"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]


Thursday, January 23, 2014

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) - Biography, Books, Background, Quotes & Sayings


''All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.''
- Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), Danish author.

As quoted in The Human Condition, Epigram, ch. 5, by Hannah Arendt (1958).



Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen
Born in in Rungsted, Zealand, Denmark, April 17, 1885
Died, September 17, 1962

A Danish writer, who mixed in her work supernatural elements, aestheticism, and erotic undertones with an aristocratic view of life, Blixen always emphasized that she was a storyteller in the traditional, oral sense of the word. She drew her inspiration from the Bible, the Arabian Nights, the works of Homer, the Icelandic Sagas, and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, who was her great fellow countryman. She wrote in English and in Danish. - GoodReads


Seven Gothic Tales
Seven Gothic Tales

Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.

Contents of Book

The Deluge at Norderney
The Old Cevalier
The Monkey
The Roads Round Pisa
The Supper at Elsinore
The Dreamers
The Poet


Out of Africa
Out of Africa

In this book, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the Prince of Wales to Knudsen, the old charcoal burner, who visited her: of primitive festivals: of big game that were her near neighbors--lions, rhinos, elephants, zebras, buffaloes--and of Lulu, the little gazelle who came to live with her, unbelievably ladylike and beautiful.



Amazon Link
Babette's Feast

"Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost." So writes Isak Dinesen in "Babette's Feast" as she spins a tale of friendship's ultimate sacrifice and the deepest values of life. In "Sorrow-Acre" Dinesen probes the heart of a mother who sows a field single-handedly in an attempt to save her son. These two complete stories echo Babette's plea with haunting poignancy.


Other Works by Karen Blixen (Source: Wikipedia)

Works about Karen Blixen in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

Some of Blixen's works were published posthumously, including tales previously removed from earlier collections and essays she wrote for various occasions.

  • The Hermits (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
  • The Ploughman (1907, published in a Danish journal under the name Osceola)
  • The de Cats Family (1909, published in Tilskueren)
  • The Revenge of Truth (1926, published in Denmark)
  • Seven Gothic Tales (1934 in USA, 1935 in Denmark)
  • Out of Africa (1937 in Denmark and England, 1938 in USA)
  • Winter's Tales (1942)
  • The Angelic Avengers (1946)
  • Last Tales (1957)
  • Anecdotes of Destiny (1958) (including Babette's Feast)[13]
  • Shadows on the Grass (1960 in England and Denmark, 1961 in USA)
  • Ehrengard (posthumous 1963, USA)
  • Carnival: Entertainments and Posthumous Tales (posthumous 1977, USA)
  • Daguerreotypes and Other Essays (posthumous 1979, USA)
  • On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (posthumous 1986, USA)
  • Letters from Africa, 1914–1931 (posthumous 1981, USA)
  • Karen Blixen in Danmark: Breve 1931–1962 (posthumous 1996, Denmark)

Biography of Karen Blixen

Karen von Blixen-Finecke (17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French, and English.

Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s. She never did win, though she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andrić was awarded the prize.


Biography of Karen Blixen
Source: Wikpedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Blixen

Karen von Blixen-Finecke (Danish: [kʰɑːɑn ˈb̥leɡ̊sn̩]; 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962), née Karen Christenze Dinesen, was a Danish author also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen. She also wrote under the pen names Tania Blixen, Osceola and Pierre Andrézel. Blixen wrote works in Danish, French and English.


Blixen is best known for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed, Academy Award-winning motion pictures. Prior to the release of the first film, she was noted for her Seven Gothic Tales, for which she is also known in Denmark.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, described it as "a mistake" that Blixen was not awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature during the 1930s.[1] Although never awarded the prize she finished in third place behind Graham Greene in 1961, the year Ivo Andrić was awarded the prize.[2]

Early years

Mattrup Manor, 1861
Karen Dinesen was the daughter of writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, and Ingeborg Westenholz, and was the sister of Thomas Dinesen. Her mother came from a wealthy Unitarian bourgeois merchant family. She spent her early years in the bourgeois environment of her mother's estate of Mattrup Manor near Horsens. She was later schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome.

She began publishing fiction in Danish periodicals in 1905 under the pseudonym Osceola. From August 1872 to December 1873, Wilhelm Dinesen had lived among the Chippewa Indians, in Wisconsin, where he fathered a daughter, who was born after his return to Denmark. Wilhelm Dinesen hanged himself in 1895, after being diagnosed with syphilis when Karen was ten.

