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A poet, novelist, fiction writer, and playwright, Langston Hughes is known for his insightful, colorful portrayals of black life in America from the twenties through the sixties and was important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance.

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Langston Hughes - Poems, Quotes & Harlem Renaissance

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Langston Hughes was an African American writer whose poems, columns, novels and plays made him a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

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Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to honestly portray the joys and hardships of working-class black lives, avoiding both sentimental idealization and negative stereotypes. As he wrote in his essay " The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."

This approach was not without its critics. Much of Hughes's early work was roundly criticized by many black intellectuals for portraying what they thought to be an unattractive view of black life. In his autobiographical The Big Sea, Hughes commented:

Fine Clothes to the Jew [Hughes's second book] was well received by the literary magazines and the white press, but the Negro critics did not like it at all. The Pittsburgh Courier ran a big headline across the top of the page, LANGSTON HUGHES' BOOK OF POEMS TRASH. The headline in the New York Amsterdam News was LANGSTON HUGHES THE SEWER DWELLER. The Chicago Whip characterized me as 'the poet low- rate of Harlem.' Others called the book a disgrace to the race, a return to the dialect tradition, and a parading of all our racial defects before the public. ... The Negro critics and many of the intellectuals were very sensitive about their race in books. (And still are.) In anything that white people were likely to read, they wanted to put their best foot forward, their politely polished and cultural foot-and only that foot.

In fact, the title Fine Clothes to the Jew, which was misunderstood and disliked by many people, was derived from the Harlemites Hughes saw pawning their own clothing; most of the pawn shops and other stores in Harlem at that time were owned by Jewish people. Lindsay Patterson, a novelist who served as Hughes's assistant, believed that Hughes was

critically, the most abused poet in America. ... Serious white critics ignored him, less serious ones compared his poetry to Cassius Clay doggerel, and most black critics only grudgingly admired him. Some, like James Baldwin, were downright malicious about his poetic achievement. But long after Baldwin and the rest of us are gone, I suspect Hughes' poetry will be blatantly around growing in stature until it is recognized for its genius. Hughes ... was unashamedly black at a time when blackness was démodé. He had the wit and intelligence to explore the black human condition in a variety of depths, but his tastes and selectivity were not always accurate, and pressures to survive as a black writer in a white society (and it was a miracle that he did for so long) extracted an enormous creative toll.

Nevertheless, Hughes, more than any other black poet or writer, recorded faithfully the nuances of black life and its frustrations.
In Hughes's own words, his poetry is about "workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago-people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter-and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July."

Hoyt W. Fuller commented that Hughes "chose to identify with plain black people ... precisely because he saw more truth and profound significance in doing so. Perhaps in this he was inversely influenced by his father-who, frustrated by being the object of scorn in his native land, rejected his own people. Perhaps the poet's reaction to his father's flight from the American racial reality drove him to embrace it with extra fervor." (Langston Hughes's parents separated shortly after his birth and his father moved to Mexico. The elder Hughes came to feel a deep dislike and revulsion for other African-Americans.)

Although Hughes had trouble with both black and white critics, he was the first black American to earn his living solely from his writing and public lectures. Part of the reason he was able to do this was the phenomenal acceptance and love he received from average black people. A reviewer for Black World noted in 1970: "Those whose prerogative it is to determine the rank of writers have never rated him highly, but if the weight of public response is any gauge then Langston Hughes stands at the apex of literary relevance among Black people. The poet occupies such a position in the memory of his people precisely because he recognized that 'we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength,' and because he used his artistry to reflect this back to the people."

Hughes brought a varied and colorful background to his writing. Before he was 12 years old he had lived in six different American cities. When his first book was published, he had already been a truck farmer, cook, waiter, college graduate, sailor, and doorman at a nightclub in Paris, and had visited Mexico, West Africa, the Azores, the Canary Islands, Holland, France, and Italy. As David Littlejohn observed in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes: "On the whole, Hughes' creative life [was] as full, as varied, and as original as Picasso's, a joyful, honest monument of a career. There [was] no noticeable sham in it, no pretension, no self-deceit; but a great, great deal of delight and smiling irresistible wit. If he seems for the moment upstaged by angrier men, by more complex artists, if 'different views engage' us, necessarily, at this trying stage of the race war, he may well outlive them all, and still be there when it's over. ... Hughes' [greatness] seems to derive from his anonymous unity with his people. He seems to speak for millions, which is a tricky thing to do.

Hughes reached many people through his popular fictional character, Jesse B. Semple (shortened to Simple). Simple is a poor man who lives in Harlem, a kind of comic no-good, a stereotype Hughes turned to advantage. He tells his stories to Boyd, the foil in the stories who is a writer much like Hughes, in return for a drink. His tales of his troubles with work, women, money, and life in general often reveal, through their very simplicity, the problems of being a poor black man in a racist society. "White folks," Simple once commented, "is the cause of a lot of inconvenience in my life." Simple's musings first appeared in 1942 in "From Here to Yonder," a column Hughes wrote for the Chicago Defender and later for the New York Post. According to a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews, their original intent was "to convince black Americans to support the U.S. war effort." They were later published in several volumes.

