The Poetry of R.E. Slater: 03/01/2014

"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]

Monday, March 24, 2014

Ave Maria - The Prayer: Background, Source, Text, and Music

La Purisima Inmaculada Concepcion de Maria con Artista Ribera.
Por la gloria de la Iglesia Santa Romana Catolica. By Lloyd Baltazar.

Ave Maria - The Prayer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ave_maria

The Hail Mary, also commonly called the Ave Maria (Latin) or Angelic Salutation, is a traditional Christian prayer asking for the intercession of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus. In Roman Catholicism, the prayer forms the basis of the Rosary and the Angelus prayers. In the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, a similar prayer is used in formal liturgies, both in Greek and in translations. It is also used by many other groups within the Catholic tradition of Christianity including Anglicans, Independent Catholics, and Old Catholics. Some Protestant denominations, such as Lutherans, also make use of a form of the prayer.

Based on the greeting of the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in the Gospel of Luke, the prayer takes different forms in various traditions. It has often been set to music, although the most famous musical expression of the words Ave Maria by Schubert does not actually contain the Hail Mary prayer.

Biblical source

The prayer incorporates two passages from Saint Luke's Gospel: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee,"^[1] and "Blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb."^[2] In mid-13th-century Western Europe the prayer consisted only of these words with the single addition of the name "Mary" after the word "Hail," as is evident from the commentary of Saint Thomas Aquinas on the prayer.^[3]

The first of the two passages from Saint Luke's Gospel is the greeting of the Angel Gabriel to Mary, originally written in Koine Greek. The opening word of greeting, χαῖρε, chaíre, here translated "Hail," literally has the meaning "rejoice" or "be glad." This was the normal greeting in the language in which Saint Luke's Gospel is written and continues to be used in the same sense in Modern Greek. Accordingly, both "Hail" and "Rejoice" are valid English translations of the word ("Hail" reflecting the Latin translation, and "Rejoice" reflecting the original Greek).

The word κεχαριτωμένη, (kecharitōménē), here translated as "full of grace," admits of various translations. Grammatically, the word is the feminine present perfect passive voice participle of the verb χαριτόω, charitóō, which means "to show, or bestow with, grace" and, in the passive voice, "to have grace shown, or bestowed upon, one."^[4]^[5]

The text also appears in the account of the annunciation contained in the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 9.

"Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee."

Angelic visitation of Mary

Meaning and Contexts (a large section) -

Greek, Western, Eastern, Slavonic, Roman, Anglican, Lutheran

Musical settings

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

William Ernest Henry - Invictus

Invictus

by William Ernest Henley

c. 1849–1903

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

Analysis of Poem - Cummings Study Guide

Wikipedia Background to Poem

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invictus

"Invictus" is a short Victorian poem by the English poet William Ernest Henley (1849–1903). It was written in 1875 and published in 1888 in his first volume of poems, Book of Verses, where it is the fourth poem in the section Life and Death (Echoes).^[1] It originally had no title.^[1] Early printings contained only the dedication To R. T. H. B.—a reference to Robert Thomas Hamilton Bruce (1846–1899), a successful Scottish flour merchant and baker who was also a literary patron.^[2] The title "Invictus" (Latin for "unconquered"^[3]) was added by editor Arthur Quiller-Couch when the poem was included in The Oxford Book of English Verse .^[4]^[5]

Biography of William Ernest Henley

Source: Poetry Foundation

Born in Gloucester, England, poet, editor, and critic William Ernest Henley was educated at Crypt Grammar School, where he studied with the poet T.E. Brown, and the University of St. Andrews. His father was a struggling bookseller who died when Henley was a teenager. At age 12 Henley was diagnosed with tubercular arthritis that necessitated the amputation of one of his legs just below the knee; the other foot was saved only through a radical surgery performed by Joseph Lister. As he healed in the infirmary, Henley began to write poems, including “Invictus,” which concludes with the oft-referenced lines “I am the master of my fate; / I am the captain of my soul.” Henley’s poems often engage themes of inner strength and perseverance. His numerous collections of poetry include A Book of Verses (1888), London Voluntaries (1893), and Hawthorn and Lavender (1899).

Henley edited the Scots Observer (which later became the National Observer), through which he befriended writer Rudyard Kipling, and the Magazine of Art, in which he lauded the work of emerging artists James McNeill Whistler and Auguste Rodin. Henley was a close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who reportedly based his Long John Silver character in Treasure Island in part on Henley.

