William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

William Butler Yeats 

(1865-1939)

Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865, William Butler Yeats was the son of a well-known Irish painter, John Butler Yeats. He spent his childhood in County Sligo, where his parents were raised, and in London. He returned to Dublin at the age of fifteen to continue his education and study painting, but quickly discovered he preferred poetry. Born into the Anglo-Irish landowning class, Yeats became involved with the Celtic Revival, a movement against the cultural influences of English rule in Ireland during the Victorian period, which sought to promote the spirit of Ireland's native heritage. Though Yeats never learned Gaelic himself, his writing at the turn of the century drew extensively from sources in Irish mythology and folklore. Also a potent influence on his poetry was the Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889, a woman equally famous for her passionate nationalist politics and her beauty. Though she married another man in 1903 and grew apart from Yeats (and Yeats himself was eventually married to another woman, Georgie Hyde Lees), she remained a powerful figure in his poetry.

Yeats was deeply involved in politics in Ireland, and in the twenties, despite Irish independence from England, his verse reflected a pessimism about the political situation in his country and the rest of Europe, paralleling the increasing conservativism of his American counterparts in London, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. His work after 1910 was strongly influenced by Pound, becoming more modern in its concision and imagery, but Yeats never abandoned his strict adherence to traditional verse forms. He had a life-long interest in mysticism and the occult, which was off-putting to some readers, but he remained uninhibited in advancing his idiosyncratic philosophy, and his poetry continued to grow stronger as he grew older. Appointed a senator of the Irish Free State in 1922, he is remembered as an important cultural leader, as a major playwright (he was one of the founders of the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin), and as one of the very greatest poets—in any language—of the century. W. B. Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 and died in 1939 at the age of 73.

The Second Coming

LISTEN TO THE POEM:

LISTEN TO THE LECTURE ABOUT THE POEM:

LINKS TO FOLLOW:

ANALYSIS

EXPLICATION

THE SECOND COMING AND A VISION 

STUDY GUIDE

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why do you think Yeats put so many confusing symbols in the poem? Many poets, when they use symbolism, try to make everything relate to each other. But what does falconing have to do with a sphinx or a "blood-dimmed tide," and what does either of them have to do with a sphinx and the "indignant desert birds"? Most people who read this poem want to make these things correspond to something real in the world. But we have to consider that Yeats did not want his poem to be interpreted in this way.
2. How would you explain the poem’s relationship to the Bible? Most of the symbols are very general and timeless, like something out of the Book of Revelation. But it’s also easy to tell that this is notthe Bible. For one thing, Christ doesn’t show up at the end, but a "rough beast." Does the poet sound like a religious man, and, if so, what kind?
3. Why does Yeats think of history as this swirling vortex, the gyre? Because the gyre moves further and further from its center, does it mean that things are always getting worse? It should be mentioned that Yeats’s idea was highly original and not shared by everyone. There are still plenty of people, even today, who think that history is linear (except for a few blips like wars), and that society is constantly improving itself.
4. Is it possible that the appearance of the "rough beast" could be good for the world, in the end? After all, if the world is already so violent that "innocence is drowned," things can’t get much direr. Maybe Yeats thinks it’s like tearing down an old building in order to put up a new one. But, then again, there’s nothing in the poem about society rebuilding itself.
5. Do you think the poem could apply to the entire world, or is it only intended for Christian Europe? People in other civilizations, for example the Middle East, have found this to be a very compelling poem, and they have made it fit into their own views of history. Maybe it speaks most directly to people with an "apocalyptic" outlook, who think that big, sweeping changes are on the horizon.

W.H.Auden (1907-1973)

"Musee des Beaux Arts"

W.H.Auden 

(1907-1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England, in 1907. He moved to Birmingham during childhood and was educated at Christ Church, Oxford. As a young man he was influenced by the poetry of Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost, as well as William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Old English verse. At Oxford his precocity as a poet was immediately apparent, and he formed lifelong friendships with two fellow writers, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood.

In 1928, his collection Poems was privately printed, but it wasn't until 1930, when another collection titled Poems (though its contents were different) was published, that Auden was established as the leading voice of a new generation.

