Introduction to Literature

Introduction to Literature Lesson eight: brooks, larkin, hudgins Teenagers Margarette connor

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

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

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

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

Most dominant theme • “the impact of ethnicity and life experiences on one's view of life.”

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

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

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

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

In the 1940s-60s • During this time, her fame grew, but according to many critics, she didn’t get the honors she deserved. • This was only because she was black. Brooks’s novel, 1953

Political change • In 1967 attended the second Black Writers’ Conference and met a number of young black poets • They convinced her that • “black poets should write as blacks, about blacks, and address themselves as blacks.” • Up to that point, she didn’t feel that she was “writing consciously with the ideas that blacks must address blacks”.

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

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

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

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

On “We Real Cool,” interview 1970 • They have no pretensions to any glamor. They are supposedly dropouts, or at least they're in the poolroom when they should possibly be in school, since they're probably young enough, or at least those I saw were when I looked in a poolroom, and they. . . . First of all, let me tell you how that's supposed to be said, because there's a reason why I set it out as I did. These are people who are essentially saying, "Kilroy is here. We are." But they're a little uncertain of the strength of their identity.

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

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

Philip Larkin(1922-1985) • “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

Major voice of the 20th century • "It is part of his poems' strength to speak directly to most people who come across them. He makes each of us feel that he is 'our' poet, in a way that Eliot, for instance, does not - and each of us creates a highly personal version of his character to accompany his work. Pointing out that he was contradictory doesn't pose much of a threat to these versions. It's more disturbing, however, to say that many of Larkin's inner conflicts evolved in ways his work can only hint at. (con’t next slide)

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

Negative image revealed • In the biography we see a man who is: • racist, • right-wing, • selfish, • cruel to his partners. • Friends say this isn’t the whole picture, though.

Famous for three volumes of poetry: • The Less Deceived (1955) • The Whitsun Weddings (1964) • High Windows (1974)

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

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

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

Education • Attended the Coventry’s King Henry VIII School, 1930-1940. • On to St. John's College, Oxford. • didn’t have to go to war because of his poor eyesight. • While at Oxford met his close friend, novelist Kingsley Amis. • Graduated 1943.

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

Mixed influences • “Looking back, I find in the poems not one abandoned self but several – the ex-schoolboy, for whom Auden was the only alternative to ‘old-fashioned’ poetry; the under-graduate, whose work a friend affably characterized as ‘Dylan Thomas, but you’ve a sentimentality that’s all your own’; and the immediately post-Oxford self, isolated in Shropshire with a complete Yeats stolen from the local girls’ school. (con’t on next slide)

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

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

The Less Deceived 1955 • Because of this volume, Larkin became the preeminent poet of his generation, • Leading voice of what came to be called "The Movement," • a group of young English writers who rejected the prevailing fashion for neo-Romantic writing in the style of Yeats and Dylan Thomas.

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Hudgins, 1951- • "one of America's most accessible, natural poets."

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

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

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

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

Genesis of his “characters” • They are a “combination of personal experience, borrowed experience from other people, and so, of course, that means people's stories that they told you. There's only our personal experiences and other people's experiences that we can have. Other people's experience comes through books and through what they tell you. Then there's also the imagination in play. (con’t next slide)

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction to Literature