=== text:story:same-time-next-year === Owner: story:same-time-next-year Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Same Time Next Year Author: Hello Doggo Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 54490ae20c6097bc36865f8a688b2bd4533287378fb75706b8a38460ae7f981d Every Halloween for eleven years, the same child has come to my door. Always last. Always just before midnight. Always alone. A small figure in a black coat... wearing a rubber mask of a man's face. The first year, I didn't recognize it. I thought it was some cheap movie villain. It was my face. I told myself it was a prank. A neighbor's kid with a sick sense of humor. But every year... the mask got older. Exactly as I did. The grey at the temples. The lines around the eyes. The year I grew a beard, the mask had a beard. It had it the Halloween before I grew it. Then, six years ago, the mask came with a scar. A thin white line, through the left eyebrow. Three weeks later, I went through a windshield on Route 9. Same scar. Same eyebrow. After that, I studied the mask. Every October thirty-first, I'd open the door... and look for what was coming. A cut. A limp. A tooth I hadn't lost yet. The child never spoke. It held out its bag... took one piece of candy... and walked back into the dark. Tonight, the doorbell didn't ring. At eleven fifty-eight, I went to turn off the porch light... and the child was already standing in my hallway. Inside. The door was still locked. I looked at the mask. The skin was grey. The lips were blue. And the eyes... my eyes... were closed. And for the first time in eleven years, it spoke. In my voice. "Trick or treat." I held out the bowl. It didn't want candy. It held its bag open... wide... the way you hold a bag for something you've come to collect. It's still here. Right behind me. Waiting. It's been very patient. I'm recording this because I don't think I'll be the one who answers the door next year. I think I'll be the one wearing the mask. === text:story:its-cold-out-here === Owner: story:its-cold-out-here Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: It's Cold Out Here Author: Hello Doggo Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 6e15a3cdbd483cf0bbb9f7ed590c84cc8cb9a58e5f4a810601387080ca739131 My mother moved in with me last spring. She's eighty-one. Some days she knows what year it is. Most days she doesn't. In September, she started telling me about the young man. "Such good manners," she said. "He comes to my window at night. He'd like to come in." "I told him no, of course. It's your house, sweetheart. He'll have to ask you." Her room is on the second floor. I laughed it off. But she was getting thinner. Paler. Always cold. The doctor said anemia and gave her iron... and the iron did nothing. So I put a camera in her room. Three-twelve in the morning. My mother sits up in bed and smiles at the window. She talks. She nods. She laughs, softly, the way she used to laugh at my father. The window is empty. But the glass isn't. One at a time... small marks appear on it. From the outside. Fingertips. Tapping. Patient. Polite. Then my mother turns. Looks straight into the camera. And says, perfectly clear, perfectly calm... "He'd like a word with you, sweetheart." That was two weeks ago. This morning, I found her bed empty. Her window open. Her slippers on the sill... side by side. Like she'd stepped out of them, onto nothing. It's past three now. Something is tapping on my bedroom window. I know the rhythm. I grew up with it. It's how she used to knock on my door when I was a boy, home sick from school. And just now, through the glass, I heard her. Sweet. Clear. More alive than I've heard her in years. "Sweetheart. It's cold out here. Let me in." She's smiling. Her lips are red. She never wore lipstick in her life. And I'm her son. I always let her in. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-immortal-man-whose-name-we-lost === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-immortal-man-whose-name-we-lost Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Immortal Man Whose Name We Lost Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Shakespeare Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 844eedde3b30bc60adf26c95a0543e9584e0895cf3361efd0b5de8680eeadfe4 Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? You've heard it at weddings. It's usually taken as a man wooing a woman. Probably not. It sits among the first hundred and twenty-six sonnets, which scholars generally take to be addressed to a young man. And the poem makes him an astonishing promise: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee." So who was he? Here's where it gets good. The sonnets came out in sixteen oh nine, with a dedication from the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, to "the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mister W. H." Mister W. H. has kept people busy for four hundred years. Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, with his initials swapped round? William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke? In the seventeen hundreds, a scholar called Thomas Tyrwhitt spotted something in Sonnet Twenty. In the line "a man in hue, all hues in his controlling", the original printing gives that second "hues" a capital letter, in italics. A pun, he thought. On a name. Hughes. Oscar Wilde adored this. He made Hughes a boy actor called Willie, and wrote a whole story, The Portrait of Mister W. H., in which a young man has a portrait of Willie Hughes forged, to prove the theory. Nobody has ever found a Willie Hughes who fits. And nobody has proved any of the others, either. So Shakespeare kept his promise. The young man lives every time the poem is spoken. He just forgot to leave a name. Sources: - Shake-speares Sonnets (London: Thomas Thorpe, 1609), with the publisher's dedication to "Mr. W. H." Sonnet 18 ("Shall I compare thee") and Sonnet 20, in which the 1609 quarto prints "Hews" in italics with a capital. - Thomas Tyrwhitt's "Hughes" conjecture, first published in Edmond Malone's Supplement to the Edition of Shakspeare's Plays (1780), where Malone credits it to Tyrwhitt. - Oscar Wilde, "The Portrait of Mr. W. H.", Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, July 1889 (an expanded version was published after his death, 1921). - For the Southampton and Pembroke candidates and the long history of the argument: Katherine Duncan-Jones, ed., Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Shakespeare, 1997), introduction. Notes: - That Sonnets 1–126 address a young man is the general scholarly reading, not something Shakespeare stated. No candidate for "W. H." has ever been proved, and no Willie Hughes has been found. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-second-best-bed === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-second-best-bed Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Second-Best Bed Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Shakespeare Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 8d997a5bc86b2fbcb7662ea8b897fb3fe85e961ce2e087e413ec4ddd6538be53 When William Shakespeare signed his will in March sixteen sixteen, he remembered almost everyone. His daughters. His sister. His godson. Money to buy rings for three old friends from the theatre, Burbage, Heminges and Condell. Ten pounds for the poor of Stratford. And his wife of thirty-three years, Anne? One line, squeezed in between the others, like an afterthought. I give unto my wife my second best bed, with the furniture. Furniture, back then, meant the hangings and the bedding. That's it. The only thing the will leaves her in so many words. The gossips have had centuries of fun with that. In the eighteenth century the scholar Edmond Malone decided Shakespeare had cut her off, not with a shilling, but with an old bed. Throw in the wedding — Anne was some eight years older, and, by the dates, three months pregnant at the altar — and you can see where people's minds went. But here's the other reading. In a house like his, the best bed was often kept for guests, and the second best was the one a couple actually slept in. Quite possibly, the marriage bed. And the law usually gave a widow a share of the family property for life anyway, so perhaps he didn't need to spell it out. Insult, or love token? Nobody can prove it either way. One early transcriber misread the line as my brown best bed, which would have settled everything. Shakespeare once wrote, to love that well which thou must leave ere long. What he left her was the bed. Sources: - Shakespeare's will, signed 25 March 1616, The National Archives, Kew (PROB 1/4). The bequest reads: "Item I gyve unto my wief my second best bed with the furniture." - Edmond Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare (1790), where Malone remarks that Shakespeare had "cut her off, not indeed with a shilling, but with an old bed." - The marriage: licence bond of 28 November 1582 and the baptism of Susanna Shakespeare, 26 May 1583 (Stratford parish register). - For the "guest bed" reading and a widow's customary dower rights: S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975); Germaine Greer, Shakespeare's Wife (2007). - The "brown best bed" misreading occurs in an early manuscript transcript of the will. - "To love that well which thou must leave ere long": Sonnet 73. Notes: - The bequests to Burbage, Heminges and Condell for memorial rings, and the ten pounds to the poor of Stratford, are all in the will. Whether the bed was a slight or a keepsake is unresolvable from the documents. === text:story:poetry-tale-cursed-be-he-that-moves-my-bones === Owner: story:poetry-tale-cursed-be-he-that-moves-my-bones Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Cursed Be He That Moves My Bones Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Shakespeare Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 46d410575ba5b5fc0e7b61a0caab26ee2c60d393a9894cd4f4fdf4d9c3dadaea In Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, there's a stone in the floor with a warning carved into it. Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear, to dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones. That's Shakespeare's grave. And as far as anyone knows, it has never officially been opened. Unofficially? In eighteen seventy-nine, a magazine called the Argosy published a story, signed only by "a Warwickshire man". It claimed that in seventeen ninety-four a doctor called Frank Chambers heard that the collector Horace Walpole would pay three hundred guineas for Shakespeare's skull. So he hired some local men to dig into the grave and carry the head away. A ripping yarn, mostly filed under fiction. Nobody has ever proved it happened. Then, in two thousand and sixteen, the archaeologist Kevin Colls announced what ground-penetrating radar had seen beneath the floor. No digging required. The scan showed shallow burials. And at the head end of Shakespeare's grave, an odd disturbance — what looked like an old repair. He found it, he said, very, very convincing that the skull isn't at Holy Trinity at all. The vicar wasn't persuaded. A later chapter of the legend claimed the stolen skull was hidden in a crypt at Beoley, a village nearby. It was examined. It belonged to a woman in her seventies. So the head may be missing, and the curse may have failed. But the sonnets are all present and correct. So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Sources: - The epitaph on Shakespeare's gravestone, chancel of Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. - "How Shakespeare's Skull Was Stolen" by "A Warwickshire Man", The Argosy, October 1879. The author was later identified as the Rev. C. J. Langston, vicar of Beoley, who published a sequel claiming the skull lay in the Sheldon crypt at St Leonard's, Beoley. - Secret History: Shakespeare's Tomb (Channel 4, broadcast 26 March 2016), presenting the ground-penetrating radar survey led by Kevin Colls of the Centre of Archaeology, Staffordshire University, and the forensic analysis of the Beoley skull. Press coverage: Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, March 2016. - Sonnet 18. Notes: - The Argosy story has never been corroborated and is generally treated as fiction. The 2016 survey found a disturbance at the head end of the grave consistent with an old repair; it did not, and could not, prove what was or was not beneath. The vicar of Holy Trinity publicly disagreed with the conclusion. The Beoley skull was assessed as that of a woman in her seventies. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-tree-full-of-angels === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-tree-full-of-angels Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Tree Full of Angels Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Blake Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 374ed26cef43bcd74218d68c12e502c4616303adf878e78cb89d054036c11a98 William Blake started early. According to his wife, the first time he saw God, he was four years old. God put his head to the window. And the little boy screamed. That's how Catherine Blake is said to have reminded him of it, years later. A few years on, at eight or ten perhaps, young William is out walking on Peckham Rye, south of London. He looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, every bough bespangled with bright wings, like stars. He goes home and tells his parents. His father, an honest hosier, decides the boy is lying, and gets ready to give him a thrashing. Only his mother's pleading saves him. Now, all of this reaches us second-hand. Alexander Gilchrist put it into print in eighteen sixty-three, decades after Blake died, from the memories of people who knew him. And another early account has a darker twist. When the boy announced he'd seen the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields, it was his mother who beat him. The lesson didn't take. Blake went on seeing angels, prophets and spirits for the rest of his life, and he told anyone who would listen. And when he came to write a little poem for children, he handed the child the biggest question there is. Little Lamb, who made thee? Dost thou know who made thee? Blake thought he knew. He'd seen him at the window. Sources: - Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, "Pictor Ignotus" (1863), chapter 2, for the angels on Peckham Rye and the father's threatened thrashing. - Catherine Blake's remark that Blake first saw God at four, "and He put His head to the window and set you a-screaming", was recorded by Henry Crabb Robinson in his Reminiscences; printed in G. E. Bentley Jr., Blake Records (1969; 2nd ed. 2004). - The Ezekiel story, with the mother administering the beating, is among the early accounts collected in Bentley, Blake Records. - "The Lamb", Songs of Innocence (1789). Notes: - Blake died in 1827. All of these childhood stories were set down by others, decades later, from the memories of people who knew him. Bentley's Blake Records is the collection of all the surviving contemporary and near-contemporary testimony. === text:story:poetry-tale-paradise-without-the-trousers === Owner: story:poetry-tale-paradise-without-the-trousers Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Paradise, Without the Trousers Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Blake Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a40ddb16b3d43cd6b785ea5ea5329d41e1ccb43fe934a7b92ae4fe41a6cd2b07 Picture the scene. Lambeth, the seventeen-nineties. Thomas Butts, William Blake's most loyal patron, strolls down the little garden at Hercules Buildings to the summer-house at the end. Inside sit William and his wife Catherine. Without a stitch on. They've been reciting Paradise Lost. In character. And Blake, entirely unbothered, calls out: "Come in! It's only Adam and Eve, you know!" It's one of the great anecdotes in English literature. Alexander Gilchrist put it into his Life of William Blake in eighteen sixty-three, describing the couple as freed from "those troublesome disguises" that had prevailed since the Fall. Which is a very Victorian way of saying: no trousers. Now — nobody can actually prove this happened. Gilchrist was writing sixty-odd years after the fact, long after Blake was dead. And the painter John Linnell, one of Blake's closest friends in later life, flatly refused to believe it. The story, he said, was "so entirely unlike everything I have known of him", and improbable "on account of climate". Which is a fair point. This is south London, not the Garden of Eden. So perhaps it happened. Or perhaps, as Linnell suspected, it simply grew in the telling, passing round the town until it arrived in print fully undressed. Either way, it's rather wonderful. And the best objection anyone ever raised to his paradise was the English weather. Sources: - Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Blake (1863), chapter 12 (the Lambeth years at 13 Hercules Buildings): the Thomas Butts anecdote, "Come in! it's only Adam and Eve, you know!", and the phrase "those troublesome disguises". - John Linnell's objection ("so entirely unlike everything I have known of him"; improbable "on account of climate") comes from his comments on Gilchrist's text, printed in Bentley, Blake Records, and in A. T. Story, The Life of John Linnell (1892). - John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, for "those troublesome disguises which we wear". Notes: - Gilchrist's source was Butts, by then long dead; the story reached print some sixty years after the supposed event. Linnell knew Blake only in his last decade. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-least-terrifying-tiger-in-literature === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-least-terrifying-tiger-in-literature Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Least Terrifying Tiger in Literature Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Blake Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 2d9dfd39f5690bf44f08d6b75558bfd6ec9721c63908dfb462770359bc3add74 "Tyger Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night." You know the one. Fearful symmetry. A beast forged with a hammer, a chain and a furnace, by a creator with nerves of steel. Now look at the tiger William Blake actually drew underneath it. He's quite small. He's standing politely beside a tree. And his expression is — how to put this — mild. Faintly bewildered. You could, at a push, imagine offering him a biscuit. And there's no blaming an illustrator. Blake wrote the words, designed the picture, etched the plate and printed the page, in about seventeen ninety-four, with the colour added by hand — by William, or possibly by his wife Catherine. So was he simply not very good at tigers? Was it a joke? Or a riddle to match the poem's great question: "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" Here's the honest answer. Nobody knows. As far as anyone can tell, Blake never explained it, so every confident explanation you'll hear is a guess. But here's a lovely footnote. In December twenty twenty-five, a first-issue print of The Tyger sold at Christie's in London for more than two hundred and twenty-eight thousand pounds, reported as a record for a single Blake print. And one of its previous owners, according to Christie's, was Kenneth Grahame. The man who wrote The Wind in the Willows. Which feels exactly right. Of all the beasts in English poetry, this is the one tiger you could safely invite to tea with Ratty and Mole. Sources: - "The Tyger", Songs of Experience (1794); the illuminated plate and its colouring, with copy-by-copy details, in the William Blake Archive (blakearchive.org). - Christie's London, The Old Masters to Modern Day Sale, 3 December 2025: a first-issue, colour-printed impression of The Tyger, sold for £228,600 against an estimate of £80,000–£120,000, described by Christie's as a record at auction for a Blake print. The catalogue provenance lists Kenneth Grahame as a former owner. Reported by AFP, 3 December 2025, and Fine Books & Collections, 19 November 2025. - Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (1908). Notes: - Whether the colouring on a given copy is by William or Catherine Blake is often uncertain. Blake left no explanation of the tiger's expression; every reading is interpretation. