“Who is known as the “poet of the American Revolution”? Philip Freneau (1752-1832), whose poems include “American Liberty” (1775) and “The Indian Burying Ground” (1788). He was a favorite of Thomas Jefferson’s.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged poetry, readings/research, united states history
“Symbol and Symbolism: The word symbol derives from the Greek verb symballien ‘to throw together’, and its noun symbolon ‘mark’, ’emblem’, ‘token’ or ‘sign.’ It is an object, animate or inanimate, which represents or “stands for” something else. As Coleridge put it, a symbol ‘is characterized by a translucence of the special [i.e. the species] in the individual.’ A symbol differs from an allegorical (see ALLEGORY) sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary.
Scales, for example, symbolize justice; the orb and scepter, monarchy and rule; a dove, peace; a goat, lust; the lion, strength and courage; the bulldog, tenacity; the rose, beauty; the lily, purity; the Stars and Stripes, America and its States; the Cross, Christianity; the swastika (or crooked cross) Nazi Germany and Fascism; the gold, red and black hat of the Montenegrin symbolizes glory, blood and mourning. The scales of justice may also be allegorical; as might, for instance, a dove, a goat or a lion.
Actions and gestures are also symbolic. The clenched fist symbolizes aggression. Beating of the breast signifies remorse. Arms raised denote surrender. Hands clasped and raised suggest suppliance. A slow upward movement of the head accompanied by a closing of the eyes means, in Turkish, ‘no.’ Moreover, most religious and fertility rites are rich with symbolic movements and gestures, especially the Roman Mass.
A literary symbol combines an image with a concept (words themselves are a kind of symbol). It may be public or private, universal or local. They exist, so to speak. As Baudelaire expressed in his sonnet Correspondances:
La Nature est un temple ou de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;
L’homme y passé a travers des forets de symboles…
In literature an example of a public or universal symbol is a journey into the underworld (as in the work of Virgil, Dante and James Joyce) and return from it. Such a journey may be an interpretation of a spiritual experience, a dark night of the soul and a kind of redemptive odyssey. Examples of private symbols are those that recur in the work of W.B. Yeats: the sun and moon, a tower, a mask, a tree, a winding stair and a hawk.
Dante’s Divina Commedia is structurally symbolic, In Macbeth there is a recurrence of the blood image symbolizing guilt and violence. In Hamlet weeds and disease symbolize corruption and decay. In King Lear clothes symbolize appearances and authority; and the storm scene in this play may be taken as symbolic of cosmic and domestic chaos to which ‘unaccomodated man’ is exposed. The poetry of Blake and Shelley is heavily marked with symbols. The shooting of the albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is symbolic of all sin and stands for lack of respect for life and a proper humility towards the natural order. In his Four Quartets T.S. Eliot makes frequent use of the symbols of Fire and the Rose. To a lesser extent symbolism is an essential part of Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (especially Part III) and The Waste Land.
In prose works the great white whale of Melville’s Moby Dick (the ‘grand-god’) is a kind of symbolic creature—a carcass which symbol hunters have been dissecting for years. Much of the fiction of William Golding (especially Lord of the Flies, Pincher Martin and The Spire) depends upon powerful symbolism capable of more interpretations than one. To these examples should be added the novels and short stories of Kafka, and the plays of Maeterlinck, Andreyev, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Synge and O’Neill.
In these works we find instances of the use of a concrete image to express an emotion or an abstract idea; or as Eliot put it when explaining his term ‘objective correlative’ (q.v.), finding ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.’
There is plentiful symbolism in much 19th century French poetry. In Oeuvres completes (1891) Mallarme explained symbolism as the art of evoking an object ‘little by little so as to reveal a mood’ of, conversely, ‘the art of choosing an object and extracting from it an etat d’ame.’ This ‘mood’ he contended, was to be extracted by ‘a series of deciphering.’
Mallarme’s follower Henri Regnier made the additional point that a symbol is a kind of comparison between the abstract and the concrete in which one of the terms of the comparison is only suggested. Thus it is implicit, oblique, not spelt out.
As far as particular objects are concerned, this kind of symbolism is often private and personal. Another kind of symbolism is known as the ‘transcendental.’ In this kind, concrete images are used as symbols to represent a general or universal ideal world of which the real world is a shadow. Sir Thomas Browne, long before theories of symbolism were abundant, suggested the nature of this in his magnificent neo-Platonic phrase: ‘The sun itself is the dark simulacrum, and light is the shadow of God.’
