University, Michigan State University, the University of Virginia, Skidmore College, Columbia University, San Diego State University and in the Master of Fine Arts program at George Mason University. She is now Director of the Lannan Center for Poetry and Poetics and holds the Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. She lives in Maryland with her husband, Harry Mattison, a photographer, whom she married in 1984. Career Forché's first poetry collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition, leading to publication by Yale University Press. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría. She has also translated the work of Georg Trakl and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as many others. Upon her return from Spain, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (1981), was published with the help of Margaret Atwood. It received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, and was also the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. She won the 2006 Robert Creeley Award. Her articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, Mother Jones, Boston Review, and others. Forché has held three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1992 received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship. Her anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, was published in 1993, and her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (1994), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her works include the famed poem The Colonel (The Country Between Us). She is also a trustee for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Although Forché is sometimes described as a political poet, she considers herself a poet who is politically engaged. After first acquiring both fame and notoriety for her second volume of poems, The Country Between Us, she pointed out that this reputation rested on a limited number of poems describing what she personally had experienced in El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. Her aesthetic is more one of rendered experience and at times of mysticism rather than one of ideology or agitprop. Forché is particularly interested in the effect of political trauma on the poet’s use of language. The anthology Against Forgetting was intended to collect the work of poets who had endured the impress of extremity during the 20th century, whether through their engagements or force of circumstance. These experiences included warfare, military occupation, imprisonment, torture, forced exile, censorship, and house arrest. The anthology, composed of the work of one hundred and forty-five poets writing in English and translated from over thirty languages, begins with the Armenian Genocide and ends with the uprising of the pro-Democracy movement at Tiananmen Square. Although she was not guided in her selections by the political or ideological persuasions of the poets, Forché believes the sharing of painful experience to be radicalizing, returning the poet to an emphasis on community rather than the individual ego. In this she was strongly influenced by Terrence des Pres. Forché is also influenced by her Slovak family background, particularly the life story of her grandmother, an immigrant whose family included a woman resistance fighter imprisoned during the Nazi occupation of former Czechoslovakia. Forché was raised Roman Catholic and religious themes are frequent in her work. Among her translations are Mahmoud Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003), Claribel Alegría’s Sorrow (1999), and Robert Desnos’s Selected Poetry (with William Kulik, for the Modern English Poetry Series, 1991). Her fourth book of poems, Blue Hour, was released in 2003. Other books include a memoir, The Horse on Our Balcony (2010, HarperCollins); a book of essays (2011, HarperCollins); and a fifth collection of poems, In the Lateness of the World (Bloodaxe Books, due out in 2017). Forché received an honorary doctorate from the University of Scranton in 2010.

Daniel Abse, CBE FRSL (22 September 1923– 28 September 2014) was a Welsh poet. Early years Abse was born in Cardiff, Wales, to a Jewish family. He was the younger brother of politician and reformer Leo Abse and the eminent psychoanalyst, Wilfred Abse. Unusually for a middle-class Jewish boy, Dannie Abse attended St Illtyd’s College, a working-class Catholic school in Splott. Abse studied medicine, first at the University of Wales College of Medicine, and then at Westminster Hospital Medical School and King’s College London. Abse was a passionate supporter of Cardiff City football club. He first went to watch them play in 1934 and many of his writings refer to his experiences watching and lifelong love of the team known as the “The Bluebirds”. Career as poet Although best known as a poet, Abse worked in the medical field, and was a physician in a chest clinic for over thirty years. He received numerous literary awards and fellowships for his writing. In 1989, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wales. His first volume of poetry, After Every Green Thing, was published in 1949. His autobiographic work, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, was published in 1954. He won the Welsh Arts Council Award in both 1971 and 1987, and the Cholmondeley Award in 1985. He was a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature from 1983. In a foreword to Collected Poems 1948–1976, Abse noted that his poems are increasingly “rooted in actual experience,” both domestic and professional, and many display a reconciliation between Jewish and Welsh themes and traditions. Abse lived for several decades in the north-west area of London, mainly near Hampstead, where he has considerable ties. For several years he wrote a column for the Hampstead and Highgate Express, the local newspaper. These articles were subsequently published in book form. In 2005, his wife Joan Abse was killed in a car accident, while Abse suffered a broken rib. His poetry collection, Running Late, was published in 2006, and The Presence, a memoir of the year after his wife died, was published in 2007; it won the 2008 Wales Book of the Year award. The book was later dramatised for BBC Radio 4. He was awarded the Roland Mathias prize for Running Late. In 2009 Abse brought out a volume of collected poetry. In the same year, he received the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award. Abse was a judge for the inaugural 2010 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Abse was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2012 New Year Honours for services to poetry and literature. Dannie Abse died on 28 September 2014, aged 91. Books * After Every Green Thing Hutchinson, 1948 * Walking Under Water Hutchinson, 1952 * Fire in Heaven Hutchinson, 1956 * Mavericks: An Anthology (editor with Howard Sergeant) Editions Poetry and Poverty, 1957 * Tenants of the House: Poems 1951–1956 Hutchinson, 1957 * Poems, Golders Green Hutchinson, 1962 * Poems! Dannie Abse: A Selection Vista/Dufour, 1963 * Modern European Verse (editor) Vista, 1964 * Medicine on Trial Aldus, 1967 * Three Questor Plays Scorpion, 1967 * A Small Desperation Hutchinson, 1968 * Demo Sceptre, 1969 * Selected Poems Hutchinson, 1970 * Modern Poets in Focus 1 (editor) Corgi, 1971 * Modern Poets in Focus 3 (editor) Corgi, 1971 * Thirteen Poets (editor) Poetry Book Society, 1972 * Funland and Other Poems Hutchinson, 1973 * Modern Poets in Focus 5 (editor) Corgi, 1973 * The Dogs of Pavlov Vallentine, Mitchell, 1973 * A Poet in the Family Hutchinson, 1974 * Penguin Modern Poets 26 (Dannie Abse, D. J. Enright and Michael Longley) Penguin, 1975 * Collected Poems 1948–1976 Hutchinson, 1977 * More Words BBC, 1977 * My Medical School Robson, 1978 * Pythagoras Hutchinson, 1979 * Way Out in the Centre Hutchinson, 1981 * A Strong Dose of Myself Hutchinson, 1983 * One-legged on ice: poems University of Georgia Press, 1983 * Doctors and Patients (editor) Oxford University Press, 1984 * Ask the Bloody Horse Hutchinson, 1986 * Journals From the Ant Heap Hutchinson, 1986 * Voices in the Gallery: Poems and Pictures (editor with Joan Abse) Tate Gallery, 1986 * The Music Lover’s Literary Companion (editor with Joan Abse) Robson, 1988 * The Hutchinson Book of Post-War British Poetry (editor) Hutchinson, 1989 * White Coat, Purple Coat: Collected Poems 1948–1988 Hutchinson, 1989 * People (contributor) National Language Unit of Wales, 1990 * Remembrance of Crimes Past: Poems 1986–1989 Hutchinson, 1990 * The View from Row G: Three Plays Seren, 1990 * Intermittent Journals Seren, 1994 * On the Evening Road Hutchinson, 1994 * Selected Poems Penguin, 1994 * The Gregory Anthology 1991–1993 (editor with A. Stevenson) Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994 * Twentieth-Century Anglo-Welsh Poetry (editor) Seren, 1997 * Welsh Retrospective Seren, 1997 * Arcadia, One Mile Hutchinson, 1998 * Be seated, thou: poems 1989–1998 Sheep Meadow Press, 1999 * Encounters Hearing Eye, 2001 * Goodbye, Twentieth Century: An Autobiography Pimlico, 2001 * New and Collected Poems Hutchinson, 2002 * The Two Roads Taken: A Prose Miscellany Enitharmon Press, 2003 * Yellow Bird Sheep Meadow Press, 2004 * Running Late Hutchinson, 2006 * 100 Great Poems of Love and Lust: Homage to Eros (compiler and editor) Robson, 2007 * The Presence Hutchinson, 2007 * New Selected Poems 1949–2009: Anniversary Collection Hutchinson, 2009 (shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry) * Speak, Old Parrot Hutchinson, 2013 Fiction * Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve (Hutchinson, 1954) * Some Corner of an English Field (Hutchinson, 1956) * O Jones, O Jones (Hutchinson, 1970) * There Was A Young Man From Cardiff (Hutchinson, 1991) * The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds & Dr Glas (Robson, 2002) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dannie_Abse

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, PC (25 October 1800– 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer; his books on British history have been hailed as literary masterpieces. He was a member of the Babington family by virtue of his aunt’s marriage to Thomas Babington. Macaulay held political office as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848. He played a major role in introducing English and western concepts to education in India. He supported the replacement of Persian by English as the official language, the use of English as the medium of instruction in all schools, and the training of English-speaking Indians as teachers. In his view, Macaulay divided the world into civilised nations and barbarism, with Britain representing the high point of civilisation. In his Minute on Indian Education of February 1835, he asserted, “It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England”. He was wedded to the Idea of Progress, especially in terms of the liberal freedoms. He opposed radicalism while idealising historic British culture and traditions. Early life Macaulay was the eldest child of Zachary Macaulay, a Scottish Highlander, who became a colonial governor and abolitionist, and Selina Mills of Bristol, a former pupil of Hannah More. Thomas Macaulay was born in Leicestershire, England, where he was noted as a child prodigy. As a toddler, gazing out of the window from his cot at the chimneys of a local factory, he is reputed to have asked his father whether the smoke came from the fires of hell. He was educated at a private school in Hertfordshire and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Whilst at Cambridge he wrote much poetry and won several prizes, including the Chancellor’s Gold Medal in June 1821. In 1825 he published a prominent essay on Milton in the Edinburgh Review. He studied law and in 1826 he was called to the bar but showed more interest in a political than a legal career. Macaulay, who never married and had no children, was once rumoured to have fallen in love with Maria Kinnaird, the wealthy ward of “Conversation” Sharp (who was a hat-maker, banker, merchant, poet, critic and British politician). But in fact, Macaulay’s strongest emotional ties were to his youngest sisters, Margaret who died while he was in India, and Hannah. As Hannah grew older, he formed the same close attachment to Hannah’s daughter Margaret, whom he called “Baba”. Macaulay retained a passionate interest in classical literature throughout his life, and prided himself on his knowledge of Ancient Greek literature. He likely had an eidetic memory. While in India, he read every ancient Greek and Roman work that was available to him. In his letters, he describes reading the Aeneid whilst on vacation in Malvern in 1851, and being moved to tears by the beauty of Virgil’s poetry. He also taught himself German, Dutch, and Spanish, and remained fluent in French. Political career In 1830 the Marquess of Lansdowne invited Macaulay to become Member of Parliament for the pocket borough of Calne. His maiden speech was in favour of abolishing the civil disabilities of the Jews in the UK. Macaulay made his name with a series of speeches in favour of parliamentary reform. After the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed, he became MP for Leeds. In the Reform, Calne’s representation was reduced from two to one; Leeds had never been represented before, but now had two members. Though proud to have helped pass the Reform Bill, Macaulay never ceased to be grateful to his former patron, Lansdowne, who remained a great friend and political ally. India (1834–1838) Macaulay was Secretary to the Board of Control under Lord Grey from 1832 until 1833. The financial embarrassment of his father meant that Macaulay became the sole means of support for his family and needed a more remunerative post than he could hold as an MP. After the passing of the Government of India Act 1833, he resigned as MP for Leeds and was appointed as the first Law Member of the Governor-General’s Council. He went to India in 1834, and served on the Supreme Council of India between 1834 and 1838. In his famous Minute on Indian Education of February 1835, Macaulay urged Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General to reform secondary education on utilitarian lines to deliver 'useful learning’ - to Macaulay synonymous with Western culture. There was no tradition of secondary education in vernacular languages; the institutions then supported by the East India Company taught either in Sanskrit or Persian. Hence, he argued, “We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language.” Macaulay argued that Sanskrit and Persian were no more accessible than English to the speakers of the Indian vernacular languages and existing Sanskrit and Persian texts were of little use for 'useful learning’. In one of the less scathing passages of the Minute he wrote: I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. He also contended that Sanskrit or Arabic had any useful poetic heritage in the same famous Minutes on Indian Education. He wrote: It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same. From the sixth year of schooling onwards, instruction should be in European learning, with English as the medium of instruction. This would create a class of anglicised Indians who would serve as cultural intermediaries between the British and the Indians; the creation of such a class was necessary before any reform of vernacular education. I feel... that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, - a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. Macaulay’s minute largely coincided with Bentinck’s views and Bentinck’s English Education Act 1835 closely matched Macaulay’s recommendations (in 1836, a school named La Martinière, founded by Major General Claude Martin, had one of its houses named after him), but subsequent Governors-General took a more conciliatory approach to existing Indian education. His final years in India were devoted to the creation of a Penal Code, as the leading member of the Law Commission. In the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny of 1857, Macaulay’s criminal law proposal was enacted. The Indian Penal Code in 1860 was followed by the Criminal Procedure Code in 1872 and the Civil Procedure Code in 1909. The Indian Penal Code inspired counterparts in most