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-soldier-in-the-garden === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-soldier-in-the-garden Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Soldier in the Garden Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Blake Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 0865878f574e744d5bf9c2ae726e45467ca254bc0b392798e0e862602b2ae6c1 Most of us have had a bad neighbour. William Blake had a soldier in his garden. And it very nearly finished him. Felpham, on the Sussex coast. The twelfth of August, eighteen-oh-three. Blake finds a private, John Scolfield, among his plants. By Blake's own account, he asks him to leave. Scolfield refuses, with threats. So the poet of Songs of Innocence takes him by the elbows and propels him down the road. Three days later, Scolfield swore a statement. Blake, he claimed, had damned the King — and said the soldiers were all slaves. Britain was at war with Napoleon, and invasion fears were everywhere. Words like that weren't rudeness. They were sedition. In January eighteen-oh-four, Blake stood trial at Chichester. His patron, William Hayley, found him a barrister. The jury acquitted him. So did Blake actually say it? Here's the delicious part: nobody knows. The indictment still survives in the West Sussex archives, but an accusation isn't proof. And years later his friend John Linnell is reported to have thought it rather likely that Blake had indeed damned the King. It does sound like him. Now, A Poison Tree came out nine years before any of this. It's about a man who nurses his anger until it bears fruit, and ends with "my foe outstretched beneath the tree". Blake didn't kill Scolfield. He did something far more Blakean. He wrote him into his epic poem Jerusalem, as Skofeld, one of its villains. For ever. Sources: - Blake's own account of the incident of 12 August 1803: letter to Thomas Butts, 16 August 1803 (The Letters of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes). - Private John Scolfield's sworn information, 15 August 1803, and the indictment, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester; both printed in Bentley, Blake Records. - The trial, Chichester Quarter Sessions, 11 January 1804, reported in the Sussex Weekly Advertiser, 16 January 1804. Blake's counsel, Samuel Rose, was retained through William Hayley. - Linnell's later opinion that Blake probably had damned the King is reported in Bentley, Blake Records. - "A Poison Tree", Songs of Experience (1794). Scolfield appears as "Skofield"/"Skofeld" in Jerusalem (c. 1804–20). Notes: - The only accounts of what was said in the garden come from the two parties. Blake was acquitted; nothing was proved either way. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-ghost-of-a-flea === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-ghost-of-a-flea Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Ghost of a Flea Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Blake Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 246872abd02e87e1551f1fb67fa655b1779ec8bbd522e485b69722759734602d London, around eighteen nineteen. Late at night. Two grown men sit in a room, waiting for the dead to drop by. One is John Varley, a landscape painter and a devoted astrologer. The other is William Blake. Varley would name a ghost, and Blake, pencil ready, would draw whoever turned up. Kings. Warriors. Prophets. And one night, a flea. Varley later wrote it all up. Blake began drawing the head, and then the creature opened its mouth. So Blake stopped, moved to another part of the paper, and drew the mouth on its own, until the spirit closed it again. Varley took that as proof. Blake, he said, clearly had a real image before him. And while Blake worked, the flea talked. It explained that all fleas were inhabited by the souls of men who were, in Varley's words, by nature bloodthirsty to excess. That was why they were kept so small. A flea the size of a horse, it said, would empty a great part of the country. Now. Was Blake really seeing a ghost? Or was he quietly having Varley on? Scholars still argue about it, and nobody can prove it either way. Whatever was going on, Blake painted him. A tiny panel, tempera and gold on mahogany, now in the Tate. A muscled, scaly figure stalking across a stage, tongue flicking out, clutching a cup for blood. This is the poet who asked what immortal hand or eye could frame the tiger's fearful symmetry. Turns out he could do it for a flea. In gold. Sources: - John Varley, A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), which prints an engraving of the flea and Varley's account of the sittings, including the flea's remarks on bloodthirsty souls and its size. - William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, c. 1819–20, tempera heightened with gold on mahogany, Tate, London (N05889). - The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of "Visionary Heads" (rediscovered 1967); Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981). - "The Tyger", Songs of Experience (1794). Notes: - Varley was a committed believer in astrology and the supernatural; whether Blake shared his belief or was gently teasing him is still argued (see Bentley, The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake, 2001). === text:story:poetry-tale-expelled-then-immortalised-in-marble === Owner: story:poetry-tale-expelled-then-immortalised-in-marble Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Expelled, Then Immortalised in Marble Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Percy Bysshe Shelley Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 2819add84a162fa7694731cd95cbe03ee52ac82642afd319202ff68021dbae05 In March eighteen eleven, an eighteen-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley was thrown out of Oxford. He'd rather asked for it. With his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he'd produced an anonymous pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. Copies went on sale in an Oxford bookshop. The story goes that somebody noticed and burnt the lot, and that Shelley then posted copies to the heads of the colleges. University College summoned the pair. Had they written it? They wouldn't say. The college records that they were to be "publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them". So, strictly speaking, Shelley wasn't expelled for atheism. He was expelled for refusing to discuss it, and for refusing to disown it. In eighteen twenty-two, aged twenty-nine, he drowned off the coast of Italy. About seventy years later, his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, commissioned a marble monument for his grave in Rome: the drowned poet, naked, washed up on the shore. It turned out to be too big for the spot. So she offered it to, of all places, University College, and a room was built for it. It was unveiled in eighteen ninety-three, and he's still there. Generations of students have pranked him. They've splashed him with paint, and once flooded his room with water and goldfish. The gilded laurel wreath that used to crown his head was taken away in the nineteen-thirties, after one prank too many. So Oxford threw him out in eighteen eleven, and took him back eighty-two years later. Naked, in marble. And still refusing to answer questions. Sources: - The Necessity of Atheism (Worthing, 1811), by Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg. - University College, Oxford, college register, 25 March 1811: the two were "publicly expelled for contumaciously refusing to answer questions proposed to them, and for also repeatedly declining to disavow a publication entitled The Necessity of Atheism." - Hogg's account of the bookshop and the expulsion: T. J. Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1858). - The Shelley Memorial by Edward Onslow Ford, commissioned by Lady Jane Shelley, originally intended for the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, unveiled at University College in 1893; the college's own published history of the memorial covers the pranks and the removal of the gilded wreath in the 1930s. - Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974). Notes: - The burning of the copies in the bookshop and the posting of the pamphlet to college heads are retold from Hogg and later biographers; the register entry is the one contemporary document. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-heart-that-would-not-burn === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-heart-that-would-not-burn Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Heart That Would Not Burn Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Percy Bysshe Shelley Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 3f18e43f7662f3c8ab53921c5c70b9d65bb7dabeeaa293bad83f589e8bffffc6 July, eighteen twenty-two. Percy Bysshe Shelley sails out of Livorno in his little boat. A storm comes up. He never comes home. Ten days later, the sea gives him back, near Viareggio. Italian quarantine rules meant the body couldn't simply be carried off. So, in August, on the beach, his friends burned it. The most vivid account comes from one of them, Edward Trelawny. He remembered a book of Keats in Shelley's jacket pocket, folded back, as if he'd shoved it away mid-poem. He built the pyre and fed it wine and oil. Lord Byron couldn't watch. He swam out to sea instead. Byron asked to keep the skull. Trelawny refused. Byron, he remembered, had once used a skull as a drinking cup. Then the strange part. The body burned for hours, but the heart, Trelawny wrote, would not burn. He snatched it out, and badly burnt his hand. A squabble followed, and the heart went to Shelley's widow, Mary. Yes — the woman who wrote Frankenstein kept her husband's heart. After she died, so the family story goes, her son opened her desk. Inside, wrapped in the pages of Adonais, Shelley's elegy for Keats, was what was left of it. Was it really a heart? Some say it was his liver. Others, a heart hardened by old illness. And Trelawny rarely told a story without improving it. Shelley once wrote: Nothing in the world is single; all things by a law divine in one spirit meet and mingle. He was talking about kisses. Mary kept the heart. Sources: - Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858), revised and expanded as Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878): the cremation at Viareggio, the Keats volume in the pocket, Byron swimming out, the skull-cup, and the heart that "would not burn". - Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (1850), for Hunt's part in the dispute over the heart. - The discovery of the heart in Mary Shelley's desk, wrapped in a copy of Adonais, after her death in 1851: family tradition recorded in Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (1974), and Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (2000). - The liver and calcified-heart theories: discussed in Holmes. - "Love's Philosophy" (1819), for "Nothing in the world is single". Notes: - Trelawny's two versions differ in detail, and he is known to have improved his stories. The heart (or whatever it was) is believed to have been buried with Sir Percy Florence Shelley at Bournemouth in 1889. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-novel-she-absolutely-hated === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-novel-she-absolutely-hated Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Novel She Absolutely Hated Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 4f3c003e4dcda1b3498a7a6ef7b65f1164db7d5d9dd750c90eb448bc627f8fb5 In the summer of eighteen thirty-six, in the Swiss town of Thun, a young American widower called Henry Wadsworth Longfellow met a Boston heiress named Fanny Appleton. They went walking. They talked about books. They studied German together. He fell in love. She did not. So he did what any poet would do. He put her in a novel. Hyperion came out in eighteen thirty-nine. Its hero, Paul Flemming, is a sensitive young traveller with a broken heart. He falls for a clever young woman called Mary Ashburton, who turns him down. Boston society did not need a key. Fanny got her copy. And in a letter she called it "desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the author's mind." She allowed there were some exquisite things in it. She also noted that the hero was evidently himself. Then she went frosty. For years. Now, Boston legend has him walking from Cambridge, over the river, to her door on Beacon Street, again and again, for the best part of seven years. The bridge on that spot is called the Longfellow Bridge today. Historians aren't convinced he made the walk all that often. What's certain is this. In May eighteen forty-three, quite suddenly, she said yes. Nobody really knows why. They married that July. Decades later he wrote The Sound of the Sea, a sonnet about inspirations that seem to come from nowhere — from somewhere, as he put it, "beyond our reason or control." Which is still the best explanation anyone's got for Fanny Appleton's change of heart. Sources: - Longfellow, Hyperion: A Romance (1839). - Fanny Appleton's verdict ("desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the author's mind") and her remark that the hero was evidently the author: Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton Longfellow, ed. Edward Wagenknecht (1956). - The Thun meeting of 1836, the courtship, the sudden acceptance in May 1843 and the marriage in July: Longfellow's journals in Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1886); Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004). - The bridge legend and its doubters: Calhoun (2004). The West Boston Bridge was renamed the Longfellow Bridge in 1927. - "The Sound of the Sea", The Masque of Pandora and Other Poems (1875). Notes: - How often Longfellow actually walked to Beacon Street is not documented; the "seven years" of crossings is a Boston tradition. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-cross-of-snow === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-cross-of-snow Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Cross of Snow Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a6d8d79c6c244c9cd438b0cc285cedffaf931079676f8c496c7b9f8c039a70cb Cambridge, Massachusetts. A hot July day in eighteen sixty-one. Fanny Longfellow is at home, putting locks of her little daughters' hair into envelopes, as keepsakes. To seal them, she melts wax. Her light summer dress catches fire. She runs to her husband, burning. Henry tries to smother the flames, with a rug, with his arms. His face and hands are badly burned. Fanny dies the next morning. She is buried on their wedding anniversary, and he's too injured to go. That's the traditional version. Long afterwards their youngest, Annie, who was five that summer, admitted privately that she might have been to blame: that she'd been playing with matches. Nobody can say for certain which is true. The fire marked him, too. The story is that his scars made shaving impossible, so he let his beard grow: the long white beard of every portrait. There's no record he ever said so. But in photographs from before that summer, he's clean-shaven. Eighteen years later, on the anniversary of her death, he wrote a sonnet about a mountain in Colorado he knew from a picture in a book. A peak where ravines shelter a cross of snow from the sun. Such is the cross I wear upon my breast, he wrote, these eighteen years, through all the changing scenes and seasons, changeless since the day she died. He never published it. It was found among his papers after he died. The beard covered the scars you could see. The sonnet, he kept for the other kind. Sources: - The fire of 9 July 1861 and Fanny Longfellow's death the next day: Longfellow's letters and journal, and contemporary Cambridge press reports, as given in Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1886). - "The Cross of Snow", dated 10 July 1879, first printed in Samuel Longfellow's Life (1886) from the manuscript found among the poet's papers. - Annie Allegra Longfellow Thorp's private account of playing with matches: recorded in the archives of the Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site, Cambridge, and discussed in Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004). - The beard and the scars: Calhoun (2004); pre-1861 photographs in the Longfellow House collection. - The Mount of the Holy Cross, Colorado, became famous through William Henry Jackson's photograph (1873) and Thomas Moran's painting (1875); Longfellow knew it from a reproduction. Notes: - Longfellow never spoke publicly about the cause of the fire or the beard. Both the sealing-wax version and Annie's version are family testimony. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-dream-inside-an-earlier-poem === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-dream-inside-an-earlier-poem Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Dream Inside an Earlier Poem Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edgar Allan Poe Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 904619139f6f349a65e5e994f194fb4737d2a2df7e5ba0f133f074655b360a39 A Dream within a Dream sounds as if it was written in one feverish, sleepless night, in the last year of Poe's life, with the sand running out. It's a lovely picture. It's also about twenty-two years out. Yes, the poem was printed in March eighteen forty-nine, in a Boston weekly called the Flag of Our Union. Poe was dead that October. But its roots go back to eighteen twenty-seven, to a poem called Imitation, tucked into a slim pamphlet called Tamerlane and Other Poems. Poe's name wasn't even on it. The title page said simply: by a Bostonian. He was eighteen. Hardly anyone noticed. Perhaps fifty copies were printed, and only about a dozen survive. In two thousand and nine, one of them sold at auction for six hundred and sixty-two thousand, five hundred dollars. Not bad for a book nobody wanted. And Poe simply would not leave that poem alone. He rewrote it, renamed it, folded bits of it into other poems. Early in eighteen forty-nine he copied out the sand-and-surf passage for his friend Annie Richmond. Then, at last, came the poem we know. Here's the twist. The great Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott compared the versions. The second keeps exactly one line from the first. The final poem keeps none at all. Not a single grain. Which is rather the point. Listen to the poem: "How few! yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep." Poe held on to that poem for more than twenty years. And still, every original line slipped away. Sources: - "A Dream Within a Dream", The Flag of Our Union (Boston), 31 March 1849. - "Imitation", in Tamerlane and Other Poems, By a Bostonian (Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas, 1827). - The textual history, line-by-line comparison of the versions, and the passage copied for Annie Richmond: Thomas Ollive Mabbott, ed., Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 1, Poems (Harvard University Press, 1969). - The auction: a copy of Tamerlane sold at Christie's, New York, December 2009, for $662,500. Notes: - About a dozen copies of Tamerlane are known to survive; the print run of around fifty is an estimate. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poem-in-someone-elses-album === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poem-in-someone-elses-album Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poem in Someone Else’s Album Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edgar Allan Poe Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 08ba11d7495decb53d1f9ae6e5e7cb8fa2f73ad8403f978be74bf28127d157ac Some time around eighteen twenty-nine, in Baltimore, a young man was handed a young woman's autograph album. The custom was to write something sweet. A compliment. A neat little verse about friendship. Edgar Allan Poe wrote this: "From childhood's hour I have not been as others were. I have not seen as others saw." Twenty-two lines about being different, ending with a cloud that took the form of a demon. The album belonged to Lucy Holmes. Poe never published the poem. It sat in her album for nearly half a century, until eighteen seventy-five, when a Baltimore writer called Eugene Didier printed it in Scribner's Monthly, with a facsimile of Poe's handwriting. Except the facsimile had been touched up. Didier had added a title, Alone, and a date line: Baltimore, March the seventeenth, eighteen twenty-nine. Neither was Poe's. The leading English authority on Poe, John Ingram, denounced the poem as a forgery. The great Poe editor Thomas Mabbott later put that down to Ingram not knowing Poe's early handwriting very well. The doubts have long since been dismissed. The handwriting is Poe's. So are the words. The title, though, is Didier's. Poe's great poem about standing alone — and as far as anyone knows, he never once called it Alone. Sources: - Eugene L. Didier, "Alone", Scribner's Monthly, September 1875, with the retouched facsimile carrying the added title and date line. - The album of Lucy Holmes (later Lucy Holmes Balderston), Baltimore. - John H. Ingram's forgery charge and Mabbott's response: Mabbott, Collected Works, vol. 1 (1969), headnote to "Alone". Notes: - The poem is now universally accepted as Poe's. The title and the "March 17, 1829" date line are Didier's additions, which is why the date of composition is given only as "about 1829". === text:story:poetry-tale-the-balloon-that-never-flew === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-balloon-that-never-flew Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Balloon That Never Flew Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edgar Allan Poe Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: c30c812bb43b4e9ac1a91e35090790b7391df8b2676cc32bbbc585095ba31680 April, eighteen forty-four. Edgar Allan Poe has been in New York for less than a week. He's broke, his wife is ill, and he needs money. So he sells the city a balloon. On the thirteenth, the New York Sun rushes out a special edition. Astounding news, it cries. The Atlantic crossed in three days. A flying machine called the Victoria, carrying the famous balloonist Monck Mason, has drifted from Wales to Sullivan's Island, near Charleston, in seventy-five hours. It's beautifully done. Diaries from the passengers. Technical details about the gas, the propeller, the rudder. Some of the engineering, Poe borrowed from Mason's own writing. The voyage, he invented. And it worked. Poe later wrote that the square around the Sun building was literally besieged, from soon after sunrise until about two in the afternoon. He'd never witnessed more intense excitement, he said, to get possession of a newspaper. He saw a half-dollar paid for a single copy. There's even a story that Poe stood on the Sun's steps that very day, telling the crowd it was all a hoax. Lovely if true — but I can't find anyone who actually saw him do it. Two days later, the Sun admitted it was inclined to believe the intelligence was erroneous. Which is one way of putting it. And the best part? Poe said he tried, in vain, all day, to get his hands on a copy. He couldn't buy his own lie. Sources: - The New York Sun, Extra edition, 13 April 1844: "Astounding News by Express, via Norfolk! The Atlantic crossed in Three Days!" - The Sun's retraction, 15 April 1844. - Poe's own account of the crowd and of his failure to buy a copy: "Doings of Gotham", letter dated 21 May 1844, published 25 May 1844 in the Columbia Spy (Columbia, Pennsylvania). - Thomas Monck Mason, Account of the Late Aeronautical Expedition from London to Weilburg (1836), the source of the technical detail Poe borrowed. Notes: - The story that Poe stood on the Sun's steps announcing the hoax appears in later biographies without a contemporary witness. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-enemy-who-wrote-the-obituary === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-enemy-who-wrote-the-obituary Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Enemy Who Wrote the Obituary Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edgar Allan Poe Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 61817bf1a3238ca3277b47c2c3be33975ff191ccca4858075fb213e2ce89fcab "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it." That was Poe's obituary, in the New York Tribune, in October eighteen forty-nine. It went on to say that he had few or no friends. It was signed, simply, Ludwig. Ludwig was Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Anthologist, editor, and Poe's rival. Poe had mocked Griswold's big anthology of American poets in public. Griswold had taken over Poe's old job at Graham's Magazine, reportedly on a better salary. And gossip had them both rather sweet on the same poet, Frances Osgood. How much of that was real, nobody can quite say. Then it got worse. Poe's aunt and mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, signed his literary affairs over to Griswold. Griswold edited the collected works, and added a memoir. Poe the drunk. Poe the madman. Poe the man without a friend. Later scholars showed he'd doctored some of Poe's letters to make the case. For the best part of a generation, that was the Poe most readers knew. Some still do. Poe once asked, in A Dream within a Dream: "Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?" Not all of it, Edgar. Some of it was Griswold. Sources: - "Ludwig" [Rufus Wilmot Griswold], "Death of Edgar A. Poe", New-York Daily Tribune, 9 October 1849. - Griswold, "Memoir of the Author", in The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 3 (1850). - The altered and forged letters were exposed in Arthur Hobson Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941). - Griswold at Graham's Magazine, Maria Clemm's transfer of Poe's literary affairs, and the Frances Osgood rivalry: Quinn (1941); Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (1991). - "A Dream Within a Dream" (1849). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-stranger-at-the-grave === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-stranger-at-the-grave Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Stranger at the Grave Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edgar Allan Poe Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: f6c2fdd825e28bac41d7eb4548e829448a6c208ec88871aff1b98cad7601aeea Every year, in the small hours of the nineteenth of January — Edgar Allan Poe's birthday — someone slipped into a Baltimore churchyard. Dressed in black. Hat pulled low, face hidden by a scarf or hood. He knelt at Poe's original grave, raised a glass of cognac to him, and left behind three roses and what remained of the bottle. Then he was gone. The roses are usually read as three people buried there: Poe, his young wife Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm. The cognac? Nobody knows. For years the curator, Jeff Jerome, kept vigil with a few watchers, and they let the visitor be. Sometimes he left notes. In nineteen ninety-three: The torch will be passed. In two thousand and one, by most accounts, a note backed the New York Giants against the Baltimore Ravens — a team named after Poe's own poem. In Baltimore. That takes nerve. Then, in two thousand and seven, a ninety-two-year-old local historian called Sam Porpora announced he'd invented the whole thing in the nineteen sixties, as a stunt to rescue a struggling church. It was just a lark, he said. Awkward, then, that a Baltimore paper had mentioned a bottle left at the grave back in nineteen fifty. Jerome said there were holes in Sam's story you could drive a Mack truck through. The visits stopped after Poe's two-hundredth birthday, in two thousand and nine. For three more Januaries the watchers came back and waited. The real visitor never showed. His name was never revealed. Quoth the Raven: Nevermore. Sources: - Press coverage of the "Poe Toaster" at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, Baltimore, chiefly in The Baltimore Sun, including the 1993 note ("The torch will be passed") and the January 2001 note about the Giants and the Ravens. - The earliest known press reference to a bottle left at the grave: The Evening Sun (Baltimore), 1950. - Sam Porpora's claim: Associated Press, August 2007, with Jeff Jerome's response ("holes ... you could drive a Mack truck through"). - Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum and organiser of the annual vigil, declared the tradition ended in 2012 after three years without a visit. - "The Raven" (1845). Notes: - The reading of the three roses as Poe, Virginia and Maria Clemm is the watchers' interpretation. The visitor's identity has never been established. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-dirty-monk-next-door === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-dirty-monk-next-door Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Dirty Monk Next Door Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 6176b6a32669ceafa2c91095cddc94de8ec6ddeffef15b5cae7a25cd4b9495e5 On the Isle of Wight, in the eighteen sixties, the most famous poet in Britain had a neighbour. Her name was Julia Margaret Cameron. She had a camera. And nobody was safe. She'd bought a house at Freshwater to be near Alfred Tennyson. She called him Alfred. She photographed him again and again, and in May eighteen sixty-five she made one of the most famous portraits of her career: rumpled, brooding, eyes heavy with shadow. Tennyson rather liked it. He called it The Dirty Monk. To be fair, he'd earned the title. Thomas Carlyle once described him as a man whose clothes were cynically loose, and who smoked infinite tobacco. In July eighteen sixty-eight, Longfellow came to visit. Tennyson walked his fellow poet over to Missus Cameron's studio, handed him in, and reportedly warned him to do whatever she told him. He'd be back soon, he said, to see what was left of him. Now, the wilder tales are hearsay, so take them with salt. When the Italian hero Garibaldi sat in Tennyson's garden in eighteen sixty-four, a wild-looking woman is said to have rushed up, begging to photograph him. He took her for a gypsy and sent her away. It was Julia. And when Tennyson refused to be vaccinated against smallpox, she supposedly marched round and called him a coward. So the most famous poet in Britain, the dirty monk of Farringford, had met his match. Next door to Julia Margaret Cameron, he was the quiet one. Sources: - Julia Margaret Cameron, Alfred Tennyson ("The Dirty Monk"), albumen print, May 1865; Tennyson's nickname for it is recorded in Cameron's own annotation and in Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir (1897). - Thomas Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 5 August 1844 (The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle): "his clothes cynically loose ... smokes infinite tobacco". - Longfellow's visit of July 1868 and Tennyson's warning: told in Helmut Gernsheim, Julia Margaret Cameron: Her Life and Photographic Work (1948), and Colin Ford, Julia Margaret Cameron: 19th Century Photographer of Genius (2003). - The Garibaldi story (1864) and the vaccination quarrel: Freshwater reminiscences collected in Hester Thackeray Fuller, Three Freshwater Friends (1933), Gernsheim (1948) and Ford (2003). Notes: - The Longfellow remark is well attested; the Garibaldi and vaccination stories are family and village hearsay, repeated by Cameron's biographers with that caveat. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-voice-for-the-men-the-poem-couldnt-feed === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-voice-for-the-men-the-poem-couldnt-feed Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Voice for the Men the Poem Couldn’t Feed Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Alfred, Lord Tennyson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 1f0d47e299eb910e5bd565c3b55895eede9b316ecee829a36beacdbcd65ea11a Here's the trouble with being immortalised in a famous poem. It doesn't pay the rent. In eighteen ninety, thirty-six years after the Charge of the Light Brigade, word got out that some of its survivors were destitute. The Secretary for War said he couldn't help. So a London paper, the Saint James's Gazette, started a relief fund. Enter Colonel George Gouraud, Thomas Edison's man in Britain, with a phonograph and an idea. Famous voices. On wax. First, Tennyson himself, reciting the poem that made those men immortal: "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward." Then Florence Nightingale, at her house in Mayfair, speaking into the horn: "When I am no longer even a memory, just a name, I hope my voice may perpetuate the great work of my life. God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava and bring them safe to shore." And finally a veteran trumpeter, Martin Lanfried of the Seventeenth Lancers, sounded the charge, on a bugle said to have been blown at Waterloo. Now, Lanfried claimed he'd sounded the charge at Balaclava, too. So did other men. Who actually blew it, if anyone did, is still argued over. The cylinders still survive. You can hear them, crackling, more than a century on. Years before the Charge, Tennyson had written Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead, about a soldier carried home, and the grief that follows. The country had wept for the dead. It had rather forgotten the living. Sources: - The Light Brigade Relief Fund, launched by the St James's Gazette in 1890 after reports that survivors of the charge were destitute. - The 1890 wax-cylinder recordings made for Colonel George Gouraud, Edison's representative in Britain: Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade"; Florence Nightingale's message ("God bless my dear old comrades of Balaclava"); and Trumpeter Martin Lanfried