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Article 23

February 2, 2014, 1:56 pm
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MARGARET ATWOOD
(1939 - )

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Ontario, November 18, 1939. Her father was a zoologist. Due to the job of her father, who was doing researches in forest entomology regularly in the backwoods of northern Quebec, the whole family had to accompany him, and thus Margaret did not attend school for a full academic year until the eighth grade. But she read constantly and eclectically, everything from the classics to comic books. The whole family finally moved to Toronto in 1946, and following high school Margaret Atwood entered Victoria College at the University of Toronto in 1957. 
In her several endeavors Margaret Atwood has been exceptionally original and influential for over five decades, attaining the stature, now very rare, of all-around person of letters. Equally unusual for a contemporary author, she has been not only prolific in multiple genres but highly proficient in each of them, gaining a huge popular audience while garnering the respect of serious critics and scholars. Although she is more famous for her fiction, Atwood began as a poet (like Aldous Huxley, to put an example) and so she has remained. Well into the eighties she brought out superb poetry collections at two- or three-year intervals between her probing novels, along with  important anthologies ande collections of her own short stories, nonfiction, or literary criticism. Margaret Atwood is particularly adept at portraying situations of conflict from the perspective of a female protagonist, and her lines more with propulsive force toward dramatic conclusions.
Margaret Atwood's early poetry, well represented in her Selected Poems 1965-1976 (1976), is probably her strongest and remains fresh: continually surprising both for bold ideas and vigorously inventive use of language. Margaret Atwood published a great deal of poetry books but her accomplishments as a poet began to be eclipsed by the acclaim that followed the publication of some of her novels: Life Before Man (1976), Bodily Harm (1981), and the extremely successful The Handmaid's Tale (1985), a grim vision of the future, in a Orwellian or Huxleyan manner. The next decades Margaret Atwood's output in poetry diminished in quantity, and was sometimes of uneven quality compared with the superlative earlier work. Following the Selected Poems of 1976, she published Two-Headed Poems (1978), True Stories (1981), Interlunar (1984), Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (1987), Morning in the Burned House (1996), Eating Fire: Selected Poems, 1965-1995 (1998), and The Door (2007). Among the many international acclaim, she was given the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2008. 

HABITATION

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

It is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
                the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire


FROM SONGS OF THE TRANSFORMED

PIG SONG

This is what you changed me to:
a greypink vegetable with slug
eyes, buttock
incarnate, spreading like a slow turnip,

a skin you stuff so you may feed
in your turn, a stinking wart
of flesh, a large tuber
of blood which munches
and bloats. Very well then. Meanwhile

I have the sky, which is only half
caged, I have my weed corners,
I keep myself busy, singing
my song of roots and noses,

my song of dung. Madame,
this song offends you, these grunts
which you find oppressively sexual,
mistaking simple greed for lust.

I am yours. If you feed me garbage,
I will sing a song of garbage.
This is a hymn.



There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain

In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,

your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whippers.

You rock in the rain's arms
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.


Recommended Bibliography:

By Atwood:


In Spanish:


On Margaret Atwood:


Websites:



Youtube:

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Article 22

February 13, 2014, 10:05 am
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Robert Von Ranke Graves was among the most versatile writers of the previous century. He was born in 1895 in Wimbledon (London). He had a scholarship to Oxford, but when the Great was declared he enlisted, at age nineteen, in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. He befriended Siegfried Sassoon while they served in France. As a result of his experiences in the conflict, Graves published Over the Brazier (1916), which he later suppressed, believing it inferior to the war poetry of poets like Sassoon and Owen. 
Robert Graves was badly wounded at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and was reported killed in action, but miraculously he survived to read his obituary in The Times. Believing him dead, Sassoon wrote an elegy, "To His Dead Body". But their friendship came to an end when Sassoon objected to inaccuracies and the unauthorized use of his work in Goodbye to All That (1929), Graves's brilliant memoir of his Victorian childhood and the English way of life that came to an end with the war, whose horros he described in very graphic details.
Shortly before the Armistice, Graves married the painter and feminist Nancy Nicholson, with whom he had four children. He attended St. John's College, Oxford, where he became friends with T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia), whose biography he wrote in 1927. In 1926 he took his degree and went to teach in Cairo, accompanied by his family and his new lover, the domineering American poet Laura Riding. After his marriage broke up, he and Riding moved to Majorca, where they collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928). But Laura Riding's strange behaviour ruined their relationship. She tried to commit suicide several times. They finally got divorced. 
After World War II Robert Graves was able to return to Majorca with his new love, Beryl Hodge, whom he met in 1946 and married in 1959 and with whom he had another four children. The royalties from Goodbye to All That and the immensely popular historical novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1943), freed him to write poetry, his first love, and to pursue other interests like mythology, history and classical literature. In his most controversial study, The White Goddess (1948), "a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth", Graves proposed as the font of artistic inspiration a prototypical female deity of birth, love, and death associated with the moon. He was the Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1961-1966 and was recognized with many of the most prestigious literary awards in the United Kingdom and the United States. He died on Majorca in 1985. 

THE LAST POST

The bugler sent a call of high romance -
"Light out! Light out!" to the deserted square.
On the thin brazen notes he threw a prayer,
"God, if it's this for me next time in France...
O spare the phantom bugle as I lie
dead in the gas and smoke and roar of guns,
dead in a row with the other broken ones
lying so stiff and still under the sky.
Jolly young Fusiliers too good to die."


THE KISS

Are you shaken, are you stirred
    By a whisper of love,
Spellbound to a word
    Does Time cease to move,
Till her calm grey eye
    Expands to a sky
And the clouds of her hair
    Like storms go by?
Then the lips that you have kissed
    Turn to frost and fire,
And a white-steaming mist
    Obscures desire:
So back to their birth
    Fade water, air, earth,
And the First Power moves
    Over void and dearth.

Is that Love? no, but Death,
    A passion, a shout,
The deep in-breath,
    The breath roaring out,
And once that is flown,
    You must lie alone,
Without hope, without life,
    Poor flesh, sad bone.


THE PERSIAN VERSION

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon 
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaissance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
but as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece -they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defense and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.


Those famous men of old, the Ogres 
They had long beards and stinking arm-pits. 
They were wide-mouthed, long-yarded and great-bellied 
Yet of no taller stature, Sirs, than you. 
They lived on Ogre-Strand, which was no place 
But the churl's terror of their proud extent. 
Where every foot was three-and-thirty inches, 
And every penny bought a whole sheep.
Now of their company none survive, not one, 
The times being, thank God, unfavorable 
To all but nightmare shadows of them. 
Their images stand howling in the waste, 
(The winds enforced against their wide mouths) 
whose granite haunches king and priest must yearly 
Buss and their cold knobbled knees.
So many feats they did to admiration: 
With their enormous lips they sang louder 
Than ten cathedral choirs, and with their grand yards 
Stormed the most rare and obstinate maidenheads, 
With their strong-gutted and capacious bellies 
Digested stones and glass like ostriches.
They dug great pits and heaped great cairns, 
Deflected rivers, slew whole armies, 
And hammered judgments for posterity 
For the sweet cupid-lipped and tassel-yarded 
Delicate-stomached dwellers 
In Pygmy Alley, where with brooding on them 
A foot is shrunk to seven inches 
And twelve-pence will not buy a spare rib.
And who would choose between Ogres and Pygmies 
The thundering text, the sniveling commentary 
Reading between such covers he will likely 
Prove his own disproportion and not laugh.


Recommended Bibliography:

D. N. G. Carter, Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement (London: Macmillan, 1989).
Robert Graves, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin, 2003).
____________, The White Goddess (London: Faber & Faber, 1988).
Frank L. Kernowski, The Early Poetry of Robert Graves: The Goddess Beckons (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 20029.
Patrick J. Quinn, New Perspectives on Robert Graves (London: Associated University Presses, 1999).

En español:

Robert Graves, Cien poemas (Barcelona: Lumen, 1986).

Websites of Interest:



Videos:





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Article 21

March 1, 2014, 11:11 am
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Theodore Roethke was born in 1908 in Saginaw, Michigan. His German immigrant grandfather, uncle, and father ran greenhouses, and as a boy he spent a great deal of time amid the soil and plants,
images that would figure prominently in his poetry. The greenhouse, he wrote, "is my symbol for the whole of life, a womb, a heaven-on-earth." When he was fifteen his uncle committed suicide and his father died of cancer, a trauma that left deep scars. In 1935 Roethke took a teaching post at Michigan State College but was soon hospitalized with debilitating depression, the first of many such episodes. In 1941 he published his first book, Open House, which was very favorably reviewed. While this volume imitated many of Roethke's favorite poets, it also violated Eliot's notion of impersonality; from the start he poet's emphasis was on his own innermost experiences. In 1948 he produced The Lost Son and Other Poems, a breakthrough volume in which he used the greenhouse as a symbol of the inner self, a world of organic growth where the poet worked through his pain over his absent father as well as his fears about the father figures in literary tradition, the Great Dead. In the book Roethke also used nursery rhymes, nonsense verse, puns, and other wordplay to conjure up a pre rational state. The idea of regression and other processes of psychoanalysis would become recurring motifs in Roethke's poetic explorations, inviting Freudian critics to speculate about the poet's unresolved conflicts, repression, filial anxiety, and so on, notions he did not deny.
He married in 1952 and received more awards, including large grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Institute of Arts and Letters that allowed time to write and travel in Europe. While staying at W. H. Auden's house on Ischia, he finished work on The Waking: Poems 1933-1953 (1953); the collection, which included new pieces in formal verse, won the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
Roethke continued to write, and to win awards, with remarkable proficiency. Following trips to Italy and England on a Fulbright grant, he published Words for the Wind in 1957. In August 1963, while swimming, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The poems he left behind were published posthumously in The Far Field (1964), which won the National Book Award, and The Collected Poems (1966). On the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose was also published in 1966, the Selected Letters in 1968.


                                      MY PAPA'S WALTZ


The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrozen itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.


                                LONG LIVE THE WEEDS
                                                               Hopkins



Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm! -
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit,
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.


                                     AGAINST DISASTER

Now I am out of element
And far from anything my own,
My sources drained of all content,
The pieces of my spirit strewn.

All random, wasted, and dispersed,
The particles of being lie;
My special heaven is reversed,
I move beneath an evil sky.

This flat land has become a spit
Wherein I am beset by harm,
The heart must rally to my wit
And rout the specter of alarm.


                                   A WHEEZE FOR WYSTAM
                     "I had an Aunt that Loved a Plant", W. H. Auden.

If Auden's Aunt could love a Plant,
My Aunt could love a kiwi,
Her Features were so pinched and gaunt
She never seemed to see me.

She was Absurd: An Ostrich-Bird
That lived on cold Kohlrabi;
My uncle never said a Word:
Not-speaking was his Hobby.

They had a Child, -Oh what a Child!
Who can out-face a Foetus?
The neighbors swore that IT ran Wild-
IT never ran to meet us.

We'd come to call, and IT would howl
From right above the Ceiling;
Dear Auntie'd rearranged her Shawl
And ask how we were feeling.

Once we had Tea, and I'll agree,
The Fare was Oddly Simple:
Aspic of Newt and Manatee-
One bite was more than ample.

Then Spinach Scones, Three Buttered Bones,
And Various Processes Cheeses.


                                 EPIDERMAL MACABRE

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, -
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
to sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.


Websites:


Bibliography:

Peter Balakian, Theodore Roethke's Far Fields: The Evolution of his Poetry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Ralph J. Mills, Theodore Roethke, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1963)
Theodore Roethke, On the Poet and his Craft: Selected prose (Seattle: Washington U.P., 1965).
Theodore Roethke, The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke(New York: Anchor Books, 1974).
Allan Seager, The Glass House: The Life of Theodore Roethke(Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991).