other British colonies, and to date many of these laws are still in effect in places as far apart as Pakistan, Singapore, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nigeria and Zimbabwe, as well as in India itself. In Indian culture, the term “Macaulay’s Children” is sometimes used to refer to people born of Indian ancestry who adopt Western culture as a lifestyle, or display attitudes influenced by colonisers ("Macaulayism")– expressions used disparagingly, and with the implication of disloyalty to one’s country and one’s heritage. In independent India, Macaulay’s idea of the civilising mission has been used by Dalitists, in particular by neoliberalist Chandra Bhan Prasad, as a “creative appropriation for self-empowerment”, based on the view that Dalit folk are empowered by Macaulay’s deprecation of Hindu civilisation and an English education. Return to British public life (1838–1857) Returning to Britain in 1838, he became MP for Edinburgh. He was made Secretary at War in 1839 by Lord Melbourne and was sworn of the Privy Council the same year. In 1841 Macaulay addressed the issue of copyright law. Macaulay’s position, slightly modified, became the basis of copyright law in the English-speaking world for many decades. Macaulay argued that copyright is a monopoly and as such has generally negative effects on society. After the fall of Melbourne’s government in 1841 Macaulay devoted more time to literary work, and returned to office as Paymaster-General in 1846 in Lord John Russell’s administration. In the election of 1847 he lost his seat in Edinburgh. He attributed the loss to the anger of religious zealots over his speech in favour of expanding the annual government grant to Maynooth College in Ireland, which trained young men for the Catholic priesthood; some observers also attributed his loss to his neglect of local issues. In 1849 he was elected Rector of the University of Glasgow, a position with no administrative duties, often awarded by the students to men of political or literary fame. He also received the freedom of the city. In 1852, the voters of Edinburgh offered to re-elect him to Parliament. He accepted on the express condition that he need not campaign and would not pledge himself to a position on any political issue. Remarkably, he was elected on those terms. He seldom attended the House due to ill health. His weakness after suffering a heart attack caused him to postpone for several months making his speech of thanks to the Edinburgh voters. He resigned his seat in January 1856. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay, of Rothley in the County of Leicester, but seldom attended the House of Lords. Later life (1857–1859) Macaulay sat on the committee to decide on the historical subjects to be painted in the new Palace of Westminster. The need to collect reliable portraits of notable figures from history for this project led to the foundation of the National Portrait Gallery, which was formally established on 2 December 1856. Macaulay was amongst its founding trustees and is honoured with one of only three busts above the main entrance. During his later years his health made work increasingly difficult for him. He died of a heart attack on 28 December 1859, aged 59, leaving his major work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second incomplete. On 9 January 1860 he was buried in Westminster Abbey, in Poets’ Corner, near a statue of Addison. As he had no children, his peerage became extinct on his death. Macaulay’s nephew, Sir George Trevelyan, Bt, wrote a best-selling “Life and Letters” of his famous uncle, which is still the best complete life of Macaulay. His great-nephew was the Cambridge historian G. M. Trevelyan. Literary works As a young man he composed the ballads Ivry and The Armada, which he later included as part of Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular poems about heroic episodes in Roman history which he composed in India and published in 1842. The most famous of them, Horatius, concerns the heroism of Horatius Cocles. It contains the oft-quoted lines: Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?" His essays, originally published in the Edinburgh Review, were collected as Critical and Historical Essays in 1843. Historian During the 1840s, Macaulay began work on his most famous work, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, publishing the first two volumes in 1848. At first, he had planned to bring his history down to the reign of George III. After publication of his first two volumes, his hope was to complete his work with the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The third and fourth volumes, bringing the history to the Peace of Ryswick, were published in 1855. At his death in 1859 he was working on the fifth volume. This, bringing the History down to the death of William III, was prepared for publication by his sister, Lady Trevelyan, after his death. Political writing Macaulay’s political writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the Whig interpretation of history. This philosophy appears most clearly in the essays Macaulay wrote for the Edinburgh Review and other publications, which were collected in book form and a steady best-seller throughout the 19th century. But it is also reflected in History; the most stirring passages in the work are those that describe the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688. Macaulay’s approach has been criticised by later historians for its one-sidedness and its complacency. Karl Marx referred to him as a 'systematic falsifier of history’. His tendency to see history as a drama led him to treat figures whose views he opposed as if they were villains, while characters he approved of were presented as heroes. Macaulay goes to considerable length, for example, to absolve his main hero William III of any responsibility for the Glencoe massacre. Winston Churchill devoted a four volume biography of the Duke of Marlborough to rebutting Macaulay’s slights of his ancestor, expressing hope 'to fasten the label “Liar” to his genteel coat-tails.' On the other hand, this outlook, together with his obvious love of his subject matter and of English civilisation, helps to place the reader within the age being described in a personal way that no cold neutrality could, and Macaulay’s History is generally recognised as one of the masterpieces of historical writing and a magisterial literary triumph only comparable as such to Gibbon and Michelet. Legacy as a historian The Liberal historian Lord Acton read Macaulay’s History of England four times and later described himself as “a raw English schoolboy, primed to the brim with Whig politics” but “not Whiggism only, but Macaulay in particular that I was so full of.” However, after coming under German influence Acton would later find fault in Macaulay. In 1880 Acton classed Macaulay (with Burke and Gladstone) as one “of the three greatest Liberals”. In 1883 he advised Mary Gladstone “that the Essays are really flashy and superficial. He was not above par in literary criticism; his Indian articles will not hold water; and his two most famous reviews, on Bacon and Ranke, show his incompetence. The essays are only pleasant reading, and a key to half the prejudices of our age. It is the History (with one or two speeches) that is wonderful. He knew nothing respectably before the seventeenth century, he knew nothing of foreign history, of religion, philosophy, science, or art. His account of debates has been thrown into the shade by Ranke, his account of diplomatic affairs, by Klopp. He is, I am persuaded, grossly, basely unfair. Read him therefore to find out how it comes that the most unsympathetic of critics can think him very nearly the greatest of English writers”. In 1885 Acton asserted that: “We must never judge the quality of a teaching by the quality of the Teacher, or allow the spots to shut out the sun. It would be unjust, and it would deprive us of nearly all that is great and good in this world. Let me remind you of Macaulay. He remains to me one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious for certain reasons which you know.” In 1888 he wrote that Macaulay "had done more than any writer in the literature of the world for the propagation of the Liberal faith, and he was not only the greatest, but the most representative, Englishman then [1856] living". W. S. Gilbert described Macaulay’s wit, “who wrote of Queen Anne” as part of Colonel Calverley’s Act I patter song in the libretto of the 1881 operetta Patience. (This line may well have been a joke about the Colonel’s pseudo-intellectual bragging, as most educated Victorians knew that Macaulay did not write of Queen Anne; the History encompasses only as far as the death of William III in 1702, who was succeeded by Anne.) Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) attacked Whig history. The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, writing in 1955, considered Macaulay’s Essays as “exclusively and intolerantly English”. On 7 February 1954 Lord Moran, doctor to the Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, recorded in his diary: “Randolph, who is writing a life of the late Lord Derby for Longman’s, brought to luncheon a young man of that name. His talk interested the P.M.... Macaulay, Longman went on, was not read now; there was no demand for his books. The P.M. grunted that he was very sorry to hear this. Macaulay had been a great influence in his young days”. George Richard Potter, Professor and Head of the Department of History at the University of Sheffield from 1931 to 1965, claimed “In an age of long letters... Macaulay’s hold their own with the best”. However Potter also claimed: “For all his linguistic abilities he seems never to have tried to enter into sympathetic mental contact with the classical world or with the Europe of his day. It was an insularity that was impregnable... If his outlook was insular, however, it was surely British rather than English”. He said this about Macaulay’s determination to inspect physically the places mentioned in his History: "Much of the success of the famous third chapter of the History which may be said to have introduced the study of social history, and even... local history, was due to the intense local knowledge acquired on the spot. As a result it is a superb, living picture of Great Britain in the latter half of the seventeenth century... No description of the relief of Londonderry in a major history of England existed before 1850; after his visit there and the narrative written round it no other account has been needed... Scotland came fully into its own and from then until now it has been a commonplace that English history is incomprehensible without Scotland." Potter noted that Macaulay has had many critics, some of whom put forward some salient points about the deficiency of Macaulay’s History but added: “The severity and the minuteness of the criticism to which the History of England has been subjected is a measure of its permanent value. It is worth very ounce of powder and shot that is fired again it.” Potter concluded that “in the long roll of English historical writing from Clarendon to Trevelyan only Gibbon has surpassed him in security of reputation and certainty of immortality”. In 1972, J. R. Western wrote that: “Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay’s History of England has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period.” In 1974 J. P. Kenyon stated that: “As is often the case, Macaulay had it exactly right.” W. A. Speck wrote in 1980 that a reason Macaulay’s History of England “still commands respect is that it was based upon a prodigious amount of research”. Speck claims that “Macaulay’s reputation as an historian has never fully recovered from the condemnation it implicitly received in Herbert Butterfield’s devastating attack on The Whig Interpretation of History. Though he was never cited by name, there can be no doubt that Macaulay answers to the charges brought against Whig historians, particularly that they study the past with reference to the present, class people in the past as those who furthered progress and those who hindered it, and judge them accordingly”. Speck also said that Macaulay too often "denies the past has its own validity, treating it as being merely a prelude to his own age. This is especially noticeable in the third chapter of his History of England, when again and again he contrasts the backwardness of 1685 with the advances achieved by 1848. Not only does this misuse the past, it also leads him to exaggerate the differences". On the other hand, Speck also wrote that Macaulay “took pains to present the virtues even of a rogue, and he painted the virtuous warts and all”, and that “he was never guilty of suppressing or distorting evidence to make it support a proposition which he knew to be untrue”. Speck concluded: “What is in fact striking is the extent to which his History of England at least has survived subsequent research. Although it is often dismissed as inaccurate, it is hard to pinpoint a passage where he is categorically in error... his account of events has stood up remarkably well... His interpretation of the Glorious Revolution also remains the essential starting point for any discussion of that episode... What has not survived, or has become subdued, is Macaulay’s confident belief in progress. It was a dominant creed in the era of the Great Exhibition. But Auschwitz and Hiroshima destroyed this century’s claim to moral superiority over its predecessors, while the exhaustion of natural resources raises serious doubts about the continuation even of material progress into the next.” In 1981 J. W. Burrow argued that Macaulay’s History of England: ... is not simply partisan; a judgement, like that of Firth, that Macaulay was always the Whig politician could hardly be more inapposite. Of course Macaulay thought that the Whigs of the seventeenth century were correct in their fundamental ideas, but the hero of the History was William, who, as Macaulay says, was certainly no Whig... If this was Whiggism it was so only, by the mid-nineteenth century, in the most extended and inclusive sense, requiring only an acceptance of parliamentary government and a sense of gravity of precedent. Butterfield says, rightly, that in the nineteenth century the Whig view of history became the English view. The chief agent of that transformation was surely Macaulay, aided, of course, by the receding relevance of seventeenth-century conflicts to contemporary politics, as the power of the crown waned further, and the civil disabilities of Catholics and Dissenters were removed by legislation. The History is much more than the vindication of a party; it is an attempt to insinuate a view of politics, pragmatic, reverent, essentially Burkean, informed by a high, even tumid sense of the worth of public life, yet fully conscious of its interrelations with the wider progress of society; it embodies what Hallam had merely asserted, a sense of the privileged possession by Englishmen of their history, as well as of the epic dignity of government by discussion. If this was sectarian it was hardly, in any useful contemporary sense, polemically Whig; it is more like the sectarianism of English respectability. In 1982 Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote that “most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did. Yet there was a time when anyone with any pretension to cultivation read Macaulay.” Himmelfarb also laments that “the history of the History is a sad testimonial to the cultural regression of our times”. In the novel Marathon Man and its film adaptation, the protagonist was named 'Thomas Babington’ after Macaulay. In 2008, Walter Olson argued for the pre-eminence of Macaulay as a British classical liberal. Works * Works by Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay at Project Gutenberg * Lays of Ancient Rome * The History of England from the Accession of James II: * 5 vols. (1848): Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, Vol 4, Vol 5 at Internet Archive * 5 vols. (1848): Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4, Vol. 5 at Project Gutenberg * volumes 1–3 at LibriVox.org * Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols., edited by Alexander James Grieve. Vol. 1,Vol. 2 * William Pitt, Earl of Chatham: Second Essay (Maynard, Merrill, & Company, 1892 - 110 pages) * The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, 4 vols. Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4 * Machiavelli on Niccolò Machiavelli * The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 6 vols., edited by Thomas Pinney. * The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay, 5 vols., edited by William Thomas. * Macaulay index entry at Poets’ Corner * Lays of Ancient Rome (Complete) at Poets’ Corner with an introduction by Bob Blair * Works by Thomas Babington Macaulay at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks) Arms References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay

