Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
Depto. de Letras, Programa de Inglês
Disciplina: Língua Inglesa 8A		 Centro de Artes e Comunicação
Professor: Dr. João Sedycias
Código da Disciplina: LE 627

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English Written Expression 4 – Primary Sources

P o e t r y

 
Elizabeth Browning (1806-1861)

Born 06 March 1806, near Durham, England.
Died 29 June 1861, Florence, Italy.

Elizabeth Barrett, an English poet of the Romantic Movement, was born in 1806 at Coxhoe Hall, Durham, England. The oldest of twelve children, Elizabeth was the first in her family born in England in over two hundred years. For centuries, the Barrett family, who were part Creole, had lived in Jamaica, where they owned sugar plantations and relied on slave labor. Elizabeth's father, Edward Barrett Moulton Barrett, chose to raise his family in England, while his fortune grew in Jamaica. Educated at home, Elizabeth apparently had read passages from Paradise Lost and a number of Shakespearean plays, among other great works, before the age of ten. By her twelfth year she had written her first "epic" poem, which consisted of four books of rhyming couplets. Two years later, Elizabeth developed a lung ailment that plagued her for the rest of her life. Doctors began treating her with morphine, which she would take until her death. While saddling a pony when she was fifteen, Elizabeth also suffered a spinal injury. Despite her ailments, her education continued to flourish. Throughout her teenage years, Elizabeth taught herself Hebrew so that she could read the Old Testament; her interests later turned to Greek studies. Accompanying her appetite for the classics was a passionate enthusiasm for her Christian faith. She became active in the Bible and Missionary Societies of her church.

In 1826 Elizabeth anonymously published her collection An Essay on Mind and Other Poems. Two years later, her mother passed away. The slow abolition of slavery in England and mismanagement of the plantations depleted the Barrett's income, and in 1832, Elizabeth's father sold his rural estate at a public auction. He moved his family to a coastal town and rented cottages for the next three years, before settling permanently in London. While living on the sea coast, Elizabeth published her translation of Prometheus Bound (1833), by the Greek dramatist Aeschylus.

Gaining notoriety for her work in the 1830's, Elizabeth continued to live in her father's London house under his tyrannical rule. He began sending Elizabeth's younger siblings to Jamaica to help with the family's estates. Elizabeth bitterly opposed slavery and did not want her siblings sent away. During this time, she wrote The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838), expressing Christian sentiments in the form of classical Greek tragedy. Due to her weakening disposition she was forced to spend a year at the sea of Torquay accompanied by her brother Edward, whom she referred to as "Bro." He drowned later that year while sailing at Torquay and Elizabeth returned home emotionally broken, becoming an invalid and a recluse. She spent the next five years in her bedroom at her father's home. She continued writing, however, and in 1844 produced a collection entitled simply Poems. This volume gained the attention of poet Robert Browning, whose work Elizabeth had praised in one of her poems, and he wrote her a letter.

Elizabeth and Robert, who was six years her junior, exchanged 574 letters over the next twenty months. Immortalized in 1930 in the play The Barretts of Wimpole Street, by Rudolf Besier (1878-1942), their romance was bitterly opposed by her father, who did not want any of his children to marry. In 1846, the couple eloped and settled in Florence, Italy, where Elizabeth's health improved and she bore a son, Robert Wideman Browning. Her father never spoke to her again. Elizabeth's Sonnets from the Portuguese, dedicated to her husband and written in secret before her marriage, was published in 1850. Critics generally consider the Sonnets – one of the most widely known collections of love lyrics in English – to be her best work. Admirers have compared her imagery to Shakespeare and her use of the Italian form to Petrarch.

Political and social themes embody Elizabeth's later work. She expressed her intense sympathy for the struggle for the unification of Italy in Casa Guidi Windows (1848-51) and Poems Before Congress (1860). In 1857 Browning published her verse novel Aurora Leigh, which portrays male domination of a woman. In her poetry she also addressed the oppression of the Italians by the Austrians, the child labor mines and mills of England, and slavery, among other social injustices. Although this decreased her popularity, Elizabeth was heard and recognized around Europe. Elizabeth Barrett Browning died in Florence on June 29, 1861.