A more recent collection, 1994's The Return of Simple, contains previously unpublished material but remains current in its themes, according to a Publishers Weekly critic who noted Simple's addressing of such issues as political correctness, children's rights, and the racist undercurrent behind contraception and sterilization proposals. Donald C. Dickinson wrote in his Bio-Bibliography of Langston Hughes that "[the] charm of Simple lies in his uninhibited pursuit of those two universal goals, understanding and security. As with most other humans, he usually fails to achieve either of these goals and sometimes once achieved they disappoint him. ... Simple has a tough resilience, however, that won't allow him to brood over a failure very long. ... Simple is a well-developed character, both believable and lovable. The situations he meets and discusses are so true to life everyone may enter the fun."

A reviewer for Black World commented on the popularity of Simple: "The people responded. Simple lived in a world they knew, suffered their pangs, experienced their joys, reasoned in their way, talked their talk, dreamed their dreams, laughed their laughs, voiced their fears-and all the while underneath, he affirmed the wisdom which anchored at the base of their lives." Hoyt W. Fuller believed that, like Simple, "the key to Langston Hughes ... was the poet's deceptive and profound simplicity. Profound because it was both willed and ineffable, because some intuitive sense even at the beginning of his adulthood taught him that humanity was of the essence and that it existed undiminished in all shapes, sizes, colors and conditions. Violations of that humanity offended his unshakable conviction that mankind is possessed of the divinity of God."

It was Hughes's belief in humanity and his hope for a world in which people could sanely and with understanding live together that led to his decline in popularity in the racially turbulent latter years of his life. Unlike younger and more militant writers, Hughes never lost his conviction that " most people are generally good, in every race and in every country where I have been." Reviewing The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times in Poetry, Laurence Lieberman recognized that Hughes's "sensibility [had] kept pace with the times," but he criticized his lack of a personal political stance. "Regrettably, in different poems, he is fatally prone to sympathize with starkly antithetical politics of race," Lieberman commented. "A reader can appreciate his catholicity, his tolerance of all the rival-and mutually hostile-views of his outspoken compatriots, from Martin Luther King to Stokely Carmichael, but we are tempted to ask, what are Hughes' politics? And if he has none, why not? The age demands intellectual commitment from its spokesmen. A poetry whose chief claim on our attention is moral, rather than aesthetic, must take sides politically."

Hughes's position in the American literary scene seems to be secure. David Littlejohn wrote that Hughes is "the one sure Negro classic, more certain of permanence than even Baldwin or Ellison or Wright. ... His voice is as sure, his manner as original, his position as secure as, say Edwin Arlington Robinson's or Robinson Jeffers'. ... By molding his verse always on the sounds of Negro talk, the rhythms of Negro music, by retaining his own keen honesty and directness, his poetic sense and ironic intelligence, he maintained through four decades a readable newness distinctly his own."

The Block and The Sweet and Sour Animal Book are posthumously published collections of Hughes's poetry for children that position his words against a backdrop of visual art. The Block pairs Hughes's poems with a series of six collages by Romare Bearden that bear the book's title. The Sweet and Sour Animal Book contains previously unpublished and repeatedly rejected poetry of Hughes from the 1930s. Here, the editors have combined it with the artwork of elementary school children at the Harlem School of the Arts. The results, noted Veronica Chambers in the New York Times Book Review, "reflect Hughes's childlike wonder as well as his sense of humor." Chambers also commented on the rhythms of Hughes's words, noting that "children love a good rhyme" and that Hughes gave them "just a simple but seductive taste of the blues." Hughes's poems have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, and Czech; many of them have been set to music.

Donald B. Gibson noted in the introduction to Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays that Hughes

has perhaps the greatest reputation (worldwide) that any black writer has ever had. Hughes differed from most of his predecessors among black poets, and (until recently) from those who followed him as well, in that he addressed his poetry to the people, specifically to black people. During the twenties when most American poets were turning inward, writing obscure and esoteric poetry to an ever decreasing audience of readers, Hughes was turning outward, using language and themes, attitudes and ideas familiar to anyone who had the ability simply to read. He has been, unlike most nonblack poets other than Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg, a poet of the people. ... Until the time of his death, he spread his message humorously-though always seriously-to audiences throughout the country, having read his poetry to more people (possibly) than any other American poet.

Hughes died on May 22, 1967, due to complications from prostate cancer.

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Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays. He sought to...

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Resources for Family Engagement from the Library of Congress | Library of Congress

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We invite you and your family to participate in these activities, inspired by the collections, programs, and expertise of the Library of Congress.

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Poem: Life is Fine

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I went down to the river,
I set down on the bank.
I tried to think but couldn't,
So I jumped in and sank.

I came up once and hollered!
I came up twice and cried!
If that water hadn't a-been so cold
I might've sunk and died.

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

I took the elevator
Sixteen floors above the ground.
I thought about my baby
And thought I would jump down.

I stood there and I hollered!
I stood there and I cried!
If it hadn't a-been so high
I might've jumped and died.

But it was High up there! It was high!

So since I'm still here livin',
I guess I will live on.
I could've died for love--
But for livin' I was born

Though you may hear me holler,
And you may see me cry--
I'll be dogged, sweet baby,
If you gonna see me die.

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

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Life Is Fine - Life Is Fine Poem by Langston Hughes

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Poem: Dreal Variations

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To fling my arms wide
In some place of the sun,
To whirl and to dance
Till the white day is done.
Then rest at cool evening
Beneath a tall tree
While night comes on gently,
Dark like me-
That is my dream!