James Thomson (23 November 1834– 3 June 1882), who wrote under the pseudonym Bysshe Vanolis, was a Scottish Victorian-era poet famous primarily for the long poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874), an expression of bleak pessimism in a dehumanized, uncaring urban environment. Life Thomson was born in Port Glasgow, Scotland, and, after his father suffered a stroke, he was sent to London where he was raised in an orphanage, the Royal Caledonian Asylum on Chalk (later Caledonian after the asylum) Road near Holloway. He spoke with a London accent. He received his education at the Caledonian Asylum and the Royal Military Academy and served in Ireland, where in 1851, at the age of 17, he made the acquaintance of the 18-year-old Charles Bradlaugh, who was already notorious as a freethinker, having published his first atheist pamphlet a year earlier. More than a decade later, Thomson left the military and moved to London, where he worked as a clerk. He remained in contact with Bradlaugh, who was by now issuing his own weekly National Reformer, a “publication for the working man”. For the remaining 19 years of his life, starting in 1863, Thomson submitted stories, essays and poems to various publications, including the National Reformer, which published the sombre poem which remains his most famous work. The City of Dreadful Night came about from the struggle with insomnia, alcoholism and chronic depression which plagued Thomson’s final decade. Increasingly isolated from friends and society in general, he even became hostile towards Bradlaugh. In 1880, nineteen months before his death, the publication of his volume of poetry, The City of Dreadful Night and Other Poems elicited encouraging and complimentary reviews from a number of critics, but came too late to prevent Thomson’s downward slide. Thomson’s remaining poems rarely appear in modern anthologies, although the autobiographical Insomnia and Mater Tenebrarum are well-regarded and contain some striking passages. He admired and translated the works of the pessimistic Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), but his own lack of hope was darker than that of Leopardi. He is considered by some students of the Victorian age as the bleakest of that era’s poets. He died in London at the age of 47. In 1889, seven years after Thomson’s death, Henry Stephens Salt wrote his first major biography, The Life of James Thomson (B.V.). Thomson’s pseudonym, Bysshe Vanolis, derives from the names of the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Novalis. He is often distinguished from the earlier Scottish poet James Thomson by the letters B.V. after the name. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Thomson_(poet,_born_1834)

Mark Strand (April 11, 1934– November 29, 2014) was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014. Biography Strand was born in 1934 at Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Raised in a secular Jewish family, he spent his early years in North America and much of his adolescence in South and Central America. Strand graduated from Oakwood Friends School in 1951 and in 1957 earned his B.A. from Antioch College in Ohio. He then studied painting under Josef Albers at Yale University, where he earned a B.F.A in 1959. On a U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission scholarship, Strand studied 19th-century Italian poetry in Florence in 1960–61. He attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa the following year and earned a Master of Arts in 1962. In 1965 he spent a year in Brazil as a Fulbright Lecturer. In 1981, Strand was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress during the 1990–91 term. In 1997, he left Johns Hopkins University to accept the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professorship of Social Thought at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. From 2005 to his death, Strand taught literature and creative writing at Columbia University, in New York City. Strand received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship in 1987 and the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Blizzard of One. Strand died of liposarcoma on November 29, 2014, in Brooklyn, New York. Poetry Many of Strand’s poems are nostalgic in tone, evoking the bays, fields, boats, and pines of his Prince Edward Island childhood. Strand has been compared to Robert Bly in his use of surrealism, though he attributes the surreal elements in his poems to an admiration of the works of Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, and René Magritte. Strand’s poems use plain and concrete language, usually without rhyme or meter. In a 1971 interview, Strand said, “I feel very much a part of a new international style that has a lot to do with plainness of diction, a certain reliance on surrealist techniques, and a strong narrative element.” Academic career Strand’s academic career took him to various colleges and universities, including: Teaching positions University of Iowa, Iowa City, instructor in English, 1962–1965 University of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Fulbright lecturer, 1965–1966 Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, assistant professor, 1967 Columbia University, New York City, adjunct associate professor, 1969–1972 Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, New York City, associate professor, 1970–1972 Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, Bain-Swiggett Lecturer, 1973 Brandeis University, Hurst professor of poetry, 1974–1975 University of Utah, Salt Lake City, professor of English, 1981–1993 Johns Hopkins University, Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry, 1994–c. 1998 University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, 1998– ca. 2005 Columbia University, New York City, professor of English and Comparative Literature, ca. 2005–2014 Visiting professor University of Washington, 1968, 1970 Columbia University, 1980 Yale University, 1969–1970 University of Virginia, 1976, 1978 California State University at Fresno, 1977 University of California at Irvine, 1979 Wesleyan University, 1979 Harvard University, 1980 Awards * Strand has been awarded the following: * 1960–1961: Fulbright Fellowship * 1979: Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets * 1987: MacArthur Fellowship * 1990–1991: Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress * 1992: Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry * 1993: Bollingen Prize * 1999: Pulitzer Prize, for Blizzard of One * 2004: Wallace Stevens Award * 2009: Gold Medal in Poetry, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters Bibliography References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Strand

Lizelia Augusta Jenkins Moorer (September 1868 - May 24, 1936) was a poet and teacher in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She taught at the Normal and Grammar Schools, Claflin University, Orangeburg, South Carolina from 1895 to 1899. In 1907, she published a collection of poems, “Prejudice Unveiled and Other Poems”. Her work was called, by Joan R. Sherman, the “best poems on racial issues written by any black woman until the middle of the century”. Moorer attacks “lynching, debt peonage, white rape, Jim Crow segregation, and the hypocrisy of the church and the white press”. Moorer was born in September 1868 to Warren D. Jenkins and Mattie Miller in Pickens, South Carolina. In 1899, she married Jacob Moorer, an attorney in Orangeburg who frequently saw cases defending the rights of blacks against what he saw as a prejudiced legal system in South Carolina. In particular, he fought against the constitutionality of election law in the 1895 South Carolina Constitution. Lizelia was also a very strong activist. Beyond her poetry, she was active in the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, serving as State Vice-President in South Carolina in 1910. In 1924, she attended the 1924 Methodist Episcopal Church General Conference where she gave a speech arguing that women should be allowed to be ordained within the Methodist Church. During that conference, women were, indeed, given the right to be ordained as local deacons and elders.

Jane Austen (/ˈdʒeɪn ˈɒstɪn/; 16 December 1775– 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen’s plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. With the publications of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1815), she achieved success as a published writer. She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818, and began a third, eventually titled Sanditon, but died before its completion. Her novels have rarely been out of print, although they were published anonymously and brought her little fame during her lifetime. A significant transition in her posthumous reputation occurred in 1869, fifty-two years after her death, when her nephew’s publication of A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced her to a wider audience. Austen has inspired a large number of critical essays and literary anthologies. Her novels have inspired many films, from 1940's Pride and Prejudice to more recent productions: Sense and Sensibility (1995) and Love & Friendship (2016). Biographical material Very little biographical detail of Austen’s life survives. Of the approximately 3,000 letters Jane wrote in her lifetime only about 160 survive. Her sister Cassandra (to whom most of the letters were addressed) burned “the greater part” of those she kept and censored those she did not destroy, ostensibly to prevent their falling into the hands of relatives and ensuring that “younger nieces did not read any of Jane Austen’s sometimes acid or forthright comments on neighbors or family members”. Other letters were destroyed by the heirs of Admiral Francis Austen, Jane’s brother. Most of the early biographical material about Austen was written by her relatives and reflects the family’s biases in favour of “good quiet Aunt Jane”, that her domestic situation was happy and that her family was the mainstay of her life. With little evidence other than the small amount of biographical materials her brother and nephew produced, which served to set a family legend according to Deirdre Le Faye. Early life Steventon Austen was born at Steventon on 16 December 1775. Her parents, George Austen (1731–1805), and his wife Cassandra (1739–1827), were members of the gentry. George was born into woollen manufacturers. Cassandra was a member of the prominent Leigh family, and daughter to the Master of Balliol, “short, fragile, pretty, and disinclined to marry”. They married on 26 April 1764 at Walcot Church in Bath. For much of Jane’s life, George Austen served as the rector of the Anglican parishes at Steventon, Hampshire, and a nearby village. From 1773 until 1796, he supplemented this income by farming and by teaching three or four boys at a time, who boarded at his home. After a few months at home, her mother placed her with Elizabeth Littlewood who nursed and raised her until she was weaned. She came from a family of six brothers and one sister. Her sister was Austen’s closest friend and confidante throughout her life. The eldest, James, was ten years older; George, a year younger, was born deaf and mute and raised in the village by a local family. During her childhood Jane taught herself enough sign language to communicate with George, suggesting he visited the family home regularly. Charles and Frank served in the navy, both rising to the rank of admiral. Edward was sold to be adopted, to his fourth cousin, Thomas Knight, whose name he took and estate he inherited in 1812. Of her brothers, Austen felt closest to Henry, a banker and, after his bank failed, an Anglican clergyman. Henry acted as his sister’s literary agent, whose large circle of friends and acquaintances in London included bankers, merchants, publishers, painters and actors. He exposed her to a social world not normally visible from a small parish in rural Hampshire. Private theatricals were an essential part of Austen’s education. From her early childhood, the family and friends staged a series of plays in the rectory barn, including Richard Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and David Garrick’s Bon Ton. Jane’s eldest brother James wrote the prologues and epilogues and Jane probably joined in these activities, first as a spectator and later as a participant. Most of the plays were comedies, which suggests how Austen’s satirical gifts were cultivated. At age 12, Jane tried her own hand at dramatic writing; she wrote three short plays during her teenage years. In 1783 Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley, and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane nearly died. Austen was from then home educated, until she attended boarding school with her sister from early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. The sisters returned home before December 1786; the Austens could not afford to send both the daughters to school. After 1786, Austen “never again lived anywhere beyond the bounds of her immediate family environment”. The remainder of her education came from reading, guided by her father and brothers James and Henry. Austen apparently had unfettered access both to her father’s library and that of a family friend, Warren Hastings. Together these collections amounted to a large and varied library. Her father was also tolerant of Austen’s sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing. According to Park Honan, life in the Austen home was lived in “an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere” where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed. Juvenilia (1787–1793) For her own and family’s amusement Austen wrote poems and stories. She later compiled “fair copies” of 29 of these early works into three bound notebooks, now referred to as the Juvenilia, containing work written between 1787 and 1793. There is manuscript evidence that Austen continued to work on these pieces as late as the period 1809–1811, and that her niece and nephew, Anna and James Edward Austen, made further additions as late as 1814. Among these works are a satirical novel in letters titled Love and Freindship [sic], where she mocked popular novels of sensibility, and The History of England, a manuscript of 34 pages accompanied by 13 watercolour miniatures by her sister, Cassandra. Austen’s History parodied popular historical writing, particularly Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England (1764). Austen’s Juvenilia are often, according to scholar Richard Jenkyns, “boisterous” and “anarchic”; he compares them to the work of 18th-century novelist Laurence Sterne and the 20th-century comedy group Monty Python. She sent short pieces of writing to her newborn nieces Fanny Catherine and Jane Anna Elizabeth. Austen was particularly proud of her accomplishments as a seamstress. She also attended church regularly, socialized frequently with friends and neighbours, and read novels—often of her own composition—aloud with her family in the evenings. Socializing with the neighbours often meant dancing, either impromptu in someone’s home after supper or at the balls held regularly at the assembly rooms in the town hall. Her brother Henry later said that “Jane was fond of dancing, and excelled in it”. In 1793 Austen began but abandoned a short play, later titled Sir Charles Grandison or the happy Man, a comedy in 6 acts, which she returned to and completed around 1800. This was a short parody of various school textbook abridgments of