Famous Poets Biography

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T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot's poetry from Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer: the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not to become a «religious poet». and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious force. However, his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) are more openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a traditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliot's plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959) were published in one volume in 1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963.
 

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Hermann Hesse

Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) was born into a family of Pietist missionaries and religious publishers in the Black Forest town of Calw, in the German state of Wüttenberg. Johannes Hesse, his father, was born a Russian citizen in Weissenstein, Estonia. Hesse's mother, Marie Gundert, was born in Talatscheri, India, as the daughter of the Pietist missionary and Indologist, Hermann Gundert. His parents expected him to follow the family tradition in theology - they had served as missionaries in India. Hesse entered the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn in 1891, but he was expelled from the school. After unhappy experiences at a secular school, Hesse left his studies. He worked a bookshop clerk, a mechanic, and a book dealer in Tübingen, where he joined literary circle called Le Petit Cénacle. During this period Hesse read voluminously and determined the become a writer. In 1899 Hesse published his first works, ROMANTISCHE LIEDER and EINE STUNDE HINTER MITTERNACHT.

Hesse became a freelance writer in 1904 after the publication of his novel PETER CAMENZIND. In the Rousseauesque 'return to nature' story the protagonist leaves the big city to live like Saint Francis of Assisi. The book gained literary success and Hesse married Maria Bernoulli, with whom he had three children. A visit in India in 1911 was a disappointment but it gave start to Hesse's studies of Eastern religions and the novel SIDDHARTHA (1922). In the story, based on the early life of Gautama Buddha, a Brahman son rebels against his father's teaching and traditions. Eventually he finds the ultimate enlightenment. The culture of ancient Hindu and the ancient Chinese had a great influence on Hesse's works. For several years in the mid-1910s Hesse underwent psychoanalysis under Carl Jung's assistant J.B. Lang.

In 1912 Hesse and his family took a permanent residence in Switzerland. In the novel ROSSHALDE (1914) Hesse explored the question of whether the artist should marry. The author's replay was negative and reflected the author's own difficulties. During these years his wife suffered from growing mental instability and his son was seriously ill. Hesse spent the years of World War I in Switzerland, attacking the prevailing moods of militarism and nationalism. He also promoted the interests of prisoners of war. Hesse, who shared with Aldous Huxley belief in the need for spiritual self-realization, was called a traitor by his countrymen.

Hesse's breakthrough novel was DEMIAN (1919). It was highly praised by Thomas Mann, who compared its importance to James Joyce's Ulysses and André Gide's The Counterfeiters. The novel attracted especially young veterans of the WW I, and reflected Hesse's personal crisis and interest in Jungian psychoanalysis. Demian was first published under the name of its narrator, Emil Sinclair, but later Hesse admitted his authorship. In the Faustian tale the protagonist is torn between his orderly bourgeois existence and a chaotic world of sensuality. Hesse later admitted that Demian was a story of "individuation" in the Jungian manner. The author also praised unreservedly Jung's study Psychological Types, but in 1921 he suddenly canceled his analysis with Jung and started to consider him merely one of Freud's most gifted pupils.

Leaving his family in 1919, Hesse moved to Montagnola, in southern Switzerland. Siddharta was written during this period. It has been one of Hesse's most widely read work. Its English translation in the 1950s became a spiritual guide to a number of American Beat poets. Hesse's short marriage to Ruth Wenger, the daughter of the Swiss writer Lisa Wenger, was unhappy. He had met her in 1919 and wrote in 1922 the fairy tale PIKTOR'S VERWANDLUNGEN for Ruth. In the story a spirit, Piktor, becomes an old tree and finds his youth again from the love of a young girl. Hesse divorced from Maria Bernoulli, and married in 1924 Ruth Wenger, but the marriage ended after a few months. These years produced DER STEPPENWOLF (1927). The protagonist, Harry Haller, goes through his mid-life crisis and must chose between life of action and contemplation. His initials perhaps are not accidentally like the author's. "The few capacities and pursuits in which I happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more tan a most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities, instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of Steppenwolf." Haller feels that he has two beings inside him, and faces his shadow self, named Hermine. This Doppelgänger figure introduces Harry to drinking, dancing, music, ***, and drugs. Finally his personality is disassembled and reassembled in the 'Magic Theatre' - For Madmen Only.

During the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) Hesse stayed aloof from politics. BETRACHTUNGEN (1928) and KRIEG UND FRIEDEN (1946) were collections of essays, which reflected his individualism and opposition to mass movements of the day. NARZISS UND GOLDMUND (1930, Narcissus and Goldmund) was a pseudomedieval tale about an abbot and his worldly pupil, both in search of the Great Mother.

In 1931 Hesse married Ninon Dolbin (1895-1966). Ninon was Jewish. She had sent Hesse a letter in 1909 when she was 14, and the correspondence had continued. In 1926 they met accientally. At that time Ninon was separated - she had married the painter B.F. Doldin and planned a career as an art historian. Hesse moved with her to Casa Bodmer, and his restless life became more calm. Hesse's books continued to be published in Germany during the Nazi regime, and were defended in a secret circular in 1937 by Joseph Goebbels. When he wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung Jewish refugees in France accused him of supporting the Nazis, whom Hesse did not openly oppose. However, he helped political refugees and when Narcissus and Goldmund was reprinted in 1941, he refused to leave out parts which dealt with pogroms and anti-Semitism. In 1943 he was placed on the Nazi blacklist.

In 1931 Hesse began to work on his masterpiece DAS GLASPERLENSPIEL, which was published in 1943. The setting is in the future in the imaginary province of Castilia, an intellectual, elitist community, dedicated to mathematics and music. Knecht ('servant') is chosen by the Old Music Master as a suitable aspirant to the Order. He goes to the city of Waldzell to study, and there he catches the attention of the Magister Ludi, Thomas von der Trave (an allusion to Hesse's rival Thomas Mann). He is the Master of the Games, a system by which wisdom is communicated. Knecht dedicates himself to the Game, and on the death of Thomas, he is elected Magister Ludi. After a decade in his office Knecht tries to leave to start a life devoted to realizing human rights, but accidentally drowns in a mountain lake. - In 1942 Hesse sent the manuscript to Berlin for publication. It was not accepted by the Nazis and the work appeared in Zürich, Switzerland.

After receiving the Nobel Prize Hesse published no major works. Between the years 1945 and 1962 he wrote some 50 poems and about 32 reviews mostly for Swiss newspapers. Hesse died of cerebral hemorrhage in his sleep on August 9, 1962 at the age of eighty-five. Hesse's other central works include In Sight of Chaos (1923), a collection of essays, and the novel Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), set in the Middle Ages and repeating the theme of two contrasting types of men. In the 1960s and 1970s Hesse became a cult figure for young readers. The interest declined in the 1980s. In 1969 the Californian rock group Sparrow changed their name to Steppenwolf after Hesse's classic, and released 'Born to be Wild'. Hesse's books have gained readers from the New Age movements and he is still one of the bestselling German-speaking writers throughout world.
 

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Gabriela Mistral

Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), pseudonym for Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga, was born in Vicuña, Chile. The daughter of a dilettante poet, she began to write poetry as a village schoolteacher after a passionate romance with a railway employee who committed suicide. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She played an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile, was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations, and was Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She held honorary degrees from the Universities of Florence and Guatemala and was an honorary member of various cultural societies in Chile as well as in the United States, Spain, and Cuba. She taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico.

