The Sheila Variations

Today in history: January 1, 1892

The Irish potato famine of 1847, with its millions of people pouring into America in a neverending stream, had been the first sign that the country would need some sort of system to register these people, make sure they weren't bringing in diseases, whatever. Immigrants had always come to America, but it was usually in more of a trickle - rather than a flood, like in "black '47".

And so today in history, January 1, 1892, Ellis Island officially opened for business as the primary immigration-registration center for entry into the United States.

The first immigrant of millions to pass through on this day in history was a 14-year-old Irish girl from County Cork named Annie Moore. Three large ships waited to land on that day, and eventually 700 immigrants entered the country on January 1 alone.

Annie Moore was given a 10 dollar gold piece, and welcomed to America.

From American Notes: Travels in America, 1750-1920, a memory from an immigrant, 1914:

"At seven o'clock our boat lifted anchor and we glided up the still waters of the harbour. The whole prow was a black mass of passengers staring at the ferry-boats, the distant factories, and sky-scrapers. Every point of vantage was seized, and some scores of emigrants were clinging to the rigging. At length we came into sight of the green-grey statue of Liberty, far away and diminutive at first, but later on, a celestial figure in a blaze of sunlight. An American waved a starry flag in greeting, and some emigrants were disposed to cheer, some shed silent tears. Many, however, did not know what the statue was. I heard one Russian telling another that it was the tombstone of Columbus.

We carried our luggage out at eight, and in a pushing crowd prepared to disembark…. At a quarter to ten we steamed for Ellis Island. We were then marched to another ferry-boat, and expected to be transported somewhere else, but this second vessel was simply a floating waiting-room. We were crushed and almost suffocated upon it. A hot sun beat upon its wooden roof; the windows in the sides were fixed; we could not move an inch from the places where we were awkwardly standing, for the boxes and baskets were so thick about our feet; babies kept crying sadly, and irritated emigrants swore at the sound of them. All were thinking--"Shall I get through?"

The "tombstone of Columbus"! Ha!!

To those of you who ever visit New York - I highly recommend taking a trip over to Ellis Island. It's strangely emotional - you just can feel the ghosts of the millions of people who passed through. They are all still there. The museum does a great job of displaying information, there's a film to watch, tours to take - it is well worth it.

Here's an image of the Inspection Room - where each immigrant would be screened by doctors for any signs of illness, physical ailments, disease. This was also where their documents would be checked and double-checked. If they were healthy, and if their papers were correct - they would then be allowed to enter the United States.

And so today, let's take a second to remember Annie Moore, the 14 year old Irish girl, the first name on the long long rolls of immigrant records at Ellis Island. There's a statue of Annie Moore at Ellis Island - a bronze statue - which was unveiled by Ireland's president Mary Robinson in 1993.

Here's some more information about Annie Moore. My favorite excerpt from that piece comes at the end:

So what's really important about Annie Moore is not so much that she was born in Ireland, but that she came to America. Someone had to be the first immigrant to land at Ellis Island and as fate would have it she was the one. It might just as easily been someone named Rebecca Schimkowitz or Maria Parmasano. In somewhat the same spirit of commemorating an Unknown Soldier as a symbol of patriotic sacrifice, the story and statues of Annie Moore are intended to remind people of this and future generations of the courageous journey made by countless millions of nameless, faceless immigrants who set out to make a new life for themselves in a strange and distant place called America.

Some images below, including the Inspection Certificate from January 1, 1892, showing Annie Moore's name (the last image below the jump).

Happy birthday, Ellis Island.

Happy 400th birthday, John Milton

I am a baffled and awe-inspired fan. He has the kind of genius that is best not talked about too much. Just leave it be. Don't try to ask why, or HOW ... (I can't help it: HOW????????) Just accept that in this day and age of mortal man, giants still walk the earth on occasion. JUST ACCEPT IT. Every now and then, once every three or four centuries, a giant walks the earth. DEAL.

Milton was born on this day in 1608. He went to Oxford for a bit - but ended up leaving - and studied, basically, all of human nature and history and mankind on his own. The depth and breadth of his work, and his inquiry, is remarkable. I find myself in a state of blank wordlessness here.

I guess, on a personal note, my own terror of going blind (it's not a "fear" - that is way too mild a word - I wake up screaming from nightmares because of it on a regular basis) makes me feel a strange fearful kinship with John Milton who went blind, and had to dictate his great works to others. He dictated Paradise Lost to his daughter.

What?

Honestly. I go blank. I can't speak.

There are some people who seem to be vessels of a higher being. Whatever you want to call it. You could tie them up, and throw them in a basement for 75 years, and they would STILL scratch out their epic on the basement wall. This is something that cannot be easily explained. It just is.

I'll just end with a poem that ranks among my favorites of all time. My fear of losing my sight is so deep and so profound that it is hard to even admit to, because I feel like it will come true if I speak it out loud. Milton stands before me, as a beacon - of someone this happened to - and yet he persevered. But oh. To live in darkness. To have the world of Paradise Lost in your head ... and to have to wait ... to WAIT ... as someone else takes it down in dictation ... is terrifying.

And so .... echoing this terrifying image of having to WAIT while your head is crammed full of Paradise Lost I'll end with Milton's sonnet to his own blindness.

Sonnet XIX: On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask; But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at His bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

I don't care how many times I have read it. It still brings me to tears.

Ms. Baroque has a goosebump-worthy post up right now about Milton's language. Not to be missed.

Here are some quotes I've compiled about (and from) Milton:

"Milton, with the possible exception of Spenser, is the first eccentric English poet, the first to make a myth out of his personal experience, and to invent a language of his own remote from the spoken word." -- W.H. Auden

Milton, even Milton, rankt with living men!
Over the highest Alps of mind he marches,
And far below him spring the baseless arches
Of Iris, colouring dimly lake and fen.
-- Walter Savage Landor

"His harmonicall and ingeniose Soul did lodge in a beautifull and well-proportioned body. He was a spare man ... He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire - he was so faire they called him the Lady of Christ's College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray." -- John Aubrey

"Yet for two and a half centuries - even for a 'speaker' like Wordsworth - Milton's virtue was this language, which engaged and developed subjects difficult to combine, moral verities and the created world. The language of speech is not the only, or first, language of poetry. To criticize work in terms strictly irrelevant to it is of little value: a critical act of "brute assertive will", or a prejudice so ingrained as to be indistinguishable, for uncritical readers, from truth itself. With the decline of literacy, Milton, like Spenser, becomes a more difficult mountain to scale, more remote from the 'common reader'. Yet Chaucer and Shakespeare, the only poets in the tradition who are Milton's superiors, both grow and recede in the same way and are not dismissed. They seem more accessible. In the end Leavis's hostility, like Empson's and Richards's in other areas, is to the Christian content of the poems, and in Milton it is obtrusive and central. We read Herbert's and Donne's divine poems even if we are unbelievers: there is their doubt to engage, and the framed drama of specific situations. But Milton will not allow disbelief to go unchallenged: his structures and narratives are not rooted in individual faith but in universal belief. The question of revealed truth raises its head as in no other poet in the language." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancieng English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on itself lay.
-- Wordsworth

"In Milton the world of Spenser was reconfigured and almost unrecognisable ... What had been reasonable and courteous, a belief in the fact that men of culture and intellect will be able to engage in rational discussion and agree to disagree, had been displaced by faction and sometimes violent intolerance. The moderate had stood down and the fanatic had taken his place, in the pulpit, in Parliament, and on the very peaks of Parnassus." -- TS Eliot

"I take it to be my portion in this life, joined with a strong propensity of nature, to leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die." -- John Milton

"I have bought a pocket Milton, which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments - the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, the noble defiance of hardship, in that great personage, SATAN." -- Robert Burns

"He was much more admired abrode than at home." -- John Aubrey

"My mind is not capable of forming a more august conception than arises from the contemplation of this greatest man in his latter days: poor, sick, old, blind, slandered, persecuted: 'Darkness before and danger's voice behind,' in an age in which he was as little understood by the party for whom, as by that against whom, he had contended, and among men before whom he strode so far as to dwarf himself by the distance; yet still listening to the music of his own thoughts, or, if additionally cheered, yet cheered only by the prophetic faith of two or three solitary individuals, he did nevertheless
... argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bore up and steer'd
Right onward."
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"True musical delight consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse to another." -- John Milton

Today in history: December 7, 1941

And below the jump, a chilling telegram:

Here is a cool fact about my home state, little Rhode Island:

There is only one newspaper in the United States that comes out on Sunday afternoon, (as opposed to Sunday morning) and that is the local paper for Westerly, (a small town in Rhode Island), called The Westerly Sun.

Because The Westerly Sun comes out at the odd time of 3 pm on Sunday - it was the only newspaper in the entire country to report the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941 - on the day it actually happened. If you look at that NY Times front page, the date, naturally, is December 8, since it didn't go to the presses until the afternoon of December 7.

The Westerly Sun is a teeny little local newspaper ... and it was the FIRST and ONLY one on that day of days.

I am picturing that tiny clapboard newspaper office in Westerly, off route 1 ... a place I have driven by many times ... a newspaper with a miniscule circulation. It is a Sunday morning and the staff of the newspaper, who normally report on school committee meetings and water board issues and the local police beat are all there, on the forefront, putting the front page together on that historic awful day.