Ever since, he has been admired for his unsurpassed technical virtuosity and an ability to write poems in nearly every imaginable verse form; the incorporation in his work of popular culture, current events, and vernacular speech; and also for the vast range of his intellect, which drew easily from an extraordinary variety of literatures, art forms, social and political theories, and scientific and technical information. He had a remarkable wit, and often mimicked the writing styles of other poets such as Dickinson, W. B. Yeats, and Henry James. His poetry frequently recounts, literally or metaphorically, a journey or quest, and his travels provided rich material for his verse.

He visited Germany, Iceland, and China, served in the Spanish Civil war, and in 1939 moved to the United States, where he met his lover, Chester Kallman, and became an American citizen. His own beliefs changed radically between his youthful career in England, when he was an ardent advocate of socialism and Freudian psychoanalysis, and his later phase in America, when his central preoccupation became Christianity and the theology of modern Protestant theologians. A prolific writer, Auden was also a noted playwright, librettist, editor, and essayist. Generally considered the greatest English poet of the twentieth century, his work has exerted a major influence on succeeding generations of poets on both sides of the Atlantic.

W. H. Auden was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1954 to 1973, and divided most of the second half of his life between residences in New York City and Austria. He died in Vienna in 1973.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Poems (privately printed, 1928)
Poems (1930)
The Orators prose and verse (1932)
Look, Stranger! in America: On This Island (1936)
Spain (1937)
Another Time (1940)
The Double Man (1941)
The Quest (1941)
For the Time Being (1944)
The Sea and the Mirror (1944)
Collected Poetry (1945)
The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (1947)
Collected Shorter Poems 1930-1944 (1950)
Nones (1952)
The Shield of Achilles (1955)
Selected Poetry (1956)
The Old Man's Road (1956)
Homage to Clio (1960)
About the House About the House (1965)
Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (1966)
Collected Longer Poems (1968)
City without Walls (1969)
Academic Graffiti (1971)
Epistle to a Godson (1972)
Thank You, Fog: Last Poems (1974)
Selected Poems (1979)
Collected Poems (1991)

Prose

Letters from Iceland (1937)
Journey to a War (1939)
Enchaféd Flood (1950)
The Dyer's Hand (1962)
Selected Essays (1964)
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

Anthology

Selected Poems by Gunnar Ekelöf (1972)

Drama

Paid On Both Sides (1928)
The Dance of Death (1933)
The Dog Beneath the Skin: or, Where is Francis? (1935)
The Ascent of F.6 (1936)
On the Frontier (1938)

About Pieter Bruegel,  the Elder  ( [ˈpitəɾ ˈbɾøːɣəl] 1525 – 1569)

WebMuseum

WikiPaintings

Listen to the poem "Musee des Beaux  Arts"

About the poem:

Allusions

Paintings with Biblical allusions:

The Census  at Bethlehem, based on Luke 2:1-5

"[Bruegel] depicted a Flemish village on a cold December evening; the red ball of the setting sun has begun to slip behind the trees at the left.  Peasants trudge through the ice and snow from all directions, converging on the inn at lower left, where a crowd has already gathered to pay its taxes.  Amid the bustle, no one notices the presence of Joseph leading the Virgin on a mule." (144)

                                              The Massacre of the Innocents  

"[Here] another peasant village has been invaded by an army of soldiers who carry out Herod's command with cold-blooded efficiency.  The villagers protest and plead in vain as their children are slaughtered before their eyes.  This grim business is supervised by a detachment of armoured knights in the centre, led by a sinister grey bearded man dressed in black, perhaps Herod himself, .." (Gibson,144)
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus 

The literary source is the myth about the great Greek engineer Daedalus, who, as a slave, worked for King Minos at Crete, and among other things constructed the famous Labyrinth for him. His most passionate desire was to get freedom, he constructed wings for his son, Icarus, and himself to fly away from Crete. Icarus ignored his father’s warning not to fly high; there the sun melted the wax, which fastened the feathers of the wings, and Icarus fell into the sea. Only the legs of Icarus could be seen in the right bottom corner of the painting. The painting also refers to the Flemish proverb ‘No plough stops because a man dies’.