Austen’s favourite contemporary novel, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753), by Samuel Richardson. Honan speculates that not long after writing Love and Freindship [sic] in 1789, Austen decided to “write for profit, to make stories her central effort”, that is, to become a professional writer. Whenever she made that decision, beginning in about 1793, Austen began to write longer, more sophisticated works. Between 1793 and 1795 Austen wrote Lady Susan, a short epistolary novel, usually described as her most ambitious and sophisticated early work. It is unlike any of Austen’s other works. Austen biographer Claire Tomalin describes the novella’s heroine as a sexual predator who uses her intelligence and charm to manipulate, betray and abuse her lovers, friends and family. Tomalin writes: “Told in letters, it is as neatly plotted as a play, and as cynical in tone as any of the most outrageous of the Restoration dramatists who may have provided some of her inspiration... It stands alone in Austen’s work as a study of an adult woman whose intelligence and force of character are greater than those of anyone she encounters.” Early manuscripts (1796–1798) When Austen was twenty, Tom Lefroy, a neighbour, visited Steventon from December 1795 to January 1796. He had just finished a university degree and was moving to London for training as a barrister. Lefroy and Austen would have been introduced at a ball or other neighbourhood social gathering, and it is clear from Austen’s letters to Cassandra that they spent considerable time together: “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” The English scholar John Halperin wrote that Austen almost certainly died a virgin, and though she had several chances to marry, all ended in disappointment. Austen wrote in her first surviving letter to her sister Cassandra that Lefroy was “very gentlemanlike, good-looking, pleasant young man”. Austen called him her “friend” and explained that on this account Cassandra must anxious to know more about him. Five days later in another letter, Austen wrote she expected an “offer” from her “friend” and that “I shall refuse him, however, unless he promises to give away his white coat”, going on to write “I will confide myself in the future to Mr. Tom Lefroy, for whom I don’t give a sixpence” and refuse all others. The next day, Austen wrote: “The day will come on which I flirt my last with Tom Lefroy and when you receive this it will be all over. My tears flow as I write at this melancholy idea”. Halperin cautioned that Austen often liked to satirize the sentimental romantic literature that was popular at the time in her letters, and some of the statements about Lefroy may have been ironic. However, it is clear that Austen was genuinely attracted to Lefroy and subsequently none of her other suitors ever quite measured up to him. The Lefroy family intervened and sent him away at the end of January. Marriage was impractical, as both Lefroy and Austen must have known. Neither had any money, and he was dependent on a great-uncle in Ireland to finance his education and establish his legal career. If Tom Lefroy later visited Hampshire, he was carefully kept away from the Austens, and Jane Austen never saw him again. In November 1798, Lefroy was still on Austen’s mind as she wrote to her sister she had tea with one of his relatives, wanted desperately to ask about him, but could not bring herself to raise the subject. After finishing Lady Susan, Austen began her first full-length novel Elinor and Marianne. Her sister remembered that it was read to the family "before 1796" and was told through a series of letters. Without surviving original manuscripts, there is no way to know how much of the original draft survived in the novel published anonymously in 1811 as Sense and Sensibility. Austen began a second novel, First Impressions, in 1796. She completed the initial draft in August 1797, aged 21, (later published as Pride and Prejudice); as with all of her novels, Austen read the work aloud to her family as she was working on it and it became an “established favourite”. At this time, her father made the first attempt to publish one of her novels. In November 1797, George Austen wrote to Thomas Cadell, an established publisher in London, to ask if he would consider publishing First Impressions. Cadell returned Mr. Austen’s letter, marking it “Declined by Return of Post”. Austen may not have known of her father’s efforts. Following the completion of First Impressions, Austen returned to Elinor and Marianne and from November 1797 until mid-1798, revised it heavily; she eliminated the epistolary format in favour of third-person narration and produced something close to Sense and Sensibility. In 1797, Austen met her sister-in-law, Eliza de Feullide, a French aristocrat whose first husband the Comte de Feullide had been guillotined, causing her to flee to Britain, where she married Henry Austen. The description of the execution of the Comte de Feullide related by his widow left Austen with an intense horror of the French Revolution that lasted for the rest of her life. During the middle of 1798, after finishing revisions of Elinor and Marianne, Austen began writing a third novel with the working title Susan—later Northanger Abbey—a satire on the popular Gothic novel. Austen completed her work about a year later. In early 1803, Henry Austen offered Susan to Benjamin Crosby, a London publisher, who paid £10 for the copyright. Crosby promised early publication and went so far as to advertise the book publicly as being “in the press”, but did nothing more. The manuscript remained in Crosby’s hands, unpublished, until Austen repurchased the copyright from him in 1816. Bath and Southampton In December 1800 George Austen unexpectedly announced his decision to retire from the ministry, leave Steventon, and move the family to Bath. While retirement and travel were good for the elder Austens, Jane Austen was shocked to be told she was moving from the only home she had ever known. An indication of her state of mind is her lack of productivity as a writer during the time she lived at Bath. She was able to make some revisions to Susan, and she began and then abandoned a new novel, The Watsons, but there was nothing like the productivity of the years 1795–1799. Tomalin suggests this reflects a deep depression disabling her as a writer, but Honan disagrees, arguing Austen wrote or revised her manuscripts throughout her creative life, except for a few months after her father died. The years from 1801 to 1804 are something of a blank space for Austen scholars as Cassandra destroyed all of her letters from her sister in this period for unknown reasons. In December 1802 Austen received her only known proposal of marriage. She and her sister visited Alethea and Catherine Bigg, old friends who lived near Basingstoke. Their younger brother, Harris Bigg-Wither, had recently finished his education at Oxford and was also at home. Bigg-Wither proposed and Austen accepted. As described by Caroline Austen, Jane’s niece, and Reginald Bigg-Wither, a descendant, Harris was not attractive—he was a large, plain-looking man who spoke little, stuttered when he did speak, was aggressive in conversation, and almost completely tactless. However, Austen had known him since both were young and the marriage offered many practical advantages to Austen and her family. He was the heir to extensive family estates located in the area where the sisters had grown up. With these resources, Austen could provide her parents a comfortable old age, give Cassandra a permanent home and, perhaps, assist her brothers in their careers. By the next morning, Austen realised she had made a mistake and withdrew her acceptance. No contemporary letters or diaries describe how Austen felt about this proposal. In 1814, Austen wrote a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, who had asked for advice about a serious relationship, telling her that "having written so much on one side of the question, I shall now turn around & entreat you not to commit yourself farther, & not to think of accepting him unless you really do like him. Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without Affection". The English scholar Douglas Bush wrote that Austen had “had a very high ideal of the love that should unite a husband and wife... All of her heroines... know in proportion to their maturity, the meaning of ardent love”. A possible autobiographical element in Sense and Sensibility occurs when Elinor Dashwood contemplates that “the worse and most irremediable of all evils, a connection for life” with an unsuitable man. In 1804, while living in Bath, Austen started but did not complete her novel, The Watsons. The story centres on an invalid and improvised clergyman and four unmarried daughters. Sutherland describes the novel as “a study in the harsh economic realities of dependent women’s lives”. Honan suggests, and Tomalin agrees, that Austen chose to stop work on the novel after her father died on 21 January 1805 and her personal circumstances resembled those of her characters too closely for her comfort. Her father’s relatively sudden death left Jane, Cassandra, and their mother in a precarious financial situation. Edward, James, Henry, and Francis Austen pledged to make annual contributions to support their mother and sisters. For the next four years, the family’s living arrangements reflected their financial insecurity. They spent part of the time in rented quarters in Bath before leaving the city in June 1805 for a family visit to Steventon & Godmersham. They moved for the autumn months to the newly fashionable seaside resort of Worthing, on the Sussex coast, where they resided at Stanford Cottage. It was here that Austen is thought to have written her fair copy of Lady Susan and added its “Conclusion”. In 1806 the family moved to Southampton, where they shared a house with Frank Austen and his new wife. A large part of this time they spent visiting various branches of the family. On 5 April 1809, about three months before the family’s move to Chawton, Austen wrote an angry letter to Richard Crosby, offering him a new manuscript of Susan if needed to secure the immediate publication of the novel, and requesting the return of the original so she could find another publisher. Crosby replied that he had not agreed to publish the book by any particular time, or at all, and that Austen could repurchase the manuscript for the £10 he had paid her and find another publisher. She did not have the resources to buy the copyright back at that time, but was able to purchase it in 1816. Chawton Around early 1809 Austen’s brother Edward offered his mother and sisters a more settled life—the use of a large cottage in Chawton village that was part of Edward’s nearby estate, Chawton House. Jane, Cassandra and their mother moved into Chawton cottage on 7 July 1809. Life was quieter in Chawton than it had been since the family’s move to Bath in 1800. The Austens did not socialise with gentry and entertained only when family visited. Her niece Anna described the family’s life in Chawton: “It was a very quiet life, according to our ideas, but they were great readers, and besides the housekeeping our aunts occupied themselves in working with the poor and in teaching some girl or boy to read or write.” Published author During her time at Chawton, Jane Austen published four generally well received novels. Through her brother Henry, the publisher Thomas Egerton agreed to publish Sense and Sensibility, which appeared in October 1811. Reviews were favourable and the novel became fashionable among young aristocratic opinion-makers; the edition sold out by mid-1813. Austen’s earnings from Sense and Sensibility provided her with some financial and psychological independence. Egerton then published Pride and Prejudice, a revision of First Impressions, in January 1813. He advertised the book widely and it was an immediate success, garnering three favourable reviews and selling well. By October 1813 Egerton was able to begin selling a second edition. Mansfield Park was published by Egerton in May 1814. While Mansfield Park was ignored by reviewers, it was very popular with readers. All copies were sold within six months, and Austen’s earnings on this novel were larger than for any of her other novels. Austen learned that the Prince Regent admired her novels and kept a set at each of his residences. In November 1815, the Prince Regent’s librarian James Stanier Clarke invited Austen to visit the Prince’s London residence and hinted Austen should dedicate the forthcoming Emma to the Prince. Though Austen disliked the Prince Regent, she could scarcely refuse the request. Austen disapproved of the Prince Regent on the account of his womanizing, gambling, drinking, spendthrift ways and generally disreputable behaviour. She later wrote Plan of a Novel, according to hints from various quarters, a satiric outline of the “perfect novel” based on the librarian’s many suggestions for a future Austen novel. Austen was greatly annoyed by Clarke’s often pompous literacy advice, and the Plan of A Novel parodying Clarke was intended as her revenge for all of the unwanted letters she had received from the royal librarian. In mid-1815 Austen moved her work from Egerton to John Murray, a better known London publisher, who published Emma in December 1815 and a second edition of Mansfield Park in February 1816. Emma sold well but the new edition of Mansfield Park did poorly, and this failure offset most of the income from Emma. These were the last of Austen’s novels to be published during her lifetime. While Murray prepared Emma for publication, Austen began The Elliots, later published as Persuasion. She completed her first draft in July 1816. In addition, shortly after the publication of Emma, Henry Austen repurchased the copyright for Susan from Crosby. Austen was forced to postpone publishing either of these completed novels by family financial troubles. Henry Austen’s bank failed in March 1816, depriving him of all of his assets, leaving him deeply in debt and losing Edward, James, and Frank Austen large sums. Henry and Frank could no longer afford the contributions they had made to support their mother and sisters. Illness and death Austen was feeling unwell by early 1816, but ignored the warning signs. By the middle of that year, her decline was unmistakable, and she began a slow, irregular, deterioration. The majority of biographers rely on Dr. Vincent Cope’s 1964 retrospective diagnosis and list her cause of death as Addison’s disease, although her final illness has also been described as resulting from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She continued to work in spite of her illness. Dissatisfied with the ending of The Elliots, she rewrote the final two chapters, finished on 6 August 1816. In January 1817 she began The Brothers (titled Sanditon when published in 1925), and completed twelve chapters before stopping work in mid-March 1817, probably due to illness. Austen made light of her condition, describing it as “bile” and rheumatism. As her illness progressed she experienced difficulty walking and lacked energy; by mid-April she was confined to bed. In May Cassandra and Henry brought her to Winchester for treatment. Austen died in Winchester on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41. Henry, through his clerical connections, arranged for his sister to be buried in the north aisle of the nave of Winchester Cathedral. The epitaph composed by her brother James praises Austen’s personal qualities, expresses hope for her salvation, mentions the “extraordinary endowments of her mind”, but does not explicitly mention her achievements as a writer. Posthumous publication After Austen’s death, Cassandra, Henry Austen, and Murray arranged for the publication of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey as a set. Henry Austen contributed a Biographical Note which for the first time identified his sister as the author of the novels. Tomalin describes it as “a loving and polished eulogy”. Sales were good for a year—only 321 copies remained unsold at the end of 1818. In 1832 Richard Bentley purchased the remaining copyrights to all of her novels, and over the following winter published five illustrated volumes