The central figure

Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound is generally considered the poet most responsible for defining and promoting a modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers, and was famous for the generosity with which he advanced the work of such major contemporaries as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H. D., James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and especially T. S. Eliot.

His own significant contributions to poetry begin with his promulgation of Imagism, a movement in poetry which derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry - stressing clarity, precision, and economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter in order to, in Pound's words, "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of the metronome." His later work, for nearly fifty years, focused on the encyclopedic epic poem he entitled The Cantos.

Ezra Pound was born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885. He completed two years of college at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905. After teaching at Wabash College for two years, he travelled abroad to Spain, Italy and London, where, as the literary executor of the scholar Ernest Fenellosa, he became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry.

He married Dorothy Shakespear in 1914 and became London editor of the Little Review in 1917. In 1924, he moved to Italy; during this period of voluntary exile, Pound became involved in Fascist politics, and did not return to the United States until 1945, when he was arrested on charges of treason for broadcasting Fascist propaganda by radio to the United States during the Second World War.

In 1946, he was acquitted, but declared mentally ill and committed to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. During his confinement, the jury of the Bollingen-Library of Congress Award (which included a number of the most eminent writers of the time) decided to overlook Pound's political career in the interest of recognizing his poetic achievements, and awarded him the prize for the Pisan Cantos (1948). After continuous appeals from writers won his release from the hospital in 1958, Pound returned to Italy and settled in Venice, where he died, a semi-recluse, in 1972.

In 1908, when a projected academic career was cut short, he set sail for Europe, spending several months in Venice and finally settling in London, where he was befriended by his hero, W. B. Yeats. Between 1908 and 1911 he published six collections of verse, most of it dominated by a passion for Provençal and early Italian poetry. This is filtered through the medievalizing manner of Browning and the Pre-Raphaelites.

Under the influence of Ford Madox Ford and T. E. Hulme he modernized his style, and in 1912 launched the Imagist movement, advocating concreteness, economy, and free verse. The oriental delicacy of his brief Imagist lyrics (e.g. 'In a Station of the Metro') soon gave way to the more dynamically avant-garde manner of Vorticism. Association with Vorticist visual artists (e.g. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Wyndham Lewis) helped him to see how poems could be made up, like post-Cubist sculptures, of juxtaposed masses and planes.

These lessons were reinforced by his work on Ernest Fenollosa's literal versions of classical Chinese poems, which he turned into the beautiful free-verse lyrics of Cathay (1915). Fenollosa had argued that Chinese written characters were ideograms--compressed and abstracted visual metaphors. In this interplay of concrete signs Pound saw the model for a new kind of poetry, dynamic and economical, which juxtaposed not only images but diverse 'facts’--allusions, quotations, fragments of narrative.

Such a method, soon to be tried out in his major work The Cantos (on which he tentatively embarked in 1915), would permit the use of quotations from other languages and even gobbets of prose.

The range and brilliance of Pound's contacts in all the arts convinced him that London was to be the centre of a new Renaissance. He cast himself in the role of impresario, editor, and advocate, contributing to Yeats's mature style, discovering and promoting Joyce and Eliot, advising an American businessman on the modern works of art to buy in London.

But his hopes foundered in the waste of the First World War, and the consequent disappointment was to colour the rest of his life's work. In the short term it provoked his first major poems, 'Homage to Sextus Propertius' (1919) and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1921). These two ironic sequences represent a contrast. The free-verse 'Homage', an ironic persona poem based on the lyrics of the first-century Roman poet, is a defence of the private and erotic in poetry against the imperialistic jingoism promoted by war.

Mauberley, in tautly rhymed satirical stanzas, depicts the war as the Götterdammerung of an emasculated and philistine culture, condemned by the limitation of its own horizons. The poem is also evidence of Pound's close working relationship with Eliot, whose taste it reflects (cf. the 'Sweeney' poems of the same period). The relationship was to culminate in the crucial part played by Pound in cutting The Waste Land (1922).

Mauberley has been described as Pound's farewell to London. In 1920 he left, spending four years in Paris then moving on to Italy, where he settled in Rapallo in 1924. He was now concentrating on The Cantos, his 'poem including history', and the first section was published in 1925.

As The Cantos shows, he was now preoccupied with economics. The war, as he saw it, had been caused by the rivalries of international capitalists. He thought he had found a solution to the evils of unchecked capitalism, one especially favourable to the arts, in the Social Credit theory of Major C. H. Douglas, who argued that a system of state credit could increase purchasing power in the population at large, thus promoting creativity and removing power from bankers and financiers.

Attracted to Mussolini by his energy and his promises of monetary reform, Pound naïvely assumed that the Italian leader could be persuaded to put Douglas's theory into practice. At first, the main target of Pound's attacks is 'usury', which he depicts (e.g. in Canto 45) as an unnatural force that pollutes the creative instinct in humanity. By about 1930 the usurers he condemns are usually Jews, and his language is vitiated by virulent anti-Semitism.

A Draft of XXX Cantos (1930) presents the poet as wandering Odysseus, travelling among the dead. Through juxtaposition, he uncovers repeated patterns in history and experiences moments when the world of time is transfigured by the eternal world of the gods. The mainly Mediterranean emphasis of the first thirty Cantos then gives way (in Cantos 31-70, published 1934-40) to the economic policies of early US presidents and the governance of ancient China. Despite an increase in prosy didacticism and much consequent turgidity, these sections contain some of Pound's finest poetry (e.g. Cantos 36,45, 47, and 49).