The love poems in memory of the dead, Sonetos de la muerte (1914), made her known throughout Latin America, but her first great collection of poems, Desolación [Despair], was not published until 1922. In 1924 appeared Ternura [Tenderness], a volume of poetry dominated by the theme of childhood; the same theme, linked with that of maternity, plays a significant role in Tala, poems published in 1938. Her complete poetry was published in 1958.
 

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Rabindranath Tagore

Greatest writer in modern Indian literature, Bengali poet, novelist, educator, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Tagore was awarded the knighthood in 1915, but he surrendered it in 1919 as a protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400 Indian demonstrators protesting colonial laws. Tagore's reputation in the West as a mystic has perhaps mislead his Western readers to ignore his role as a reformer and critic of colonialism.

"When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose touch of the one in the play of the many." (from Gitanjali)

Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta in a wealthy and prominent Brahman family. His father was Maharishi Debendranath Tagore, a religious reformer and scholar. His mother Sarada Devi, died when he was very young - her body carried through a gate to a place where it was burned and it was the moment when he realized that she will never come back. Tagore's grandfather had established a huge financial empire for himself, and financed public projects, such as Calcutta Medical College. The Tagores were pioneers of Bengal Renaissance and tried to combine traditional Indian culture with and Western ideas. However, in My Reminiscenes Tagore mentions that it was not until the age of ten when he started to use socks and shoes. Servants beat the children regularly. All the children contributed significantly to Bengali literature and culture. Tagore, the youngest, started to compose poems at the age of eight. He received his early education first from tutors and then at a variety of schools. Among them were Bengal Academy where he studied Bengali history and culture, and University College, London, where he studied law but left after a year without completing his studies. Tagore did not like the weather. Once he gave a beggar a gold coin - it was more than the beggar had expected and he returned it. In England Tagore started to compose the poem Bhagna Hridaj (a broken heart).

In 1883 Tagore married Mrinalini Devi Raichaudhuri, with whom he had two sons and three daughters. He moved to East Bengal in 1890. His first book, a collection of poems, appeared when he was 17; it was published by Tagore's friend who wanted to surprise him. In East Bengal (now Bangladesh) he collected local legends and folklore and wrote seven volumes of poetry between 1893 and 1900, including Sonar Tari (The Golden Boat), 1894 and Khanika, 1900. This was highly productive period in Tagore's life, and earned him the rather misleading epitaph 'The Bengali Shelley.' More important was that Tagore wrote in the common language of the people and abandoned the ancient for of the Indian language. This also was something that was hard to accept among his critics and scholars.

In 1901 Tagore founded a school outside Calcutta, Visva-Bharati, which was dedicated to emerging Western and Indian philosophy and education. It became a University in 1921. He produced poems, novels, stories, a history of India, textbooks, and treatises on pedagogy. His wife died in 1902, followed in 1903 by the death of one of his daughters and in 1907 his younger son.

Tagore's reputation as a writer was established in the United States and in England after the publication of Gitanjali: Song Offerings, in which Tagore tried to find inner calm and explored the themes of divine and human love. The poems were translated into English by Tagore himself. His cosmic visions owed much to the lyric tradition of Vaishnava Hinduism and its concepts about the relationship between man and God. The poems appeared in 1912 with an introduction by William Butler Yates, who wrote "These lyrics - which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical invention - display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all my life long." His poems were praised by Ezra Pound, and drew the attention of the Nobel Prize committee. "There is in him the stillness of nature. The poems do not seem to have been produced by storm or by ignition, but seem to show the normal habit of his mind. He is at one with nature, and finds no contradictions. And this is in sharp contrast with the Western mode, where man must be shown attempting to master nature if we are to have "great drama." (Ezra Pound in Fortnightly Review, 1 March 1913) However, Tagore also experimented with poetic forms and these works have lost much in translations into other languages. Especially Tagore's short stories influenced deeply Indian Literature, and he was the first Indian to bring an element of psychological realism to his novels. Tagore wrote his most important works in Bengali, but he translated his poems into English, forming new collections. Many of his poems are actually songs, and inseparable from their music. His written production, still not completely collected, fill 26 substantial volumes. At the age of 70 Tagore took up painting. He was also a composer, settings hundreds of poems to music. Tagore's song Sonar Bangla Our Golden Bengal became the national anthem of Bangladesh. He was an early advocate of Independence for India and his influence over Gandhi and the founders of modern India was enormous.
 

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Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling, (1865-1936) was born in Bombay, India, where his father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an arts and crafts teacher at the Jeejeebhoy School of Art. His mother, the former Alice Macdonald, was a sister-in-law of the painter Edward Burne-Jones. India was at that time ruled by the British. Ruddy, as Kipling was affectionally called, was brought up by an ayah, who taught him Hidustani as his first language.

Kipling's writings at the age of thirteen were influenced by the pre-Raphaelites - and he also had family connections to them: two of his mother's sisters were married into the pre-Raphaelite community. At the age of six he was taken to England by his parents and left for five years at a foster home at Southsea. Kipling, who was not accustomed to traditional English beatings, expressed later his feeling of the treatment in the short story 'Baa Baa, Black Sheep', in the novel THE LIGHT THAT FAILED (1890), and in his autobiography (1937).

In 1878 Kipling entered United Services College, a boarding school in North Devon. It was an expensive institution that specialized in training for entry into military academies. His poor eyesight and mediocre results as a student ended hopes about military career. However, these years Kipling recalled in lighter tone in one of his most popular books, STALKY & CO (1899). Kipling's bookishness separated him from the other students; he had to wear glasses and was nicknamed "Gigger", for gig (carriage) for lamps. However, Kipling wrote about the non-conformist Headmaster, Cormell Price: "Many of us loved the Head for what he had done for us, but I owed him more than all of them put together and I think I loved him even more than they did."

Kipling returned to India in 1882, where he worked as a journalist in Lahore for Civil and Military Gazette (1882-87) and an assistant editor and overseas correspondent in Allahabad for Pioneer (1887-89). The stories written during his last two years in India were collected in THE PHANTOM RICKSHAW. It that included the famous story 'The Man Who Would Be a King.' In the story a white trader, Daniel Dravot sets himself up as a god and king in Kafristan, but a woman discovers that he is a human and betrays him. His companion, Peachey Carnehan, manages to escape to tell the tale, but Dravot is killed.

Kilping's short stories and verses gained success in the late 1880s in England, to which he returned in 1889, and was hailed as a literary heir to Charles Dickens. When he toured Japan he criticized the Japanese middle-class for its eagerness to adopt western fashions and values. "... I was a barbarian, and no true Sahib," he wrote. Between the years 1889 and 1892, Kipling lived in London and published LIFE'S HANDICAP (1891), a collection of Indian stories that included 'The Man Who Was,' and BARRACK-ROOM BALLADS, a collection of poems that included 'Gunga Din,' a praise of a Hindu water carrier for a British Indian regiment. Wellington had viewed the private soldier as "the very scum of the earth", but Kipling portrayed him as the embodiment of British virtue

In 1892 Kipling married Caroline Starr Balestier, the sister of an American publisher and writer, with whom he collaborated a novel, THE NAULAHKA (1892). The young couple moved to the United States. Kipling was dissatisfied with the life in Vermont, and after the death of his daughter, Josephine, Kipling took his family back to England and settled in Burwash, Sus***. According to the author's sister, Kipling became a "harder man" - but also his political beliefs started to stiffen. Kipling's marriage was not in all respects happy. The author was dominated by his wife who had troubles to accept all aspects of her husband's character. During these restless years Kipling produced MANY INVENTIONS (1893), JUNGLE BOOK (1894), a collection of animal stories for children, THE SECOND JUNGLE BOOK (1895), and THE SEVEN SEAS (1896).