Listen to the analysis of the poem:

Links to follow:

Analysis 1

Analysis 2

Analysis 3
Analysis 4

Commentary

 You can listen to the lecture from Yale University here

Listen to the poem again and study the questions below: 

QUESTIONS FOR UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYSIS

1. This poem by Auden seems to allude to three paintings. Of the three paintings reproduced above, which painting do lines 5-8 refer to? Which painting do lines 9-13 refer to? Which painting do the remaining lines refer to? How do the first four lines relate to all three of these paintings?
2. Briefly, what is the mythological story about Icarus? What part of that story is expressed in Breughel's painting about Icarus?
3. Both the first and the second stanzas are about the position of human suffering in life, or the concurrence of grand human suffering and the daily (and sometimes trivial) activities.  (The "its" and "it" in line 3 refers to human suffering and aspiration.)
4. a. What are the examples of human suffering in the first stanza?  How are they set in contrast to the daily activities of human beings or even animals?   For the speaker, these two kinds of events concur and the "Old Masters" know it.  What is the speaker's attitude toward this concurrence, and toward the Old Master?  (Pay special attention to the depiction of the children, the dogs, and the horse.)
5. b. The human suffering in the second stanza is Icarus's failed aspiration.   But in this stanza, as well as in Brueghel's painting, the focus is not so much on Icarus' aspiration/suffering (his "forsaken cry" and disappearing "white legs") as on the plowman's, the sun's and the ship's indifference to it.  Why?  And what do the speaker of the poem and the painter think about this indifference?
6. When you first read this poem, you probably did not notice the rhymes. Go back over the poem now and identify the rhyming words. How do these almost hidden rhymes relate to the meaning of the poem? Do they suggest something about the possibility for order in a world that appears disorderly?
7. Do you see other patterns of order in the poem?
8. What do the poem and paintings suggest about art and nature?
9. How would "Musée des Beaux Arts" be different if the speaker let us know more about his own thoughts and feelings?
10. Is this a poem about Icarus's flight? Or about something else? (Put another way, who's the main character in this poem?)
11. Why is the title important?

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Ernest Hemingway, famous author and journalist, was born in the affluent Chicago suburb of Oak Park, Illinois, on July 21, 1899. His father was a doctor; his mother, a musician. He was named after his maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall. As a young man, he was interested in writing; he wrote for and edited his high school’s newspaper, as well as the high school yearbook. Upon graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked for the Kansas City Star newspaper briefly, but in that short time, he learned the writing style that would shape nearly all of his future work.

As an ambulance driver in Italy during World War I, Ernest Hemingway was wounded and spent several months in the hospital. While there, he met and fell in love with a Red Cross nurse named Agnes von Kurowsky. They planned to marry; however, she became engaged to an Italian officer instead. This experience devastated Hemingway, and Agnes became the basis for the female characters in his subsequent short stories “A Very Short Story” (1925) and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), as well as the famous novel “A Farewell To Arms” (1929). This would also start a pattern Ernest would repeat for the rest of his life – leaving women before they had the chance to leave him first.

Ernest Hemingway began work as a journalist upon moving to Paris in the early 1920s, but he still found time to write. He was at his most prolific in the 20s and 30s. His first short story collection, aptly titled “Three Stories and Ten Poems,” was published in 1923. His next short story collection, “In Our Time,” published in 1925, was the formal introduction of the vaunted Hemingway style to the rest of the world, and considered one of the most important works of 20th century prose. He would then go on to write some of the most famous works of the 20th century, including “A Farewell to Arms,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” and “The Old Man and the Sea.” He also won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.

Ernest Hemingway lived most of his later years in Idaho. He began to suffer from paranoia, believing the FBI was aggressively monitoring him. In November of 1960 he began frequent trips to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for electroconvulsive therapy – colloquially known as “shock treatments.” He had his final treatment on June 30, 1961. Two days later, on July 2, 1961, he committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth with a twelve-gauge shotgun. He was a few weeks short of his 62nd birthday. This wound up being a recurring trend in his family; his father, as well as his brother and sister, also died by committing suicide. The legend of Hemingway looms large, and his writing style is so unique that it left a legacy in literature that will endure forever.