To fling my arms wide
In the face of the sun,
Dance! Whirl! Whirl!
Till the quick day is done.
Rest at pale evening...
A tall, slim tree...
Night coming tenderly
Black like me.

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Dream Variations - Dream Variations Poem by Langston Hughes

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6. Langston Hughes& the Harlem Rennaissance

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6. Langston Hughes& the Harlem Rennaissance

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Video course

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Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance: Crash Course Literature 215

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Langston Hughes - "The Weary Blues" on CBUT, 1958

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The author of numerous collections of poetry, Rita Dove served as the US Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995 and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011.

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Rita Dove (she/her) was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she attended Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany, and the University of Iowa, where she earned her creative writing MFA in 1977. In 1987, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her third...

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Poem: Lady Freedom Among Us

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Popular Poets & Member Poets - Poem Hunter Poets

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Different poets all around the world. Thousands of poets. Search for poets using the Poetry Search Engine.

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on the future of literature

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Rita Dove was 41 years old when, in 1993, she became poet laureate of the United States-the youngest person and the first African-American to serve in the post. She has published nine books of poetry, including the 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning Thomas and Beulah, based on her grandparents, and this past year's Sonata Mulattica. Dove, who has also written short stories, a verse play and a novel, is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. She spoke with associate editor Lucinda Moore.

What is the future of literature?
With the advent of technology and cyberspace and iPads and Kindle, I feel change happening even at the level of composition. In the past, a reader had to rely upon the author to supply all the details of what it was like to hike in Nepal, let's say. Thanks to search engines, now you can quickly look it up, and that's going to change the way literature is written.

How will blogs, YouTube and other technology affect authors?
The intimacy that literature affords-that feeling that you are really in the head of the characters portrayed-used to be almost the private privilege of plays, novels and poetry. Now there's another place that has it-be it blogs, Facebook or Twitter-and it gives you second-by-second accounts. That does not diminish the power of literature, because literature is shaped intimacy. For the writer, it raises the bar, as it should. The very fact that we can be found at any moment, through a cellphone or whatever, changes the way plot will work. How many plots were dependent upon the fact that a note had to be passed here or there or that someone didn't answer the phone?

What is shaping literature and its future?
I flash back to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, which came out in 1969. It seemed to be a plot that had exploded, which you then had to piece together. It seemed to acknowledge the fact that you couldn't put all the pieces together right away. At the end of the novel, it still felt like it was going on. The acknowledgement that things are going to be playing out beyond the provenance of the work of fiction had some of its seeds right there. I think you see more of a willingness in literature to acknowledge the fact that this is not a perfectly shaped whole, that lives are going to be messy.

Things like the iPad and Kindle will allow us to carry around massive amounts of literature. Because of that, literature is going to be looking for different ways to distinguish itself from mass media, and it's going to feel freer to experiment. Because of movies, which satisfy so many people's need for a visual effect and aural effect combined, theater is going to go increasingly toward things that only theater can do. In the new poetry, I see a fascinating confidence in switching viewpoints very quickly, in mid-sentence practically. So there's a speeding up of changing viewpoints and expressions that comes from technology speeding us up and the fact that you can keep several screens open at a time and divide your attention. The narratives are getting faster and are having more interruptions because we can tolerate interruption.

Genealogical research is causing more people to embrace a multiracial heritage. How will this affect literature?
It cuts down on stereotyping and the fear of the other, because we all are the other or the other is us. The assumptions of the mainstream change. A mainstream novel of the early '70s or so would contain the dilemmas of, say, a household in Connecticut. Everything that had to do with country clubs or the tensions at a cocktail party was assumed to be the mainstream. That left a burden of explanation for any writer who was not of the mainstream. So a Jewish-American writer had to go into great details to explain Seder, or an African-American writer had to explain-somehow in the context of their story-how they did their hair. Now that we are more and more identifying ourselves as multiracial, these elements of other cultures are becoming better known. That will change the nature of the mainstream, and that is quite a tidal wave.

You once asked, "Why can't we find the universal in our differences?" Is literature getting there?
Absolutely. That's one of the great shining lights of the future. I think as we become more multicultural and able to look at each corner of the world, the more at ease we are with our differences. And we are going to be more comfortable reading something about experiences which are, on the surface, very different from ours. Yet we'll still feel confident that we can access the common humanity.

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The Pulitzer-Prize winning poet discusses how new technologies will affect the creative process

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Poem: The Abduction

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Poem: Parsley

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Rita Dove's poem "Parsley" with explanation

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Poet Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, and grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio. She graduated with a degree in history from Fisk University. A world-renowned poet and one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Movement, her notable books of poetry are Black Judgment...

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Yolanda Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943. She was the daughter of Jones "Gus" Giovanni and Yolande Cornelia Giovanni (née Watson). Raised in Woodlawn, Ohio, north of Cincinnati, Giovanni was the youngest of two daughters. Her older sister, Gary Ann, began to call Giovanni "Nikki" during childhood. In 1960, Giovanni enrolled at Fisk University. She was dismissed after her first semester for failing to conform to the university's conservative standards. Giovanni returned to Fisk four years later and participated in the Fisk Writing Workshops directed by then writer-in-residence John Oliver Killens. Giovanni also restored Fisk's chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). She graduated magna cum laude in February 1967 with BA in history. Before taking graduate courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, Giovanni organized the Black Arts Festival in Cincinnati. From 1967 to 1968, she studied social work at the University of Pennsylvania. Giovanni then enrolled in an MFA program at Columbia in 1969.

