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20th Century Lit
20th Century Lit
82
Literature
Undergraduate 4
03/07/2010

Additional Literature Flashcards

 


 

Cards

Term
Neutral Tones - Thomas Hardy
Definition

Published 1898.


WE stood by a pond that winter day,

 And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,

 And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,

 —They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.

 

   Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove        5

Over tedious riddles solved years ago;

And some words played between us to and fro—   

On which lost the more by our love.  

 

The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing

Alive enough to have strength to die;        10

And a grin of bitterness swept thereby   

Like an ominous bird a-wing….  

 

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,

And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me

Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,        15   

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

 

Term
Hap - Thomas Hardy
Definition

Published 1898

 

IF but some vengeful god would call to me

  From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
  That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
 
Then would I bear, and clench myself, and die,         5
  Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, too, that a Powerfuller than I
  Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
 
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
  And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?         10
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
  And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan….
  These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
His father was a brick-laying working man and his mother had a more artistic literary personality. He took after both parents. He had a talent for art and architecture and apprenticed himself to an architect who worked on churches. But at the same time he began writing poems and worked on publishing them and later his novels.
Term
T.S. Eliot
Definition
was born in St. Louis and received a first-rate education, including time spent at Harvard. Before receiving his Ph. D., however, He left America entirely and became an expatriate, living in London, working in a bank, and writing poetry.While in England He met Ezra Pound, who was a huge influence on his poetry. Pound made his poetry more obscure, more fragmented, and even more allusive than ever. He also married, though he and his wife had trouble from the start.
Term
T.S. Eliot's Best Known Poem
Definition
The Waste Land - Go Read it.
Term
William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming
Definition
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Term
William Butler Yeats - Easter, 1916
Definition
I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
Term
William Butler Yeats - Leda and the Swan
Definition
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower[20]
And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Term
William Butler Yeats - No Second Troy
Definition
WHY should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great.
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
Term
William Butler Yeats - The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Definition
I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
Term
William Butler Yeats - Sailing To Byzantium
Definition
THAT is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
Term
William Butler Yeats - When You Are Old
Definition
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Term
William Butler Yeats - A Biography
Definition
was born the son of an important Irish painter. Both his father and his uncle were well known artists, and He himself early set his goals on painting. After studying at the School of Art in Dublin, He decided he wanted to become a writer instead, and began focusing on writing poems and plays. His early poetry comes from a traditional background, with meter and rhyme scheme—several of these early lyrics have been set to music. He also became increasingly interested in mystical religion and Irish politics and folklore. In religion, He moved away from Catholicism into a yearning after something spiritual, quite undefined and unconventional. In politics, he became an Irish nationalist, one who wanted Ireland free of English control, though in his practice he was far too tame for many of his associates, who wanted to free Ireland both from the English language and return to Gaelic and wanted to free Ireland by force and terror from English control. He himself never abandoned English as his language and never advocated violence. He did, however, fall in love with one such radical—Maude Gonne, reputed to be the most beautiful woman in Ireland. His unrequited love for Gonne (and much later her daughter) provided him with the fodder of some of his best poems. He also worked hard at developing an Irish national theater, with Irish actors performing plays based on Irish themes and folklore, many of which he wrote himself. As he grew older, his themes shifted and broadened. He became interested in the aging process and wrote about love, death, and Irish politics with a more spare, colloquial style. In many ways, He completely reinvented his poetic style, moving from being a Victorian into a full-fledged Modernist. He eventually married Georgie Hyde-Lees, who practiced automatic writing on their honeymoon. Such messages from the “spirit world” became an integral part of his philosophy, which he in turn incorporated into his poems. Some of his best later work has its roots in his belief in cyclical history, which he derived from his wife’s spiritual communicators.
Term
William Butler Yeats - Other Famous Poem
Definition
Among Schoolchildren
Term
Wallace Stevens - Sunday Morning
Definition
I

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

II

Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
Term
Wallace Stevens - The Snow Man
Definition
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Term
Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream
Definition
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Term
Wallace Stevens - 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Definition
I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the black bird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Term
Wallace Stevens
Definition
Peter Quince at the Clavier
Term
Wallace Stevens
Definition
Le Monocle de Mon Oncle
Term
Wallace Stevens
Definition
The Comedian as the Letter C
Term
Wallace Stevens - The Idea of Order in Key West (Idea of Order Canon)
Definition
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.