Widely regarded as unofficial poet laureate, Kipling refused this and many honors, among them the Order of Merit. During the Boer War in 1899 Kipling spent several months in South Africa. In 1902 he moved to Sus***, also spending time in South Africa, where he was given a house by Cecil Rhodes, the influential British colonial statesman. In 1901 appeared KIM, widely considered Kipling's best novel. The story, set in India, depicted adventures of an orphaned son of a sergeant in an Irish regiment. His own children appeared in the stories as Dan and Una - the death of "Dan" (John) in the WW I darkened author's later life. John Kipling was a brave young officer, unspoilt by his father's fame.

Soon after Kipling had received the Nobel Prize, his output of fiction and poems began to decline. In 1923 Kipling published THE IRISH GUARDS IN THE GREAT WAR, a history of his son's regiment. Between the years 1922 and 1925 he was a rector at the University of St. Andrews. Kipling died on January 18, 1936 in London, and was buried in Poet's Corner at Westminster Abbey. Kipling's autobiography, SOMETHING OF MYSELF, appeared posthumously in 1937. Kipling did his best to obtain and destroy letters he had sent - to protect his private life. His widow continued the practice but a number of his letters survived and have been published. In 1884 he wrote to Edith Macdonald about his visit to an Afghan Khan, Kizil Bas, who had to stay in Lahore as a prisoner - the Afghan Sirdars had fought against the British. The Khan asks Kipling to write to his "Khubber-Ke-Kargus" (newspaper) and help him to gain again his freedom. He throws a bundle of money to Kipling who refuses to take them. Then the Khan offers a Cashmiri girl, and Kipling loses his temper. Finally he promises three beautiful horse. Kipling resists the temptation, they smoke, drink coffee, and Kipling rides of the city. "I haven't told anyone here of the bribery business because, if I did, some unscrupulous beggar might tell the Khan that he would help him and so lay hold of the money, the lady or, worse still, the horses. Besides I may able to help the old boy respectably and without any considerations."

Kipling's glorification of the "Empire and extension" gained its peak in the poem 'The White Man's Burden' (1899): "Take up the White Man's burden - / Send forth the best ye breed - / Go bind your sons to exile / To serve your captives' need; / To wait in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild - / Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child." George Orwell, who also spent his early childhood in India, rejected in an essay in New English Weekly (1936) Kipling's view of the world, which he associated with the ignorant and sentimental side of imperialism, but admired the author as a storyteller. However, readers loved Kipling's romantic tales about the adventures of Englishmen in strange and distant parts of the world. Characteristic for Kipling is sympathy for the world of children, satirical attitude toward pompous patriotism, and belief in the blessings and superiority of the British rule, without questioning its basic nature.

 

