Capek, Karel (pronounced "chop-ek") 1890-1938. Czech dramatist, novelist, and journalist. Capek was the most popular writer of the first Czech republic (1918-1938). In his writings, he defended the democratic and humanisticideals of its founder, President T.G. Masaryk. Capek's early stories and plays,most notably The Life of Insects (1923), were written with his brother Josef, a prominent avant-garde painter and writer. He gainedan international reputation with his science fiction drama R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) 1921, which introduced the word robot to the language. The Macropulous Secret, 1927, deals with the scientific prolongation of life. Krakatit (1924) is a science fiction novel involving international intrique and the invention of an atomic bomb.
Cubism: An artistic movement begun in 1907 in Paris. It was influenced by the structural simplifications of African sculpture and by CEZANNE'S concepts of geometry in the visual representation of objects. Cubism is characterized by a reduction of objects, figures, and occasionally of landscapes to their basic geometric forms. This effect is achieved by flattening and superimposing planes without the use of perspective or light. Analytical cubism (1910-1912) increasd the breakdown of forms and simultaneously represented various aspects of the same object. Monochromatic and austere, this phase led to the inclusion on the canvasof such materials as sand, glass, newspaper, and cloth. with synthetic cubism (1913-1914) the planes grew larger and more varied, form and color reappeared, and reality was represented in its most general tems. PABLO PICASSO and GEORGES BRAQUE were the founders of cubism in the visual arts, and its most outstanding representatives.
In literature, the poes Guillaume APOLLINAIRE, Max JACOB, and Andre Salmon. . . experimented with cubistic poetry, arranging apparently imagistic lines in clear-cut blocks. The results were the immediate precursors of surrealistic poetry. Writers who employed shifting and multiple points of view (Joyce, Eliot, Woolf . . .)were also seen as applying techniques akin to cubism.
Cummings, E.E.
When serpents bargain for the right to squirm (1923)
when serpents bargain
for the right to squirm
when serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage---
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age
when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
--and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close
when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn--valleys accuse their
mountains of having attitude--and march
denounces april as a saboteur
then we'll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind (and not until)
Buffalo Bill (1923)
Buffalo Bill's
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blueeyed boy
Mister Death nobody loses all the time
nobody loses all the time (1926)
i had an uncle named
Sol who was a born failure and
nearly everybody said he should have gone
into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle Sol could
sing McCann He Was a Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which
may or may not account for the fact that my Uncle
Sol indulged in that possible inexcusable
of all to use a highfalootin phrase
luxuries that is or to
with farming and be
if needlessly
added
my Uncle Sol's farm
failed because the chickens
ate the vegetables so
my Uncle Sol had a
chicken farm till lthe
skunks ate chickens when
my Uncle Sol
had a skunk farm but
the skunks caught cold and
died and so
my Uncle Sol imitated the
skunks in a subtle manner
or by drowning himself in the watertank
but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor
Victrola and records while he lived presented to
him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a
scrumptious not to mention splenderiferous funeral with
tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and
i remember we all cried like the Missouri
when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because
somebody pressed a button
(and down went
my Uncle
Sol
and started a worm farm)
Dada: A liteary and artistic movement founded in 1916 and devoted t the negation of all traditional values in philosopy and the arts. Its form was a protest againts what its leaders felt to be the insane destruction of civilized llllllife and thought during World War I. Organized in Zurich by Tristan TZARA, with Hans ARP . . . the movement produced the Dada review. This review proclaimed its intention to replace logical reson in thought with deliberate madness, and to substitute intentionally discordant chaos for established notions of beauty or harmony in the arts. Dada meetings turned into riots; art exhibits were mocking hoaxes.
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888-1965). American-born English poet, critic, and dramatist. Eliot lived in England from 1914 and became a British subject in 1927. Eliot is universally recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century, and his reputation grew to almost mythic proportions during his lifetime. Because of its radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter, his poetry revolutionized the literary conventions bequeathed by the Romantics and Victorians and gave expression to the spirit of the world after World War I.
Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He was educated at Harvard, where his flair for eclectic scholarship and his keen sensitivity to the social-psychological currrents of the day were already marked characteristics, according to the reminiscences of his fellow students. Feeling that the poetry of his own country and day could be of little use to him as a literary model he turned to the poetry of other nations and epochs. The English Jacobeans and the French Sym\bolists were revelations to hiim; his indebtedness to Laforgue and Baudelaire is already apparent in his undergraduate poems. After graduate work at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, Eliot settled in London in 1915. There he came under the influence of EZRA POUND, who recognized Eliot's genius at once, and criticized and encouraged his work. Pound was also largely responsible for getting the early poems into print; he saw tothe publication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. With his early work in print, Eliot's reputation quickly grew. By the time The Waste Land appeared in 1922, his position was firmly established among the avant garde, and he had become the recognized leader of younger poets.
In technique, as in subject matter, Eliot's poetry broke with the literary conventions of his day, conventions that he felt were inadequate to express the experience of the modern world. In order to capture the spirit of a new age, he believed it was necessary to create new poetic forms and a new poetic language,which, in turn, might break up current modes of perception and change contemporary attitudes. Perhaps his most important technical innovations were twofold: instead of 'poetic diction' Eliot used the idiom and natural rhythms of speech, and instead of relying on abstractions he expressed himself solely through sense impressionss (see Dissociation of Sensibility). The subject matter of his early poems also reflected the world about him. For material he drew on his own social background as well as the surrounding squalor of an industrial age. In such poems as "Prufrock," Portrait of a Lady, Gerontion, the Sweeney poems, The Waste Land and The Hollow Man, he depicts the emotional impoverishment, boredom, and spiritual emptiness common both to the dying genteel world of devitalized social rituals and to the new urban materialistic world. Eliot's later poetry reflects his conversion to Anglicanism in the late 1920's. In poems such as Ash Wednesday, Journey of the Magi, and Marina, he portrays alternating states of despair, skepticism, hope and joy in the soul's struggle for renewal. Four Quartets is generally acknowledged to be the major work of this later period. It is a series of four long meditative poems in which Eliot weaves together his complex thoughts on the irreconcilable tension between man's position in the space-time world and his desire to escape its dimensions. He also wrote poems in a lighter vein, such as "The Hippopotamus" (1920) and Old Possum's Bookd of Practical Cats (1939).
