~Happy 183rd Birthday Emily Dickinson~

 The End Has Come! Our class is about to be wrapped up and tomorrow is the final day of our blogs. I wish I posted more on this during the semester, but maybe, just maybe I'll continue updating this weekly or bi-weekly. Hope everyone enjoyed reading this as it has been pretty fun for me to do! 

How fitting is it that this possible final blog ends on a poet that we actually talked about in class? Today we celebrate the 183rd birthday of Emily Dickinson! (hit me with a picture please!)

Credit: www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org

Emily Dickinson was born on this very day back in 1830 in Amherst, Massachusetts. A very famous poet in our generation, but was semi private in her time. Out of nearly eighteen hundred poems, only a handful were published in her lifetime. It wasn't until 58 years ago that her complete and basically unaltered collection of work was published in 1955. Though it didn't receive the greatest reviews at first, this woman is now considered one of the most important poets in American history!

She died on May 15th, 1886 at the age of just 55 to "Bright's disease" which was a form of kidney disease that now we would call acute or chronic nephritis. For two and a half years she was dealing with this before her death. Her funeral was rather interesting as she was laid in a white coffin with vanilla scented heliotrope, which is a highly fragrant plant, and blue field violets placed about it. Higginson read "No Coward Soul Is Mine", which was a favorite poem of Dickinson written by Emily Bronte. Lastly, she had previously asked to not be driven to the cemetery, but instead carried through a field of buttercups. Her burial is at West Cemetery.

I made this post rather short because I'm sure all of you read her introduction in our book, and I didn't want to take up too much of your time, because I'm sure you have finals to study for, or a blog to post/comment on as well. My final thoughts on her are that Emily was a great poet. She wrote so many wonderful poems and the fact that they were super short, yet super meaningful, made me so interested that I have probably re-read more than a dozen of them over and over again. I encourage anyone who would like to learn more about her to head over to her website. CLICK THIS LINK!
Here's a short one minute video on her website:

Thanks to all of you who have been reading this. Thanks to you who are just now reading this blog for the first time. Will this be the last post on this blog? Tomorrow is the due date. Will I continue to update and provide birthdays every week? Or will this blog become full of dust and rot in the back corner of a dark abandoned house? Tune in next time(?) as we find out these answers and more!

~Happy 184th Birthday Henry Timrod~

Good afternoon everyone! Hope you are all enjoying your lazy Sunday afternoon as I am. It's a little bit nasty outside, but inside the candles are lit, I'm sipping on a Big K Cola (because I'm a poor white college kid), and I'm ready to knock out another day of this birthday celebration blog. So who are we celebrating today you might ask? (as if you didn't read the title of the post) Well, today s the birthday of Dwight Howard, but he makes you sick too right? What about Nicki Minaj? More like Nicki Manot! We could even celebrate the beloved Ann Coulter for it is her birthday today as well, but she's just a terrible person so I will save that for never. No, today we take a look back to the early/mid 1800's and celebrate a poet named Henry Timrod.

Credit: www.thetimrodlibrary.org

  I would kill for his mustache! 96,776,196 minutes ago from the time I started this post, Mr. Henry Timrod was born. The year was 1828, the location was Charleston, South Carolin, which is where Stephen Colbert grew up AND where Andy Dick was born. Fun Facts! Henry was of a German emigrated family and his father was a poet himself. His father died while Henry was just nine years old, and only a short few years after his death, their house burned down, making his family impoverished. He had a short stent at the University of Georgia, but after becoming ill, was forced to move back to Charleston and find a new profession. He took up becoming a lawyer and starting his own law practice while at the same time he wrote poems. Seemingly flowing with poems, he quite his job as a lawyer calling it "distasteful" and continued his work as a writer/poet.

   He really began to come to fame during the American Civil War period and his poems even caused many young men to enlist into the Confederacy! His famous poems from that time are "Ethnogenesis", "A Cry to Arms", Carolina", and "Kaite". He even joined himself and served as a private in Company B, 20th South Carolina Infantry. Like when he was in school, he had to leave the service because he fell ill once again. After the service he settled in Columbia, South Carolina, where he married Katie, the one he wrote a poem about. These two had a child born on Christmas Eve, which is extremely awesome in my opinion! His closing years were pretty depressing. His newspaper office he had was destroyed during that war and the aftermath caused his family to be in severe poverty. Once again illness got the best of him and once again trying to be in a newspaper office, but that place folded. His son died shortly after, followed by Henry himself because of consumption in 1867.

