Introduction to Literature

1
Introduction to Literature

• Lesson eight brooks, larkin, hudgins
• Teenagers

Margarette connor
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Teenagers

• Teenage as a social construct. In post-war
  period, America was prosperous, and teenagers
  then were given a lot of freedom and material
  support.
• These teenagers started to be rebellious. Rock
  N Roll further separated them from the main
  stream society.
• Teenage years is a period of difficult time also
  because of the hormonal changes that happen to
  every teenager.
• Literary writers present some of these problems.
  These works have more resonance to our students.
• Enjoy them!!!

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Contents

• Gwendolyn Brooks
• We Be Cool discussion
• Philip Larkin
• This Be the Verse discussion
• Andrew Hudgins
• blank verse
• Seventeen discussion

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Gwendolyn Brooks

• the first African-American writer to both win the
  Pulitzer Prize (1949) and to be appointed to the
  American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976)
• won countless awards during her writing career.
• received more than fifty honorary doctorates from
  colleges and universities.
• 1969, the Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center opened
  on the campus of Western Illinois University

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African-American poet

• offers readers
• insight into African-American culture,
• commentary on the impact of racial and ethnic
  identity on life,
• a vision of the pressures of day-to-day existence
  throughout all of her literature.

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Most dominant theme

• the impact of ethnicity and life experiences on
  one's view of life.

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Parents

• Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917
• Father, David Anderson Brooks
• Mother, Keziah Corine Wims
• Raised in Chicago, the city that will always be
  associated with Brooks.
• She died in Chicago, 2000.

8
Much encouragement

• Her mother believed that she could be the lady
  Paul Laurence Dunbar and encouraged her
  daughters writing.
• When young she also attended many poetry readings
  by African-American writers such as Langston
  Hughes.
• At thirteen she had her first poem published.

9
Education

• Attended Wilson Junior College, graduated in 1936
• After attended a poetry workshop at the South
  Side Community Art Center,
• studied the major modernists and according to one
  biographer, got introduced to the rigors of
  poetic technique
• In 1937 her work appeared in two anthologies.

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Marriage

• In 1939 married Henry Blakely
• They had two children.
• While bringing them up, started to produce a
  number of volumes of poetry

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In the 1940s-60s

• During this time, her fame grew, but according to
  many critics, she didnt get the honors she
  deserved.
• This was only because she was black.

Brookss novel, 1953
12
Political change

• In 1967 attended the second Black Writers
  Conference and met a number of young black poets
• They convinced her that
• black poets should write as blacks, about
  blacks, and address themselves as blacks.
• Up to that point, she didnt feel that she was
  writing consciously with the ideas that blacks
  must address blacks.

13
Revitalized

• She began to teach verse-writing for a group of
  Chicago teenagers called the Blackstone Rangers.
• Also became an activist leader.
• During this period, she sought to clarify her
  language so that she could reach wider
  audiences, specifically, to all manner of
  blacks

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More than twenty books of poetry,

• Children Coming Home 1991
• Blacks (1987)
• The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)
  
• Riot (1969)
• In the Mecca (1968)
• The Bean Eaters (1960)
• Annie Allen (1949), which received the Pulitzer
  Prize and
• A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

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Many other volumes

• Including
• Maud Martha, a novel (1953)
• Report from Part One An Autobiography (1972)

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Other major honors

• In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the
  State of Illinois
• 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
• 1985-86, Consultant in Poetry to the Library of
  Congress.

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On We Real Cool, interview 1970

• They have no pretensions to any glamor. They are
  supposedly dropouts, or at least they're in the
  poolroom when they should possibly be in school,
  since they're probably young enough, or at least
  those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom, and
  they. . . . First of all, let me tell you how
  that's supposed to be said, because there's a
  reason why I set it out as I did. These are
  people who are essentially saying, "Kilroy is
  here. We are." But they're a little uncertain of
  the strength of their identity.

