Happy birthday, Archibald MacLeish

It is the birthday of writer Archibald MacLeish (1892), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, for his collection Conquistador (1933), and for his collection Collected Poems 1917-1952 (1953) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1959 for his free-verse play J.B., a modern version of the biblical story of Job. JB also won a Tony Award for best play. MacLeish was greatly influenced by poets Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and is considered a traditional modernist. His best-known poem is Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry). It includes a line that states the modernist poetic philosophy: "A poem should not mean/but be." As a young man, MacLeish left the law firm he worked for and went to Paris in 1923, joining literary and artistic expatriates such as John Dos Passos, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso, John O'Hara, Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. President Franklin Roosevelt appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. He reorganized the library, making it more efficient and enabling it to meet the needs of the nation. He expanded the library's budget and helped focus its mission to collect materials expressing the life an achievements of the people of the United States. During the 1940s and 1950s, he was the target of such anti-Communists as Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover. To detractors he said, "No one would be more shocked to learn I am a Communist than the Communists themselves."

Allan G. Odell wrote Burma-Shave rhymes

Burma-Shave signs on U.S. Route 66 in Mohave County, Arizona | Photo by Ken Koehler

 It is the birthday of shaving cream executive Allan G. Odell (1904), who wrote the Burma-Shave rhymes that entertained travelers on America's highways for four decades. Odell was just out of college in 1925 when he joined his father's patent medicine company in Minnesota. Sales were sagging and Odell came up with the idea to advertise the company's brushless shaving cream product. He convinced his father, Clinton, to spend $200 on signs. He bought wood from a reclaimed lumber company to make the first signs, which were hand-stenciled. The first signs were placed 100 feet apart on straight stretches of U.S. 61 and U.S. 65 near Red Wing and Alert Lea, Minnesota. Each group ended with the Burma-Shave logo. Sales soared and the campaign was expanded. By the 1950s, there were 7,000 sets of signs in 45 states. The signs were discontinued after Odell, who eventually became president, retired, and the company was sold to Phillip Morris in 1964. Here are a few of the witty rhymes:

* Is he lonesome or just blind, the guy who drives so close behind?
* Better try less speed per mile. That car may have to last a while.
* Five star generals, privates first class look the same in a looking glass
* Spring has come, the grass has ris' where last year's careless drivers is.
* If Crusoe'd kept more tidy his chin, he might have found a lady again.
* She put a bullet through his hat, but he's had closer shaves than that.
* Substitutes are like a girdle; they find some jobs they just can't hurdle.
* These signs are not for laughs alone. The face they shave may be your own.

Poet Richard Wilbur won Pulitzer twice

It is the birthday of poet Richard Wilbur (1921), who won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1957 and 1989 for his poetry collections Things of This World (1956) and New and Collected Poems (1988). Wilbur also translated works of the French playwright Moliére, including The Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and The School For Wives. Here is a reading of his poem Museum Piece, a light look at classical artists.

Happy birthday, poet X.J. Kennedy

It is the birthday of poet and writer X.J. Kennedy (1929), who is known not only for his lighthearted verse, but also for his poetry and literature textbooks for college students as well as his children's books.

Kennedy was known as Joe Kennedy as a young man and published science fiction magazines in the 1940s but people kept saying he was related to Joseph P. Kennedy, then-ambassador to Great Britain, (which he is not) so he added an X in front of his name on a couple of pieces that were published in The New Yorker. They were his first published poetry. "He stuck the X on and has been stuck with it ever since," says his Web site.

Kennedy's first book of poetry, Nude Descending a Staircase (1961) the title of which seems to be a play on the 1887 stop-action photographic images by Eadweard Muybridge and the 1912 painting by Marcel Duchamp. Kennedy's book won several awards and began his career as a poet. Other Kennedyt titles include Breaking and Entering (1971), Missing Link (1983), Hangover Mass (1984), Cross Ties: Selected Poems (1985, and The Lords of Misrule: Poems (2002).

Among his numerous textbooks, Kennedy's popular Introduction to Poetry, (first published in 1976) is in its 12th edition.Introduction to Fiction (1976) is in its 10th edition.

He has to his credit at least 20 children's books, including One Winter Night in August (1975), Brats (1986), Ghastlies, Goops, and Pincushions (1989) and Exploding Gravy: Poems to Make You Laugh (2002).

Here is his reading of Lonesome George, a poem about the celebrated Galapagos turtle, the last of his kind, that died recently.

Witter Bynner created poetry hoax

Witter Bynner

It is the birthday of poet Witter Bynner (1881), who may be less remembered for his poetry than for an elaborate hoax he and a friend perpetrated on the literary world. It is known as the Spectra Hoax, and it worked better than Bynner and his colleague expected, maybe too well.

In the early part of the 20th century, new movements in poetry materialized, modernist schools pretentiously espousing a stark departure from the pastoral imagery of the Romantic period and the idealization of the Victorian era.

Among them was the Imagism movement, a style using very specific word pictures, "luminous details,"  as Ezra Pound put it. It was developed in Paris in 1911 by Pound, along with Hilda Doolittle (who wrote as H.D.) and Richard Aldington. The idea spread in literary circles in Europe and the United States, and was soon considered a new school of poetry.