Happy birthday, Louisa May Alcott

"November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year," said Meg, standing at the window one dull afternoon, looking out at the frostbitten garden.

"That's the reason I was born in it," observed Jo pensively, quite unconscious of the blot on her nose.

-- Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was born on this day, in 1832. (I just LOVE that picture of her above. The dress!!) This is perfect, because it was my birthday 2 days ago - and yesterday my whole family came over (aunts, uncles, cousins) and aunt Regina brought me a gift - two old old books (Eight Cousins and Rose in Bloom) - probably editions from the early 20th century - and they were given to my great-great grandmother by her aunt Sadie (we could tell this from the inscription in the front - in the perfect spidery script of the 19th century). Precious gifts! Regina found them in a box in her elf house and brought them down for me for my birthday. It took some deciphering to figure out who the 'Regina Rogers' was in the inscription. It couldn't be my grandmother, could it? Nobody could remember an "Aunt Sadie" from that generation - so it had to be from the generation before. The generation that still spoke in brogues. Glorious!!

To me, Little Women is a perfect book (even with the whole Laurie debacle, and the advent of the German professor which never works for me, to this day) - it is a book I go back to again and again and again - always seeing something new in it, always finding new levels. The characters seem to grow up with me. When I first read it, when I was 10 years old, I was ALL ABOUT JO. And my love affair with Jo continues to this day. She is one of my favorite female characters ever written (it's a tie between Jo March and Harriet the Spy). Jo LIVES. No one can convince me that she is just a fictional character. Nope. You cannot do it.

But as I have grown up, and as I have continuously gone back to the book - the other sisters have come to the foreground - I see myself in all of them. Parts of me are like Amy, parts of me are like Meg, and I would like to think that parts of me are like Beth. But honestly: Jo is the one. Jo is the one I most relate to. She's the artist. The tomboy. The independent wild spirit. The one who is afraid to make the wrong choice. The one who sticks to her guns.

I still am not really reconciled to the fact that she and Laurie did not end up together - HOWEVER, I can see Jo's point. They were like brother and sister. But ... but ... but ... couldn't that have segued into a love thing? The intimacy they have together, the comfort?

When I was a kid, I HATED the professor. With his stupid German accent, and his goofy poetry as he wooed Jo. I resented the fact that he wasn't Laurie. I loved Laurie.

Now I know that Louisa May Alcott was forced by her publishers to marry Jo off. She wanted her to stay single. And if you really think about it, THAT would be much more logical - it makes much more sense that Jo, even with all her passion, and her ability to understand men (in a way that Meg, the one with all the love affairs, doesn't) - would choose to spend her life alone. She would marry her writing. In that day and age, those were the choices. It was the choice Louisa May Alcott herself made. She could not submit to the demands of wifehood and motherhood - it would infringe on her writing. She knew it, even when she was 15 years old, and wrote in her journal:

"I will do something by and by. Don't care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I'll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won't!"

Alcott grew up in Concord, one of 4 girls, and part of what we would now call an activist family. They were abolitinists. Social reformers. Her mother was a social worker. Her father was an educational philosopher (more on this extraordinary and, frankly, bizarre man here), and had a belief in communal living (Louisa May Alcott wrote some funny pieces about these experiments of her father's, and having to submit to them as a young girl.) Her father (Amos Bronson Alcott - also born on this day) was buddies with Emerson, and part of the Transcendentalist movement. At the time, her father's views on teaching were very controversial: He actually believed that students should enjoy learning. Heaven forbid! He thought that students should be actively involved in their own education, and not just sit back and be passive little drones. Her father thought it was very important to have a beautiful classroom - not just desks and a chalkboard. He poured his heart (and finances) into a school - which ran for a couple of years - but then went under, putting the family at financial risk. Louisa May Alcott eventually, many years later, would be pretty much the sole supporter of her parents. She made a ton of money DURING her lifetime, which is quite rare. Her parents just weren't the money-making types - obviously. As a young teenager Louisa May Alcott had a passionate girlish love of Emerson - a crush, if you will. His intellect, his library that she was allowed to use, whatever ... She adored him.

In 1862, Alcott (as always, determined to make a living - and to contribute financially to her family) traveled to Washington DC as a Civil War nurse. By this point, Alcott had already started getting stuff published - poems, short stories in the Gothic melodramatic vein ... She actually preferred Gothic melodramas to the kinds of books that later would make her name. (She despised Little Women and found the writing of it extremely tedious.) Her experience as a nurse in the Civil War prompted her to publish a book called Hospital Sketches. At that point, her publisher asked her if she would write a book "for girls". Never one to back off from a challenge, Louisa May Alcott sat down and wrote Little Women in two months. She had grown up with 3 sisters - and she put her entire childhood and life into that book, even as she hated doing it, and didn't think the book would amount to much.

Little Women was published in 1868 and was an immediate rip-roaring success. The publisher, within only a couple of weeks of its publication, begged Alcott to get to work on a sequel. So Alcott did. Another smash success. Louisa May Alcott had become a star.

Every book she wrote after that was eagerly awaited for by a breathless loving public. Success had, indeed, come - her childish ambitions to be 'rich and famous' came to fruition tenfold ... but 'happy'? Was she happy?

She never married. She ended up taking care of her sister May's daughter - after May died from complications in childbirth. Being a surrogate mother to this young girl was one of the most fulfilling experiences of Alcott's life. She kept writing, kept publishing ... although she began to get more and more ill from mercury poisoning she had received years earlier during the Civil War (she had, like many other Civil War nurses, contracted typhoid fever - and at the time, the proscribed cure was something called "calomel" - a drug laden with mercury).

Near the end of her life, Alcott became active in the suffragette movement. Her father (an extraordinary man in his own right) had always been a feminist himself:

His passion was to see that his four daughters were educated, well-rounded, and part of the intellectual community he lived in. (Some heavy-hitters there - Emerson, Thoreau, etc.) Louisa's father kept detailed diaries during the raising of his 4 girls, chronicling everything about each one of them. His whole thing was early education - the importance of the first couple of years - and again, you don't ever get the sense that he thought this was only good for BOYS. On the contrary. Here's a snippet of a letter Louisa's father wrote to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1869, which gives you some idea of who this man was:

Woman is helping herself to secure her place in a better spirit and manner than any we [men] can suggest or devise, it becomes us to take, rather than proffer Consels, readily waiting to learn her wishes and aims, as she has so long, and so patiently deferred to us.

In 1879, Louisa May Alcott was the first woman to register to vote in Concord - for the school committee election. Pretty awesome, huh?

Her beloved father passed away on March 4, 1888. Louisa May Alcott died two days later.

An extraordinary woman.

She didn't care for the book that made her name ... and probably wished that her legacy was different ... but that's okay. It is not for the artist to decide what the audience will react to, what the reader will respond to. She created something with Little Women that transcends the ages, that pierces through the centuries. It is a classic book. And perhaps it's fitting, in a way, that she wrote it for hire, pretty much - it was not her idea, and yet - look at what she was able to create. Look at what she was able to bring out!!

Those 4 girls are immortal.

When I was 16 years old, one of the assignments we had in our Drama class was to do a one-person show - maybe 15, 20 minutes long - based on either a real person from history, or a fictional character - and we had to come into the class as that character, and do a monologue - based on our research - and then take questions from the class - in character. I still remember my core group of friends and their projects: Beth came in as Mae West. She was incredible. She had on a blowsy blonde wig, and wore a tight sparkley dress - and I still remember the shock when Beth started telling us all about birth control options - because Mae West was an early champion of birth control for women. It was awesome. Beth was fearless. Betsy did Paddington Bear (although she has no memory of this! But I SWEAR it is true!!) (and I still remember how one of the questions for Betsy was: "Why don't you eat some of your marmalade?" and Betsy - who despises marmalade - had to dip her hand into the jar, take out a big scoop of it, and eat it - pretending she liked it. Now that's dedication to the acting craft!). Michele did Marilyn Monroe. Unbelievable. Michele was an amazing actress, a natural. She got the sadness beneath the blonde glamour of Marilyn.

And I did Louisa May Alcott.

One of my first forays into the one-person show format ... I did hours and hours and hours of research for a mere 20 minute piece - because I had no idea what questions people would ask, and I had to be ready for anything!

It was great, because I had known nothing about her before that. I had just read Little Women and we had also visited her house in Concord on a family trip (a great thing to do if you are in the area). Orchard House:

Once I learned all this stuff about her, my admiration for her grew. I loved that our birthdays were almost the same. She was a Sagittarius too.

Little Women. Here's the excerpt I posted from it - an excerpt that still, after so many times reading it, brings a lump to my throat.

I don't know if I would call Little Women a great book - but I would say that it is something much better than "great": it is beloved. And that is a rare and precious thing.

Happy birthday, Louisa May!

Happy birthday, William Blake

He was a poet (virtually unknown in his own lifetime), and also an engraver (I've put some of his startling work in the extended entry - but if you want to see more of his work, check out this link). He did illustrations for children's books, religious books, volumes of poetry ... and now his stuff is considered priceless.