His poems are relatively long compared to the last poet I talked about, so I won't provide you one on here, but feel free to go onto a cool website with a lot of information on poets and check his work out. I recommend reading "Katie" because it's really cute and I personally loved it!  CHECK IT OUT

QUOTES

• "Out in the lonely woods the jasmine burns Its fragrant lamps, and turns Into a royal court with green festoons The banks of dark lagoons." 
• "Each has its lesson; for our dreams in sooth, come they in shape of demons, gods, or elves, are allegories with deep hearts of truth that tell us solemn secrets of ourselves."
• "Spring is a true reconstructionist."

~Happy 127th Birthday Joyce Kilmer~

Everyone studying for exams this week? Getting in all that extra credit in order to save your grades from a C to a B? Not putting everything off until the very last night with minimum hours to go? The semester is just about over as we have a week left of school and I don't know about you guys, but I'm ready for the break! After this semester I'll only have two or three classes left until I graduate! Though it has taken me five years and a handful of degree switches, and I'm JUST NOW getting my associates, it's a great feeling to get a degree non the less. Well enough about me! It's someones birthday today! 

 

Lets turn the clocks back to December 6, 1886 shall we? At this time it is Monday and how about we go to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where our birthday boy is arriving into the world? Now after his mother gets to hold him, everyone jump out and yell happy birthday! Too far? .... sorry, trying to be a little entertaining. Did I succeed? Probably not. Non the less, today is the 127th birthday of Joyce Kilmer. He doesn't really resemble Val Kilmer, and I'm sure he never would have tried to compete with Michael Keaton, because lets be honest, Keaton owned the Batman gimmick, but like Val, Joyce was a hero. Not only was this guy a poet, but he was also a great leader in WWI. Before we get to that, lets jump into his literature career. 

Kilmer (Joyce people, we are done with Val) was an American writer and poet during the early 1900's who is mainly remembered for a super short poem called "Trees". I will write the poem on here in a few moments, and I'm pretty sure the only quotes I could find by him are from, or related to, that poem. Most of his works are unknown and while he is famous for the poem, he was also a lecturer, editor, and journalist. Most people of his time, and even today, criticize his work as "too simple". Nothing else is really said about him as far as the poetry is concerned, but I will add that he was married to a poet/author named Aline Murray. Also, they had five children together. 

Since this is a blog of literature I'll make quick the information on his war times. I just want to add them in here because it is interesting to me, and goes to show poets aren't just people who sit back and watch the action, they also take action! A few days after WWI started, Kilmer enlisted into the war and assigned as a statistician with the "Fighting 69th". He gained higher ranks quickly and when offered a better position as an officer, he declined because of how loyal and caring he was towards the Fighting 69th. He loved being in the war so much that he wanted to do something more dangerous than what he had been doing and thus joined the military intelligence section of his regiment. Though a brave and courageous thing to do, this would ultimately be the cause of his death. During the "Second Battle of Marne" on July 30, 1918, he volunteered to accompany Major William "Wild Bill" Donovan, who had to lead his team in an attack on the Germans. The mission was to find a position of a German machine gun and while possibly scouting a position, Kilmer was shot in the head most likely by a sniper. He was wared the Croix De Guerre, which is the War Cross, by the French Republic. 

It was interesting to me reading about this man, not only because of his odd poem, but because I typically read poets or authors who talk about the war from an outside looking in perspective, never from a poet who has served in the war. Though his poem was well before the war, it was cool to find out that he served and was highly ranked. Here is his famous poem "Trees". 

"I THINK that I shall never see

A Poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree." 

 QUOTES

• "I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree."
• "But only God can make a tree." 

 

 

 

~Happy 181st Birthday Louisa Alcott~

What a time it has been trying to get this published! Like I will explain in the next paragraph, I was called in last night to work before I could get a start on this blog. Now, I’m sitting here, it’s 1:21 am, and I’m just now finishing what I was hoping to do yesterday (Thursday). Everything you see below has been worked on throughout today and has been very difficult to complete up until I got home at 12:30. Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and I’ll be back later today to post another birthday for the 30^th!

    My plan was to do a birthday blog yesterday after stuffing myself with tons of food, but work decided to change that plan as I got called in to close. Since I didn’t get home until eleven thirty I decided to just do my blog today. Of course, I’m a day late and already stressed about missing two days in a row of birthdays, so it makes sense that I’d over sleep and have to work until close again. I’m going to try something new because I’m tired of putting stuff off until the next day only for it to be pushed back yet again! Instead of being angry and stressing over when I’ll have time to do this blog, I have decided to use my cell phone to complete this birthday blog today/tonight while at work. The current time is 3:17pm and the story is pretty slow, but it’s Friday (the busiest day of the week) so let’s see how long it takes!? 