In an early essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot propunded the doctrine that poetry should be impersonal, transmuting private feelings into general truths. This view is closely connected with his belief in the indebtedness of the poet to the tradition of the past and the necessity for incorporating the experience of the past into the poetry of the present.
Dissociation of Sensibility A phrase coined by T.S. Eliot in The Metaphycal Poets (1921). According to Eliot, the 17th-century poets could "feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose." In the poetry of John Donne, for example, he saw a fusion of thought and feeling. But on into the latter part of the century, with the poetry of Milton and Dryden, a dissociation of sensibility set in. Thought and feeling became disjointed, and poets became either intellectual or emotional, but not both. Like the French Symbolists, Eliot was trying to recapture a union of emotion and intellect.
Objective Correlative: (from BG) a term popularized by Eliot . . . to refer to an image, action, or situation . . . that somehow evokes a particular emotion from the reader without expressly stating what that emotion should be. As Eliot wrote, "The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."
The Wasteland (1922) A long poem by T.S. Eliot. Completely breaking from conventional modes of expression in its condensed use of language, in its wealth of literary and historical references, and its lack of narrative sequence, the poem occasioned a violent literary controversy on publication and has been the subject of an endless amount of critical explication ever since. In five sections it explores the different psychic stages of a soul in despair, struggling for redemption. The wasteland, throughout the poem a central image of spiritual drought, is contrasted with sources of regeneration relied upon in the past, such as fertility rituals and Christian and Eastern religious practices. The dominant imagery in the poem is drawn from Jesse L. Weston's From Ritual to Romance (1920), a study of some of the themes of medieval romances and legends, such as the Grail story, which probably originated in ancient fertililty religions. In medieval legend, the wasteland and its ruler, the Fisher King, underwent purifying ordeals. But doubt remains the burden of Eliot's poem, and there is no resolution in the end, when in a decaying twilight world, the poet shores up his ruins with literary and religious fragments. Each one echoes a hope of rebirth, but they are in a medley of foreign languages, suggesting that they are nothingmore than unassimilated memories.
The publication of The Waste Land was an important event in the development of modern English poetry. The technique of the poem was as radically new as and in some ways similar to Joyce's Ulysses. Both contrast the spiritual stagnation of the present with the myths of the past; both use the city as a major symbol of paralysis; both are full of scenes, phrases, and references that have little meaning in themselves but that echo and explain one another; and both depend upon the reader's knowledge of many works of literature, of various religions, and of history.
Following Ezra Pound's suggestions, Eliot reduced The Wasteland to about half its original length.
Robert Frost
Fire and Ice (1923)
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice,
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
Nothing Gold Can Stay (1923)
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Harlem Renaissance A literary and artistic movement in the 1920's, centered in Harlem, New York City. In 1925 Alain Locke (1886-1954), one of the fosters and founders of the renaissance, published an anthology of current work called The New Negro: An Interpretation. In his introduction Locke outlined the new trends in black writing: a discovery by the educated, urbanized blacks of the beauty, vigor, and honesty of life in the Harlem ghetto. They celebrated blackness in repudiation of earlier writers such as Chesnutt (1858-1932) and Dunbar whose work they felt conformed to white literary standards. The leadingwriters in the movement were Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston.
Hasek, Jaroslav (1883-1923). Czech satirist and journalist. His participation in World War I, first as an Austrian soldier, then as a Czech legionnaire in Russia and, finally, as a commisar of the Red Army, wass the main source of his literary inspiration. The figure of Svejk appears in prewar satirical short stories; it is developed into a full type in the four-volume unfinishednovel (1921-1923), The Good Soldier Schweik (pub. 1930). This gargantuan satire on the decaying military machine of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, and on war in general, chronicles the misadventures of the seemingly idiotic but good-hearted Schweik, which by their very absurdity points up the stupidity of war.
Imagery (BG) A term used to refer to 1> the actual language that a writer uses to convey a visual picture (or, most critics would add, to create or represent any sensory experience); and 2> the use of figures of speech, often to express abstract ideas in a vivid and innovative way. Imagery of this second tyhpe makes use of such devices as metaphor, simile, personification, and metonymy, symbolism, among others
Imagism (BG) A school of poetry that flourished in North America and England, but especially in the U.S., at the beginning of the 20th-Century. Imagists rejected the sentimentalism of late 19th-century verse in favor of a poetry that relied on concrete imagery. Ezra Pound originally led the movement, which drew upon T. E. Hulme's poetic theory, but Amy Lowell soon became its most famous proponent; "Amygism" was first used by the displaced Pound to refer derogatorily to the movement.
In a collection of imagist poems that Lowell edited called Some Imagist Poets (three volumes, published annually from 1915-1917), she formally outlined the major objectives or criteria of the Imagists, who believed that poetry should 1> regularly use everyday speech, but avoid cliches; 2> create new rhythms; 3> address any subject matter the poet desired; and 4> depict its subjects through precise, clear images. Imagist poems, which are typically written in free verse, are generally short since Imagists seek above all else to write concentrated poetry. They seek to render the poet's response to a visual impression as concisely and precisely as possible; in this, at least, the influence of such short nature poemss as the Japanese haiku is obvious. Those taking part in the Imagist movement included H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Carl Sandberg, F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, D.H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams.