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A. Pushkin Unofficial

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26, 1799 (Old Style). In 1811 he was selected to be among the thirty students in the first class at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo . He attended the Lyceum from 1811 to 1817 and received the best education available in Russia at the time. He soon not only became the unofficial laureate of the Lyceum, but found a wider audience and recognition. He was first published in the journal The Messenger of Europe in 1814. In 1815 his poem “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” met the approval of Derzhavin, a great eighteenth-century poet, at a public examination in the Lyceum.
After graduating from the Lyceum, he was given a sinecure in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs in Petersburg. The next three years he spent mainly in carefree, light-hearted pursuit of pleasure. He was warmly received in literary circles; in circles of Guard-style lovers of wine, women, and song; and in groups where political liberals debated reforms and constitutions. Between 1817 and 1820 he reflected liberal views in “revolutionary” poems, his ode “Freedom,” “The Village,” and a number of poems on Aleksandr I and his minister Arakcheev. At the same time he was working on his first large-scale work, Ruslan and Liudmila.
In April 1820, his political poems led to an interrogation by the Petersburg governor-general and then to exile to South Russia, under the guise of an administrative transfer in the service. Pushkin left Petersburg for Ekaterinoslave on May 6, 1820. Soon after his arrival there he traveled around the Caucasus and the Crimea with the family of General Raevsky. During almost three years in Kishinev, Pushkin wrote his first Byronic verse tales, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1820-1821), “The Bandit Brothers (1821-1822), and “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” (1821-1823). He also wrote “Gavriiliada” (1821), a light approach to the Annunciation, and he started his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1823-1831).
With the aid of influential friends, he was transferred in July 1823 to Odessa, where he engaged in theatre going, social outings, and love affairs with two married women. His literary creativeness also continued, as he completed “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” and the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, and began “The Gypsies.” After postal officials intercepted a letter in which he wrote a thinly-veiled support of atheism, Pushkin was exiled to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoe in north Russia.
The next two years, from August 1824 to August 1826 he spent at Mikhaylovskoe in exile and under surveillance. However unpleasant Pushkin my have found his virtual imprisonment in the village, he continued his literary productiveness there. During 1824 and 1825 at Mikhaylovskoe he finished “The Gypsies,” wrote Boris Godunov , “Graf Nulin” and the second chapter of Eugene Onegin.
When the Decembrist Uprising took place in Petersburg on December 14, 1825, Pushkin, still in Makhaylovskoe, was not a participant. But he soon learned that he was implicated, for all the Decembrists had copies of his early political poems. He destroyed his papers that might be dangerous for himself or others. In late spring of 1826, he sent the Tsar a petition that he be released from exile. After an investigation that showed Pushkin had been behaving himself, he was summoned to leave immediately for an audience with Nicholas I. On September 8, still grimy from the road, he was taken in to see Nicholas. At the end of the interview, Pushkin was jubilant that he was now released from exile and that Nicholas I had undertaken to be the personal censor of his works.
Pushkin thought that he would be free to travel as he wished, that he could freely participate in the publication of journals, and that he would be totally free of censorship, except in cases which he himself might consider questionable and wish to refer to his royal censor. He soon found out otherwise. Count Benkendorf, Chief of Gendarmes, let Pushkin know that without advance permission he was not to make any trip, participate in any journal, or publish — or even read in literary circles — any work. He gradually discovered that he had to account for every word and action, like a naughty child or a parolee. Several times he was questioned by the police about poems he had written.
The youthful Pushkin had been a light-hearted scoffer at the state of matrimony, but freed from exile, he spent the years from 1826 to his marriage in 1831 largely in search of a wife and in preparing to settle down. He sought no less than the most beautiful woman in Russia for his bride. In 1829 he found her in Natalia Goncharova, and presented a formal proposal in April of that year. She finally agreed to marry him on the condition that his ambiguous situation with the government be clarified, which it was. As a kind of wedding present, Pushkin was given permission to publish Boris Godunov — after four years of waiting for authorization — under his “own responsibility.” He was formally betrothed on May 6, 1830.
Financial arrangements in connection with his father’s wedding gift to him of half the estate of Kistenevo necessitated a visit to the neighboring estate of Boldino, in east-central Russia. When Pushkin arrived there in September 1830, he expected to remain only a few days; however, for three whole months he was held in quarantine by an epidemic of Asiatic cholera. These three months in Boldino turned out to be literarily the most productive of his life. During the last months of his exile at Mikhaylovskoe, he had completed Chapters V and VI of Eugene Onegin, but in the four subsequent years he had written, of major works, only “Poltava”(1828), his unfinished novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827) and Chapter VII of Eugene Onegin (1827-1828). During the autumn at Boldino, Pushkin wrote the five short stories of The Tales of Belkin; the verse tale “The Little House in Kolomna;” his little tragedies, “The Avaricious Knight,” “Mozart and Salieri;” “The Stone Guest;” and “Feast in the Time of the Plague;” “The Tale of the Priest and His Workman Balda,” the first of his fairy tales in verse; the last chapter of Eugene Onegin; and “The Devils,” among other lyrics.
Pushkin was married to Natalia Goncharova on February 18, 1831, in Moscow. In May, after a honeymoon made disagreeable by “Moscow aunties” and in-laws, the Pushkins moved to Tsarskoe Selo, in order to live near the capital, but inexpensively and in “inspirational solitude and in the circle of sweet recollections.” These expectations were defeated when the cholera epidemic in Petersburg caused the Tsar and the court to take refuge in July in Tsarskoe Selo. In October 1831 the Pushkins moved to an apartment in Petersburg, where they lived for the remainder of his life. He and his wife became henceforth inextricably involved with favors from the Tsar and with court society. Mme. Pushkina’s beauty immediately made a sensation in society, and her admirers included the Tsar himself. On December 30, 1833, Nicholas I made Pushkin a Kammerjunker, an intermediate court rank usually granted at the time to youths of high aristocratic families. Pushkin was deeply offended, all the more because he was convinced that it was conferred, not for any quality of his own, but only to make it proper for the beautiful Mme. Pushkina to attend court balls. Dancing at one of these balls was followed in March 1834 by her having a miscarriage. While she was convalescing in the provinces, Pushkin spoke openly in letters to her of his indignation and humiliation. The letters were intercepted and sent to the police and to the Tsar. When Pushkin discovered this, in fury he submitted his resignation from the service on June 25, 1834. However, he had reason to fear the worst from the Tsar’s displeasure at this action, and he felt obliged to retract his resignation.
Pushkin could ill afford the expense of gowns for Mme. Pushkina for court balls or the time required for performing court duties. His woes further increased when her two unmarried sisters came in autumn 1834 to live henceforth with them. In addition, in the spring of 1834 he had taken over the management of his improvident father’s estate and had undertaken to settle the debts of his heedless brother. The result was endless cares, annoyances, and even outlays from his own pocket. He came to be in such financial straits that he applied for a leave of absence to retire to the country for three or four years, or if that were refused, for a substantial sum as loan to cover his most pressing debts and for the permission to publish a journal. The leave of absence was brusquely refused, but a loan of thirty thousand rubles was, after some trouble, negotiated; permission to publish, beginning in 1836, a quarterly literary journal, The Contemporary, was finally granted as well. The journal was not a financial success, and it involved him in endless editorial and financial cares and in difficulties with the censors, for it gave importantly placed enemies among them the opportunity to pay him off. Short visits to the country in 1834 and 1835 resulted in the completion of only one major work, “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”(1834), and during 1836 he only completed his novel on Pugachev, The Captain’s Daughter, and a number of his finest lyrics.
Meanwhile, Mme. Pushkina loved the attention which her beauty attracted in the highest society; she was fond of “coquetting” and of being surrounded by admirers, who included the Tsar himself. In 1834 Mme. Pushkina met a young man who was not content with coquetry, a handsome French royalist ÊmigrÊ in Russian service, who was adopted by the Dutch ambassador, Heeckeren. Young d’Anthes-Heeckeren pursued Mme. Pushkina for two years, and finally so openly and unabashedly that by autumn 1836, it was becoming a scandal. On November 4, 1836 Pushkin received several copies of a “certificate” nominating him “Coadjutor of the International Order of Cuckolds.” Pushkin immediately challenged d’Anthes; at the same time, he made desperate efforts to settle his indebtedness to the Treasury. Pushkin twice allowed postponements of the duel, and then retracted the challenge when he learned “from public rumour” that d’Anthes was “really” in love with Mme. Pushkina’s sister, Ekaterina Goncharova. On January 10, 1837, the marriage took place, contrary to Pushkin’s expectations. Pushkin refused to attend the wedding or to receive the couple in his home, but in society d’Anthes pursued Mme. Pushkina even more openly. Then d’Anthes arranged a meeting with her, by persuading her friend Idalia Poletika to invite Mme. Pushkina for a visit; Mme. Poletika left the two alone, but one of her children came in, and Mme. Pushkina managed to get away. Upon hearing of this meeting, Pushkin sent an insulting letter to old Heeckeren, accusing him of being the author of the “certificate” of November 4 and the “pander” of his “bastard.” A duel with d’Anthes took place on January 27, 1837. D’Anthes fired first, and Pushkin was mortally wounded; after he fell, he summoned the strength to fire his shot and to wound, slightly, his adversary. Pushkin died two days later, on January 29.
As Pushkin lay dying, and after his death, except for a few friends, court society sympathized with d’Anthes, but thousands of people of all other social levels came to Pushkin’s apartment to express sympathy and to mourn. The government obviously feared a political demonstration. To prevent public display, the funeral was shifted from St. Isaac’s Cathedral to the small Royal Stables Church, with admission by ticket only to members of the court and diplomatic society. And then his body was sent away, in secret and at midnight. He was buried beside his mother at dawn on February 6, 1837 at Svyatye Gory Monastery, near Mikhaylovskoe.
 