In her early work, Giovanni expressed the militant themes of the Black Arts Movement. These themes are especially apparent in her first two volumes, Black Feeling, Black Talk (Harper Perennial, 1968) and Black Judgment (Broadside Press, 1969), in which the poem "Nikki-Rosa" first appeared. A year later, she published her third volume Re: Creation (Broadside Press, 1970), which includes the classic poem, "Ego-Tripping." Also in 1970, Giovanni privately published Night Comes Softly (Medic Press), one of the earliest anthologies of Black women's poetry.

Giovanni is the author of eleven illustrated children books, in addition to her poetry collections. Her books include A Library (Versify, 2022); A Good Cry: What We Learn From Tears and Laughter (William Morrow, 2017); Chasing Utopia: A Hybrid (William Morrow, 2013); Bicycles: Love Poems (William Morrow, 2009); and Acolytes (HarperCollins, 2007), among others. A lung cancer survivor, Giovanni also contributed an introduction to the anthology Breaking the Silence: Inspirational Stories of Black Cancer Survivors (Hilton Publishing, 2005).

Giovanni's honors include the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Award for Dedication and Commitment to Service in 2009, seven NAACP Image Awards for Literature, the Langston Hughes award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters in 1996, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1970, as well as thirty honorary degrees from national colleges and universities. She has been given keys to more than a dozen cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Miami, and New Orleans.

Several magazines have named Giovanni Woman of the Year, including Essence, Mademoiselle, Ebony, and Ladies Home Journal. She was the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award. She has served as poetry judge for the National Book Awards and was a finalist for a Grammy Award in the category of Spoken Word.

In 1969, Giovanni accepted a teaching position at Rutgers University. From 1987 to 2022, Giovanni taught at Virginia Tech. In 1999, she was named a University Distinguished Professor.

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Nikki Giovanni - Born in 1943, Nikki Giovanni is the author of numerous collections of poetry and was the first recipient of the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award.

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Nikki Giovanni - Poet Nikki Giovanni Poems

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Nikki Giovanni poems, quotations and biography on Nikki Giovanni poet page. Nikki Giovanni poetry page; read all poems by Nikki Giovanni written.

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Poem: Balances

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In life
one is always
balancing

like we juggle our mothers
against our fathers

or one teacher
against another
(only to balance our grade average)

3 grains of salt
to one ounce truth

our sweet black essence
or the funky honkies down the street

and lately i've begun wondering
if you're trying to tell me something

we used to talk all night
and do things alone together

and i've begun

(as a reaction to a feeling)
to balance
the pleasure of loneliness
against the pain
of loving you

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Balances - Balances Poem by Nikki Giovanni

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About Utopia. "What we want of an author is a voice"

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“Poetry prevents everybody from feeling lonely,” says Nikki Giovanni. Her latest book, “Chasing Utopia,” is a collection of poetry, recipes and short stories.

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Poem: Choices

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Poetry Thursday

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As a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney, Martín Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for human rights and reclaiming the historical record. His critically acclaimed collections of poetry celebrate-and lament-the working class experience. Whether narrating the struggles of immigrants as they adjust to life in the United States, or chronicling the battles that Latin Americans have waged against their own repressive governments, Espada has given voice to otherness, powerlessness, and poverty into poetry that is at once moving and vivid. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and several books of essays, the translator of Puerto Rican poet Clemente Soto Vélez, and the editor of influential anthologies such as El Coro (1997) and Poetry Like Bread (1994).

Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York. His greatest influence is his father, Frank Espada, a community organizer, civil rights activist, and documentary photographer who created the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. Espada earned a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and earned his JD from Northeastern University. For many years he was a tenant lawyer; his first book of poetry, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (1982), included photographs taken by his father. His subsequent books, including Trumpets from the Island of Their Eviction (1987), Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (1990), and City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993), received significant attention. Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996)won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Often concerned with socially, economically, and racially marginalized individuals, Espada's early work is full of engaging narratives. Rebellion Is the Circle of a Lover's Hands (1990)won the PEN/Revson Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Though defiantly and insistently political, his work is also known for its gentle humor. Richard Blanco has commented, "Espada's poems continue to define the role of the poet as an emotional historian. Like Whitman, Espada stirs in us an undeniable social consciousness and connectedness."

Espada's books of poetry include A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (2000), Alabanza: New and Selected Poems, 1982-2002 (2003), The Republic of Poetry (2006), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Meaning of the Shovel (2014), Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), and Floaters (2021), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry. His collection Alabanza won the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was also named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year; its title poem, which addresses 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. The Republic of Poetry, which is concerned with the political power and efficacy of poetry, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Taking cues from documentary poetics as well as formal argumentation and Espada's ongoing fascination with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the volume interrogates the role of poetry in the public and private spheres: poems range from elegies to poets known and unknown-including Robert Creeley and Jeff Male-to treatments of the Chilean coup, to anti-war statements, to sage instructions for young poets.