The ‘transcendental’ concept is Platonic in origin, was elaborated by the neo-Platonists in the 3rd century and was given considerable vogue in the 18th century by Swedenborg. In the 19th century there developed the idea that this ‘other world’ was attainable, not through religious faith or mysticism, but, as Baudelaire expressed it in Notes nouvelles sur Edgar Poe, ‘a travers la poesie.’ Through poetry the soul perceives ‘les splendeurs situees derriere le tombeau.’
Baudelaire and his followers created the image of the poet as a kind of seer (q.v.) or voyant, who could see through and beyond the real world to the world of ideal forms and essences. Thus the task of the poet was to create this ‘other world’ by suggestion and symbolism; by transforming reality into a greater and more permanent reality.
The attainment, in transcendental symbolism, of the vision of the essential Idea was to be achieved by a kind of deliberate obfuscation of blurring of reality so that the ideal becomes clearer. This, according to symbolist theory, could be best conveyed by the fusion of images and by the musical quality of the verse; by, in short, a form of so-called pure poetry (q.v.). The music of the words provided the requisite element of suggestiveness, Verlaine, in his poem Art poetique (1874), for instance, says that verse must possess this musical quality ‘avant toute chose.’ Such a point of view was also expressed, in other words, by Mallarme, Valery and Rimbaud.
Theory and practice led the French symbolist poets to believe that the evocativeness and suggestiveness could best be obtained by verse forms that were not too rigid. Hence verse liberes and vers libres (qq.v). Rimbaud and Mallarme were the main experimenters in these forms; Rimbaud the chief practitioner of the ‘prose poem’ (q.v.). Such verse enable the poet to achieve what Valery described as ‘cette hesitation prolongee entre le son et le sens.’
The definitive manifesto of symbolism was published in September 1886 in an article in Le Figaro by Jean Moreas, contending that romanticism, naturalism and the movement of les Parnassiens were over and that henceforth symbolic poetry ‘cherche a vetir l’idee d’une forme sensible.. Moreas founded the Symbolist School whose progenitors were Baudelaire, Mallarme, Verlaine and Rimbaud; and whose disciples were, among others, Rene Ghil, Stuart Merrill, Francis Viele-Griffin and Gustave Khan.
Some of the major symbolists poems by Baudelaire are Les Correspondences, Harmonie du Soir Spleen, La Chevelure, L’Invitation un voyage, Benediction, Au lecteur, Moesta et Errabunda, Elevation, Les Sept Viellards, Le Voyage, Le Cygne. His main work is the collection known as Le Fleurs du mal (1857).
From Verlaine’s work one should mention Poemes saturniens (1866), Fetes galantes (1869), La Bonne Chanson (1872), Romances sans paroles (1874) and Sagesse (1881). From Rimbaud Le Bateau (1871), Une saison en enfer (1873) and Les Illuminations (1886). From Mallarme, these poems particularly: Apparition, Les Fenetres, Sonnet allegorique de lui-meme, Se spurs ongles, Un coup de des, Grand oeuvre. His main collection is Poesies (1887).
These poets were later to influence the work of Valery very considerably, as can be seen for a study of Le Cimetiere marin, L’Abeille, Le Rameur, Palme, Les Grenades, Le Jeune Parque and in various poems in the collection Charmes (1922).
Other influences of symbolist theory and practice are discernible in Lautreamont’s prose poem Chants de Maldoror (1868-1869), in several works by Laforgue, in a number of plays by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, Maurice Maeterlinck and Claudel, in J-K Huysmans’s novel A rebours (1884), and, most of all, in Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu (1913-1927).
The main ‘heirs’ of the symbolist movements outside France are W.B. Yeats, the Imagist group of English and American poets (especially T.E. Hulme and Ezra Pound), and T.S. Eliot; and, in Germany, Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George. The ideas of the French symbolists were also adopted by Russian writers in the 1870s and the early years of the 20th century; notably by Bryusov, Volynsky and Bely. See also ALLEGORY; CORRESPONDENCE OF THE ARTS; IMAGERY; IMAGISTS; IMPRESSIONISM; METONYMY; PARNASSIANS; PRIMITIVISM; SUGGESTION; SYMBOLIC ACTION; SYNECDOCHE; TROPE.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
[You can also grab this as a Word document if you want it that way.]
Some Questions to Ask when Roaming among Readers
Always:
Mostly:
And Also:
Main Character Queries:
Author Queries:
Critical Queries:
When It’s A Page Turner:
Process Queries:
When There’s No Zone:
Excerpted from: Atwell, Nancie. The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers. New York: Scholastic, 2007.
