LITERATURA USA 18.04.2011
WYKŁAD
“Richard Cory”
There is a contrast between visible surfaces and what lies between them.
Richard Cory is admired by his neighbors (their perspective). Readers are not prepared for the horror of the final stage.
Richard Cory finds failure in success.
He is lonely and acutely isolated, quietly desperate.
“Cliff Klingenhagen”
Cliff Klingenhagen finds success if not in failure, at least in a muted life.
Love can be rich and even ecstatic, but death parts even the happiest marriages and leaves a suicidal Luke Havergal, an inconsolable Reuben Bright, or orphaned children over whom the young mother in “For a Dead Lady” bends so tenderly.
Robinson later moved towards affirmation (midpoint in his career) “The Man Against the Sky”. We want to live and look for meaning, search for values, remain dreamers.
ROBINSON JEFFERS (1887 - 1962)
Life:
His father was a professor of Old Testament, literature and theology, his mother - a church organist.
R. Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh.
At the age of 15 Jeffers was fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German (educated in boarding schools in Europe).
Robinson was also highly educated in the USA, studied medicine and forestry.
He lived on the coast of California, where he built a granite house and a tower on cliffs facing the sea.
Poetry:
Flagons and Apples (1912)
Californians (1916)
Tamar and Other Poems (1924)
Hungerfield and Other Poems (1954), moving eulogy to Una Call Kuster with her in California, his muse and partner.
Beauty of his descriptions of the natural world - early environmentalist, perhaps the first to grasp the devastating extent of changes of human technologies and populations had on the rest of earth biological life.
Some pessimisms of human culture: human culture is destructive and out of control.
He wanted us to rediscover our relationship with the foundations of nature.
He insisted that human kind should acknowledge the superior value of the instinctive life.
“Inhumanism”
Jeffers's assertion that mankind was too egocentric, too unmoved by the “astonishing beauty of things”.
“The Double Axe” - defined “inhumanism” criticized the Allie's role in WW II - putting Roosevelt and Churchill on the same moral level as Hitler and Mussolini.
“Divinely Superfluous Beauty”
Vision of the spontaneous energy running through all things.
Wish to be indentified with this energy, to become one with what is “divinely superfluous”, “The incredible beauty of joy. Stars with the fire the joining of lips.”
“The Burial Place”
Union between himself and nature complete ………………………………..
“put me in a beautiful place far off from men ……………………………….. cemetery I should be pleased to lie in one grave with'em” (the quick deer, the lonely puma).
The human animal is absurd and petty, every thing appears small in contrast to the enigmatic beauty, the intrinsic perfection of nature. We have to return to earth, our origin.
Jeffers's impact
Depends upon PERSPECTIVE.
Human life is seen from an immense distance, as it were placed within the larger dimensions of earth, sea, and sky.
Colloquial speech, first conflict, then union between human nature and nature
Recognition of the needs and limits of the human character.
CARL SANDBURG (1878 - 1967)
Life:
Sandburg was a son of poor Swedish immigrants. Hr had to quit school at 13 to begin working.
He roamed over Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado working as a truck handler, harvest hand, dishwasher, brick maker, porter, janitor, milkman, among other jobs.
He worked as a war correspondent during Spanish-American War.
He completed four years at Lombard College in Galesburg but did not graduate.
In 1908, he became a political organizer for the Social Democrats. He served as a secretary to the mayor of Milwaukee. He went back to newspaper work.
Poet, folksinger and journalist.
Poetry:
He spoke for the common man and woman.
The Chicago Poems (1916) followed by
Cornhuskers (1918) raised him to a position of leadership among the Chicago Renaissance group (T. Dreiser, V. Lindsay, S. Anderson)
He traveled about the US and collected folk songs which he published in The American Songbag containing 280 songs and ballads which he collected from convicts, cowboys and farmers.
He was an admirer of A. Lincoln and published a monumental biography of his hero. (The Prairie Years, two volumes, The War Years, four volumes).
Subjects of his poems
His poems celebrate:
work and the worker
men and women alike
arrogance, coarseness, and vitality of a young notion.
The People, Yes (1936)
“Chicago”
It is his best known poem.
It was first published in Poetry Magazine in 1914.
It is filled with vigorous imagery which bombards the senses of the reader.
“Happiness”
“Anna Imroth”
“Fog”
VACHEL LINDSAY (1879 - 1931)
He was trying to be “a lamp”, an entertainer with bardic ambitions.
He walked through America giving recitals and lectures and selling copies of his poems.
He recited and sang his poems.
Poetry:
To change the oldest style of recitation, the chant, Lindsay would incorporate whoops, yells, booms, cheers - all the exuberant noises and rhythms he found in American life.
He was interested in blending music, dance, art, poetry, film, and performance to reach younger potential poetry readers.
Lindsay's tours of country
He was not after money. He was seeking love, understanding, brotherhood.
The reading tours were chances to meet and understand the American masses he was coming to love with a truly religious favour.
His interest was not in academics or literary critics or the poetic aristocracy, but Americans in general and high school and college students in particular.
ROBERT FROST (1874 - 1963)
Misleading
One of the most well-known American poets of the 20th century.
His poems, which are often about the woods and farms of New England and are written in rural everyday language, literary constitute a body of writing that looks a good deal like folk wisdom.
The image of misleading on two counts
1. It has lead to a certain amount of scorn for Frost's work among literary critics.
His easy-going poems differed radically from those of the great modernists T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Their work was learned, difficult, and highly wrought, it alluded to earlier cultures; took a pessimistic view of life and was overtly international.
Conclusion: those who liked Frost did not like poetry or modern literature in general.
H e was accused of being facile and philistine.
The more serious criticism of Frost is that he neither delves inward very far (as, say Dickinson does), nor offers a panoramic view of his nation (as, say Whitman does,).
Finally, in 1959, Lionel Trilling paid homage to Frost on his 85th birthday, declaring that the war between Frost and New York was over, and that Frost indeed belonged in the great iconoclastic tradition.
2. It is important to recognize that Frost belongs in the front ranks of poetry, because he deals with the same crises of beliefs that Eliot Pound and Stevens do.
3. Despite their homely manner and materials, Frost's poems are large propositions, bidding to reconfigure who we are and where we live.
The different lies in Frost's approach to these issues
Not expressed in “high-brow”.
By dint of vision that is shot with sardonic wit and wry pragmatism.
Matter-of-fact poetry is compatible with rich vision of language, and passion even with fantasy.
His outlook on nature even though it harks back to Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson in his pursuit of spirits has an ominous dark side with which we need to come to terms.
Celebrates the meaning of work, measures our investments in the rhythms of life.
He chose New England as the sufficient base and prism for examining life.
His most well-known poems are considerably more open-ended and less settled than is usually thought.
Robert Frost and the Spirit of New England
1913 A Boy's Will - first collection of Frost's poems
his poems are bristling and unsetting
“Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”
We are lulled by the sing-song rhythms.
The setting seems to be idyllic and soothing at the first glance.
Yet at the end, the piece announces a tug-of-war between the ethnical and the natural realms of life, the horse wants to go on, but the man is hypnotized and wants to stay.
The first line is about the ownership: not who owns the wood, but whether the woods own the speaker whether the human subject can maintain self-ownership
There is the feeling of dissolution, of letting go.
The woods themselves are seductive and alluring. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”.
There is a desire to dissolve in nature - throwing over all kind of social or responsible thought.
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