ellynpeirson.com · Web viewBiography William Blake. William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker.He is considered one of the

Biography William Blake

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. He is considered one of the greatest romantic poets leaving a legacy of memorable poetry. He combined a lofty mysticism, imagination and vision – with an uncompromising awareness of the harsh realities of life.

ONE OF THE GREATEST POETS EVER: William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age. What he called his prophetic works were said by 20th-century critic Northrop Frye to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language".[2] His visual artistry led 21st-century critic Jonathan Jones to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced".[3] In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.[4] While he lived in London his entire life, except for three years spent in Felpham,[5] he produced a diverse and symbolically rich œuvre, which embraced the imagination as "the body of God"[6] or "human existence itself".[7]

Although Blake was considered mad by contemporaries for his idiosyncratic views, he is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. His paintings and poetry have been characterised as part of the Romantic movement and as "Pre-Romantic". [8] A committed Christian who was hostile to the Church of England (indeed, to almost all forms of organised religion), Blake was influenced by the ideals and ambitions of the French and American Revolutions.[9] Though later he rejected many of these political beliefs, he maintained an amiable relationship with the political activist Thomas Paine; he was also influenced by thinkers such as Emanuel Swedenborg.[10] Despite these known influences, the singularity of Blake's work makes him difficult to classify. The 19th-century scholar William Michael Rossetti characterised him as a "glorious luminary",[11] and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors". [12]

William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick St.) in Soho, London. He was the third of seven children,[14][15] two of whom died in infancy.

Blake's father, James, was a hosier.[15] He attended school only long enough to learn reading and writing, leaving at the age of ten, and was otherwise educated at home by his mother Catherine Blake (née Wright).[16] Even though the Blakes were English Dissenters,[17] William was baptised on 11 December at St James's Church, Piccadilly, London.[18] The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and remained a source of inspiration throughout his life.

Blake started engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father, a practice that was preferred to actual drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck and Albrecht Dürer. The number of prints and bound books that James and Catherine were able to purchase for young William suggests that the Blakes enjoyed, at least for a time, a comfortable wealth.[17] When William was ten years old, his parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but instead enrolled in drawing classes at Pars's drawing school in the Strand.[19] He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake made explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms.

Apprenticeship to Basire

The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in Blake's work. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen prays before the world he has forged. The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as the Continental Prophecies.

On 4 August 1772, Blake was apprenticed to engraver James Basire of Great Queen Street, at the sum of £52.10, for a term of seven years.[15] At the end of the term, aged 21, he became a professional engraver. No record survives of any serious disagreement or conflict between the two during the period of Blake's apprenticeship, but Peter Ackroyd's biography notes that Blake later added Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries – and then crossed it out.[20] This aside, Basire's style of line-engraving was of a kind held at the time to be old-fashioned compared to the flashier stipple or mezzotint styles.[21] It has been speculated that Blake's instruction in this outmoded form may have been detrimental to his acquiring of work or recognition in later life.

After two years, Basire sent his apprentice to copy images from the Gothic churches in London (perhaps to settle a quarrel between Blake and James Parker, his fellow apprentice). His experiences in Westminster Abbey helped form his artistic style and ideas. The Abbey of his day was decorated with suits of armour, painted funeral effigies and varicoloured waxworks. Ackroyd notes that "...the most immediate [impression] would have been of faded brightness and colour".[22] This close study of the Gothic (which he saw as the "living form") left clear traces in his style.[23] In the long afternoons Blake spent sketching in the Abbey, he was occasionally interrupted by boys from Westminster School, who were allowed in the Abbey. They teased him and one tormented him so much that Blake knocked the boy off a scaffold to the ground, "upon which he fell with terrific Violence".[24] After Blake complained to the Dean, the schoolboys' privilege was withdrawn.[23] Blake claimed that he experienced visions in the Abbey. He saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard their chant.[23]

Royal Academy

On 8 October 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand.[25] While the terms of his study required no payment, he was expected to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude towards art, especially his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty". Reynolds wrote in his Discourses that the "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind"; Blake responded, in marginalia to his personal copy, that "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit".[26] Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical precision of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

David Bindman suggests that Blake's antagonism towards Reynolds arose not so much from the president's opinions (like Blake, Reynolds held history painting to be of greater value than landscape and portraiture), but rather "against his hypocrisy in not putting his

ideals into practice."[27] Certainly Blake was not averse to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, submitting works on six occasions between 1780 and 1808.