    Shocker! It is now 10:30 and I’m still unable to truly start on this blog. I think my plan failed, which I’m not surprised, but I will be finishing it up after I get home. So this should be posted a littler after 12:30-1am. I’m still going to count the birthday being for November 29 since I had already gathered information and read up on someone. Be back soon!

Credit: Wikipedia.org

    Happy birthday Louisa May Alcott! Today we celebrate her 181 birthday! For those of you counting the weeks she is 9,444 and for those of you counting days she is 66,109. Louisa was a famous novelist born in Germantown, Pennsylvania and died in 1888 of a stroke. Though her name didn’t ring a bell to me at first, I did find a very interesting note to add; Louisa’s family was friends with Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson! When I read that, I knew she was a perfect fit for this class blog! Something I found really interesting about her as well was that during the Civil War, she went to Washington D.C. and helped out as a nurse.  She served at the Union Hospital in Georgetown for six weeks and wrote letters to home during her stay. Those letters eventually were published in something called the Commonwealth. 

    Louisa was a very famous and best-selling novelist of the late 1800s, and even today she has popular works such as Little Women. Some of her novels were even turned into movies. The Inheritance, An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving, Little Men, and again, Little Women are the noted movies that I could find of hers. Before becoming famous, she published many of her works under the pen name Flora Fairfield and A.M. Barnard. Her first few published novels under her real name were Atlantic Monthly and Lady’s Companion, but she would not see great success until, again, Little Women was published. This gave her enough wealth to base her living on writing books. She even dabbled in adult novels, but they weren’t very successful.  

    Louisa remained a writer until her death on March 6, 1888 in Boston at the age of 55 from a stroke. It has been noted that her last words were “Is it not meningitis?” Kind of a weird farewell goodbye, but interesting none the less! I also read that she is buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery very close to Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson! This hillside that they all rest in peace at is known as “Authors Ridge”. Pretty neat don’t you think?! 

QUOTES

• "I am not afraid of storms for I am learning how to sail my ship."
• "Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable."
• "Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead." (my favorite)
• "Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us - and those around us - more effectively. Look for the learning." 
• "Love is a great beautifier." 
• "A faithful friend is as strong defense; And he that hath found him hath found a treasure." 
• "We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving, and we all have the power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing." 
• "It takes two flints to make a fire." 
• "Housekeeping ain't no joke."
• "Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes." 

I also found a link to a 1994 movie based off her book Little Women: 

Hope everyone enjoyed this birthday blog of the day as it took me a while to actually finish it! I also hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying their fall break(though I'm not sure any of us truly have a week off from school work). I shall be back on here in about twelve hours or so to make another post on another birthday. So until then, take care and READ ON!

~Happy 94th Birthday Frederik Pohl~

Greetings everyone! From here on out I'm going to try to update this daily, or at least every other day. Not just because I want a great grade in class, but I want to see if we can stumble upon a famous poet that we all have heard of! Also, I am in the process of starting my own personal blog on here and figure it will motivate me more to update both if I do this daily. Though non of you will probably be interested in listening to me ramble on about anime, video games, and whatever else I randomly come up with, feel free to check it out in the next few days as I plan on adding content to it!
AstartBselect

To start off this week of posts I was hoping to have a great poet to talk about, but that idea was immediately shutdown after taking a look at the birthdays today. I could write about William Cowper or Herman Gorter, which were the only two poets listed under birthdays today, but neither of them are American. So instead, I'm going to share with you a writer named Frederik Pohl. Though Pohl is noted as an American science fiction writer and editor, he is also known for his first published work, which was a poem, "Elegy to a dead Satellite: Luna" from 1937. With that said, enjoy!

Photo From: frederikpohl.com

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was born on this very day back in 1919 in New York City. His career in writing and editing has spanned over seventy five years from his first published work, that being the above mentioned poem, "Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna", up until his last published novel, "All the Lives He Led" in 2011, and some essays/articles from 2012. His love for science fiction and his impact on that genre is apparent with the awards he has won as well as a quote from Kingsley Amis(English novelist, poet, and critic), "..the most consistently able writer science fiction, in its modern form, has yet produced." He has won so many awards and I will list them in just a few moments. It was noted that he had won just about every science fiction award worth being awarded. Very impressive!