In Spanish:
Theodore Roethke, Meditaciones y otros poemas (Madrid: Ediciones Trea, 2012).
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Article 20

March 27, 2014, 5:31 am
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BORN in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, Williams was of British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish ancestry. In 1902 he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania where he eventually met Ezra Pound, who, though two years younger than Williams, adopted a patronizing manner from the first. Williams was cowed by Pound's erudition but appreciated his practical advice as well as his help later in persuading Elkin Mathews to publish his second book, The Tempers (1913). Through Pound he met Hilda Doolittle, who was also impressed by their friend's apparent brilliance. Williams took his medical degree in 1906, then interned in New York City, at a Hell's Kitchen charity hospital; in 1909-1919 he spent a year training in pediatrics in Leipzig. In his return from Germany he set up his practice in obstetrics in Rutherford, where he married Florence (Floss) Herman and remained the rest of his life. 
Dr. Williams was not a simple baby doctor from the provinces. He kept a journal and jotted down poems between examinations and house calls, often on prescription pads; this habit, bred of necessity, helps explain the brevity of many of his pieces. He often crossed over to Manhattan where, like his friend Wallace Stevens, he visited art galleries and became acquainted with radicals such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. In his youth Williams had hoped to become a painter himself, and he kept up an interest all his life. 
Part of his liberated feeling came from the realization that art did not have to deal with exalted subject matter: a bowl of plums and other prosaic items were equally admissible. Williams was comfortable at the typewriter, and following Guillaume Apollinaire's experiments in his Calligrammes (published in his friend the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's journal 291) he discovered how the placement of letters, words, and lines on a page could produce a visual as well as a verbal artifact, as in "The Red Wheelbarrow," where the long first line forms the "handle." Many of his differences with editors centered on such "merely mechanical" but significant matters of form. 
"Williams is a suburban physician, who goes into a state of coma, but occasionally produces a good poem", Pound told on certain occasion, and the condescension indicates something of their ambivalent relationship. 
He also found his own style, and from Al Que Quiere! (1917) onward the books flowed with remarkable frequency and in great variety: the prose improvisations of Kora in Hell (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), the anti-novel The Great American Novel (1923), the prose-verse collection Spring and All (also 1923), the historical essays of In the American Grain (1925). From 1920 to 1923 he edited his own little magazine, Contact. In 1924 he took time off for a trip to Paris where he visited Pound and was introduced to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and other luminaries of the times. But in 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land -"the great catastrophe," as Williams put it. In the Autobiography he remembered: "It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it ... I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years, and I'm sure it did".
During the thirties Williams published three short-story collections and a novel, and in 1923 his Collected poems 1921-1931 was brought out by the small Objectivist Press. By the forties and fifties his growing influence on the younger generation was inescapable. With his collage like arrangements in Paterson, Williams presented his answer to Pound's Cantos. In the city of Paterson he thought he found and adequate subject and symbol, a microcosm to express his vision of America. Like the Cantos, the five books of Paterson are without plot or formal structure but composed of sharply observed fragments: descriptions of place, bits of history, interior monologues, "found objects" such as letters, paragraphs from textbooks, snatches of conversation... Although critical opinion remains divided, the enterprise made Williams a celebrity. 

THE RED WHEELBARROW

So much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

 This poem is in free verse, which, as the name implies, is verse that does not conform to a fixed pattern. But there is no knife-edge line between formal verse and free verse, just as there is no knife-edge line between verse and prose. Rather, there is a shading off from a scrupulous meter toward greater and greater informality. Over the years, there has been much debate about locating the precise point where informality in free verse because so marked that free verse should not be called verse at all. There is certainly a point where the sense of form can be lost (except the form dictated by the principles of prose-syntax, grammar, an the like). 
What most obviously distinguishes a piece of free verse from prose? It is the lining on the page. Even in the dreariest piece of writing that aspires to be free verse, the fact of its being set off in lines has some significance. It is significant, for one thing, because it pretends to be significant. 
The only line of "The Red Wheelbarrow" that is not absolutely arbitrary is the first one, which does have a certain intrinsic structured, the structure of a clause. The lining is so arbitrary that we have to see the poem in print before we have any notion that it is intended as a poem at all. But the very arbitrariness is the point itself. We are forced to focus our attention upon words, and details, in a very special way, a puzzling way. Now the poem itself is about that puzzling portentousness that an object, even the simplest, like a red wheelbarrow, assumes when we fix attention exclusively upon it. Reading this poem is like peering at some ordinary object through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard. The fact that the pin prick frames it arbitrarily endows it with a puzzling, and exciting, freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation. And that is what the poem is actually about: 
"So much depends" -but what, we do not know! Do you know?

MARRIAGE

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

POEM

By the road to the contagious hospital,
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast -a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields,
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen,

patches of standing water,
the scattering of tall trees.

All along the road the reddish,
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish,
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wild-carrot leaf.

One by one objects are defined-
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf,

But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them; rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Copestake, Ian D., The Ethics of William Carlos Williams's Poetry (New York: Camden Houe, 2010).
Doyle, Charles (ed.), William Carlos Williams (London: Routledge, 1980).
Litz, A. Walton & Cristopher MacGowan (eds), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol I (1909-1939) (New York: New Directions, 1991).
MacGowan (ed.), The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol II (1939-1962) (New York: Cercanet Press, 2000).
Marzón, Julio, The Spanish Roots of William Carlos Williams (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994).
Williams, William Carlos, The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1967).
———————————, Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1971).
———————————, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1992).

In Spanish:

Williams, William Carlos, Paterson (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001)
——————————, Antología bilingüe (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2009) [Selected and translated by Juan Miguel López Merino]
———————————, Viaje al amor (Barcelona: Lumen, 2009) [Translated by Juan Antonio Montiel]
———————————, Cuadros de Brueghel (Barcelona: Lumen, 2007) [Translated by Juan Antonio Montiel].

WEBLIOGRAPHY:


VIDEOS:




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Article 19

April 16, 2014, 2:18 am
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H. D. (1886 — 1961)

Hilda Doolittle became recognized by her initials after poet Ezra Pound blue-penciled her early poems, scowled "H. D., Imagiste" below them, and attached a cover letter to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine declaring the work was "Objective—no slither; direct... It's straight talk—straight as the greek!". Four of the poems were printed in Poetry in January 1913 and created much speculation about the mysterious author. Within months Doolittle asked Monroe to drop the "affected"Imagiste tag. But thus she was known ever after—to her frustration when her writing changed and broadened in scope, to longer sequences and narratives, but editors kept asking for poems in her terse early style.
Hilda Doolittle was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1886, the only girl among five brothers. Her father, Charles Doolittle, taught mathematics and astronomy, subjects that she invested with mystical significance. Her mother was a member of the Moravian brotherhood, a dissident Protestant sect originally from Germany that believed in direct contact with and enlightenment from God. This numinous connection with the deity was passed down family to family, they taught, and the writer herself thought part of her gifts as a poet stemmed from this visionary tradition.
While she was a student at Bryn Mawr College, she had a romance with Ezra Pound, she inspired several of his early poems, and they were engaged for a time, then became friends with William Carlos Williams while the men were students at Penn. Strangely, Doolittle stayed in college only briefly. She failed English (her spelling and punctuation always remained shaky) and had a nervous breakdown, precipitated by her conflicted feelings about Pound. 
In 1911, with her boyfriend, Frances Gregg, and Gregg's mother, she traveled to Europe intending only a short visit, but stayed the rest of her life. In London Pound introduced her to important literary friends like Richard Aldington, James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. With the passage of time, Pound later admitted that he had hastily made up the Imagist "movement" mainly to get H. D. into print. But gradually, she, like his other "protégés," became weary of Pound's high-handed ways and began to distance herself and take her instruction from Aldington, who encouraged her reading, particularly of the French Symbolists. 
In 1913, Doolittle married Aldington, who with Pound's help had acquired an editorial position at The Egoist, the important early little magazine. In 1917, after Aldington went off to fight in the Great War, H. D. had a brief liaison with the composer Cecil Gray and became pregnant. She had her daughter Perdita. She broke up her affair with Gray, Aldington separated after the war and her new friend and lover Bryher (writer Winifred Ellerman) adopted the child. When Bryher entered into a marriage of convenience with the gay novelist Robert McAlmon in 1921, H. D. accompanied them to Paris, where Bryher underwrote McAlmon's adventurous Contact Press, publisher of the earliest books of Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Retaining her deep interest in classical mythology—which she recast from a feministic viewpoint or revised to present strong matriarchal figures— H. D. published the poetry volumes Hymen (1922), Heliodora and Other Poems (1924), Collected Poems (1925), Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), and Red Roses for Bronze (1931), as well as the experimental prose of Palimpsest (1927), which fictionalizes her early relationship with Bryher, and Hedylus (1928).
Bryher divorced McAlmon and in 1927 married Kenneth Macpherson, an avant-garde filmmaker, and together they started the cinema journal Close Up and a production company. H. D. Appeared in three of the movies and became acquainted with Sergei Eisenstein and other movie directors of the times. Bryher arranged for H.D. to meet Sigmud Freud in Vienna, and the poet became his analysand in 1933 and 1934. As a result of this friendship she wrote Tribute to Freud, her memoir of the experience, printed in 1956. During World War II, Bryher and H.D. moved to London. They lived in Hyde Park, where Bryher published the magazine Life and Letters Today while H.D. worked on new prose and poetry, including The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), her evocative reflections on existence in the ravaged London of the war years. It became the first volume of Trilogy, completed with Tribute to the Angels (1945) and the Flowering of the Rod (1946). Always interested in spiritualism and Moravian doctrine and ritual, she became more involved in the forties with the occult, astrology, Tarot cards, and other esoteric arts.
After the war H. D. had a sever nervous breakdown and returned to Switzerland for treatment. Her Selected Poems appeared in 1957, the novel Bid Me to Live in 1960, and Helen in Egypt in 1961. 
In recent decades Doolittle's life and works have attracted increasing attention from literary historians, scholarly critics, and feminist theorists. 

Extract from "HYMEN"

From the closed garden
Where our feet pace
Back and forth each day,
This gladiolus white,
This red, this purple spray—
Gladioulus tall with dignity
As yours, lady—we lay
Before your feet and pray:

Of all the blessings—
Youth, joy, ecstasy—
May one gift last
(As the tall gladiolus may
Outlast the wind-flower,
Winter-rose or rose),
One gift above,
Encompassing all those;

For her, for him,
For all within these palace walls,
Beyond the yeast,
Beyond the cry of Hymen and the torch,
Beyond the night and music
Echoing through the porch till day.


LEDA

Where the slow river   
meets the tide,
a red swan lifts red wings
and darker beak,
and underneath the purple down
of his soft breast
uncurls his coral feet.

Through the deep purple
of the dying heat
of sun and mist,
the level ray of sun-beam
has caressed
the lily with dark breast,
and flecked with richer gold
its golden crest.

Where the slow lifting   
of the tide,   
floats into the river   
and slowly drifts   
among the reeds,   
and lifts the yellow flags,   
he floats   
where tide and river meet.   

Ah kingly kiss—
no more regret   
nor old deep memories   
to mar the bliss;   
where the low sedge is thick,   
the gold day-lily   
outspreads and rests   
beneath soft fluttering   
of red swan wings
and the warm quivering
of the red swan's breast.


HEAT


O Wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

Bibliography:

Bloom, Harold (ed), H.D (London: Chelsea House), 2002.
Doolittle, Hilda, End to Torment, A Memoir of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions), 1979.
——————, HERmione (New York: New Directions), 1981.
——————, Collected Poems (1912 — 1944) (New York: New Directions), 1986.
——————, Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions), 2012.

In Spanish:

Hilda Doolittle, Poemas escogidos(México D.F.: Ambos Mundos), 1996 [Translated and selected with an Introduction by Pura López Colomé].
——————, Jardín junto al mar (Tarragona: Igitur), 2001 [Translated by Alison Bartolo and Alfredo Martínez].