Espada has edited three important anthologies: El Coro: A Chorus of Latino and Latina Poetry (1997), Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (2000), and His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics of Víctor Jara (2012). In addition to his work as a translator and editor, Espada has also published books of essays and criticism, including Zapata's Disciple (1998, 2016), The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive (2010), and The Necessary Poetics of Atheism (with Lauren Schmidt and Jeremy Schraffenberger, 2016). In the Progressive, poet Rafael Campo commended Espada's courage in Zapata's Disciple, maintaining that he is one of only a few poets who "take[s] on the life-and-death issues of American society at large." The book was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican American Studies program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and issued in a 2016 edition by Northwestern University Press. The Lover of a Subversive is Also a Subversive considers the role of poetry in political movements. According to poet Barbara Jane Reyes, "To be a poet, Espada asserts throughout this series of essays, is to be an advocate, to advocate for those who have been silenced, and for places that are unspoken ... Our work as poets can empower the silenced to speak." Espada himself has never wavered in his commitment to poetry as a source of political and personal power. In a 2016 Democracy Now! interview with Juan González, Espada spoke to the impact of poetry and its relationship to social activism: "I grew up with it. I grew up in an activist household. I grew up in my father's household. Resistance was as natural as breathing. I was surprised when I went into the world and discovered that not everybody was raised the way I was. So, when it turned to the writing of poetry, quite naturally it turned to poetry about social justice. That's how I was raised."

Espada is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has also taught at the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine, Holy Cross College, Emerson College, Wheelock College, Tufts University, and Suffolk University Law School. His honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence, the Busboys and Poets Award, the International Latino Book Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, United States Artists, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2018 he was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation.

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As a poet, essayist, translator, editor, and attorney, Martín Espada has dedicated much of his career to the pursuit of social justice, including fighting for human rights and reclaiming the historical record. His critically acclaimed collections of poetry celebrate-and lament-the working class...

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Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1957, Martín Espada is the author of more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. A former tenant lawyer in the Greater Boston area's Latino community, he received a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 and a JD from Northeastern University in 1985.

Espada published his first poetry collection, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero (Waterfront Press), in 1982. Among his other books of poetry are Floaters (W. W. Norton, 2021), which received the National Book Award in Poetry in 2021; Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W. W. Norton, 2016); The Trouble Ball (W. W. Norton, 2011), which was the recipient of the Milt Kessler Award, a Massachusetts Book Award, and an International Latino Book Award; The Republic of Poetry (W. W. Norton, 2006), which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and Imagine the Angels of Bread (W. W. Norton, 1996), winner of an American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Espada has also published multiple essay collections, including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books 2, 2019); The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive (University of Michigan Press, 2010); and edited three anthologies, including Poetry Like Bread: Poets of the Political Imagination (Curbstone, 1994). In 2004, he released a CD of poetry called Now the Dead will Dance the Mambo (Leapfrog).

About Espada's work, the poet Gary Soto has said,

Martín Espada has chosen the larger task: to go outside the self-absorbed terrain of most contemporary poets into a landscape where others-bus drivers, revolutionaries, the executed of El Salvador-sit, walk, or lie dead "without heads." There's no rest here. We're jostled awake by the starkness of these moments, but occasionally roll from Espada's political humor.

Espada has received numerous fellowships and awards, including a 2021 Letras Boricuas Fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, an International Latino Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2018, he received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

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Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest book of poems is called Floaters (2021). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books 2, 2019).

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Martín Espada discusses poetry and activism

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Martín Espada discusses poetry and activism

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Poem: Alabanza

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on the power behind poetry

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Martín Espada on the Power Behind Poetry

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Seamus Heaney is widely recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century. A native of Northern Ireland, Heaney was raised in County Derry, and later lived for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism, and edited several widely used anthologies.

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Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013) was the eldest child of nine born to a farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He won a scholarship to St Columb's College, Derry, beginning an academic career that would lead, through Queen's University Belfast, where his first books of poems were written, to positions including Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry. As a poet, Heaney has become both critically feted and publicly popular. Among his many awards are the Nobel Prize for Literature 1995 and the Whitbread prize (twice); he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996.

Heaney's poetry is grounded in actual, local detail, often in memories of Derry or observation of his adopted home in the Republic of Ireland. 'Death of a Naturalist', the title poem of his first collection, finds a moment of horror at nature that is all the more telling for the precise details, such as the "frogspawn that grew like clotted water". Recent Irish history is one of the strongest influences on these details, appearing in its most outspoken form in the poems from North, but often obliquely present elsewhere.

In 'Fosterling', Heaney writes of "waiting until I was nearly fifty / to credit marvels"; his later poetry is certainly open to the marvellous, such as the mysterious ship that appears to the monks in the extract from 'Squarings'. His ability to unite this with the local is praised in his Nobel nomination for poems "which exalt everyday miracles". 'The Skylight', a poem about the fitting of an unwanted window into the roof of his study, leads to an almost Damascene response to the wonder of this light streaming into his room; more threateningly, a trip on 'The Underground' becomes permeated with myths from Ovid, Hansel & Gretel and Eurydice.

In his intimate reading style, Heaney balances a sense of natural speech with his commitment to what he described as "a musically satisfying order of sounds". This grants full weight to the formal skill that shapes the poems, yet gives the impression that we are being confided in by the man whose poetry, according to the Swedish Academy, is distinguished by "lyrical beauty and ethical depth".