By 1916, Bynner, then a young poet living in New Hampshire, and his friend from Harvard, Arthur Davison Fricke, had had enough of nonsensical verses of the new poetry. They decided to spoof the Imagism School by creating a new tongue-in-cheek school, supposedly centered in Pittsburgh.

Fortified with 10 quarts of scotch, in 10 days they produced a volume of very bad poetry, complete with a suitably pretentious sounding preface explaining the Spectric School of Poetry. They adopted pseudonyms Emanuael Morgan (Bynner) and Anne Knish (Ficke) and proceeded to have the book published, letting the publisher in on the joke only as the volume was about to go to press.

To their surprise, a whole lot of literary types took the Spectric School seriously, including William Carlos Williams, Edgar Lee Masters, and John Gould Fletcher. Bynner was even asked to write a review of a book of poetry from the Spectric School that he had secretly published.

Years later, Bynner was giving a talk and someone in the audience asked him if it was true that he was really was Emanuael Morgan. Yes, he replied. And the secret was out. The two later admitted that they were, perhaps, better known for the hoax than for their poetry.

In 1918, Bynner taught oral English at Berkeley. He was rather unorthodox, often conducting his classes outside. He had rooms at a nearby hotel where faculty and students stayed. He started inviting students to his rooms, which he had turned into an incense-filled Aesthetic Movement retreat inspired by his visit to Japan. Clad in a silk kimono, he would serve undergraduates wine and cocktails. Naturally, when the head of the English department heard about it, Bynner was severely reprimanded. The university didn't renew his contract the following year.

Bynner eventually moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he presided over the artistic community for decades, making friends with actors, artists and writers, including such notables as Ansel Adams, Willa Cather, Igor Stravinsky, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Clara Bow, Errol Flynn, Rita Hayworth, Christopher Isherwood, Carl Van Vechten, Martha Graham, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Thornton Wilder.

Bynner died in 1968. His home is now a bed and breakfast called the Inn of the Turquoise Bear.

Walter de la Mare: poet, novelist

Walter de la Mare

It is the birthday of English poet and novelist Walter de la Mare (1873), whose poems and ghost stories intrigued British children for generations. After schooling, he went to work in the 1890s for Standard Oil Company in London as a bookkeeper. He was married, had a family but still found time to write. He worked for Standard Oil for 18 years. His first novel, Henry Brocken (1904), a tale of the supernatural, was published. Four years later, through the intervention of a friend with connections, he was granted a Civil List pension, allowing him to leave his job and focus on his writing. It afforded him the opportunity to  produce children's poetry, chilling ghost stories and one of his most memorable works, Memoirs of a Midget (1921), which some critics have called a tour de force. It is a fully realized fictional memoir of a diminutive woman whose story is supposedly being published after her death. It is left in the care of a friend, a standard-sized man who visited her throughout her life, and offers an introduction by way of explaining its publication. It begins with the narrator, Miss M, noting that newspaper stories about her were works of fiction in which the reporter, apparently to amuse his readers, made jokes about her physical features, suggesting, among other things, that she was an expert painter of miniatures and a changeling who could speak the fairy tongue. The book goes on to reveal a human being, regardless of size, with a mind and heart and thoughts, feelings and aspirations. The book won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Literature, one of Britain's most prestigious awards.The poetry of de la Mare has been compared with William Blake and Thomas Hardy.

Robert Penn Warren, won three Pulitzers

Robert Penn Warren

It is the birthday of poet, novelist and literary critic Robert Penn Warren (1905), whose novel All the Kings Men (1946) won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979, and served as Poet Laureate of the United States. No other writer has won Pulitzers for both poetry and fiction. He also was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom. All the Kings Men was inspired by the rise of legendary Louisiana politician Huey Long, who served as governor and U.S. senator. Warren had been grappling with the themes of political power and moral corruptions since his days as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University. When he taught at LSU, Warren watched the rise of Long and his writing developed into All the King's Men. The book is considered one of the best in American literature. Warren helped start the literary organization Fellowship of Southern Writers and founded the literary journal The Southern Review. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, Warren became a member of the poet group known as the Fugitives. With some of them, he later formed a writers group known as the Southern Agrarians along with Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, Andrew Nelson Lytle, and John Crowe Ransom. The Southern Agrarians were largely responsible for the revival of Southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s.

'Over the river and through the wood ...'

Lydia Maria Child

It is the birthday of poet and novelist Lydia Maria Child (1802), who may be best remembered for her Thanksgiving poem Over the River and Through The Woods (1844), about going for holiday dinner at her grandfather's house on the Mystic River in Medford, Massachusetts. Child became involved in the anti-slavery movement and published a book, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), arguing for immediate emancipation of slaves. Under a pseudonym "An American," she wrote Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), about and interracial marriage between a white woman and a Native American man. A World War II Liberty Ship was named for her.

For Mother’s Day, a tribute …

Felicia Hemans

Felicia Hemans was a single working mother who raised five children by herself. What’s more, she supported her family writing poetry -- in the early 19th century.