Websites:


In Spanish:















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Article 18

April 29, 2014, 4:20 am
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D. H. LAWRENCE (1885 — 1939)

David Herbert Lawrence, the son of a coal-miner, was born at Eastwood in Nottinghamshire in 1885 and educated at Nottingham High School and University College, Nottingham. There is a large Larence literature, so that it is only necessary to note a few salient facts of his life: his qualifying as a school teacher —one of his best 'rhyming' pomes is "The Last Lesson of the Afternoon"; his friendship with Aldous Huxley; his marriage to Frieda in 1914; his travels in Italy, Australia, and New Mexico— see see Twilight in Italy (1916), Sea and Sardinia 81921), Mornings in Mexico (1927); and his death of tuberculosis near Nice in 1939. He also gained a high reputation as a novelist with The White Peacock (1911) and Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1921), Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928).
Lawrence's Collected Poems were published in 1928, to be followed by Last Poems (1933). Aldous Huxley edited his letters with a useful introduction in 1932. One of the best criticisms of Lawrence as a poet is to be found in The Shaping Spirit: Studies in Modern English and American Poets (1958) by A. Alvarez. I have chosen the poems  "The Mosquito" and "Innocent England" for the post dedicated to D. H. Lawrence. "The Mosquito" is one of the less familiar pieces of "Birds, Beasts, and Flowers", a section of his Collected Poems containing a high proportion of his best poetry. "Innocent England" celebrates Lawrence's contempt and indignation at the suppression of his exhibition of paintings in London in 1928: the authorities feared for public morals because he painted pubic hair on his nudes. Louis MacNeice in a journalistic, provocative "An Alphabet of Literary Prejudices" (The Windmill, Vol. 3, n.1, 1948) remarks under the heading "Dark God":

  • As D. H. Lawrence was well slapped down in the twenties by Mr. Wyndham Lewis there is no need now to take another slap at one who, in spite of his unfortunate effect on adolescents, was a great writer and a godsend. Lawrence had imagination without common sense … and got away with it— but in most people this divorce will degrade imagination itself.




When did you start your tricks,
Monsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?
Why this length of shredded shank,
You exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwards
And weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,
Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged Victory
In sluggish Venice.
you turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilry
Into that translucent phantom shred
Of a frail corpus?

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legs,
How you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,
A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;
Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:
Invisibility, and the anesthetic power
To deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

Queer, how you stalk and prowl the air
In circles and evasions, enveloping me,
Ghoul on wings
Winged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanks
Eyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,
You speck.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into air
Having read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,
And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.
Man or mosquito.

You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist.
Now then!

It is your trump,
It is your hateful little trump,
You pointed fiend,
Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:
It is your small, high hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?
Surely it is bad policy.

They say you can't help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.
But it sounds so amazingly like a slogan,
A yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red blood
Super-magical
Forbidden liquor.

I behold you stand
For a second enspasmed in oblivion,
Obscenely ecstasied
Sucking live blood,
My blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,
Such gorging,
Such obscenity of trespass.

You stagger
As well as you may.
Only your accursed hairy frailty,
Your own imponderable weightlessness
Saves you, wafts you away on the dry draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a paean of derision,
You winged blood-drop.

Can I not overtake you?
Are you one too many for me,
Winged Victory?
Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?

Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makes
Beside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!
Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

INNOCENT ENGLAND
Oh what a pity, Oh! don't you agree
that figs aren't found in the land of the free!

Fig-trees don't grow in my native land;
there's never a fig-tree near at hand

when you want one; so I did without;
and that is what the row's about.

Virginal, pure policemen came
and hid their faces for very shame,

while they carried the shameless things away
to gaol, to be hid from the light of day.

And Mr Mead, that old, old lily
said: 'Gross! coarse! hideous! — and I, like a silly

thought he meant the faces of the police-court officials,
and how right he was, and I signed my initials

to confirm what he said: but alas, he meant
my pictures, and on the proceedings went.

The upshot was, my pictures must burn
that English artists might finally learn

when they painted a nude, to put a cache sexe on,
a cache sexe, a cache sexe, or else begone!

A fig-leaf; or, if you cannot find it
a wreath of mist, with nothing behind it.

A wreath of mist is the usual thing
in the north, to hide where the turtles sing.

Though they never sing, they never sing,
don't you dare to suggest such a thing

or Mr Mead will be after you.
—But what a pity I never knew

A wreath of English mist would do
as a cache sexe! I'd have put a whole fog.

But once and forever barks the old dog,
so my pictures are in prison, instead of in the Zoo.


Websites:


Bibliography:

Boulton, James T., The Selected Letters of D. H. Lawrence (Cambridge: CUP), 1997.
Gilbert, Sandra M., Acts of Attention: The Pomes of D. H. Lawrence (Chicago: Illinois University Press), 1990.
Lawrence, David Herbert, The Complete Poems (Kent: Wordsworth), 2002.
Lockwood, M. J., A Study of the Poems of D. H. Lawrence: Thinking in Poetry (London: Macmillan), 1987.
Sagar, Keith, D. H. Lawrence: Poet (New York: Humanities-Ebooks), 2010.
Spender, Stephen, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prohet(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson), 1973.

In Spanish:

Lawrence, D. H., Poemas, (Buenos Aires: Argonauta), 1990.
Lawrence, D. H., Poemas escogidos (Madrid: Visor), 2011.

Videos:







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Article 17

May 14, 2014, 12:36 pm
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(1904 - 1972)

     Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day Lewis, who with Auden and Spender was thought of as forming the original political-cum-poetical triumvirate of the thirties, was born in Ireland in 1904 and educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford. He edited Oxford Poetry with Auden in 1927, and, after leaving the university, became a schoolmaster in turn at Oxford, Helensburgh, and Cheltenham until 1935. He was employed at the Ministry of Information during the war. Since then he has been occupied with writing, lecturing, and broadcasting. He became Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1951 (being Auden's immediate predecessor in his position). The Buried Day (1960) is an autobiographical account of the earlier part of his life. It is worth reading (although inferior in candor and insight to Stephen Spender's World Within World) and Poet Laureate in 1968. 
     He is primarily a poet, but he also wrote novels, detective fiction (under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake), and stories for children. He wrote 25 novels, most of which were signed under the pen name Nicholas Blake. He confirmed himself as a master of crime and detective novels. In his novel The Sad Variety (1964) he showed his discontent with the course of Communism in the Soviet Union. This novel represents his breakup with Communism. He also wrote much criticism. His criticism includes A Hope for Poetry(1934);Poetry for You (1945), a book which was popular in schools; The Poetic Image (1947), which is the published form of his Clark Lectures at Cambridge; and Notable Images of Virtue (1954). His 1951 Warton Lecture, The Lyric Poetry of Thomas Hardy, has a special interest for readers of his poems.
From left to right: W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis and Christopher Isherwood
Cecil Day Lewis was a fluent poet with a large published output in verse. Collected Poems (1929-33) (1948) contains his work up to that time including both the pre-political poetry of From Feathers to Iron (1931), perhaps his best collection until Word Over All (1943), and the rather strident tub-thumping and pylon-praising of The Magnetic Mountain (1933). Later books include Overtures to Death (1938), Word Over All (1943), Poems 1943-1947 (1948), which is a volume of personal lyrics mixing the influences of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and An Italian Visit (1953).Collected Poems(1954) supersedes the 1948 collected edition and covers all the poetry from 1929 to 1953. The only volume since 1954 is Pegasus and Other Poems (1957).
Stephen Spender said that Day Lewis was a poet "who is least sure of himself when he writes of his immediate feelings". This statement can be accepted if such lyrics as "Marriage of Two" and "The Woman Alone" (from Poems 1943-1947) can be taken as exceptions proving the rule. It is true that as a personal lyric poet he often fumbles and produces blurred or trite effects. His abilities as a translator or as a narrative poet —a good specimen is "The Nabara" from Overtures to Death— can rarely be questioned in this way. Poems 1943-1947 contains an excellent example of translation in "The Graveyard by there Sea", a version of Paul Valéry's Le Cimetière Marin. The parodies or imitations of Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Auden, and Dylan Thomas in An Italian Visit are further illustrations of a surprising poetic versatility. There is no real falling-off in quality in Pegasus and Other Poems—for many years now Day Lewis has been a remarkably consistent poetic performer. Anne Ridler notes of this last volume that it contains poems "generated at a low poetic temperature", but this criticism can be applied to volumes published in the thirties and forties and connects with the "professionalism" that the same critic comments on respectfully.
     In brief it may be said that Day Lewis's failures are verbal, his successes rhythmical. This is a simplification, but the greater pleasure to be derived from his later volumes is more due, I think, to an increased power of making rhythmical patterns than to any change in subject-matter or deepening of sensibility. It is also worth mentioning his political commitment with the Spanish Civil War. He served as a partisan supporting the Republican Army. His books of poems: Overtures to Death (1938) is a manifest of his bitter memories during the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Fascism in Europe. "The Nabara" was the most significant poem he wrote inspired by the Spanish conflict. The long poem is the core of his book of poems Noah and the Waters (1947). In the late thirties he became so disillusioned with Communism that he abandoned his party membership and his leftish political ideas. He died on 22 May 1972, at Lemmons (Hertfordshire, England).



They preferred, because of the rudeness of their heart, to die rather than to surrender

Phase One

Freedom is more than a word, more than the base coinage
Of statesmen, the tyrant's dishonored cheque, or the dreamer's mad
Inflated currency. She is mortal, we know, and made
In the image of simple men who have no taste for carnage
But sooner kill and are killed than see that image betrayed.
Mortal she is, yet rising always refreshed from her ashes:
She is bound to earth, yet she flies as high as a passage bird
To home wherever man's heart with seasonal warmth is stirred:
Innocent is her touch as the dawn's, but still it unleashes
The ravisher shades of envy. Freedom is more than a word.

I see man's heart two-edged, keen both for death and creation.
As a sculptor rejoices, stabbing and mutilating the stone
Into a shapelier life, and the two joys make one-
So man is wrought in his hour of agony and elation
To efface the flesh to reveal the crying need of his bone.
Burning the issue was beyond their mild forecasting
For those I tell of - men used to the tolerable joy and hurt
Of simple lives: they coveted never an epic part;
But history's hand was upon them and hewed an everlasting
Image of freedom out of their rude and stubborn heart.

The year, Nineteen-thirty-seven: month, March: the men, descendants
Of those Iberian fathers, the inquiring ones who would go
Wherever the sea-ways led: a pacific people, slow
To feel ambition, loving their laws and their independence-
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
Fishermen, with no guile outside their craft, they had weathered
Often the sierra-ranked Biscayan surges, the wet
Fog of the Newfoundland Banks: they were fond of pelota: they met
No game beyond their skill as they swept the sea together,
Until the morning they found the leviathan in their net.

Government trawlers Nabara, Guipuzkoa, Bizkaya,
Donostia, escorting across blockaded seas
Galdames with her cargo of nickel and refugees
From Bayonne to Bilbao, while the rest of war curled higher
Inland over the glacial valleys, the ancient ease.
On the morning of March the fifth, a chill North-Wester fanned them,
Fogging the glassy waves: what uncharted doom lay low
There in the fog athwart their course, they could not know:
Stout were the armed trawlers, redoubtable those who manned them-
Men of the Basque country, the Mar Cantabrico.
[...]

[Fragment from the long poem "The Nabara" (Noah and the Waters)]

Nota Bene: The episode upon which this poem is based is related in G. L. Steer's The Tree of Gernika.


Do not expect again a phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and hear's first ease
Tranced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.

By a blazed trail our joy will be returning:
One burning hour throws light a thousand ways,
And hot blood stays into familiar gestures.
The best years wait, the body's plenitude.

Consider then, my lover, this is the end
Of the lark's ascending, the hawk's unearthly hover:
Spring season is over soon and first heatwave;
Grave-browed with cloud ponders the huge horizon.

Draw up the dew. Swell with pacific violence.
Take shape in silence. Grow as the clouds grew.
Beautiful brood the corn lands, and you are heavy;
Leafy the boughs-they also hide big fruit.