as part of his Standard Novels series. In October 1833, Bentley released the first collected edition of her works. Since then, Austen’s novels have been continuously in print. Genre and style Austen’s works critique the sentimental novels of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. The earliest English novelists, Richardson, Henry Fielding and Tobias Smollett, were followed by the school of sentimentalists and romantics such as Walter Scott, Horace Walpole, Clara Reeve, Ann Radcliffe, Laurence Sterne, and Oliver Goldsmith, whose style and genre Austen rejected, returning the novel on a “slender thread” to the tradition of Richardson and Fielding for a “realistic study of manners”. Walter Scott noted Austen’s “resistance to the trashy sensationalism of much of modern fiction—'the ephemeral productions which supply the regular demand of watering places and circulating libraries’”. Yet her rejection of these genres is complex, as evidenced by Northanger Abbey and Emma. Similar to William Wordsworth, who excoriated the modern frantic novel in the “Preface” to his Lyrical Ballads (1800), Austen distances herself from escapist novels; the discipline and innovation she demonstrates is similar to his, and she shows “that rhetorically less is artistically more.” She eschewed popular Gothic fiction, stories of terror in which a heroine typically was stranded in a remote location, a castle or abbey (32 novels between 1784 and 1818 contain the word “abbey” in their title). Yet in Northanger Abbey she alludes to the trope, with the heroine, Catherine, anticipating a move to a remote locale. Rather than full-scale rejection or parody, Austen transforms the genre, juxtaposing reality, with descriptions of elegant rooms and modern comforts, against the heroine’s “novel-fueled” desires. Nor does she completely denigrate Gothic fiction: instead she transforms settings and situations, such that the heroine is still imprisoned, yet her imprisonment is mundane and real—regulated manners and the strict rules of the ballroom. In Sense and Sensibility Austen presents characters who are more complex than in staple sentimental fiction, according to critic Keymer, who notes that although it is a parody of popular sentimental fiction, “Marianne in her sentimental histrionics responds to the calculating world... with a quite justifiable scream of female distress.” Richardson’s Pamela, the prototype for the sentimental novel, is a didactic love story with a happy ending, written at a time women were beginning to have the right to choose husbands and yet were restricted by social conventions. Austen attempted Richardson’s epistolary style, but found the flexibility of narrative more conducive to her realism, a realism in which each conversation and gesture carries a weight of significance. The narrative style utilises free indirect speech—she was the first English novelist to do so extensively—through which she had the ability to present a character’s thoughts directly to the reader and yet still retain narrative control. The style allows an author to vary discourse between the narrator’s voice and values and those of the characters. Austen had a natural ear for speech and dialogue, according to scholar Mary Lascelles “Few novelists can be more scrupulous than Jane Austen as to the phrasing and thoughts of their characters.” Techniques such as fragmentary speech suggest a character’s traits and their tone; “syntax and phrasing rather than vocabulary” is utilised to indicate social variants. Dialogue reveals a character’s mood—frustration, anger, happiness—each treated differently and often through varying patterns of sentence structures. For example, when Elizabeth Bennett rejects Darcy, her stilted speech and the convoluted sentence structure reveals that he has wounded her: From the very beginning, from the first moment I may almost say, of my acquaintance with you, your manners impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form that the groundwork of disapprobation, on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike. And I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry. Austen’s plots highlight women’s traditional dependence on marriage to secure social standing and economic security. As an art form, the 18th-century novel lacked the seriousness of its equivalents from the 19th century, when novels were treated as “the natural vehicle for discussion and ventilation of what mattered in life”. Rather than delving too deeply into the psyche of her characters, Austen enjoys them and imbues them with humour, according to critic John Bayley. He believes that the well-spring of her wit and irony is her own attitude that comedy “is the saving grace of life”. Part of Austen’s fame rests on the historical and literary significance that she was the first woman to write great comic novels. Samuel Johnson’s influence is evident, in that she follows his advice to write “a representation of life as may excite mirth”. Her humour comes from her modesty and lack of superiority, allowing her most successful characters, such as Elizabeth Bennet, to transcend the trivialities of life, which the more foolish characters are overly absorbed in. Austen used comedy to explore the individualism of women’s lives and gender relations, and she appears to have used it to find the goodness in life, often fusing it with “ethical sensibility”, creating artistic tension. Critic Robert Polhemus writes, “To appreciate the drama and achievement of Austen, we need to realize how deep was her passion for both reverence and ridicule... and her comic imagination reveals both the harmonies and the telling contradictions of her mind and vision as she tries to reconcile her satirical bias with her sense of the good.” Reception Contemporaneous responses As Austen’s works were published anonymously, they brought her little personal renown. They were fashionable among opinion-makers, but were rarely reviewed. Most of the reviews were short and on balance favourable, although superficial and cautious. They most often focused on the moral lessons of the novels. Sir Walter Scott, a leading novelist of the day, contributed one anonymously. Using the review as a platform to defend the then-disreputable genre of the novel, he praised Austen’s realism. The other important early review was attributed to Richard Whately in 1821. However, Whately denied having authored the review, which drew favourable comparisons between Austen and such acknowledged greats as Homer and Shakespeare, and praised the dramatic qualities of her narrative. Scott and Whately set the tone for almost all subsequent 19th-century Austen criticism. 19th century Because Austen’s novels did not to conform to Romantic and Victorian expectations that "powerful emotion [be] authenticated by an egregious display of sound and colour in the writing", 19th-century critics and audiences preferred the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot. In a rare sympathetic review, in this case of Emma in 1815, Sir Walter Scott wrote that book displayed “the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes from an imaginary world, a correct and and striking representation of that which is daily taking place around him”. Through Scott was positive, Austen’s work did not match the prevailing aesthetic values of the Romantic zeitgeist. Though Austen’s novels were republished in Britain from the 1830s and sold at a steady rate, they were not bestsellers. Austen had many admiring readers in the 19th century who considered themselves part of a literary elite. Philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes expressed this viewpoint in a series of enthusiastic articles published in the 1840s and 1850s. This theme continued later in the century with novelist Henry James, who referred to Austen several times with approval and on one occasion ranked her with Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Henry Fielding as among “the fine painters of life”. The publication of James Edward Austen-Leigh’s A Memoir of Jane Austen in 1869 introduced Austen to a wider public as “dear aunt Jane”, the respectable maiden aunt. Publication of the Memoir spurred the reissue of Austen’s novels—the first popular editions were released in 1883 and fancy illustrated editions and collectors’ sets quickly followed. Author and critic Leslie Stephen described the popular mania that started to develop for Austen in the 1880s as “Austenolatry”. Around the start of the 20th century, members of the literary elite reacted against the popularization of Austen. They referred to themselves as Janeites in order to distinguish themselves from the masses who did not properly understand her works. For example, Henry James responded negatively to what he described as “a beguiled infatuation” with Austen, a rising tide of public interest that exceeded Austen’s “intrinsic merit and interest”. The American literacy critic A. Walton Litz noted that the “anti-Janites” in the 19th and 20th centuries comprise a formidable literacy squad of Mark Twain, Henry James, Charlotte Bronte, D.H. Lawrence and Kingsley Amis, but in “every case the adverse judgement merely reveals the special limitations or eccentricities of the critic, leaving Jane Austen relativity untouched”. Modern Several of Austen’s works have been subject to academic study. The first examination came from a 1911 essay by Oxford Shakespearean scholar A. C. Bradley. In his essay, Bradley groups of Austen’s novels into “early” and “late” works, a distinction still used by scholars today. The second was R. W. Chapman’s 1923 edition of Austen’s collected works. Not only was it the first scholarly edition of Austen’s works, it was also the first scholarly edition of any English novelist. The Chapman text has remained the basis for all subsequent published editions of Austen’s works. With the publication in 1939 of Mary Lascelles’s Jane Austen and Her Art, the academic study of Austen took hold. Lascelles’s innovative work included an analysis of the books Austen read and the effect of her reading on her work, an extended analysis of Austen’s style, and her “narrative art”. Concern arose that academics were taking over Austen criticism and that it was becoming increasingly esoteric, a debate that has continued since. A more revisionist approach in the 1940s, together with F. R. Leavis’s and Ian Watt’s pronouncement that Austen was one of the great writers of English fiction, did much to cement Austen’s reputation amongst academics. They agreed that she "combined [Henry Fielding’s and Samuel Richardson’s] qualities of interiority and irony, realism and satire to form an author superior to both". The period since World War II has seen more scholarship on Austen using a diversity of critical approaches, including feminist theory, and perhaps most controversially, postcolonial theory. The continuing disconnection between the popular appreciation of Austen, particularly by modern Janeites, and the academic appreciation of Austen has widened considerably. A sign of the way that Austen can still spark debate can be seen when the American English professor Gene Koppel mentioned in a lecture that Austen and her family were “Tories of the deepest dye” [the Tories were the conservative party while the Whigs were the liberal party], a statement which greatly upset many of Koppel’s liberal students, who much to his amusement, complained to him how was it possible that Austen was a conservative?. The conservative Koppel noted several feminist authors such as Claudia Johnson and Mollie Sandock were claiming Austen for their own cause. Citing the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Koppel argued that different people can and do react to the same work of literature in different ways as art is always a subjective discipline as various people have their standards for evaluating literature.?. A such, Koppel argued that competing interpretations of Austen’s work, provided that they are grounded in readings of her work are all equally valid, and so it equally possible to see Austen as a feminist critiquing Regency society and as a conservative upholding the values of Regency society. Adaptations Austen’s novels have resulted in sequels, prequels and adaptations of almost every type, from soft-core pornography to fantasy. From the 19th century, her family members published conclusions to her incomplete novels, and by 2000 there were over 100 printed adaptations. The first film adaptation was the 1940 MGM production of Pride and Prejudice starring Laurence Olivier and Greer Garson. BBC television dramatisations since the 1970s have attempted to adhere meticulously to Austen’s plots, characterisations and settings. From 1995 a large number of Austen adaptations began to appear, with Ang Lee’s film of Sense and Sensibility, for which screenwriter and star Emma Thompson won an Academy Award, and the BBC’s immensely popular TV mini-series Pride and Prejudice, starring Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. A 2005 British production of Pride and Prejudice, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen, was followed in 2007 by ITV’s Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, and in 2016 by Love & Friendship, a film version of Lady Susan that borrowed the title of Austen’s Love and Freindship [sic].

Aline Murray Kilmer (August 1, 1888– October 1, 1941), was an American poet, children’s book author, and essayist, and the wife and widow of poet and journalist Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918). Aline attended the Rutgers College Preparatory School with her husband, Alfred Joyce Kilmer and married him soon after his graduation from Columbia University in 1908. In their short marriage, lasting 10 years, her husband had achieved fame as a poet, literary critic and among Catholic circles as America’s most prominent Catholic writer. After his death in World War I, Aline began publishing her own poetry and a few children’s books. Today, her work is largely forgotten. Biography She was born as Aline Murray on 1 August 1888 in Norfolk, Virginia. She was the daughter of Ada Foster Murray, a poet; and Kenton C. Murray, (d. 1895) editor of the Norfolk Landmark newspaper. Ada Foster Murray, remarried on February 22, 1900, in Metuchen, New Jersey to Henry Mills Alden. Henry was the managing editor of Harper’s Magazine, and he became Aline’s stepfather. Aline was educated at the Rutgers College Grammar School (now Rutgers Preparatory School) in New Brunswick, New Jersey and the Vail-Deane School in Elizabeth, New Jersey the latter institution from which she was graduated in 1908. Shortly after graduation, Aline married Alfred Joyce Kilmer on June 9, 1908, after he was graduated from Columbia University in New York City. The pair had five children: Kenton Sinclair Kilmer (1909-1995), Rose Kilburn Kilmer (1912-1917), Deborah Clanton Kilmer (1914-1999), Michael Barry Kilmer (1916-1927), and Christopher Kilmer (1917-1984). Their daughter Rose was stricken with an infantile paralysis shortly after her birth, a crisis which led Joyce and Aline to convert to Roman Catholicism. Shortly before Joyce’s deployment to France in World War I, Rose died. During his deployment, her husband was killed in action during the Second Battle of the Marne near Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles, in France, on 30 July 1918 at the age of 31. Several years later, her second son, Michael, who most closely resembled her in appearance and manner, also died. After Joyce’s death in Battle, Kilmer turned to publishing her poetry and to authoring children’s book. Aline’s poetry is described as “subtle, delicate, and somewhat subdued—certainly far from gayety” and with a tone of “ironic disillusionment” compared to her husband’s as “direct, vigorous, gay.” In her final three years, Aline suffered from an excruciating illness. Aline Kilmer died at her home, “Whitehall”, in Stillwater Township, New Jersey, on October 1, 1941 and was interred at Saint Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in Newton, New Jersey. Five lines from her poem, “Sanctuary”, are inscribed on her gravestone:

Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564– 30 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe’s mysterious early death. Marlowe’s plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists. A warrant was issued for Marlowe’s arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason was given for it, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain “vile heretical conceipts”. On 20 May, he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until “licensed to the contrary”. Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved. Early life Marlowe was born in Canterbury to shoemaker John Marlowe and his wife Catherine. His date of birth is not known, but he was baptised on 26 February 1564, and is likely to have been born a few days before. Thus, he was just two months older than his contemporary William Shakespeare, who was baptised on 26 April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. Marlowe attended The King’s School in Canterbury (where a house is now named after him) and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he studied on a scholarship and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1584. In 1587, the university hesitated to award him his Master of Arts degree because of a rumour that he intended to go to the English college at Rheims, presumably to prepare for ordination as a Roman Catholic priest. However, his degree was awarded on schedule when the Privy Council intervened on his behalf, commending him for his “faithful dealing” and “good service” to the Queen. The nature of Marlowe’s service was not specified by the Council, but its letter to the Cambridge authorities has provoked much speculation, notably the theory that Marlowe was operating as a secret agent working for Sir Francis Walsingham’s intelligence service. No direct evidence supports this theory, although the Council’s letter is evidence that Marlowe had served the government in some secret capacity. Literary career Of the dramas attributed to Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage is believed to have been his first. It was performed by the Children of the Chapel, a company of boy actors, between 1587 and 1593. The play was first published in 1594; the title page attributes the play to Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Marlowe’s first play performed on the regular stage in London, in 1587, was Tamburlaine the Great, about the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane), who rises from shepherd to warlord. It is among the first English plays in blank verse, and, with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, generally is considered the beginning of the mature phase of the Elizabethan theatre. Tamburlaine was a success, and was followed with Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. The two parts of Tamburlaine were published in 1590; all Marlowe’s other works were published posthumously. The sequence of the writing of his other four plays is unknown; all deal with controversial themes. * The Jew of Malta (first published as The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta), about a Maltese Jew’s barbarous revenge against the city authorities, has a prologue delivered by a character representing Machiavelli. It was probably written in 1589 or 1590, and was first performed in 1592. It was a success, and remained popular for the next fifty years. The play was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 17 May 1594, but the earliest surviving printed edition is from 1633. * Edward the Second is an English history play about the deposition of King Edward II by his barons and the Queen, who resent the undue influence the king’s favourites have in court and state affairs. The play was entered into the Stationers’ Register on 6 July 1593, five weeks after Marlowe’s death. The full title of the earliest extant edition, of 1594, is The troublesome reigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England, with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer. * The Massacre at Paris is a short and luridly written work, the only surviving text of which was probably a reconstruction from memory of the original performance text, portraying the events of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, which English Protestants invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. It features the silent “English Agent”, whom subsequent tradition has identified with Marlowe himself and his connections to the secret service. The Massacre at Paris is considered his most dangerous play, as agitators in London seized on its theme to advocate the murders of refugees from the low countries and, indeed, it warns Elizabeth I of this possibility in its last scene. Its full title was The Massacre at Paris: With the Death of the Duke of Guise. * Doctor Faustus (or The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), based on the German Faustbuch, was the first dramatised version of the Faust legend of a scholar’s dealing with the devil. While versions of “The Devil’s Pact” can be traced back to the 4th century, Marlowe deviates significantly by having his hero unable to “burn his books” or repent to a merciful God in order to have his contract annulled at the end of the play. Marlowe’s protagonist is instead carried off by demons, and in the 1616 quarto his mangled corpse is found by several scholars. Doctor Faustus is a textual problem for scholars as two versions of the play exist: the 1604 quarto, also known as the A text, and the 1616 quarto or B text. Both were published after Marlowe’s death. Scholars have disagreed which text is more representative of Marlowe’s original, and some editions are based on a combination of the two. The latest scholarly consensus (as of the late 20th century) holds the A text is more representative because it contains irregular character names and idiosyncratic spelling, which are believed to reflect a text based on the author’s handwritten manuscript, or “foul papers.” The B text, in comparison, was highly edited, censored because of shifting theater laws regarding religious words onstage, and contains several additional scenes which scholars believe to be the additions of other playwrights, particularly Samuel Rowley and William Bird (alias Borne). Marlowe’s plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the imposing stage presence of Edward Alleyn. Alleyn was unusually tall for the time, and the haughty roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written especially for him. Marlowe’s plays were the foundation of the repertoire of Alleyn’s company, the Admiral’s Men, throughout the 1590s. Marlowe also wrote the poem Hero and Leander (published in 1598, and with a continuation by George Chapman the same year), the popular lyric “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”, and translations of Ovid’s Amores and the first book of Lucan’s Pharsalia. In 1599, his translation of Ovid was banned and copies publicly burned as part of Archbishop Whitgift’s crackdown on offensive material. Marlowe has been credited in the New Oxford Shakespeare series as co-author of the three Henry VI plays. Legend As with other writers of the period, little is known about Marlowe. What evidence there is can be found in legal records and other official documents. This has not stopped writers of both fiction and non-fiction from speculating about his activities and character. Marlowe has often been described as a spy, a brawler, and a heretic, as well as a “magician”, “duellist”, “tobacco-user”, “counterfeiter”, and “rakehell”. J. A. Downie and Constance Kuriyama have argued against the more lurid speculation, but J. B. Steane remarked, “it seems absurd to dismiss all of these Elizabethan rumours and accusations as 'the Marlowe myth’”. Spying Marlowe is alleged to have been a government spy (Park Honan’s 2005 biography even had “Spy” in its title). The author Charles Nicholl speculates this was the case and suggests that Marlowe’s recruitment took place when he was at Cambridge. As noted above, in 1587 the Privy Council ordered the University of Cambridge to award Marlowe his degree of Master of Arts, denying rumours that he intended to go to the English Catholic college in Rheims, saying instead that he had been engaged in unspecified “affaires” on “matters touching the benefit of his country”. Surviving college records from the period also indicate that Marlowe had had a series of unusually lengthy absences from the university– much longer than permitted by university regulations– that began in the academic year 1584–1585. Surviving college buttery (provisions store) accounts indicate he began spending lavishly on food and drink during the periods he was in attendance– more than he could have afforded on his known scholarship income. It has sometimes been theorised that Marlowe was the “Morley” who was tutor to Arbella Stuart in 1589. This possibility was first raised in a TLS letter by E. St John Brooks in 1937; in a letter to Notes and Queries, John Baker has added that only Marlowe could be Arbella’s tutor due to the absence of any other known “Morley” from the period with an MA and not otherwise occupied. If Marlowe was Arbella’s tutor (and some biographers think that the “Morley” in question may have been a brother of the musician Thomas Morley), it might indicate that he was there as a spy, since Arbella, niece of Mary, Queen of Scots, and cousin of James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, was at the time a strong candidate for the succession to Elizabeth’s throne. Frederick S. Boas dismisses the possibility of this identification, based on surviving legal records which document his "residence in London between September and December 1589". Marlowe had been party to a fatal quarrel involving his neighbours and the poet Thomas Watson in Norton Folgate, and was held in Newgate Prison for a fortnight. In fact the quarrel and his arrest was on 18 September, he was released on bail on 1 October, and he had to attend court– where he was cleared of any wrongdoing– on 3 December, but there is no record of where he was for the intervening two months. In 1592 Marlowe was arrested in the town of Flushing (Vlissingen) (then an English garrison town) in the Netherlands for his alleged involvement in the counterfeiting of coins, presumably related to the activities of seditious Catholics. He was sent to be dealt with by the Lord Treasurer (Burghley) but no charge or imprisonment resulted. This arrest may have disrupted another of Marlowe’s spying missions, perhaps by giving the resulting coinage to the Catholic cause. He was to infiltrate the followers of the active Catholic plotter William Stanley and report back to Burghley. Arrest and death In early May 1593 several bills were posted about London threatening Protestant refugees from France and the Netherlands who had settled in the city. One of these, the “Dutch church libel”, written in rhymed iambic pentameter, contained allusions to several of Marlowe’s plays and was signed, “Tamburlaine”. On 11 May the Privy Council ordered the arrest of those responsible for the libels. The next day, Marlowe’s colleague Thomas Kyd was arrested. Kyd’s lodgings were searched and a 3-page fragment of a heretical tract was found. In a letter to Sir John Puckering, Kyd asserted that it had belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had been writing “in one chamber” some two years earlier. In a second letter, Kyd described Marlowe as blasphemous, disorderly, holding treasonous opinions, being an irreligious reprobate, and ‘intemperate & of a cruel hart’. At that time they had both been working for an aristocratic patron, probably Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A warrant for Marlowe’s arrest was issued on 18 May, when the Privy Council apparently knew that he might be found staying with Thomas Walsingham, whose father was a first cousin of the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s principal secretary in the 1580s and a man more deeply involved in state espionage than any other member of the Privy Council. Marlowe duly presented himself on 20 May but, there apparently being no Privy Council meeting on that day, was instructed to “give his daily attendance on their Lordships, until he shall be licensed to the contrary”. On Wednesday, 30 May, Marlowe was killed. Various accounts of Marlowe’s death were current over the next few years. In his Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, Francis Meres says Marlowe was “stabbed to death by a bawdy serving-man, a rival of his in his lewd love” as punishment for his “epicurism and atheism.” In 1917, in the Dictionary of National Biography, Sir Sidney Lee wrote that Marlowe was killed in a drunken fight, and this is still often stated as fact today. The official account came to light only in 1925 when the scholar Leslie Hotson discovered the coroner’s report of the inquest on Marlowe’s death, held two days later on Friday 1 June 1593, by the Coroner of the Queen’s Household, William Danby. Marlowe had spent all day in a house in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull, and together with three men: Ingram Frizer, Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley. All three had been employed by one or other of the Walsinghams. Skeres and Poley had helped snare the conspirators in the Babington plot and Frizer would later describe Thomas Walsingham as his “master” at that time although his role was probably more that of a financial or business agent as he was for Walsingham’s wife Audrey a few years later. These witnesses testified that Frizer and Marlowe had argued over payment of the bill (now famously known as the 'Reckoning’) exchanging “divers malicious words” while Frizer was sitting at a table between the other two and Marlowe was lying behind him on a couch. Marlowe snatched Frizer’s dagger and wounded him on the head. In the ensuing struggle, according to the coroner’s report, Marlowe was stabbed above the right eye, killing him instantly. The jury concluded that Frizer acted in self-defence, and within a month he was pardoned. Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave in the churchyard of St. Nicholas, Deptford immediately after the inquest, on 1 June 1593. The complete text of the inquest report was published by Leslie Hotson in his book, The Death of Christopher Marlowe, in the introduction to which Prof. G. L. Kittredge said “The mystery of Marlowe’s death, heretofore involved in a cloud of contradictory gossip and irresponsible guess-work, is now cleared up for good and all on the authority of public records of complete authenticity and gratifying fullness”, but this confidence proved fairly short-lived. Hotson himself had considered the possibility that the witnesses had “concocted a lying account of Marlowe’s behaviour, to which they swore at the inquest, and with which they deceived the jury” but came down against that scenario. Others, however, began to suspect that this was indeed the case. Writing to the Times Literary Supplement shortly after the book’s publication, Eugénie de Kalb disputed that the struggle and outcome as described were even possible, and Samuel A. Tannenbaum (a graduate of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons) insisted the following year that such a wound could not have possibly resulted in instant death, as had been claimed. Even Marlowe’s biographer John Bakeless acknowledged that “some scholars have been inclined to question the truthfulness of the coroner’s report. There is something queer about the whole episode” and said that Hotson’s discovery “raises almost as many questions as it answers.” It has also been discovered more recently that the apparent absence of a local county coroner to accompany the Coroner of the Queen’s Household would, if noticed, have made the inquest null and void. One of the main reasons for doubting the truth of the inquest concerns the reliability of Marlowe’s companions as witnesses. As an agent provocateur for the late Sir Francis Walsingham, Robert Poley was a consummate liar, the “very genius of the Elizabethan underworld”, and is even on record as saying “I will swear and forswear myself, rather than I will accuse myself to do me any harm.” The other witness, Nicholas Skeres, had for many years acted as a confidence trickster, drawing young men into the clutches of people in the money-lending racket, including Marlowe’s apparent killer, Ingram Frizer, with whom he was currently engaged in just such a swindle. In other words, despite their being referred to as “generosi” (gentlemen) in the inquest report, they were all professional liars. Some biographers, such as Kuriyama and Downie, nevertheless take the inquest to be a true account of what occurred, but in trying to explain what really happened if the account was not true, others have come up with a variety of murder theories. Jealous of her husband Thomas’s relationship with Marlowe, Audrey Walsingham arranged for the playwright to be murdered. Sir Walter Raleigh arranged the murder, fearing that under torture Marlowe might incriminate him. With Skeres the main player, the murder resulted from attempts by the Earl of Essex to use Marlowe to incriminate Sir Walter Raleigh. He was killed on the orders of father and son Lord Burghley and Sir Robert Cecil, who thought that his plays contained Catholic propaganda. He was accidentally killed while Frizer and Skeres were pressuring him to pay back money he owed them. Marlowe was murdered at the behest of several members of the Privy Council who feared that he might reveal them to be atheists. The Queen herself ordered his assassination because of his subversively atheistic behaviour. Frizer murdered him because he envied Marlowe’s close relationship with his master Thomas Walsingham and feared the effect that Marlowe’s behaviour might have on Walsingham’s reputation. There is even a theory that Marlowe’s death was faked to save him from trial and execution for subversive atheism. However, since there are only written documents on which to base any conclusions, and since it is probable that the most crucial information about his death was never committed to writing at all, it is unlikely that the full circumstances of Marlowe’s death will ever be known. Philosophy During his lifetime, Marlowe was reputed to be an atheist which, at that time, held the dangerous implication of being an enemy of God and, by association, the state. With the rise of public fears concerning The School of Night, or “School of Atheism” in the late 16th century, accusations of atheism were closely associated with disloyalty to the Protestant monarchy of England. Some modern historians consider that Marlowe’s professed atheism, as with his supposed Catholicism, may have been no more than an elaborate and sustained pretense adopted to further his work as a government spy. Contemporary evidence comes from Marlowe’s accuser in Flushing, an informer called Richard Baines. The governor of Flushing had reported that each of the men had “of malice” accused the other of instigating the counterfeiting, and of intending to go over to the Catholic “enemy”; such an action was considered atheistic by the Church of England. Following Marlowe’s arrest in 1593, Baines submitted to the authorities a “note containing the opinion of one Christopher Marly concerning his damnable judgment of religion, and scorn of God’s word.” Baines attributes to Marlowe a total of eighteen items which “scoff at the pretensions of the Old and New Testament” such as, "Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest [unchaste]", “the woman of Samaria and her sister were whores and that Christ knew them dishonestly”, and, “St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom” (cf. John 13:23–25), and, “that he used him as the sinners of Sodom”. He also implies that Marlowe had Catholic sympathies. Other passages are merely skeptical in tone: “he persuades men to atheism, willing them not to be afraid of bugbears and hobgoblins”. The final paragraph of Baines’s document reads: These thinges, with many other shall by good & honest witnes be aproved to be his opinions and Comon Speeches, and that this Marlowe doth not only hould them himself, but almost into every Company he Cometh he persuades men to Atheism willing them not to be afeard of bugbeares and hobgoblins, and vtterly scorning both god and his ministers as I Richard Baines will Justify & approue both by mine oth and the testimony of many honest men, and almost al men with whome he hath Conversed any time will testify the same, and as I think all men in Cristianity ought to indevor that the mouth of so dangerous a member may be stopped, he saith likewise that he hath quoted a number of Contrarieties oute of the Scripture which he hath giuen to some great men who in Convenient time shalbe named. When these thinges shalbe Called in question the witnes shalbe produced. Similar examples of Marlowe’s statements were given by Thomas Kyd after his imprisonment and possible torture (see above); both Kyd and Baines connect Marlowe with the mathematician Thomas Harriot and Sir Walter Raleigh’s circle. Another document claimed at around the same time that “one Marlowe is able to show more sound reasons for Atheism than any divine in England is able to give to prove divinity, and that... he hath read the Atheist lecture to Sir Walter Raleigh and others.” Some critics believe that Marlowe sought to disseminate these views in his work and that he identified with his rebellious and iconoclastic protagonists. However, plays had to be approved by the Master of the Revels before they could be performed, and the censorship of publications was under the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Presumably these authorities did not consider any of Marlowe’s works to be unacceptable other than the Amores. Sexuality Like William Shakespeare, Marlowe is frequently claimed to have been homosexual. Others argue that the question of whether an Elizabethan was gay or homosexual in a modern sense is anachronistic. For the Elizabethans, what is often today termed homosexual or bisexual was more likely to be recognised as a sexual act, rather than an exclusive sexual orientation and identity. Some scholars argue that the evidence is inconclusive and that the reports of Marlowe’s homosexuality may simply be exaggerated rumours produced after his death. Richard Baines reported Marlowe as saying: “All they that love not Tobacco and Boys are fools”. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen describe Baines’s evidence as “unreliable testimony” and make the comment: “These and other testimonials need to be discounted for their exaggeration and for their having been produced under legal circumstances we would regard as a witch-hunt”. One critic, J.B. Steane, remarked that he considers there to be “no evidence for Marlowe’s homosexuality at all.” Other scholars, however, point to homosexual themes in Marlowe’s writing: in Hero and Leander, Marlowe writes of the male youth Leander, “in his looks were all that men desire” and that when the youth swims to visit Hero at Sestos, the sea god Neptune becomes sexually excited, "[i]magining that Ganymede, displeas’d, [h]ad left the Heavens... [t]he lusty god embrac’d him, call’d him love... He watched his arms and, as they opened wide [a]t every stroke, betwixt them would he slide [a]nd steal a kiss,... And dive into the water, and there pry [u]pon his breast, his thighs, and every limb,... [a]nd talk of love", while the boy, naive and unaware of Greek love practices, protests, “'You are deceiv’d, I am no woman, I.' Thereat smil’d Neptune.” Edward the Second contains the following passage supporting homosexual relationships: Marlowe wrote the only play about the life of Edward II up to his time, taking the humanist literary discussion of male sexuality much further than his contemporaries. The play was extremely bold, dealing with a star-crossed love story between Edward II and Piers Gaveston. Though it was common practice at the time to reveal characters as gay to give audiences reason to suspect them as culprits of a given crime, Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II is portrayed as a sympathetic character. Reputation among contemporary writers Whatever the particular focus of modern critics, biographers and novelists, for his contemporaries in the literary world, Marlowe was above all an admired and influential artist. Within weeks of his death, George Peele remembered him as “Marley, the Muses’ darling”; Michael Drayton noted that he "Had in him those brave translunary things / That the first poets had", and Ben Jonson wrote of “Marlowe’s mighty line”. Thomas Nashe wrote warmly of his friend, “poor deceased Kit Marlowe”. So too did the publisher Edward Blount, in the dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham. Among the few contemporary dramatists to say anything negative about Marlowe was the anonymous author of the Cambridge University play The Return From Parnassus (1598) who wrote, "Pity it is that wit so ill should dwell, / Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell.” The most famous tribute to Marlowe was paid by Shakespeare in As You Like It, where he not only quotes a line from Hero and Leander ("Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might, ‘Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?’") but also gives to the clown Touchstone the words “When a man’s verses cannot be understood, nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.” This appears to be a reference to Marlowe’s murder which involved a fight over the “reckoning”, the bill, as well as to a line in Marlowe’s Jew of Malta– “Infinite riches in a little room”. Shakespeare was heavily influenced by Marlowe in his work, as can be seen in the re-using of Marlovian themes in Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice, Richard II, and Macbeth (Dido, Jew of Malta, Edward II and Doctor Faustus, respectively). In Hamlet, after meeting with the travelling actors, Hamlet requests the Player perform a speech about the Trojan War, which at 2.2.429–32 has an echo of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare brings on a character “Marcade” (three syllables) in conscious acknowledgement of Marlowe’s character “Mercury”, also attending the King of Navarre, in Massacre at Paris. The significance, to those of Shakespeare’s audience who had read Hero and Leander, was Marlowe’s identification of himself with the god Mercury. As Shakespeare A theory has arisen centered on the notion that Marlowe may have faked his death and then continued to write under the assumed name of William Shakespeare. However, orthodox academic consensus rejects alternative candidates for authorship, including Marlowe. Memorials A Marlowe Memorial in the form of a bronze sculpture of The Muse of Poetry by Edward Onslow Ford was erected by subscription in Buttermarket, Canterbury in 1891. In July 2002, a memorial window to Marlowe– a gift of the Marlowe Society– was unveiled in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. Controversially, a question mark was added to the generally accepted date of death. On 25 October 2011 a letter from Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells was published by The Times newspaper, in which they called on the Dean and Chapter to remove the question mark on the grounds that it “flew in the face of a mass of unimpugnable evidence”. In 2012, they renewed this call in their e-book Shakespeare Bites Back, adding that it “denies history”, and again the following year in their book Shakespeare Beyond Doubt. Fictional works about Marlowe Wilbur G. Zeigler’s novel It was Marlowe (1895) was the first book to argue that Marlowe’s death was faked—apparently in support of Zeigler’s claim that Marlowe was the actual author of Hamlet, which was written after Marlowe’s recorded death. Herbert Lom’s Enter a Spy: The Double Life of Christopher Marlowe (1978), a historical novel. Philip Lindsay’s One Dagger For Two (1932), novel which claims that Marlowe was stabbed in a dispute over a woman. Leo Rost’s Marlowe (1981), was an American rock musical staged on Broadway. Peter Whelan’s play The School of Night (1992), about Marlowe’s links to the freethinking “school of night” and the young Shakespeare, was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. Anthony Burgess’s A Dead Man in Deptford (1993), an imaginative treatment of Marlowe’s death, was the last of Burgess’s novels to be published in his lifetime. Marlowe appears in Harry Turtledove’s Ruled Britannia (2002), an alternate history depicting an England where the Spanish Armada was successful in 1588 and imposed the rule of King Philip II of Spain. In this depiction, Marlowe is still alive in 1598 and is active among conspirators seeking to overthrow Spanish rule and restore the imprisoned Queen Elizabeth. This involvement leads to Marlowe being killed, five years later than in actual history, and he does not live to see the success of the rebellion he helped foment. Louise Welsh’s 2004 novel Tamburlaine Must Die about Marlowe’s last days was chosen as a BBC Radio 4 “Book at Bedtime” in April 2006. The 2010 Dr Who audio play Point of Entry starring Colin Baker has Marlowe haunted by a demon seeking an Aztec dagger. Marlowe plays a major role in Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age Series (2006-2013), which combines elements of secret history and fantasy. Among other things, in this account Marlowe and Shakespeare had a secret, deeply emotional homosexual love affair and many of Shakespeare’s Sonnets were written to express his love for Marlowe. Also, as depicted in the Promethean Age series, Christopher Marlowe was not assassinated in 1593 as history records but was taken into Faerie where he became the lover of the witch Morgan le Fay. The Christopher Marlowe Mysteries was a 4-episode BBC Radio 4 series, first broadcast in 2007. Michael Butt’s radio play, The Killing, was performed as “Afternoon Drama” on BBC Radio 4 in August 2010. D. Lawrence-Young’s novel Marlowe: “Soul’d to the Devil” (2010) is close to a biography of Marlowe’s life. Ros Barber’s verse novel The Marlowe Papers (2012), in which Marlowe looks back on his past and faked death, was winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize and joint winner of the Authors’ Club First Novel Award for 2013. M. J. Trow’s The Kit Marlowe Series (2011 - ), in which Marlowe is depicted as a detective and spy for Sir Francis Walsingham Ellen Wilson’s novel, In the Shadow of Shakespeare (2013), mixing historical fiction, romance, and science fiction, the heroine, Alice, travels back in time and meets Christopher Marlowe. Marlowe is a character in the 2015 film Bill. Marlowe (played by Jamie Campbell-Bower) is a main character in the 2017 TNT series Will. Michelle Butler Hallett’s This Marlowe (2016) explores the relationship between Kyd and Marlowe, and gives an account of Kyd’s interrogation and the murder of Marlowe. Works (The dates of composition are approximate.) Plays * Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1586) (possibly co-written with Thomas Nashe) * Tamburlaine the Great, part 1 (c. 1587), part 2 (c. 1587–1588) * The Jew of Malta (c. 1589) * The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (c. 1589, or, c. 1593) * Edward II (c. 1592) * The Massacre at Paris (c. 1593) * The play Lust’s Dominion was attributed to Marlowe upon its initial publication in 1657, though scholars and critics have almost unanimously rejected the attribution. Poetry * Translation of Book One of Lucan’s Pharsalia (date unknown) * Translation of Ovid’s Amores (c. 1580s?) * “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (pre-1593) * Hero and Leander (c. 1593, unfinished; completed by George Chapman, 1598) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Marlowe

Zora Bernice May Cross (18 May 1890– 22 January 1964) was an Australian poet, novelist and journalist. She was born on May 18, 1890 on Eagle Farm, Brisbane to Earnest William Cross and Mary Louisa Eliza Ann. Her father was a Sydney born accountant. Cross inherited her love for literature from both her parents, poetry from her mother and Celtic knowledge from her father, who was also the son of an Irish printer. and was educated at Ipswich Girls’ Grammar School and then Sydney Teachers’ College from 1909 to 1910. She taught for three years and then worked as a journalist, for the Boomerang and then as a freelance writer. On March 11, 1911, she married Stuart Smith but later refused to live with him. This led to her marriage being dissolved on September 10, 1922. Later on in her life, Cross had a “de facto” husband, David McKee Wright, who she had two daughters with.