In the later 1930s Pound devoted much of his energy to defending fascism and trying to avert war. When war broke out, he embarked on a series of fanatical addresses to American troops, which were broadcast on Rome Radio. As a result, he was arrested by partisans in 1945 and handed over to the US forces, who held him for six months at a Disciplinary Training Centre near Pisa, pending trial on a treason charge.

It seems likely that the inhuman conditions he endured there for the first three weeks accelerated the breakdown in rationality already to be glimpsed in his writings. Repatriated to the United States to stand trial, he was found unfit to plead on grounds of insanity and incarcerated in St Elizabeths Hospital, Washington DC, from 1946 to 1958.

His imprisonment brought about an artistic recovery. The Pisan Cantos (1948), drafted in the DTC, are the most directly personal poems he wrote. In adversity, and conscious of the tragedy of Europe, he contemplates his own past in that context, especially the water-shed years of the modern movement. Suffering and retrospection induce a new humility, exemplified in his care for the life around him--the insects, the animals, the camp guards. In St. Elizabeths he completed two rather more cryptic sections of the poem--Section: Rock-Drill (1955) and Thrones (1959)--as well as a programme of translations from the Confucian classics.

On his release he returned to Italy, dying in Venice in 1972. Despite moments of defiance, his last years were overshadowed by self-doubt and consciousness of his 'errors and wrecks'. In rare public utterances he condemned The Cantos as a failure, a view he seems not consistently to have held; but the poem was never completed. In 1969 he concluded its publication with Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII: thirty-two pages of verse, mostly serene but poignant in its fragmentation.

Pound was the central figure in the modern movement, personally responsible for the renewal of English poetry in the 1910s. Yet he remains a controversial figure. His brutal politics have been damaging to his lofty view of the artist and civilization; he is also condemned as an élitist, an obscurantist, and a charlatan—a man deficient in self-knowledge, with no real understanding of the modern world despite his avant-gardiste posturing. None of these charges quite shakes the substance of his achievement, which is fundamentally a matter of technical accomplishment to a point where refinement of skill becomes a moral quality.

Such is the sensitivity of his verse movement that it seems to release independent life and otherness in his subjects, as if it had discovered them by chance. This is so whether he seeks to evoke the movement of olive leaves in the wind or the character of a Renaissance condottiere.

The same quality lies behind his genius for translation, an art he has been said to have invented for our time: uncannily, he creates a language for each author which registers the remoteness of the author from our world while at the same time making his work available to us.

If Pound is obscure, it is largely because of his wide frame of reference; he was also an educator, who used poetry to introduce his readers to works and ideas he had discovered for himself. It is hardly his fault that his syllabus has never been adopted.

Pound's poetry is collected in two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems (London, 1984)--the American edition is entitled Personae: Collected Poems (New York, 1971)--and The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York, 1972; London, 1981). The Translations of Ezra Pound, ed. Hugh Kenner (New York and London, 1953), is a large selection with major omissions.

The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London and New York, 1954), suggests the scope of his criticism, while Selected Prose, 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson (London and New York, 1973), includes much of his polemical writing as well. The fullest biography is Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character (London, 1988), though it has been severely criticized.

The questions of a black vulcanoe

Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka, born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA, is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist who has recited poetry and lectured on cultural and political issues extensively in the USA, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe.

With influences on his work ranging from musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra to the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X and world revolutionary movements, Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetics.

The movement and his published and performance work, such as the signature study on African-American music, Blues People (1963) and the play Dutchman (1963) practically seeded “the cultural corollary to black nationalism” of that revolutionary American milieu.

Other titles range from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003).

The Essence of Reparations is Baraka’s first published collection of essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically.

It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Somebody Blew Up America & Other Poems is Baraka’s first collection of poems published in the Caribbean and includes the title poem that has headlined him in the media in ways rare to poets and authors.

The recital of the poem “that mattered” engaged the poet warrior in a battle royal with the very governor of New Jersey and with a legion of detractors demanding his resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate because of Somebody Blew Up America’s provocatively poetic inquiry (in a few lines of the poem) about who knew beforehand about the New York City World Trade Center bombings in 2001.

The poem’s own detonation caused the author’s photo and words to be splashed across the pages of New York’s Amsterdam News and the New York Times and to be featured on CNN--to name a few US city, state and national and international media.

Baraka lives in Newark with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head up the word-music ensemble, Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako’s Blues People, the “artspace” housed in their theater basement for some fifteen years.

His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.

SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA

(All thinking people
oppose terrorism
both domestic
& international…
But one should not
be used
To cover the other)

They say its some terrorist, some
barbaric
A Rab, in
Afghanistan
It wasn't our American terrorists
It wasn't the Klan or the Skin heads
Or the them that blows up nigger
Churches, or reincarnates us on Death Row
It wasn't Trent Lott
Or David Duke or Giuliani
Or Schundler, Helms retiring

It wasn't
the gonorrhea in costume
the white sheet diseases
That have murdered black people
Terrorized reason and sanity
Most of humanity, as they pleases

They say (who say? Who do the saying
Who is them paying
Who tell the lies
Who in disguise
Who had the slaves
Who got the bux out the Bucks

Who got fat from plantations
Who genocided Indians
Tried to waste the Black nation

Who live on Wall Street
The first plantation
Who cut your nuts off
Who rape your ma
Who lynched your pa

Who got the tar, who got the feathers
Who had the match, who set the fires
Who killed and hired
Who say they God & still be the Devil

Who the biggest only
Who the most goodest
Who do Jesus resemble

Who created everything
Who the smartest
Who the greatest
Who the richest
Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