Websites:

Cecil Day-Lewis Official Website
On "A Hope for Poetry"
Some Online Poems
C. S. Lewis as Poet
Poet Laureate
Poetry Foundation
"Do not Expect Again a Phoenix Hour" read by Cecil Day Lewis

En español:

Noticia en español sobre su hijo, el actor Daniel Day-Lewis
Poema "El voluntario" ("The Volunteer") en español.


Bibliography:

Cecil Day Lewis 1938: Overtures to Death and Other Poems. London: J. Cape.
——————   1947: Noah and the Waters. New York: Transatlantic Arts.
——————— 1979: Collected Poems. London: Hyperion.
——————— 2002 (1960): Studies in Words. Cambridge: CUP.
Nicholas Blake (C. Day-Lewis) 1979: The Sad Variety. London: Harper Collins.
Albert Gelpi 1997: Living in Time: The Poetry of Cecil Day Lewis. Oxford: OUP.
Peter Stanford 2007: C. Day-Lewis: A Life. London: Bloomsbury.

En español:

Lewis, Cecil Day 2001: Nabarra. Bilbao: Labayru Ikastegia.
Lewis, Cecil Day 2006: El Nabarra. Vitoria: Bassarai Ediciones.Niall Binns 2004: La llamada de España: Escritores extranjeros en la Guerra Civil. Madrid: Montesinos.



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August 30, 2015, 4:06 am
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LAWRENCE DURRELL
(1914-1990)

     Durrell was born in India and educated at Darjeeling and St Edmund's School, Canterbury. For many years, after leaving school he led a bohemian life in London, at one time playing the piano in a nightclub for a living, at another working in a photographer's studio, but for the last thirty years or so he lived abroad, chiefly around the Mediterranean, and he wrote some of his books at his home in Provence (France). His publisher was T. S. Eliot, and he became a lifelong friend with Henry Miller.
 Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea, Durrell is probably better known as a novelist than as a poet, but it was as a poet that he began writing, and it is his poetry that still seems to be his central achievement. His first poetic collection —if we disregard a preliminary Poems (1938), edited by O. Blakeston— was A Private Country (1943). Later volumes are: Cities, Plains and People (1956), On Seeming to Presume (1948), and The Tree of Idleness (1955). Collected Poems appeared in 1960. Other publications than those already mentioned include Prospero's Cell (1957) and Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953), which he described as "companions to the landscapes of Corfu and Rhodes", a verse play Sappho (1950), and a single work of literary criticism, A Key to Modern British Poetry (1952).

       Durrell's work, in which the evocation of the landscapes of the Aegean Islands and of the Near East plays an important part as a background to feeling, has a sensuousness nicely kept in control by wit and a satirical temperament. This combination is exhilarating and satisfying. His weaknesses are occasional carelessness about making his meaning clear and, in some of the earlier poems, a kind of undergraduate brashness. He died in his house at Sommières (French Provence) in 1990.

Since the completion of The Alexandria Quartet (1960), a 'word continuum' consisting of the four novels. 


Fragments from "THE DEATH OF GENERAL UNCEBUNKE"

I

My uncle sleeps in the image of death.
In the greenhouse and in the potting-shed
The wrens junket: the old girl with the trowel
Is a pillar of salt, insufferably brittle.
His not to reason why, though a thinking man.
Beside his mesmeric incomprehension
The little mouse mopping and mowing,
The giraffe and the spin-turtle, these can
On my picture-book look insufferably little
But knowing, incredibly Knowing.

III

Well, God sends weather, the English apple,
The weeping willow.
Grum lies the consort of Prudence quite:
Mum as a long fiddle in regimentals:
This sudden IT between two tropical thumbs.
Unwrinkled him, Lord, unriddle this strange gorgon,
For tall Prudence who softens the small lamps,
Gives humble air to the organ that it hums.


Fragments from "DEUS LOCI"

I

All our religions founder, you
remain, small sunburnt deus loci
safe in your natal shrine,
landscape of the precocious southern heart,
continuously revived in passion's common
tragic and yet incorrigible spring:
in every special laughter overheard,
your specimen is everything-
accents of the little cackling god,
part animal, part insect, and part bird.

II

This dust, this royal dust, our mother
modeled by spring-belonging rain
whose soft blank drops console
a single vineyard's fever or a region
falls now in soft percussion on the earth's
old stretched and wrinkled vellum skin:
each drop could make one think
a footprint of the god, but out of season,
yet in your sudden coming know
life lives itself without recourse to reason.

III

On how many of your clement springs
the fishermen set forth, the foresters
resign their empty glasses, rise, 
confront the morning star, accept
the motiveless patronage of all you are—
desire recaptured on the sea or land
in the fables of fish, or grapes help up,
a fistful of some champion wine
glowing like a stained-glass window
in a drunkard's trembling hand.

VI

The saddle-nose, the hairy thighs
composed these vines, these humble vines,
so dedicated to themselves yet offering
in the black froth of grapes their increment
to pleasure or to sadness where a poor
peasant at a husky church-bell's chime
crosses himself: on some cracked pedestal
by the sighing sea sets eternally up,
item by item, his small mid-day meal,
garlic and bread, the wine-can and the cup.


Bibliography:

Brigham, James, ed. (1985): Lawrence Durrell, Collected Poems 1931-74. Diane Pub Co: London.
Bowker, Gordon (1997): Through the Dark Labyrinth: A Biography of Lawrence Durrell. St Martin's Press: New York.
Durrell, Lawrence (1970): Key to Modern British Poetry. Oklahoma University Press: Oklahoma.
Herbrechter, Stefan (1999): Lawrence Durrell, Postmodernism and the Ethics of Alterity. Rodopi: Amsterdam.
Lillios, Anna (2004): Lawrence Durrell and the Greek World. Associated University Presses: London. 

En español:

Durrell, Lawrence (1982): Lawrence Durrell, poemas escogidos (1935-1963). Madrid: Visor.

Websites:








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September 11, 2015, 4:16 am
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HOMAGE TO T. S. ELIOT ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSAY OF HIS DEATH: "GERONTION"

Sketches of T. S. Eliot, by Patrick Heron (National Portrait Gallery)

     Eliot's literary career illustrates in a striking manner the controlling force of the poetic impulse. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri (USA), where his father held an important position the the business world. But he was descended on both sides from New England families of the early settlements. Among his forebears, T. S. Eliot numbered many distinguished scholars, clergymen, and men of letters. That is why in his early poems there are a number of sketches, not always entirely dutiful, of Boston relatives and of that little society, Puritan, earnestly intellectual, and highly exclusive, which survived as the aristocracy of America until nowadays. In Four Quartets, Eliot described both East Coker, the village from which his family emigrated nearly three hundred years ago, and, in "The Dry Salvages", the Massachusetts coast which he knew in his childhood.
Young T. S. Eliot at Harvard (1913).
     Eliot's family tradition connected him with Harvard, where he received his education. At Harvard University there is now a collection of material relation to Eliot's early life, together with much office juvenilia. While at Harvard, he was especially interested in philosophy. In 1910 he went to the Sorbonne, to read literature and philosophy, subsequently returning to Harvard for further study. Afterwards he studied in Germany and at Oxford. During World War I he stayed in England, working first as a schoolmaster, then as a banker, and finally as an editor and publisher. It was during this period that his poetic work began to appear in various magazines, and between 1917 and 1929 in small volumes. But it was in 1922, with the publication of The Waste Land, that Eliot assumed that commanding position in English poetry which he ever after retained. In 1927 he became a British subject, and announced in the preface to a book of essays that he was now a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a statement with caused some disturbance in literary circles, where none of these tenets was very prominently advocated. 
     During the next decade he published some important poetry, wrote and lectured on a wide variety of subjects connected with literature and society, and through his editing of the Criterion, a quarterly magazine, exercised considerable influence upon the literary world. After the world he published what many people consider his greatest poem, Four Quartets, then turned quite deliberately to the stage; but the Criterion ceased tu publication in 1939. His authority and reputation had, however, grown steadily, and whilst in the nineteen-twenties he was known chiefly to the young and enthusiastic students of the universities and to the younger literary generation in London, he became gradually accepted during the course of the next decade by the more traditional and conservative guardians of literary reputations.  
     He received from King George VI the Order of Merit, that most rare and coveted of honors, the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and the highest American civilian honor, the Medal of Freedom, in 1964. His double task was the interpretation of the age to itself, "holding the Mirror up to Nature" as the greatest poet of all proclaimed, and maintaining the standards of strict literary excellence, "purifying the dialect of the tribe", as he himself, quoting Mallarmé, declared his aim to be. As Eliot said of another poet, in his own work the reader will find "a record of the spiritual struggles of a man of intellectual power and emotional intensity who gave much toil to perfecting his verses. As such, it should be a document of interest to all who are curious to understand their fellow men". T. S. Eliot at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965.

"GERONTION"

    This is one of the 26 poems in the title Poems (1920), which discuses primarily religion and sexuality. Eliot was accused of anti-Semitism by many scholars. However, "Gerontion" is a great poem. The old man, whose soliloquy stands at the head of the Poems, is a dramatic figure not unlike Tiresias, the old blind seer of "The Waste Land". Both are voices rather than persons, the voices of representative Man, as he contemplates a decaying civilization and the pitiable fragments of humanity that inhabit this "decayed house". Mr. Silver, Hakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, and Fraulein von Kulp, Mrs Cammel are only names, but the mixture of nationalities, the suggestions of various kinds of international hocus-pocus, artistic, or occult, picks up the description of the "owner of the house", the Jew: "My house is a decayed house, /  And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner, / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp". In another poem of this volumen, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleinstein with a Cigar", the simile between "the Jews" and "the rats" in the poem gave rise to much criticism: "The rats are underneath the piles, / The jew is underneath the lot, / Money in furs".  Obviously, the depiction of the "Jew" is inappropriate and unsuitable. Gerontion, the major character of the poem, is a displaced, homeless person whose spiritual desolation is symbolized in the traditional religious metaphor of drought. There is no apparent sequence of thought or logical arrangement in the poem, only the broken fragmentary recollections and meditations of the old man, as he recalls those heroic deaths in battle, suggestive of Homeric war, which he did not share, 

             I was neither at the hot gates
             Nor fought in the warm rain
             Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
             Bitten by flies, fought

     In the meditation which follows, not only contemporary society, but the inner world of the individual is seen to be crumbling, 

         These with a thousand small deliberations 
          Protract the profit of their chill delirium, 
          Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled, 
          With pungent sauces, multiply variety 
          In a wilderness of mirrors.

     By a technique not unlike that of the early Russian films, Eliot gives a series of "shots" which when put together do form a single sequence. The unity lies in the mood and tone, the flat listless accents of the old man whose vision may have the inconsequence of a dream, because, as Eliot says in the quotation from Shakespeare which heads the poem, 

       Thou hast nor youth nor age,
       But as it were an after dinner sleep,
       Dreaming of both.
     
     The poem is full of echoes of Shakespeare and of other Elizabethan playwrights. these literary echoes have often caused apprehension in the mind of readers, who feel that without an ability to recognize such allusions, they may lose the point of the poem. This fear is without foundation. A successful poem does not rely upon anything but itself for the essential core of its meaning. Eliot's use of literary allusions is part of his technique of implication. 

GERONTION
Gerontion, Acrylic Sculpture by Frederick Hart (1982)

Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
  Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
  I was neither at the hot gates
  Nor fought in the warm rain
  Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
  Bitten by flies, fought.
  My house is a decayed house,
  And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.

                        I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.

Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger

In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.

After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bilhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.

                    Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.


Bibliography: 

Julius, Anthony, 1995: T. S. Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press: New York.
Williamson, George, 1953: A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot. Syracuse University Press: New York.


Websites:


En español:

Arturo Casas: "Evidentia, Deixis y enunciación en la lírica de referente histórico (La modalidad EHN-T), pp. 173-74.
Abad, Pilar, 1992: Cómo leer a T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Júcar.
Barón, Emilio, 1996: Eliot en España. Universidad de Almería: Almería.