Blake became a friend of John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland during his first year at the Royal Academy. They shared radical views, with Stothard and Cumberland joining the Society for Constitutional Information.[28]

Gordon Riots

Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that in June 1780 Blake was walking towards Basire's shop in Great Queen Street when he was swept up by a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison.[29] The mob attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building ablaze, and released the prisoners inside. Blake was reportedly in the front rank of the mob during the attack. The riots, in response to a parliamentary bill revoking sanctions against Roman Catholicism, became known as the Gordon Riots and provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, and the creation of the first police force.

Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (1786)Marriage and early career

Blake met Catherine Boucher in 1782 when he was recovering from a relationship that had culminated in a refusal of his marriage proposal. He recounted the story of his heartbreak for Catherine and her parents, after which he asked Catherine, "Do you pity me?" When she responded affirmatively, he declared, "Then I love you." Blake married Catherine – who was five years his junior – on 18 August 1782 in St Mary's Church, Battersea. Illiterate, Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. The original wedding certificate may be viewed at the church, where a commemorative stained-glass window was installed between 1976 and 1982.[30] Later, in addition to teaching Catherine to read and write, Blake trained her as an engraver. Throughout his life she proved an invaluable aid, helping to print his illuminated works and maintaining his spirits throughout numerous misfortunes.

Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was printed around 1783.[31] After his father's death, Blake and former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a print

shop in 1784, and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson.[32] Johnson's house was a meeting-place for some leading English intellectual dissidents of the time: theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley, philosopher Richard Price, artist John Henry Fuseli,[33] early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and English revolutionary Thomas Paine. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the French and American revolutions and wore a Phrygian cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in France. In 1784 Blake composed his unfinished manuscript An Island in the Moon.

Blake illustrated Original Stories from Real Life (2nd edition, 1791) by Mary Wollstonecraft. They seem to have shared some views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage, but there is no evidence proving that they met. In 1793's Visions of the Daughters of Albion, Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfilment.

From 1790 to 1800, William Blake lived in North Lambeth, London, at 13 Hercules Buildings, Hercules Road.[34] The property was demolished in 1918, but the site is now marked with a plaque.[35] There is a series of 70 mosaics commemorating Blake in the nearby railway tunnels of Waterloo Station.[36][37][38] The mosaics largely reproduce illustrations from Blake's illuminated books, The Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and the prophetic books.[38]

Emily Dickinson, regarded as one of America’s greatest poets, is also well known for her unusual life of self-imposed social seclusion. Living a life of simplicity and seclusion, she yet wrote poetry of great power; questioning the nature of immortality and death, with at times an almost mantric quality. Her different lifestyle created an aura; often romanticised, and frequently a source of interest and speculation. But ultimately Emily Dickinson is remembered for her unique poetry. Within short, compact phrases she expressed far-reaching ideas; amidst paradox and uncertainty, her poetry has an undeniable capacity to move and provoke.

Early Life Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on 10th December 1830, in the town of Amherst, Massachusetts. Amherst, 50 miles from Boston, had become well known as a centre for Education, based around Amherst College. Her family were pillars of the local community; their house known as “The Homestead” or “Mansion” was often used as a meeting place for distinguished visitors including, Ralph Waldo Emerson. (although it unlikely he met with Emily Dickinson)As a young child, Emily proved to be a bright and

conscientious student. She showed a sharp intelligence and was able to create many original writings of rhyming stories, delighting her fellow classmates. Emily’s father was strict and keen to bring up his children in the proper way. Emily said of her father. “his heart was pure and terrible”.  His strictness can be shown through his censorship of reading materials; Walt Whitman, for example, was considered “too inappropriate” and novels had to be smuggled into the house. In response, Emily was highly deferential to her father and other male figures of authority. But in her own way she loved and respected her father, even if at times, he appeared to be aloof. At a young age, she said she wished to be the “best little girl”. However, despite her attempts to please and be well thought of, she was also at the same time independently minded, and quite willing to refuse the prevailing orthodoxy’s on certain issues.