Aside from science fiction, Pohl was also a lecturer and teacher in the area of future studies, as well as an author of many non-fiction works. Some notable ones are Practical Politics, which was a manual of the American political process, Our Angry Earth, Chasing Science, and he is also the Encyclopedia Britannica's authority for the First Century A.D. Roman emperor, Tiberius. That was really exciting to learn because I love(understatement) history!

 Stepping backwards into his past, one shocking thing I read was that he dropped out of high school when he was 17, but eventually was given a diploma from Brooklyn Tech. Also, he was married five times! His late wife, whom he stayed with until his death, was Elizabeth Anne Hull, a science fiction expert. He died on September 2 of this year in Palatine, Illinois, which was where he had been living most of his later years after moving from Middletown, New Jersey.

Awards:

• Campbell Memorial Award
• Hugo Award
• National Book Award
• Nebula Award
• Edward E. Smith and Donald A. Wollheim memorial awards
• French Prix Apollo, Yugoslavian Vizija
• Nebula(which he won 3 times including the "grand master" for lifetime contributions to the field)
• Hugo(won 6 times, and is the only person to win this award as writer and editor!)

Quotes:

"My first thought was always a cigarette. It still is, but I haven't cheated."

"That's the method: restructure the world we live in in some way, then see what happens."
"I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time."

"Stephen Hawking said he spent most of his first couple years at Cambridge reading science fiction (and I believe that, because his grades weren't all that great).

"People ask me how I do research for my science fiction. The answer is, I never do any research."

"The big new development in my life is, when I turned 80, I decided I no longer have to do four pages a day. For me, it's like retiring."

Though he wasn't much of a poet, I still enjoyed learning about him and his very lengthy, amazing, successful career. I'm going to have to take a look into some of his novels, essays, and the blog he created because he seems like a very interesting guy. Hope you all enjoyed this birthday blog of the day and I will see you back tomorrow or on turkey day! Until then, READ ON!

~HAPPY 126th BIRTHDAY MARIANNE MOORE~

Thanks to terrible employees, I had to go into work earlier today instead of work on homework and this blog. So I am finally off work, at home, drinking and Vanilla Coke, and ready to talk about a new birthday girl. At this very moment of typing, our birthday girl Marianne Moore is 66,271,541 minutes old! If you calculate that into weeks, she is only 6,574 weeks old! Am I the only one who gets kind of disturbed by that? I know six thousand is a lot of weeks, but to me, the thought that we don't even live for that long kind of freaks me out. I did my age and I've only been around for 284 months. That just does not seem like a long time and within my lifetime I'll be lucky if I make it to 600! Maybe I look too deep into it? Maybe I should stop rambling on and get with our information on Marianne Moore? Yes? Okay I will. Lets learn about this writer! 

 

Photo © George Platt Lynes

 Everyone say hello to Marianne Moore! Today is her day and what an interesting woman she is. One of the ways I determine if I want to write about the person or not, is depending on their quotes. I love reading quotes from writers and authors and she has some pretty good ones that we will read in just a few moments. 

Moore was born on November 15, 1887, in Missouri. She attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated with  a B.A. in 1909. After college she studied typing. In 1921, after having lived with her mother for some time in New York City, became an assistant at the New York Public Library. Because of this job, she came in contact with other poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. She wrote in and eventually became an editor for the Dial.

Her poems began being published into a magazine called Egoist, which was an English magazine. I'm not sure who or what this is, but I did read that "H.D." (if you could inform me on what or who this is I'd appreciate it) published Marianne Moore's first book, Poems, without her even knowing. Some accomplishments by her would be winning the Bollingen prize, the Nation Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

One thing I'd like to say about her before I wrap this up with her quotes is that she was huge into baseball. I know that has nothing to do with American Literature, and I myself am not too fond of baseball, but found it extremely interesting that a female poet/writer was a huge fan. In fact, in 1968, she threw the first pitch of the season in the Yankee Stadium! That's pretty awesome in my opinion and just thought I should share!

Moore never married and eventually died in 1972 after suffering a series of strokes. Though I have never heard of this lady until now, she was a big deal as her entire living room has actually been preserved in its replica layout. You can see this at the Rosenberg Museum & Library in Philadelphia. I read that all her photographs, poetry drafts, and even a baseball that was signed by Mickey Mantle can be viewed by the public, among other things of hers. She was obviously a great well respected lady of her time and I'm very glad to of read up on her! Hopefully I will have time over the next few days to read a couple of her things and I'll either post on here or talk about it in the next IM Discussion Board!