William Blake was born in 1757 in London, the third of five children. He went to school until he was 14 and then had to go to work. He got a job as an apprentice to an engraver, which is how he ended up making his paltry living. He lived in pretty much poverty for his entire life. He married at 25 the illiterate Catherine Boucher. Blake taught her how to read, and they ended up becoming collaborators in bringing out volumes of his poetry. He did engravings to illustrate his poems. Catherine was the one who bound the books, and got them ready for publication. The entire thing was a joint production. They did all the work themselves.

The two of them never had any children. They were extremely unconventional, and visitors tell of stopping by the Blake house to find the two of them sitting out in their back garden completely naked. Just hanging out, reading, working together, NUDE. They had a whole philosophy about nakedness, and sex, and innocence - that there was nothing dirty about any of that stuff. It actually all was quite holy, and it was human prudery that made celebration of the body a dirty thing.

William Blake had visions. He speaks about them openly and much of his work has a phantasmagorical religious feeling to it. When he was a young boy, he said he looked up into a tree and saw that it was full of winged angels.

His view of God, the Spirit, the Holy Trinity is so inspiring to me. It's vital, it's alive, and it seems to be all about love. There are not too many people I would call "genius" - but Blake I most certainly would.

However - again - William Blake, despite these astonishing works of poetry he put out during his lifetime - died unrecognized.

Now, though, he is considered to be one of the greatest poets in the English language.

He's one of my all-time favorites.

His poem about the little lisping chimney-sweep is in the "canon". If you took any kind of sweeping Poetry 101 course, you probably would have encountered it. I'll post it below. But it's really his long form poems, especially the SPECTACULAR "Marriage of Heaven and Hell", where the guy literally has no equal. None. Blake has no peers.

Here's the one about the chimney sweep, which is an indictment of the society in which he lives, a society that treats its most innocent members with brutality and uncaring indifference. He is a visionary poet, yes, but he did not turn his eyes away from earthly matters. Far from it.

"The Chimney Sweep" - from Songs of Innocence

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved: so I said,
"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet; and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight, -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins and set them all free;
Then down a green plain leaping, laughing, they run,
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,
He'd have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm;
So if all do their duty they need not fear harm.

And here ... for those of you who are interested ... is "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" in its entirety (accompanied by more of Blake's engravings).

Just go with it. Just succumb.

As you can see, the guy was so ahead of his time that he is timeless. He predicts the Beat generation (and Allen Ginsberg was partially responsible for bringing Blake back into vogue), he predicts modernism, he would fit in with the poetry slams of today (except that he is, well, you know - GOOD). He was a man who plumbed his unconscious for material. He brought what was within him OUT. His poetry is the literary version of Van Gogh's Starry Night. Van Gogh was not interpreting the sky. Van Gogh was actually painting what he saw. William Blake is the same way.

Thanks, Blake! Wish I could have visited you and your wife in your back garden, and sat around with you all, nude, drinking tea, and talking about angels.

Here are some quotes by and about William Blake. Enjoy!

"He had no public: he very early gave up publishing in any serious sense. one obvious consequence, or aspect, of this knowledge is the carelessness that is so apparent in the later prophetic books. Blake had ceased to be capable of taking enough trouble." -- F.R. Leavis

Improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without Improvement, are roads of Genius. -- Blake

"I mean, don't you think it's a little bit excessive?"
"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. William Blake."
Pause.
"William Blake?"
"William Blake!"
"William Blake???"
"William Blake!!!"
-- Bull Durham

"I do not condemn Pope or Dryden because they did not understand imagination, but because they did not understand verse." -- William Blake

"The prophetic robe with its woof of meekness and its warp of wrath was forced on [Blake] by loneliness and his modest station in life." -- Robert Graves

"In his youth, [Blake] had a gift of simple and fair speech; but he lost it. Although he could always catch the heavenly harmony of thoughts he could seldom mount them on a fitting chariot of rhythm and rhyme. His fine passages were the direct gift of the Muse, and are followed by lines of other origin." -- Edward Thomas

"It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant." -- T.S. Eliot

"Think of a white cloud as being holy, you cannot love it, but think of a holy man within the cloud, love springs up in your thoughts, for to think of holiness distinct from man is impossible to the affections. Thought alone can make monsters, but the affections cannot." -- Blake

"He is very eighteenth century." -- T.S. Eliot

"The emotions are presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language." -- T.S. Eliot on "Songs of Innocence" and "Songs of Experience"

"In America in the late 1940s Allen Ginsberg, interested in Supreme Reality, alone and suffering a 'dark night of the soul sort of,' his lover Neal Cassady having sloped off, and having himself just masturbated, with a volume of Blake before him - 'I wasn't even reading, my eye was idling over the page of "Ah, Sun-flower," and it suddenly appeared - the poem I'd read a lot of times before.' He began to understand the poem, and 'suddenly, simultaneously with understanding it,' he 'heard a very deep earthen grave voice in the room, which I immediately assumed, I didn't think twice, was Blake's voice.' This 'apparitional voice' became his guiding spirit: 'It was like God had a human voice, with all the infinite tenderness and anciency and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.' On Ginsberg this 'anciency fathered Howl, though the Blake simulacrum was aided by the hallucinogens popular at the time, the recipe for Part II of the poem including peyote, just as for Kaddish he was assisted by amphetamine injections. 'The amphetamine gives a peculiar metaphysical tinge to things, also. Space-outs.' Blake managed his visions without substance abuse. Ginsberg's appropriation of the poet of innocence and experience did much to promote Blake to the alternative culture of the 1950s and 1960s." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"a completely and uncompromisingly individual idiom and technique ... individual, original, and isolated enough to be without influence." -- FR Leavis

"You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with ideas." -- TS Eliot

"Romantic writers glorified childhood as a state of innocence. Blake's 'The Chimey Sweeper', written in the same year as the French Revolution, combines the Romantic cult of the child with the new radical politics, whichcan both be traced to social thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It is the boy sweep, rather than Blake, who speaks: he acts as the poet's dramatic persona or mask. There is no anger in his tale. On the contrary, the sweep's gentle acceptance of his miserable life makes his exploitation seem all the more atrocious. Blake shifts responsibility for protest onto us." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn"

Some of William Blake's extraordinary engravings below:

Christ in the sepulcher guarded by angels - 1805

Whirlwind of Lovers (Illustration to Dante's Inferno)

The Ancient of Days - 1794

Isaac Newton - 1795

Today in history: November 26, 1942

Casablanca premiered at the Hollywood Theatre in New York City.

It was not expected to be a long-lasting mythical evocation of the quintessential American ideals we all aspire to, from generation to generation. It was just supposed to be another one of the pro-war propaganda movies the studios were churning out at that time. It went on to win the Academy Award the next year - but again, lots of films win Academy Awards and don't go on to achieve legendary status.

The legend around the film began growing in the late 50s, a couple of years after Bogart's death. The stories about the Casablanca showings at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts are now famous ... and make me wish for a time machine.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II, explains:

Humphrey Bogart died in 1957. The cult of Casablanca was born three months later. If Cyrus Harvey, Jr., was not the father of the phenomenon, he was certainly the midwife. In 1953, Harvey and Bryant Haliday had turned the Brattle Theatre across from, Harvard University into an art cinema. Harvey, who had spent much of his Fulbright scholarship year in Paris watching movies at Henri Langlois's Cinemathique Francaise, programmed the Brattle with European classics and the early films of Fellini, Antonini, Truffaut, and Ingmar Bergman, for whom Harvey and Halliday became the American distributors.

"At some point, we thought that we ought to bring in some of the American films that hadn't been shown that much," says Harvey. "And my partner and I both thought that the Bogarts were vastly underrated. I think Casablanca was the first one we played. It was my favorite. I thought that Bogart was probably the best American actor who ever lived. And the picture caught on very rapidly. The first time we played it, there was a wonderful reaction. Then the second, third, fourth and fifth times it took off. The audience began to chant the lines. It was more than just going to the movies. It was sort of partaking in a ritual."

Casablanca played at the Brattle for the first time on April 21, 1957. It was so successful with Harvard students that it was held over for a second week. Then the Bogart festivals began, with six or eight of his mopvies playing each semester during final-examination weeks. The festivals would culminate with Casablanca. It was at Harvard that the relevance of Casablanca to a generation that had no relationship to World War II became apparent.

So. Happy birthday to a film that has done so much to shape how we think about ourselves. It has meant different things to different generations - and that's the definition of a good piece of art. If you watch a lot of the other WWII movies made at that time - they seem dated, overblown, propagandistic, and overly simplistic. Not this one. Not this one.

I have a feeling (just a hunch) that if Ilse had not gotten on that plane with Victor - if she had stayed with Rick ... the movie would not be remembered today. It might be still watched, on late-night movie channels, but it would not have taken on that mythical quality. It is the vision of self-sacrifice that taps into our deepest held beliefs and hopes. It is who we hope and aspire to be. It is a noble outlook ... and yet, at the center of the film, is the Rick character, who says he is not good at being noble. If you make a big deal out of your own nobility, then you are just a jackass who thinks way too highly of yourself. But if you quietly, and with no fanfare, do the right thing - abdicate your own wants for a greater cause, practice the art of letting go ... then you truly deserve to be called noble.

Hokey? Sure. Sentimental? Absolutely.

If you're a fan of this movie - enjoy the quotes below!