It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Term
Wallace Stevens - Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
Definition
I
To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times,
To be crested and wear the mane of a multitude
And so, as part, to exult with its great throat,

To speak of joy and to sing of it, borne on
The shoulders of joyous men, to feel the heart
That is the common, the bravest fundament,

This is a facile exercise. Jerome
Begat the tubas and the fire-wind strings,
The golden fingers picking dark-blue air:

For companies of voices moving there,
To find of sound the bleakest ancestor,
To find of light a music issuing

Whereon it falls in more than sensual mode.
But the difficultest rigor is forthwith,
On the image of what we see, to catch from that

Irrational moment its unreasoning,
As when the sun comes rising, when the sea
Clears deeply, when the moon hangs on the wall

Of heaven-haven. These are not things transformed.
Yet we are shaken by them as if they were.
We reason about them with a later reason.
Term
Wallace Stevens
Definition
The Auroras of Autumn
Term
Wallace Stevens - An Ordinary Evening in New Haven
Definition
The plainness of plain things is savagery,
As: the last plainness of a man who has fought
Against illusion and was, in a great grinding

Of growling teeth, and falls at night, snuffed out
By these obese opiates of sleep. Plain men in plain towns
Are not precise about the appeasement they need.

They only know a savage assuagement cries
With a savage voice; and in that cry they hear
Themselves transposed, muted and comforted

In a savage and subtle and simple harmony,
A matching and mating of surprised accords,
A responding to a diviner opposite.

So lewd spring comes from winter's chastity.
So, after summer, in the autumn air,
Comes the cold volume of forgotten ghosts,

But soothingly, with pleasant instruments,
So that this cold, a children's tale of ice,
Seems like a sheen of heat romanticized.

XIII.

The ephebe is solitary in his walk.
He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out
The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is
A serious man without the serious,
Inactive in his singular respect.

He is neither priest or proctor at low eve,
Under the birds, among the perilous owls,
In the big X of the returning primitive.

It is a fresh spiritual that he defines,
A coldness in a long, too-constant warmth,
A thing on the side of a house, not deep in a cloud,

A difficulty that we predicate:
The difficulty of the visible
To the nations of the clear invisible,

The actual landscape with its actual horns
Of baker and butcher blowing, as if to hear,
Hear hard, gets at an essential integrity.
Term
Wallace Stevens - The Planet on the Tables
Definition
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.
They were of a remembered time
Or of something seen that he liked.

Other makings of the sun
Were waste and welter
And the ripe shrub writhed.

His self and the sun were one
And his poems, although makings of his self,
Were no less makings of the sun.

It was not important that they survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.
Term
Wallace Stevens - A Biography
Definition
was born in Pennsylvania to people of Holland Dutch ancestry. He was educated at Harvard, where, as an undergraduate he began writing poems. He was shy, but friendly when he made friends. He received his law degree in 1904 and worked most of his working days for Hartford Accident and Indemnity, an insurance company. He married (successfully) and had a daughter, Holly, who later collated the poems into a volume called The Palm at the End of the Mind. He kept the two parts of his life distinct. At his office no one knew he was a poet. When he visited his poet friends in New York (including Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams) he did not discuss his business.
Term
E. E. Cummings - maggie and milly and molly and may
Definition
maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach(to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea
Term
E. E. Cummings - anyone lived in a pretty how town
Definition
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn't he danced his did

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain
Term
E. E. Cummings - Olaf
Definition
i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.
Term
E. E. Cummings - Spring
Definition
Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.
Term
E. E. Cummings - Cambridge ladies
Definition
the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
they believe in Christ and Longfellow,both dead,
are invariably interested in so many things-
at the present writing one still finds
delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
....the Cambridge ladies do not care,above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
sky lavender and cornerless, the
moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
Term
E. E. Cummings - why must itself up every of a park
Definition
why must itself up every of a park
anus stick some quote statue unquote to
prove that a hero equals any jerk
who was afraid to dare to answer "no"?
quote citizens unquote might otherwise
forget(to err is human;to forgive
divine)that if the quote state unquote says
"kill" killing is an act of christian love.
"Nothing" in 1944 AD
"can stand against the argument of mil
itary necessity"(generalissimo e)
and echo answers "there is no appeal
from reason"(freud)--you pays your money and
you doesn't take your choice. Ain't freedom grand
Term
E. E. Cummings
Definition
was born October 14, 1894 in the town of Cambridge Massachusetts. His father, and most constant source of awe, was a professor of Sociology and Political Science at Harvard University. In 1900, His Father left Harvard to become the ordained minister of the South Congregational Church, in Boston. As a child, He attended Cambridge public schools and lived during the summer with his family in their summer home in Silver Lake, New Hampshire. (Kennedy 8-9) He loved his childhood in Cambridge so much that he was inspired to write disputably his most famous poem.