Imagism itself, although comparatively short-lived as a movement, had a wide-ranging influence on subsequent poetry of the 20th-century which continues to employ and juxtapose precise images. Example: William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923) presents a single concrete image that exemplifies his edict about poetry, " No ideas but in things":
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Jazz Age A term used to designate the period of the 1920's in the U.S. At that time the apparent emotional abandon of jazz seemed best to express the spirit of determined unconventionality, gaiety, and dissipation of the American boom era that followed World War I. F. Scott Fitzgerald was one of the first to use this term by titling one of his works Tales from the Jazz Age (1922). Other writers of this period include John Dos Passos and James T. Farrell.
Kafka, Franz. (1883-1924) Austrian novelist. Kafka is known for the visionary character of his novels, stories, parables, and sketches, all of which center on the problematic existence of modern man. He was born and raised in the German-Jewish enclave of Prague, the city where he spent most of his unhappy life. As a Jew, he encountered anti-Semitism; as a German-Austrian, the political resentment of the Czech population; and as the son of a well-to-do businessman, the class hatred of the poor. While he earned a law degree and then for fourteen years as he worked as a bureaucrat in a positiion he detested, Kafka blamed his father for stripping him of all self-confidence and for developing in him a "boundless feeling of guilt." His strained family life, as well as his intense personal concern with religious questions, undoubtedly explains his repeated exploration of the utter incomprehensibility of God and the psychological ambivalence of family relationships, particularly between father and son. In his stories Das Urteil (The Judgment, 1913) and The Metamorphosis and in the novels Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, fathers, father-figures, or authorities misunderstand, judge, misjudge, abuse, and even kill the young heroes.
Kafka scratched the surface of everyday existence to reveal a world of absurdity and paradox, of aimlessness and futility, in which man is tormented by an unrelieved and unexplained anxiety. His style is remarkably precise and lucid, despite the grotesque unreality of the occurrences that it is used to describe. His stories, in their combination of clarity and unreality, are masterpieces of dream-fiction.
When he died of tuberculosis, all his unfinished writings, including the three novels mentioned, were left to his friend Max Brod with instructions that they be burned. Instead, Brod edited and published the works, along with Kafka's diaries.
Lost Generation A term used to describe the generation of men and women who came to maturity between World War I and the Depression of the 1930's. Gertrude Stein first heard the phrase from the proprietor of the Hotel Pernollet in Belley. Referring to a young mechanic repairiing Stein's car, M. Pernollet used the expression une generationperdue to describe the dislocation, rootlessness, and disillusionment experienced in the wake of the war. Stein later expanded the meaning of the phrase in conversation with Ernest Hemingway, saying that hiswas a decadent generation that was drinking itself to death. Hemingway, whose early books were prototypes for the lost generation of writers, recounts this conversation in a preface to The Sun Also Rises (1926) and again in A Moveable Feast (1964). F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1934),is a striking account of the spiritual climate of that time. Much of Malcolm Cowley's work, notably The Lost Generation (1931) deals with the writers of that generation.
Claude McKay
The Harlem Dancer (1922)
Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.
Marx, Karl (1818-1883). German socialist who, with Friedrich Engels, formulated the principles of DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM, or economic determinism.Marx used Hegel's concept of the dialectic to explain history as a series of antitheses and syntheses, but whereas the Hegelian dialectic describes the conflict of ideas leading to the development of reason and freedom, the Marxian dialectic operates in terms of economic forces. Marx maintained that economic structure is the basis of history and determines all the social, political, and intellectual aspects of life. The evils of capitalistic society cannot be abolished by reform, therefore, but only by destruction of the whole capitalist economy and establishment of a new, classless society. Because of his revolutionary activities, Marx spent most of his life outside Germany, and his major work, Das Kapital, was written in London, where healso organized the First International, an association of European socialists, in 1864. His ideas had great influence on Lenin and the develomentof Russian communism.
Millay, Edna St. Vincent
What lips my lips haved kissed, and where, and why, (1923)
What lips my lips haved kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
I, being born a woman and distressed (1923)
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
Modernism (BG) A revolutionary movement encompassing all of the creative arts that had its roots in the 1890's (the fin de siecle), a transitional period during which artists and writers sought to liberate themselves from the constraints and polite conventions we associate with Victorianism. Modernism exploded onto the international scene in the aftermath of World War I, a traumatic transcontinental event that physically devastated and psychologically disillusioned the West in an entirely unprecedented way. A wide variety of new and experimental forms and techniques arose in architecture, dance, literature, music, painting, and sculpture.
As a literary movement, modernism gained prominence during and, especially, just after the first World War; it subsequently flourished in Europe and America during the 1920's and 1930's. Modernist authors sought to break away from traditions and conventions through experimentation with new literary forms, devices, and styles. They incorporated the new psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung into their works and paid particular attention to language--both how it is used and how they believed it could or ought to be used. Their works reflected the pervasive sense of loss, disillusionment, and even despair in the wake of the Great War, hence their emphasis on historical discontinuity and the alienation of humanity. Although modernist authors tended to perceive the world as fragmented, many--such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce--believed they could help counter that disintegration through their works. Such writers viewed art as a potentially integrating, restorative force, a remedy for the uncertainty of the modern world. To this end, even while depicting disorder in their works, modernists also injected order by creating patterns of allusion, symbol, and myth. This rather exalted view of art fostered a certain elitism among modernists.