When Seamus Heaney died in August 2013, tributes flowed from around the English-speaking world. UK Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, said that for his "brothers and sisters in poetry, he came to be the poet we all measured ourselves against and he demonstrated the true vocational nature of his art for every moment of his life. He is irreplaceable." Poetry Archive Director, Andrew Motion, called Heaney "a great poet, a wonderful writer about poetry, and a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence." For poet Don Paterson, "the death of this beloved man seems to have left a breach in the language itself". Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber Poetry Editor, said Heaney had been "a father figure: the head of our poetry household." And former U.S. President Bill Clinton said: "Both his stunning work and his life were a gift to the world. His mind, heart, and his uniquely Irish gift for language made him our finest poet of the rhythms of ordinary lives and a powerful voice for peace. And he was a good and true friend."

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Seamus Heaney (1939 - 2013) was the eldest child of nine born to a farming family in County Derry, Northern Ireland. He won a scholarship to St Columb's College, Derry, beginning an academic career that would lead, through Queen's University...

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Seamus Heaney was born on April 13, 1939, in Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland. He earned a teacher's certificate in English at St. Joseph's College in Belfast and in 1963 took a position as a lecturer in English at that school. While at St. Joseph's he began to write, joining a poetry workshop with Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and others under the guidance of Philip Hobsbaum. In 1965, he married Marie Devlin, and the following year he published Death of a Naturalist (Oxford University Press, 1966).

Heaney produced numerous collections of poetry during his career, including Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); District and Circle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Opened Ground (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Spirit Level (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996); Selected Poems 1966-1987 (Faber and Faber, 1990); and Sweeney Astray (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). He also wrote several volumes of criticism, including The Redress of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), and of translation, including Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award.

In June of 2012, Heaney was awarded the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry. He was also a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and held the chair of professor of poetry at Oxford University from 1989 to 1994. In 1995, he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Heaney was a resident of Dublin from 1976 to 2013. Beginning in 1981, he also spent part of each year teaching at Harvard University, where, in 1984, he was elected the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory.

Seamus Heaney passed away in Dublin on August 30, 2013. He was seventy-four.

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Born in Ireland in 1939, Seamus Heaney was the author of numerous poetry collections, including Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). He split his time between Dublin, Ireland, and Boston, where he taught at Harvard University for many years. In 1995, Heaney received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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S eamus Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest member of a family which would eventually contain nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres in County Derry in Northern Ireland, but the father's real commitment was to cattle-dealing. There was something very congenial to Patrick Heaney about the cattle-dealer's way of life to which he was introduced by the uncles who had cared for him after the early death of his own parents. The poet's mother came from a family called McCann whose connections were more with the modern world than with the traditional rural economy; her uncles and relations were employed in the local linen mill and an aunt had worked "in service" to the mill owners' family. The poet has commented on the fact that his parentage thus contains both the Ireland of the cattle-herding Gaelic past and the Ulster of the Industrial Revolution; indeed, he considers this to have been a significant tension in his background, something which corresponds to another inner tension also inherited from his parents, namely that between speech and silence. His father was notably sparing of talk and his mother notably ready to speak out, a circumstance which Seamus Heaney believes to have been fundamental to the "quarrel with himself" out of which his poetry arises.

Heaney grew up as a country boy and attended the local primary school. As a very young child, he watched American soldiers on manoeuvres in the local fields, in preparation for the Normandy invasion of 1944. They were stationed at an aerodrome which had been built a mile or so from his home and once again Heaney has taken this image of himself as a consciousness poised between "history and ignorance" as representative of the nature of his poetic life and development. Even though his family left the farm where he was reared (it was called Mossbawn) in 1953, and even though his life since then has been a series of moves farther and farther away from his birthplace, the departures have been more geographical than psychological: rural County Derry is the "country of the mind" where much of Heaney's poetry is still grounded.

When he was twelve years of age, Seamus Heaney won a scholarship to St. Columb's College, a Catholic boarding school situated in the city of Derry, forty miles away from the home farm, and this first departure from Mossbawn was the decisive one. It would be followed in years to come by a transfer to Belfast where he lived between 1957 and 1972, and by another move from Belfast to the Irish Republic where Heaney has made his home, and then, since 1982, by regular, annual periods of teaching in America. All of these subsequent shifts and developments were dependent, however, upon that original journey from Mossbawn which the poet has described as a removal from "the earth of farm labour to the heaven of education." It is not surprising, then, that this move has turned out to be a recurrent theme in his work, from "Digging", the first poem in his first book, through the much more orchestrated treatment of it in "Alphabets"( The Haw Lantern, 1987), to its most recent appearance in "A Sofa in the Forties" which was published this year in The Spirit Level.

At St. Columb's College, Heaney was taught Latin and Irish, and these languages, together with the Anglo-Saxon which he would study while a student of Queen's University, Belfast, were determining factors in many of the developments and retrenchments which have marked his progress as a poet. The first verses he wrote when he was a young teacher in Belfast in the early 1960s and many of the best known poems in North, his important volume published in 1975, are linguistically tuned to the Anglo-Saxon note in English. His poetic line was much more resolutely stressed and packed during this period than it would be in the eighties and nineties when the "Mediterranean" elements in the literary and linguistic heritage of English became more pronounced. Station Island (1984) reveals Dante, for example, as a crucial influence, and echoes of Virgil - as well as a translation from Book VI of The Aeneid - are to be found in Seeing Things (1991). Heaney's early study of Irish bore fruit in the translation of the Middle Irish story of Suibhne Gealt in Sweeney Astray (1982) and in several other translations and echoes and allusions: the Gaelic heritage has always has been part of his larger keyboard of reference and remains culturally and politically central to the poet and his work.