Attending Harvard, He studied Greek and other languages. In college, He was introduced to the writing and artistry of Ezra Pound, who was a large influence on him and many other artists in his time. After graduation, He volunteered for the Norton-Haries Ambulance Corps.

Father was killed in Auto Accident with Train.
Term
E. E. Cummings
Definition
The Enormous Room
Term
E. E. Cummings
Definition
Viva
Term
E. E. Cummings - In Just
Definition
*******
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little lame baloonman


whistles far and wee


and eddyandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring


when the world is puddle-wonderful


the queer
old baloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing


from hop-scotch and jump-rope and


it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed


baloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
Term
Virginia Woolf - Mrs. Dalloway
Definition
Clarissa
Richard
Sally Seton/Lady Rosseter
Elizabeth
Mrs. Kilman—Elizabeth’s tutor
Peter Walsh—Clarrissa’s old flame, back from India
Septimus Smith
Lucrezia Smith
Term
Virginia Woolf - A Biography
Definition
born on the 15th of January 1882. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a famous scholar and philosopher and was at one time the editor of Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother was Julia Jackson. Both being previously married, they brought four children into their marriage. Together they had four more children, the third being Her. Their primary home was in the Kensington area of London, but summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. London and St Ives served as the settings for most of her novels.
In 1895, she had her first of quite a few mental breakdowns when her mother died unexpectedly. Unfortunately, two years later, her half-sister Stella, who had taken over the house, died suddenly while she was returning from her honeymoon. She had little to no education, but no matter what, she was determined to be a writer. Seven years later, she suffered a second breakdown when her father Leslie died in 1904. It is suggested that her frequent breakdowns and bouts of depression were also helped along by the sexual abuse that her and her sister were subject to from their half brothers, which she mentions in her autobiographical essays, A Sketch of the Past.
About eight years after her father died, she married Lenoard, a writer and critic himself, whose interests in both literature and socioeconomics were in common with hers. They both founded the Hogarth Press which published not only many of her works, but other well-known writers such as Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot.
She began writing critical essays for the Times Literary Supplement when she was young and these were eventually collected together in a two-volume book set called The Common Reader.
Altogether, She was the author of fifteen books, starting with The Voyage Out (1915) and ending with Three Guineas (1938).
Unfortunately, her breakdowns finally wore on her and she decided that she could no longer take it and so on March, 28, 1941 she committed suicide. She put her coat on and filled the pockets with rocks and walked into the Rover Ouse and drowned. Her body was found almost a month later and her husband buried her ashes under a tree in the back yard of their home.
Term
Virginia Woolf
Definition
To The Lighthouse (1927)
Term
Virginia Woolf
Definition
Orlando (1928)
Term
Virginia Woolf
Definition
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Term
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
Definition
Addie Bundren, the wife of Anse Bundren, is dying. Cash, her eldest son, is building her coffin. Addie is visited by Dr. Peabody, but she is beyond his help and obviously wants to die. It becomes apparent quickly that Anse is stingy, given to easy self-justification, and eager (despite protestations to the contrary) to have his burdens carried by others. Darl, the second son, is looked on by the neighbors as strange. He has the power to read the thoughts of, or at least to guess the secrets of, the family members. He knows that Jewel--the third child-- is not Anse’s son. From Addie we learn that Jewel is the son of Whitfield, the preacher. And Darl knows that Dewey Dell, the forth child, is pregnant by Lafe, a neighbor, and that she wants Addie to be buried in Jefferson so that she can have an abortion there. Vardaman, the youngest, thinks Peabody has killed his mother because her death coincides with Peabody's visit and with the killing of a fish for supper. A number of neighbors are also involved in the action. Cora Tull is a self-righteous woman who sees all her beliefs and actions as having divine authority; her husband is a put-upon but patient and helpful man.
Presently Addie dies. The funeral journey to Jefferson is a nightmare: the coffin is upset in a flooded stream; Cash’s leg is broken, then coated with cement which causes swelling and possible gangrene and the cement must be removed at the cost of much lost skin; Darl sets fire to Gillespie’s barn to destroy the decaying corpse, but the coffin is saved by Jewel; buzzards follow the corpse; in Mottson the sheriff tells the Bundrens to keep moving, and a respectable druggist indignantly refuses to sell pills to Dewey Dell which would bring about miscarriage. In Jefferson, Addie is finally buried, Dewey Dell is seduced by a soda jerk who pretends to be a doctor, Darl is picked up and sent to an insane asylum in Jackson, and Anse, with a new set of teeth, returns to his waiting family to introduce a “duck-shaped woman” with popeyes as the new Mrs. Bundren.
Term
William Faulkner - A Biography
Definition