In June of 2003, I began what would turn out to be my woefully inadequate summer of training in the New York City Teaching Fellows. I’d already had a fair amount (13 years, to be exact) of experience working with kids, but I’d never really served, other than substituting, as a teacher. Needless to say, I had a lot to learn. The one thing I took away from that summer was this: it is the duty, responsibility, obligation and job of the special education teacher to adapt the curriculum to the needs, abilities and interests of struggling learners.
2008 was my fifth year of teaching. Year five is something of a milestone for most educators: they either leave the profession (even by the most conservative estimates, an alarming number do just that) or begin to hit their stride as proficient teachers.
When I began work in the fall of 2008 at the High School of Economics & Finance–or “Eco” as its constituents have it–in Lower Manhattan I’d like to think that I was in that latter cohort (though it’s not really for me to say). It was that year, however, that my interest in curricular design, particularly on behalf of the students I served, really began to take hold. I started reading more deeply about ways to help kids for whom school was a struggle.
For the first two years I worked at Eco, I co-taught a sophomore English class. The curriculum included Chinua Achebe’s masterpiece Things Fall Apart. I set to work immediately creating adapted materials to accompany the reading of this novel. Over two years I created documents to (I hope!) foster comprehension of the literal meaning of the novel, and thereby plumb the depths of its allegorical content.
Somewhere along the way I developed this reading and comprehension worksheet on Nigeria to begin this unit. Because Chinua Achebe took his title from it, here is a reading on “The Second Coming“, the famous poem by W.B. Yeats, along with its accompanying (and longer than usual, if you’ve taken any of the numerous Intellectual Devotional materials posted here, you’ll notice this immediately) vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. Here are twenty-five context clues worksheets and twenty-five reading comprehension worksheets–in other words, one for each chapter of the novel. Finally, here are three quizzes that cover all twenty-five chapters of the novel. Nota bene please, that there are no lesson plans to accompany all of this; I was co-teaching, learning myself how to structure lessons, and trying to figure out, as above, how to adapt the curriculum for the students in front of me. I balanced a very complicated workload and the lack of lesson plans rationalizing this material indicates the extent to which I was spread thin.
In preparing these documents for publication here, I reformatted and generally spruced them up a bit. That said, I recognize this as, well, frankly, not some of my best work. Fortunately for you, gentle reader and user, like virtually everything else on Mark’s Text Terminal, this material is in Microsoft Word and therefore very easily manipulable.
Finally, if you’re not familiar with Things Fall Apart, here is synopsis from Benet’s Readers’ Encyclopedia (Bruce Murphy, ed. New York: Harper Collins, 1996): “Things Fall Apart (1958) A novel by Chinua Achebe. Set in eastern Nigeria during the British expansion into Igboland, the novel recounts the tragedy of Okonkwo and his clansmen under British colonialism. When Okonkwo, a respected tribal leader, accidentally kills one of his clansmen, he is banished from his village for seven years. On his return, he finds his village subject to colonial laws and his tribal beliefs replaced by Christianity. Okonkwo opposes these new practices but finds the villagers divided. In a moment of rage, he kills a messenger from the British District Officer, only to find that his clansmen will not support him. He hangs himself in despair. The first novel by an African to attain the status of a contemporary classic, Things Fall Apart has been translated into many languages.”
This is the point at which I usually plead for users of this blog to notify me if they find typos in any of the documents included in a post. In this case, I’m not so concerned about that, since I will most likely not use these documents again. However, I remain interested in peer review; if you use these materials, I would be very interesting in hearing how, why, and whether or not they were effective.
Post Scriptum: Memo to WordPress: how about making it possible to use different typefaces in blog post titles? I don’t like to put titles in quotes! I want italics in the title box….
“Monday’s child is full of face * Tuesday’s child is full of grace * Wednesday’s child is full of woe * Thursday’s child has far to go * Friday’s child is loving and giving * Saturday’s child works hard for living * And the child that is born on the Sabbath day is bonny and blithe, good and gay
This poem was first printed in a collection of Devon folk-tales in 1838, though it had a widespread English oral tradition for many centuries before this, Should you recite it to a child who turns out to be born on a Wednesday, you should know that there is a useful version that swaps fates with Friday’s child. You can also, at will, exchange the Scot-sounding phrase of ‘bonny and blithe’ for ‘happy and wise.'”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
“Anticlimax: According to Dr. Johnson’s definition (and he appears to have been the first to record the word) it is “a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.” In fact, a bathetic declension from a noble tone to one less exalted. The effect can be comic and is often intended to be so. A good example occurs in Fielding’s burlesque (q.v.), Tom Thumb:
King [Aruther, to his queen Dolallola]
…Whence flow those tears fast down thy blubber’d cheeks,
Like swoln Gutter, gushing through the streets?
