Our homeland impacts us more than we could ever imagine. I have had a yearning to return to Scotland for many years now having only been once when I was too young to remember. My dad’s family lived in that country for the last twenty plus generations and I cannot but venture to guess that this is the reasoning behind my strong urge to return. Claude McKay’s homeland, Jamaica, called out for his homeland his entire life. McKay spent most of his life in his country yet impacted the Harlem Renaissance more than many Africa American authors of the day. McKay is still considered a key writer of his generation because he incorporated his life into his work, leading to the revelation of the internationality of the Harlem Renaissance.
Festus Claudius McKay was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica. Sunny Ville is known only for McKay and the manner in which he described it. It played as his “symbol of a lost golden age” (pg 1457) in his works. In this small town, McKay found his calling. He studied “the British masters” (website). This was particularly difficult for Blacks at the time. They had been taught to speak and taught to learn in the conqueror’s language and knew no other way of freedom. McKay noticed quickly how ridiculous this was and “cease[d] mimicking the English poets” and began “producing verse in Jamaican dialect”(website), a radical decision for the day. McKay went to study in Europe, which began to shape his writing. He wrote his most famous work, If We Must Die, before leaving on this trip. The poem, If We Must Die, played role model for Ernest J. Gaines work, A Lesson Before Dying, several years later. Gaines’ work had nothing to do with Jamaica yet McKay’s poem had everything to do with his homeland. McKay wrote the poem after living in Kingston, where he was disgusted at the lack of resistance to the white man’s rule.
McKay moved to the United States in 1921 to try and become a more prominent voice. His radical ideas were lost on the general public but some key people took notice. While in Harlem, however, home called out for McKay once more. His autobiography was entitled A Long Way from Home, clearly referring to his island nation. He never did move back but McKay did become an American citizen in 1940, over twenty years after first arriving. McKay was able to make an international impact without leaving the United States, however. McKay’s work in Jamaica started to raise Black awareness. He started a trend of abandoning the White Man’s English and regressing back to the natural idiom of the country. McKay, after showing his island what freedom could really be like, moved on to Europe, where his ideas fell upon deaf ears. On the Eurasian continent, racism mattered less and people were treated much more fairly. McKay noticed and quickly returned to the United States, where he made enemies with such leaders as W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke (pg 1456). He made sure his voice was heard in this country and became a severely under recognized influence of the Harlem Renaissance movement.
McKay never got to go back to his homeland after moving to Harlem permanently. He moved to Chicago and died there a few years later. Yet his heart was never in the United States. My heart lies in Scotland. I hope that I am more fortunate than McKay; if I don’t get to go back, my life will be incomplete. McKay kept Jamaica in his mind and heart by writing about it, incorporating it into a little of everything. His homeland influenced him more than any of ours impacts us.
Works Cited
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=4573
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Between the Wars 1914-1945, Sixth Edition, Volume D
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Home is Where the Pen is
It has long been said that any good writer can only write about what he or she knows. What we know best is our home. Every leaf on every tree, the street sign's colors, the neighbor's houses are all ingrained into our brains for life. This is the same for William Carlos Williams. He wrote not about his home but rather incorporated a little of it into every one of his poems.
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, just outside of Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson is the place of our focus. Paterson was founded in 1792 indirectly by Alexander Hamilton as a hub of water falls. It soon became known as the "silk city" for its massive output of the material. Not too much longer after that, Paterson sprouted as a massive factory locale. What Paterson is most known for, however, is not its accomplishments but the people it turned out and the writings spun around the third largest town in New Jersey.
Paterson was the birth place of not only William Carlos Williams but also to two other major poets: Allen Ginsberg and Simon Perchik. The first was one of the first beat poets and one of the most influential voices of the Postmodernism movement. Ginsberg was very vocal in his activism and stood up for, among other things, Gay Rights, Free Speech, and NAMBLA. Ginsberg wrote "Howl," which is still read in High Schools around the country. Simon Perchik, on the other hand, is much less controversial. He is an ex-lawyer who served in the military, Ginsberg's polar opposite. Perchik still writes poetry about his hometown.