Billy Wilder says:

"This is the most wonderful claptrap that was ever put on the screen ... Claptrap that you can't get out of your mind. The set was crummy. By God, I've seen Mr. Greenstreet sit in that same wicker chair in fifty pictures before and after, and I knew the parrots that were there. But it worked. It worked absolutely divinely. No matter how sophisticated you are and it's on television and you've seen it 500 times, you turn it on."

Sociologist Todd Gitlin writes:

Casablanca dramatizes archetypes. The main one is the imperative to move from disengagement and cynicism to commitment. The question is why Casablanca does this more effectively than other films. Several other Bogart films of the same period -- Passage to Marseilles, To Have and Have Not, Key Largo -- enact exactly the same conversation. But the Rick character does not simply go from disengagement to engagement but from bitter and truculent denial of his past to a recovery and reignotion of the past. And that is very moving, particularly because it is also associated with Oedipal drama. But there is also a third myth narrative, a story about coming to terms with the past. Rick had this wonderful romance; he also had his passionate commitment. It seems gone forever. But you can get it back. That is a very powerful mythic story, because everybody has lost something, and the past it, by definition, something people have lost. This film enables people to feel that they have redeemed the past and recovered it, and yet without nostalgia. Rick doesn't want to be back in Paris. And the plot is brilliantly constructed so that these three myths are not three separate tales, but one story with three myths rushing down the same channel.

Aljean Harmetz, author of Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II writes:

I was in elementary school during World War II; I did my part in the war by rolling tinfoil and rubber bands into balls and bringing them to the Warners Beverly Theatre on Saturday mornings. World War II had receded with all its certainties and moral imperatives, leaving muddy flats behind. The world is a cornucopia of grays. I believed the romantic interpretation of Casablanca then -- love lost for the good of the world -- and believe it now. But it is the very ambiguity of Casablanca that keeps it current. Part of what draws moviegoers to the movie again and again is their uncertainty about what the movie is saying at the end ...

Casablanca's potent blend of romance and idealism -- a little corny and mixed with music and the good clean ache of sacrifice and chased down with a double slug of melodrama -- is available at the corner video store, but Casablanca couldn't be made today. There is too much talk and not enough action. There are too many characters too densely packed, and the plot spins in a hard-to-catch-your-balance circular way instead of walking a straight line. There is no Humphrey Bogart to allow the audience a permissible romance without feeling sappy. And the studio would insist that all the ambiguity be written out in the second draft.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"Bogart had competence," says Billy Wilder. "You felt that, if that big theatre where you were watching Casablanca caught on fire, Bogart could save you. Gable had that same competence and, nowadays, Mr. Clint Eastwood." But Gable is too heroic for a disillusioned world. Three decades after his death, Bogart still seems modern. "He wore no rose-colored glasses," wrote Mary Astor. "There was something about it all that made him contemptuous and bitter. He related to people as though they had no clothes on -- and no skin, for that matter."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the seventy-five actors and actresses who had bit parts and larger roles in Casablanca, almost all were immigrants of one kind or another. Of the fourteen who were given screen credit, only Humphrey Bogart, Dooley Wilson, and Joy Page were born in America. Some had come for private reasons. Ingrid Bergman, who would lodge comfortably in half a dozen countries and half a dozen languages, once said that she was a flyttfagel, one of Sweden's migratory birds. Some, including Sydney Greenstreet and Claude Rains, wanted richer careers. But at least two dozen were refugees from the stain that was spreading across Europe. There were a dozen Germans and Austrians, nearly as many French, the Hungarians SZ Sakall and Peter Lorre, and a handful of Italians.

"If you think of Casablanca and think of all those small roles being played by Hollywood actors faking the accents, the picture wouldn't have had anything like the color and tone it had," says Pauline Kael.

Dan Seymour remembers looking up during the singing of the Marseillaise and discovering that half of his fellow actors were crying. "I suddenly realized that they were all real refugees," says Seymour.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart and Rains admired each other, and that admiration comes through their scenes together. What seems to be a genuine friendship between Rick and Renault takes the sting out of the ending of Casablanca. "My father loved Humphrey Bogart," says Jessica Rains. "He told me so." The cockney who turned himself into a gentleman was unexpectedly compatible with the gentle-born son of a doctor and a famous illustrator who turned himself into a rowdy. "Professional" is the word the people they worked with pin, like a badge, to both men. "Bogart never missed a cue," says script supervisor Meta Carpenter. "He was completely professional." Rains, says assistant director Lee Katz, "was very professional altogether." To the Warner hairdressers, said Jean Burt, Bogart and Bette Davis were "the real pros. They were on time; they knew their lines; they knew their craft."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

[During shooting] Bogart was snappish and moody. Love scenes were uncharted waters for him. "I've always gotten out of my scrapes in front of the camera with a handy little black automatic," he told a journalist who visited the Casablanca set during production. "It's a lead pipe cinch. But this. Well, this leaves me a bit baffled." The interview is typically frothy and insubstantial as Bogart plays with the idea of becoming a sophisticated lover or a caveman lover. But, even as he jokes about it, his uneasiness is obvious. "I'm not up on this love stuff and don't know just what to do."

According to a memoir by Bogart's friend Bathaniel Benchley, before Casablanca began shooting, a mutal friend, Mel Baker, advised Bogart to stand still and make Bergman come to him in the love scenees. Bogart appears to have taken the advice, but his reticence may have been as much innate as calculated. Nearly a dozen years after Casablanca, Bogart told a biographer that love scenes still embarrassed him. "I have a personal phobia maybe because I don't do it very well," he said.

"What the women liked about Bogey, I think," said Bette Davis, "was that when he did love scenes he held back -- like many men do -- and they understood that." Miscast as an Irish horse trainer in Dark Victory, Bogart had tried to make love to Davis, who played his rich employer. Said Davis, "Up until Betty Bacall I think Bogey was really embarrassed doing love scenes, and that came over as a certain reticence. With her he let go, and it was great. She matched his insolence."

However distant Bogart and Bergman may have been from each other in real life, and however uneasy Bogart may have been with Bergman in his arms, their love scenes have the poignancy and passion that Hollywood calls chemistry. "I honestly can't explain it," says Pauline Kael, "but Bogart had that particular chemistry with ladylike women. He had it with Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen and he so conspicuously had it with Lauren Bacall -- who pretended to be a tough girl but really wasn't -- in To Have and Have Not. But he didn't have it with floozy-type girls."

Critic Stanley Kauffmann explains the match between Bogart and Bergman as the resonance of a relationship between brash America and cultured Europe. "She was like a rose," he says. "You could almost smell the fragrance of her in the picture, and you could feel his whiskers when you looked at the screen. It was intangible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Of the stars, Bergman had the more difficult job. Bogart had only to play a man in love. Foreshadowing without giving away too much, Bergman had to let the audience know that love wasn't enough.

ILSA. And I hate this war so much. Oh, it's a crazy world. Anything can happen. If you shouldn't get away, I mean, if something should happen to keep us apart. Wherever they put you and wherever I'll be, I want you to know that I -- Kiss me! Kiss me as though it were the last time.

And Bergman had to hold the audience even when she was saying dialogue that was so richly romantic that it was almost a parody, including, "Was that cannon fire? Or was it my heart pounding?"

Her voice and her face could make almost anything believable. In 1947, several top sound men agreed that Bergman had the sexiest voice of any actress. "The middle register of her voice is rich and vibrant, which gives it a wonderfully disturbing quality," said Francis Scheid. "It's sexy in a refined, high-minded way." "The face is quite amazing," says Pauline Kael. "I think she had a physical awkwardness on the stage and in her early films, but I think somehow that the beauty of her face obviated it. Even in Casablanca, her physical movements are not very expressive. But you didn't really care."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Casablanca started on Stage 12A with the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's romance in Paris. It was an accident that Bogart was required to make love to Bergman almost before he was introduced to her. Originally, production was to start in Rick's Cafe on Stage 8, but the intricate clockwork that matched actors, scripts, stages, and sets had been thrown off because Irving Rapper was two weeks behind schedule on Now, Voyager. Claude Rains didn't finish his role as the wise psychiatrist in Now, Voyager until June 3. Paul Henreid was not free until June 25. So the [Michael] Curtiz movie began with the scene in the Montmartre cafe. The first day, a lovestruck Richard Blaine -- "His manner is wry but not the bitter wryness we have seen in Casablanca" say the stage directions -- pours champagne for himself, Ilsa, and Sam while the Germans march toward Paris and Sam plays, "As Time Goes By".

According to Geraldine Fitzgerald, Bogart and Bergman had lunch together a week or ten days before Casablanca started production. "I had lunch with them," she says. "And the whole subject at lunch was how they could get out of the movie. They thought the dialogue was ridiculous and the situations were unbelievable. And Ingrid was terribly upset because she said she had to portray the most beautiful woman in Europe, and no one would ever believe that. It was curious how upset she was by it. 'I look like a milkmaid,' she said.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

"I remember," says film critic Pauline Kael, "my friends and I talked about when are the executives going to discover this guy [Humphrey Bogart]. It was early in his career, when he appeared in horror movies and all sorts of stuff that Warners threw at him. We liked him years before he got the leading roles. he was small, but he knew how to use every part of himself. By the late thirties, he was quite in charge of everything in his performance. He had a tension, like a coiled spring. You didn't want to take your eyes off him."