Religious Influence on the Poetry of Emily Dickinson

A crucial issue at the time was the issue of religion, which to Emily was the “all important question” The antecedents of the Dickinson’s can be traced back to the early Puritan settlers, who left Lincolnshire in the late 17th Century. Her antecedents had left England so that they could practise religious freedom in America. In the nineteenth- century, religion was still the dominant issue of the day. The East coast, in particular, saw a revival of strict Calvinism; developing partly in response to the more inclusive Unitarianism. Amherst College itself was founded with the intention of training ministers to spread the Christian word. Calvinism. By incrimination, Emily Dickinson would probably have been more at ease with the looser and more inclusive ideology of Unitarianism. However, the “Great Revival” as it was known, pushed the Calvinist view to greatest prominence.

Religious Belief – Emily Dickinson

The Calvinist approach to religion believed that men were inherently sinful and most humans were doomed to hell. There was only a small number who would be saved, and this could only be achieved by the adherent proclaiming his faith in Jesus Christ, as the true Saviour. There was a subtle, but concerted effort, to encourage people to declare themselves saved. Both, at school and at college, there would have been much of this

subtle pressure put on Emily to join the “saved”; but this she never did. She always retained an independent view towards the matter of religion.

“Faith” is a fine inventionFor gentlemen who see,But Microscopes are prudentIn an emergency!

– Emily Dickinson

Her father was not too concerned with the religious views of his children even though, later in his life, he also accepted this belief. Thus, on the crucial issue of the day, Emily was relatively isolated. Amongst other reasons, Emily could never accept the doctrine of “original sin”. Despite remaining true to her own convictions, Emily was left with a sense of exclusion from the established religion, and these sentiments inform much of her poetry. There is frequent reference to “being shut out of heaven”. Yet despite this rejection of the orthodox religion, there is much in her poetry which reveals a profoundly religious temperament. For Emily religious experience was not a simple intellectual statement of belief; it could be more accurately reflected in the beauty of nature, and the experiences of ecstatic joy. Yet, although her poetry expressed intense inner experiences, this separation from established religion is a factor in her uncertainties and fluctuations in sentiment, evident in many poems.

It is a matter of speculation to what extent her poems could be considered autobiographical, but this poem gives an indication of the fleeting joy of spiritual experience, and also the more painful reality of life.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) poet, author and religious seeker. Converted to Catholicism and then became a Jesuit. His poems reflected his spiritual journey and his innovative use of meter and rhythm established him as one of the foremost Victorian poets.

Gerard Manley Hopkins SJ (28 July 1844 – 8 June 1889) was an English poet and Jesuit priest, whose posthumous fame established him among the leading Victorian poets. His manipulation of prosody – particularly his concept of sprung rhythm and use

of imagery – established him as an innovative writer of verse. Two of his major themes were nature and religion. Only after his death did Robert Bridges begin to publish a few of Hopkins's mature poems in anthologies, hoping to prepare the way for wider acceptance of his style. By 1930 his work was recognised as one of the most original literary accomplishments of his century. It had a marked influence on such leading 20th-century poets as T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis.

"The sonnets of desolation"

According to John Bayley, "All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of 'time's eunuch' with no more to 'spend'... " a sense of inadequacy, graphically expressed in his last sonnets.[18] Toward the end of his life, Hopkins suffered several long bouts of depression. His "terrible sonnets" struggle with problems of religious doubt. He described them to Bridges as "[t]he thin gleanings of a long weary while."[19]

"Thou Art Indeed Just, Lord" (1889) echoes Jeremiah 12:1 in asking why the wicked prosper. It reflects the exasperation of a faithful servant who feels he has been neglected, and is addressed to a divine person ("Sir") capable of hearing the complaint, but seemingly unwilling to listen.[20] Hopkins uses parched roots as a metaphor for despair.