* * * * * * * * * *

Biography of William Ernest Henley

Source: PoemHunter

William Ernest Henley (August 23, 1849 - July 11, 1903) was a British poet, critic and editor.

Henley was born in Gloucester and educated at the Crypt Grammar School. The school was a poor relation of the Cathedral School, and Henley indicated its shortcomings in his article (Pall Mall Magazine, Nov. 1900) on T. E. Brown the poet, who was headmaster there for a brief period. Brown's appointment was a stroke of luck for Henley, for whom it represented a first acquaintance with a man of genius. "He was singularly kind to me at a moment when I needed kindness even more than I needed encouragement." Brown did him the essential service of lending him books. Henley was no classical scholar, but his knowledge and love of literature were vital.

After suffering tuberculosis as a boy, he found himself, in 1874, aged twenty-five, an inmate of the hospital at Edinburgh. From there he sent to the Cornhill Magazine where he wrote poems in irregular rhythms, describing with poignant force his experiences in hospital. Leslie Stephen, then editor, visited his contributor in hospital and took Robert Louis Stevenson, another recruit of the Cornhill, with him. The meeting between Stevenson and Henley, and the friendship of which it was the beginning, form one of the best-known episodes in English literature (see Stevenson's letter to Mrs Sitwell, Jan. 1875, and Henley's poems "An Apparition" and "Envoy to Charles Baxter").

In 1877 Henley went to London and began his editorial career by editing London, a journal written for the sake of its contributors rather than the public. Among other distinctions it first gave to the world The New Arabian Nights of Stevenson. Henley himself contributed a series of verses chiefly in old French forms. He had been writing poetry since 1872, but (so he told the world in his “ advertisement” to his collected Poems, 1898) he “found himself about 1877 so utterly unmarketable that he had to own himself beaten in art and to addict himself to journalism for the next ten years.” When London folded, he edited the Magazine of Art from 1882 to 1886. At the end of that period he came into the public eye as a poet. In 1887 Gleeson White made for the popular series of Canterbury Poets (edited by William Sharp) a selection of poems in old French forms. In his selection Gleeson White included many pieces from London, and only after completing the selection did he discover that the verses were all by Henley. In the following year, HB Donkin in his volume Voluntaries, written for an East End hospital, included Henley's unrhymed rhythms quintessentializing the poet's memories of the old Edinburgh Infirmary. Alfred Nutt read these, and asked for more; and in 1888 his firm published A Book of Verse.

Henley was by this time well known within a restricted literary circle, and the publication of this volume determined his fame as a poet, which rapidly outgrew these limits, two new editions of the volume being printed within three years. In this same year (1888) Fitzroy Bell started the Scots Observer in Edinburgh, with Henley as literary editor, and early in 1889 Bell left the conduct of the paper to him. It was a weekly review on the lines of the old Saturday Review, but inspired in every paragraph by the vigorous and combative personality of the editor. It was transferred to London as the National Observer, and remained under Henley's editorship until 1893. Though, as Henley confessed, the paper had almost as many writers as readers, and its fame was mainly confined to the literary class, it was a lively and influential feature of the literary life of its time. Henley had the editor's great gift of discerning promise, and the "Men of the Scots Observer," as Henley affectionately and characteristically called his band of contributors, in most instances justified his insight. The paper found utterance for the growing imperialism of its day, and among other services to literature gave to the world Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia William Ernest Henley; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

Monday, March 17, 2014

William Butler Yeats - Easter (a poem with videos and biography)

William Butler Yeats

Easter, 1916

by William Butler Yeats 1865–1939

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or a gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

This man had kept a school

And rode our wingèd horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the living stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live:

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them till they died?

I write it out in a verse—

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

FOOTNOTES: September 25, 1916

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)

William Butler Yeats photographed
in 1903 by Alice Boughton

Biography - Poetry Foundation

Biography - Wikipedia

"Easter 1916," by W.B. Yeats

Irish Poetry

W.B.Yeats Reading His Own Verse

Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and

the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on

January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before

the microphone in 1937.

Radio Documentary on W.B. Yeats and Politics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oN2x6DSWgjo

Friday, March 14, 2014

John le Carre - Biography

'The writer with the double life': John le Carré near his Cornwall home. Photograph: Adrian Sherratt /Rex Features

John le Carré: Behind the Smiley face, a man of mystery

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/mar/09/john-le-carre-smiley-face-man-of-mystery-profile

by Robert McCrum

The Observer, Saturday 8 March 2014

At 82, the great spy novelist still exerts a grip on our imagination,

with a film and biography both on the way. But are we any nearer to

really knowing the confused son of a confidence trickster?