Modernism encompassed a number of literary endeavors and styles, many of which became known as movements in their own right, such as Dadaism, expressionism, formalism, and surrealism. Modernist works are often called avant-garde, an appellation that has also been applied to more radically experimental postmodernits works written in the devastating wake of World War II. Many literary scholars distinguish between 'old' (or modernist) avant-garde works and 'new' (or postmodernist) ones. A moderninst surrealist work is easily differentiated from a postmodernist Absurdist one.
Modern and modernist are not synonymous. The term 'modern' broadly refers to that which is contemporary, that which pertains to the present day. 'Modernist' refers to the complex of characteristics shared by those who participated in or follow the modernist movement.
Examples: T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland (1922), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) are famous modernist literary works. Modernist art includes the cubist and surrealistic paintings of Pablo Picasso (such as Three Musicians (1921) and Three Dancers (1925), respectively) and the surrealist works of Salvador Dali. Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring) is an example of modernist music.
". . . to read a really new novel will always hurt, to some extent. There will always be resistance. The same with new pictures, new music. You may judge of their by the fact that they do arouse a certain resistance, and compel, at length, a certain acquiescence." - D.H. Lawrence
"A book should be like an ax for the frozen sea within us." -- Franz Kafka
Naturalism. A movement in fiction begun in France in the latter half of the 19th century. Revolting against the subjectivism and imaginative escapism that seemed to characterize the romantic school, the naturalist writers were influenced by the biological theories of DARWIN and the social and economic determinism of TAINE and MARX. The new movement sought to depict human society and the lives of the men and women who compose it as objectively and truthfully as the subject matter of science is handled. STENDHAL, BALZAC, and FLAUBERT wre forerunners of the movement; the Goncourt brothers, MAUPASSANT, DAUDAT, and, above all, ZOLA formulated the principles and engaged in the practices of naturalism. In technique, their work was marked by an objective, detached method of narration, meticulous accuracy of detail, and scholarly care in the documentation of historical background. Its subjects were drawn from the lower strata of society, and no detail of their sordid, unhappy lives was spared. Emphasis was placed on the social environment of the characters and on the totally subordinate relation of the individual human being to it. In the naturalistic novel, there is a pervading sense of the control exerted over the actions and destinies of the characters by impersonal social, economic, and biological forces. Human free will is shown as weak and almost completely ineffectual. Despite similarity of method, however, there was a difference in the aims of the naturalist writers. The Goncourt brothers engaged in a cold analysis of social misery, while Flaubert justified his minutely descriptive method on aesthetic grounds. Zola employed both his technique and his subject matter in the service of his passionate zeal for socal reform.
American writers working in the naturalist tradition or significantly influenced by it include Stephan Crane (e.g. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), Frank Norris (e.g. McTeague or The Octopus), Jack London, Theodore Dreiser (e.g. An American Tragedy, Sister Carrie), the playwright Eugene O'NEILL. English writers include George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844-1900) German philosopher, classical scholar, and poet. Nietzsche is most famous for his theory of the UBERMENSCH ('superman'), which he developed in Thus Sprach Zarathustra. As early as his Untimely Observations (1873-76), he had sharply criticized the systematic philosophy of the earlier 19th century, especially that of HEGEL; throughout his career he continually sought to penetrate beyond all rational, systematic schemes to the irrational human level beneath, as in his well known Beyond Good and Evil. His complete rejection of Christianity was based on the belief that Christianity leads man's thoughts away from this world and into the next, thus making him less capable of coping with earthly life; he said that his early career, especially in THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY, his viewswere influenced by SCHOPENHAUER. His own lyrics strongly influenced the poetry of expressionism. Other well-known works are Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human, 1878), Der Antichrist (1888), and Ecce Homo (1888). In 1889 he went insane and remained so until he died.
Nietzsche's ideas: Apollonnian and Dionysiac. Terms used by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy to designate the two central principles in Greek culture. The Apollonian, which corresponds to Schopenhauer's principle of individuation, is the basis of all analytical distinctions. Everthing that is a part of the unique individuality of a man or thing is Apollonian in character; all types of form or struture are Apollonian, since form serves to form or individualize that which is formed; thus sculpture is the most Apollonian of the arts, since it relies entirely on form for its effect. Rational thought is also Apollonian, since it is structured and makes distinctions.
The Dionysiac, which corrreponds roughly to Schopenhauer's conception of will,
is directly opposed to the Apollonnian. Drunkenness and madness are Dionysiac
because they break down a man's individual character; all forms of enthusiasm
and ecstasy are Dionysiac, for in such states a man gives up his individuality
and submerges himself in a greater whole; music is the most Dionysiac of the
arts, since it appeals directly to man's instinctive, chaotic emotions and not
to his formally reasoning mind.
Nietzsche believed that both forces were present in Greek tragedy and that true tragedy could be produced only by the tensions between them. He used the names Apollonian and Dionysiac for the two forces because Apollo, as the sun god, represents light, clarity, and form, whereas Dionysus, as the wine god, represents drunkenness and ecstasy.
O,Neill, Eugene. 1888-1953. American playwright. O'Neill is, by common consent, one of the most significant forces in the history of American theatre. With no uniquely American tradition to guide him, O,Neill introduced various dramatic techniques, which subsequently became staples of the U.S. theatre. Among his notable innovations were the use of symbolic masks and costumes, the repetition of phrases or actions to underscore the thematic intent, and the use of archetypal themes drawn from classical mythology or religion. He also revived the Elizabethan devices of soliloquy and aside to reveal the inner state of his characters. Profoundly influenced by German EXPRESSIONISM, the works of STRINDBERG, and the ideas of NIETZSCHE and FREUD, O'Neill, in his grim and moving psychological dramas, marked a radical departure from the romantic conventions of theatre as entertainment.