Who define art
Who define science

Who made the bombs
Who made the guns

Who bought the slaves, who sold them

Who called you them names
Who say Dahmer wasn't insane

Who/ Who / Who/

Who stole Puerto Rico
Who stole the Indies, the Philipines, Manhattan
Australia & The Hebrides
Who forced opium on the Chinese

Who own them buildings
Who got the money
Who think you funny
Who locked you up
Who own the papers

Who owned the slave ship
Who run the army

Who the fake president
Who the ruler
Who the banker

Who/ Who/ Who/

Who own the mine
Who twist your mind
Who got bread
Who need peace
Who you think need war

Who own the oil
Who do no toil
Who own the soil
Who is not a nigger
Who is so great ain't nobody bigger

Who own this city

Who own the air
Who own the water

Who own your crib
Who rob and steal and cheat and murder
and make lies the truth
Who call you uncouth

Who live in the biggest house
Who do the biggest crime
Who go on vacation anytime

Who killed the most niggers
Who killed the most Jews
Who killed the most Italians
Who killed the most Irish
Who killed the most Africans
Who killed the most Japanese
Who killed the most Latinos

Who/Who/Who

Who own the ocean

Who own the airplanes
Who own the malls
Who own television
Who own radio

Who own what ain't even known to be owned
Who own the owners that ain't the real owners

Who own the suburbs
Who suck the cities
Who make the laws

Who made Bush president
Who believe the confederate flag need to be flying
Who talk about democracy and be lying
WHO/ WHO/ WHOWHO/

Who the Beast in Revelations
Who 666
Who decide
Jesus get crucified

Who the Devil on the real side
Who got rich from Armenian genocide

Who the biggest terrorist
Who change the bible
Who killed the most people
Who do the most evil
Who don't worry about survival

Who have the colonies
Who stole the most land
Who rule the world
Who say they good but only do evil
Who the biggest executioner

Who/Who/Who ^^^

Who own the oil
Who want more oil
Who told you what you think that later you find out a lie
Who/ Who/ ???

Who fount Bin Laden, maybe they Satan
Who pay the CIA,
Who knew the bomb was gonna blow
Who know why the terrorists
Learned to fly in Florida, San Diego

Who know why Five Israelis was filming the explosion
And cracking they sides at the notion

Who need fossil fuel when the sun ain't goin' nowhere

Who make the credit cards
Who get the biggest tax cut
Who walked out of the Conference
Against Racism
Who killed Malcolm, Kennedy & his Brother
Who killed Dr King, Who would want such a thing?
Are they linked to the murder of Lincoln?

Who invaded Grenada
Who made money from apartheid
Who keep the Irish a colony
Who overthrow Chile and Nicaragua later

Who killed David Sibeko, Chris Hani,
the same ones who killed Biko, Cabral,
Neruda, Allende, Che Guevara, Sandino,

Who killed Kabila, the ones who wasted Lumumba, Mondlane , Betty Shabazz, Princess Margaret, Ralph Featherstone, Little Bobby

Who locked up Mandela, Dhoruba, Geronimo,
Assata, Mumia,Garvey, Dashiell Hammett, Alphaeus Hutton

Who killed Huey Newton, Fred Hampton,
MedgarEvers, Mikey Smith, Walter Rodney,
Was it the ones who tried to poison Fidel
Who tried to keep the Vietnamese Oppressed

Who put a price on Lenin's head

Who put the Jews in ovens,
and who helped them do it
Who said "America First"
and ok'd the yellow stars
WHO/WHO/ ^^

Who killed Rosa Luxembourg, Liebneckt
Who murdered the Rosenbergs
And all the good people iced,
tortured , assassinated, vanished

Who got rich from Algeria, Libya, Haiti,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi, Kuwait, Lebanon,
Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine,

Who cut off peoples hands in the Congo
Who invented Aids Who put the germs
In the Indians' blankets
Who thought up "The Trail of Tears"

Who blew up the Maine
& started the Spanish American War
Who got Sharon back in Power
Who backed Batista, Hitler, Bilbo,
Chiang kai Chek who WHO W H O/

Who decided Affirmative Action had to go
Reconstruction, The New Deal, The New
Frontier, The Great Society,

Who do Tom Ass Clarence Work for
Who doo doo come out the Colon's mouth
Who know what kind of Skeeza is a Condoleeza
Who pay Connelly to be a wooden negro
Who give Genius Awards to Homo Locus
Subsidere

Who overthrew Nkrumah, Bishop,
Who poison Robeson,
who try to put DuBois in Jail
Who frame Rap Jamil al Amin, Who frame the Rosenbergs, Garvey,
The Scottsboro Boys, The Hollywood Ten

Who set the Reichstag Fire

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away ?
/
Who,Who, Who/
explosion of Owl the newspaper say
the devil face cd be seen Who WHO Who WHO

Who make money from war
Who make dough from fear and lies
Who want the world like it is
Who want the world to be ruled by imperialism and national oppression and terror
violence, and hunger and poverty.

Who is the ruler of Hell?
Who is the most powerful

Who you know ever
Seen God?

But everybody seen
The Devil

Like an Owl exploding
In your life in your brain in your self
Like an Owl who know the devil
All night, all day if you listen, Like an Owl
Exploding in fire. We hear the questions rise
In terrible flame like the whistle of a crazy dog

Like the acid vomit of the fire of Hell
Who and Who and WHO (+) who who ^
Whoooo and Whooooooooooooooooooooo!

Safe upon the solid rock

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay Millay, Edna, St. Vincent (22 Feb. 1892-19 Oct. 1950), poet, was born in the small town of Rockland, Maine, the daughter of Henry Tollman Millay, a schoolteacher, and Cora Buzzelle.