The image of the poet's estrangement from God figures in "I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day", in which he describes lying awake before dawn, likening his prayers to "dead letters sent To dearest him that lives alas! away." The opening line recalls Lamentations 3:2: "He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light."

"No Worst, There is None" and "Carrion Comfort" are also counted among the "terrible sonnets".

Sprung rhythm

"Pied Beauty"

Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him.

"Pied Beauty" written 1877.[21]

Much of Hopkins's historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Prior to Hopkins, most Middle English and Modern English poetry was based on a rhythmic structure inherited from the Norman side of English literary heritage. This structure is based on repeating "feet" of two or three syllables, with the stressed syllable falling in the same place on each repetition. Hopkins called this structure "running rhythm", and although he wrote some of his early verse in running rhythm, he became fascinated with the older rhythmic structure of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, of which Beowulf is the most famous example.

Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. It is similar to the "rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional metre. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become "same and tame". In this way, Hopkins sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry, or as a bridge between the two poetic eras.

Use of language

The language of Hopkins's poems is often striking. His imagery can be simple, as in Heaven-Haven, where the comparison is between a nun entering a convent and a ship entering a harbour out of a storm. It can be splendidly metaphysical and intricate, as it is in As Kingfishers Catch Fire, where he leaps from one image to another to show how each thing expresses its own uniqueness, and how divinity reflects itself through all of them.

Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English. In an 1882 letter to Robert Bridges, Hopkins writes: "It makes one weep to think what English might have been; for in spite of all that Shakespeare and Milton have done... no beauty in a language can make up for want of purity."[22] He took time to learn Old English, which became a major influence on his writing. In the same letter to Bridges he calls Old English "a vastly superior thing to what we have now."[23]

He uses many archaic and dialect words but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn-drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him

steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compounds nouns, concentrates his images, communicating to his readers the instress of the poet's perceptions of an inscape.

Added richness comes from Hopkins's extensive use of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, both at the end of lines and internally as in:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;As tumbled over rim in roundy wellsStones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell'sBow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Hopkins was influenced by the Welsh language, which he had acquired while studying theology at St Beuno's near St Asaph. The poetic forms of Welsh literature and particularly cynghanedd, with its emphasis on repeating sounds, accorded with his own style and became a prominent feature of his work. This reliance on similar-sounding words with close or differing senses means that his poems are best understood if read aloud. An important element in his work is Hopkins's own concept of inscape, which was derived in part from the medieval theologian Duns Scotus. Anthony Domestico explains,

Inscape, for Hopkins, is the charged essence, the absolute singularity that gives each created thing its being; instress is both the energy that holds the inscape together and the process by which this inscape is perceived by an observer. We instress the inscape of a tulip, Hopkins would say, when we appreciate the particular delicacy of its petals, when we are enraptured by its specific, inimitable shade of pink."[24]

The Windhover aims to depict not the bird in general, but instead one instance and its relation to the breeze. This is just one interpretation of Hopkins's most famous poem, one which he felt was his best.[4]

I caught this morning morning's minion, king- dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and stridingHigh there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wingIn his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hidingStirred for a bird, — the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

The first stanza of "The Windhover" written 30 May 1877, published 1918.[25]

During his lifetime, Hopkins published few poems. It was only through the efforts of Robert Bridges that his works were seen. Despite Hopkins burning all his poems on entering the Jesuit novitiate, he had already sent some to Bridges, who with some other

friends, was one of the few people to see many of them for some years. After Hopkins's death they were distributed to a wider audience, mostly fellow poets, and in 1918 Bridges, by then poet laureate, published a collected edition; an expanded edition, prepared by Charles Williams, appeared in 1930, and a greatly expanded edition by William Henry Gardner appeared in 1948 (eventually reaching a fourth edition, 1967, with N. H. Mackenzie).

Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.[26]

T. S. Eliot

1888–1965

read poems by this poet

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri,  on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.

After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Collected Poems (1962)The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)Four Quartets (1943)Burnt Norton (1941)The Dry Salvages (1941)East Coker (1940)Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)Ash Wednesday (1930)Poems, 1909–1925 (1925)

The Waste Land (1922)Poems (1919)Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Prose

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)Poetry and Drama (1951)Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)Elizabethan Essays (1934)The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)After Strange Gods (1933)John Dryden (1932)Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)Dante (1929)For Lancelot Andrews (1928)Andrew Marvell (1922)The Sacred Wood (1920)

Drama

The Elder Statesman (1958)The Confidential Clerk (1953)The Cocktail Party (1950)The Family Reunion (1939)Murder in the Cathedral (1935)The Rock (1934)Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

Edward Estlin "E. E." Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962), often styled as e e cummings, as he is attributed in many of his published works,[1] was an American poet, painter, essayist, author, and playwright. He wrote approximately 2,900 poems, two autobiographical novels, four plays, and several essays. He is often regarded as one of the most important American poets of the 20th century. Cummings is associated with modernist free-form poetry. Much of his work has idiosyncratic syntax and uses lower case

spellings for poetic expression. His use of lower case extended to rendering even the personal pronoun I as i, as in the phrase "i shall go.”

Early years

Edward Estlin Cummings was born on October 14, 1894 in Cambridge, Massachusetts to Edward Cummings and the former Rebecca Haswell Clarke, a well-known Unitarian couple in the city. His father was a professor at Harvard University who later became nationally known as the minister of South Congregational Church (Unitarian) in Boston, Massachusetts.[2] His mother, who loved to spend time with her children, played games with Cummings and his sister, Elizabeth. From an early age, Cummings' parents supported his creative gifts.[3] Cummings wrote poems and drew as a child, and he often played outdoors with the many other children who lived in his neighborhood. He grew up in the company of such family friends as the philosophers William James and Josiah Royce. Many of Cummings' summers were spent on Silver Lake in Madison, New Hampshire, where his father had built two houses along the eastern shore. The family ultimately purchased the nearby Joy Farm where Cummings had his primary summer residence.[4]

He expressed transcendental leanings his entire life. As he matured, Cummings moved to an "I, Thou" relationship with God. His journals are replete with references to "le bon Dieu", as well as prayers for inspiration in his poetry and artwork (such as "Bon Dieu! may i some day do something truly great. amen."). Cummings "also prayed for strength to be his essential self ('may I be I is the only prayer—not may I be great or good or beautiful or wise or strong'), and for relief of spirit in times of depression ('almighty God! I thank thee for my soul; & may I never die spiritually into a mere mind through disease of loneliness')."[5]

Cummings wanted to be a poet from childhood and wrote poetry daily from age 8 to 22, exploring assorted forms. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1915 and received a Master of Arts degree from the university in 1916.[6] In his studies at Harvard, he developed an interest in modern poetry, which ignored conventional grammar and syntax, while aiming for a dynamic use of language. Upon graduating, he worked for a book dealer. [7]

Masthead from volume 56 of The Harvard Monthly; Cummings was an editor and contributor to this literary journal while at HarvardWar years

In 1917, with the First World War ongoing in Europe, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps. On the boat to France, he met William Slater Brown and they would become friends. Due to an administrative error, Cummings and Brown did not receive an assignment for five weeks, a period they spent exploring Paris. Cummings fell in love with the city, to which he would return throughout his life. [8]

During their service in the ambulance corps, the two young writers sent letters home that drew the attention of the military censors. They were known to prefer the company of French soldiers over fellow ambulance drivers. The two openly expressed anti-war views; Cummings spoke of his lack of hatred for the Germans.[9] On September 21, 1917, five months after starting his belated assignment, Cummings and William Slater Brown were arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. They were held for three and a half months in a military detention camp at the Dépôt de Triage, in La Ferté-Macé, Orne, Normandy.[8]