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November 15, 2015, 11:08 am
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1897-1970

     The pronouncement that Louise Bogan was the best American woman poet between Dickinson and Bishop would not have pleased her, for she disliked, fastidious and detached spirit that she was, all such headings and herdings; we can merely call attention to the signal merit of her narrowly focused but passionate verse, most of which was written int he first half of her life, much anthologized but, compacted as it was in the charged stanzas of the seventeen-century poets she so admired, never won "popularity" in the heart-on-the-sleeve manner of her contemporary Edna St. Vincent Millay.

     Bogan was, of course, the author of six books of lyric verse, much sifted to produce, in The Blue Estuaries of 1968, a life's work of 110 poems; her several volumes of criticism, too (she served for nearly forty years as poetry critic for The New Yorker, though she discussed much more than poetry in those pages), were posthumously winnowed down to one big book, Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation", and appropriately title by her editors A Poet's Alphabet. Though the landscapes of her poetry were always American (New England and the Atlantic seaboard), there was nothing provincial about her criticism, which achieved a trenchant accounting of Gide and Rilke, of Dinesen and Lorca, of Yeats and Colette, as well as a characteristically stringent response to American classics such as Hawthorne and Dickinson, Whitman and James. Nor is it surprising that her prose carried her further into a sort of autobiographical meditation assembled by her literary executor from journals, memoirs, stories, and letters: Journey Around My Room is a great American document of ironic self-appraisal.


      Yet it is the poetry which shines brightest, and will endure as the great lyric achievement of her time, the line of truth exactly superimposed on the line of feeling. The implications of her verse are best stated by Marianne Moore, who remarked in a review of her work as early as 1941, that "it is a fact as well as a mystery that weakness is power, that handicap is proficiency, that the scar is a credential, that indignation is no adversary for gratitude, or heroism for joy. There are medicines". That shrewdly accounts for the moral sense of Louise Bogan's poems, a triumph not shared, as I began by saying, by any American woman poet since Dickinson. 
     
Louise Bogan was born in Livermore Falls, maine, on August 11, 1897. Respected as one of the most skilled crafters of poetry of her age, Luise Bogan died on February 4, 1970, in New York City.


THE DAEMON

                                         Must I tell again
                                         In the words I know
                                         For the ears of men
                                         The flesh, the blow?

                                         Must I show outright
                                         The bruise in the side,
                                         The halt in the night,
                                         and how death cried?

                                         Must I speak to the lot
                                         Who little bore?
                                          It said Why not?
                                          It said Once more.

THE DREAM

   O God, in the dream the terrible horse began
   To paw at the air, and make for me with his blows.
   Fear kept for thirty-five years poured through his mane,
   And retribution equally old, or nearly, breathed through his nose.

   Coward complete, I lay and wept on the ground
   When some strong creature appeared, and leapt for the rein.
   Another woman, as I lay half in a sound,
   Leapt int he air, and clutched at the leather and chain.

   Give him, she said, something of yours as a charm.
   Throw him, she said, some poor thing you alone claim.
   No, no, I cried, he hates me; he's out for harm,
   And whether I yield or not, it is all the same.

   But, like a lion in a legend, when I flung the glove
   Pulled from my sweating, my cold right hand,
   The terrible beast, that no one may understand,
   Came to my side, and put down his head in love.


Bibliography:

Bogar, Louise, 1972. A Poet's Alphabet: Reflections on the Literary Art and Vocation. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bogar, Louise, 1994. The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968. New York: Farrar.
Knox, Clair E, 1990. Louise Bogan, A Reference Source. Scarecrow Press: Michigan University.
Peterson, Douglas Lee 1952. A Critical Study of the Poetry of Louise Bogan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Ridgeway, Jaqueline 1984. Louise Bogan. New York: Twayne.

Webliography: 


En español:


Catalá:



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December 29, 2015, 4:39 am
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     Last December 11th, 2015, CEU UNIVERSIDAD SAN PABLO hosted the first Doctoral Dissertation on the South African poet Roy Campbell. This is the first Doctoral Thesis Defense in the Academic World on Roy Campbell. The Thesis was defended by Emilio Domínguez Díaz, who, as a candidate, offered a brilliant dissertation on the  following topic of research: Roy Campbell: Marginación, exilio y conversión de un poeta amigo de España. Apart from the printed version, the members of the trial also received a DVD with lots of unpublished images, hundreds of documents, a video, a sheet music on "Mass at Dawn" and its recording and even some radio programmes on RC the candidate had taken part in. 
     We hope this Thesis research will soon become published in book form by a relevant editorial. Ph. D. Emilio Domínguez Díaz is today one of the greatest specialists worldwide in Roy Campbell, and undoubtedly the best scholar on Roy Campbell in the Hispanic-Portuguese Academic stage. This ambitious Academic project is definitely the best Spanish homage to Roy Campbell, the man and the poet, and no mistake an"emotional" tribute. Ph. D. Emilio Domínguez Díaz is a teacher of English at the prestigious Colegio Tajamar in Madrid.
Members and participants of the Thesis Tribunal, from left to right: Ph.D. Jesús Isaías Gómez López; Ph.D. Alfonso Bullón de Mendoza;  Ph.D. Isabel Abradelo de Usera; Emilio Domínguez Díaz (Candidate); Ph.D. José Luis Orella Martínez (Director of Doctoral Thesis); Ph.D. Beatriz Villacañas; Ph.D. Maria do Rosário Lupi Bello.


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February 1, 2016, 11:40 am
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NORMAN CAMERON
Norman Cameron, of Scottish ancestry, was born in Bombay in 1905 and educated at Fettes College and Oriel College, Oxford. After leaving the university he was for a while a superintendent of education in Nigeria before becoming an advertising copy-writer in London. In the thirties he contributed frequently to Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse and to Epilogue, the miscellany issued by Robert Graves and Laura Riding. He was awarded the M.B.E. for work on propaganda to German troops in Italy during the war, and he was with the British Forces in Austria until early in 1947, when he returned to his work in advertising.
He brought out the following books of verse: The Winter House (1935) and Work in Hand (1942), the latter also containing poems by Robert Graves and Alan Hodge. He published Forgive Me, Sire (1950) and His Collected Poems (1957) were published posthumously with an introduction by Robert Graves.
Edwin Muir described Cameron as "a neat, semi-epigrammatic poet", but this is a tepid way of referring to this precision and skill with words. The Winter House is a collection in which no single poem appears to have been forced. His poems wear well, and we suspect that they may be read when some fancied modern poets with much bigger reputations are quite forgotten. He died in 1953.

 NAKED AMONG THE TREES

          Formerly he had been a well-loved god,
          Each visit from him a sweet episode,
          Not like the outrageous Pentecostal rush
          Or wilful Jahveh shrieking from a bush.

          He bloomed in our bodies to the finger-tips
          And rose like barley-sugar round the lips,
          Then unawares was cleanly gone away,
          With no relapse or after taint to pay.

          We've forced the burgeoned lust he gave to us
          Into a thousand manners of misuse,
          Into the hot alarms, wishes and frets,
          The drinking-bouts, the boasting and the bets.

          And these have made his cult degenerate,
          So that the booted Puritan magistrate
          Did right to spur down on the devotees,
          Catch them and whip them naked among the trees.

THE INVADER

          Our shops and farms wide open lie;
          Still the invader feels a lack:
          Disquiet whets his gluttony
          For what he may not carry back.

          He prowls about in search of wealth
          But has no skill to recognize
          Our things of worth: we need no stealth
          To mask them from his pauper eyes.

          He calls for worship and amaze;
          We give him yes-men in a row,
          Reverberating that self-praise
          He wearied of a while ago.

          He casts around for some new whim,
          Something preposterously more:
          'Love me' he bids. We offer him
          The slack embraces of a whore.

          And when he spitefully makes shift
          To share with us his pauperdom,
          By forcing on us a gift
          The shoddy wares he brought from home,

           And watches that we sell and buy
          Amongst us his degrading trash,
          He gets no gain at all. Though sly
          With what he knows, the guns and cash,

          What he knows not he may not touch:
          Those very spoils for which he came
          Are still elusive to his clutch-
          They swerve and scorch him like a flame.

          Invader-outcast of all lands,
          He lives condemned to gorge and crave,
          To foul his feast with his own hands:
          At once the oppressor and the slave.


Bibliography:

Warren Hope, Jonathan Barker (eds), Norman Cameron: Collected Poems and Selected Translations, Greenwich, Anvil Press poetry, 1990. 





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February 14, 2016, 11:50 am
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Article 0

February 23, 2016, 9:36 am
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(POEMS OF THE JAZZ AGE)

      Note of the editors and translator, en español and in English: 

     Fue el propio F. Scott Fitzgerald quien en los años veinte bautizó su época como la «Jazz Age», convirtiéndose así el propio autor en «The Voice of the Jazz Age» para la crítica especializada, a sabiendas de que todas estas voces, ritmos, personajes y temas de esa era de excesos y de sátira que impregnaba todos los ámbitos de su mundo ya estaban presentes en su obra poética, la primigenia vocación literaria de nuestro autor. Es la poesía el primer género literario con que el joven Scott —como prefería ser llamado— con apenas quince años, iniciaría su signatura como escritor con la publicación del poema «Football», en 1911. La poesía de Fitzgerald tiene su propio timbre y pulso poético, así como una bien definida intención lírica orientada hacia lo cotidiano, la nota simpática a modo de recorte de prensa, la parodia, la broma y la crítica más inoportuna, satírica o despiadada, con la que el joven poeta aspiraba a convertirse en «el Rupert Brooke americano».
Poema escrito y dedicado a su hija Mary,
«For Mary's Eighth Birthday»,
en su octavo cumpleaños, pero como indica en el texto, publicado
siete años después.
     Esta poesía, como primer período literario de Fitzgerald, responde a una etapa de formación del autor con la que este busca su propia identidad y su propia voz con sentimientos subjetivos donde la obra de arte, como proceso lírico, tiene una marcada vocación de universalidad. De ahí que el hablante lírico a menudo parece olvidarse de sí mismo para abrazar la poesía como obra de arte intimista, directa y mágica, mediante unos procesos líricos que tienen sus orígenes y raíces en las experiencias más íntimas del poeta, que parece sumergirse en una actividad instintiva nacida de una predisposición natural hacia la fantasía como estímulo del alma y el sentimiento más puro de su creador. 
     Con la presente edición bilingüe asistimos a la primera publicación en español de la poesía de F. Scott Fitzgerald, el creador de una de las mayores sátiras sociales de la América del pasado siglo, El gran Gatsby.El presente trabajo comprende la mayoría de los poemas escritos por Fitzgerald con la intención de ser publicados en su día en distintas revistas, aunque unos lo fueron y otros no. El autor nunca llegó a publicar en vida poemario alguno. Ciertamente, su obra poética —salvo algunos poemas aparecidos en distintos blocs de notas y obras de ficción— fue básicamente compuesta durante su juventud, por lo que los poemas aquí recogidos corresponden, en su mayoría, a esta etapa novel de la carrera literaria del autor. Para ello, además de la búsqueda de todos estos poemas en distintas revistas de la época, hemos tenido la oportunidad de contrastarlos con el ímprobo trabajo realizado por el especialista Matthew Bruccoli, hasta la fecha, el único título que recoge casi toda la poesía de Scott Fitzgerald: F. Scott Fitzgerald: Poems (1911-1940), edición que, sin duda, nos ha valido enormemente para confirmar el preceptivo rigor académico y científico de la nuestra. La edición de Matthew Bruccoli recoge también muchos de los poemas aparecidos en las novelas del autor, así como abundantes apuntes de corte lírico y letras de canciones. Para nuestra edición hemos descartado todos los poemas que ya forman parte de su obra de ficción por considerar que el lector, tanto en inglés como en español, habrá tenido la oportunidad de leerlos; también hemos dejado de lado toda la ingente producción de letras de canciones, de letras para obras de teatro, así como de numerosos chistes en forma de verso, por considerar estas formas alejadas del verdadero sentimiento poético. Por consiguiente, hemos preferido contar con los poemas que estimamos mejor definen el espíritu lírico de nuestro autor, esa primigenia vocación literaria del mítico F. Scott Fitzgerald. Con esta hermosa e inédita edición bilingüe también queremos aprovechar para rendir homenaje a nuestro entrañable y tristemente desaparecido amigo y maestro, profesor de literatura americana en la Universidad de Granada, y gran novelista, el profesor don Manuel Villar Raso, siempre en nuestra mejor memoria.
     These poems are the concretions of an extraordinarily perceptive, wry, slightly sardonic and highly self-conscious mind, poetic in its intuitive verbal grasp, its individual linguistic apprehension of reality, but committed to the craft of verse in only an obvious and superficial way, and seemingly not more than slightly aware of the real expressive potentialities of verse form; not aware enough, in any case, to work out the embodiment of its sensibility on those terms. One might conclude, then, that Fitzgerald's work here, his random reflections, verse-letters, jokes, momentary satires, parodies, and song lyrics, as well as his attempts at "serious" poetry, were, if not exactly a tragic waste of time, then a more or less complete one. But though there is some truth in this assumption, it leaves out of account things worth considering. To begin with, the evidences of an unusual mind are never completely worthless, no matter whether the mind is in its true groove or out of it. It is of course saddening that a medium which Fitzgerald loved did as much to hide his gift as any form of composition might be expected to do; it is disconcerting to find so very little of sustained value in an idiom in which a gifted man placed so much importance. That is part of the bafflement of Fitzgerald, but it is an important part. Yet here too, even in the corny lyrics, the private jokes for friends (in one of these he calls Gary Cooper "the tall mule skinner," which is better than perfect), the curious telegrams and communiques like some private code, there are occasional random sparks of the uniquely Fitzgeraldian insight. Beneath everything here, even the most trivial, there is the flicker of a fine unmistakable consciousness, and one could do worse—a lot worse—than to give each item the attention reserved for the inimitable: "It is what it is because an extraordinary genius paused at that point in history and touched it".