Quotes From Marianne Moore

• "We are suffering from too much sarcasm."
• "Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time."
• "Superior people never make long visits." 
• "The passion for setting people right is in itself an afflictive disease."
• "You're not free until you've been made captive by supreme belief."
• "There never was a war that was not inward."
• "I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it."
• "Psychology which explains everything explains nothing, and we are still in doubt."             (my personal favorite)

until next time everyone....READ ON! 

~Happy 163rd Birthday to Ella Wheeler Wilcox~

Finally! After a month of not updating this, I'm actually doing what I'm supposed to do and that is post something! Hopefully I'll be doing this twice a week, which I believe is manageable, but it seem as of late that I'm more the king of procrastination than anything. Enough about me! It is time to celebrate the birthday of an American writer and poet, Ella Wheeler Wilcox!

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was born on this day way back in 1850 and is best known for her work called Poems of Passion. She is also known for Solitude, which is actually interesting to me because it contains a quote that I've always heard, but never knew who originated it. In Solitude she writes, "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone. For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth But has trouble enough of its own." The first two lines I have heard so many times in the past from people. It instantly reminded me of a quote from the movie The Producers, which is a little off topic, but its my blog and I'd like to share it! "Smile, and the world smiles with you."

While looking up information on her I found out that that quote from Solitude was sent into the Sun and she received a dashing total of five dollars for it. While she didn't get put into the The Oxford Book of American Verse, she did have fourteen of her poems put into Best Loved Poems of the American People as well as Solitude and The Winds of Fate put into Best Remembered Poems.

Ella died of cancer in 1919, but right before her passing she actually had an autobiography written. This was called The Worlds and I. On her Wiki page they quote her final words in that autobiography so I thought I would too. "From this mighty storehouse(of God, and the hierarchies of Spiritual Beings) we may gather wisdom and knowledge, and receive light and power, as we pass through this preparatory room of earth, which is only one of the innumerable mansions in our Father's house. Think n these things". 

Quotes from Ella Wilcox

• "Always continue the climb. It is possible for you to do whatever you choose, if you first get to know who you are and are willing to work with a power that is greater than ourselves to do it."
• "There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul." 
• "So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs."
• "And the smile that is worth the praises of earth is the smile that shines through tears." 
• "It has ever been since time began, and ever will be, till time lose breath, that love is a mood - no more - to a man, and love to a woman is life or death." 

I honestly wanted to put more of her quotes in, but I will let you continue on looking at her stuff on your own if you find her interesting like I did. She had some powerful, beautiful, and intelligent quotes, and I except to be reading some of her stuff off of my ebook account in the near future! Hope you all enjoyed today's birthday girl and until next time, READ ON! 

 

~Happy 134th Birthday to John Erskine~

My blogs will focus on authors of American Literature that are celebrating their birthday on the day I post a blog. I hope to stumble across a really famous author, but I will dig up information on each person I choose to my best ability. Of course, Chris Ross(me) loves to procrastinate and put everything off until the last second, and though I have to go into work within the next thirty minutes, I will try to make my first blog post as nice as possible. Though I couldn't find a picture of my first subject, I did learn a few cool facts about him, and also have some quotes to share! Hope you all enjoy and please feel free to give ideas and feedback, negative or positive. ENJOY! 

John Erskine was born in New York, New York and has published over 100 books. Though I am celebrating his birthday today, he died on June 2, 1951 at the age of 71. He was not only an author, but also a pianist and a composer. He also was a professor at Amherst College between 1903 and 1909, then moved on to Columbia University from 1909 until 1937. During his time at Columbia University, he formulated something called the General Honors Course. Because of his work with that, later in time the Great Books movement formed. These were very important to us as they were books essential to the foundation in literature of Western culture. 

 Quotes From John Erskine

"Lets tell young people the best books are yet to written; the best painting, the best government, the best of everything is yet to re done by them."

"There's a difference between beauty and charm. A beautiful woman is one I notice. A charming woman is one who notices me." (I laughed out loud when I read this one. Funny!)

"Opinion is that exercise of the human will which helps us to make a decision without information."

 

 

 This will hopefully be the shortest blog post I do as this is just the rough draft and first test into what I hope will be something interesting to everyone else besides me! Let me know what you think on this idea and hopefully all of you weren't too bored reading about someone you most likely have never heard of! Take care everyone and until next time, READ ON!