There's something about the English that loves a spy. Last week, like a dormant virus, there was a renewed outbreak of Smiley fever. Several broadsheets devoted many column inches to the career of a deceased MI5 man, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris.

An MI5 leak played its part, of course, but this was chiefly because, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, Bingham was "the man who inspired George Smiley". As an extra spike in the temperature chart, it was also alleged that Smiley's creator John le Carré "was in love with wife of spy hero" (the Times).

All of which goes to demonstrate that, with the possible exception of JK Rowling, no living writer exerts quite the same grip on the British imagination as John le Carré and his Smiley novels. Once again, fans and critics, writers and readers, have been asking themselves: how does he do it?

The enigma of le Carré is an old story, and almost as sprightly as the 82-year-old author himself. He was born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931 to Olive and Ronnie Cornwell in Poole, Dorset. Until Adam Sisman's biography is published later this year, the story so far is that it's the father who holds the key to the man – a view richly endorsed by A Perfect Spy (1986).

Ronnie Cornwell was a confidence trickster who made and lost a number of fortunes and was, at least once, imprisoned for fraud. "Thanks to his father," says a friend, "David doesn't really know who he is. Actually, he never did know who he was, or where he fitted. One minute, there was a mock Tudor mansion in Maidenhead; the next, his father was in jail."

From an early age, Cornwell was making up stories to cover his tracks and explain things away, a gift that became essential when, as a teenager, he was sent to board at Sherborne school. Cornwell did not fit in and left early to make his way in the world. Later, he wrote: "People who have had unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves."

Being untruthful became a habit of being. After studying abroad, he attended Oxford, joined MI5, later transferring to MI6, adopted his nom de plume and began writing fiction. Le Carré's work has always been more autobiographical than most readers realise. His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), featured George Smiley. Soon, he found his subject and his voice when he put his MI6 experience to work in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, an international hit hailed by Graham Greene as "the best spy story I ever read".

With Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, (1974), originally titled "The Eternal Autumn of George Smiley", le Carré became the storyteller of the national myth and the master of moral complexity in the looking-glass world of secret conflict. Smiley, who is partly based on Bingham but also on the Sherborne chaplain and le Carré's Oxford tutor Vivian HH Green, joined the immortals of English fiction such as Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. Le Carré, who cherishes the work of PG Wodehouse, takes an almost Victorian satisfaction from watching his characters become braided into the imagination of the ordinary British reader.

Smiley and "the Circus" of MI6 have a threefold appeal. First, by an extraordinary sleight of hand, le Carré contrived to make a fictive world seem tangible and real, what he has called "a spook world better suited to my needs". So potent was his art that former colleagues in MI5 and MI6 began to adopt his invented lingo of "lamplighters", "moles", "ferrets", "pavement artists", and the rest. Unconsciously, no doubt, his devoted readers became complicit with his fabrications. In his 2008 essay The Madness of Spies, he wrote of doing "a sort of Tolkien job" on his experience. Thus, he said, it was his fantasy to dream "the Great Spy's Dream" [of being] "at the Spies' Big table, playing the world's game". Needless to add, he has occasionally asserted the exact opposite.

Second, mixed with his lifelong fascination with a class to which he knows he can never belong, there's le Carré's abiding love for the adulterers, depressives, alcoholics and con men who people his plots. At heart, he is a romantic who is charmed by the seedy, the marginal and the betrayed, but from the inside. Accordingly, he bestows a weird humanity on the flotsam and jetsam of the secret state. This is the le Carré whom some, exasperated by the etiolated condition of British "literary fiction", celebrate as our greatest postwar novelist. Such praise is not just insular sentiment. Philip Roth has described A Perfect Spy as "the best English novel since the war."

Above all, as an inside-outsider, the writer with the double life, he has used the reflecting mirrors of the secret service to explore the nature of English society at the end of empire, especially as it affected the "poor loves" denied their global inheritance. In The Secret Pilgrim (1990), he gave George Smiley a speech that is almost a summary of le Carré's visceral intuition about Britain's post-imperial upper class:

"The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth… Was, is now, and ever shall be, for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully, or find it harder to confess to you that he's been a damn fool. Nobody acts braver when he's frightened stiff, or happier when he's miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman..."