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Adam Lindsay Gordon

Adam Lindsay Gordon (October 19, 1833 – June 24, 1870) was an Australian poet, frequently known now as the “national poet of Australia”.
Born in the Azores of an old Scottish family, his father was a retired army captain who later became professor of Oriental languages at Cheltenham College. The family moved to Madeira when he was a child, and then to Cheltenham, in 1840. Gordon was sent to the newly founded college in 1841, but was expelled later for poor behaviour.
In 1852 he was sent to be educated at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester. The headmaster at the time, Canon Temple, recorded that Gordon had a “most extraordinary genius.” But within four months of arrival he was already in trouble. His chief interest of horses led him to be almost imprisoned for stealing a horse to ride in the Worcester Steeplechase.
Gordon was due to ride Lallah Rookh, a mare at a steeplechase meeting in Crowle. The owner of the horse had placed bets on him winning the race. However, the bailiffs seized the horse the night before the meeting and locked it in the stables at the Plough Inn, Worcester. Gordon stormed into the stables at the Plough Inn and led the mount away. He was prevented from racing, but the owner went on to race instead and actually won the event. Gordon was ordered to appear at Worcester Magistrates Court but was saved from being imprisoned by Tom Oliver of Worcester, who bailed him out of court. His name appears in the poem: Ye Wearie Wayfarer – Fytte II.
It was during his time at Worcester that Gordon also had his first romance. He fell in love with Jane Brydges who lived in St. John’s across the river from Worcester. Unfortunately Jane was not interested in Gordon. Gordon later wrote the following poem about his love for Jane:
I loved a girl not long ago
And till my suit was told
I thought her breast as fair as snow
‘Twas very near as cold.
And yet I spoke with feelings more
Of recklessness than pain,
Those words I never spoke before
Nor never shall again.
Her cheek grew pale, in her dark eye
I saw a tear-drop shine
Her red lips faltered in reply
And then were pressed to mine
A quick pulsation of the heart!
A flutter of the breath
A smothered sob! – and thus we part
To meet no more till death.
It was said that his Headmaster at Worcester had greatened his interest in the classics and inspired him to write.
In despair of his son’s waywardness, his father sent him to South Australia in 1853 where Gordon found he was excellently adapted to the lifestyle and opted to join the mounted police rather than present his letters of introduction. Two years later, when he was a travelling horse-breaker and trainer, he met J. E. Tenison Woods, a Roman Catholic missionary and naturalist, who encouraged Gordon in his writing. In 1862 Gordon at the age of 29 he married Maggie Park, 17, who had nursed him after an accident.
Gordon came into £7000 after his father died in 1864. He bought some race horses, and in time became the best steeplechase rider in Australia. In 1864 he enhanced his reputation as a horseman by making what was to become a famous leap onto a ledge above the Blue Lake, Mount Gambier – commemorated in 1887 by an obelisk. He also entered the South Australian Parliament from Victoria in 1865 but resigned the next year. In 1867 he went to Mt. Gambier to live by writing and horse-training. He ran into debt from gambling, drinking and from borrowing heavily to finance a suit to sue for recovery of some ancestral lands in Scotland. In June 1870 he lost his suit. He saw his last book of verses through the press, but, burdened with money worries, the next day, June 24, 1870, shot himself.
He is now regarded as the national poet of Australia and is “the laureate of the horse.” There is a monument to him in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey being the only Australian poet to have one. There is also a monument outside Parliament House in Melbourne in a nature reserve named Gordon Square alongside a monument to his relative General Gordon .
Two of his poems were immortalised by the composer Sir Edward Elgar those being A Song to Autumn and The Swimmer from Sea Pictures.​
 

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Biography of Amy Lowell


Amy Lowell (February 9, 1874-May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Lowell was born to a prominent Massachusetts family. One brother, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer, who predicted the existence of the planet Pluto; another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, served as President of Harvard University. She herself never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which became near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later.
That same year, she met actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who became her companion and lover and the subject of her more erotic work. The two women travelled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who was at once a major influence and a major critic of her work.
Lowell was an imposing figure, who dressed in clothing considered manly, kept her hair cropped short, and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that Pound once commented that she was a “hippopoetess.” Her writing also included critical works on French literature and a biography of John Keats.
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What’s O’Clock. Forgotten for years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work because of its focus on ******* themes and her collection of love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell.
 