In The Maltese Falcon, as Dashiell Hammett's detective Sam Spade, Bogart carried to the right side of the law the wary watchfulness, the cynicism, and the ambiguities that had infused his deadliest killers. "I think it was his very best performance," says Kael, who was twenty years old in 1941 when she saw the movie for the first time. "Because you got a sense of the ambivalances in th eman, and he used all the tensions marvelously physically. I don't think he could have been as good as he was in Casablanca if he hadn't done the Falcon first, because he really discovered his powers in the Falcon. he created more tension in his scenes than he ever had before. And I think afterwards he drew on the qualities he had discovered in himself in the Falcon. So I think it was [John] Huston who brfought those things out. And [Michael] Curtiz benefited from them."...

The arc of Bogart's career at Warner Brothers can be seen in how and when he chose to fight Warner -- and with what success. Bogart was suspended for refusing to play the part of the outlaw Cole Younger in Bad Men of Missouri ... His suspension ended in June 1941, when George Raft, whose career decisions at Warners were unerringly wrong, refused The Maltese Falcon because "it is not an important picture." And what would have happened if Raft had agreed to play Sam Spade? The odds are high that Bogart would have made a breakthrough in some other movie. The disillusionment, stoicism, and weary aloofness that he brought to the screen fit the heroes of a new kind of movie melodrama, film noir, too well to have gone unnoticed ...

Warner Brothers could overuse and misuse its actors. It could dump Van Johnson and Susan Peters in 1942 and let MGM build their careers. But the studio would not have remained in business if it had missed the obvious. The Maltese Falcon had been immensely profitable, and George Raft was becoming more difficult with every role he was offered. In January 1942, Bogart demanded $3,000 a week and the right to do ten guest radio appearances a year. He was given a new contract, starting at $2,750 a week. After six years at Warners, Bogart finally had a star's contract. Warner Brothers was stuck with him for seven years, and the studio began to look for a role that would turn him into a romantic lead.

On February 14, [Hal] Wallis sent a memo to Steve Trilling: "Will you please figure on Humphrey Bogart and Ann Sheridan for Casablanca, which is scheduled to start the latter part of April." Six weeks later, Jack Warner wrote Wallis that George Raft was lobbying him for the role. Wallis held firm and Casablanca had the first of its three stars.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Much of the major work on the Casablanca screenplay was done between April 6, when Howard Koch was assigned to the movie, and June 1, when a revised final script was mimeographed ...

Each subsequent script for Casablanca became leaner and sharper, more economical, the scenes rearranged for greater dramatic effect and the speeches polished and clipped. Within the confines of a studio that both Koch and Julie Epstein describe as 'a family", Koch rewrote the Epsteins to give the movie more weight and significance, and the Epsteins then rewrote Koch to erase his most ponderous symbols and to lighten his earnestness.

This kind of survival-of-the-fittest script is unlikely to happen today, when writers, director, and studio executives come insecurely and suspiciously together to make a single movie, the original writer is rarely brought back after his work is rewritten, and screen credit means that someone gets extra money from television and videocassette sales...

At the beginning of May, the Epsteins finished the second section of the script of Casablanca, while Howard Koch turned in his revision of the Epsteins' first act. Earlier, in nineteen pages of suggestions of "Suggestions for Revised Story", Koch had warned:

There is also a danger that Rick's sacrifice in the end will seem theatrical and phony unless, early in the story, we suggest the side of his nature that makes his final decision in character. It would be interesting to have Renault penetrate the mystery in his first scene with Rick when he guesses that the cynical American is underneath, a sentimentalist. Rick laughs at the idea, then Renault produces his record -- "ran guns to Ethiopia", "fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish War." Rick says he got well paid on both occasions. Renault replies that the winning side would have paid him better. Strange that he always happens to be on the side of the underdog. Rick dismisses the implication, but throughout the picture we see evidences of his humanity, which he does his best to cover up.

Koch's script of May 11 also deepened Rick's character and underlined the political tensions in subtle ways. For example, Koch makes the man Rick bars from his gambling room -- who was an English cad in the play -- into a representative of the Deutschebank. When the owner of the Blue Parrot offers to buy Rick's Cafe, Koch has added dialogue in which the character played by Sidney Greenstreet also offers to buy Sam, and Rick says, "I don't buy or sell human beings." (In their rewrite of Koch's script, the Epsteins would build on Koch's line by having Greenstreet respond, "That's too bad. That's Casablanca's leading commodity.") If Koch layered the politics rather heavily -- in his version, Victor Laszlo forces Renault to toast liberte, egalite, fraternite -- the Epsteins would remove those speeches in the script of June 1. With delicate balance, Koch managed to hold down the gags while the Epsteins managed to cut out the preaching.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

In the Epsteins' first script, Lois is still Lois and Renault's womanizing still has an unpleasant edge. However, the groundwork has been laid for the relationship between Rick and Renault, which may lie as close to the emotional heart of the film as the relationship between Rick and Ilsa. The Epsteins have created a bantering between equals, an admiration at the edges of the frame.

RENAULT. I have often speculated on why you do not return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with the President's wife? I should like to think you killed a man. It is the romantic in me.

RICK. It was a combination of all three.

RENAULT. And what in Heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?

RICK. My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.

RENAULT. Waters? What waters? We are in the desert.

RICK. I was misinformed.

Says Epstein today: "My brother and I tried very hard to come up with a reason why Rick couldn't return to America. But nothing seemed right. We finally decided not to give a reason at all."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

The sixty-six pages of script, labeled Part I TEMP., were mimeographed on April 2. The Epsteins had written the first third of the movie, the section preceding the flashback to Rick and Ilsa's Paris romance. Ilsa and her Resistance-hero husband had come to Casablanca, and at the end of the Epsteins' script, Rick was sprawled drunkenly in his empty cafe, waiting for her to return.

"That first part was very close to the play," Epstein says. "It was with the second half that we had trouble."

Those sixty-six pages mirror the final movie. The Epsteins even begin with a spinning globe, an animated map, and a description of the refugee trail that leads to Casablanca. Everybody Comes to Rick's took place inside Rick's Cafe, and Rick was the first character to be introduced. The Epsteins start by creating the feel of Casablanca: A man whose papers have expired is short by the police; a pickpocket warns his victims that vultures are everywhere; refugees look up longingly as an airplane brings the Gestapo captain (a few scripts later he was promoted to major) Strasser to Casablanca and lands beyond a neon sign that reads RICK'S. Inside the cafe, a dozen desperate refugees try to buy or sell their way to freedom. Rick is not introduced until page 15, when a hand writes "Okay -- Rick" on the back of a check and the camera pulls back to a medium shot of Humphrey Bogart. And the plot is driven by an invention of the Epsteins: the Letters of Transit were being carried by two German couriers who have been murdererd.

Of the four major characters in Everybody Comes to Rick's, only the noble Victor Laszlo remains essentially the same in the movie. Rick, who in the play is a self-pitying married lawyer who has cheated on his wife, takes on Bogart's persona of wary, hooded toughness. Says Jules Epstein: "Once we knew that Bogart was going to play the role, we felt he was so right for it that we didn't have to do anything special. Except we tried to make him as cynical as possible."

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

However, there was no mistaking the fact that Casablanca, with its snappy dialogue, eccentric characters, witty cynicism, wary anti-hero and liberal political message was definitely a Warner movie. Casablanca is a less raw and angry melodrama than the studio might have made a few years earlier, but it has the same distrust of authority and suspicion of human nature. America's entry into the war was already softening movies by requiring them to throb with patriotism, but the milieu of Casablanca is still corrupt, and the little people still don't get a fair shake.

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Bogart's response to the success of Casablanca was more typically sardonic. He enjoyed telling his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, how Charles Enfield, the studio's head of publicity, had had the amazing revelation that the actor had sex appeal. Says Bacall, "Bogie would say, 'Of course, I did nothing in Casablanca that I hadn't done in twenty movies before that, and suddenly they discover I'm sexy. Any time that Ingrid Bergman looks at a man, he has sex appeal.'"

From Making of Casablanca, The: Bogart, Bergman, and World War II:

Warner Brothers was the most frugal of the studios, and little was wasted there in 1942. World War II gave the studio's president, Harry Warner, an excuse to pick up nails dropped by careless carpenters. But he had obsessively picked up nails before the war made iron scarce. Casablanca moved onto the French Street created for The Desert Song the day after that film moved off. A few signs and two live parrots turned the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter El Khobar into the French Morocco of heroic freedom fighter Victor Laszlo. And half a dozen bit players with foreign accents got a full week's work by straddling the two films. More than half of the movies Warners made in 1942 dealt in one way or another with the war, a bonanza for actors who had fled from Berlin or Vienna. Casablanca was filled with those Jewish refugees, many of them playing Nazis.

Film critic Stanley Kauffmann wrote:

"Bogart absolutely encapsulates permissible romance. In this disillusioned, disenchanted world here was a romantic hero we could accept. I think that that disenchantment began with World War I and the emergence of what could be called the Hemingway -- the undeluded -- generation. And I think that that revulsion with the romances and the lies of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century has persisted. There have been plenty of representatives of the lovely bucolic strain of American life on the screen. Bogart was someone urban -- in a sense more jagged and abrasive than Cagney -- who you felt was suffering. Cagney was triumphant. Bogart was tough, but he had sensitivity. Certainly the epitome he stood for was in Casablanca. I was misinformed. That's the twentieth century."