The son of James O'Neill and Ella Quinlan, both actors, O'Neill was educated at parochial and private schools, and, for a year, at Princeton. He then worked at odd jobs around the country, and took several voyages as a merchant seaman, experiences which provided him with much material for his plays. In 1912 he contracted tuberculosis and entered a sanatarium, where he began reading and eventually writiing plays. By 1914 he had written 12 one act and two long plays. Of this early work only Thirst and Other One-Act Plays (1914) was originally published. From this point on, O'Neill's work falls roughly into three phases: the early sea plays, written from 1914 to 1921; the experimental one-act plays, written in the fourteen years after 1921; and the last, great plays, written between 1934 and his death in 1953.
Crucial to his development were the year he spent as apprentice to George Pierce Baker in his Harvard Workshop (1914), and the association, beginning in 1916, with George Cram Cook, Susan Glaspell, and the Provincetown Players, who produced in that year Bound East for Cardiff, his one-act play about a dying seaman. The sailor's wistful dreams to leave the sea and become a farmer marked the beginning of a theme--the life sustaining pipe dream--that was to become central to O'Neill's later work. Other plays of the sea followed, including The Long Voyage Home (1917), concerning sailors in a bar after a voyage; Ile (1917) the story of a captain who persists in his hunt for whale oil at the expense of his wife's sanity; The Moon of the Caribbees (1918), depicting the crisis on the steamer Glencairn, when women came aboard; and Where the Cross is Made (1918), the tale of another obsessed captain. The plays of this era were collected in Bound East for Cardiff and Other Plays (1916) and The Moon of the Caribbees and Other Plays (1919). The critical interest that they generated paved the way for the production of his first full length drama Beyond the Horizon, which won a Pulitzer Prize. In this early period, culminating in Anna Christie, another play of the sea and also a Pulitzer Prize winner, O'Neill was greatly influenced by the NATURALISM of ZOLA. Also evident is an increasing interest in the charachters' search for their own identity.
O'Neill's subsequent experiments with technique and thematic material show clearly the influences he was feeling. In The Emperor Jones (1920), sometimes called the first expressionist play in America, it was STRINDBERG. The Hairy Ape (1922), which continued the theme of a search for identity, combined the expressionistic with the naturalistic mode. Desire Under the Elms (1924), a family tragedy set in New England, drew on Freudian psychology and the theories of Nietzsche. All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924) dealing with miscegination, pointedly flouted the convention of caricaturing blacks in literature and helped destroy it. In these years O'Neill also wrote The Great God Brown (1926), Marco Millions (1928), and Lazarus Laughed (1927), all of which make use of masks and deal with another recurring theme: the clash between spiritual and material values. The most important play to come out of this periodwas Strange Interlude (1928), winner of his third Pulitzer Prize. Notable for its innovative use of asides and soliloquy, it is an intricate psychological study of an emotionally barren woman. Following the great trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra,in which he attempted to translate the Greek concept of fate into psychological and environmental determinism, he produced the uncharacteristically lighthearted Ah Wilderness (1933). After Days Without End (1934), in which two actors play the conflicting sides of the protagonist, no O'Neill play was seen untill 1946.
In the interim, O'Neill had planned a nine-play series documenting the history of an American family over two hundred years. He saw America as "the greatest failure in the world," with materialistic obsessions and saccharine optimism covering up the ugly underbelly of a nation of lost souls. However, plagued by Parkinson's disease and consumed by a preoccupation with his own past, O'Neill abandoned his saga of America's failure and turned instead to an analysis of the failure of his own family. A Touch of the Poet (written 1943; published 1957) and More Stately Mansions (unfinished; published 1964), both posthumously produced, are all that survive of the "America" series. The Iceman Cometh (1939) restored O'Neill to Broadway; this play and Long Day's Journey Into Night (written 1941, produced 1956) and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943, pub. 1952) are all autobiographical. These last plays contain some of O'Neill's best writing, with the clear emergence of his authentic voice. he shed the earlier self-conscious symbolism and heavy use of myth and focused directly and realistically on penetrating close-ups of his characters. The themes developed throughout his career--of illusion and pipe dreams; of a tortured quest for some meaning or affirmation of life; of the struggle between materialistic and idealistic ends--were crystalized now with coherence and precision. O'Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936.
Stein, Gertrude (1874-1946)."My sentences do get under their skin." American poet, novelist, and critic. For many years a prominent expatriate in Paris, she was at the center of a celebrated literary and artistic circle and was herself the subject of wide literary controversy in the 1920's. Her unique style, which was influenced by the psychological theories of William James and by modern French painting, was intended as a verbal counterpart to CUBISM. She used words fortheir associations and sounds rather than for their meaning, frequently employing an intricate system of repetition and variation on a single verbal theme. She avoided conventional punctuation and syntax, placing her emphasis on the presentatiion of impressions and a particular state of mind rather than the telling of a story. In an effort to liberate language and thinking from the bonds of convention, she created improbable juxtapositions of common language and concentrated on concrete, spare diction in a basically monosyllabic vocabulary.
Stein was reaised in a wealthy family in Pennsylvania. She studied psychology under William James at Radcliffe College and later began studies at Johns Hopkins University. In 1903 she settled in Paris with her brother and Alice B. Toklas (1877-1967), her secretary and companion for forty years. She returned to America only once, in 1934, for a brief and successful lecture tour. Her home in Paris became a center for such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Braque, and Juan Gris, whose work she collected, and for such writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, among many others.