That she would write poetry throughout her life was probably inevitable. She was a precocious child, homeschooled by her mother, and became fluent in Latin, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and French, as well as English, by the time she was a teenager. Later, she taught herself German. She wrote poetry from an early age.

Family was very important to her, and though her father abandoned the family, she remained close to her mother and her brothers. She was the fifth of seven children. Her father was a successful merchant but lost his fortune in an economic downturn. The family moved from her birthplace in Liverpool to a naturally beautiful region of northern Wales. Shortly after their move, her father went to Canada to try to regain his fortune, but he failed to do so and died in Quebec, without ever seeing his family again.

 The natural countryside in Wales was the perfect setting to inspire young Felicia. She was at home there.

She memorized long passages from the Bible and the work of contemporary poets, and entertained her family with recitations. She also wrote poetry, and when she was 15, her family published her first book,  a slim volume called Poems.

She was a beautiful young teenager, and this, along with her poetical talent, drew the attention of young Percy Bysshe Shelley, who started writing her letters. Felicia's mother didn’t approve of Shelley and discouraged the relationship.

When she was about 14, Felicia became enamored with a handsome army officer who was as friend of her older brother. Her brother served with the young man in the Peninsula War against Napoleon III. Within a year or so, Felicia and Capt. Alfred Hemans were engaged, but as Felicia's mother disapproved of this relationship as well, Felicia delayed a wedding. Finally, when Felicia was 19, her mother relented and the couple was married.

Felicia’s third book, Domestic Affections and Other Poems, was published shortly before the wedding. It examined the woman’s place in the home and some say it idealized domestic bliss. In any case, it was perfect for the Victorian era in which she lived.

For the next six years, Felicia had babies and wrote poetry. She published three more books. Capt. Heman was discharged from the army and only received half the pay he had received on active duty. To make ends meet, the family moved in with Felicia’s mother.

Felicia was pregnant with their fifth son when Alfred abandoned the family and moved to Italy, ostensibly to recover from an illness. Scholars think the couple just separated. Felicia never visited her husband and they rarely exchanged letters. In any case, she never saw him again.

For the next nine years, Felicia raised her boys and focused on her writing when she could, though it was a struggle finding the peace and quiet necessary for concentration in a household of rambunctious youngsters. She wrote to her sister “When you talk of tranaquility and a quiet home, I stare about in wonder, having almost lost the recollection of such things.”

Felicia did find a place of refuge, however. She wrote her favorite poem, The Forest Sanctuary, in the laundry room.

She wrote relentlessly and of necessity, pursuing anything that would bring in income, including songs, translations and magazine articles. She also tried her hand at writing plays. Her first, The Vespers of Palermo, was produced in Edinburgh and Covent Garden in London. She was paid 200 guineas. But the play failed to find a following and closed. She tried twice more but those efforts failed too, and she gave up playwriting.

Still, her poetry was very popular both in Great Britain and the United States. She grew in prominence and was acknowledged as a serious poet during her lifetime. In all, 19 books of her work were published during her lifetime. One of the most popular was Records of Woman: With Other Poems. A copy of the American edition published in 1828 is in the collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

Felicia Hemans died in 1835 at the age of 41.

Robert Frost’s first book

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
– Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost about 1910.

Robert Frost wasn’t much of a farmer but he loved living on a farm. Though he was born in the city (San Francisco), some of his formative years were spent on his grandfather’s farm in Massachusetts. Indeed, much of his poetry seems influenced by his rural life.

His grandfather left him a farm when he died and Robert worked it for a few years but he really wasn’t suited for farming. He wrote poetry and he wanted to make a living doing it. In the end, he sold his farm and moved his family to Great Britain in 1912. The family lived briefly in Glasgow and then settled into a cottage in Beaconsfield, a small town northwest of London.

It was in England, where he found a more receptive audience for his pastoral poetry, that his literary career began to blossom. He met Irish poet William Butler Yeats and American expatriate poets Hilda Doolittle (known as H.D.) and Ezra Pound. His first book, A Boy’s Will, was published by David Nutt in 1913. 

Frost's first book, 1913

Still, Frost was largely unknown in the literary world. His publisher had only 1,000 copies printed and bound them only as needed. One of the earliest copies of this volume is in our collection of rare and unusual books at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

It is a remarkable book in near fine condition. It is bound in bronze pebbled cloth and signed on the half-title page by the author. The title and author’s name are gilt-stamped on the front cover. It is thought to be one of less than 350 copies in this earliest binding. The remainder of the edition were bound in batches, and there are four other known bindings.

The book is divided into three parts, with 20 poems on Part I, seven in Part II and five in Part III.  Many of the poems in this book reflect the rural and natural influences on his work, in imagry, at least.

Frost and his family returned to the United States in 1915, and he promptly bought a farm in New Hampshire, where they lived for several years. Rural life, indeed, seemed to suit Robert Frost and feed him creatively. Of course, Frost’s work is far deeper and too full of symbolism to simply be considered a Currier and Ives poet.

Images: Please click to enlarge.