“Of his earlier poems, many are very licentious; the later are chiefly devout. Few are good for much.”
Henry Hallam, Introduction to the Literature of Europe 1837
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities, poetry
“By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Here is a short Cultural Literacy exercise on understatement. I use these to get class periods started, as well as to help those students who struggle with transitions between classes to settle themselves and focus on the work at hand.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
(The post just below this one is a Weekly Text on Langston Hughes’ poem “I, too, sing America,” which is Mr. Hughes’ response to Walt Whitman’s poem “I Hear America Singing.” This seemed as a good as place as any to post these squibs about Mr. Whitman’s work from these, uh, unperceptive reviewers.)
“No, no, this kind of thing won’t do…. The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it.”
James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works, Vol. 14, 1904
“Whitman is as unacquainted with poetry as a hog is with mathematics.”
The London Critic
“Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language.”
William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
For the third week of Black History Month, Mark’s Text Terminal showcases Langston Hughes and his poem “I, too, sing America.” This week’s text is a reading which includes the poem itself with this comprehension and exegesis worksheet to analyze the poem. While this worksheet asks questions just slightly above the comprehension level of understanding, the reading does a nice job of presenting its exegesis of the poem in that way. Struggling learners and readers therefore have a chance to perform genuine exegetical work on this key literary monument of the Harlem Renaissance. Finally, because I believe in using every lesson as an opportunity to build students’ vocabularies, here is a context clues worksheet on the noun exegesis, another on the noun exegete, and a third on the adjective exegetical.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
[Max Nordau published Degeneration—which is, interestingly, available as a available for free download as a PDF here— in 1892; the book was a precursor to some of the “decline of the West” rhetoric the Nazi party employed. Given that Nordau himself was Jewish, and a co-founder of the World Zionist Organization, that fact remains a particularly bitter irony. It’s also important to remember that the Nazis famously mounted an exhibition called “Entarte Kunst” which means “Degenerate Art.” This exhibition of modernist art aimed to show the extent to which the works shown, many of them by Jewish artists, “insult[ed] German feeling.” Here, Nordau turns his withering gaze on one of the greatest of American poets, Walt Whitman.]
“He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature could hardly be found with author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime.”
Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1895.
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Mr. Eliot has shown that he can at moments write real blank verse; but that is all. For the rest, he has quoted a great deal, he has parodied and imitated. But the parodies are cheap and the imitations inferior.”
New Statesman
“…it is the finest horses which have the most tender mouths and some unsympathetic tug has sent Mr. Eliot’s gift awry. When he recovers control we shall expect his poetry to have gained in variety and strength from this ambitious experiment.”
Times Literary Supplement
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Next week is my badly needed spring break, so Mark’s Text Terminal will be on sabbatical, enjoying spring weather and light. I’ll return with a fresh Weekly Text on Friday, May 6. For today, here is a glossary of basic poetic terms. One of these days I’m going to write a unit to accompany this support. This learning support is several years old, and it is an example of the kind of cart-before-the-horse planning I used as a novice teacher. I suspect this will be useful for teachers–if nothing else, it can be manipulated to serve your purposes in teaching poetry and poetic from.
Happy Spring! See you again on May 6.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Such, such were the joys/When we all, girls and boys/In our youth time were seen/On the Echoing Green.”
William Blake, Songs of Innocence (1789)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
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