Karen Blixen Museum, Narobi, Kenya
Life in Africa

In 1913 Karen Dinesen became engaged to her second-cousin, the Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, after a failed love affair with his brother. The couple moved to Kenya, where in early 1914 they used family money to establish a coffee plantation, hiring African workers, predominantly the Kikuyu tribes people who lived on the farmlands at the time of their arrival. About the couple's early life in Africa, Karen Blixen later wrote,
Here at long last one was in a position not to give a damn for all conventions, here was a new kind of freedom which until then one had only found in dreams![3]
The two were quite different in education and temperament, and Bror Blixen was unfaithful to his wife. She was diagnosed with syphilis toward the end of their first year of marriage. According to Dinesen's biographer Judith Thurman, there is reason to doubt that Bror Blixen was the cause. Although Dinesen's illness was eventually cured (some uncertainty exists), it created medical anguish for years afterward. The Blixens separated in 1921, and were divorced in 1925.

During her early years in Kenya, Karen Blixen met the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, and after her separation she and Finch Hatton developed a close friendship which eventually became a long-term love affair. Finch Hatton used Blixen's farmhouse as a home base between 1926 and 1931, when he wasn't leading one of his clients on safari. He died in the crash of his de Havilland Gipsy Moth biplane in 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation, as a result of the worldwide economic depression and the unsuitability of her farm's soil for coffee growing, forced Blixen to abandon her beloved farm. The family corporation sold the land to a residential developer, and Blixen returned to Denmark, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Life as a writer

Jurij Moskvitin (middle) acompaning Karen Blixen/
Isak Dinesen (right) meeting composer Igor Stravinskij
(left) at the City Hall of Copenhagen, May 25, 2959
On returning to Denmark, Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the US in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. This first book, highly enigmatic and more metaphoric than Gothic, won great recognition, and publication of the book in Great Britain and Denmark followed. Her second book, now the best known of her works, was Out of Africa, published in 1937, and its success firmly established her reputation as an author. She was awarded the Tagea Brandt Rejselegat (a Danish prize for women in the arts or academic life) in 1939.

During World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Germans, Blixen started her only full-length novel, the introspective tale The Angelic Avengers, under another pseudonym, Pierre Andrezel; it was published in 1944. The horrors experienced by the young heroines were interpreted as an allegory of Nazism.

Her writing during most of the 1940s and 1950s consisted of tales in the storytelling tradition. The most famous is "Babette's Feast", about a chef who spends her entire 10,000-franc lottery prize to prepare a final, spectacular gourmet meal. The Immortal Story, was adapted to the screen in 1968 by Orson Welles, a great admirer of Blixen's work and life. Welles later attempted to film The Dreamers, but only a few scenes were ever completed.

Blixen's tales follow a traditional style of storytelling, and most take place against the background of the 19th century or earlier periods. Concerning her deliberately old-fashioned style, Blixen mentioned in several interviews that she wanted to express a spirit that no longer existed in modern times, that of destiny and courage. Indeed, many of her ideas can be traced back to those of Romanticism. Blixen's concept of the art of the story is perhaps most directly expressed in the story "The Cardinal's First Tale" from her fifth book, Last Tales.

Though Danish, Blixen wrote her books in English and then translated her work into her native tongue. Critics describe her English as having unusual beauty.[who?] Her later books usually appeared simultaneously in both Danish and English. As an author, she kept her public image as a charismatic, mysterious old Baroness with an insightful third eye, and established herself as an inspiring figure in Danish culture, although shunning the mainstream.

Blixen was widely respected by contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway and Truman Capote, and during her tour of the United States in 1959, writers who visited her included Arthur Miller, E. E. Cummings, and Pearl Buck. She also met actress Marilyn Monroe with her husband Arthur Miller. The socialite Babe Paley gave a lunch in her honour at St.Regis with Truman and Cecil Beaton as guests, and Gloria Vanderbilt gave her a dress by Mainbocher. The photographer Richard Avedon took one of his famous pictures of her during her stay in New York. She was admired by Cecil Beaton and the patron Pauline de Rothschild of the Rothschild family.

She was awarded the Danish Ingenio et Arti medal in 1950.[4] In 2012, the Nobel records were opened after 50 years and it was revealed that Blixen was among a shortlist of authors considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, along with John Steinbeck (winner), Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell and Jean Anouilh.[5] Blixen became ineligible after dying in September.[5]

Karen Blixen's grave in Rungstedlund, Denmark
Illness and death

Although it was widely believed that syphilis continued to plague Blixen throughout her lifetime, extensive tests were unable to reveal evidence of syphilis in her system after 1925. Her writing prowess suggests that she did not suffer from the mental degeneration of late stages of syphilis, nor from cerebral poisoning due to mercury treatments. She did suffer a mild permanent loss of sensation in her legs that could be attributed to chronic use of arsenic in Africa.