Paterson mainly played role as setting for two other semi-random authors. It was the setting of Junot Diaz's short story that won her the Pulitzer. For John Updike, Paterson was the setting for his short story "In the Beauty of the Lillies." The most famous work, though, lies with William Carlos Williams and his five book poem with the title of the town.
Thus, the town was clearly important to William Carlos Williams. His family history is quite skewed, not based out of just one place. "His maternal grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to America with her son, married again, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son – William’s father – married a woman descended on one side from French Basque people, on the other from Dutch Jews. This mix of origins always fascinated Wiliams and made him feel that he was different from what he thought of as mainstream Americans" (pg 1263). This only helped Williams to separate himself from the average people. He was raised mainly by his mother and grandmother as well, which also played well into his poetry. In his work, any woman is portrayed "as an earth mother, whom men require for completion and whose reason for being is to supply that completeness" (pg 1263). Thus, home is where the heart is and his heart was not only in with his family but with the town that nurtured him, Paterson, New Jersey.
Works Cited
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Between the Wars 1914-1945, Sixth Edition, Volume D
http://www.patersonnj.gov/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson,_New_Jersey
William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, just outside of Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson is the place of our focus. Paterson was founded in 1792 indirectly by Alexander Hamilton as a hub of water falls. It soon became known as the "silk city" for its massive output of the material. Not too much longer after that, Paterson sprouted as a massive factory locale. What Paterson is most known for, however, is not its accomplishments but the people it turned out and the writings spun around the third largest town in New Jersey.
Paterson was the birth place of not only William Carlos Williams but also to two other major poets: Allen Ginsberg and Simon Perchik. The first was one of the first beat poets and one of the most influential voices of the Postmodernism movement. Ginsberg was very vocal in his activism and stood up for, among other things, Gay Rights, Free Speech, and NAMBLA. Ginsberg wrote "Howl," which is still read in High Schools around the country. Simon Perchik, on the other hand, is much less controversial. He is an ex-lawyer who served in the military, Ginsberg's polar opposite. Perchik still writes poetry about his hometown.
Paterson mainly played role as setting for two other semi-random authors. It was the setting of Junot Diaz's short story that won her the Pulitzer. For John Updike, Paterson was the setting for his short story "In the Beauty of the Lillies." The most famous work, though, lies with William Carlos Williams and his five book poem with the title of the town.
Thus, the town was clearly important to William Carlos Williams. His family history is quite skewed, not based out of just one place. "His maternal grandmother, an Englishwoman deserted by her husband, had come to America with her son, married again, and moved to Puerto Rico. Her son – William’s father – married a woman descended on one side from French Basque people, on the other from Dutch Jews. This mix of origins always fascinated Wiliams and made him feel that he was different from what he thought of as mainstream Americans" (pg 1263). This only helped Williams to separate himself from the average people. He was raised mainly by his mother and grandmother as well, which also played well into his poetry. In his work, any woman is portrayed "as an earth mother, whom men require for completion and whose reason for being is to supply that completeness" (pg 1263). Thus, home is where the heart is and his heart was not only in with his family but with the town that nurtured him, Paterson, New Jersey.
Works Cited
The Norton Anthology of American Literature Between the Wars 1914-1945, Sixth Edition, Volume D
http://www.patersonnj.gov/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paterson,_New_Jersey
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Tartlet
When I was much younger and much more naive than I am now, my mother told me that words were exhaustible. She said that if I said any given word too many times I would not be able to say that word any longer. Being the smart-ass that I was, I tested this theory. "Cat, cat, cat," I proclaimed loudly for two days straight. When I awoke on the third, I couldn't say it any longer. The word, which had meant so much to me before, now was meaningless. After saying the word so many times, it had worn out and my mind had developed a mental block to saying it. I walked around for day, sunken in a depression of realizing how useless words are as a form of communication. They don't stand alone as a generalization; they mean something unique to everyone else. This is precisely the idea explored by Gertrude Stein's quote. She said : “In Tender Buttons and then on and on I struggled with the ridding myself of nouns, I knew nouns must go in poetry as they had gone in prose if anything that is everything was to go on meaning something. And so I went on with this exceeding struggle of knowing really knowing what a thing was really knowing it knowing anything I was seeing anything I was feeling so that its name could be something, by its name coming to be a thing in itself as it was but would not be anything just and only as a name”(242). What this simply means to her is that words do not translate with the same meaning. She, like the younger version of me, used certain words repeatedly in the text to purposefully demonstrate their irrelevance. Each time she used the word was meant to felt different but, in reality, merely highlighted the incongruences of language. In the first three sections of "Objects" for example, the word "color" is used three times specifically, once a section. She brings out the word to show how color demonstrates several different things in our language, English, but can mean something totally different in, say, Italian.