The effect can also be unintentionally comic. There is a well-known example in Crashaw’s Saint Mary Magdelene, or the Weeper:
And now where e’er He Strays,
Among the Galilean Mountains,
Or more unwelcome ways,
He’s followed by two faithful fountains;
Two walking baths, two weeping motions;
Portable & compendious oceans.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“Ignacio Manuel Altamirano: (1834-1893) Mexican novelist and poet. A full-blooded Indian, Altamirano was an adherent of Benito Juarez and fought against the French intervention in Mexico. In 1869, he founded Renacimiento, a review to encourage literary activity, almost moribund after fifteen years of turbulence. He became the mentor of the younger generation, to whom he advocated the importance of creating a literature rooted in national life. His poetry consists of a single volume of Rimas (1880), written before 1867 and notable for its description of the Mexican landscape. Altamirano’s preoccupation with purely Mexican themes and customs is also evident in the prose works for which he is best known: Clemencia (1869), a love story set against the background of the French intervention; La navidad en las montanas (1870), a novelette; and El Zarco (1901), a novel dealing with bandits in the state of Morelos.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, hispanic history, poetry, readings/research
Delmira Agustini: (1886-1914) Uruguayan poet. Together with Gabriela Mistral, Juana de Ibarbourou, Alfonsina Storni, and Dulce Maria Loynaz, Agustini is one of the key voices in the rich tradition of Spanish American poetry by women. Influenced by Ruben Dario’s Modernismo, her poetry is marked by sensuality and eroticism. Agustini published three collections of poetry: El libro blanco (1907); Cantos de la manana (1910); and Los calices vacios (1913). At the time of her death, she was working on Los astros del abismo (1954). Agustini’s biography has drawn almost as much attention as her writing. She was raised in cultivated and conventional surroundings in Montevideo, but was murdered by her estranged husband less than a year after their marriage.
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Bello, Andres (1781-1865) Venezuelan, scholar, poet, humanist, and educator. He was one of the great figures of nineteenth-century Latin America, often referred to as the intellectual father of the continent. His complete works total twenty-six volumes. Bello studied classical literature, law, and philosophy. His interest in science was stimulated by having known Alexander von Humboldt. He was active in the wars of independence through his political work in Europe, primarily England, where he lived for almost twenty years. There he met Bentham and James Mill and translated Byron. A poet greatly influenced by Spain’s Golden Age writers (Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, and Calderon), in Britain Bello wrote his best-known verses: Alocucion a la poesia (1823; tr in The Odes of Bello, Olmedo, and Heredia, 1920), asserting Latin America’s right to literary independence; and La agricultura de la zona torrida (1826; tr A Georgic of the Tropics, 1954), notable for its description of the plants of America, in which realistic detail is combined with Horatian overtones. Yet, along with Bello’s exaltation of America through nature or culture, there is a sadness and solitude evoked, as well as a bitterness that true liberty had yet to be realized in the newly established republics.
From 1829 to his death he resided in Chile. In 1830 he started the newspaper El Araucano and was its principal editor until 1853. He was founder and first president of the University of Chile (1842), and was the chief architect of the Chilean civil code (1855), also adopted in Ecuador and Colombia. Though a creature of the Enlightenment, Bello was also close to the Romantic movement. Bello’s Gramatica de la lengua castellana (1847). still considered an important grammar, advocated the enrichment of the Spanish language. His vast culture–humanistic, scientific, and legal–was dedicated to writing manuals and other works with a pedagogic purpose, within a liberal humanist tradition. Other works available in English include the Anthology of Andres Bello (1981) and his Filosofia del entendimiendo (1881; tr Philosophy of the Understanding, 1984).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, hispanic history, poetry, readings/research
“Claribel Alegria: (1924-2018) Salvadoran writer, born in Nicaragua. Alegria has published poetry, novelas, and novels. Her work ranges from the intimate lyric to agonized denunciation of the horrors that have beset Central America. Her Sobrevivo (1978) won the Casa de las Americas award in poetry. She excels at a narrative poetry that that is compact, tender, fanciful, and even fantastic, Alegria deals with love, solitude, family life, and injustice from a political and feminist stance, as in La mujer del Rio Sampul (1987; tr Woman of the River, 1990). She has coauthored many books with her husband, Darwin J. Flakoll, particularly testimonial accounts of the Nicaraguan revolution and the lives of Salvadoran women. Cenizas de Izalco (1966; tr Ashes of Izalco, 1989) is a recreation of the peasant uprising of 1932. Luisa en el pais de la realidad (1987; tr Luisa in Realityland, 1987) is an experimental novel.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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