Others attribute her weight loss and eventual death to anorexia nervosa.[6]

During the 1950s Blixen's health quickly deteriorated, and in 1955 she had a third of her stomach removed because of an ulcer. Writing became impossible, although she did several radio broadcasts.

In her analysis of Blixen's medical history, Linda Donelson points out that Blixen wondered if her pain was psychosomatic even though she blamed it in public on the emotive syphilis: "Whatever her belief about her illness, the disease suited the artist's design for creating her own personal legend."[7]

Unable to eat, Blixen died in 1962 at Rungstedlund, her family's estate, at the age of 77, apparently of malnutrition. The source of her abdominal problems remains unknown, although gastric syphilis, manifested by gastric ulcers during secondary and tertiary syphilis, was well-known prior to the advent of modern antibiotics.

Rungstedlund Museum

The Karen Blixen Museum in Rungstedlund, Denmark
Blixen lived most of her life at the family estate Rungstedlund, which was acquired by her father in 1879. The property is located in Rungsted, 24 kilometres (15 mi) north of Copenhagen, Denmark's capital. The oldest parts of the estate date to 1680, and it had been operated as both an inn and a farm. Most of Blixen's writing was done in Ewald's Room, named after author Johannes Ewald. The property is managed by the Rungstedlund Foundation, founded by Blixen and her siblings. It was opened to the public as a museum in 1991.

Legacy

The Nairobi suburb that stands on the land where Blixen farmed coffee is now named Karen. Blixen herself declared in her later writings that "the residential district of Karen" was "named after me".[8] And Blixen's biographer, Judith Thurman, was told by the developer who bought the farm from the family corporation that he planned to name the district after Blixen.

Blixen was known to her friends not as "Karen" but as "Tania." The family corporation that owned her farm was incorporated as the "Karen Coffee Company". The chairman of the board was her uncle, Aage Westenholz,[9] who may have named the company after his own daughter Karen. However, the developer seems to have named the district after its famous author/farmer rather than the name of her company.

There is a Karen Blixen Coffee House and Museum in the district of Karen, located near Blixen's former home.

Karen Blixen's portrait was featured on the front of the Danish 50-krone banknote, 1997 series, from 7 May 1999 to 25 August 2005.[10][11]

Family

Blixen's great-nephew, Anders Westenholz, was also an accomplished writer, and has written books about her and her literature, among other things.
Karen Blixen was also, in addition to being depicted on a Danish banknote, featured on a Danish postage stamp that was issued in 1980.






   


Out of Africa Movie Poems
http://www.karenblixen.com/moviepoems.html

The screenwriter, Kurt Luedtke, included the following fragments of poems
in his Academy Award-winning filmscript from 1985.


Scene: Denys Finch Hatton (Robert Redford) washing Karen Blixen's (Meryl Streep's)
hair on safari:

From THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

(Note: Denys Finch Hatton loved this poem. The lines "He prayeth well, who loveth well /Both man and bird and beast" appear on commemorative brass plaques, once placed by Denys Finch Hatton's brother Toby on the obelisk at Denys's tomb in the Ngong Hills, and still found in Ewerby Church, Lincolnshire, England. In the flyleaf of the copy of the poem owned by Karen Blixen, Denys drew a picture of a rhinoceros. This drawing is reproduced in Isak Dinesen's Letters from Africa, page 140.)

... Laughed loud and long, and all the while
His eyes went to and fro.
Ha, ha, quoth he, full plain I see
The Devil knows how to row.
Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest:
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast."

Scene: At Denys's grave:

From A SHROPSHIRE LAD: XIX TO AN ATHLETE DYING YOUNG
by A. E. Housman (1859-1936).

"The time you won your town the race
We cheered you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high...

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose...

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man...

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl's."


(Note: A play, "The Invention of Love" by Tom Stoppard, examines the life of A. E. Housman. The play opened in London in 1998 and in Philadelphia in February, 2000.) The (fictional) script written for the movie gives Meryl Streep the further comments:

"Now take back the soul
of Denys George Finch Hatton,
whom You have shared with us.
He brought us joy...
we loved him well.
He was not ours.
He was not mine."