In 1900 Cora Millay divorced her husband for financial irresponsibility and soon thereafter moved to Camden, Maine, with Edna and her sisters. The hardworking mother supported them by nursing--often overnight--and encouraged her daughters to love reading and music and to be independent.


Millay attended public high school, where she wrote for and served as editor in chief of the school magazine (1905-1909). She also published several juvenile pieces in the St. Nicholas Magazine (1906-1910). Her first great poem, "Renascence," was published in an anthology called The Lyric Year in 1912.

When a Young Women's Christian Association education officer heard Millay read this poem, she helped obtain a scholarship for the talented girl to attend Vassar College. Millay took preparatory courses for one semester at Barnard College and then entered Vassar in 1913. While there she wrote poetry and plays (published in the Vassar Miscellany), acted, starred in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page, and studied literature and languages. Although she frequently rebelled against rules designed to protect female students, Millay graduated with an A.B. in 1917. That year Millay published Renascence and Other Poems.


She moved to New York City, where she acted with the Provincetown Players, lived impecuniously in Greenwich Village, and indulged in love affairs with several men, including the novelist Floyd Dell and, briefly, the married poet Arthur Davison Ficke.


She earned a little money by publishing short stories (under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd) and poems in Ainslee's magazine (1918-1921). In 1919 she wrote and directed a one-act, antiwar verse play with a fairy-tale motif titled Aria da Capo, for the Provincetown Players. During this period she also met the critic Edmund Wilson, at that time the managing editor of Vanity Fair, which had published some of her work (1920). Millay won a $100 prize from Poetry: A Magazine of Verse for "The Bean-Stalk" in 1920.

She also published her second book of verse, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920; rev. eds., 1921 and 1922), and Aria da Capo (1920), which sold well. With an agreement to write for Vanity Fair, the hardworking Millay enjoyed a varied sojourn in Europe from 1920 to 1923. In 1921 she published two more plays and a solid collection of poetry, Second April. Meanwhile, she had other love affairs, including a reported relationship with a French violinist that led to an abortion.


She encouraged but soon decided not to marry the poet Witter Bynner. After obtaining a $500 advance from Horace Liveright for a novel titled "Hardigut" that was never completed, she sent for her mother, and the two toured France and England; they then returned to New York. In 1923 Millay was honored as the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. I


n that same year she published The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems, and after a brief courtship she married the 43-year-old widower Eugen Jan Boissevain; they had no children. He was a burly American importer of Dutch-Irish extraction who was sensitively intelligent, profeminist, and considerate. Millay went on arduous reading tours and sailed around the world with her husband in 1924.


The couple bought and occupied "Steepletop," their permanent home on 700 acres of farmland near Austerlitz, New York, during 1925. Shortly thereafter Millay created the stirring libretto for The King's Henchman, Deems Taylor's splendid opera, which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera of New York in 1927 starring the American baritone Lawrence Tibbett. The libretto was published and went through four quick editions, reportedly earning Millay $100 a day for a while.

Later in 1927 Millay became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian-born anarchists and labor agitators, had been convicted in 1921 of the 1920 murder of two payroll guards in South Braintree, Massachusetts. The verdict was challenged by those who felt that the two were being persecuted for their history as social activists and anarchists.


Although questions about their innocence remained, they were executed on 23 August 1927. Millay and many other intellectuals had joined in a sensational protest, in which she personally appealed to Governor Alvan T. Fuller and was arrested and jailed for joining the "death watch." In response, Millay wrote and published "Justice Denied in Massachusetts" (New York Times, 22 Aug. 1927). Her involvement in the protest was evidence of her long-standing sympathy for the socialistic aspects of communism.


Despite or perhaps partly because of this notoriety, many honors came to Millay, including her election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1929) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1940). During approximately this same period, however, three deaths severely depressed her. Her close friend, the poet Elinor Wylie, died in 1928, her mother died in 1931, and her estranged father died in 1935. Given her psychological makeup, Millay had found the ideal husband in Boissevain.


He attended to all the household chores, traveled widely with his "Vincent"--often to Florida, the Riviera, and Spain--and cooperated with her intellectual and linguistic interests. He catered to her whims and even condoned her having an occasional lover. One, George Dillon, who was fourteen years her junior and whom she met in 1928 while giving a reading at the University of Chicago, inspired Fatal Interview (1931), a 52-sonnet sequence. In one sonnet she snarls: "Love me no more, now let the god depart, / If love be grown so bitter to your tongue!"


Nonetheless, Dillon and Millay collaborated later on translations from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1936). Still later, in a sonnet in Huntsman, What Quarry? (1939), she says, "As God's my judge, I do cry holy, holy, / Upon the name of love however brief." Beginning in 1933, Millay and her husband enjoyed summer retreats on tiny Ragged Island, having bought the 85-acre spot in Casco Bay, Maine. Her other pre-World War II works include The Buck in the Snow (1928), Wine from These Grapes (1934), and Conversation at Midnight (1937); the original, unique manuscript of this dialogue of seven men was burned in a Sanibel Island hotel fire a year earlier.


In Huntsman, What Quarry? Millay had included stirring poems against the brutalities of Fascist Spain, Nazi Germany, and imperialistic Japan. Other events, such as Italy's attacks on Ethiopia and the German-Russian nonaggression treaty, caused the once-pacifist poet to call for preparedness and then to dash off pro-British and pro-French propaganda verse. Most of her poetry of World War II, much of which she collected in Make Bright the Arrows: 1940 Notebook (1940), has proved vapid, but a memorable exception is The Murder of Lidice (1942).