Heaney's poems first came to public attention in the mid-1960s when he was active as one of a group of poets who were subsequently recognized as constituting something of a "Northern School" within Irish writing. Although Heaney is stylistically and temperamentally different from such writers as Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (his contemporaries), and Paul Muldoon, Medbh McGuckian and Ciaran Carson (members of a younger Northern Irish generation), he does share with all of them the fate of having be en born into a society deeply divided along religious and political lines, one which was doomed moreover to suffer a quarter-century of violence, polarization and inner distrust. This had the effect not only of darkening the mood of Heaney's work in the 1970s, but also of giving him a deep preoccupation with the question of poetry's responsibilities and prerogatives in the world, since poetry is poised between a need for creative freedom within itself and a pressure to express the sense of social obligation felt by the poet as citizen. The essays in Heaney's three main prose collections, but especially those in The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry (1995), bear witness to the seriousness which this question assumed for him as he was coming into his own as a writer.

These concerns also lie behind Heaney's involvement for a decade and a half with Field Day, a theatre company founded in 1980 by the playwright Brian Friel and the actor Stephen Real. Here, he was also associated with the poets Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin, and the singer David Hammond in a project which sought to bring the artistic and intellectual focus of its members into productive relation with the crisis that was ongoing in Irish political life. Through a series of plays and pamphlets (culminating in Heaney's case in his version of Sophocles' Philoctetes which the company produced and toured in 1990 under the title, The Cure at Troy), Field Day contributed greatly to the vigour of the cultural debate which flourished throughout the 1980s and 1990s in Ireland.

Heaney's beginnings as a poet coincided with his meeting the woman whom he was to marry and who was to be the mother of his three children. Marie Devlin, like her husband, came from a large family, several of whom are themselves writers and artists, including the poet's wife who has recently published an important collection of retellings of the classic Irish myths and legends ( Over Nine Waves, 1994). Marie Heaney has been central to the poet's life, both professionally and imaginatively, appearing directly and indirectly in individual poems from all periods of his oeuvre right down to the most recent, and making it possible for him to travel annually to Harvard by staying on in Dublin as custodian of the growing family and the family home.

The Heaneys had spent a very liberating year abroad in 1970/71 when Seamus was a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California. It was the sense of self-challenge and new scope which he experienced in the American context that encouraged him to resign his lectureship at Queen's University (1966-72) not long after he returned to Ireland, and to move to a cottage in County Wicklow in order to work full time as a poet and free-lance writer. A few years later, the family moved to Dublin and Seamus worked as a lecturer in Carysfort College, a teacher training college, where he functioned as Head of the English Department until 1982, when his present arrangement with Harvard University came into existence. This allows the poet to spend eight months at home without teaching in exchange for one semester's work at Harvard. In 1984, Heaney was named Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, one of the university's most prestigious offices. In 1989, he was elected for a five-year period to be Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, a post which requires the incumbent to deliver three public lectures every year but which does not require him to reside in Oxford.

In the course of his career, Seamus Heaney has always contributed to the promotion of artistic and educational causes, both in Ireland and abroad. While a young lecturer at Queen's University, he was active in the publication of pamphlets of poetry by the rising generation and took over the running of an influential poetry workshop which had been established there by the English poet, Philip Hobsbaum, when Hobsbaum left Belfast in 1966. He also served for five years on The Arts Council in the Republic of Ireland (1973-1978) and over the years has acted as judge and lecturer for countless poetry competitions and literary conferences, establishing a special relationship with the annual W.B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. In recent years, he has been the recipient of several honorary degrees; he is a member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of artists and writers, and a Foreign Member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, subsequent to his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, he was made a Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.
Seamus Heaney died on 30 August 2013.

To cite this section
MLA style: Seamus Heaney - Biographical. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach AB 2023. Fri. 17 Nov 2023. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/biographical/>

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The Nobel Prize in Literature 1995 was awarded to Seamus Heaney "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past"

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From his extensive oeuvre, here are some of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner's best lines

"But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on window-sills at home,

On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots burst into nimble-

"Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

They buried us without shroud or coffin

And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave."

"So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman,

Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

Then reappear from your lorry as my mother's

Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes"

to the tick of two clocks."

"They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

You'll know them if I can get them true.

They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through."

"The soul exceeds its circumstances". Yes.

History not to be granted the last word

Or the first claim ... In the end I gathered

From the display-case peat my staying powers,

Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,

My old uncallused hands to be young sward,

The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored

"I returned to a long strand,

the hammered curve of a bay,

and found only the secular

powers of the Atlantic thundering."

"Be advised my passport's green.

No glass of ours was ever raised

"I retreated to the cool of the Prado.

Goya's 'Shootings of the Third of May'

Covered a wall - the thrown-up arms

And spasm of the rebel, the helmeted

And knapsacked miliatry, the efficient

to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning.

For every one of us, living in this world

means waiting for our end. Let whoever can

win glory before death. When a warrior is gone,

that will be his best and only bulwark."

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From his extensive oeuvre, here are some of the Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner's best lines

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A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature.

No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of "Morpho Eugenia," too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt's wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion.

Her novels are Shadow of a Sun (1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun in 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance (1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer's Tale (2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), and Babel Tower (1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Woman in 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories (1987), Angels and Insects (1992), The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye(1994), and Elementals (1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology's modest omission of its editor's own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999.

Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story "A Lamia in the Cévennes." As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer's Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia's pleasures-they seemed equal-in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d'Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

INTERVIEWER

In what circumstances did you write your first novel, The Shadow of the Sun?

A. S. BYATT

Well, I tend to say I wrote nothing as an undergraduate. But, in fact, I sat there in most of the lectures I went to, which weren't many, writing this novel very obsessively and extremely slowly. And knowing it was no good, and knowing I didn't want to write a novel about a young woman at a university who wanted to write a novel, and equally knowing I didn't know anything else, and had to write that sort of novel . . .

INTERVIEWER

And perhaps not wishing to put your life on hold until you did know something else?

BYATT

No, because looking back on it, I don't have a driven desire actually to be in the act of writing. But my response to any form of excitement about reading is to want to write. I think I was lucky at Cambridge. A university English degree stops most people wanting to write. And it slowed me down and embarrassed me a great deal about wanting to write, but, at the same time, it intensely increased my desire to write.

INTERVIEWER

Did you write as a child?

BYATT

Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls' boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.

INTERVIEWER

There's a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there's an element of the smokescreen to it. It's quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn't it?

BYATT

Yes, this is true. It's also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës' joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen.

INTERVIEWER

To go back to your first novel, The Shadow of the Sun -how did it come to be published?

BYATT

Well, when I left Cambridge, I went and did one postgraduate year in America where I actually started a second novel, The Game, having put The Shadow of the Sun in a drawer. I then came back to England and went to Oxford, which gave me a whole area of The Game -another of the smokescreens in that it's very much about what I think of as the Oxford mind as opposed to the Cambridge mind. Iris Murdoch is always asking me if I think there's a difference, and I do.

I got married in 1959 and went to live in Durham, which is another medieval place. In those days if you were a woman they took away your grant for getting married. If you were a man, they increased it. So there I was with no grant, which secretly at some deep level I was pleased about, because I truly would rather have been a writer than an academic, and I needed to be forced into making that decision. I decided to put The Game back in the drawer and got out the first one. I had two small children, and in a slow and rather unhappy way, knowing that it was all inadequate, I rewrote and rewrote, with one or the other child in a little chair on the desk, rocking him with one hand. When I had finished it, I showed it to an academic at Durham who said, Oh, I expect you're going to put that in a drawer and do something else now. So I never spoke to him really again. He turned up some years later at my publishers' claiming that he had been the first encourager of my career!

I sent The Shadow of the Sun off to John Beer, the Coleridge man, who was my friend in Cambridge, the excellence of whose work, his thesis on Coleridge, had struck me, and whose ideas, I think, run through almost everything I write. He wrote back and said that he thought the first part might make a nice little book, and he wasn't so sure about the second part, but he sent it off to Chatto & Windus. I then got a letter back from there, from Cecil Day-Lewis, saying, I have read your novel with great interest. Would you care to come to lunch with me in the Athenaeum? So I went to lunch with Cecil Day-Lewis in the Athenaeum, where you had to eat in the basement because you were a woman. He kept muttering, Boardinghouse food, boardinghouse food. He didn't really mention the novel. We talked about poetry and Yeats and Auden and Shakespeare, and it was the literary conversation I had never had. When we got out on the pavement I rather tremblingly said, Might you be thinking of publishing this novel? He said, Oh yes, of course, of course.

INTERVIEWER

There's a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It's not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist.

BYATT

In a sense, it's a working-out of one's relation to all those great figures who stalked across the landscape of the Cambridge mind-particularly, I suppose, D. H. Lawrence, with whom my relationship is extremely ambivalent. F. R. Leavis's book on him must have just come out about then. Graham Hough at Christ's was writing on him. Leavis was a very important figure for me in the sense that I perceived him as a kind of blockage to everybody who wanted to do what I wanted to do. At the same time, he did teach reading. He really did teach reading. I went to two of his seminars, which, you know, is a story I have told in Possession -I decided I wasn't going to go to any more because either I would get like the other people who worshipped him, who derived an enormous amount from him, but somehow didn't make anything, or I would just get angrier and angrier with what I saw as his manipulation of his students into admiring him.

INTERVIEWER

And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements.

BYATT

Exactly. He did do things which I do think were rather vulgar, like throwing other people's books in the rubbish bin at the beginning of his lecture. And he was paranoid, and paranoia is a very bad thing for anybody. Also, I have never wanted to belong to anything ever and he was a movement. He was a guru. I'm trying to write a novel at the moment with a guru in it. I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently. And, of course, he was a very ambiguous figure because he appeared to be doing the one, and was doing the other.

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Born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939, Seamus Heaney was the eldest of nine children in a Catholic family. After receiving a degree in English from Queen's University in 1961, Heaney worked as a school teacher, then for several years as a freelancer. In 1975, he was appointed to a...

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Poem: Digging

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Seamus Heaney, the humble heart-throb of poetry: Nobel Prize winner dies at 74

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The Dublin-based writer won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature ‘for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past’.

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44. Langston Hughes - Theme for English B

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44. Langston Hughes - Theme for English B

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California Poetry Out Loud 2010 Cheryl Evans of Contra Costa County Rd. 3

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Jay Parini: The list could go on and on, but these are the poems that seem to me to have left the deepest mark on US literature – and me