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A. Pushkin Unofficial

A. Pushkin Unofficial

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin was born in Moscow on May 26, 1799 (Old Style). In 1811 he was selected to be among the thirty students in the first class at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo . He attended the Lyceum from 1811 to 1817 and received the best education available in Russia at the time. He soon not only became the unofficial laureate of the Lyceum, but found a wider audience and recognition. He was first published in the journal The Messenger of Europe in 1814. In 1815 his poem “Recollections in Tsarskoe Selo” met the approval of Derzhavin, a great eighteenth-century poet, at a public examination in the Lyceum.
After graduating from the Lyceum, he was given a sinecure in the Collegium of Foreign Affairs in Petersburg. The next three years he spent mainly in carefree, light-hearted pursuit of pleasure. He was warmly received in literary circles; in circles of Guard-style lovers of wine, women, and song; and in groups where political liberals debated reforms and constitutions. Between 1817 and 1820 he reflected liberal views in “revolutionary” poems, his ode “Freedom,” “The Village,” and a number of poems on Aleksandr I and his minister Arakcheev. At the same time he was working on his first large-scale work, Ruslan and Liudmila.
In April 1820, his political poems led to an interrogation by the Petersburg governor-general and then to exile to South Russia, under the guise of an administrative transfer in the service. Pushkin left Petersburg for Ekaterinoslave on May 6, 1820. Soon after his arrival there he traveled around the Caucasus and the Crimea with the family of General Raevsky. During almost three years in Kishinev, Pushkin wrote his first Byronic verse tales, “The Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1820-1821), “The Bandit Brothers (1821-1822), and “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” (1821-1823). He also wrote “Gavriiliada” (1821), a light approach to the Annunciation, and he started his novel in verse, Eugene Onegin (1823-1831).
With the aid of influential friends, he was transferred in July 1823 to Odessa, where he engaged in theatre going, social outings, and love affairs with two married women. His literary creativeness also continued, as he completed “The Fountain of Bakhchisaray” and the first chapter of Eugene Onegin, and began “The Gypsies.” After postal officials intercepted a letter in which he wrote a thinly-veiled support of atheism, Pushkin was exiled to his mother’s estate of Mikhaylovskoe in north Russia.
The next two years, from August 1824 to August 1826 he spent at Mikhaylovskoe in exile and under surveillance. However unpleasant Pushkin my have found his virtual imprisonment in the village, he continued his literary productiveness there. During 1824 and 1825 at Mikhaylovskoe he finished “The Gypsies,” wrote Boris Godunov , “Graf Nulin” and the second chapter of Eugene Onegin.
When the Decembrist Uprising took place in Petersburg on December 14, 1825, Pushkin, still in Makhaylovskoe, was not a participant. But he soon learned that he was implicated, for all the Decembrists had copies of his early political poems. He destroyed his papers that might be dangerous for himself or others. In late spring of 1826, he sent the Tsar a petition that he be released from exile. After an investigation that showed Pushkin had been behaving himself, he was summoned to leave immediately for an audience with Nicholas I. On September 8, still grimy from the road, he was taken in to see Nicholas. At the end of the interview, Pushkin was jubilant that he was now released from exile and that Nicholas I had undertaken to be the personal censor of his works.
Pushkin thought that he would be free to travel as he wished, that he could freely participate in the publication of journals, and that he would be totally free of censorship, except in cases which he himself might consider questionable and wish to refer to his royal censor. He soon found out otherwise. Count Benkendorf, Chief of Gendarmes, let Pushkin know that without advance permission he was not to make any trip, participate in any journal, or publish — or even read in literary circles — any work. He gradually discovered that he had to account for every word and action, like a naughty child or a parolee. Several times he was questioned by the police about poems he had written.
The youthful Pushkin had been a light-hearted scoffer at the state of matrimony, but freed from exile, he spent the years from 1826 to his marriage in 1831 largely in search of a wife and in preparing to settle down. He sought no less than the most beautiful woman in Russia for his bride. In 1829 he found her in Natalia Goncharova, and presented a formal proposal in April of that year. She finally agreed to marry him on the condition that his ambiguous situation with the government be clarified, which it was. As a kind of wedding present, Pushkin was given permission to publish Boris Godunov — after four years of waiting for authorization — under his “own responsibility.” He was formally betrothed on May 6, 1830.
Financial arrangements in connection with his father’s wedding gift to him of half the estate of Kistenevo necessitated a visit to the neighboring estate of Boldino, in east-central Russia. When Pushkin arrived there in September 1830, he expected to remain only a few days; however, for three whole months he was held in quarantine by an epidemic of Asiatic cholera. These three months in Boldino turned out to be literarily the most productive of his life. During the last months of his exile at Mikhaylovskoe, he had completed Chapters V and VI of Eugene Onegin, but in the four subsequent years he had written, of major works, only “Poltava”(1828), his unfinished novel The Blackamoor of Peter the Great (1827) and Chapter VII of Eugene Onegin (1827-1828). During the autumn at Boldino, Pushkin wrote the five short stories of The Tales of Belkin; the verse tale “The Little House in Kolomna;” his little tragedies, “The Avaricious Knight,” “Mozart and Salieri;” “The Stone Guest;” and “Feast in the Time of the Plague;” “The Tale of the Priest and His Workman Balda,” the first of his fairy tales in verse; the last chapter of Eugene Onegin; and “The Devils,” among other lyrics.
Pushkin was married to Natalia Goncharova on February 18, 1831, in Moscow. In May, after a honeymoon made disagreeable by “Moscow aunties” and in-laws, the Pushkins moved to Tsarskoe Selo, in order to live near the capital, but inexpensively and in “inspirational solitude and in the circle of sweet recollections.” These expectations were defeated when the cholera epidemic in Petersburg caused the Tsar and the court to take refuge in July in Tsarskoe Selo. In October 1831 the Pushkins moved to an apartment in Petersburg, where they lived for the remainder of his life. He and his wife became henceforth inextricably involved with favors from the Tsar and with court society. Mme. Pushkina’s beauty immediately made a sensation in society, and her admirers included the Tsar himself. On December 30, 1833, Nicholas I made Pushkin a Kammerjunker, an intermediate court rank usually granted at the time to youths of high aristocratic families. Pushkin was deeply offended, all the more because he was convinced that it was conferred, not for any quality of his own, but only to make it proper for the beautiful Mme. Pushkina to attend court balls. Dancing at one of these balls was followed in March 1834 by her having a miscarriage. While she was convalescing in the provinces, Pushkin spoke openly in letters to her of his indignation and humiliation. The letters were intercepted and sent to the police and to the Tsar. When Pushkin discovered this, in fury he submitted his resignation from the service on June 25, 1834. However, he had reason to fear the worst from the Tsar’s displeasure at this action, and he felt obliged to retract his resignation.
Pushkin could ill afford the expense of gowns for Mme. Pushkina for court balls or the time required for performing court duties. His woes further increased when her two unmarried sisters came in autumn 1834 to live henceforth with them. In addition, in the spring of 1834 he had taken over the management of his improvident father’s estate and had undertaken to settle the debts of his heedless brother. The result was endless cares, annoyances, and even outlays from his own pocket. He came to be in such financial straits that he applied for a leave of absence to retire to the country for three or four years, or if that were refused, for a substantial sum as loan to cover his most pressing debts and for the permission to publish a journal. The leave of absence was brusquely refused, but a loan of thirty thousand rubles was, after some trouble, negotiated; permission to publish, beginning in 1836, a quarterly literary journal, The Contemporary, was finally granted as well. The journal was not a financial success, and it involved him in endless editorial and financial cares and in difficulties with the censors, for it gave importantly placed enemies among them the opportunity to pay him off. Short visits to the country in 1834 and 1835 resulted in the completion of only one major work, “The Tale of the Golden Cockerel”(1834), and during 1836 he only completed his novel on Pugachev, The Captain’s Daughter, and a number of his finest lyrics.
Meanwhile, Mme. Pushkina loved the attention which her beauty attracted in the highest society; she was fond of “coquetting” and of being surrounded by admirers, who included the Tsar himself. In 1834 Mme. Pushkina met a young man who was not content with coquetry, a handsome French royalist ÊmigrÊ in Russian service, who was adopted by the Dutch ambassador, Heeckeren. Young d’Anthes-Heeckeren pursued Mme. Pushkina for two years, and finally so openly and unabashedly that by autumn 1836, it was becoming a scandal. On November 4, 1836 Pushkin received several copies of a “certificate” nominating him “Coadjutor of the International Order of Cuckolds.” Pushkin immediately challenged d’Anthes; at the same time, he made desperate efforts to settle his indebtedness to the Treasury. Pushkin twice allowed postponements of the duel, and then retracted the challenge when he learned “from public rumour” that d’Anthes was “really” in love with Mme. Pushkina’s sister, Ekaterina Goncharova. On January 10, 1837, the marriage took place, contrary to Pushkin’s expectations. Pushkin refused to attend the wedding or to receive the couple in his home, but in society d’Anthes pursued Mme. Pushkina even more openly. Then d’Anthes arranged a meeting with her, by persuading her friend Idalia Poletika to invite Mme. Pushkina for a visit; Mme. Poletika left the two alone, but one of her children came in, and Mme. Pushkina managed to get away. Upon hearing of this meeting, Pushkin sent an insulting letter to old Heeckeren, accusing him of being the author of the “certificate” of November 4 and the “pander” of his “bastard.” A duel with d’Anthes took place on January 27, 1837. D’Anthes fired first, and Pushkin was mortally wounded; after he fell, he summoned the strength to fire his shot and to wound, slightly, his adversary. Pushkin died two days later, on January 29.
As Pushkin lay dying, and after his death, except for a few friends, court society sympathized with d’Anthes, but thousands of people of all other social levels came to Pushkin’s apartment to express sympathy and to mourn. The government obviously feared a political demonstration. To prevent public display, the funeral was shifted from St. Isaac’s Cathedral to the small Royal Stables Church, with admission by ticket only to members of the court and diplomatic society. And then his body was sent away, in secret and at midnight. He was buried beside his mother at dawn on February 6, 1837 at Svyatye Gory Monastery, near Mikhaylovskoe.​
 