In conclusion, le Carré (Smiley) might be speaking about the Philbys, Burgesses and Macleans who so comprehensively betrayed the covert society he joined in the late 1950s: "He can have a Force 12 nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you'll never be the wiser. Which is why some of our best officers turn out to be our worst. And our worst, our best. And why the most difficult agent you will ever have to run is yourself. "

In his prime, as Smiley's Boswell, David Cornwell conducted himself, Greene-like, as the invisible man, rarely giving interviews, sequestered in his clifftop Cornish retreat, secure in the company of his second wife, Jane. But then history caught up with him, the Wall came down, the cold war ended, and he had to leave Smiley, who had become another kind of father figure, behind.

These were difficult years. He continued to write obsessively, as he has always done, but his imagination was misfiring. The naysayers, who class him as merely a popular genre writer, jeered that, with the fall of the USSR, his day was over. Far from it: he simply reinvented himself, reconnected with the world, and came up with The Constant Gardener (2001) and A Most Wanted Man (2008), mature novels of savage indignation. For a writer who first became a bestseller when Harold Macmillan was prime minister, it was a remarkable late flowering.

There have been some health scares but now, as he approaches his 83rd birthday, he's running in the posterity stakes, as painfully sensitive to his reputation and record as ever. Like Prospero, he manipulates from afar. An interview here; a démarche there (often focusing, in the last decade on the war in Iraq and its consequences); anon, a letter to the newspapers. Unlike Shakespeare's magician, he has not yet "drowned" his book, however, and continues to write himself out of trouble from day to day. To his friends and admirers, he remains the best company in the world – sharp, witty and well informed, a wicked mimic and a brilliant raconteur.

This promises to be a big year. The film of A Most Wanted Man, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, will excite widespread interest. In the autumn, there's Sisman's John le Carré: The Biography, published by Bloomsbury.

Not even Cornwell knows exactly what skeletons his biographer has turned up, and there have been some jumpy moments, notably a wild rumour that the old wizard was going to upstage himself and release a competing memoir.

Sisman, who says it is hard not to be seduced by le Carré, insists he has preserved his splinter of ice. Speaking to the Observer last week, he said: "Far from slowing down as he enters his ninth decade, [David] seems to be speeding up. He's infuriatingly difficult to pin down, and half a century after The Spy who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré remains an enigma. At the top of his genre, I'd rate him as one of the most important writers of our times."

THE LE CARRE FILE

Born David John Cornwell, 19 October 1931, in Poole, Dorset. Married twice. Has four children. Lives with his second wife in Cornwall.

Best of times Perhaps leaving the Foreign Office in 1964 because he was then able to write full time; in the same year, he won the Somerset Maugham prize. By his own reckoning, his best work includes The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Tailor of Panama and The Constant Gardener.

Worst of times Several contenders from his childhood and early adulthood – including his runaway mother, who abandoned the family when he was five, and his conman father.

What he says "Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.

What others say "The enemy in le Carré's universe, both fictional and not [is] the virus of shortsightedness, hypocrisy, lies and unfettered greed that plagues the 'post-imperial, post-cold-war world'." Critic Olen Steinhauer on A Delicate Truth, le Carre's most recent novel.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Bloomsbury To Publish Adam Sisman's

Biography Of John Le Carré

http://www.johnlecarre.com/news/2011/03/22/bloomsbury-to-publish-adam-sisman-s-biography-of-john-le-carre

Announcement23 Mar 2011

Sisman states that John le Carré ‘will eventually be acknowledged

as one of the finest British post-War novelists’.

www.Booktradeinfo.com reports that:

‘Bloomsbury plan to publish in 2014, half a century after the worldwide success of The Spy who came in from the Cold, which Graham Greene dubbed ‘the best spy story I have ever read.’

Le Carré will provide Sisman with information and introductions, as well as access to his hitherto unseen private archive but he will have no control over the biography. Sisman will have a free hand, which is at the wish of both the biographer and his subject.

Sisman approached le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, last summer. Sisman says: ‘David Cornwell is a rich subject for a biographer. His writing is intensely personal, and permeated by strongly-held values. From the moment when his identity became public, readers around the world have speculated about the degree to which he has drawn on his own experiences in his fiction, in particular on his career with the intelligence services. His semi-autobiographical novel A Perfect Spy provided tantalising clues to his extraordinary childhood.’ […]

‘I have admired and enjoyed David’s work since I discovered him in my teens,’ Sisman continues, ‘and believe that his enormous commercial success has hindered recognition that he is writer of the highest quality, who will eventually be acknowledged as one of the finest British post-War novelists. Philip Roth rated le Carré’s A Perfect Spy as ‘the best English novel since the war’.’