This long, dramatic verse narrative is based on the depraved German army butchery of an entire Czech village. In 1944 Millay suffered a nervous breakdown and was unable to write for two years. During this time and later, her husband catered to her so selflessly that he depleted his own reserves of strength and died in 1949 of lung cancer followed by surgery and a stroke.


Millay, who with her husband had drunk to excess since the 1930s, evidently grew more dependent on alcohol during her brief, inconsolable widowhood. She died sitting at the foot of her staircase, alone, at Steepletop. Millay is the poetic voice of eternal youth, feminine revolt and liberation, and potent sensitivity and suggestiveness.


Her best and most representative themes are bittersweet love, sorrow, the inevitability of change, resignation, death, and ever-abiding nature. One of her very best poems is her early, mystical "Renascence," about spiritual interment and resurrection through the cycles of nature. It smoothly combines naiveté and profundity and modern and archaic diction.


In "Afternoon on a Hill" (published in Renascence [1917]) the delicate persona says, "I will touch a hundred flowers / And not pick one." She occasionally takes a snide tone in A Few Figs from Thistles (1920); for example, she begins one sonnet with these lines: "I shall forget you presently, my dear, / So make the most of this, your little day." But the collection also includes "Recuerdo," which memorably describes the dawn that a happy couple sees from a ferryboat: "The sky went wan, and the wind came cold, / And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold." Second April (1921) contains tender elegies to a Vassar friend who died of influenza in 1918. "


The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver," the technically brilliant title poem of Millay's 1923 collection, dramatizes a mother's love: a woman too poor to provide necessities for her little son weaves clothes for him by magically playing her harp. In the same book "The Spring and the Fall" bitterly contrasts a lover's vernal attention and his autumnal gibes and concludes that "'Tis not love's going hurts my days, / But that it went in little ways." The Buck in the Snow (1928) proved unpopular, perhaps because it features much experimental verse; for example, "The Pigeons" contains one line of twenty-five syllables. Her imagery grows startling, as when in "On First Having Heard the Skylark" the bird's cry is "like a crystal dart." The bitter philosophical poems in Wine from These Grapes (1934) are well represented by "Apostrophe to Man," in which, seeming to anticipate World War II, Millay exhorts everyone to "expunge yourself, die out, / Homo called sapiens."


The mounted huntsman in the terse title poem of Huntsman, What Quarry? is tempted to enjoy "a one-night's bride" but decides instead to go kill the fox. Notable from the posthumous Mine the Harvest (1954) are Millay's delight that "thought unbraids itself" ("Ragged Island"), her conceited disgust with time-consuming visitors--"What chores these churls do put upon the great" ("Cave Canem"), and Christ's warning to His followers, "No shelter will be found / Save in my shadow" ("Jesus to His Disciples"). Millay will always be remembered for her flippant quatrain, which she titled "First Fig" (1920): My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends--
It gives a lovely light! She should also be remembered, however, for her "Second Fig" (1920): "Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come see my shining palace built upon the sand!" Her "shining" poetry should never fall out of fashion. Its lyricism, praise of beauty, freedom, and individualism, and technical virtuosity are timeless. Most of Millay's papers are at the New York Public Library, Yale University, and the Library of Congress. See also Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (1952). Primary and secondary bibliographies are Karl Yost, A Bibliography of the Works of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1937); John J. Patton, "A Comprehensive Bibliography of Criticism of Edna St. Vincent Millay," Serif 5 (Sept. 1968): 10-32; and Judith Nierman, Edna St. Vincent Millay: A Reference Guide (1977). Biographical studies include Jean Gould, The Poet and Her Book: A Biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay (1969); Joan Dash, A Life of One's Own: Three Gifted Women and the Men They Married (1973); and Anne Chaney, Millay in Greenwich Village (1975). The best critical study is Norman A. Brittin, Edna St. Vincent Millay (1967; rev. ed., 1982). Discerning evaluations of Millay's early poetry are in Alfred Kreymborg, Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) (1929), while generally derogatory comments are in Hyatt H. Waggoner, American Poets from the Puritans to the Present (1968; rev. ed., 1984). Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, ed. Colin Falck (1991), provides a provocative introduction. David Felix, Protest: Sacco-Vanzetti and the Intellectuals (1965), chronicles the crime, trial, reviews, and executions and concludes that both men were probably guilty. Katherine Anne Porter, The Never-Ending Wrong (1977), describes the actions of the protestors, including Millay and Porter herself, during the Sacco-Vanzetti tragedy. An obituary is in the New York Times, 20 Oct. 1950.

Salty humor in a sad heart

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was an American writer and poet, born Dorothy Rothschild to Jacob Henry and Eliza Annie Rothschild Eliza Annie(née Marston) at 732 Ocean Avenue in the West End village of Long Branch, New Jersey, where her parents had a summer beach cottage. Dorothy's mother was of Scottish descent, and her father was of German-Jewish descent (unrelated, however, to the Rothschild banking dynasty).


Her mother died in West End in July 1898, when Parker was a month shy of turning five. Her father remarried, in 1900, a woman named Eleanor Francis Lewis. Parker detested her father and stepmother, accusing her father of being physically abusive and refusing to call Eleanor either "mother" or "stepmother," instead referring to her as "the housekeeper." grew up on the Upper West Side, and attended Roman Catholic elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament, despite having a Jewish father and Protestant stepmother.

