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Flashcards about key people and events in American Literature
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Thomas Wolfe was born and raised in __.
Asheville, North Carolina
Thomas Wolfe attended __ and edited The Tar Heel newspaper there.
UNC Chapel Hill
Thomas Wolfe studied __ at Harvard.
playwriting
__ was Thomas Wolfe's editor and they had a contentious relationship.
Maxwell Perkins
Aline Bernstein and Thomas Wolfe had a __ year affair.
five
Wolfe immortalized Bernstien as the character of __ in his novels.
Esther Jack
The Lost Boy was published in __.
1937
Confessional poets wrote about dark and private subject matters such as __.
Death, trauma, depression, relationships
The Fish was written by __.
Elizabeth Bishop
The Fish poem is about the __.
ethics of knowing
Sylvia Plath's father, __, passed away when she was eight, which traumatized her.
Otto
Sylvia Plath tried to kill herself __ times.
three
Sylvia Plath was married to __.
Ted Hughes
Jack Kerouac is well known for producing the novel __.
On the Road
Charles Olson is known for his work in __.
Projective verse
__ was institutionalized and his mom was crazy and suffered through psychological delusions.
Allen Ginsberg
Skunk Hour Poem:One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;
I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind’s not right.
A car radio bleats,
“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air—
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland, Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction stinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night…My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night.
the mind is not right when there is a confusion of time
title of the poem: humans have a diversion acknowledging the human mind is going through suffering
existentialism: expassing the notion of nothing, “god is dead” absurdity. So absurd, nothing makes sense
The Fish by Elizabeth Bishop
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
fish did not fight because he was caught and released over and over again
flat poem
repeated similes
knowledge requires a knower and a known
fish poem is about the ethics of knowing
fisherman is bothered that the fish is not fighting for its life