Scene: Karen leaving the farm for good:

From Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen (1885-1962), chapter titled "Kamante and Lulu," page 83:

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"


Scene: "Rose-lipped maidens"

The line "Rose-lipped maidens" appears when Meryl Streep is offered a drink in the Muthaiga Club near the end of the movie, and also before the seduction scene on safari. The following poem was set to music by Samuel Barber (1910-1931).

A. E. Housman (1859-1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896.


WITH rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping 
The lightfoot boys are laid;
the rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.










Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen
Quotes
http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/4480096.Isak_Dinesen

“The cure for anything is salt water - tears, sweat, or the sea.”

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”

“Perhaps he knew, as I did not, that the Earth was made round so that we would not see too far down the road.”

“To be a person is to have a story to tell.”

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

“All sorrows can be born if you put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

“Here I am, where I am supposed to be.”

“There was a place in the Hills, on the first ridge in the Game Reserve, that I myself at the time when I thought that I was to live and die in Africa, had pointed out to Denys as my future burial-place. In the evening, while we sat and looked at the hills from my house, he remarked that then he would like to be buried there himself as well. Since then, sometimes when we drove out in the hills, Denys had said: "Let us drive as far as our graves.”

“The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.”

“I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”

“I don't think...
one gets a flash of happiness once,
and never again;
it is there deep within you...”

“You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.”

“But by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all for fate to get rid of.” 

“Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.”

“All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.”

“Alas! as I have lived I have lost the capacity of fear. When you know what things are really like, you can make no poems about them. When you have had talk with ghosts and connections with the devils you are, in the end, more afraid of your creditors than of them; and when you have been made a cuckold you are no longer nervous about cuckoldry. I have become too familiar with life; it can no longer delude me into believing that one thing is much worse than the other. The day and the dark, an enemy and a friend—I know them to be about the same. How can you make others afraid when you have forgotten fear yourself? I once had a really tragic tale, a great tale, full of agony, immensely popular, of a young man who in the end had his nose and his ears cut off. Now I could frighten no one with it, if I wanted to, for now I know that to be without them is not so very much worse than to have them. This is why you see me here, skin and bone, and dressed in old rags instead of keeping near the thrones of the mighty, flourishing and flattered, as was when I was young.”

“I remember an old Danish bishop’s saying to me that there are many ways to the recognition of truth, and that Burgundy is one of them.”

“The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.”

“I had a farm in Africa.”

“It is terrible and unbearable to an artist,' he said, 'to be encouraged to do, to be applauded for doing his second best.' He said: 'Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost!”

“People love to be frightened. The great princes, fed up with the sweets of life, wished to have their blood stirred again. The honest ladies, to whom nothing ever happened, longed to tremble in their beds just for once. The dancers were inspired to a lighter pace by tales of flight and pursuit.”

“In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself—all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.”

“At times I believe that my feet have been set upon a road which I shall go on following, and that slowly the centre of gravity of my being will shift over from the world of day, from the domain of organizing and regulating universal powers, into the world of Imagination. Already now I feel...that day is a space of time without meaning, and that it is with the coming of dusk, with the lighting of the first star and the first candle, that things will become what they really are, and will come forth to meet me.”

“Emmanuelson said good-bye to me; he started to walk, and then came back and said good-bye once more. I sat in the car and watched him, and I think that as he went he was pleased to have a spectator. I believe that the dramatic instinct within him was so strong that he was at this moment vividly aware of being leaving the stage, of disappearing, as if he had, with the eyes of his audience, seen himself go. Exit Emmanuelson. Should not the hills, the thorn-trees and the dusty road take pity and for a second put on the aspect of cardboard?”

“What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn?”

“What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine? You may even ask which is the more intense craving and pleasure: to drink or to make water. But in the meantime, what has been done? A song has been composed, a kiss taken, a slanderer slain, a prophet begotten, a righteous judgment given, a joke made. The world drank in the young story-teller Mira. He went to its head, he ran in its veins, he made it glow with warmth and color. Now I am on my way down a little; the effect has worn off. The world will soon be equally pleased to piss me out again, and I do not know but that I am pressing on a little myself. But the tales which I made—they shall last.”

“I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.”