Three Lives was her first book. In part an example of primitivistic writing, it is regarded by many critics as her best. Tender Buttons (1914) is a poetic series of paragraphs about objects, often witty, often close to automatic writiing. In 1925 she finally published her longest and most complex work, The Making of Americans, which she had written between 1906 and 1911. Among her many latger works are matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, with Two Shorter Stories (1933); two operas with music by Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All (1947); in Savoy, or "Yes" Isfor a Very YoungMan (1946), which was produced on Broadway in 1949; and Four in America (1947), essays on George Washington, U.S. Grant, Wilbur Wright, and Henry James.
Stein'swork has never been met with indifference; it is either celebrated as the work of a genius (an appraisal with which she heartily concurred) or dismissed as tedious and hopelessly obscure. By any measure, her influence on other writers was significant; she forged new pathways of experimental writing and helped bring wide attention to avant-garde movements in literature and art. Many of her lines became famous, most notably, " A rose is a rose is a rose." She also gave currency to the phrase "the Lost Generation," which described the expatriates after World War I. One of her least experimentaql and most widely read works is her autobiography, which she titled The Autobiography of Allice B. Toklas.
The Autobiography of Allice B. Toklas (1933). An autobiography by Gertrude Stein, written as though the author were her secretary and companion, Miss Toklas. Although the book provoked an attack by other Parisian writers and artists in Testimony Against Gertrude Stein (1935), it remains a fascinating account of the expatriate life in the Paris of that period. Alice B. Toklas' own account of her life with Gertrude Stein appeared in What Is Remembered (1963).
Christian Berard (1934) (audio)
Eating is her subject.
While eating is her subject.
Where eating is her subject.
Withdraw whether it is eating which is her subject. Literally while she aqte
eating is her subject. Afterwards
too and in between. This is an introduction to what
she ate.
She ate a pigeon and a souffle.
That was on one day.
She ate a thin ham and its sauce.
That was on another day.
She ate desserts.
That had been on one day.
She had fish grouse and little cakes that was before
that day.
She had breaded veal and grapes that was on that
day.
After that she ate every day.
Very little but very good.
What is the difference between steaming and
roasting, she ate it cold because of Saturday.
Remembering potatoes because of for
part of the day.
There is a difference in preparation of cray-fish
which makes a change in their fish for instance.
What was it besides bread.
Why is eating her subject.
There are reasons why eating is her subject.
Because.
Help Helena.
With whether a pound.
Everybody who comes has been with whether we
mean ours allowed.
Tea rose snuff box tea rose.
Willed him well will till well.
By higher but tire by cry my tie for her.
Meeting with with said.
Gain may be hours.
There there their softness.
By my buy high.
By my softness.
There with their willow with without out outmost
lain in out.
Has she had her tooth without a telegram.
Nothing surprises Edith. Her sister made it once
for all.
Chair met alongside.
Paved picnic with gratitude.
He is strong and sturdy.
Pile with a pretty boy.
Having tired of some one.
Tire try.
Imagine how they felt when they were invited.
Preamble to restitution.
Tire and indifferent.
Narratives with pistache.
A partly boiled.
Next sentence.
Now or not nightly.
A sentence it is whether wither intended.
A sentence text. Taxed.
A sampler with ingredients may be unmixed with
their accounts how does it look like. If in way
around. Like lightning.
Apprehension is why they help to do what is in
amount what is an amount.
A sentence felt way laid.
A sentence without a horse.
It is a mend that to distribute with send.
A sentence is in a letter ladder latter.
Birth with birth.
If any thinks about what is made for the sake they
will manage to place taking take may.
How are browns.
How are browns.
Got to go away.
Anybodycan be taught to love whatever
they like better.
Taught of butter.
Whatever they like better.
She Bowed to Her Brother (1934)
The story of how she bowed to her brother.
Who has whom as his.
Did she bow to her brother. When she say him.
Any long story. Of how she bowed to her brother.
Sometimes not.
She bowed to her brother. Accidentally. When she
saw him.
Often as well. As not.
She did not. Bow to her brother. When she. Saw
him.
This could happen. Without Him.
Everybody finds in it a sentence that pleases them.
This is the story included in. How she bowed to her
brother.
Could another brother have a grand daughter.
No. But. He could have a grandson.
This has nothing to do with the other brother of
whom it is said that we read she bowed to her brother.
There could be a union between reading and
learning.
And now everybody. Reads. She bowed. To her
brother.
And no one. Thinks.
Thinks that it is clearly. Startling.
She started. By not bowing. To her brother.
And this was not the beginning.
She has forgotten.
How she bowed. To her brother.
And. In mentioning. She did mention. That this was.
A recollection.
For fortunately. In detail. Details are given.
Made an expression. Of recollection.
Does whether. They gather. That they heard.
Whether. They bowed. To each other. Or not.
If in. They made it. Doubtful. Or double. Of their
holding it. A momentary after. That she was never.
Readily made rather. That they were. Whether. She
asked her. Was she doing anything. Either.
In all this there lay. No description. And so.
Whether. They could come to be nearly. More.
Than more. Or rather. Did she. Bow to her brother.
PART II
They were a few. And they knew. Not that. She
had bowed. To her brother. There were not. A few.
Who knew. That she. Had. Bowed to her brother.
Because if they knew. They would say. That a few.
Knew. That she. Had bowed to her brother. But
necessarily. Not a few. Knew. They did. Not know.
Because they. Were not there. There are not a few.
Who are there. Because. Nobody. Was there. Nor
did. She know. That she was there. To help to
share. And they can. Be there. To tell. Them. So.
That. They know. She bowed. To her brother. More. There. Than. There.