was born and raised in Mississippi, and this locale cannot be separated from his best work. He had famous progenitors, with his great-grandfather and grandfather being well known for bringing the railroad to Oxford and fighting in the Civil War. His father never lived up to this reputation and he spent much of his life trying to. He performed poorly in school and attended the university (Old Miss) only for a short time. He volunteered for the Canadian Airforce in WWI, but never saw action. His high school sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and he determined to become a writer. He did a variety of odd jobs (postmaster, bookseller, night watchman), as he worked on his novels. When Estelle returned home, divorced, he married her and eventually bought a large house which he proceeded to fix up in Southern mansion style. He spent many years, off and on, as a screen writer in Hollywood, a job which he hated, feeling he was prostituting his real talent for money. He did, however, contribute to several very successful films, including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. He continued to publish novels, most of which were set in the area of Mississippi he came from, which he fictionally name Yoknapatawpha County, with Jefferson being modeled on real-life Oxford. He gained fame only in later years, finally receiving the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his body of work. An alcoholic most of his life, he drank himself into ill health and died after a fall from his horse.
Term
William Faulkner
Definition
The Sound and the Fury
Term
William Faulkner
Definition
Light in August
Term
William Faulkner
Definition
Absalom, Absalom
Term
William Faulkner
Definition
Go Down, Moses
Term
James Joyce
Definition
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Term
James Joyce
Definition
Ulysses
Term
James Joyce
Definition
Dubliners
Term
James Joyce
Definition
Finnegan's Wake
Term
James Joyce - A Biography
Definition
Born in Dublin into a working class home, He was educated in Jesuit schools, then later at University College, Dublin. During these formative years, He felt he had to break away from home (his family), country (Ireland), and the Catholic Church—all of which he saw as wrapped in false and problematic traditions. He spent a year in Paris in 1902, then returned briefly to Dublin. During this time he met Nora Barnacle, a uneducated chambermaid. With her, he then left Ireland for good, living primarily in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, supporting himself by teaching English in Berlitz language schools. While supporting himself by teaching, he worked on his writing, much of which he had great trouble getting published. During these years publishers were subjected to being shut down or even imprisonment for publishing scandalous material, and while his work seems tame by today’s tabloid standards, his work did include some sexual situations and language deemed as unfit. Perfectionist as he was, He refused to modify his work to fit publication standards; therefore, some of his best work was published first in France, which had less repressive publishing laws. He published only four major works, but each one is considered a masterpiece.
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
Far From the Madding Crowd
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
The Return of the Native
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Term
Thomas Hardy
Definition
Jude the Obscure
Term
F. Scott Key Fitzgerald
Definition
was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on September 24, 1896. His father, Edward, was from Maryland, with an allegiance to the Old South and its values. His mother, Mary (Mollie) McQuillan, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who became wealthy as a wholesale grocer in St. Paul. Both were Catholics.
He attended the St. Paul Academy; his first writing to appear in print was a detective story in the school newspaper when he was thirteen. During 1911-1913 he attended the Newman School, a Catholic prep school in New Jersey. He joined the army in 1917 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry. In June 1918, He was assigned to Camp Sheridan, near Montgomery, Alabama. There he fell in love with, eighteen-year-old Zelda Sayre. The war ended just before he was to be sent overseas; after his discharge in 1919 he went to New York City to seek his fortune in order to marry. Zelda Sayre broke their engagement due to impatience.
He quit his job in July 1919 and returned to St. Paul to rewrite his novel as This Side of Paradise, published in the spring of 1920. He married Zelda Sayre in New York a week later. They embarked on an extravagant life as young celebrities. The family took an apartment in New York City; there he wrote his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, when Zelda became pregnant they took their first trip to Europe in 1921 and then settled in St. Paul for the birth of their only child.
Seeking tranquility for his work the family went to France in the spring of 1924. He wrote The Great Gatsby during the summer and fall in Valescure near St. Raphael, but the marriage was damaged by Zelda’s involvement with a French naval aviator. The extent of the affair, if it was in fact consummated is not known. The family spent the winter of 1924-1925 in Rome, where he revised The Great Gatsby. In Paris, he met Ernest Hemingway. The family remained in France until the end of 1926.
The Family spent time in Switzerland for Zelda’s mental health. The Family returned to America in the fall of 1931. He made a second unsuccessful trip to Hollywood in 1931. Zelda suffered a relapse in February 1932 and entered Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. In Baltimore, he completed his fourth novel, Tender Is the Night, published in 1934. He went to Hollywood alone in the summer of 1937. He began his Hollywood novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon, in 1939 and had written more than half of a working draft when he died of a heart attack in Graham’s apartment on December 21, 1940.