She was asked to leave following her characterization of the Immaculate Conception as "spontaneous combustion." Her stepmother died in 1903, when Parker was nine. Parker later went to Miss Dana's School, a finishing school in Morristown, New Jersey. Her formal education ended when she was 13. Her father died in 1913. Following his death, she played piano at a dancing school to earn a living while she worked on her verse.


She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, she met and married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II (March 28, 1893 in Hartford, Connecticut - ?), but they were separated by his army service in World War I.


She had ambiguous feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In 1919, her career took off while writing theatre criticism for Vanity Fair, which she began in 1918 as a stand-in for the vacationing P. G. Wodehouse. At the magazine she met Robert Benchley, who became a close friend, and Robert E. Sherwood.


The trio began lunching at the Algonquin Hotel on a near-daily basis and became founding members of the Algonquin Round Table. The Round Table numbered among its members the newspaper columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Alexander Woollcott. Through their re-printing of her lunchtime remarks and short verses, particularly in Adams' column "The Conning Tower," Dorothy began developing a national reputation as a wit.


Parker's caustic wit as a critic initially proved popular, but she was eventually terminated by Vanity Fair in 1920 after her criticisms began to offend powerful producers too often. In solidarity, both Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, she and Benchley were part of a "board of editors" established by Ross to allay concerns of his investors. Parker's first piece for the magazine appeared in its second issue.


Parker became famous for her short, viciously humorous poems, many about the perceived ludicrousness of her many (largely unsuccessful) romantic affairs and others wistfully considering the appeal of suicide. Her greatest period of productivity and success came in the next 15 years.


In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. Parker published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies and garnered impressive reviews.


The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity." Although some critics, notably the New York Times, dismissed her work as "flapper verse," the volume helped cement her status, as the New York World review put it, as "one of the most sparkling wits who express themselves through light verse."

Parker released two more volumes of verse, Sunset Gun (1927) and Death and Taxes (1931), along with the short story collections Laments for the Living (1930) and After Such Pleasures (1933). Not So Deep as a Well (1936) collected much of the material previously published in Rope, Gun and Death and she re-released the fiction with a few new pieces in 1939 under the title Here Lies.


In 1924, Parker collaborated with fellow Algonquinite George S. Kaufman on a one-act play, Business is Business. She next collaborated with playwright Elmer Rice to create Close Harmony. The play was well received in out-of-town previews and was favorably reviewed in New York but closed after a run of just 24 performances. It did, however, become a successful touring production under the title The Lady Next Door.


Some of her most popular work was published in The New Yorker in the form of acerbic book reviews under the byline "Constant Reader" (her response to a moment of whimsy in A. A. Milne's The House at Pooh Corner: "Tonstant Weader fwowed up.").

Her reviews appeared semi-regularly from 1927 to 1933, were widely read, and were later published in a collection under the name Constant Reader in 1970. Her best-known short story, "Big Blonde", published in The Bookman magazine, was awarded the O. Henry Award as the best short story of 1929.

Her short stories, though often witty, were also spare and incisive, and more bittersweet than comic. She eventually separated from her husband and had a number of affairs, including with reporter-turned-playwright Charles MacArthur and the publisher Seward Collins.


Her relationship with MacArthur resulted in a pregnancy, which Parker aborted, and a depression that culminated in her first attempt at suicide. Edwin and she divorced in 1928. It was toward the end of this period that Parker began to become politically aware and active. What would become a lifelong commitment to left-leaning causes began in 1927 with the pending executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.


Parker travelled to Boston to protest the proceedings. She and fellow Round Tabler Ruth Hale were arrested, and Parker eventually pleaded guilty to a charge of "loitering and sauntering," paying a $5 fine. In 1934, she married Alan Campbell, an actor with aspirations of being a screenwriter. (Like Parker, he was half-Jewish and half-Scottish.)


He was reputed to be bisexual—indeed, Parker did some of the reputing by claiming in public that he was "queer as a billy goat". The pair moved to Hollywood and signed ten-week contracts with Paramount Pictures, with Campbell (who was also expected to act) earning $250 per week and Parker earning $1,000 per week.


They would eventually earn $2,000 and in some instances upwards of $5,000 per week as freelancers for various studios. She and Campbell worked on more than 15 films. In 1936, she contributed lyrics for the song "I Wished on the Moon", with music by Ralph Rainger. The song was introduced in the The Big Broadcast of 1936 by Bing Crosby. With Robert Carson and Campbell, she wrote the script for the 1937 film A Star is Born, for which they were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing - Screenplay.


She wrote additional dialogue for The Little Foxes in 1941 and received another Oscar nomination, with Frank Cavett, for 1947's Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman. In 1944, Parker and Alexander Woollcott collaborated to produce an anthology of her work as part of a series published by Viking Press for servicemen stationed overseas.


With an introduction by Somerset Maugham the volume compiled over two dozen of Parker's short stories along with selected poems from Enough Rope, Sunset Gun, and Death and Taxes. It was released in the United States under the title The Portable Dorothy Parker. Parker's is one of only three of the Portable series (the other two being William Shakespeare and The Bible) to remain continuously in print.


During the 1930s and 1940s period, Parker became a more vocal advocate of increasingly radical left-wing causes, a fierce civil libertarian and civil rights advocate and a frequent critic of those in authority. She reported on the Loyalist cause in Spain for the Communist New Masses magazine in 1937. At the behest of Otto Katz, a covert Soviet Comintern agent and operative of German Communist Party agent Willi Muenzenberg, Parker helped to found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League in 1936.


The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League's membership eventually grew to some 4,000 strong, whose often wealthy but mostly unsuspecting members were, in the words of David Caute, "able to contribute as much to [Communist] Party funds as the whole American working class."