III.
It might be easily pointed out. By the chance.
Of a. Wish. No wish.
He might. Not wish. Not to. Be easily. Pointed
out. By no. Wish.
Which they. Might easily.
Not be pointed. Out. As. A. and not. The wish.
It is not. To be pointed out. That. There. Is. No
wish.
Not. A wish.
She bowed to her brother. Was not easily.
Pointed out. And. No wish.
Which it. And easily. Pointed out. And. No.
Wish. She and. No wish. Which is. Not easily pointed
out. And. So which. They. And. No wish. Which.
And not. Easily pointed out. She bowed to her
brother. And no wish. And not. Easily pointed out.
And not. Wish.
For them. Which. To wish. Which. Easily.
Pointed out. And. No wish. Which. She bowed
to her brother. And. Which.
If she had been likely to restate that doors which
relate an advantage to their advancing. And not at all.
As a coincidence.
She bowed to her brother. This was a chance. That
might have happened. Minutely.
To interrupt a white dog. Who can occasionally.
In instance
Noone counts alike
She bowed to her brother. For. And. Counts alike.
She bowed. To her brother. Could be lost. By their
leaving. It as lost. By. The time. In which. They feel.
They will. It is. Indebted. That able. Presence. As very
much. And idle. If she were walking along. She would
be. She would not. Bow to her brother. If she were riding
Along. She would. Be. She would Be. Not as bowing.
To her. Brother.
As she rode along. Easily. By driving. As she rode.
Along. She. Bowed. To her brother.
It is. True. As. She drove. Along. She. Bowed. To her
brother.
Just like that.
She bowed. To her brother.
They were. There. That is to say. They were. Passing
there. They were passing there. But not. On that day.
And with this. To say: It was said. She bowed. To her
brother. Which was. A fact.
If she bowed. To her brother. Which was. A fact.
That is. If she bowed. Which. If she bowed. Which she
did. She bowed to her brother.
Which she did. She bowed to her brother. Or rather.
Which she did. She bowed to her brother. Or rather
which she did she bowed to her brother.
She could think. Of how she was. No better. Than
when. They could say. Not. How do you do. To-day.
Because. It is an accident. In suddenness. When
there is. No stress. On their. Address. They do not
address you. By saying. Rather. That they went by.
And came again. Not. As. Or. Why.
It is. What is. Even. Not always occurred. Just by
the time. That it. Can happen. To be curious. She
bowed. To her brother. And why. Again. In there.
Should have been. Not more. Than. That. Which.
She bowed. To her brother.
By which. It is. In tendency. To more. By which. It
is. In tendency to not. Have had. She in the. Three.
She bowed. To her brother.
Would it be. In a way. Not they. Would. Not. They.
Be in a way that is. To say. She. Is to say. Did. She
bow. To her brother. In. Which way. Did. She come
to say. It was. That way.
She bowed to her brother.
It it was. Separately. Not. To separate. Separately.
Won. Is there. But three. Was it. With them. As perhaps.
Portions. For three. Which. In which. She
bowed to her brother.
Not. After. In intention. The same. As mention.
She did not mention. Nor was there. Intention. That
she. Bowed to her brother.
She bowed to her brother.
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) American poet. Although critically regarded as one of the most significant American poets of the 20th-century, Stevens did not receive widespread recognition until the publication of his Collected Poems (1954). A lawyer by training, Stevens was associated for nearly forty yeaars with the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, serving as its vice-president from 1934 until his death. The wholly individual poetry that he wrote in his spare time was notably influenced both by the French SYMBOLISTS and the English romantic poets, particularly Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Part of the poetic renaissance shortly before World War I, Stevens' first poems were published in Poetry in 1914, but it was not until he was nearly forty-four that his first book of poems, Harmonium, appeared. He wrote little during the 1920's, adding only a few poems to the reissue of Harmonium in 1931. The volumes that followed--Ideas of Order (1935), Owl's Clover (1936), The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937) Parts of a World (1942), Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), Esthetique du Mal (1945), Three Academic Pieces (1947), and The Aurora of Autumn (1950)--show the progressive development of his poetic style. Stevens gradually turned away from the intricate stylization, recondite vocabulary, and lavish, tropical imagery that characterized much of his early work to a more exacting, moderate, though abstract style and a profound concern with aesthetics. Central to all Stevens' work is the primacy of the creative imagination: in a universe devoid of clear spiritual definition, the imagination creates form, order, and understanding, hence, knowledge. Although his later work is often more carefully studied, such earlier poems as "The Emperor of Ice Cream," "Peter Quince at the Clavier," "Sunday Morning," "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," and "Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores" are among his best known.
Because of his highly visual imagery, his metaphors of brilliant originality, and his inimitable style, Stevens' influence oin younger poets has been almost more as a philosopher of aesthetics than as a poetic model.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1923)
Call the roller of big cigars,
\ The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Note: ". . . the true sense of Let be be the finale of seem is let being become
the conclusion of
denouement of appearing to be: in short, ice cream is an absolute good. The
poem is obviously not
about ice-cream, but about being as distinguished from seeming to be." Stevens,
Letters, p. 341.
Anecdote of the Jar (1923)
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1923)
I.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird
II.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds
III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII.
O thin men of Haddam,
Who do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In tha he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-liimbs.
Fabliau of Florida (1923) (audio)
Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,
Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.
Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.
Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.
There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.