Roger Ebert - who provides the commentary to the DVD (and I highly suggest you check it out, if you haven't already - it's marvelous commentary, true goosebump material from someone who has STUDIED and also LOVED this movie since it first came out) - wrote the following article about Casablanca for his "Great Movies" series:

If we identify strongly with the characters in some movies, then it is no mystery that ``Casablanca'' is one of the most popular films ever made. It is about a man and a woman who are in love, and who sacrifice love for a higher purpose. This is immensely appealing; the viewer is not only able to imagine winning the love of Humphrey Bogart or Ingrid Bergman, but unselfishly renouncing it, as a contribution to the great cause of defeating the Nazis.

No one making ``Casablanca'' thought they were making a great movie. It was simply another Warner Bros. release. It was an ``A list'' picture, to be sure (Bogart, Bergman and Paul Henreid were stars, and no better cast of supporting actors could have been assembled on the Warners lot than Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, Claude Rains and Dooley Wilson). But it was made on a tight budget and released with small expectations. Everyone involved in the film had been, and would be, in dozens of other films made under similar circumstances, and the greatness of ``Casablanca'' was largely the result of happy chance.

The screenplay was adapted from a play of no great consequence; memoirs tell of scraps of dialogue jotted down and rushed over to the set. What must have helped is that the characters were firmly established in the minds of the writers, and they were characters so close to the screen personas of the actors that it was hard to write dialogue in the wrong tone.

Humphrey Bogart played strong heroic leads in his career, but he was usually better as the disappointed, wounded, resentful hero. Remember him in ``The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,'' convinced the others were plotting to steal his gold. In ``Casablanca,'' he plays Rick Blaine, the hard-drinking American running a nightclub in Casablanca when Morocco was a crossroads for spies, traitors, Nazis and the French Resistance.

The opening scenes dance with comedy; the dialogue combines the cynical with the weary; wisecracks with epigrams. We see that Rick moves easily in a corrupt world. ``What is your nationality?'' the German Strasser asks him, and he replies, ``I'm a drunkard.'' His personal code: ``I stick my neck out for nobody.''

Then ``of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' It is Ilsa Lund (Bergman), the woman Rick loved years earlier in Paris. Under the shadow of the German occupation, he arranged their escape, and believes she abandoned him--left him waiting in the rain at a train station with their tickets to freedom. Now she is with Victor Laszlo (Henreid), a legendary hero of the French Resistance.

All this is handled with great economy in a handful of shots that still, after many viewings, have the power to move me emotionally as few scenes ever have. The bar's piano player, Sam (Wilson), a friend of theirs in Paris, is startled to see her. She asks him to play the song that she and Rick made their own, ``As Time Goes By.'' He is reluctant, but he does, and Rick comes striding angrily out of the back room (``I thought I told you never to play that song!''). Then he sees Ilsa, a dramatic musical chord marks their closeups, and the scene plays out in resentment, regret and the memory of a love that was real. (This scene is not as strong on a first viewing as on subsequent viewings, because the first time you see the movie you don't yet know the story of Rick and Ilsa in Paris; indeed, the more you see it the more the whole film gains resonance.)

The plot, a trifle to hang the emotions on, involves letters of passage that will allow two people to leave Casablanca for Portugal and freedom. Rick obtained the letters from the wheedling little black-marketeer Ugarte (Peter Lorre). The sudden reappearance of Ilsa reopens all of his old wounds, and breaks his carefully cultivated veneer of neutrality and indifference. When he hears her story, he realizes she has always loved him. But now she is with Laszlo. Rick wants to use the letters to escape with Ilsa, but then, in a sustained sequence that combines suspense, romance and comedy as they have rarely been brought together on the screen, he contrives a situation in which Ilsa and Laszlo escape together, while he and his friend the police chief (Claude Rains) get away with murder. (``Round up the usual suspects.'')

What is intriguing is that none of the major characters is bad. Some are cynical, some lie, some kill, but all are redeemed. If you think it was easy for Rick to renounce his love for Ilsa--to place a higher value on Laszlo's fight against Nazism--remember Forster's famous comment, ``If I were forced to choose between my country and my friend, I hope I would be brave enough to choose my friend.''

From a modern perspective, the film reveals interesting assumptions. Ilsa Lund's role is basically that of a lover and helpmate to a great man; the movie's real question is, which great man should she be sleeping with? There is actually no reason why Laszlo cannot get on the plane alone, leaving Ilsa in Casablanca with Rick, and indeed that is one of the endings that was briefly considered. But that would be all wrong; the ``happy'' ending would be tarnished by self-interest, while the ending we have allows Rick to be larger, to approach nobility (``it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world''). And it allows us, vicariously experiencing all of these things in the theater, to warm in the glow of his heroism.

In her closeups during this scene, Bergman's face reflects confusing emotions. And well she might have been confused, since neither she nor anyone else on the film knew for sure until the final day who would get on the plane. Bergman played the whole movie without knowing how it would end, and this had the subtle effect of making all of her scenes more emotionally convincing; she could not tilt in the direction she knew the wind was blowing.

Stylistically, the film is not so much brilliant as absolutely sound, rock-solid in its use of Hollywood studio craftsmanship. The director, Michael Curtiz, and the writers (Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch) all won Oscars. One of their key contributions was to show us that Rick, Ilsa and the others lived in a complex time and place. The richness of the supporting characters (Greenstreet as the corrupt club owner, Lorre as the sniveling cheat, Rains as the subtly homosexual police chief and minor characters like the young girl who will do anything to help her husband) set the moral stage for the decisions of the major characters. When this plot was remade in 1990 as ``Havana,'' Hollywood practices required all the big scenes to feature the big stars (Robert Redford and Lena Olin) and the film suffered as a result; out of context, they were more lovers than heroes.

Seeing the film over and over again, year after year, I find it never grows over-familiar. It plays like a favorite musical album; the more I know it, the more I like it. The black-and-white cinematography has not aged as color would. The dialogue is so spare and cynical it has not grown old-fashioned. Much of the emotional effect of ``Casablanca'' is achieved by indirection; as we leave the theater, we are absolutely convinced that the only thing keeping the world from going crazy is that the problems of three little people do after all amount to more than a hill of beans.

Today in History: November 14, 1732

On this day in history, the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731 - and still open today) hired its first librarian, and opened for "business".

Here is a painting of Benjamin Franklin opening the first subscription library - (painting by Charles Mill):

The Library Company was the brainchild of "The Junto", a group of local merchants and bigwigs in the community, who would gather periodically to talk about philosophy, politics, literature, whatever. Eventually, one of the things that came up in their conversations was the general need for more comprehensive libraries. Naturally having a library of your own at that time was the mark of a successful person, so there were private libraries, mainly in people's homes, and books, in general, were not always easy to come by. So at first, these Junto gentlemen wanted to expand their OWN libraries and thought if they pooled their resources (sharing book seller contacts in America and abroad) they could do that. But eventually, this idea expanded into the thought of creating a subscription library for the entire community.

Here are the "minutes" from the board of directors meeting where that decision was made:

[An] Extract from minutes of the directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia, dated August 31 st ., directed to the President, was read, as follows:

Upon motion, ordered,
That the Librarian furnish the gentlemen, who are to meet in Congress, with the use of such Books as they may have occasion for, during their sitting, taking a receipt for them.
By order of the Directors,

(Signed) William Attmore, Sec'y.

Ordered, That the thanks of the Congress be returned to the Directors of the Library Company of Philadelphia, for their obliging order.

Gives me goosebumps!

Here's a description of the plan from HW Brands' (not-very-good) biography of Ben Franklin: The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin:

Private libraries were common enough among men of wealth in the colonies. Franklin had taken advantage of a few himself. Nor were institutional libraries unheard of; these were usually joined to churches or other bodies heavenly bent. A secular subscription library, however, was something new. Subscribers would pool their resources to buy books all would share and from which all might benefit. Franklin floated the idea in the Junto; upon favorable reception he drew up a charter specifying an initiation fee of forty shillings and annual dues of ten shillings. The charter was signed in July 1731, to take effect upon the collection of fifty subscriptions.

Franklin led the effort to obtain the subscriptions. At first, in doing so, he presented the library as his own idea, as indeed it was. But he encountered a certain resistance on the part of potential subscribers, a subtle yet unmistakable disinclination in some people to give credit by their participation to one so openly civic-minded. They asked themselves, if they did not ask him, what was in this for Ben Franklin that made him so eager to promote the public weeal. To allay their suspicions, Franklin resorted to a subterfuge. "I therefore put myself as much as I could of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading."

Within four months the Library Company had its requisite two score and ten commitments. Compiling the initial book order involved identifying favorite titles and consulting James Logan, the most learned man in Pennsylvania. Logan knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian and was said to be the only person in America sufficiently conversant with mathematics to be able to comprehend Newton's great Principia Mathematica. Before Franklin's emergence, Logan -- who was thirty years the elder and had been the personal protege of William Penn -- was the leading figure of Pennsylvania letters (and numbers). Naturally Franklin cultivated him as source of advice, patronage, and civic goodwill. Logan listed several items essential to the education of any self-respecting person; between these and the titles Franklin and the other library directors chose on their own, early purchases covered topics ranging from geometry to journalism, natural philopsophy to metaphysics, poetry to gardening.