 
Caroline Norton (1808–1877)

Born 22 March 1808, London, England.
Died 15 June 1877, London, England.

English poet and novelist whose matrimonial difficulties and her resultant efforts to secure legal protection for married women made her a notorious figure in mid-Victorian society. In many respects, she gained more renown for her eventful life than for her writings.

One of three granddaughters of the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, she began to write while in her teens. In 1827 she made an unfortunate marriage to the Honourable George Norton, whom she left after three years. In retaliation, Norton brought action against her friend Lord Melbourne for seducing his wife. The suit may have been a political move to discredit Melbourne (then prime minister). When the case came to trial in 1836, the evidence was so flimsy that the jury decided against Norton without leaving the courtroom. Norton then refused his wife access to their children, and her outcries against this injustice were instrumental in introducing the Infant Custody Bill, which was finally carried in 1839. In 1855 she was again involved in a lawsuit because her husband not only refused to pay her allowance but demanded the proceeds of her books. Her eloquent letter of protest to Queen Victoria had great influence on the Marriage and Divorce Act of 1857, abolishing some of the inequities to which married women were subject.

Among her contemporaries, Mrs. Norton held a high literary reputation. The Dream, and Other Poems appeared in 1840 to critical enthusiasm, and Aunt Carry's Ballads (1847), dedicated to her nephews and nieces, was written with tenderness and grace. Her novels – Stuart of Dunleath (1851), Lost and Saved (1863), and Old Sir Douglas (1867) – were based on her own unhappy experiences. After her husband's death in 1875, she married Sir William Stirling-Maxwell.

 
Christina Rossetti (1830–1894)

Born 05 December 1830, London, England.
Died 29 December 1894, London, England.

English poet. Her collections of verse include Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866) and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881), and 'A Birthday', 'Remember', 'Uphill' and the Christmas carol 'In the Bleak Mid-Winter'. She also wrote Sing-song, a Nursery Rhyme Book (1862) for children, which was illustrated by Arthur Hughes. Rossetti's main concern was her religious poetry, and she had great lyrical gifts. She was associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, which included her brothers D.G. and W.M. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris.

Christina was the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and like him she showed promise as a poet while still very young. She was educated at home and encouraged to write by her family; her teenage poems were printed by her grandfather on his own press.

She was a devout Anglican, and refused two suitors on religious grounds: the painter James Collinson because he became a Roman Catholic; and Charles Bagot Cayley, because he was an atheist. Perhaps as a result of this self-denial, a recurrent theme in her poetry is the rejection of earthly passion in favour of spiritual devotion. Even those poems with a strong element of fantasy in them, such as 'Goblin Market' or 'The Prince's Progress' are often written with a clear moral purpose in mind.

Though she was haunted by an ideal of spiritual purity that demanded self-denial, Christina resembled her brother Dante Gabriel in certain ways, for beneath her humility, her devotion, and her quiet, saintlike life lay a passionate and sensuous temperament, a keen critical perception, and a lively sense of humour. Part of her success as a poet arises from the fact that, while never straining the limits of her sympathy and experience, she succeeded in uniting these two seemingly contradictory sides of her nature. There is a vein of the sentimental and didactic in her weaker verse, but at its best her poetry is strong, personal, and unforced, with a metrical cadence that is unmistakably her own. The transience of material things is a theme that recurs throughout her poetry, and the resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy love is often a dominant note.

Rossetti's health was always poor, and illness had rendered her an invalid by the time she was fifty. She continued to write however, producing Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), which contained poems and thoughts for each day, and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892). After her death her brother W. M. Rossetti brought out an edition of her later poetry, New Poems, in 1896, and edited her Collected Poems (1904). Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the greatest female poet in English up to her own time. She was considered for the position of Poet Laureate, before her final illness made the appointment impossible.