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April 22, 2016, 5:51 am
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RAY BRADBURY:
"A POEM WRITTEN ON LEARNING THAT SHAKESPEARE AND CERVANTES BOTH DIED ON THE SAME DAY"
Great Shakespeare lost, Cervantes gone 
The sun at noon goes down. The dawn 
Refuses light. Time holds its breath
At this coincidence of death
Then can it be? and is it so
That these twin gods to darkness go
All in a day! and none to stop
The harvesting of this fell crop
Each in its field, and each so bright
They, burning, hurled away the night.
Yet night returns to seize its due,
One Spirit Spout? No! Death takes two.
First one. The world goes wry from lack 
Then two! tips world to balance back.
Two Comet strikes within a week,
First Spain, the dumbstruck England’s cheek. 
The world grinds mute in dreads and fears 
Antarctica melts down to tears,
And Caesars ghosts erupted, rise
All bleeding Amazons from eyes,
An age has ended, yet must stay
As witness to a brutal day
When witless God left us alone
By deathing Will, then Spanish clone.
Who dares to try and gauge each pen
We shall not see such twins again. 
Shakespeare is lost, Cervantes dead?
The conduits of God are bled 

And gone the Light, and shut the clay
Two Titans gone within a day,
Two felled by one sure stroke of death,
Christ gapes his wounds, God stops his breath. 
And we are staggered by twin falls
The vastness of the day appalls
As if a tribunal of Kings
From Caesars down to our Royal Things,
A pageant of rich royalty
Were drowned in Time’s obscenity.
Who ordered thus: «Two giants — die.» 
First one and then our other eye
God shut the great, then greatest dream 
One not enough? No, it would seem
A void half full if Shakespeare, done
Went down to doom at sunset’s gun.
So then lamenting, then with laugh,
God seized and filled the other half. 
Cervantes pulled across the sill
To heart of Comet brim and fill.
God sent both forth, twin stars whose fire 
Birthed whales and beauteous beasts for hire 
And long years since we beg for rides
Where Cervantes plus Shakespeare hides 
Their fall? knocked echoes round the Stage 
And still we reckon our outrage
Because where is the sense in this
Our left hand and our right we miss
Which clapped together made applause
For God and Primal Cosmic Cause.
But Cervantes and Bard strewn cold
Two wild Dreams in one dumb soil mold?
Let all the echoes flow in tides
Where comets are their flowering brides 
And Cervantes and bawdy Will 

Do windmill fight our hopes uphill
And rouse us up in nightmare bed
To cry: Quixote, Hamlet, dead?
In one fell day? Get off! Get. Go!
Such funerals I will not know.
Their graves, their stones, these I refuse. 
Lend me their books, show me their Muse. 
By end of day or, latest, week,
I bid Cervantes/Shakespeare speak
To brim my heart, to fill my head
With what? Good Don. Fine Lear. Not dead. Not dead! 

Bibliography: 
Ray Bradbury (2002): I live By The Invisible: New & Selected Poems. Clare: Salmon Poetry, pp. 13-15.


«POEMA ESCRITO AL SABER QUE SHAKESPEARE Y CERVANTES MURIERON EL MISMO DÍA» (RAY BRADBURY)
 
El gran Shakespeare desaparecido, Cervantes fallecido
y el sol que descinde al mediodía. El amanecer
rechaza la luz. El tiempo contiene el aliento
ante esta coincidencia de muerte
¿y puede ser?, ¡cómo puede ser
que estos dioses mellizos se marchen a la oscuridad
los dos el mismo día!, y que ninguno detenga
la siega de esta cruel cosecha
cada una en su campo, y cada una tan brillante,
ambas, ardiendo, alejaron la noche.
Aunque lanoche regresa para apropiarse de sus derechos,
¿A Liberar un Espíritu? ¡No! La Muerte se lleva dos.
Primero uno. El mundo anda desnivelado
¡pues dos! Y el mundo entonces se vuelve a equilibrar.
Dos choques de Cometas en na semana,
primero España, luego el boquiabierto rostro de Inglaterra.
El mundo se queda mudo de pánico y miedo,
la Antártida se derrite en lágrimas,
y los fantasmas de los Césares violentados surgen
como amazonas de ojos ensangrentados,
una edad ha concluido, aunque debe quedar
como testigo de un día brutal
en el que el absurdo Dios nos dejó solos
al dar muerte a Qilliam, y después al clon español.
¿Quién se atreve a intentar evaluar esas plumas?
Ya no volveremos a ver tales mellizos de nuevo.
Shakespeare ha desaparecido, ¿y Cervanes muert?
Los conductos de Dios están desangrados
y sin Luz, y terminado el barro,
pues dos Titanes se han ido en un solo día,
los dos derribados por un certero golpe de la muerte,
Cristo contempla con asombro sus heridas. Dios deja de respirar.
Y nosotros nos quedamos consternados por caídas mellizas,
la inmensidad del día horroriza
como si un tribunal de Reyes,
desde los Césares hasta nuestros Asuntos Reales,
un desfile de lujosa realeza
se ahogara en la obscenidad del Tiempo.
Alguien así lo ordenó: «Que mueran dos giganges».
primero un ojo y luego el otro,
Dios cerró el grande, ¿entonces el más grande sueño
no es bastante? No, parecería
un vacío meido lleno si Shakespeare, perdido
descendiera a la muerte justo alpistoletazo del ocaso.
Así pues lamentando, después riendo,
Dios cogió y llenó la otra mitad.
Cervantes avanzó por el umbral
para llenar y colmar el corazón del Cometa.
Dios los envió a los dos, estrellas gemelas cuyo fuego
alumbró ballenas y hermosas bestias de alquiler
y muchos años ya suspirando por los paseos
donde Cervantes más Shakespeare esconden
su caída. Ecos golpeteados por el Escenario
y aun así imaginamos nuestra atrocidad
porque donde se encuentra el sentido de esto
echamos de menos nuestra mano izquierda y derecha
que aplaudían juntas
a Dios y a la Primera Causa Cósmica.
Pero Cervantes y el Bardo helados
¿dos Sueños salvajes en un mudo molde de tierra?
Que todos los ecos fluyan con las mareas
donde los cometas sean sus novias florecientes
y Cervantes y el impúdico Will
disputen nuestras esperanzas cuesta arriba
y nos despierten del espantoso sueño
para gritar: «¿Quijote, Hamlet, muertos?
¿En un aciago día? ¡Déjalo!, venga. ¡Vamos!».
No veré tales funerales.
Sus tumbas, sus lápidas, las rechazo.
Prestadme sus libros, mostradme sus Musas.
Al final del día o, a más tardar, de la semana,
ruego a Cervantes/Shakespeare que hable
para colmar mi corazón, para llenar mi cabeza
¿de qué? Del Gran Don. Del buen Lear. No han muerto. ¡No han muerto!
23 de Abril de 1980


Referencia: Ray Bradbury, Poesía completa, Madrid, Cátedra, 2013, págs. 977-981 [Edición, Introducción y traducción de Jesús Isaías Gómez López]


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Article 1

September 18, 2016, 9:06 am
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KARL SHAPIRO


     Born in Baltimore, Maryland (1913), the son of a businessman, he entered the University of Virginia in 1932 but left after a year; in his poem "University", he asserted the "curriculum" was to "hurt the Negro & avoid the Jew". In Shapiro's case he was shunned by both the WASP and the German-Jewish students, who looked down on Jews of Eastern European ancestry (his ancestors were Russian). He also notice that there were no Jewish names in the Oxford Book of English Verse and felt it would be hard to get published without an Anglo-Saxon name. He kept Shapiro anyway, but changed the original Carl, and later said "that decision made me 'Jewish'". 
     Although he attended two universities and taught at several more, Shapiro never took a degree. He served as Clerk in the Medical Corps in the South Pacific for the duration, and managed to produce four volumes of poetry. The Place of Love and Person, Place and Thing, appeared in 1942. V-Letter and Other Poems was published in 1944 and won the Pulitzer Prize. 
     Without access to a library, Shapiro also wrote the remarkable Essay on Rime (1944), a bold critique in verse of all he found wrong with Pound and Eliot (especially Eliot's notion of impersonality), the strictures of the New Criticism, and the narrowness of academic poetry of the time. Preferring the immediacy, openness, and personal voice of William Carlos Williams, he continued to attack what he felt was the over intellectualizing of poetry; his controversial essays were eventually gathered in In Defense of Ignorance (1960). 
     In 1948 Shapiro began teaching at Johns Hopkins. He did not care for the job and accepted the position of editor of Poetry in 1950. After several positions at Berkeley and University of Nebraska he ended his teaching career at the University of California, Davis, in 1985.
     Shapiro's later books, notably Poems of a Jew (1958) and The Bourgeois Poet (1964), were written in freer modes but were no less forceful in subject matter and attitude. Their open-mindedness reflected his affinity to Beat poetry and harkened back to Whitman's declarative style. Shapiro's Selected Poems and White-Haired Lover (1968) shared the 1969 Bollinger Prize with John Berryman. Considering the ironies of his iconoclastic career, Shapiro quipped: "I have a special status around English Departments —I'm not really a professor, but sort of a mad guest." In 1994 he moved to New York with his third wife; he died in Manhattan May 14, 2000. 

    THE ALPHABET
The letters of the Jews as strict as flames
Or little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Unsacrifices the bled son of man
Yet plaits his crown of thorns.

Where go the tipsy idols of the Roman
Past synagogues of patient time,
Where go the sisters of the Gothic rose,
Where go the blue eyes of the Polish women
Past the almost natural crime,
Past the still speaking embers of ghettos,
There rise the tinder flowers of the Jews.
The letters of the Jews are dancing knives
That carve the heart of darkness seven ways.
These are the letters that all men refuse
And will refuse until the king arrives
And will refuse until the death of time
And all is ruled back in the book of days.


Bibliography:

Joseph Reino (1981): Karl Shapiro. New York: Gale.