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
Tender is the Night
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
The Last Tycoon
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
The Beautiful and the Damned
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
This Side of Paradise
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
The Great Gatsby
Term
Thomas Pynchon
Definition
Very good at Math and Physics, worked on instructions for Boeing, Math Major before his time in the navy. School Records mysteriously disappeared.
Term
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Definition
lived a short and turbulent life. He was born in St. Paul into a middle class family. He attended [b]Princeton University[/b], where he became deeply involved in campus life and culture. He dropped out, however, and after a brief stint in the army, he began writing, wanting to become a rich and famous writer. He early developed a taste for expensive things and married a woman whose taste matched his—Zelda Sayre. He had begun publishing some work—first a novel, and many short stories in popular magazines. The stories were primarily written for money, and he did make a lot of it. He was always pressed for more, however, and had to work extremely hard to write and sell his stories. He and Zelda lived for a time on the French Riviera, fitting in with the American expatriate socialite set there. He went on to write several more novels. He began drinking heavily and both he and Zelda had bouts of illness. Eventually, Zelda was institutionalized for mental illness and died in a fire there. To buffer his income, like Faulkner he went to Hollywood and worked on screenplays. His alcoholism eventually totally broke him and he died from a heart attack.
Term
Fitzgerald
Definition
The Beautiful and the Damned
Term
Fitzgerald
Definition
This Side of Paradise
Term
Fitzgerald
Definition
The Great Gatsby
Term
Fitzgerald
Definition
Tender is the Night
Term
Nathanael West
Definition
- Born to german jews who had immigrated to the US
o Blue Collar
- Changed his name again.
- Intelligent kid
o Writing
o Satire
- Brown University
o Knew S.J Pearlman
 Married West’s sister
o Cheated and borrowed papers from Pearlmans
- Moved to Paris – lived cheaply
After returning, he goes to NY and writes and publishes.
- Let Writers stay half price or free.
o Hellman – Little Foxes
o Hamat – Maltese Falcon
o Others…
- Journalist – never sold well, critically acclaimed.
- Moved to Hollywood – Screen Plays
- Married
- Died Young in Car Accident.
o EL Central
- Died same weekend that Fitzgerald died.
Term
Nathanael West
Definition
Miss Lonelyheart
Term
Nathanael West
Definition
Day of the Locust
Term
Raymond Carver
Definition
He was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, and spent most of his life in the Pacific Northwest. He married when he was 19 to Maryann and had several children in the first two years of marriage. He attended a small college in northern California, where he studied creative writing under John Gardener, who had not yet published any work, but who had already written two or three novels. Gardener was very exacting of his students and taught him to question every word, every punctuation mark he put down. Also, Gardener taught him the importance of revision. He held a variety of odd jobs while he wrote poetry and short stories, though early on he had little economic success and placed few stories in any magazines. In the late 70’s he began to place more work and his name came to be recognized as one of the best practitioners of the short story in America. With increased success came increased drinking and he had severe bouts with alcoholism that caused him to be hospitalized four times in 1976 and 1977. For several years he produced almost no work and his marriage disintegrated. He eventually got off alcohol and once again began producing short stories and poems, turning out a number of successful collections. He also edited a number of short story anthologies. He won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award, and several other awards, both for his stories and poems. Shortly before his death he married Tess Gallagher, with whom he had earlier collaborated on a screenplay regarding Dostoevsky. He died in 1988 from cancer.
Term
Raymond Carver
Definition
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
Term
Raymond Carver
Definition
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Term
Raymond Carver
Definition
Where I’m Calling From
Term
Don Delillo
Definition
He was born to Italian immigrants in the Bronx, New York. He went to Catholic schools, including Fordham University, a Jesuit-run institution, where he majored in communication arts. From there, he took a job in an advertising agency, work which he hated, but which did enable him to focus on language and how to use it persuasively. After three years of work, he began writing his first novel, quit his job, and took a series of jobs to earn barely enough money to stay alive and write. He continued writing a series of novels, several of which won awards, further enabling him to write without financial worries. He traveled widely, incorporating some of his experiences into his fiction. He rarely grants interviews, and when he does, he refuses to talk about his personal life. He’s married and lives in Westchester, a suburb of New York.
Term
Don Delillo
Definition
White Noise
Term
Don Delillo
Definition
Libra
Term
Don Delillo
Definition
Mao II
Term
Don Delillo
Definition
The Body Artist
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