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Adam Lindsay Gordon

Adam Lindsay Gordon

Adam Lindsay Gordon (October 19, 1833 – June 24, 1870) was an Australian poet, frequently known now as the “national poet of Australia”.
Born in the Azores of an old Scottish family, his father was a retired army captain who later became professor of Oriental languages at Cheltenham College. The family moved to Madeira when he was a child, and then to Cheltenham, in 1840. Gordon was sent to the newly founded college in 1841, but was expelled later for poor behaviour.
In 1852 he was sent to be educated at the Royal Grammar School in Worcester. The headmaster at the time, Canon Temple, recorded that Gordon had a “most extraordinary genius.” But within four months of arrival he was already in trouble. His chief interest of horses led him to be almost imprisoned for stealing a horse to ride in the Worcester Steeplechase.
Gordon was due to ride Lallah Rookh, a mare at a steeplechase meeting in Crowle. The owner of the horse had placed bets on him winning the race. However, the bailiffs seized the horse the night before the meeting and locked it in the stables at the Plough Inn, Worcester. Gordon stormed into the stables at the Plough Inn and led the mount away. He was prevented from racing, but the owner went on to race instead and actually won the event. Gordon was ordered to appear at Worcester Magistrates Court but was saved from being imprisoned by Tom Oliver of Worcester, who bailed him out of court. His name appears in the poem: Ye Wearie Wayfarer – Fytte II.
It was during his time at Worcester that Gordon also had his first romance. He fell in love with Jane Brydges who lived in St. John’s across the river from Worcester. Unfortunately Jane was not interested in Gordon. Gordon later wrote the following poem about his love for Jane:
I loved a girl not long ago
And till my suit was told
I thought her breast as fair as snow
‘Twas very near as cold.
And yet I spoke with feelings more
Of recklessness than pain,
Those words I never spoke before
Nor never shall again.
Her cheek grew pale, in her dark eye
I saw a tear-drop shine
Her red lips faltered in reply
And then were pressed to mine
A quick pulsation of the heart!
A flutter of the breath
A smothered sob! – and thus we part
To meet no more till death.
It was said that his Headmaster at Worcester had greatened his interest in the classics and inspired him to write.
In despair of his son’s waywardness, his father sent him to South Australia in 1853 where Gordon found he was excellently adapted to the lifestyle and opted to join the mounted police rather than present his letters of introduction. Two years later, when he was a travelling horse-breaker and trainer, he met J. E. Tenison Woods, a Roman Catholic missionary and naturalist, who encouraged Gordon in his writing. In 1862 Gordon at the age of 29 he married Maggie Park, 17, who had nursed him after an accident.
Gordon came into £7000 after his father died in 1864. He bought some race horses, and in time became the best steeplechase rider in Australia. In 1864 he enhanced his reputation as a horseman by making what was to become a famous leap onto a ledge above the Blue Lake, Mount Gambier – commemorated in 1887 by an obelisk. He also entered the South Australian Parliament from Victoria in 1865 but resigned the next year. In 1867 he went to Mt. Gambier to live by writing and horse-training. He ran into debt from gambling, drinking and from borrowing heavily to finance a suit to sue for recovery of some ancestral lands in Scotland. In June 1870 he lost his suit. He saw his last book of verses through the press, but, burdened with money worries, the next day, June 24, 1870, shot himself.
He is now regarded as the national poet of Australia and is “the laureate of the horse.” There is a monument to him in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey being the only Australian poet to have one. There is also a monument outside Parliament House in Melbourne in a nature reserve named Gordon Square alongside a monument to his relative General Gordon .
Two of his poems were immortalised by the composer Sir Edward Elgar those being A Song to Autumn and The Swimmer from Sea Pictures.​
 

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Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez

Al Alvarez was born in London 1929.
Alvarez was educated at Oundle School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
He was poetry critic of The Observer from 1956 to 1966 and is a poet and novellist, but some of his most famous works are in the realm of non-fiction: The Savage God: A Study of Suicide; and Biggest Game in Town, about poker players.
He says of his Penguin anthology, The New Poetry: “I had attacked the British poets’ nervous preference for gentility above all else.”
In her study, The Silent Woman – Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm provides an analysis of Alvarez and his relationships with Plath and Hughes.
Alvarez’s recent publications include Poker: Bets, Bluffs and Bad Beats (2000), his autobiography Where Did It All Go Right? (first published 1999, Bloomsbury paperback 2002), and Feeding the Rat, the story of climbing legend Mo Anthoine.
You can look up Al Alvarez’s poker record on our celeb poker pages. According to the aforementioned, Biggest Game in Town, Al Alvarez plays poker every Tuesday.​
 

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Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Pushkin

Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, [Born. June 6 (N.S.), 1799, Died. Feb. 10 (N.S.), 1837], was Russia’s greatest poet. His use of the vernacular as the language of poetry freed Russian writing from the constraints of tradition and set new literary standards for novelists and poets, and his preference for subjects from history and folklore brought fresh vitality to Russian literature.
Born in Moscow, Pushkin was descended from a family of cultured but impoverished aristocrats. He was taught by his family to love literature, and from an early age he showed great promise as a poet. Pushkin studied at the lyceum in the town of Tsarskoye Selo, later renamed Pushkin, and after graduating (1817), was appointed to a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the capital city of Saint Petersburg. Here Pushkin indulged in the glittering social life available to a well-born Russian youth of his day – the life he would eventually satirize in Eugene Onegin (1823-31), a verse novel that describes a shallow, pleasure-loving man’s insensitivity to the love of a noble woman. Despite the somewhat frivolous nature of his social pursuits, Pushkin remained deeply committed to social reform and gained the reputation of spokesman for literary radicals. As a result he angered the government and was transferred from the capital, first to Kishinev (1820-23) and then to Odessa (1823-24).
Pushkin again clashed with his superiors in Odessa and was again exiled, this time to his mother’s rural estate. In 1826 he was recalled to Moscow under the tsar’s protection, but his relations with the government remained strained throughout his life. He married Natalia Goncharova, a society beauty, in 1831. His wife’s social ambitions caused Pushkin to become involved in a reckless social life, put him deeply in debt, and eventually killed him. Early in 1837 he was forced to fight a duel to defend Natalia’s reputation and was mortally wounded.
Pushkin’s early writing is mainly in the 18th-century classical tradition of light, frivolous verse. The verse fairy tale Ruslan and Ludmila (1820) is his first major attempt to use colloquial speech and themes from Russian folklore. This work and other exotic narratives written at that time were very much influenced by romanticism, the movement that was beginning to dominate contemporary English poetry. Pushkin was particularly drawn to the verse of Lord Byron, whose style he emulated in such poems as The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1822), The Robber Brothers (1827), and Eugene Onegin. In Onegin, however, the Byronic hero has been changed by Pushkin into a tragic figure. He disdains the love offered him by a naive and awkward provincial girl, only to fall in love with her later when he meets her in Saint Petersburg, now a poised, married woman prominent in society. Although she still loves him, the heroine remains faithful to her husband and rejects Onegin. The plot is simple, but Pushkin has used it to convey his poignant central theme: the relentless passage of time and the irrevocable nature of past actions.
Pushkin’s deep regard for his compatriots, his interest in history, and his distaste for the rigid class structure of his society, are evident in most of his mature work. In Wasteland Sower of True Freedom, a political tract published in 1823, he deplores the cruelties of serfdom and warns prophetically that reform is necessary to avert revolution. Several of his major dramas recall great Russian heroes of the past, notably BORIS GODUNOV (1831; Eng. trans., 1899), Poltava (1828-29; Eng. trans., 1899), and The Bronze Horseman (1837; Eng. trans., 1899), which depicts the legendary Peter the Great. In later years Pushkin frequently wrote prose. Two of his most widely read works are the novel The Captain’s Daughter (1834; Eng. trans., 1846) and the short story “The Queen of Spades” (1834; Eng. trans., 1894).
Pushkin’s inventive use of language, the subtle blending of sense and sound in his lyrics, and the classic simplicity with which he expresses emotion combine to make his poetry unique. His has remained the single most important influence on Russian literature since the 19th century, and his work has been admired by such Russian masters as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, and Chekhov. His writing has, in addition, provided fertile ground for Russian composers, notably Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov.​
 