They were imprisoned with other detainees in a large room. Cummings' father failed to obtain his son's release through diplomatic channels, and in December 1917 he wrote a letter to President Woodrow Wilson. Cummings was released on December 19, 1917, and Brown was released two months later. Cummings used his prison experience as the basis for his novel, The Enormous Room (1922), about which F. Scott Fitzgerald

said, "Of all the work by young men who have sprung up since 1920 one book survives—The Enormous Room by e e cummings... Those few who cause books to live have not been able to endure the thought of its mortality."[10]

Cummings returned to the United States on New Year's Day 1918. Later in 1918 he was drafted into the army. He served in the 12th Division at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, until November 1918.[11][12]

Buffalo Bill'sdefunct        who used to        ride a watersmooth-silver                                  stallionand break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat                                                  Jesus

he was a handsome man                      and what i want to know ishow do you like your blueeyed boyMister Death

"Buffalo Bill's" (1920)

Post-war years

Cummings returned to Paris in 1921 and lived there for two years before returning to New York. His collection Tulips and Chimneys was published in 1923 and his inventive use of grammar and syntax is evident. The book was heavily cut by his editor. XLI Poems was published in 1925. With these collections, Cummings made his reputation as an avant garde poet.[7]

During the rest of the 1920s and 1930s, Cummings returned to Paris a number of times, and traveled throughout Europe, meeting, among others, artist Pablo Picasso. In 1931 Cummings traveled to the Soviet Union, recounting his experiences in Eimi, published two years later. During these years Cummings also traveled to Northern Africa and Mexico. He worked as an essayist and portrait artist for Vanity Fair magazine (1924–1927).

In 1926, Cummings' parents were in a car crash; only his mother survived, although she was severely injured. Cummings later described the crash in the following passage from his i: six nonlectures series given at Harvard (as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures) in 1952 and 1953:

A locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing – dazed but erect – beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her

hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six-year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.

His father's death had a profound effect on Cummings, who entered a new period in his artistic life. He began to focus on more important aspects of life in his poetry. He started this new period by paying homage to his father in the poem "my father moved through dooms of love".[13][14]

In the 1930s Samuel Aiwaz Jacobs was Cummings' publisher; he had started the Golden Eagle Press after working as a typographer and publisher.

Final years

Grave of E. E. Cummings

In 1952, his alma mater, Harvard University, awarded Cummings an honorary seat as a guest professor. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he gave in 1952 and 1955 were later collected as i: six nonlectures.

i thank You God for most this amazingday:for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky; and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes

From "i thank You God for most this amazing" (1950)

Cummings spent the last decade of his life traveling, fulfilling speaking engagements, and spending time at his summer home, Joy Farm, in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. He died of a stroke on September 3, 1962, at the age of 67 at Memorial Hospital in North Conway, New Hampshire.[15] Cummings was buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. At the time of his death, Cummings was recognized as the second most read poet in the United States, behind Robert Frost.[16]

Cummings' papers are held at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[8]

Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.[1] In 2007 The New York Times described her as "far and away, this country's best-selling poet."[2]

Mary Oliver was born to Edward William and Helen M. (Vlasak) Oliver on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland.[3] Her father was a social studies teacher and an athletics coach in the Cleveland public schools. As a child, she spent a great deal of time outside where she enjoyed going on walks or reading. In an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1992, Oliver commented on growing up in Ohio, saying

"It was pastoral, it was nice, it was an extended family. I don't know why I felt such an affinity with the natural world except that it was available to me, that's the first thing. It was right there. And for whatever reasons, I felt those first important connections, those first experiences being made with the natural world rather than with the social world." [4]

In 2011, in an interview with Maria Shriver, Oliver described her family as dysfunctional, adding that though her childhood was very hard, by writing it helped her create her own world.[5] Oliver revealed in the interview with Shriver that she had been sexually abused as a child and had experienced recurring nightmares.[5]

Oliver began writing poetry at the age of 14. She graduated from the local high school in Maple Heights. In the summer of 1951 at the age of 15 she attended the National Music

Camp at Interlochen, Michigan, now known as Interlochen Arts Camp, where she was in the percussion section of the National High School Orchestra. At 17 she visited the home of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, in Austerlitz, New York,[3][6] where she then formed a friendship with the late poet's sister Norma. Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the estate organizing Edna St. Vincent Millay's papers.