Stein's work reads much like a drunk man's writing. That being said, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, notorious drunkards, write more clearly than Stein. Her language is twisted, in some cases more clearly read backwards than left to right. Upon first reading the poetry of hers, one imagines this is a joke assignment, written perhaps by a stoned guy, as was demonstrated in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Unfortunately, we are left without our Sugar O's to keep us from drowning. Stein's writing is full of meanings unexplained and meant to stun the reader. As was mentioned in a previous post, I am a huge LOST fan and I love puzzles. This piece of writing, however, is not a puzzle. It is a maze, designed to entrap the reader in a universe of confusion.
It took several days to undo my mental block of the word "cat." I have a nagging feeling that not even a lifetime of study could un-fog the writing of Tender Buttons.
Stein's work reads much like a drunk man's writing. That being said, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald, notorious drunkards, write more clearly than Stein. Her language is twisted, in some cases more clearly read backwards than left to right. Upon first reading the poetry of hers, one imagines this is a joke assignment, written perhaps by a stoned guy, as was demonstrated in F.R.I.E.N.D.S. Unfortunately, we are left without our Sugar O's to keep us from drowning. Stein's writing is full of meanings unexplained and meant to stun the reader. As was mentioned in a previous post, I am a huge LOST fan and I love puzzles. This piece of writing, however, is not a puzzle. It is a maze, designed to entrap the reader in a universe of confusion.
It took several days to undo my mental block of the word "cat." I have a nagging feeling that not even a lifetime of study could un-fog the writing of Tender Buttons.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Shakespeare's Wasteland
T.S. Eliot's most famous work, The Waste Land is one of the most famous works of modernism. Yet, Eliot draws from an author who defines classic literature. Within the Waste Land, no author's works are referenced more than those of William Shakespeare. Eliot either quotes or makes reference to Shakespeare's The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Hamlet in the poem's brief yet powerful sixteen pages.
The Tempest was believed to have been written in 1610 or 1611, when Shakespeare was writing The Winter's Tale. The play was first published in the first folio in 1623 along with thirty five additional works. The play itself revolves around Prospero, a magician of sorts, who has had his throne taken away. Prospero plays with the lives of people through the play. He leads three subplots. One involves love, another involves treachery, and the last beholds betrayal. The Tempest was not one of Shakespeare's more famous works until the mid eighteen hundreds, when it saw a brief revival. At the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land the play had more or less faded into the background in exchange for some of Shakespeare's more popular plays.
The date of Shakespeare's writing of Antony and Cleopatra is fuzzier than some of his other plays. It is believed that the play was written between 1603 and 1607. It, too, was published in the First Folio of 1623. The plot of Antony and Cleopatra is more of a history than The Tempest. This play focus on Marc Antony and Cleopatra, as one may deduce. This play is the first where Shakespeare shows a complex female character. He wrote her to break the stereotypes of the day, the first time he did so. This play was quite popular when T.S. Eliot was writing and would have been something he wouldn't have had to search far to find.
The final play mentioned by Eliot in his poem was the most famous of the three, Hamlet. Luckily enough, we have just completed this play in my Shakespeare class so it's history is easy to remember. Hamlet is a story of contradictory actions, familiar betrayal, and insanity. The play believed to have been written in 1602 and has widely been acknowledged as one of Shakespeare's most famous works. It was still famous when Shakespeare died and when Eliot was writing The Waste Land.