Webliography:


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November 28, 2016, 2:09 am
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Con este ensayo rescatamos una singular faceta literaria, la lírica, del autor de ciencia ficción y ensayista americano Isaac Asimov. Para ello hacemos un recorrido literario por la incursión poética de Asimov por la estética del límeric, una peculiar forma poética de la lengua inglesa, escasamente tratada en nuestra lengua. Es cierto que el límeric, como forma poética de sólo cinco versos, no comparable a ninguna forma poética del español —aunque posiblemente se aproxime a la redondilla—, de tono jocoso, cómico y frecuentemente lúbrico, podría parecer una forma poética menor; pero cuando un autor de la talla de Isaac Asimov dedicó buena parte de su actividad literaria a la composición de esta hilarante y desenvuelta fórmula poética, resulta obligado dar a conocer esta otra insólita faceta literaria suya. Sin duda, el presente ensayo viene a cubrir un importante vacío literario sobre el autor tanto en español como en inglés. 


     The aim of this essay is to reclaim one of American science fiction and essay writer Isaac Asimov's least well-known literary aspects, his poetic works. In that sense, we offer an elementary survey of Asimov's journey through the aesthetics of the limerick, a popular poetic form of the English language which, by the way, is scarcely used in Spanish, though the Spanish quatrain ("redondilla") is slightly comparable. Although the limerick could be considered a minor poetic form due to its common funny, comic and lubricous tone, the fact that such distinguished literary authority as Isaac Asimov could have dedicated part os his literary creativity to the composition of this hilarious and boastful poetic form is a crucial reason to put on the map this unusual literary side by the author. Certainly, this essay fills what would otherwise be a serious gap in the studies of Asimov in both English and Spanish.

     Leamos algunos de estos hilarantes "Gróserics" Asimovianos  en el original en inglés y en nuestra particular versión rimada en español:

En Venus el amor es adicción,
el orgasmo llega por fricción,
zarpa contra zarpa,
napia contra napia,
para mí eso es ciencia ficción.

***

En Venus el amor es adicción,
el orgasmo llega por fricción,
zarpa contra zarpa,
napia contra napia,
para mí eso es ciencia ficción».


Y seguidamente dejamos, como cifra y compendio de lo hasta aquí dicho, el más osado y descarado: 

There was a young man of La Jolla
Who kept screwing his wife in the folla.
Those who passed by would mumble
Or stub toes and stumble
But the folla was where he’d enjolla.

***

Érase un tipo de La Jolla
que se tiraba a su mujer en la folla.
Los que por allí pasaban
bien que se trastabillaban,
pero la folla era la polla.

Nota Bene: Una próxima edición bilingüe con todos los lúbricos límerics de Asimov sera publicada en breve por el autor de esta reseña y del artículo seguidamente destacado. 




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February 3, 2017, 10:29 am
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Con el presente trabajo de investigación filológica y de traducción hemos pretendido acercar al lector esta faceta lírica y harto desconocida de una de las mentes más proféticas del pasado siglo. George Orwell es, por méritos propios, el fundador, y por «fundador» queremos decir ‘creador’, de la distopía política contemporánea en su máxima expresión. En su poesía hemos advertido, mucho mejor que en su ficción, la evolución de los procesos mentales del niño y el joven Eric Blair, enamorado, infatuado y sentimental, aunque también con poemas de fuerte carga social y compromiso político; pero también la culminación del poeta que en su madurez literaria ha esculpido una voz y un pulso poéticos inconfundibles, donde las claves políticas no están condicionadas por el reino de las ideologías, sino vertebradas por el factor humano de un pensador que como novelista, ensayista y poeta, se ve a sí mismo «entre dos mundos opuestos, entre dos mundos en ambos sentidos rotos»
La poesía de Eric Blair y de Orwell no puede ser leída como paradigma de su ficción, sino más bien como acercamiento al hombre, al Orwell-Quijote que escribe estos poemas como misivas directas de su yo más intimo a un destinatario que puede ser el propio autor y cualquier lector. De ahí que en sus versos predomine una modalización lírica donde el destinatario adquiere una dimensión universal. Asistimos por consiguiente a un discurso lírico, desprovisto de recursos retóricos, que articula así una narración libre y directa, como fórmula de expresión que consigue plasmar y transmitir sus ideas como conceptos de significación, sin el deseo de convencer o conmover al lector u oyente, sino más bien de hacerse entender por este.
Estos cuarenta y un poemas, que componen nuestra presente edición de la poesía de George  Orwell, incluyen toda la producción poética que nuestro autor fue publicando en diferentes revistas literarias y periódicos desde 1914 hasta 1945, el mismo año que publica su primera sátira política, Animal Farm. Pero a estos añadimos una sección de poemas y versos «incidentales» que aportan un colorido poético en algunas de sus novelas. Para ello hemos seguido las recomendaciones de Dione Venables, la editora de la primera edición de la poesía completa de Orwell en inglés (George Orwell, The Complete Poetry), que en todo momento nos ha servido de valiosa aguja de bitácora. Si bien hemos optado por dejar fuera de la nuestra un limerick y cuatro pareados que Venables atribuye a Eric Arthur Blair aun sin poderlo acreditar científica o documentalmente.
La presente edición bilingüe de la poesía completa de George Orwell, y de Eric Arthur Blair, es la primera publicación en la lengua de Cervantes que trata la faceta lírica del autor más políticamente incorrecto y políticamente acertado del siglo XX. Don Quijote fracasa en todas sus empresas y, sin embargo, nunca llega a ser consciente de su fracaso, es ese mismo Quijote el que advertimos en el Orwell poeta, un hombre que ni teme ni duda del mensaje y la empresa de sus versos, sin miedo a la crítica, a la censura o al fracaso, que se reafirma sentimental, humana y políticamente en todos ellos como un quijote moderno y existencial.
"George Orwell", illustration by Oliver Raw
En la elaboración de un proyecto de la magnitud mediática y relevancia académica como el presente es también muy recomendable cuidar todo tipo de detalles, incluso los ajenos a la cuestión que nos ocupa, y es ahí donde la imagen también juega una importante baza. Siempre, no solamente hoy día, los libros han entrado también por los ojos. En el caso de Orwell, la simple pronunciación del apellido instala el elemento sonoro en el horizonte visual de nuestra imaginación; y es por ello por lo que una buena cubierta —como las que Visor Libros elabora con reconocida exquisitez para todo su amplio catálogo editorial—, si es acompañada de la apropiada ilustración, contagia al futuro lector de infinitas sugerencias que trascienden sus sentidos hasta elevarlos a una dimensión cercana a lo espiritual. Hemos tenido la inmensa suerte de contar con una bellísima y acertada ilustración de Orwell realizada por el reputado ilustrador americano Oliver Raw, con su ilustración "George Orwell", que, aunque ya había aparecido en periódicos como el New York Times, parecía estar esperando dar la cara definitivamente en nuestra inédita edición bilingüe, con Introducción y notas, de la carrera poética del genial y visionario George Orwell. 
Unos cuantos poemas de la lista, alguno de los cuales ya había sido seleccionado para la prestigiosa edición The Best Poems of 1934 de Thomas Moult: 
Awake!, young men of England / ¡Despertad, jóvenes de Inglaterra!
The Photographer / El fotógrafo.
Friendship and Love / La amistad y el amor.
The Lesser Evil / El menor de los males.
John Flory / John Flory.
A Dressed Man and a Naked Man / Un hombre vestido y un hombre desnudo.
On a Ruined Farm Near the his Master's Voice / En una granja en ruinas junto a la fábrica de gramófonos de La voz de su amo.
A Happy Vicar I might Have Been! / ¡Qué feliz párroco podría haber sido!
The Italian Soldier Shook my Hand / El soldado italiano me estrechó la mano.
As one Non-combatant to Another / De un no combatiente a otro.

Jesús Isaías Gómez López

Dione Venables, cousin of Eric Arthur Blair's first poetic muse, Jacintha Buddicom, has had the bright idea of putting together a currently complete collection of George Orwell's poetry. It is a valuable and interesting anthology. Most would agree that compared with Orwell, the essayist, journalist and novelist, Orwell the poet is an unremarkable figure. But, whatever one might think of his verse as literature, from a biographical viewpoint it carries rather more weight and meaning. Certainly, like his other writings, it reflects movements of his mind over time, and is perhaps better read in that light. However, poems such as "An italian Soldier Shook my Hand" and "A Happy Vicar I Might Have Been" are clear exceptions, and some, such as his amusing jingle about the Burmese woman out-haggling her would-be customer, are highly entertaining. And his early "love" poems to Jacintha, his Kiplingesque poems from school and Burmese days, and various political poem are also quite revealing. In addition, the book benefits from a running commentary by the editor and an essay by Peter Davison. No Orwell aficionado should be without this collection. 
Gordon Bowker

George Orwell, Poesía completa, Madrid, Visor Libros, 2017 (lanzamiento de la obra: 8 de febrero de 2017).
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May 6, 2017, 10:56 am
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On Account of the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium: "Almería, You Have the Light for Lover" 
(University of Almería, 19-21 April, 2017)
“'Almeria', the First Luminous Station in Huxley’s idea of ‘boundlessness and emptiness’ ”

  I would like to start this brief note with a statement by professor Wagner in his brilliant essay “Aldous Huxley and the Desert”, “Huxley is convinced that an appropriate experience of the desert, this great “natural symbol of the divine” may help us to question our personal separateness and maybe even transcend our ordinary selfawareness”.
     It is true that the desert, as a geographical setting, as an emotional state and/or as a religious experience is present in Huxley throughout his life and literary career, but today I would like to convey my speech with a chronological outline of Huxley’s experience of the desert shaped by three particular deserts: The Almería Desert, The Malpais Desert and the Mojave Desert.
     Huxley visited Spain three times, it was during his second visit to Spain, in October 1929 when he visited Almería, coming from Barcelona after attending his invitation to the Congreso de Cooperación Intelectual de Barcelona, which according to the letter to his friend Flora Strousse dated on 13 September 1929, it would be a great excuse to make him visit again Museo del Prado and get acquainted with the south of Spain: 

Tomorrow we start back for Paris, thence briefly, I hope, to England, and afterwards to Spain to attend a Conference of Societies for Intellectual Cooperation. Golly! Why not sentimental and carnal cooperation? But the conference serves as a sufficient excuse to go and look once more at the Velasquez pictures in Madrid (what an experience!) and to explore, which I’ve never done before, the Southern Moorish part of the peninsula (James Sexton’s Selected Letters of Aldous Huxley, p. 220). 

  Huxley would add on account of his visit to Spain: “One isn’t surprised at Don Quixote going mad in a country like that” (p. 120).

  1. The sonnet Almería, is published in Huxley’s fourth poetry book, The Cicadas and Other Poems, published in 1931 by Chatto & Windus. The book contains thirty poems in all, of which thirteen are published for the first time, while 17 appeared in a limited edition some two years ago under the title Arabia Infelix. The Cicadas and Other Poems, which was the first unlimited edition that Huxley had issued since his second poetry book Leda (1920), was immediately sold out. “Almería”, the sonnet is the one before the last in this edition. As Jerome Meckier states in his essay “A private Waste Land of the Thirties: Aldous Huxley’s Arabia Infelix and The Cicadas” (221) in reference to the poem “Orion” (and I quote): “he is eager to refill the heavens with deities”. And in line with these luminous poems, referring to another poem based on Spain, and having Goya as its source of inspiration, in the poem “Picture by Goya”, Meckier sees that “the idea behind it, the poet determines, is that art, to be like life, should seem essentially heartless and amoral, hence an imposible repository for values” (213).
But it will be in Amería, where Huxley finds the source of light, the most luminous station of the Mediterranean, and possibly one of the most luminous settings in the world, to such an extent that Almería becomes the metaphor of a divine and beautiful woman, a goddess of knowledge and revelation, an epiphanic encounter with the divinity: “You have the Light for lover”. This “Fortunate Earth” of Almería makes love with this “Light” in capital, as Nicholas Murrey states in his scholar title, Aldous Huxley, “his life was a constant search for Light ... He offered as his personal motto the legend hung around the neck of a ragged scarecrow of a man in a painting by Goya: aun aprendo, which by the way, has wisely been chosen as the motto of the AHS. “aun aprendo” means “I am still learning”, painted by Goya, from the Bordeaux album, which dates from around 1825-1828, and may well be the drawing that best sums up Goya’s spirit in the final years of his life, but in the case of Huxley, we could state that Almería, to some extent, becomes some kind of secondary motto in his intellectual, mystic and spiritual exploration, that land “whose dry dust is all she brings to birth”, like the biblical “dust”, which in the “Word” signifies the grave, in other words, “death”, but death with resurrection, a death that also signifies Light and life, symbolic also of the Buddhist Wheel of Kharma: the neverending process of life and death. In Genesis 2:7, we read:

Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature”. Almería gives to birth this “dust” which is the seed and charm of life, “that child of clay by even celestial fire (Genesis 2:7).