Stream of Consciousness: a narrative technique developed
toward the end of the 19th century, often cnfused with interiour monologue,
and employed to evoke the psychic life of a character and depict subjective
as well as objective reality. The term 'stream of consciousness' was first used
by William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890); the concept
behind it--that ideas and conciousness in general are fluid and shifting, rather
than fixed--contributed to a new approach to the novel. This approach was also
given impetus by the new Freudian theories of the conscious and unconscious
mind, and the Bergsonian concept of time as duration and of consciousness as
an indivisible flux. (finish)
Strindberg, August (1849-1912). Swedish playwright, novelist, and poet. The son of a serving woman and a bankrupt ex-gentleman, Strindberg knew poverty and misery from childhood. Later he was variously employed as a journalist, a tutor, and an assistant at the Royal Library. His first significant play was Master Olaf. It was followed by Lucky Per's Travels (1880), reminiscent of Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and Sir Bengt's Wife (1882), an answer to Ibsen's A Doll House, which Strindberg hated. In 1879 Strindberg first became the subject of literary excitement with his satirical novel The Red Room, which many critics consider the first example of modern Swedish realism. With the publication of the stories in Married (1884-86), his fame became unpleasant notoreity for these satirical, bitter narratives involved their author in a prosecution for blasphemy. He was acquitted, but the experience contributed to his feelings of persecution that culminated in his breakdown of 1896.
Strindberg embarked on the first of his unfortunate marriages in 1877. His relations with his wife, the former Siri Wrangel, probably formed the basis for the conflicts in the major plays of his realistic-naturalistic period, The Father, Comrades, and The Creditors. These three works are centered on the duel between the sexes: the woman, ruthless and aggressive, asserts herself as the equal, if not the superior, of the man, usurps his masculine prerogatives of decision and leadership, and destroys him. Not until many years later, in the powerful The Dance of Death, did Strindberg write of a husband who enslaves and torments his wife. In Miss Julie, probably the best known of the plays of this period, Strindberg depicts both sexual antagonism and class conflict in the figure of the aristocratic young woman who seduces her father's footman.
In 1891 Strindberg's first marriage ended in a painful divorce. He married again in 1893, but his union lasted only a few years. He was beginning to show increased evidence of emotional disturbance, and his feelings of persecution were intensified by his difficulties in getting his plays produced; he had been forced to establish his own Experimental Theatre in Copenhagen to have Miss Julie and The Creditors performed. He became interested in the physical sciences, but his experiments in chemistry were soon transformed into delving into alchemy, occultism, and mysticism. In July of 1896 he suffered a psychological crisis which brought him to the edge of madness, an experience which he recorded in the autobiographical Inferno (1897) and Legends (1898), and expressed dramatically in the mystical and symbolic plays To Damascus, Advent, and There are Crimes and Crimes. This period of crisis marks the beginning of what is perhaps the most interesting phase of his creative life; in order to give dramatic form to his new vision of life--a vision in which the inner world has as much, if not more, claim to reality than external experience--he wrote the haunting, surrealistic "dream-plays" that became the forerunners of modern EXPRESSIONISM. Gentler and less bitter than the plays of his realistic period, these dramas have a scope that ranges from the mystic surrealism of A Dream Play (1902) to the nearly naturalistic but tenderly mystical Easter (1901). As his emotional health improved, he turned again to Swedish history and wrote a series of dramas probably inspired by the historical plays of Shakespeare. Among them re The Saga of the Volsungs, Gustavus Vasa, Erik XIV, and Gustavus Adolphus. In 1907 he and August Falck established the Intimate Theatre in Stockholm, for which Strindberg wrote a series of four "chamber plays"; of these, only The Spook Sonata (1907) achieved marked succcess.
Stindberg's collected writings--plays, fairy tales, poems, short stories, prose sketches, essays, autobiographical writings, novels--fill fifty-five volumes. Particularly interesting are his autobiographical works, including The Son of a Servant (1886), A Fool's Defense (1893), and Alone (1903).
Surrealism: A literary, artistic, and philosophical movement founded in 1924. Surrealism sought a reality above or within the surface reality, usually through efforts to suspend the discipline of conscious and logical reason, esthetics, or morality in order to allow the expression of subconscious thought and feeling.
Ever since symbolism there had been a growing interest in the irrational and in the technique of producing impressions throught the startling juxtapositions of images. LAUTREAMONT, RIMBAUD, MALLARME, and JARRY were considered the leading precursors of surrealism, and Guillaume APPOLLINAIRE seems to have coined the name. World War I heightened the sense of protest agains a purely scientific and materialistic world view, and strengthened the conviction tht the intellect alone could not achieve complete understanding of life. After first voicing their despair through the DADA movement, the surrealist group announced themselves with Andre BRETON's Manifeste du surrealisme: Poisson soluble (1924). Based on FREUD'S theory of the unconscious, it claimed that through 'automatic' writing and painting the subconscious would dictate images and symbols in combinations which, however unexpected and incongruous to the conscious mind, would actually reveal the true nature and content of the human soul. A second manifesto (1930) stressed the importance of investigation of dreams and psychic states.
Giorgio di CHIRICO and Salvador DALI became the leading surrealist painters; others include Yvess TANGUY and Max ERNST, and to some extent, Paul Klee, Juan Miro, Pablo Picasso.
William Carlos Williams
so much depends (1923)
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
This Is Just to Say (1934)
This is just to say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were so delicious
so sweet
and so cold.
W.B. Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1890) (audio)
The Second Coming (1920)
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Harely are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Among School Children (1927)
I walk through the long schooroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way--the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man
I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy--
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.
And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonderif fshe stood so at that age--
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage--
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.
Her present image floats into the mind--
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once--enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pangs of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts--O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise--
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise:
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom, or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Sailing to Byzantium (1927)
I.
That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
--Those dying generations--at their song.
The salmon-falls, the mackeral-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.
II.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studyiing
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
III.
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
IV.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.