“Man, my friends,is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble. We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”

“It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings”

“If Miss Malin had now been given the choice of returning to her former reasonable state, and had been capable of realizing the meaning of the offer, she might have declined it on the ground that you have in reality more fun out of life when a little off your head.”
- Isak Dinesen, Seven Gothic Tales

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”
- Karen BlixenOut of Africa

*For more quotes and saying go here to GoodReads


Friday, January 17, 2014

John Milton - Sabrina Fair, excerpted from the poem Comus


The Water Nymphs come to save Sabrina (pg 174)

from The Poetical Works of John Milton, Vol 2, with Memoir and Critical
Remarks by James Montgomery, W. Kent & Co (London), 1859

Engravings by John Thompson, S. and T. Williams,
O. Smith, J. Linton, etc; from drawings by William Harvey


William Stanley Braithwaite, ed. The Book of Restoration Verse. 1910.
http://www.bartleby.com/332/95.html


Song: ‘Sabrina fair’
By John Milton (1608–1674)
FromComus

iii

SABRINA fair
  Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
  In twisted braids of Lillies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-droping 1 hair,        5
  Listen for dear honour’s sake,
  Goddess of the silver lake,
                    Listen and save.

Listen and appear to us
In name of great Oceanus, 2        10
By the earth-shaking Neptune’s 3 mace,
And Tethys 4 grave majestick pace,
By hoary Nereus 5 wrincled look,
And the Carpathian wisards 6 hook,
By scaly Tritons 7 winding shell,        15
And old sooth-saying Glaucus 8 spell,
By Leucothea’s 9 lovely hands,
And her son that rules the strands,
By Thetis 10 tinsel-slipper’d feet,
And the Songs of Sirens sweet,        20
By dead Parthenope’s 11 dear tomb,
And fair Ligea’s 12 golden comb,
Wherwith she sits on diamond rocks
Sleeking her soft alluring locks,
By all the Nymphs that nightly dance        25
Upon thy streams with wily glance,
Rise, rise, and heave thy rosie head
From thy coral-pav’n bed,
And bridle in thy headlong wave,
Till thou our summons answered have.        30
                    Listen and save.

Sabrina rises, attended by water-Nymphes, and sings

  By the rushy-fringed bank,
Where grows the Willow and the Osier dank,
  My sliding Chariot stayes,
Thick set with Agat, and the azurn sheen        35
Of Turkis blew, and Emrauld green
  That in the channell strayes,
Whilst from off the waters fleet
Thus I set my printless feet
O’re the Cowslips Velvet head,        40
  That bends not as I tread,
Gentle swain at thy request
  I am here.

Spirit.  Goddess dear
We implore thy powerful hand        45
To’ undo the charmèd band
Of true Virgin here distrest,
Through the force, and through the wile
Of unblest inchanter vile.
Sabrina.  Shepherd ’tis my office best        50
To help insnared chastity;
Brightest Lady look on me,
Thus I sprinkle on thy brest
Drops that from my fountain pure,
I have kept of pretious cure,        55
Thrice upon thy fingers tip
Thrice upon thy rubied lip,
Next this marble venom’d seat
Smear’d with gumms of glutenous heat
I touch with chaste palms moist and cold,        60
Now the spell hath lost his hold;
And I must haste ere morning hour
To wait in Amphitrite’s bowr.

- John Milton


Note 1. Amber-dropping: “Hair of amber colour with the waterdrops falling through it.” (Masson). [back]
Note 2. Oceanus: god of the great ocean-stream which Homer supposed to encircle the earth. [back]
Note 3. Neptune: god of the sea after Saturn was overthrown. [back]
Note 4. Tethys: wife of Oceanus. [back]
Note 5. Nereus: father of the Nereids. [back]
Note 6. The Carpathian wizard: Proteus whose home was the island of Carpathus, who had the prophetic and could change his form at will. [back]
Note 7. Tritons: son of Neptune and Amphitrite, was trumpeter of the ocean, who with his sea-shell could stir or quiet the waves. [back]
Note 8. Glaucus: a Bœotian fisherman, who having eaten a magic web, was changed into a sea-god with prophetic powers. [back]
Note 9. Leucothea, was Ino, the daughter of Cadmus, who to escape the furies of her mad husband, Athamas, plunged into the sea with her son Melicertes, and became a sea-goddess. Melicertes became the sea-god Palæmon, and is associated by the Romans as the god of harbours. [back]
Note 10. Thetis: a daughter of Nereus, and mother of Achilles. [back]
Note 11. Parthenope: a sea-nymph, to whom a shrine was erected at Naples, where her dead body was washed ashore. [back]
Note 12. Ligea: one of the Sirens. [back]


Sabrina encounters the debauched Comus while lost in the wood (pg 167)

from The Poetical Works of John Milton, Vol 2, with Memoir and Critical
Remarks by James Montgomery, W. Kent & Co (London), 1859