Parker also served as chair of the Joint Anti-Fascist Rescue Committee. She organized Project Rescue Ship to transport Loyalist veterans to Mexico, headed Spanish Children's Relief and lent her name to many other left-wing causes and organizations. Her former Round Table friends saw less and less of her, with her relationship with Robert Benchley being particularly strained (although they would reconcile).


Her marriage with Campbell was tempestuous, with tensions exacerbated by Parker's increasing alcohol consumption and Alan's long-term affair with a married woman while he was in Europe during World War II. They divorced in 1947, then remarried in 1950, and remained married (although they lived apart from 1952–1961) until his death in 1963 in West Hollywood.


Parker's final screenplay was The Fan, a 1949 adaptation of Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, directed by Otto Preminger. Parker was heard occasionally on radio, including Information Please (as a guest) and Author, Author (as a regular panelist). She wrote for the Columbia Workshop, and both Ilka Chase and Tallulah Bankhead used her material for radio monologues. Parker was listed as a Communist by the publication Red Channels in 1950.


The FBI compiled a 1,000-page dossier on her because of her suspected involvement in Communism during the McCarthy era. As a result, she was placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the movie studio bosses. In 1952 Parker moved back to New York, into the Volney residential hotel. She drew upon her experiences there to co-write, with Arnaud d'Usseau, the play Ladies of the Corridor. The play opened in October 1953 to uneven reviews and closed after six weeks. From 1957 to 1962 she wrote book reviews for Esquire, though these pieces were increasingly erratic owing to her continued abuse of alcohol.


Her favorable nod gave Ellison a foothold with both mainstream publishers and film producers, and shortly afterwards he headed for Hollywood. In 1961 Parker returned to Hollywood and reconciled with Campbell.


They worked together on a number of unproduced projects; among her last was an unproduced film for Marilyn Monroe. Parker found Campbell dead in their home in 1963, a suicide by drug overdose. Following Campbell's death, Parker returned to New York City and the Volney.


In her later years, she would come to denigrate the group that had brought her such early notoriety, the Algonquin Round Table: Parker died of a heart attack at the age of 73 in 1967. In her will, she bequeathed her estate to the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation. Following King's death, her estate was passed on to the NAACP.


Her executrix, Lillian Hellman, bitterly but unsuccessfully contested this disposition. Her ashes remained unclaimed in various places, including her attorney Paul O'Dwyer's filing cabinet, for approximately 17 years.

Hollow generation

Dahlia Ravikovitch


Dahlia Ravikovitch was born on November 27, 1936. Her father, Levy (Leo) Ravikovitch, was an engineer who loved poetry and who arrived in Palestine from Harbin, China, where he was the commander of a Betar (Revisionist youth movement) unit. He married Michal, a student in the Mizrahi teachers college for women, who became an educator in the land settlement movement. Dahlia Ravikovitch had a strong bond with her parents. She wanted to be Daddy's clever girl, and he identified and was amazed at her ability to read and write at the age of three.

On September 9, 1940, Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv. More than 100 people were killed and many wounded. Four-year-old Dahlia and her mother were on the street at the time of the air raid.


When Dahlia was five and a half, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Ahikam and Amiram. When she was six, her father was killed when he was hit by a car on Jabotinsky Street in Ramat Gan. For two years the news of her father's death was kept from Dahlia. "On that day the family fell apart," she wrote years later (in the short story "A Brief History of Michal," in the collection "Come and Gone," Modan, 2005). In her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange" (1959), she described her father as a silent figure standing on the road all night and her need to approach him every night, because she is his first-born, without having a choice in the matter, while he is unable to utter even one word of love.



Already during the week of mourning for their husband and father, Michal was persuaded to move to Kibbutz Geva with Dahlia and the twins, who were then a year and a half old. Michal remarried, but Dahlia never adjusted to life on the kibbutz.

In 1965, when Ravikovitch was already an established poet, her mother, Michal Gur Aryeh, was still settling accounts with Kibbutz Geva over the treatment of her daughter some 20 years earlier. When she heard that N., one of Dahlia's homeroom teachers - who had supported the actions taken with respect to the child at the time - was about to be appointed principal of an educational institution, she lost no time protesting:

I am writing this letter not because I am the mother who sat and cried to H., so he would take back what he said to the children - 'Do what you will to her, because she will go to the city,' and he replied, 'But that is what I really think' (the reference was to Dahlia, and this was the period of the 'personality cult' of H. in Geva) - but mainly because of my deep shock (from which I have not recovered to this day, and I simply tremble when I remember his words) at the case of N., who is going to head a large educational institution for youth today and not in the 1940s or 1950s!

To purify an abomination - what is needed for that: Naivete? Blind faith? Or perhaps something that is far from what can be called 'good-heartedness' and the strength to admit to my badness if it is bad? And for this my heart is mournful.

All the best!

A notebook of poems that Ravikovitch wrote at the age of 12, found in her estate, contains a lengthy, rather gloomy poem ("Please don't read!" she jotted on the inside part of the page). These lines appear on the first of the poem's three pages:


And the time here passes in quarreling / In melancholy, murky loneliness ... And my life here is sorrow and tears / And sadness prevails here.

Even at that early stage, Ravikovitch attests, poetry had become her solace and avocation. At the end of this poem she makes a wish:

To create even one / Work that will light up the world ... / To immerse myself in creating / To contain my soul within it / And do not return to the body / And let not my fire go out / A work even if only one / That will cast light for all time to come / And to remain thus forever / Thus, always in the heights / Let it come only once / Let the tide come / I will express myself / And after will die ...