Almería is for the poet the most luminous essence of the Mediterranean. The Luminous symbols light the poem from the first line till the last one. The sonnet is also a song dedicated to the 

"La primavera", by Jesús de Perceval.

fire of life that receives the city, the province, as it were a beautiful woman: «whose breast receives all the fierce ardour of a naked sun» (The Cicadas, p. 51). And the city and province, in spite of its “dry dust” and “root-weary”, still has the faculty of offering brilliant and good auspices: “Winged future”, that turns the city into a dream land: “Fortunate Earth! /Conceive the fruit of his divine desire”. The last lines of the poem manifest a strong degree of hopefulness as Huxley, a man who has always been in search of “Light”, sees in the Light of Almería the “purest” love threatened by “hate”: “This shining love that has the force of hate”. Huxley sees in Almeria a curious Freudian ambivalence “love- hate”, in the sense that love and hate are two sides of the same coin. Love here is “dysimmetric”, the one who loves, the lover, the “naked sun” with the desert as the perfect setting or bed love, and the one who is loved, Almería. Therefore, the “naked sun”, who is the lover”, lacks something, and Almería, the one who is loved, lacks nothing, has everything, has the “Light” as lover. And the setting of the Almería desert is the bed for this love encounter between the lover, the sun, and the loved one, Almería, what Lacan would have called a “hate-falling in love” relationship, as Jacques Lacan states: “Hate comes from a kind of infatuation”.
Aldous Huxley, Poesía completa, Madrid, Cátedra, 2011 (edición bilingüe, con el poema "Almería" en español)

Almería

Los vientos aquí no tienen insignias en movimiento, pero recorren
una vacía oscuridad, una destemplada luz;
ramas que no se doblan, nunca una flor torturada
se estremece, raíces agotadas, a punto de volar;
alado futuro, marchito pasado, ni semillas ni hojas
dan fe de esos veloces pies invisibles: corren
libres por una tierra desnuda, cuyo pecho recibe
todo el fiero ardor de un sol desnudo.
Tú tienes la Luz por amante. ¡Tierra afortunada!
Que concibe el fruto de su divino deseo.
Mas el seco polvo es todo lo que ella da a luz,
esa hija de arcilla creada por el perpetuo fuego celestial.
Por lo tanto venid, suave lluvia y delicadas nubes, y calmad
este amor radiante que tiene la fuerza del odio.


traducción y notas de Jesús Isaías Gómez López, Cátedra (Letras 
Universales), Madrid, 2011 (732 páginas).


 Could this “infatuation”, experienced in the poem “Almeria”, have also affected Huxley himself? We will never know for sure, but, on that account, and in order to spread a possible debate on that possibility, let me read the letter sent by Huxley to the professor from Almería, Arturo Medina, dated on March 24th, 1957, 28 years after his visit to Almería, and in reply to Arturo Medina’s letter of appraisal to Huxley:


Dear Mr Medina,

Your letter of February 21st has just reached me. Thank you for the kind things you say of my sonnet. I am glad you feel that it has caught, in some measure, the spirit of your strange and beautiful country. Actually I was in Almeria only once – many years ago. Was it 1928 or 1929? Anyhow, it was the year of the Barcelona Exhibition. My first wife and I were making a tour by automobile ---driving down the coast, Tarragona, Valencia, then inland to Murcia and back to the sea at Almeria, and so on to Granada, Ronda, Jerez and Cadiz. Murcia made a profound impression on me and so did Almería, the landscape of which seemed to express my own preoccupations with the problem of ‘pure’ intellectuality, ‘pure’ spirituality --- too much sun, but no rain. “Qui veut-dire l’ange, fait le bête,” as Pascal says. The sense of the landscape came to me, I remember, as we left the town and drove southward into the barren country. There was a tremendous wind and the sun was blazing --- ‘the winds of doctrine’ in combination with ‘spiritual light’, but no moisture, none of the vegetative life of nature. If, as I hope, I ever make another visit to Almería, I will knock at your door, and we will talk at length about your land of wind and fire.
Yours very truly,
Aldous Huxley


We notice here that Huxley puts between inverted commas, in order to emphasize, the adjective ‘pure’ twice, “ ‘pure’ intellectuality, ‘pure’ spirituality”. He met in Almería this sort of “spiritual light” in its barren and windy land. This land of fire of Almería seems to be Huxley’s first station of boundlessness and emptiness as he stated, this same year of the letter to Arturo Medina, in his article “The Desert” (Adonis and the Alphabet, 1957):

“Boundlessness and Emptiness, These are the two most expressive symbols of that attributeless Godhead ... This Inner Light” (I quote from Yoka Dashi’s “Song of Enlightenment”) “can be likened to space; it knows no boundaries; yet it is always here, is always with us, always retains its serenity and fullness. . . You cannot take hold of it, and you cannot get rid of it; it goes on its own way”.

Inauguration of the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium (University of Almería, 19 April, 2017)


With Jerome Meckier (left), Dana Sawyer (back) and Kirpal Singh (right) at the Cafeteria of Patio de Los Naranjos.
2. And what about the two following "luminous stations" in Huxley's idea of 'boundlessness and emptiness'?
Since we are dealing with poetry, not fiction, we should put it bluntly, and in that sense, it would be advisable to follow the reverse chronological order (according to the dates of publication of "Almeria" (The Cicadas an Other Poems, 1931);  Brave New World (1932); Ape and Essence (1948). If The Mojave desert (Ape and Essence) is the perfect setting to “employ the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor”, as Ronald Zigler wisely states in his work The Educational Prophecies of Aldous Huxley (Zigler: 196); In the case of Brave New World, In many ways, Brave New World is not only a chronicle of Huxley’s experiences and most intimate reflections, it is also one of the most complicated novels for our author as he, partway through the writing of the novel, had a “literary catastrophe” and had to revise the novel (Letters of Aldous Huxley, 348- 349), because as Jerome Meckier states: “he was creating a modern British dystopia instead of a universally frightening one” (Meckier: “Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World”). And in fact, it is obviously a dystopia, a bad place, as the name Malpais suggests (Baker: Brave New World: History, Science and Dystopia, p. 124). According to biographer Dana Sawyer, "Huxley was often autobiographical in his novels" (Sawyer: Aldous Huxley: A Biography, p. 31), but he is also autobiographical in his poem “Almería”, in which desertic and barren lands, he met the “naked sun” and “a celestial fire” that were possibly, or surely, I dare say, the roots of enlightenment that he would try to reach for, for that time onwards, at full length throughout his entire life.

Fabulous Team of Almería Students Supporting and Attending the Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium



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June 30, 2017, 9:17 am
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     Emma Lazarus was born, the fourth of seven children, on July 22, 1849, in New York City, to a Sephardic Jewish family whose founders were among the first to immigrate from the Iberian peninsula before the American Revolution. Her family was secular and thoroughly assimilated, her father Moses a wealthy sugar refiner who moved with ease in Gentile Manhattan Society. Lazarus was educated at home and became proficient in several languages, French, Spanish, German, Greek and Latin. IN 1866 her father underwrote the printing of a volume of poems and translations she produced between the ages of fourteen and sixteen; with some additions, it was brought out by a New York publisher the following year. She sent a copy to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became an informal mentor through correspondence, though not quite the helper she had hoped for. 
     Lazarus also wrote a well-received novel, Alide: An Episode in Goethe's Life, in 1874, followed in 1876 by The Spagnoletto, a drama that was not performed but won praise from the critics. On trips to Europe she met Robert Browning, Henry James, and William Morris, as well as his fellow Pre-Raphaelites. She declared her own Jewish identity in Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems, published in 1882. In the American Hebrew newspaper she presented a series of fifteen "letters" in 1882-1883 entitled "An Epistle to the Hebrews," arguing that assimilated Jewish Americans should be more aware of their potential vulnerability. By that time Jewish exiles from Russia were arriving at the rate of about two thousand a month. 
     Such was her background (and unwitting preparation) when in 1883 Lazarus received a request to aid in a fund-raising effort for the pedestal for La Liberté claimant le monde—Liberty Enlightening the World. In New York City the socialite author Constance Cary Harrison organized a major art exhibit and auction for the Pedestal Fund, which included an elaborate catalogue. (The exhibit became a precursor of the famous Armory Show of dissident art in 1913.) When she asked her friend Emma for a poem to include in her "Portfolio," Lazarus had nothing "Suitable" to contribute. In her Recollections, Grave and Gay (1912), Mrs. Harrison wrote that she reminded the poet "of her visits to ... the newly arrived immigrants whose sad lot had so often excited her sympathy." Lazarus soon sent her "The New Colossus," and it was first printed in the catalogue. 
     Realizing the statue's newer, greater symbolic potential, in her poem Lazarus refocused the perspective of Liberty, from the revolutionary past to the contemporary reality and future prospects of the United States. Instead of looking back to the Declaration of Independence, Lazarus shifted emphasis to the New Country's more recent, unparalleled position as the land of freedom and opportunity to downtrodden masses throughout the world. the seven spikes in the crown, representing the seven seas and seven continents, now radiated heightened significance for immigrants in the 1880s. Similarly, the torch that until 1903 made the monument a lighthouse—like that "brazen giant," the original Colossus of Rhodes— became figuratively a beacon of hope to the "storm-toss" and dispossessed streaming to America. Officialdom apparently did not appreciate Lazarus's new slant: "The New Colossus" was not read at the dedication ceremony, October 28, 1886. But it was only in 1903, sixteen years after her death, that the poem that made Lazarus's name forever known was cast as a brass plaque and erected in the hall inside the pedestal. In her final few years, Lazarus continued to publish poems and essays on literary and social topics in the Century and other journals. She returned to Europe for a long tour beginning in the spring of 1885 but grew ill and returned to the States in the fall of 1887. She died of Hodgkin's disease on November 19, at age thirty-eight. 
     Along with the National Anthem, "The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus's hymn to the Statue of Liberty, is among all verses, patriotic or otherwise, the most recognizable to Americans. It is doubtless true that, just as the words after "the twilight's last gleaming" begin to face for singers of "The Star Spangled Banner," the complete text of Lazarus's sonnet may also elude memory. But the cry she voiced for Lady Liberty's "silent lips"—"Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..."— remains indelible, and not without reason. In these few lines the poet crystallized the dream and ideal image of America for generations of immigrants to the Land of the Free. Donal Trump's ban on travel from Muslim majority countries signed today June 30, 2017, and the official impasse of the US refugee programme is a clear example that we need to review, analyze and memorize "The New Colossus" more than ever.


THE NEW COLOSSUS

     Not like the brazen giant of Green fame,
     With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
     Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
     A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
     Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
     Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
     Glows world-wife welcome; her mild eyes command
     The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
     "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
     With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
     Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
     The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
      Send these, the homeless, tempest-toss to me,
     I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Webliography: 

Esther Chor, Emma Lazarus, Schocken, New York, 2008.
Gregory Eiselein (ed.), Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings, Broadview,  Peterborough, 2002.
Erica Silverman, The Story of Emma Lazarus: Liberty's Voice, Muffin Books, New York, 2014.
Better Roth Young, Emma Lazarus in Her World, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1995.

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