Engravings by John Thompson, S. and T. Williams,
O. Smith, J. Linton, etc; from drawings by William Harvey

Resources to the Poem

Direct Quote (pg 173) from The Poetical Works of John Milton, W. Kent & Co, London, 1859 - click link here

William Stanley Braithwaite's The Book of Restoration Verse - clink link here
found under Song: ‘Sabrina fair’ by John Milton

Braithwaite's The Book Of Restoration Verse, Vol 1


Bullfinches Mythology - Stories of Gods and HeroesChapter XXIV. Orpheus and Eurydice--Aristaeus--Amphion--Linus--Thamyris--Marsyas--Melampus--Musaeus

Complete text of poems Arcade and Comus with Introduction, Notes, and Indexes
by A. Wilson Verity, published Cambridge, The University Press, 1891 - click link here




Biography of Author
http://www.poemhunter.com/john-milton/biography/

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth (republic) of England under Oliver Cromwell. He wrote at a time of religious flux and political upheaval, and is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost.

Milton's poetry and prose reflect deep personal convictions, a passion for freedom and self determination, and the urgent issues and political turbulence of his day. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, he achieved international renown within his lifetime, and his celebrated Areopagitica, (written in condemnation of pre-publication censorship) is among history's most influential and impassioned defenses of free speech and freedom of the press.

William Hayley's 1796 biography called him the "greatest English author", and he remains generally regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language"; though critical reception has oscillated in the centuries since his death (often on account of his republicanism). Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind". Though Johnson (a Tory and recipient of royal patronage) described his politics as those of an "acrimonious and surly republican".

Because of his republicanism, Milton has been the subject of centuries of British partisanship (a "nonconformist" biography by John Toland, a hostile account by Anthony à Wood etc.).

(Partial) Biography

The phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in Stuart Britain. Under the increasingly personal rule of Charles I and its breakdown in constitutional confusion and war, Milton studied, travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation, and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist. Under the Commonwealth of England, from being thought dangerously radical and even heretical, the shift in accepted attitudes in government placed him in public office, and he even acted as an official spokesman in certain of his publications. The Restoration of 1660 deprived Milton, now completely blind, of his public platform, but this period saw him complete most of his major works of poetry.

Milton's views developed from his very extensive reading, as well as travel and experience, from his student days of the 1620s to the English Revolution. By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English intellectual life, yet unrepentant for his political choices, and of Europe-wide fame.



Complete Biographies & Additional Resources






Amazon Links to John Milton

List of Poetry Books - click here

List for Comus - click here




Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Dicken's Novels in Full Color

Gorgeous Vintage Illustrations of Dickens Novels in Full Color

January 6, 2014

Dickens was a novelist so popular in his own time that it is nearly impossible to think of a modern analogue today. (Maybe Stephen King.) At the height of his powers, it’s sometimes written, perhaps one in ten Britons had read his novels. One of his most popular books then — though nowadays it falls behind Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and any number of others in name recognition — was The Old Curiosity Shop. Dickens’ novels were, as you’ve probably heard before, been published as serials, and when The Old Curiosity Shop was in progress, the fate of its tragic heroine, Little Nell, convulsed both sides of the Atlantic. People wrote Dickens letters demanding that he let her survive. (Spoiler: he didn’t listen to them.)

The intense emotional pull of her plight perhaps explains why the illustration, below, presents Nell as unspeakably beautiful. This illustration is part of a set displayed in a late-19th-century abridgement of Dickens’ work which recently entered the public domain, and is available in the British Library’s photostream. Here are eight of the most beautiful pictures from that stream.

(click to enlarge any illustration)


Little Nell, The Old Curiosity Shop


The Old Curiosity Shop


Dombey and Son


The Cricket on the Hearth


Martin Chuzzlewit


Mrs. Gomp


Pickwick Papers


Pickwick Papers



Zora Neale Hurston - American Folklorist, Playwright, Author



Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891[1][2] – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author who worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. - Wikipedia



How It Feels to Be Colored Me
by Zora Neale Hurston (1891 - 1960)

"I remember the very day that I became colored"


Zora Neale Hurston,
photo by Carl Van Vechten (1938)
1 I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

2 I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

3 The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat for me. My favorite place was atop the gatepost. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn't mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I'd wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: "Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin'?" Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably "go a piece of the way" with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first "welcome-to-our-state" Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

4 During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me "speak pieces" and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop, only they didn't know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county--everybody's Zora.