Louis Timothée, a journeyman in Franklin's shop, was hired as librarian, and a room to house the collection was rented. Franklin and the other directors of the library instructed Timothée to open the room from two till three on Wednesday afternoons and from ten till four on Saturdays. Any "civil gentlemen" might peruse the books, but only subscribers could borrow them. (Exception was made for James Logan, in gratitude for his advice in creating the collection.) Borrowers might have one book at a time. Upon accepting a volume each borrower must sign a promissory note covering the cost of the book. This would be voided upon return of the book undamaged. The borrower might then take out another, building his edifice of knowledge, as it were, one brick at a time.

In 1774, they ended up making their entire library collection available to the first Continental Congress which was gathering in Philadelphia in Sept. 1774.

One of the things I am most impressed by, when it comes to our Founding Fathers, is that - unequivocally - each one of them would sense voids in the community (lack of newspapers, or libraries, or fire departments) and so would go about creating whatever needed to be created to fill that void, on their own. They did not look to others. They did not bitch about how there wasn't such-and-such yet. There are notable exceptions, obviously - they were, after all, men of THEIR day and age, not OURS - but in general: every single of one of them were can-do people. They did things themselves, without waiting. They were NOT like the people described in that excerpt above: the ones who were suspicious of Benjamin Franklin's enthusiasm and civic energy. Alexander Hamilton, working as a lawyer in New York, realized how his job was made so much more difficult because all of the laws in New York were not compiled and written down in one place. So, duh, he sat down and wrote that book. A huge undertaking, but SOMEONE had to do it. Nobody asked him to do it. He just sensed that void, feeling it at work in his own life, on a personal level, so decided to change the situation.

Ben Franklin realized that a public subscription library would be a wonderful thing for the community. And so he set about creating it.

So today in history: the Library Company hired Louis Timothée, as the first public librarian in the United States of America.

My father is a librarian. I cherish this date in history. I post it in honor of him.

Happy birthday, Anne Sexton

Poems and quotes from and about her below - in honor of this amazing talent, who pretty much burst fully-formed onto the poetry scene. Kind of incredible. When you read the Complete Poems, you can feel her sliding off the rails at the end (I'm not talking about mentally - I'm talking about the quality of her work, although the two are probably related) ... some of those late poems are embarrassing. (I love Robert Lowell's quote below, and think it would have been very interesting - might have saved Sexton that embarrassment). But she was all about revealing her truth, as it was in whatever moment she found herself in. The clarity and almost frightening pure expressing of much of her work is gone at the end, and some of it sounds like a bad imitation of Jack Kerouac, a riff with no purpose, no cleverness ... like this, from one of her last poems:

I love you the way the oboe plays.
I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feels.
I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
Yet I fear you,
as one in the desert fears the sun.
True.
True.

This is terrible stuff, the voice of a sentimental undergraduate in a beginning poetry class, not a celebrated prize-winning American poet. It almost embarrasses me to type that out here. So I see there to be a regression in the gift - because her first poems are spectacular, and she wasn't like Sylvia Plath - a precocious academic poetess, getting published in Seventeen magazine when she was still a teenager, and winning prizes, and all that. Sexton was getting married, having kids, and struggling with her sickness.

She was a housewife, mother, and madwoman - who had spent time in mental institutions, and a psychiatrist suggested that maybe she "should write" as a way to get through the darker moments. Maxine Kumin tells the story:

Nevertheless, seven months after her second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born in 1955, Anne suffered a second crisis and was hospitalized. The children were sent to live with her husband's parents; and while they were separated from her, she attempted suicide on her birthday, November 9, 1956. This was the first of several episodes, or at least the first that was openly acknowledged. Frequently, these attempts occurred around Anne's birthday, a time of year she came increasingly to dread. Dr. Martin Orne, Brunner-Orne's son, was the young psychiatrist at Glenside Hospital who attended Anne during this siege and treated her for the next seven years. After administering a series of diagnostic tests, he presented his patient with her scores, objective evidence that, despite the disapproving naysayers from her past, she was highly intelligent. Her associative gifts suggested that she ought to return to the writing of poetry, something she had shown a deft talent for during secondary school. It was at Orne's insistence that Anne enrolled in the Holmes workshop.

"You, Dr. Martin" came directly out of that experience, as did so many of the poems in her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back.

The first poem Anne wrote, "You, Dr. Martin", reads:

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer hotel
or the laughing bee on a stalk

of death. We stand in broken
lines and wait while they unlock
the doors and count us at the frozen gates
of dinner. The shibboleth is spoken
and we move to gravy in our smock
of smiles. We chew in rows, our plates
scratch and whine like chalk

in school. There are no knives
for cutting your throat. I make
moccasins all morning. At first my hands
kept empty, unraveled for the lives
they used to work. Now I learn to take
them back, each angry finger that demands
I mend what another will break

tomorrow. Of course, I love you;
you lean above the plastic sky,
god of our block, prince of all the foxes.
The breaking crowns are new
that Jack wore.
Your third eye
moves among us and lights the separate boxes
where we sleep or cry.

What large children we are
here. All over I grow most tall
in the best ward. Your business is people,
you call at the madhouse, an oracular
eye in our nest. Out in the hall
the intercom pages you. You twist in the pull
of the foxy children who fall

like floods of life in frost.
And we are magic talking to itself,
noisy and alone. I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself,
counting this row and that row of moccasins
waiting on the silent shelf.

Her first poem.

Whether or not you "like this sort of stuff" (and that is the main complaint you hear about Sexton and the other "confessional" poets) is not the point. The point is that the VOICE we meet in "You, Dr. Martin" is confident, strong, and unselfconscious. We know we are meeting the POET, not a persona, or a smokescreen of words and devices. It's not clever. Straight out of the gate, there was nothing between Anne Sexton and her expression of herself. Sylvia Plath's early poems suffer from precocity, they can come off as coy - arch - She was still working to find herself. Wonderful stuff, with some startling lines - but it wouldn't be until 1962, years into her career, when Plath would burst out with her original voice - that you would never ever mistake for anyone else's. Sexton STARTED at that point. Her voice didn't need to be developed, or honed. It came out fully-formed. There was much jealousy between the two, although they were also good friends.

Her life was not easy, she was a wild woman, and she made life hell for her husband, her kids, and anyone who really loved her. A mixture of drink, drugs, and a lifetime battle with mental illness took its toll on her relationships, certainly, but it also took its toll on her writing gift, which you can see in those later poems, which don't just read as hallucinatory or unclear - but as amateur.

Regardless: A remarkable journey. With some WONDERFUL poems.

My father saw her read her poetry in Cambridge, Massachusetts when he was in college. Her poetry readings were more like underground rock shows, with handmade posters, and an electric buzz of excitement running through the mostly-young crowd. They weren't poetry readings, they were events. Anne Sexton was gorgeous, and she would dress the part. When my dad saw her, she wore a bright red dress, slinked her legs around each other (so many of the photos of her have her twining those legs about), and chain-smoked. My dad said she was great, he remembers it well.

My favorite of hers is this one:

LIVE
Live or die, but don't poison everything...

Well, death's been here
for a long time --
it has a hell of a lot
to do with hell
and suspicion of the eye
and the religious objects
and how I mourned them
when they were made obscene
by my dwarf-heart's doodle.
The chief ingredient
is mutilation.
And mud, day after day,
mud like a ritual,
and the baby on the platter,
cooked but still human,
cooked also with little maggots,
sewn onto it maybe by somebody's mother,
the damn bitch!

Even so,
I kept right on going on,
a sort of human statement,
lugging myself as if
I were a sawed-off body
in the trunk, the steamer trunk.
This became perjury of the soul.
It became an outright lie
and even though I dressed the body
it was still naked, still killed.
It was caught
in the first place at birth,
like a fish.
But I play it, dressed it up,
dressed it up like somebody's doll.

Is life something you play?
And all the time wanting to get rid of it?
And further, everyone yelling at you
to shut up. And no wonder!
People don't like to be told
that you're sick
and then be forced
to watch
you
come
down with the hammer.

Today life opened inside me like an egg
and there inside
after considerable digging
I found the answer.
What a bargain!
There was the sun,
her yolk moving feverishly,
tumbling her prize --
and you realize she does this daily!
I'd known she was a purifier
but I hadn't thought
she was solid,
hadn't known she was an answer.
God! It's a dream,
lovers sprouting in the yard
like celery stalks
and better,
a husband straight as a redwood,
two daughters, two sea urchings,
picking roses off my hackles.
If I'm on fire they dance around it
and cook marshmallows.
And if I'm ice
they simply skate on me
in little ballet costumes.

Here,
all along,
thinking I was a killer,
anointing myself daily
with my little poisons.
But no.
I'm an empress.
I wear an apron.
My typewriter writes.
It didn't break the way it warned.
Even crazy, I'm as nice
as a chocolate bar.
Even with the witches' gymnastics
they trust my incalculable city,
my corruptible bed.

O dearest three,
I make a soft reply.
The witch comes on
and you paint her pink.
I come with kisses in my hood
and the sun, the smart one,
rolling in my arms.
So I say Live
and turn my shadow three times round
to feed our puppies as they come,
the eight Dalmatians we didn't drown,
despite the warnings: The abort! The destroy!
Despite the pails of water that waited,
to drown them, to pull them down like stones,
they came, each one headfirst, blowing bubbles the color of cataract-blue
and fumbling for the tiny tits.
Just last week, eight Dalmatians,
3/4 of a lb., lined up like cord wood
each
like a
birch tree.
I promise to love more if they come,
because in spite of cruelty
and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,
I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.
The poison just didn't take.
So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
the dream, the excitable gift.