 
Edwin Robinson (1869–1935)

Born 22 December 1869, Head Tide, Maine, U.S.A.
Died 06 April 1935, New York, New York, U.S.A.

American poet, born in Head Tide, Maine, attended Harvard (1891–93). At his death, many critics considered Robinson the greatest poet in the United States. He is now best remembered for his short dramatic poems concerning the people in a small New England village, Tilbury Town, very much like the Gardiner, Maine, in which he grew up.

After his family suffered financial reverses, Robinson cut short his attendance at Harvard University (1891-93) and returned to Gardiner to stay with his family, whose fortunes were disintegrating. The lives of both his brothers ended in failure and early death, and Robinson's poetry is much concerned with personal defeat and the tragic complexities of life. Robinson himself endured years of poverty and obscurity before his poetry began to attract notice.

Robinson's first volume of verse, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896), was revised and reissued as The Children of the Night (1897). In 1899, he settled in New York City. Although his third volume of verse, Captain Craig (1902), was poorly received by critics, it attracted the attention of President Theodore Roosevelt, who secured Robinson a job in the New York customshouse. He finally achieved critical recognition with The Man against the Sky (1916). Thereafter he concentrated on long psychological narrative poems, such as Avon's Harvest (1921), The Man Who Died Twice (1924; Pulitzer Prize), Dionysus in Doubt (1925), and the Arthurian romances Merlin (1917), Lancelot (1920), and Tristam (1928; Pulitzer Prize). A quiet, introverted man, Robinson never married and became legendary for his reclusiveness. Although his later poetry reveals a deep consciousness of social issues, an experimentation with symbolism, and an increasingly optimistic view of human destiny, his most lasting work is probably his early verse. "Miniver Cheevy" and "Richard Cory" are among the most famous of his brief, dramatic poems. Volumes of his collected poems were published in 1921 (Pulitzer Prize), 1937, and years after his work fell out of popular and critical fashion, in 1999.

 
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)

Born 13 June 1888, Lisbon, Portugal.
Died 30 November 1935, Lisbon, Portugal.

Poet whose part in the Modernist movement gave Portuguese literature European and worldwide significance. Reflecting the influence of both the classical tradition and French symbolism, Fernando Pessoa’s poetry moves from saudosismo, or nostalgia for a mythic past, to an increasing concern with consciousness and sensation. Pessoa is famous for having written under 73 different names. Four of these (his own, Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos) are well known. Each of these personas has his own putative biography, physical characteristics, relationship to the others, poetic voice, and outlook, and in part reflects Pessoa's disbelief in the idea of an integrated personality.

From the age of seven Pessoa lived in Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was the Portuguese consul. He became fluent in English and wrote his early verse in this language. In 1905 he returned to Lisbon, where he remained, working as a commercial translator while contributing to avant-garde reviews, especially Orpheu (1915), the organ of the Modernist movement, of which Pessoa was a leading aesthetician. He began publishing books of English poetry in 1918, but it was not until 1934 that his first book in Portuguese, Mensagem, appeared. It attracted little attention.

Fame came to Pessoa after his death in 1935, when his extraordinarily rich dream world, peopled with alter egos whose poetry he produced along with his own, became generally known. Though the works of the imaginary poets differ in outlook and style from the work done under Pessoa's own name, taken together they express different personalities that he felt to exist within himself. The most important of his works are Poesias de Fernando Pessoa (1942), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (1944), Poemas de Alberto Caeiro (1946), and Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946).

Included among English translations of some of his work are Selected Poems, 2nd ed. (1982), edited by Jonathan Griffin, and Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988), edited by Edwin Honig.

 
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Born 26 March 1874, San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
Died 29 January 1963, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations.