5 But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, a Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown--warranted not to rub nor run.

6 But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

7 Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said "Go!" I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think--to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

8 The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

9 I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira. I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

10 For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

11 Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

12 "Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

13 Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

14 At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in a most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me. The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

15 I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

16 Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me.

17 But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held--so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags filled them in the first place--who knows?

- Zora Neale Hurston, 1928



Select Quotations by Zora Neale Hurston

''Ah done growed ten feet higher from jus' listenin' tuh you, Janie. Ah ain't satisfied wid mahself no mo'.''
 - Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Phoeby, in Their Eyes Were Watching God.

"He wuz uh man, and nobody knowed 'im but God.''
- Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Ch. 26. Preacher, in Johah's...

''Trees and plants always look like the people they live with, somehow.''
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Seraph on the Suwanee, ch. 1...

Finally she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought. With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage.
Hours of this, a period of introspection, a space of retrospection, then a mixture of both....

Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), Fire!! (1926). "Sweat."





Biography of Zora Neale Hurston



Official Website Books & Audioshttp://zoranealehurston.com/books/

Amazon.com - see book link here


Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960) was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. Of Hurston's four novels and more than 50 published short stories, plays, and essays, she is best known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. 

Hurston was the fifth of eight children of John Hurston and Lucy Ann Hurston (née Potts). Her father was a Baptist preacher, tenant farmer, and carpenter, and her mother was a school teacher. She was born in Notasulga, Alabama, on January 7, 1891, where her father grew up and her grandfather was the preacher of a Baptist church. Her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns to be incorporated in the United States, when she was three. Hurston said she always felt that Eatonville was "home" to her and sometimes claimed it as her birthplace Her father later became mayor of the town, which Hurston would glorify in her stories as a place where African Americans could live as they desired, independent of white society. In 1901, some northern schoolteachers visited Eatonville and gave Hurston a number of books that opened her mind to literature, and this may be why she sometimes describes her "birth" as taking place in that year. Hurston spent the remainder of her childhood in Eatonville, and describes the experience of growing up in Eatonville in her 1928 essay "How It Feels to Be Colored Me". 

In 1904, Hurston's mother died and her father remarried, to Matte Moge, almost immediately, considered something of a minor scandal as it was rumored he had relations with Moge before Lucy died. Hurston's father and new stepmother sent her away to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, but they eventually stopped paying her tuition and the school expelled her. She later worked as a maid to the lead singer in a traveling Gilbert & Sullivan theatrical company. In 1917, Hurston began attending Morgan Academy, the high school division of the historically African-American Morgan College in Baltimore, Maryland. It was at this time, and apparently to qualify for a free high-school education (as well, perhaps to reflect her literary birth), that the 26-year-old Hurston began claiming 1901 as her date of birth. She graduated from Morgan Academy in 1918.

- PoemHunter



Official Website of Zora Neale Hurston
http://zoranealehurston.com/

"I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality,
rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."

- Letter from Zora Neale Hurston to Countee Cullen


Zora Neale Hurston knew how to make an entrance. On May 1, 1925, at a literary awards dinner sponsored by Opportunity magazine, the earthy Harlem newcomer turned heads and raised eyebrows as she claimed four awards: a second-place fiction prize for her short story "Spunk," a second-place award in drama for her play Color Struck, and two honorable mentions.

The names of the writers who beat out Hurston for first place that night would soon be forgotten. But the name of the second-place winner buzzed on tongues all night, and for days and years to come. Lest anyone forget her, Hurston made a wholly memorable entrance at a party following the awards dinner. She strode into the room--jammed with writers and arts patrons, black and white--and flung a long, richly colored scarf around her neck with dramatic flourish as she bellowed a reminder of the title of her winning play: "Colooooooor Struuckkkk!" Her exultant entrance literally stopped the party for a moment, just as she had intended. In this way, Hurston made it known that a bright and powerful presence had arrived. By all accounts, Zora Neale Hurston could walk into a roomful of strangers and, a few minutes and a few stories later, leave them so completely charmed that they often found themselves offering to help her in any way they could.

Gamely accepting such offers--and employing her own talent and scrappiness--Hurston became the most successful and most significant black woman writer of the first half of the 20th century. Over a career that spanned more than 30 years, she published four novels, two books of folklore, an autobiography, numerous short stories, and several essays, articles and plays.

Born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, Hurston moved with her family to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Her writings reveal no recollection of her Alabama beginnings. For Hurston, Eatonville was always home.

Established in 1887, the rural community near Orlando was the nation's first incorporated black township. It was, as Hurston described it, "a city of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jailhouse."