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

Edward Dowden (/ˈdaʊdən/; 3 May 1843– 4 April 1913), was an Irish critic and poet. Biography He was the son of John Wheeler Dowden, a merchant and landowner, and was born at Cork, three years after his brother John, who became Bishop of Edinburgh in 1886. Edward’s literary tastes emerged early, in a series of essays written at the age of twelve. His home education continued at Queen’s College, Cork and at Trinity College, Dublin; at the latter he had a distinguished career, becoming president of the Philosophical Society, and winning the vice-chancellor’s prize for English verse and prose, and the first senior moderatorship in ethics and logic. In 1867 he was elected professor of oratory and English literature in Dublin University. Dowden’s first book, Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (1875), resulted from a revision of a course of lectures, and made him widely known as a critic: translations appeared in German and Russian; his Poems (1876) went into a second edition. His Shakespeare Primer (1877) was translated into Italian and German. In 1878 the Royal Irish Academy awarded him the Cunningham gold medal “for his literary writings, especially in the field of Shakespearian criticism.” Later works by him in this field included an edition of The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (1881), Passionate Pilgrim (1883), Introduction to Shakespeare (1893), Hamlet (1899), Romeo and Juliet (1900), Cymbeline (1903), and an article entitled “Shakespeare as a Man of Science” (in the National Review, July 1902), which criticized T.E. Webb’s Mystery of William Shakespeare. His critical essays “Studies in Literature” (1878), “Transcripts and Studies” (1888), “New Studies in Literature” (1895) showed a profound knowledge of the currents and tendencies of thought in various ages and countries; but his Life of Shelley (1886) made him best known to the public at large. In 1900 he edited an edition of Shelley’s works. Other books by him which indicate his interests in literature include: Robert Southey (in the “English Men of Letters” series, 1880), his edition of Southey’s Correspondence with Caroline Bowles (1881), and Select Poems of Southey (1895), his Correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor (1888), his edition of Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (1892) and of his Lyrical Ballads (1890), his French Revolution and English Literature (1897; lectures given at Princeton University in 1896), History of French Literature (1897), Puritan and Anglican (1900), Robert Browning (1904) and Michel de Montaigne (1905). His devotion to Goethe led to his succeeding Max Müller in 1888 as president of the English Goethe Society. In 1889 he gave the first annual Taylorian Lecture at the University of Oxford, and from 1892 to 1896 served as Clark lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. To his research are due, among other matters of literary interest, the first account of Thomas Carlyle’s Lectures on periods of European culture; the identification of Shelley as the author of a review (in The Critical Review of December 1814) of a lost romance by James Hogg; a description of Shelley’s Philosophical View of Reform; a manuscript diary of Fabre d’Églantine; and a record by Dr Wilhelm Weissenborn of Goethe’s last days and death. He also discovered a Narrative of a Prisoner of War under Napoleon (published in Blackwood’s Magazine), an unknown pamphlet by Bishop Berkeley, some unpublished writings of William Hayley relating to Cowper, and a unique copy of the Tales of Terror. His wide interests and scholarly methods made his influence on criticism both sound and stimulating, and his own ideals are well described in his essay on The Interpretation of Literature in his Transcripts and Studies. As commissioner of education in Ireland (1896–1901), trustee of the National Library of Ireland, secretary of the Irish Liberal Union and vice-president of the Irish Unionist Alliance, he enforced his view that literature should not be divorced from practical life. His biographical/critical concepts, particularly in connection with Shakespeare, are played with by Stephen Dedalus in the library chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Leslie Fiedler was to play with them again in The Stranger in Shakespeare. Dowden married twice, first (1866) Mary Clerke, and secondly (1895) Elizabeth Dickinson West, daughter of the dean of St Patrick’s. His daughter by his first wife, Hester Dowden, was a well-known spiritualist medium. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Dowden

Thomas Gray (26 December 1716– 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. Early life and education Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London. His father, Philip Gray, was a scrivener and his mother, Dorothy Antrobus, was a milliner He was the fifth of 12 children, and the only child of Philip and Dorothy Gray to survive infancy. He lived with his mother after she left his abusive and mentally unwell father. Gray’s mother paid for him to go to Eton College where two of his uncles worked: Robert and William Antrobus. Robert became Gray’s first teacher and helped inspire in Gray a love for botany and observational science. Gray’s other uncle, William, became his tutor. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and scholarly boy who spent his time reading and avoiding athletics. He lived in his uncle’s household rather than at college. He made three close friends at Eton: Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Thomas Ashton, and Richard West, son of another Richard West who was briefly Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The four prided themselves on their sense of style, sense of humour, and appreciation of beauty. They were called the “quadruple alliance.” In 1734 Gray went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He found the curriculum dull. He wrote letters to friends listing all the things he disliked: the masters ("mad with Pride") and the Fellows ("sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things"). Intended by his family for the law, he spent most of his time as an undergraduate reading classical and modern literature, and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation. In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Walpole on his Grand Tour of Europe, possibly at Walpole’s expense. The two fell out and parted in Tuscany, because Walpole wanted to attend fashionable parties and Gray wanted to visit all the antiquities. They were reconciled a few years later. It was Walpole who later helped publish Gray’s poetry. When Gray sent his most famous poem, “Elegy,” to Walpole, Walpole sent off the poem as a manuscript and it appeared in different magazines. Gray then published the poem himself and received the credit he was due Writing and academia Gray began seriously writing poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a self-imposed programme of literary study, becoming one of the most learned men of his time, though he claimed to be lazy by inclination. Gray was a brilliant bookworm, a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar, often afraid of the shadows of his own fame. He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Gray moved to Pembroke after the students at Peterhouse played a prank on him. Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin traveling again. Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to fewer than 1,000 lines), he is regarded as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. Gray was so self-critical and fearful of failure that he published only thirteen poems during his lifetime. He once wrote that he feared his collected works would be “mistaken for the works of a flea”. Walpole said that “He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour.” Gray came to be known as one of the “Graveyard poets” of the late 18th century, along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, and Christopher Smart. Gray perhaps knew these men, sharing ideas about death, mortality, and the finality and sublimity of death. In 1762, the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure which carried a salary of £400, fell vacant after the death of Shallet Turner, and Gray’s friends lobbied the government unsuccessfully to secure the position for him. In the event, Gray lost out to Lawrence Brockett, but he secured the position in 1768 after Brockett’s death. “Elegy” masterpiece It is believed that Gray began writing his masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of St Giles parish church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in 1742. After several years of leaving it unfinished, he completed it in 1750 (see Elegy for the form). The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 (see 1751 in poetry). Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek; it is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language. In 1759 during the Seven Years War, before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to his officers, adding: “Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow”. The Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill. It contains many phrases which have entered the common English lexicon, either on their own or as quoted in other works. These include: “The Paths of Glory” (the title of a 1957 anti-war movie about World War I, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on a novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb). “Celestial fire” “Some mute inglorious Milton” “Far from the Madding Crowd” (the title of a novel by Thomas Hardy, filmed several times) “The unlettered muse” “Kindred spirit” “Elegy” contemplates such themes as death and afterlife. These themes foreshadowed the upcoming Gothic movement. It is suggested that perhaps Gray found inspiration for his poem by visiting the gravesite of his aunt, Mary Antrobus. The aunt was buried at the graveyard by the St. Giles’ churchyard, which he and his mother would visit. This is the same gravesite where Gray himself was later buried. Gray also wrote light verse, including Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, a mock elegy concerning Horace Walpole’s cat. After setting the scene with the couplet “What female heart can gold despise? What cat’s averse to fish?”, the poem moves to its multiple proverbial conclusion: “a fav’rite has no friend”, "[k]now one false step is ne’er retrieved" and “nor all that glisters, gold”. (Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase (the tub) on a pedestal at his house in Strawberry Hill.) Gray’s surviving letters also show his sharp observation and playful sense of humour. He is well known for his phrase, “where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise.” The phrase, from Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, is possibly one of the most misconstrued phrases in English literature. Gray is not promoting ignorance, but is reflecting with nostalgia on a time when he was allowed to be ignorant, his youth (1742). It has been asserted that the Ode also abounds with images which find “a mirror in every mind”. This was stated by Samuel Johnson who said of the poem, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader... The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo”. Indeed, Gray’s poem follows the style of the mid-century literary endeavor to write of “universal feelings.” Samuel Johnson also said of Gray that he spoke in “two languages”. He spoke in the language of “public” and “private” and according to Johnson, he should have spoken more in his private language as he did in his “Elegy” poem. Forms Gray considered his two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, as his best works. Pindaric odes are to be written with fire and passion, unlike the calmer and more reflective Horatian odes such as Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College. The Bard tells of a wild Welsh poet cursing the Norman king Edward I after his conquest of Wales and prophesying in detail the downfall of the House of Plantagenet. It is melodramatic, and ends with the bard hurling himself to his death from the top of a mountain. When his duties allowed, Gray travelled widely throughout Britain to places such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Scotland and most notably the Lake District (see his Journal of a Visit to the Lake District in 1769) in search of picturesque landscapes and ancient monuments. These elements were not generally valued in the early 18th century, when the popular taste ran to classical styles in architecture and literature, and most people liked their scenery tame and well-tended. Some have seen Gray’s writings on this topic, and the Gothic details that appear in his Elegy and The Bard as the first foreshadowing of the Romantic movement that dominated the early 19th century, when William Wordsworth and the other Lake poets taught people to value the picturesque, the sublime, and the Gothic. Gray combined traditional forms and poetic diction with new topics and modes of expression, and may be considered as a classically focused precursor of the romantic revival. Gray’s connection to the Romantic poets is vexed. In the prefaces to the 1800 and 1802 editions of Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth singled out Gray’s “Sonnet on the Death of Richard West” to exemplify what he found most objectionable in poetry, declaring it was “Gray, who was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.” Gray wrote in a letter to West, that “the language of the age is never the language of poetry.” Death Gray died on 30 July 1771 in Cambridge, and was buried beside his mother in the churchyard of St Giles’ church in Stoke Poges, the setting for his famous Elegy. His grave can still be seen there. Honours Gray’s biographer William Mason erected a monument to him, designed by John Bacon the Elder, in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey in 1778. John Penn “of Stoke” had a memorial to Gray built near St Giles’ churchyard and engraved with extracts from the “Elegy”. A plaque in Cornhill marks his birthplace. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gray

James Kenneth Stephen (25 February 1859– 3 February 1892) was an English poet, and tutor to Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales. Early life Stephen was the second son of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, barrister-at-law, and his wife Mary Richenda Cunningham. James Kenneth Stephen was known as 'Jem’ among his family and close friends; he was first cousin to Virginia Woolf (née Stephen). He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, where he proved to be a highly competent player of the Eton Wall Game; and then went up to King’s College, Cambridge, again as a King’s Scholar. In the Michaelmas term of 1880, he was President of the Cambridge Union Society. In 1883 he became tutor to Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, and was made a Fellow of King’s College in 1885. He was a renowned intellectual; and it was said that he spoke in a pedantic, but highly articulate and entertaining manner. Poetry Stephen became a published poet, his work being identified by the initials J. K. S. His collections of poems Lapsus Calami and Quo Musa Tendis were both published in 1891. Rudyard Kipling called him “that genius” and told how he “dealt with Haggard and me in some stanzas which I would have given much to have written myself”. Those stanzas, in which Stephen deplores the state of contemporary writing, appear in his poem ‘To R. K.’: Will there never come a season Which shall rid us from the curse Of a prose which knows no reason And an unmelodious verse: When the world shall cease to wonder At the genius of an Ass, And a boy's eccentric blunder Shall not bring success to pass: When mankind shall be delivered From the clash of magazines, And the inkstand shall be shivered Into countless smithereens: When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore: When the Rudyards cease from Kipling And the Haggards Ride no more. “The Last Ride Together (From Her Point of View)” parodies Robert Browning’s “Last Ride Together”; Lord Byron is parodied in “A Grievance”; and William Wordsworth in “A Sonnet”: Two voices are there: one is of the deep; It learns the storm-cloud's thunderous melody, Now roars, now murmurs with the changing sea, Now bird-like pipes, now closes soft in sleep: And one is of an old half-witted sheep Which bleats articulate monotony, And indicates that two and one are three, That grass is green, lakes damp, and mountains steep: And, Wordsworth, both are thine J. K Stephen was at Cambridge at the same time as the distinguished antiquarian and writer of ghost-stories, Montague R. James, and mentions him at the end of a curious Latin celebration of then-current worthies of 'Coll. Regale’ (King’s College): Vivat J.K. Stephanus, Humilis poeta! Vivat Monty Jamesius, Vivant A, B, C, D, E Et totus Alphabeta! Stephen wrote a satirical pastiche of Thomas Gray’s “Ode to the Distant Prospect of Eton College” pillorying Eton for being Tory. A poem which gave him a reputation as a misogynist is “Men and Women,” where he describes two people, a man and a woman, whom he does not know but to whom he takes a violent dislike. The first part, subtitled “In the Backs” (The Backs is a riverside area of Cambridge), concludes ...I do not want to see that girl again: I did not like her: and I should not mind If she were done away with, killed, or ploughed. She did not seem to serve a useful end: And certainly she was not beautiful. (Plough is slang for failing an exam.) However many of his other poems show that this “misogyny” Is more accurately described as only one facet of a sardonic nature. Stephen was a member of the Cambridge “Apostles”. Death Stephen suffered a serious head injury in an accident in the winter of 1886/1887 which may have exacerbated the bi-polar disorder from which he suffered. His cousin Virginia Woolf suffered from the same disorder throughout her adult life. Stephen was eventually committed to St Andrew’s Hospital, a mental asylum in Northampton. In January 1892 the former Royal tutor heard that his erstwhile pupil, the 28-year-old Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence had died of pneumonia at Sandringham, after contracting influenza. On hearing the news, Stephen refused to eat, and died twenty days later, aged 32. His cause of death, according to the death certificate, was mania. Eton legacies Stephen was noted for his prodigious size and physical strength. At Eton, he was an outstanding player of the Wall Game. He played for College on St Andrew’s Day four times: in 1874, 1875, 1876 and 1877. In the last two years he was Keeper (or captain) of the College Wall. College beat the Oppidans by 4 shies to nil in his first year as Keeper, and by 10 shies to nil the next year. Ever after, the King’s Scholars have honoured J K Stephen’s memory with a toast at the Christmas Sock Supper or other festive occasions - in piam memoriam, J. K. S. (In pious memory of J. K. S.). Stephen was recalled in less pious memory in a play by former Eton housemaster and Old Etonian, Angus Graham-Campbell; entitled Sympathy for the Devil, it premiered at the Eton Drama festival in 1993. This was based on the notion that Stephen could have been one of the Jack the Ripper suspects; this theory has been dismissed, because he would have been unable to return to Cambridge in time for lectures the following morning. Stephen’s poem The Old School List from Quo Musa Tendis is included in the front pages of H. E. C. Stapleton’s Eton School Lists 1853-1892, and the author refers to him in the preface as 'an Etonian of great promise, who died only too early for his numerous friends’. During his time at Eton, Stephen was a friend of Harry Goodhart (1858–1895), who became an England international footballer and later a Professor at the University of Edinburgh. Goodhart is referred to as “one of them’s wed” in the last verse of The Old School List: There were two good fellows I used to know. —How distant it all appears! We played together in football weather, And messed together for years: Now one of them's wed, and the other's dead So long that he's hardly missed Save by us, who messed with him years ago: But we're all in the old School List. Collections Select Poems 1926 Augustan Books of Modern Poetry Lapsus Calami JKS Cambridge 1891 Quo Musa Tendis Cambridge 1891 Lapsus Calami and other verses 1896 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Kenneth_Stephen