Here's a list of the major works of Ernest Hemingway.

Novels/Novella

• The Torrents of Spring (1925)
• The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• A Farewell to Arms (1929)
• To Have and Have Not(1937)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
• Across the River and Into the Trees (1950)
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• Adventures of a Young Man (1962)
• Islands in the Stream (1970)
• The Garden of Eden (1986)

Nonfiction

• Death in the Afternoon (1932)
• Green Hills of Africa (1935)
• The Dangerous Summer (1960)
• A Moveable Feast (1964)

Short Story Collections

• Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923)
• In Our Time (1925)
• Men Without Women (1927)
• The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1932)
• Winner Take Nothing (1933)
• The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938)
• The Essential Hemingway (1947)
• The Hemingway Reader (1953)
• The Nick Adams Stories (1972)

Read more about E.Hemingway:

Life and Works

Listen to Hemingway's Nobel Prize Acceptance speech

Go to these links to get ready for our discussion: 

Cat in the Rain

Analysis 1

Analysis 2

Analysis 3

Analysis 4

Symbolism

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1.      Read the opening paragraph of the story closely and discuss how it helps to set the tone of the story and how it provides the readers with the theme(s) of the story. For example: Why are there only two Americans stopping at the hotel? What do “the public garden” and “the war monument stand” for in the story? What is the importance of the emphasis on the weather in the opening paragraph? What is the symbolic value of the artists? What is the reason for the narrator’s emphasis on the emptiness of the square?

2.      What is the significance of the rain in the story?

3.      Identify what the female protagonist is called in the whole story and discuss in what ways this could be significant.

4.      Why does the narrator describe the cat as “crouched under one of the dripping green tables”?

5.      Make a comparison between George and the hotel keeper. What is the function of each of these characters in the story?

6.      What could be the metaphorical value of the maid’s question to the wife: “Ha perduto qualque cosa, Signoria?” (“Have you lost something, Madam?”)

7.      Why does the hotel keeper make the American wife “feel very small and at the same time really important”?

8.  Discuss the references to the wife’s hair: Why does George like his wife’s hair “the way it is”? Why does the wife want to “make a big knot at the back”?

9.  There are two cats in the story. What does each of them symbolize? Why does the wife want a kitty to sit on her lap and purr?

10.  Extension Activity:
Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory”: Hemingway views his writing style as “fashioned on the “principle of the iceberg,” for “seven eights of it [is] under water for every part that shows” (cited in Thomas Strychacz, 1999,  in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson (Ed.), p. 59). In other words, as Hemingway said, “You could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (cited in Elizabeth Dewberry, 1999, in The Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, Scott Donaldson, Ed., p. 23)
Discuss Hemingway’s metaphor of “iceberg” in relation to his short story “Cat in the Rain”.

The Killers

Link 1

Link 2

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1. Author and critic Robert Penn Warren raised this question: "To whom does ‘The Killers’ belong?" and concluded that the answer was "Nick Adams." Is he right? Who and what is this story really about?
2. Which character does the reader most identify with?
3. Identify how Sam, George and Nick react when when they find out the killers are after Ole Andreson. Then discuss what these reactions reveal about these three characters.
4. Do we believe Nick’s claim at the end of the story that he’s going to get out of town? Does this seem like an extreme reaction on his part? Does George’s final comment that he’d "better not think about it" seem likely to change Nick’s resolve to leave?
5. Why do you think Ole Anderson refuses to take action?
6. We don’t ever see Ole’s death. What effect does this have on the story? Do we hold out hope that he might live, or take it for granted that the killers will find and whack him, as they say?
7. Comment on the physical description of the two killers: why are they depicted as identical and clownish?
8. Did you notice all the repetition of the same phrases and words in the story’s dialogue? ("I don’t know," "All right," "bright boy," etc.) What purpose does this serve thematically? Structurally? Does it affect the style or tone of the story? How?
9. What message(s) does the story convey as far as the nature of the world is concerned?