Frost's father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a journalist with ambitions of establishing a career in California, and in 1873 he and his wife moved from New England (the two had met and courted while teaching school in Pennsylvania) to San Francisco. Her husband's untimely death from tuberculosis in 1885 prompted Isabelle Moodie Frost to take her two children, Robert and Jeanie, to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where they were taken in by the children's paternal grandparents. While their mother taught at a variety of schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Robert and Jeanie grew up in Lawrence, and Robert graduated from high school in 1892. A top student in his class, he shared valedictorian honours with Elinor White, with whom he had already fallen in love.

Robert and Elinor shared a deep interest in poetry, but their continued education sent Robert to Dartmouth College and Elinor to St. Lawrence University. Meanwhile, Robert continued to labour on the poetic career he had begun in a small way during high school; he first achieved professional publication in 1894 when The Independent, a weekly literary journal, printed his poem "My Butterfly: An Elegy." Impatient with academic routine, Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year. He and Elinor married in 1895 but found life difficult, and the young poet supported them by teaching school and farming, neither with notable success. During the next dozen years, six children were born, two of whom died early, leaving a family of one son and three daughters. Frost resumed his college education at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years' study there. From 1900 to 1909 the family raised poultry on a farm near Derry, N.H., and for a time Frost also taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. All this while he was writing poems, but publishing outlets showed little interest in them.

By 1911 he was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been considered a young person's game, but Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London, where publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent. Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England. Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not gotten into print. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound, Frost within a year had published A Boy's Will (1913). From this first book, such poems as "Storm Fear," "Mowing," and "The Tuft of Flowers" have remained standard anthology pieces.

A Boy's Will was followed in 1914 by a second collection, North of Boston, that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frost's work, among them "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," and "After Apple-Picking." In London, Frost's name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature, and soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell traveled to England in 1914, and in the bookstores there she encountered Frost's work. Taking his books home to America, Lowell then began a campaign to locate an American publisher for them, meanwhile writing her own laudatory review of North of Boston.

Without his being fully aware of it, Frost was on his way to fame. The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. By then Amy Lowell's review had already appeared in The New Republic, and writers and publishers throughout the Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. The American publishing house of Henry Holt had brought out its edition of North of Boston in 1914. It became a best-seller, and, by the time the Frost family landed in Boston, Holt was adding the American edition of A Boy's Will. Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an ascending curve.

Frost bought a small farm at Franconia, N.H., in 1915, but his income from both poetry and farming proved inadequate to support his family, and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Any remaining doubt about his poetic abilities was dispelled by the collection Mountain Interval (1916), which continued the high level established by his first books. His reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923), which received the Pulitzer Prize. That prize was also awarded to Frost's Collected Poems (1930) and to the collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). His other poetry volumes include West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962). Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939-43), Dartmouth (1943-49), and Amherst College (1949-63), and in his old age he gathered honours and awards from every quarter. His recital of his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was a memorable occasion.

Though Frost’s work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January 29, 1963, in Boston.

 
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)

Born 14 October 1894, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Died 03 September 1962, North Conway, New Hampshire, U.S.A.

Edward Estlin Cummings. American poet and painter who first attracted attention, in an age of literary experimentation, for his eccentric punctuation and phrasing. The spirit of New England dissent and of Emersonian "Self-Reliance" underlies the urbanized Yankee colloquialism of Cummings' verse. Cummings' name is often styled "e.e. cummings" in the mistaken belief that the poet legally changed his name to lowercase letters only. Cummings used capital letters only irregularly in his verse and did not object when publishers began lowercasing his name, but he himself capitalized his name in his signature and in the title pages of original editions of his books.

Cummings received his B.A. degree from Harvard University in 1915 and was awarded his M.A. in 1916. During World War I he served with an ambulance corps in France, where he was interned for a time in a detention camp because of his friendship with an American who had written letters home that the French censors thought critical of the war effort. This experience deepened Cummings' distrust of officialdom and was symbolically recounted in his first book, The Enormous Room (1922).

