~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."