In Eatonville, Zora was never indoctrinated in inferiority, and she could see the evidence of black achievement all around her. She could look to town hall and see black men, including her father, John Hurston, formulating the laws that governed Eatonville. She could look to the Sunday Schools of the town's two churches and see black women, including her mother, Lucy Potts Hurston, directing the Christian curricula. She could look to the porch of the village store and see black men and women passing worlds through their mouths in the form of colorful, engaging stories.

Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood, despite frequent clashes with her preacher-father, who sometimes sought to "squinch" her rambunctious spirit, she recalled. Her mother, on the other hand, urged young Zora and her seven siblings to "jump at de sun." Hurston explained, "We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground."

Hurston's idyllic childhood came to an abrupt end, though, when her mother died in 1904. Zora was only 13 years old. "That hour began my wanderings," she later wrote. "Not so much in geography, but in time. Then not so much in time as in spirit."

After Lucy Hurston's death, Zora's father remarried quickly--to a young woman whom the hotheaded Zora almost killed in a fistfight--and seemed to have little time or money for his children. "Bare and bony of comfort and love," Zora worked a series of menial jobs over the ensuing years, struggled to finish her schooling, and eventually joined a Gilbert & Sullivan traveling troupe as a maid to the lead singer. In 1917, she turned up in Baltimore; by then, she was 26 years old and still hadn't finished high school. Needing to present herself as a teenager to qualify for free public schooling, she lopped 10 years off her life--giving her age as 16 and the year of her birth as 1901. Once gone, those years were never restored: From that moment forward, Hurston would always present herself as at least 10 years younger than she actually was. Apparently, she had the looks to pull it off. Photographs reveal that she was a handsome, big-boned woman with playful yet penetrating eyes, high cheekbones, and a full, graceful mouth that was never without expression.

Zora also had a fiery intellect, an infectious sense of humor, and "the gift," as one friend put it, "of walking into hearts." Zora used these talents--and dozens more--to elbow her way into the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, befriending such luminaries as poet Langston Hughes and popular singer/actress Ethel Waters. Though Hurston rarely drank, fellow writer Sterling Brown recalled, "When Zora was there, she was the party." Another friend remembered Hurston's apartment--furnished by donations she solicited from friends--as a spirited "open house" for artists. All this socializing didn't keep Hurston from her work, though. She would sometimes write in her bedroom while the party went on in the living room.

By 1935, Hurston--who'd graduated from Barnard College in 1928--had published several short stories and articles, as well as a novel (Jonah's Gourd Vine) and a well-received collection of black Southern folklore (Mules and Men). But the late 1930s and early '40s marked the real zenith of her career. She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937; Tell My Horse, her study of Caribbean Voodoo practices, in 1938; and another masterful novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain, in 1939. When her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published in 1942, Hurston finally received the well-earned acclaim that had long eluded her. That year, she was profiled in Who's Who in America, Current Biography and Twentieth Century Authors. She went on to publish another novel, Seraph on the Suwanee, in 1948.

Still, Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. (The largest royalty she ever earned from any of her books was $943.75.) So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke--her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, so Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.

That summer, a young writer named Alice Walker traveled to Fort Pierce to place a marker on the grave of the author who had so inspired her own work. Walker found the Garden of Heavenly Rest, a segregated cemetery at the dead end of North 17th Street, abandoned and overgrown with yellow-flowered weeds.

Back in 1945, Hurston had foreseen the possibility of dying without money--and she'd proposed a solution that would have benefited her and countless others. Writing to W.E.B. Du Bois, whom she called the "Dean of American Negro Artists," Hurston suggested "a cemetery for the illustrious Negro dead" on 100 acres of land in Florida. Citing practical complications, Du Bois wrote a curt reply discounting Hurston's persuasive argument. "Let no Negro celebrity, no matter what financial condition they might be in at death, lie in inconspicuous forgetfulness," she'd urged. "We must assume the responsibility of their graves being known and honored."

As if impelled by those words, Walker bravely entered the snake-infested cemetery where Hurston's remains had been laid to rest. Wading through waist-high weeds, she soon stumbled upon a sunken rectangular patch of ground that she determined to be Hurston's grave. Unable to afford the marker she wanted--a tall, majestic black stone called "Ebony Mist"--Walker chose a plain gray headstone instead. Borrowing from a Jean Toomer poem, she dressed the marker up with a fitting epitaph: "Zora Neale Hurston: A Genius of the South."



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