Oliver studied at The Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s, but did not receive a degree at either college.[3]

Career

She worked at ''Steepletop'', the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay, as secretary to the poet's sister.[7] Oliver's first collection of poems, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, when she was 28.[8] During the early 1980s, Oliver taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her fifth collection of poetry, American Primitive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984.[3][9] She was Poet In Residence at Bucknell University (1986) and Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College (1991), then moved to Bennington, Vermont, where she held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001.[8]

She won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her piece House of Light (1990), and New and Selected Poems (1992) won the National Book Award.[3][10] Oliver's work turns towards nature for its inspiration and describes the sense of wonder it instilled in her. "When it's over," she says, "I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms." ("When Death Comes" from New and Selected Poems (1992).) Her collections Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004), and New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004) build the themes. The first and second parts of Leaf and the Cloud are featured in The Best American Poetry 1999 and 2000,[11]

and her essays appear in Best American Essays 1996, 1998 and 2001.[8]

Poetic identity

Mary Oliver's poetry is grounded in memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, setting most of her poetry in and around Provincetown after she moved there in the 1960s.[6] Influenced by both Whitman and Thoreau, she is known for her clear and poignant observances of the natural world. In fact, according to the 1983 Chronology of American Literature, the "American Primitive," one of Oliver's collection of poems, "...presents a new kind of Romanticism that refuses to acknowledge boundaries between nature and the observing self." [12] Her creativity was stirred by nature, and Oliver, an avid walker, often pursued inspiration on foot. Her poems are filled with imagery from her daily walks near her home:[8] shore birds, water snakes, the phases of the moon and humpback whales. In Long life she says "[I] go off to my woods, my ponds, my sun-filled harbor, no more than a blue comma on the map of the world but, to me, the emblem of everything."[6] She commented in a rare interview "When things are

going well, you know, the walk does not get rapid or get anywhere: I finally just stop, and write. That's a successful walk!" She said that she once found herself walking in the woods with no pen and later hid pencils in the trees so she would never be stuck in that place again.[6] She often carried a 3-by-5-inch hand-sewn notebook for recording impressions and phrases.[6] Maxine Kumin called Oliver "a patroller of wetlands in the same way that Thoreau was an inspector of snowstorms."[13] Oliver stated that her favorite poets were Walt Whitman, Rumi, Hafez, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats.[5]

Oliver has also been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues. Her poetry combines dark introspection with joyous release. Although she was criticized for writing poetry that assumes a dangerously close relationship between women and nature, she found that the self is only strengthened through an immersion with nature.[14] Oliver is also known for her unadorned language and accessible themes.[11] The Harvard Review describes her work as an antidote to "inattention and the baroque conventions of our social and professional lives. She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."[11]

Margaret Avison was born in Galt, Ontario, Canada, and lived for many years in Toronto. She received a BA and an MA from the University of Toronto and worked as a librarian, social worker, and teacher, writing her poetry in the evenings. Avison’s collections of poetry include Winter Sun (1960), Dumbfounding (1966), Sunblue (1978), No Time (1990), Concrete and Wild Carrot (2002), and Momentary Dark (2006).

Avison became a devout Christian in 1963, and her work is often described by reviewers as introspective, observant, and deeply spiritual. Judith Fitzgerald, writing of

Avison’s posthumous collection Listening (2009) in the Globe and Mail, commented: “An original, an authentic visionary without the flashily splashy trappings so often accorded those whose egos impose themselves upon others in their dubiously designated ‘poetry,’ Avison praises Creation in all its transplendent awesome/awful mutations.”

Avison was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1984. She received the Governor General’s Award twice, the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2003 for Concrete and Wild Carrot, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Leslie K. Tarr Award for outstanding contribution to Christian writing in Canada. She died in 2007 in Toronto.