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Think about the we

• The "We"you're supposed to stop after the "We"
  and think about their validity, and of course
  there's no way for you to tell whether it should
  be said softly or not, I suppose, but I say it
  rather softly because I want to represent their
  basic uncertainty, which they don't bother to
  question every day, of course.

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We Real Cool

• We real cool.
• We Left school.
• We Lurk (hang out) late.
• We Strike (shoot people) straight.
• We Sing sin.
• We Thin gin.
• We Jazz June.
• We Die soon.
• ?A very powerful poem.

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Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

• Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for
  Wordsworth.

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Major voice of the 20th century

• "It is part of his poems' strength to speak
  directly to most people who come across them. He
  makes each of us feel that he is 'our' poet, in a
  way that Eliot, for instance, does not - and each
  of us creates a highly personal version of his
  character to accompany his work. Pointing out
  that he was contradictory doesn't pose much of a
  threat to these versions. It's more disturbing,
  however, to say that many of Larkin's inner
  conflicts evolved in ways his work can only hint
  at. (cont next slide)

22
Quote continued

• When he found his authentic voice in the late
  1940s, the beautiful flowers of his poetry were
  already growing on long stalks out of pretty
  dismal ground.... He understood that the
  relationship he had created between 'high' art
  and 'ordinary' existence was a remarkable one,
  which deserved to be made public.
• from his biography by Andrew Motion

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Negative image revealed

• In the biography we see a man who is
• racist,
• right-wing,
• selfish,
• cruel to his partners.
• Friends say this isnt the whole picture, though.

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Famous for three volumes of poetry

• The Less Deceived (1955)
• The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
• High Windows (1974)

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Other works

• First volume of poems The North Ship
• Two novels, Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter
  (1947)
• Volumes of jazz criticism and essays
• Edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century
  English Verse (1973)

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Parents

• Born August 9, 1922, in Coventry, England.
• Father Sydney Larkin, City Treasurer, 1922-44
• Nazi sympathiser
• died when Larkin was 25.
• Mother Eva was coddling, snobbish and
  discontented.

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Larkin on his parents

• The marriage left me with two convictions that
  human beings should not live together, and that
  children should be taken from their parents at an
  early age."

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Education

• Attended the Coventrys King Henry VIII School,
  1930-1940.
• On to St. John's College, Oxford.
• didnt have to go to war because of his poor
  eyesight.
• While at Oxford met his close friend, novelist
  Kingsley Amis.
• Graduated 1943.

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First major publication

• 1945, ten of his poems, appeared in Poetry from
  Oxford in Wartime.
• Later that year they were included in The North
  Ship, his first volume of poetry.

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Mixed influences

• Looking back, I find in the poems not one
  abandoned self but several the ex-schoolboy,
  for whom Auden was the only alternative to
  old-fashioned poetry the under-graduate, whose
  work a friend affably characterized as Dylan
  Thomas, but youve a sentimentality thats all
  your own and the immediately post-Oxford self,
  isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats
  stolen from the local girls school. (cont on
  next slide)

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continued

• This search for a style was merely one aspect of
  a general immaturity. It might be pleaded that
  the war years were a bad time to start writing
  poetry, but in fact the principal poets of the
  day Eliot, Auden, Dylan Thomas, Betjeman were
  all speaking out loud and clear...

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Career as a librarian

• 1943, librarian at Wellington, Shropshire,
• 1946, assistant librarian at the University
  College of Leicester
• 1955, librarian at the University of Hull
• position he remained in until his retirement

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The Less Deceived 1955

• Because of this volume, Larkin became the
  preeminent poet of his generation,
• Leading voice of what came to be called "The
  Movement,"
• a group of young English writers who rejected the
  prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in
  the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

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Intensely emotional poetry

• Like Hardy, one of his own favorite poets, Larkin
  focused on intense personal emotion but strictly
  avoided sentimentality or self-pity.