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Alice Walker

Alice Walker



Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, USA, is an African American author and poet. She has written at length on issues of race and gender, and is most famous for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker was youngest of eight children, to Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. Her father, who was, in her words, “wonderful at math but a terrible farmer,” earned only $300 a year from sharecropping and dairy farming, while her mother supplemented the family income by working as a maid. Her mother worked 11 hours a day for USD $17 a week to help pay for Alice to attend college.
Living under Jim Crow Laws, Walker’s mother had struggles with landlords who expected the children of black sharecroppers to work the fields at a young age. A white plantation owner once asserted to her that blacks had “no need for education.” Mrs. Walker’s response to him was ‘You might have some black children somewhere, but they don’t live in this house. Don’t you ever come around here again talking about how my children don’t need to learn how to read and write.” When she was four years old, Alice was enrolled in the first grade, a year ahead of schedule.
Growing up with an oral tradition, listening to stories from her grandfather, Walker was writing—very privately—since she was eight years old. “With my family, I had to hide things,” she said. “And I had to keep a lot in my mind.”
In 1952, Walker was accidentally wounded in the right eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because the family had no access to a car, the Walkers were unable to take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment, and when they finally brought her to a physician a week later, she was permanently blind in that eye. A disfiguring layer of scar tissue formed over it, rendering the previously outgoing child self-conscious and painfully shy.
Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to writing poetry. Although when she was 14, the scar tissue was removed—and she subsequently became valedictorian and was voted most-popular girl, as well as queen of her senior class, she realized that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin “really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out,” as she has said.
Alice Walker met Martin Luther King Jr. when she was a student at Spelman College in Atlanta in the early 1960s. Walker credits King for her decision to return to the American South as an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. She attended the famous 1963 March on Washington. As a young adult she volunteered her time registering voters in Georgia and Mississippi.
After high school, Walker went to Spelman College in Atlanta on a full scholarship in 1961 and later transferred to Sarah Lawrence College near New York City, graduating in 1965. Walker became interested in the U.S. civil rights movement in part due to the influence of activist Howard Zinn, who was one of her professors at Spelman College. Continuing the activism that she participated in during her college years, Walker returned to the South where she became involved with voter registration drives, campaigns for welfare rights, and children’s programs in Mississippi.
In 1965, Walker met and later married Melvyn Roseman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer. They were married on March 17, 1967 in New York City. Later that year the couple relocated to Jackson, Mississippi, becoming “the first legally married inter-racial couple in Mississippi”. This brought them a steady stream of harassment and even murderous threats from the Ku Klux Klan. The couple had a daughter, Rebecca, in 1969, whom she described in 2008 as “a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge”.
Walker and her husband divorced amicably in 1976. Walker would later become estranged from her daughter, who felt herself to be more of “a political symbol… than a cherished daughter”. Rebecca would later publish a memoir entitled Black White and Jewish, chronicling the effects of her parents’ relationship on her childhood.
In the mid-1990s, Walker was involved in a romance with singer-songwriter Tracy Chapman.
Walker’s first book of poetry was written while she was still a senior at Sarah Lawrence, and she took a brief sabbatical from writing when she was in Mississippi working in the civil rights movement. Walker resumed her writing career when she joined Ms. magazine as an editor before moving to northern California in the late 1970s. An article she published in 1975 was largely responsible for the renewal of interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who was a large source of inspiration for Walker’s writing and subject matter. In 1973, Walker and fellow Hurston scholar Charlotte D. Hunt discovered Hurston’s unmarked grave in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Both women paid for a modest headstone for the gravesite.
In January 2009, she was one of over 50 signers of a letter protesting the Toronto Film Festival’s “City to City” spotlight on Israeli filmmakers, condemning Israel as an “apartheid regime.”

 

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Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg (June 3, 1926 – April 5 1997) was a gay American Beat poet born in Paterson, New Jersey. He formed a bridge between the Beat movement of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s, befriending, among others, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bob Dylan.
Ginsberg’s poetry was strongly influenced by modernism, romanticism, the beat and cadence of jazz, and his Kagyu Buddhist practice and Jewish background. He considered himself to have inherited the visionary poetic mantle handed from the English poet and artist William Blake on to Walt Whitman. The power of Ginsberg’s verse, its searching, probing focus, its long and lilting lines, as well as its New World exuberance, all echo the continuity of inspiration which he claimed. Other influences included the American poet William Carlos Williams.
Ginsberg’s principal work, “Howl”, is well-known to many for its opening line: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”. It was considered scandalous at the time of publication due to the rawness of the language, which is frequently explicit. Shortly after its 1956 publication by San Francisco’s City Lights Bookstore, it was banned for obscenity. The ban became a cause célèbre among defenders of the First Amendment, and was later lifted after judge Clayton W. Horn, declared the poem to possess redeeming social importance. Ginsberg’s liberal and generally anti-establishment politics attracted the attention of the FBI, who regarded Ginsberg as a major security threat.
It is of some interest to note that the second part of Howl was inspired and written primarily during a peyote vision. Ginsberg attempted a number of poems while under the influence of various drugs, including LSD. This practice was a specific manifestation of his more general experimental approach. He also “wrote” poems by reciting them into tape recorders and transcribing the results, and — after being encouraged by Chögyam Trungpa (see below) — he began extemporaneous composition on stage.
In his writing and in his life Ginsberg strove for freedom and authenticity. Many of his poems are extremely honest and direct. For example, in “Kaddish” he describes his mother’s madness in unflinching terms. In “Many Loves” he describes his first ***ual contact with Neal Cassady, a lover and friend. Some of his later poems focus on his relationship with Peter Orlovsky , his lifetime lover to whom he dedicated Kaddish and Other Poems.
His spiritual journey began early on with spontaneous visions, and continued with an early trip to India and a chance encounter on a New York City street (they both tried to catch the same cab) with Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche, a Tibetan Buddhist meditation master of the Vajrayana school, who became his friend and life-long teacher.
In his political life he was an iconoclast, using his wit and humor to militate for the cause of others’ personal freedom, often at significant risk to himself. Late in life, when holding a professorship at Brooklyn College, he made some controversial comments after joining the self-help organization for pedophiles NAMBLA, saying that “I’m in NAMBLA because I love boys too — everybody does, who has a little humanity.” He also said, in an interview with ‘The Harvard Gay and ******* Review’, “Like the whole labeling of pedophiles as ‘child molesters.’ Everybody likes little kids. All you’ve got to do is walk through the Vatican and see all the little statues of little prepubescents, pubescents, and postpubescents. ***** kids have been a staple of delight for centuries, for both parents and onlookers. So to label pedophilia as criminal is ridiculous.”
Ginsberg also helped found the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, a school founded by Chögyam Trungpa, Rinpoche.
In 1993, the French Minister of Culture awarded him with the medal of Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres.
 

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Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell

Amy Lowell (February 9, 1874-May 12, 1925) was an American poet of the imagist school, who posthumously won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926. Lowell was born to a prominent Massachusetts family. One brother, Percival Lowell, was a famous astronomer, who predicted the existence of the planet Pluto; another brother, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, served as President of Harvard University. She herself never attended college because it was not deemed proper for a woman, but she compensated for this with her avid reading, which became near-obsessive book-collecting. She lived as a socialite and travelled widely, turning to poetry in 1902 after being inspired by a performance of Eleonora Duse in Europe. Her first published work appeared in 1910 in Atlantic Monthly. The first published collection of her poetry, A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, appeared two years later.
That same year, she met actress Ada Dwyer Russell, who became her companion and lover and the subject of her more erotic work. The two women travelled to England together, where Lowell met Ezra Pound, who was at once a major influence and a major critic of her work.
Lowell was an imposing figure, who dressed in clothing considered manly, kept her hair cropped short, and wore a pince-nez. She smoked cigars constantly, claiming that they lasted longer than cigarettes. A glandular problem kept her perpetually overweight, so that Pound once commented that she was a “hippopoetess.” Her writing also included critical works on French literature and a biography of John Keats.
Lowell died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1925. The following year, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for What’s O’Clock. Forgotten for years, there has been a resurgence of interest in her work because of its focus on ******* themes and her collection of love poems addressed to Ada Dwyer Russell.​
 
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