"All I wanted was a little piece of life, to be married, to have children.... I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep the nightmares out." -- Anne Sexton

"Untrammeled by a traditional education in Donne, Milton, Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, Anne was able to strike out alone, like Conrad's secret sharer, for a new destiny. She was grim about her lost years, her lack of a college degree; she read omnivorously and quite innocently whatever came to hand and enticed her, forming her own independent, quirky, and incisive judgments. Searching for solutions to the depressive episodes that beset her with dismaying periodicty, Anne read widely in the popular psychiatric texts of the time: interpretations of Freud, Theodore Reik, Philip Reiff, Helena Deutsch, Erik Erikson, Bruno Bettelheim. During a summer-school course with Philip Rahv, she encountered the works of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Thomas Mann. These were succeeded by the novels of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Kurt Vonnegut. But above all else, she was attracted to the fairy tales of Andersen and Grimm, which her beloved Nana had read to her when she was a child. They were for her, perhaps, what Bible stories and Greek myths had been for other writers. At the same time that she was being entertained and drawn into closer contact with a kind of collective unconscious, she was searching the fairy tales for psychological parallels." -- Maxine Kumin

"What Sexton suggested to Plath was the force of simple rhyme and simple rhythm, the magic of nursery rhyme darkened by time, of fairy tale where the happy ending somehow doesn't happen. Sexton showed Plath the way, and then Plath died first, stealing a march on her friend, which Sexton resented and envied. Four years Plath's senior, Anne Sexton survived her by twelve years, committing suicide in 1974. But Plath keeps hold of the laurels. There are wonderful things in the Complete Poems of Sexton, published in 1981, but many of them are things we associate, whatever their original source, with Plath, and Sexton's work seems but a footnote to hers." -_ Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

"Criticism of 4 of my poems in Lowell's class: criticism of rhetoric. He sets me up with Ann Sexton, an honor, I suppose. Well, about time. She has very good things, and they get better, though there is a lot of loose stuff." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, March 20, 1959

"This then is a phenomenon ... to remind us, when we have forgotten in the weariness of literature, that poetry can happen." -- Louis Simpson on the publication of Anne Sexton's first book of poetry

"For a book or two, she grew more powerful. Then writing was too easy or too hard for her. She became meager and exaggerated. Many of her most embarrassing poems would have been fascinating if someone had put them in quotes, as the presentation of some character, not the author. -- Robert Lowell

"Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical. A leaf from Anne Sexton's book would do here. She has none of my clenches and an ease of phrase, and an honesty. I have my 40 unattackable poems." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, April 23, 1959

"I hold back nothing." -- Anne Sexton, 1969

"Retyped pages, a messy job, on the volume of poems I should be turning in to Houghton Mifflin this week. But AS [Anne Sexton] is there ahead of me, with her lover GS [George Starbuck] writing New Yorker odes to her and both of them together: felt our triple martini afternoons at the Ritz breaking up. That memorable afternoon at G's monastic and miserly room on Pinckney "You shouldn't have left us": where is responsibility to lie? I left, yet felt like a brown winged moth around a rather meagre candle flame, drawn. That is over." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 3, 1959

"Does Sexton imagine any way out of this impasse, any way to escape the debilitating terrors of a consciousness plagued by a conviction of its own evil? One possibility is to replace self-loathing with an open acceptance of evil—even admitting the likelihood that she is 'not a woman'. What is remarkable, however, is not this admission itself but the lively, almost gleeful tone in which it is uttered:

"I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming of evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

" 'A woman like that is misunderstood,' Sexton adds wryly, but the poem is a serious attempt to understand such a woman--her sense of estrangement, her impulse toward death--by internalizing evil and giving it a voice: a chortling, self-satisfied, altogether amiable voice which suggests that 'evil' is perhaps the wrong word after all. Sexton's witch, waving her 'nude arms at villages going by,' becomes something of value to the community, performing the function Kurt Vonnegut has called the 'domestication of terror.' Unlike Plath's madwoman in 'Lady Lazarus'--a woman at the service of a private, unyielding anger, a red-haired demon whose revenge is to 'eat men like air'--Sexton's witch is essentially harmless. Although she remains vulnerable--'A woman like that is not afraid to die'--she rejects anger in favor of humor, flamboyance, self-mockery. She is a kind of perverse entertainer, and if she seems cast in the role of a martyr, embracing madness in order to domesticate it for the rest of the community--making it seem less threatening, perhaps even enjoyable--it is nevertheless a martyrdom which this aspect of Sexton accepts with a peculiar zest." -- Greg Johnson on Anne Sexton's perhaps most-famous poem, "Her Kind"

Her Kind
by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

"Once, when I wrote to her about my terror of publishing a second book of poems, she answered: 'Don't dwell on the book's reception. The point is to get on with it--you have a life's work ahead of you--no point in dallying around waiting for approval. We all want it, I know, but the point is to reach out honestly--that's the whole point. I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any of us--or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem--a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer--it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem. You have the gift-- and with it comes responsibility--you mustn't neglect or be mean to that gift--you must let it do its work. It has more rights than the ego that wants approval.'" -- Erica Jong

"It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience." -- James Dickey - the man who wrote "Deliverance", a book that had, if I recall, quite a few "disgusting aspects". I suppose when women write about their bodies it's just grosser to some people. Oh, boo-hoo. I love Dickey's poems, but I do not like this comment of his.

"[Sexton's poems] raise the never-solved problem of what literature really is, where you draw the line between art and documentary." -- Hayden Carruth

"My own struggle with Anne Sexton, for twenty years now, has not been about her subject matter (she is the one who taught me that you can write a poem about anything), but about the blatant deterioration of her talent. Sexton's Complete Poems appeared in 1981, edited by her daughter/literary executor Linda Gray Sexton. This volume includes the eight books Anne Sexton sent to press during her lifetime, as well as one hundred and thirty pages of posthumously published poems. Though fascinating as Sexton documents, the latter are shockingly sloppy and full of over-the-top, bad-trip imagery. This, coupled with the fact that the last three books she did publish (The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, and That Awful Rowing Toward God) saw an obvious decline in quality, has made it difficult to come to grips with her complete body of work. It also didn't help that, after her death, her former mentor Robert Lowell wrote that her writing had become "meager and exaggerated." I jokingly refer to Sexton's late period as "Bad Anne." How else to reconcile such slipshod lines as "I flee. I flee. / I block my ears and eat salami" with her amazing early metaphors ("leaves . . . born in their own green blood / like the hands of mermaids") and admissions ("Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself")? It's too painful to think of her simply as a brilliant poet who got bad. And too easy, somehow, to blame it on pills, alcohol, insanity, fame. Better, I recently decided, to think of her as a genius with demons, writing to beat the clock. " -- David Trinidad

"Her delineation of femaleness [is] so fanatical that it makes one wonder, even after many years of being one, what a woman is." -- Mona Van Duyn

"All I need now is to hear that GS [George Starbuck] or MK [Maxine Kumin] has won the Yale and get a rejection of my children's book. AS [Anne Sexton] has her book accepted at HM and this afternoon will be drinking champagne. Also an essay accepted by PJHH [Peter J. Henniker-Heaton], the copy-cat. But who's to criticize a more successful copy-cat. Not to mention a poetry reading at McLean. And GS at supper last night, smug as a cream-fed cat, very pleased indeed, for AS is, in a sense, his answer to me." -- Sylvia Plath, journal, May 20th, 1959

"Her vision of Him as the winner in a crooked poker game at the end of that book [The Awful Rowing Toward God] is a sporting admission of her defeat rather than a decisive renewal of the Christian myth." -- Estella Lauter

"One feels tempted to drop [Sexton's poems] furtively in the nearest ashcan, rather than to be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering." -- James Dickey

"NOW: the story about George, J-- and Ann, and the children. An insufferable woman (myself of course) gets involved in the separated family. She thinks G will be fondest of her, tells mad wife (she's sick, I mean, really sick) it is of course Ann, feels very clever. Then finds out, when A's book is accepted, it is really A, gets furious. Calls up society, or gets sociologist friend to call up society for prevention of cruelty for children, never really finds out if they get through. Day in park. Children can't speak, finds herself throwing peanuts to pigeons etc. Ducks, squirrels, children blank-staring and oblivious. Smell bad, girl urinates on bench. I wouldn't be surprised to read tomorrow in the paper how that little girl was killed falling from that roof. Of course she never does read any such thing. Her good will perverted, conditional on pity that would generate from self if G was her lover, when cheated of that, it becomes nasty busybodiness. THE OLYMPIANS. Poor, married poets in Ritz bar. -- Sylvia Plath, jotting down sketches for a story about Anne Sexton, journal, June 15, 1959

Sylvia's Death - by Anne Sexton
for Sylvia Plath

O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,

with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom,

with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeam, into the dumb prayer,

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about rasing potatoes
and keeping bees?)

what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?

Thief --
how did you crawl into,

crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,

the death we said we both outgrew,
the one we wore on our skinny breasts