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The two major volumes

• Whitsun Wedding, 1964
• High Windows, 1971
• collections whose searing, often mocking, wit
  does not conceal the poet's dark vision and
  underlying obsession with universal themes of
  mortality, love, and human solitude

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Poet Laureate offer

• December 1984, offered the chance to succeed Sir
  John Betjeman as Poet Laureate.
• declined, being unwilling to accept the high
  public profile and associated media attention of
  the position.
• Ted Hughes went on to take the position.

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Death

• Summer 1985 diagnosed with cancer.
• Died December, 1985.

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This Be The Verse

• They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
• They may not mean to, but they do.
• They fill you with the faults they had
• And add some extra, just for you.
• But they were fucked up in their turn
• By fools in old-style hats and coats,
• Who half the time were soppy-stern
• And half at one another's throats.
• Man hands on misery to man.
• It deepens like a coastal shelf.
• Get out as early as you can,
• And don't have any kids yourself.

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Andrew Hudgins, 1951-

• "one of America's most accessible, natural
  poets."

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Military family

• Born in Killeen, Texas, in 1951.
• Father in the military, so they moved a lot.
• Through all the moves family remained
  distinctively Southern,
• his parents' taking their Southern Baptist
  religion and their regional values and manners
  with them as they traveled from post to post.

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Education

• Attended high school in Montgomery, Alabama.
• Attended Huntingdon College and the University of
  Alabama.
• Admitted to the prestigious Writers Workshop at
  the University of Iowa, where he earned MFA, 1983.

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Major works

• Babylon in a Jar (1998)
• The Glass Hammer A Southern Childhood (1994)
• The Never-Ending New Poems (1991)
• After the Lost War A Narrative (1988)
• Saints and Strangers (1985)
• short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize.
• book of essays, The Glass Anvil (1997)

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Educator and poet

• Currently is writer-in-residence and head of the
  writing program at the University of Cincinnati.
• Previously taught at Baylor University.

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Genesis of his characters

• They are a combination of personal experience,
  borrowed experience from other people, and so, of
  course, that means people's stories that they
  told you. There's only our personal experiences
  and other people's experiences that we can have.
  Other people's experience comes through books and
  through what they tell you. Then there's also the
  imagination in play. (cont next slide)

45
On his characters

• Those things mesh together so that one element
  can be something that happened to you but is not
  interesting enough or doesn't go where you need
  it to go, so you borrow something that someone
  else told you or that you've read, and they merge
  and produce a new fact.

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Blank verse

• Although verse described as blank is, strictly,
  no more than unrhymed, the term is limited to
  unrhymed iambic pentameter. It was chosen by
  Milton for Paradise Lost and has since been used
  more than any other form for serious verse in
  English.
• From Beckson and Ganz, Literary Terms, a
  Dictionary.

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Reasons went back to blank verse

• With free verse, I never could figure out why
  the lines stopped where they stopped it never
  made any sense to me. And we never talked about
  it, not in workshops, and not in groups of people
  that I would meet with, and some of those people
  were very smart. So I couldn't figure out why the
  line should stop one place and not another.
  That's one of the reasons I first started messing
  around with blank verse. Some people say that in
  free verse, because you're not locked into that
  beat count in the lines, the lines are more
  sensual, but they did not work that way for me.

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Over-intellectualized poetry

• What happened with me was because the line could
  stop anywhere, it became over-intellectualized,
  which is "a line breaking here for this reason
  will set up this over here, which will do this
  over here," and once I started writing in meter,
  I knew that the line had to have these five beats
  in it, and I wanted to have this kind of a weight
  on the last foot, then everything became not an
  intellectual decision, but a sensual decision

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Why its sensual

• Poetry of the senses
• how hard a beat is this beat going to be, how is
  the rhythm carrying over the meter going to spill
  down into the next line beneath it, or am I going
  to have a hard stop at the end of that line,
  those are all musical decisions, and that, then,
  freed me up to think about the content things
  going on in meter and rhythm.