In the 1920s and '30s he divided his time between Paris, where he studied art, and New York City. His first book of verse was Tulips and Chimneys (1923), followed by XLI Poems and & (1925); in the latter year he received the Dial award for distinguished service to American letters.

In 1927 his play him was produced by the Provincetown Players in New York City. During these years he exhibited his paintings and drawings, but they failed to attract as much critical interest as his writings. Eimi (1933) recorded, in 432 pages of experimental prose, a 36-day visit to the Soviet Union, which confirmed his individualist repugnance for collectivism. He published his discussions as the Charles Eliot Norton lecturer on poetry at Harvard University (1952-53) under the title i: six nonlectures (1953).

In all he wrote 12 volumes of verse, assembled in his two-volume Complete Poems (1968). Cummings' moods were alternately satirical and tough or tender and whimsical. He frequently used the language of the streets and material from burlesque and the circus. His erotic poetry and love lyrics had a childlike candour and freshness.

In his work, Cummings experiments radically with form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex. At the time of his death in 1962, he was the second most widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost

 
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

Born 08 February 1911, Worcester, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Died 06 October 1979, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada, and subsequently with an aunt in Boston. After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, she traveled abroad often, especially to warmer, tropical climates, and lived for a time in Key West, Florida (1938-42), and Mexico (1943). She was independently wealthy, and traveled extensively – to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland and Italy. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946.

During most of the 1950s and '60s she lived in Petrópolis, near the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, later dividing the year between Petrópolis and San Francisco. Her first book of poems, North & South (1946), captures the divided nature of Bishop's allegiances: born in New England and reared there and in Nova Scotia, she eventually migrated to hotter regions. Much of Bishop's later work also addresses the frigid, tropical dichotomy of a New England conscience in a tropical sphere. Questions of Travel (1965) and Geography III (1976) offer spare, powerful meditations on the need for self-exploration, on the value of art (especially poetry) in human life, and on human responsibility in a chaotic world.

Bishop was influenced by the poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend, mentor, and stabilizing force in her life. Unlike her contemporary and good friend Robert Lowell, who wrote in the "confessional" style, Bishop's poetry avoids explicit accounts of her personal life, and focuses instead with great subtlety on her impressions of the physical world. Her images are precise and true to life, and they reflect her own sharp wit and moral sense. During the time she lived in Brazil, she communicated with friends and colleagues in America only by letter. She wrote slowly and published sparingly (her Collected Poems number barely a hundred), but the technical brilliance and formal variety of her work is astonishing. Considered for years a "poet's poet," her last book, Geography III, was published in 1976 and finally established her as a major force in contemporary literature.

Bishop taught writing at Harvard University from 1970 to 1977, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976. Bishop also wrote a travel book, Brazil (1962), and translated from the Portuguese Alice Brant's Brazilian classic, The Diary of Helena Morley (1957). She edited and translated An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry (1972). She died in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in 1979, and her stature as a major poet continues to grow through the high regard of the poets and critics who have followed her.

 
Lesléa Newman (1955-)

Born 1955, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.A.

Lesléa Newman is a contemporary Jewish American author and editor with thirty books to her credit. Ms. Newman has been writing poems since she was a little girl. Her first published work was a poem in Seventeen magazine. She studied poetry at Naropa and the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, with Allen Ginsberg and other well-known poets, and in 1980 published her first chapbook, Just Looking For My Shoes. In 1987, a larger collection called Love Me Like You Mean It followed, then Sweet Dark Places in 1991, and she recently completed The Buddy Poems, a cycle of poems about a woman whose best friend dies of AIDS. She has received many literary awards including Poetry Fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award and the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement.

In addition to being an author, Ms. Newman is a social activist and popular guest lecturer, and has spoken on college campuses across the country including Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Oregon, Bryn Mawr College, Smith College and the University of Judaism. Current projects include a recently completed novel about sexual abuse entitled Jailbait, and several children's picture books including Runaway Dreidl, My Name is Aviva, and Cats, Cats, Cats.

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