Dahlia left Kibbutz Geva at the age of 13 with her mother's consent. After completing high school, while going through five foster families in Haifa and continuing to write constantly, she entered the army. Military service made it possible for her to read and write, she related, but after eight months she was discharged for psychological reasons.


She liked to tell about her first visit to the home of the renowned poet Lea Goldberg, to show her poems she had written. How she arrived early and waited outside, tense and thrilled, for the appointed time. Goldberg chose three poems, which were published in the paper.

A scholarship enabled Ravikovitch to attend the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied Hebrew language, and both English and Hebrew literature. To make ends meet she worked as a high-school teacher. She pursued her studies for three years, but did not obtain a degree. In 1959 her first book of poetry, "The Love of an Orange," drew critical praise. The critic Baruch Kurzweil, known for his rigorous standards, wrote in Haaretz that her poems "bear the seal of originality. And even the recalcitrant exoticism of her poetry ... is an integral part of her poetic world, of her singular reality which rises to true poetry."


At the age of 24 Ravikovitch married the playwright Yosef Bar Yosef; they separated after three months. Two years later, in 1962, she married Yitzhak Livni (later the director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority). The marriage ended in divorce three years later, but the two remained close friends until her death.

In 1964 her second book, "A Hard Winter," appeared and drew another laudatory appreciation from Kurzweil. "Sometimes I have the feeling," Ravikovitch said that year, "that my poems are better than me. I very much agree with the things I write. They do not surprise me, but they have the power to lift me above myself."

Among her other books of poetry [in Hebrew] are "The Third Book" (1969), "Calleth Unto Deep" (1976), "Real Love" (1987) and "Half an Hour Before the Monsoon" (1998). Interspersed with the poetry were short-story collections: "Death in the Family" (1976), "Winnie Mandela's Football Team" (1997) and "Come and Gone" (2005). She also wrote song lyrics and poems and stories for children, and translated poetry and children's books.

Prizes were for her a type of essential economic remuneration, as there were periods in which she found herself in dire economic straits. She was the recipient of the Bialik Prize (1978), the Shlonsky Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers (2005), and also was accorded the country's highest honor, the Israel Prize (1998). The prize's judges noted in their citation: "Ravikovitch is one of the pillars of Hebrew lyric poetry."

In 1978 Dahlia Ravikovitch gave birth to a baby boy; the father was Haim Kalir, a lawyer, with whom Ravikovitch lived for about 13 years. After they separated, her son, Ido, was placed in the custody of his father, by court order. The boy's relations with his mother, which suffered ups and downs but also saw some wonderful moments, engendered no few poems.

She wanted a C-section, because "the thought that I will lie on my back and scream, while being completely dependent on outside help, seems to me nightmarish. As Momo, the hero of Emile Ajar's book 'A Life Ahead,' remarks, the laws of nature are not such as to make it possible to rely on them," she wrote in a short article, excerpts from which are here published for the first time:

Apparently at 9:40 (because this is what the birth certificate states) I heard the crying of an infant in the room. A view of the room was blocked by an opaque curtain, as is undoubtedly the custom when the person undergoing surgery remains conscious. I might have been able to understand that the infant was mine, but because of that burden of thought, like bad hashish, I didn't really think thoughts. The flow of time was weird, too - both fast and slow.

I don't remember how many minutes passed until a diapered infant was placed on my bed next to my head and I only hoped that someone would take him from me quickly, because I was totally helpless and an infant must not be left for a second in the responsibility of a helpless adult. I was not curious to know what the boy looked like, because I had complete trust in him. A week later I received the birth certificate. It said: 'Male child born weighing 3.300 kilograms.' I never had a wish in my life that was realized in full and in a form that is absolutely the epitome of beauty (and I do not mean the beauty of the boy, about which there is also nothing to complain about) like that child, whose eyes were brown and whose head was covered with fairly long hair ...

And I - I had no further wishes for him. I did not hope that he would grow up and discover a cure for cancer or circle the world in a hot-air balloon or be a gifted child or the director general of the National Lottery, which is a far less prestigious job than the aforementioned ones, but nevertheless pays pretty well. I wanted that in all the days of his life to come, he would know satisfying contentment so that I would be pleased that he had been born, and that I would be a sufficiently good mother to contribute my share to that contentment, and henceforth begins a story which is already not mine and I have no right to tell it, and I trust my son to have enough words to tell his story.

But along with the moments of grace, depression battered Ravikovitch from an early age - the death of her father, life on kibbutz, the loneliness in Haifa, her distinctive personality make-up, the endless hunger for love. Ravikovitch suffered from depression during much of her life and gave this expression in her writing, which deals not only with love and motherhood, but zeroes in also on the bereavement, the suffering and the despair, which in her case was existential.

In interviews she talked about the depression and the hospitalizations and the suicide attempts. Dahlia Ravikovitch died on August 12, 2005, in her home in Tel Aviv. Her death was sudden and came as a shock to many. The initial conjecture was that she had committed suicide.

Her fragility and vulnerability were a central axis of her poetry and her life. But the coroner's report found that she had not taken her own life; the autopsy did not find an unusual quantity of medicines in her body. The conclusion was that "her death was probably caused by acute failure of the heart." She was only 69. Wise, beautiful, versed in suffering. Revered poet, writer and translator.



One of the poems in the estate is "Leaving Home," which describes the difficulty of meeting the expectations of a "normal" family woman. The poem was to have appeared in her collection "Real Love," but Ravikovitch left it in the notebook, probably because it was not fully polished. An excerpt: (Courtesy:Haartezz.com)