Each of these works played a subtle part in Eliot's most famous work. The first mentioned, The Tempest, has what can be called the most direct quoted line. In chapter one, the line "Those are pearls that were in his eyes," line 47, is taken directly from the text. It is a referrence from Ariel's song. Ariel was the tempest. The next Shakespearian reference is the Antony and Cleopatra one. It comes in chapter two, line one, "like a burnished throne." It is another direct quote, except this one is a partial text. It is not the complete line but rather a mention in passing, referring to Cleopatra herself. The final Shakespearian play discussed that holds mention in The Waste Land is the one of Hamlet, coming again in chapter two, line 172. The repeating of "Good night, ladies" comes from Ophelia, Hamlet's once lover, before her death. It is used in this case as well to represent death but one of a much more vulgar sort.
It is clear that Shakespeare played a role in Eliot's The Waste Land. It isn't until we look into the texts referenced by the poet do we see just how drastic of a difference the works made. Eliot used the plays as subtle clues into the true meaning of his cryptic play. Like a puzzle, they all fit together once we see the bigger picture.
Works Cited
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-anthony-and-cleopatra
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-hamlet
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-the-tempest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra
The Tempest was believed to have been written in 1610 or 1611, when Shakespeare was writing The Winter's Tale. The play was first published in the first folio in 1623 along with thirty five additional works. The play itself revolves around Prospero, a magician of sorts, who has had his throne taken away. Prospero plays with the lives of people through the play. He leads three subplots. One involves love, another involves treachery, and the last beholds betrayal. The Tempest was not one of Shakespeare's more famous works until the mid eighteen hundreds, when it saw a brief revival. At the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land the play had more or less faded into the background in exchange for some of Shakespeare's more popular plays.
The date of Shakespeare's writing of Antony and Cleopatra is fuzzier than some of his other plays. It is believed that the play was written between 1603 and 1607. It, too, was published in the First Folio of 1623. The plot of Antony and Cleopatra is more of a history than The Tempest. This play focus on Marc Antony and Cleopatra, as one may deduce. This play is the first where Shakespeare shows a complex female character. He wrote her to break the stereotypes of the day, the first time he did so. This play was quite popular when T.S. Eliot was writing and would have been something he wouldn't have had to search far to find.
The final play mentioned by Eliot in his poem was the most famous of the three, Hamlet. Luckily enough, we have just completed this play in my Shakespeare class so it's history is easy to remember. Hamlet is a story of contradictory actions, familiar betrayal, and insanity. The play believed to have been written in 1602 and has widely been acknowledged as one of Shakespeare's most famous works. It was still famous when Shakespeare died and when Eliot was writing The Waste Land.
Each of these works played a subtle part in Eliot's most famous work. The first mentioned, The Tempest, has what can be called the most direct quoted line. In chapter one, the line "Those are pearls that were in his eyes," line 47, is taken directly from the text. It is a referrence from Ariel's song. Ariel was the tempest. The next Shakespearian reference is the Antony and Cleopatra one. It comes in chapter two, line one, "like a burnished throne." It is another direct quote, except this one is a partial text. It is not the complete line but rather a mention in passing, referring to Cleopatra herself. The final Shakespearian play discussed that holds mention in The Waste Land is the one of Hamlet, coming again in chapter two, line 172. The repeating of "Good night, ladies" comes from Ophelia, Hamlet's once lover, before her death. It is used in this case as well to represent death but one of a much more vulgar sort.
It is clear that Shakespeare played a role in Eliot's The Waste Land. It isn't until we look into the texts referenced by the poet do we see just how drastic of a difference the works made. Eliot used the plays as subtle clues into the true meaning of his cryptic play. Like a puzzle, they all fit together once we see the bigger picture.
Works Cited
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-anthony-and-cleopatra
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-hamlet
http://poetry.suite101.com/article.cfm/the-waste-land-and-the-tempest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tempest
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_and_Cleopatra
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