Updikes A and P

Here's the Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli

Nathaniel Hawthorne: July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864

Born in Salem, Massachusetts. "Young Goodman Brown" is published in 1835. Associated with the Romantic movement.



Hawthorne joined the transcendentalist movement and moved into Brook Farm, a farming commune, in order to save money to marry Sophia Peabody.

Transcendentalism began in early to middle 19th century. Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics.

Transcendentalism was rooted in the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant (and of German Idealism more generally), which the New England intellectuals of the early 19th century embraced as an alternative to the Lockean "sensualism" of their fathers and of the Unitarian church, finding this alternative in Vedic thought, German idealism, and English Romanticism.

"Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of the Unitarian church taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Orestes Brownson, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Henry Hedge, Sylvester Judd, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Jones Very." (Wikipedia)

Lord Byron

William Blake

Lecture by John...

John Keats

Ode to a Grecian Urn

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

My favorite scene from Pandaemonium "Frost at Midnight":



David Olney's version of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"

SLIDE SHOWS of INTEREST

EDGAR ALLAN POE
This slide show includes artifacts from Poe's life (January 17, 2009 issue of the New York Times):

Click here in the blank spot: Poe Slide Show: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/16/books/eapoe-SLIDE-SHOW-01-17-2009_5.html

ANDREW WYETH (R.I.P. January 16, 2009)
This show includes his paintings and pictures of him in his father's studio.

Click here even though it looks blank: Wyeth Slide Show

Humorous Poem

This kind of poem makes me smile because it reminds me of how playful and maniacal poetry can be. Enjoy:

Fair Warning

by Alden Nowlan

I keep a lunatic chained
to a beam in the attic. He
is my twin brother whom
I'm trying to cheat
out of his inheritance.
It's all right for me
to tell you this because
you won't believe it.
Nobody believes anything
that's put in a poem.
I could confess to
murder and as long as
I did it in a verse
there's not a court
that would convict me.
So if you're ever
a guest overnight
in my house, don't
go looking for
the source of any
unusual sounds.

"Fair Warning" by Alden Nowlan, from Alden Nowlan Selected Poems.
© House of Anansi Press Limited, 1996.