sounding the charge. The cylinders are held in the British Library Sound Archive and have been published online. - The dispute over who sounded the charge at Balaklava, and over the Waterloo bugle: British Library catalogue notes and the regimental histories of the 17th Lancers. - "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854); "Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead", a song from The Princess (added in the 1850 edition). Notes: - Rudyard Kipling's "The Last of the Light Brigade" (1890) was written for the same campaign. === text:story:poetry-tale-love-letters-in-someone-elses-hand === Owner: story:poetry-tale-love-letters-in-someone-elses-hand Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Love Letters in Someone Else’s Hand Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Walt Whitman Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: b776761e6f40d9b10e88e96df788462b1bc0c7f2a36ecd7ddb593bbe02075347 In December eighteen sixty-two, Walt Whitman's family opened the New York Herald and found a list of the wounded from Fredericksburg. On it: First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore. Close enough. Walt's brother George was a lieutenant in that regiment. Walt set off south the same day. Changing trains in Philadelphia, he had his money stolen by a pickpocket. Not a promising start. He found George alive, with a cut on the cheek from a shell fragment. He also found, outside a field hospital, a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms and hands. A full load, he wrote, for a one-horse cart. He stayed. For years, he walked the hospital wards of Washington with sweets, paper and stamps. And for men who couldn't write, he wrote. Including, he said, love letters, very tender ones. Hardly any survive. Then, in twenty sixteen, a volunteer sorting pension files at the National Archives found one. A private called Robert Jabo, dying of tuberculosis, writing to his wife through Whitman's hand. He'd been discharged, he told her, but wasn't well enough to come home. And on the back: "Written by Walt Whitman, a friend." Jabo died within the year. His widow seems to have sent that letter in with her pension claim, which is why it was sitting in a government file. It may be the most useful thing Walt Whitman ever wrote. Sources: - New York Herald casualty list, December 1862 ("First Lieutenant G. W. Whitmore"); Whitman's letter to his mother, 29 December 1862, on the journey and the pickpocket (The Correspondence of Walt Whitman, ed. Edwin Haviland Miller). - "A heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands": Whitman, Specimen Days (1882), "Down at the Front"; also his wartime notebooks. - The hospital letters and the "very tender ones": Specimen Days and Memoranda During the War (1875–76). - Kenneth M. Price and Jacqueline M. Budell, "'Written by Walt Whitman, a friend'", Prologue (National Archives), Summer 2016, vol. 48, no. 2. The letter, dated January 1866, was found on 3 February 2016 by volunteer Catherine C. Wilson in the widow's pension file of Adeline Jabo (Record Group 15), where it had been submitted as evidence of Robert Jabo's condition. Jabo died in Washington in December 1866. Notes: - The Walt Whitman Archive (whitmanarchive.org) carries the full text of the correspondence and prose works cited. === text:story:poetry-tale-twelve-stone-naked === Owner: story:poetry-tale-twelve-stone-naked Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Twelve Stone, Naked Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Walt Whitman Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 5b9faf4d65095c84db746c5b28ca73f900fc5171faba2c7259ce693bf7a7f390 In February eighteen seventy-two, a young Dublin civil servant wrote a letter to Walt Whitman. Then he didn't send it. For four years. His name was Bram Stoker. He sent it at last, with a fresh note dated Valentine's Day eighteen seventy-six. It began: If you are the man I take you to be you will like to get this letter. If you are not I don't care whether you like it or not and only ask you to put it into the fire without reading any farther. He described himself: six feet two inches high, and twelve stone weight naked. Naked. To a man he had never met. And then the line people still blush at. How sweet a thing it is, he wrote, for a strong healthy man with a woman's eyes and a child's wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes, father, and brother and wife to his soul. From Camden, New Jersey, Whitman wrote back within weeks. You did well, he said, to write to me so unconventionally, so fresh, so manly, and so affectionately too. They met at last in eighteen eighty-four. Then came Dracula. Some critics see Whitman in the Count: the height, the strength, the long white hair, the heavy moustache. Others point to Stoker's employer, the actor Henry Irving. Nobody can prove it. Whitman's poem Miracles finds wonder in the strangers opposite me riding in the car. One stranger, at least, went on to invent the most famous stranger of all. Sources: - Bram Stoker to Walt Whitman, letter dated 18 February 1872, sent with a covering note dated 14 February 1876; Whitman's reply, 6 March 1876. Printed in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 4, and available on the Walt Whitman Archive. - Their meeting in 1884: Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906), chapter on Whitman. - Dracula (1897). The Whitman and Irving theories of the Count: Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (1996); Dennis R. Perry, "Whitman's Influence on Stoker's Dracula", Walt Whitman Quarterly Review (1986). - "Miracles", Leaves of Grass (first published 1856 as "Poem of Perfect Miracles"). === text:story:poetry-tale-elderberry-wine-and-a-kiss === Owner: story:poetry-tale-elderberry-wine-and-a-kiss Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Elderberry Wine and a Kiss Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Walt Whitman Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 9f606bbdaa52fb6475296b85b6dc1e2b09a6e38296c135f605ea6b02eac0ad45 January, eighteen eighty-two. Oscar Wilde is twenty-seven, long-haired, on a lecture tour of America, and very much in velvet. He takes the ferry across the Delaware to Camden, New Jersey, to meet the most scandalous poet in the country. Walt Whitman is sixty-two, and living in his brother's house. Whitman brought out the elderberry wine, made by his sister-in-law. Wilde drank it. Long afterwards, Joseph Stoddart, the publisher who'd come along, claimed Wilde said that if it had been vinegar he'd have drunk it all the same, so great was his admiration for that man. Then Whitman took him upstairs to his den, heaped with papers. Whitman announced he would call him Oscar. Out came the milk punch. They talked for two hours. Wilde told a newspaper that Whitman was the grandest man he had ever seen. Whitman told a reporter that Wilde was a great big splendid boy. Now. The gossip. Years later, Wilde is said to have told his friend George Ives, a campaigner for gay rights and a tireless diarist, that there was no doubt at all about Whitman's tastes. Then the boast, as it's usually told: that he still had the kiss of Walt Whitman on his lips. Was there a kiss? We have only Wilde's word, at second hand. And Wilde rarely let the truth spoil a good line. Whitman, for his part, had already covered himself. Do I contradict myself, he wrote. Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. Possibly including Oscar. Sources: - The visit of 18 January 1882: Whitman's interview in the Philadelphia Press, 19 January 1882 ("a great big splendid boy"), and Wilde's remarks to reporters ("the grandest man I have ever seen"). - Joseph M. Stoddart's reminiscence of the elderberry wine and Wilde's "if it had been vinegar" remark. - The George Ives diary and the "kiss of Walt Whitman" boast: Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987). - "Song of Myself", section 51 ("Do I contradict myself?"). Notes: - Stoddart was the Philadelphia publisher who later commissioned The Picture of Dorian Gray for Lippincott's. The kiss rests on Wilde's word, reported by Ives. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-brain-and-the-bad-lid === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-brain-and-the-bad-lid Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Brain and the Bad Lid Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Walt Whitman Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 929dc0b10abebcbbe6a4f53c549e4ede558a77ce0e824540f05f7f5cf8a3f794 When Walt Whitman died in Camden, New Jersey, in March eighteen ninety-two, a young doctor called Henry Cattell was at the post-mortem. And he was the one who took out the brain. This wasn't ghoulishness. It was science. Well, nearly. In Philadelphia, the American Anthropometric Society collected the brains of eminent men, hoping that genius might show up somewhere in the folds. Whitman's was meant to be a prize exhibit. It didn't survive. For years, the accepted story was this. A careless laboratory attendant dropped the jar. Smash. The poet of the whole wide world, in pieces on the floor. Then, in twenty twelve, Cattell's private diary turned up for sale on eBay. And in it is a rather different confession. "I am a fool," he wrote, "a damnable fool, with no conscious memory, or fitness for any learned position." He'd let Walt Whitman's brain spoil, he admitted, by not having the jar properly covered. He discovered it in the morning. Not a crash, then. A lid. Now, a diary can't tell us everything, and the dropped jar may just have been a kinder cover story. But it's hard to argue with a man calling himself a damnable fool in his own handwriting. In Miracles, Whitman wrote: "Every cubic inch of space is a miracle." Every cubic inch of his brain, alas, needed a lid. Sources: - Sheldon Lee Gosline, "'I Am a Fool': Dr. Henry Cattell's Private Confession about What Happened to Whitman's Brain", Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 31 (2014), publishing the diary bought on eBay in 2012. - The earlier "dropped jar" account: Edward Anthony Spitzka, "A Study of the Brains of Six Eminent Scientists and Scholars Belonging to the American Anthropometric Society", Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1907), which records that Whitman's brain was ruined by a careless attendant. - The post-mortem of March 1892 and the American Anthropometric Society: Gosline (2014); Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, final volumes. - "Miracles". === text:story:poetry-tale-the-girl-who-wouldnt-be-saved === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-girl-who-wouldnt-be-saved Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Girl Who Wouldn’t Be Saved Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 8f5122b44dc59861fd81ed528c92d0e20f65a43114c3bb27aac6f4163d89af72 Picture a girls' school where your soul gets marked. Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, eighteen forty-seven. The pupils were sorted into three groups: those who'd professed their faith, those who had hope, and those without hope. Emily Dickinson, aged sixteen, went straight into the third. Now here's the famous story. One day the principal, Mary Lyon, asks everyone who wants to be a Christian to stand. The whole hall rises. One girl stays in her seat. And afterwards Dickinson supposedly said: They thought it queer I didn't rise. I thought a lie would be queerer. Isn't that perfect? Shame about the sourcing. It comes from Clara Newman Turner, a family connection who was about three at the time, recalling what Emily told her long afterwards. Delicious, and quite possibly polished in the retelling. Also, she wasn't alone. Of the eighty or so girls without hope at the start of that year, twenty-nine were still holding out at the end. Dickinson was one of them. Her letters are less defiant and more anguished. To her friend Abiah Root: I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ. Later she wrote that she regretted not giving in when that golden opportunity was hers. She knew what answer they wanted. She just couldn't fake it. She left after a year. Years later, she wrote: Much madness is divinest sense. And, a few lines on: Assent, and you are sane. Demur, you're straightway dangerous. She'd done her demurring at sixteen. Sitting down. Sources: - Mount Holyoke Female Seminary records for 1847–48, including the sorting of students by religious standing; discussed in Richard B. Sewall, The Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), and Alfred Habegger, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books (2001), which gives the numbers of "no-hopers" at the start and end of the year. - Clara Newman Turner, "My Personal Acquaintance with Emily Dickinson", reminiscence printed as an appendix in Sewall (1974), the source of "They thought it queer I didn't rise." - Dickinson's letters to Abiah Root, 1848 and 1850 (Johnson, Letters): "I have not yet given up to the claims of Christ", and the later regret at a lost "golden opportunity". - "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (Fr620). Notes: - Mary Lyon held several such meetings during the year; Turner's account compresses them into one scene. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-woman-next-door === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-woman-next-door Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Woman Next Door Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 58da14b38bc850c9a5ce8bb7a98b50f09e02c2b8b3ec06790c6d1fe83256d0f5 The great love of a poet's life is supposed to be out of reach. Across an ocean. Lost in a war. Tragically dead. Emily Dickinson's lived next door. Susan Gilbert married Emily's brother Austin in eighteen fifty-six and moved into the house across the lawn. Emily sent her more than two hundred and fifty poems. Sue was her first reader, her sharpest critic, and quite possibly the love of her life. Here's Emily, writing to her in eighteen fifty-two: "Susie, will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?" Now, what really went on between them, nobody can prove. Letters are evidence of feeling, not a camera in the room. But here's the twist. Later, Sue's daughter, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, published Emily's letters. And, as Lillian Faderman pointed out, she tidied that one up. Her version just asks whether Susie will come home next Saturday. The kiss quietly vanished. She wasn't the only one with scissors. An early poem in praise of Sue, One Sister have I in our house, was cut up and inked out in Emily's own handmade books. Nobody was caught in the act; the editor Ralph Franklin suspected Austin or Lavinia. And yet the poems kept crossing the garden. One that Emily sent to Sue reached print in nineteen fourteen. For a love the family kept trying to edit into the shadows, she'd already written the line: I see thee better in the dark. Sources: - Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, 11 June 1852 (L96): "will you indeed come home next Saturday, and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to?" - Martha Dickinson Bianchi, The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924), where the letter appears without the kiss. - Lillian Faderman, "Emily Dickinson's Letters to Sue Gilbert", Massachusetts Review 18 (1977), and Surpassing the Love of Men (1981). - The mutilation of "One Sister have I in our house" (Fr5): R. W. Franklin, The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (1981), and Franklin's notes in The Poems of Emily Dickinson (1998). - The count of poems sent to Sue, and the full correspondence: Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson (1998). - "I see thee better — in the Dark" (Fr442), first printed in The Single Hound (1914), edited by Bianchi from Sue's copies. === text:story:poetry-tale-poetry-on-the-back-of-a-cake === Owner: story:poetry-tale-poetry-on-the-back-of-a-cake Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Poetry on the Back of a Cake Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: af33dc6b227319c30e690014b3b477ebc46dddcfc18b42fca2dbc73bc2ce7fb4 Some poets need a desk with a view. Emily Dickinson made do with a recipe for coconut cake. It still survives. Missus Carmichael's coconut cake: one cup of coconut, two cups of flour, two eggs, and so on. No oven instructions. Presumably you just knew. Turn it over, and there's a poem. The things that never can come back, are several. Childhood. Some forms of hope. The dead. Which is quite a thing to find on the back of a cake. But she really could bake. In eighteen fifty-six her rye and Indian bread took second prize at the Amherst Cattle Show. Second! Though some retellings say one of the judges was her sister Lavinia, so make of that what you will. Her father, according to family lore, would eat bread made by nobody else. And then there's the basket. The neighbourhood children remembered it. One of them, MacGregor Jenkins, wrote it up decades later: the famous recluse, at an upstairs window, lowering gingerbread down to them in a basket. Now, that's an old man's memory of childhood, so allow it a little sugar. Still. The woman who wouldn't come downstairs to visitors was posting cake out of the window. And writing about the dead on the back of a recipe. As she put it elsewhere: I taste a liquor never brewed. Clearly. She was too busy baking. Sources: - The coconut cake recipe ("Mrs Carmichael's") with the draft of "The Things that never can come back, are several" (Fr1564) on the reverse: Amherst College Archives & Special Collections (Amherst Manuscript #445); reproduced and discussed by the Emily Dickinson Museum, Amherst. - The second prize for rye and Indian bread at the Amherst Cattle Show, October 1856: reported in the Hampshire and Franklin Express; see Sewall (1974). The suggestion that Lavinia was among the judges appears in later retellings. - Edward Dickinson's preference for his daughter's bread: family tradition recorded in Sewall (1974). - MacGregor Jenkins, Emily Dickinson: Friend and Neighbor (1930), for the gingerbread basket. - "I taste a liquor never brewed" (Fr207). === text:story:poetry-tale-dear-master === Owner: story:poetry-tale-dear-master Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Dear Master Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 9b1669e79fe9bbd9ee9010f7fd7865dca7c99b32885f1d3cc3293db8ed33495a When Emily Dickinson died, in eighteen eighty-six, she left behind a great many secrets. Three of them were letters. Drafts, really. No envelope. No name. Only a title. Master. They're not polite letters. In one, calling herself Daisy, she writes: If you saw a bullet hit a Bird, and he told you he wasn't shot, you might weep at his courtesy, but you would certainly doubt his word. And: I've got a Tomahawk in my side, but that doesn't hurt me much. Her master stabs her more. And then the line that sends biographers reaching for the magnifying glass. If I had the Beard on my cheek, like you, and you had Daisy's petals, and you cared so for me, what would become of you? So. A man. With a beard. And here we leave the evidence behind, because nobody knows who he was. The favourite suspects are Samuel Bowles, the charming and very married editor of the Springfield Republican, and the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, a married Philadelphia preacher she's thought to have heard in eighteen fifty-five. Others have nominated a judge, a college friend of her brother's, her sister-in-law Susan, and even God. Nobody can prove a single one. Nobody even knows if the letters were sent. What survives is a woman writing: I want to see you more, Sir, than all I wish for in this world. Wild nights, she wrote. Wild nights. Were I with thee. And a century and a half later, we still don't know who thee was. Sources: - R. W. Franklin, ed., The Master Letters of Emily Dickinson (Amherst College Press, 1986), presenting the three drafts (c. 1858–61) held at Amherst College, with the "Daisy", "Tomahawk" and "Beard" passages. - The candidates (Samuel Bowles, Charles Wadsworth, Otis Lord, Susan Dickinson and others): Sewall (1974); Habegger (2001); Judith Farr, The Passion of Emily Dickinson (1992). - "Wild Nights — Wild Nights!" (Fr269). Notes: - The drafts are undated and unaddressed; whether fair copies were ever sent is unknown. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-dog-as-large-as-myself === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-dog-as-large-as-myself Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Dog as Large as Myself Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 638111e15f8e8ad9676fed15dacb3891279a8e7b4795a14248d91339d887fc32 In the autumn of eighteen forty-nine, Edward Dickinson, a stern Amherst lawyer, bought his eldest daughter a dog. A big one. Very probably a Newfoundland. Emily named him Carlo, most likely after a dog in Jane Eyre. And for the next sixteen years, Carlo went where she went. The woods. The fields. The long walks round Amherst. In eighteen sixty-two, the writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson asked her who her companions were. She told him. Hills, sir, and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me. They are better than Beings, she added, because they know, but do not tell. She was a small woman. He was a very large dog. It was not an exaggeration. A few months later, she brought him up again. Carlo, she thought, would please Higginson. He was dumb, and brave. High praise, from a poet with no patience for chatter. Her mother, she told her cousins, thought him a model dog. Then, in January eighteen sixty-six, came a letter to Higginson barely a line long. Carlo died. E. Dickinson. And underneath, a question. Would you instruct me now? Some biographers think she withdrew further into the house after that. It's hard to prove; she was already keeping to herself. But, as far as anyone knows, she never had another dog. Hope, she once wrote, is the thing with feathers. For sixteen years, she had something better. It had fur, and it knew how to keep a secret. Sources: - Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 25 April 1862 (L261): "Hills, Sir, and the Sundown, and a Dog large as myself, that my Father bought me." - Dickinson to Higginson, early 1866 (L314): "Carlo died ... Would you instruct me now?" - Her letters to her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross on her mother's opinion of Carlo (Johnson, Letters). - The Newfoundland identification and the Jane Eyre source of the name: Sewall (1974); Habegger (2001). - "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" (Fr314). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-colonel-who-needed-a-lie-down === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-colonel-who-needed-a-lie-down Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Colonel Who Needed a Lie-Down Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 8fb9a47c150784d6de9d478dae6199273232b74710118e5e941b1f8551e86d37 A war hero goes to meet a woman who hardly leaves the house. Guess which one needs a lie-down afterwards. August, eighteen seventy. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson — who'd led one of the first Union regiments of formerly enslaved men — finally visits Emily Dickinson in Amherst, after eight years of letters. He wrote to his wife that same day. She came in with two day lilies, put them into his hand, and said: These are my introduction. Then, under her breath: Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and hardly know what I say. Then she talked. Continuously, he said. She gave him her test for poetry: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. And she asked him: How do most people live without any thoughts? Next day he wrote again. I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much. Without touching her, she drew from me. I am glad not to live near her. Now for the gossip. Three years later, writing to his sisters about Dickinson, Higginson quoted a remark of his wife Mary's that, he said, still held: Oh, why do the insane so cling to you? And in eighteen seventy-six, in a letter to his sister, he called Dickinson his partially cracked poetess. Cracked, perhaps. But the colonel had faced Confederate fire. One day with a woman holding two lilies, and he was done in. Sources: - Higginson's two letters to his wife, 16 and 17 August 1870, printed in Johnson, Letters (L342a, L342b), and in his article "Emily Dickinson's Letters", The Atlantic Monthly, October 1891: the day lilies, "Forgive me if I am frightened", the "top of my head" test, and "I never was with any one who drained my nerve power so much." - "Oh why do the insane so cling to you?": Higginson to his sisters, December 1873 (L481). - "My partially cracked poetess": Higginson to his sister Anna, 1876. - Higginson's command of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers: his Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870). See also Brenda Wineapple, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson (2008). === text:story:poetry-tale-success-without-a-name === Owner: story:poetry-tale-success-without-a-name Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Success, Without a Name Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: d87992c46f3f152084a5aec668d64cbd86fa7f129cc8134891e4e091319c8c8d How do you get Emily Dickinson into print? You need a famous friend, a lot of nerve, and a book with no names in it. The friend was Helen Hunt Jackson, a celebrated writer who, like Dickinson, was born in Amherst in eighteen thirty. In eighteen seventy-six she wrote to her: You are a great poet — and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud. Dickinson, naturally, did NOT sing aloud. So Jackson found a loophole. A Boston publisher was putting out A Masque of Poets, an anthology in which every poem was anonymous. Dickinson resisted. Jackson pushed. In the end Jackson offered to send in a poem she already knew by heart: Success is counted sweetest, by those who ne'er succeed. It came out in eighteen seventy-eight. The publisher had quietly tweaked her wording, too. Then came the fun. Reviewers played guess-the-poet, and the favourite guess for Success was Ralph Waldo Emerson. The publisher even wrote to Dickinson afterwards to tell her so. Meanwhile Jackson wrote a review of her own, and called the poem one of the strongest and finest wrought things in the book. She knew exactly who'd written it. She'd smuggled it in. So there you are. Dickinson's grandest public moment in her lifetime: a poem about success, credited to somebody else, praised by the friend who'd planted it. Success is counted sweetest by those who ne'er succeed. Or, in her case, by those who never get the credit. Sources: - A Masque of Poets (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878), the "No Name Series", containing "Success is counted sweetest" with the publisher's small alterations. - Helen Hunt Jackson to Dickinson, 1876 ("You are a great poet — and it is a wrong to the day you live in, that you will not sing aloud") and 1878, pressing for the poem (Johnson, Letters, L444a and L573a). - Thomas Niles (Roberts Brothers) to Dickinson, 1879, reporting that the poem had been attributed to Emerson. - Jackson's review of A Masque of Poets, praising "Success" as among the strongest things in the book. - "Success is counted sweetest" (Fr112). Notes: - Jackson and Dickinson were both born in Amherst in 1830 and had known each other as children. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-mistress-and-the-manuscripts === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-mistress-and-the-manuscripts Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Mistress and the Manuscripts Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 1dc7b9b69c1313219a139b9c6e3ffd1aa760a0709c59923450d619d9188831d5 Here's how Mabel Loomis Todd met Emily Dickinson. She didn't. September eighteen eighty-two. Austin Dickinson, Emily's brother, invites Mabel — an astronomer's dazzling young wife — to sing and play the piano at the family home. Emily listens from the shadows of the hall. She never appears. But afterwards, she sends in a glass of sherry. And a poem. The next evening, so the story goes, Austin and Mabel confess their love. Austin wrote one word in his diary: Rubicon. Their affair ran for nearly thirteen years — with Austin's wife, Susan, Emily's dearest friend, living next door. And some of their meetings, it's said, took place behind closed doors in the Dickinson house itself. In eighteen eighty-six, Emily died, leaving nearly eighteen hundred poems, almost none of them published. And who did the painstaking work of deciphering them? Mabel. With Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she brought out the first collection in eighteen ninety. It was a sensation. Then came the feud. After Austin died, the family went to court over a strip of meadow, fifty-three feet wide, that he'd wanted Mabel to have. Emily's sister, Lavinia, sued, and won. Mabel's answer was to lock her share of the manuscripts in a camphorwood chest — and there they stayed for decades. Now, the sherry, the poem, the trysts — a good deal of that comes from Mabel's own diaries, so you're getting her side of things. Which rather suits the poem. Tell all the truth but tell it slant. In the Dickinson family, nobody ever told it any other way. Sources: - Polly Longsworth, Austin and Mabel: The Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd (1984), drawing on Austin's diary ("Rubicon") and on Mabel's journals and diaries (Todd–Bingham Family Papers, Yale University). - The September 1882 evening at the Homestead, the sherry and the poem: Mabel Loomis Todd's journal, as given in Longsworth. - Poems by Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson (1890). - The lawsuit over the strip of land (Todd v. Dickinson, decided for Lavinia Dickinson, 1898) and the camphorwood chest: Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades: The Literary Debut of Emily Dickinson (1945); Lyndall Gordon, Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds (2010). - "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (Fr1263). Notes: - The chest was opened by Bingham in the 1930s; the poems in it appeared in Bolts of Melody (1945). === text:story:poetry-tale-a-virgin-recluse-apparently === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-virgin-recluse-apparently Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Virgin Recluse, Apparently Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a4b1a490fd27a1bec60295af466730edb51e2e85184b8a583e85ffa637fc596f An editor has a problem. It's April, eighteen ninety-one. Thomas Wentworth Higginson is helping to prepare a second book of poems by the late Emily Dickinson — a quiet spinster from Amherst, Massachusetts, who hardly ever left her father's house. And then he turns up a poem that begins: Wild nights — wild nights! Twice. With exclamation marks. So he writes to his co-editor, Mabel Loomis Todd. We still have the letter. "One poem only I dread a little to print — that wonderful Wild Nights — lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there." That virgin recluse. You can almost hear the collar tightening. He asks whether her sister, Miss Lavinia, has any shrinking about it. And then he talks himself round: "Yet what a loss to omit it! Indeed it is not to be omitted." Fair play to him. In it went. So what might the malignant find? Well. A heart in port. Done with the compass, done with the chart. Rowing in Eden. And a speaker who longs to moor, tonight, in thee. Who was thee? Ah. That's a mystery for another night, and nobody has solved it yet. But here's the thing about Higginson's worry. Nobody needed to read anything into it. It was already there. In her handwriting. With exclamation marks. Sources: - Higginson to Mabel Loomis Todd, 21 April 1891: "One poem only I dread a little to print — that wonderful 'Wild Nights' — lest the malignant read into it more than that virgin recluse ever dreamed of putting there." Printed in Bingham, Ancestors' Brocades (1945). - Poems by Emily Dickinson, Second Series (1891), in which the poem appeared. - "Wild Nights — Wild Nights!" (Fr269). === text:story:poetry-tale-even-death-had-an-editor === Owner: story:poetry-tale-even-death-had-an-editor Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Even Death Had an Editor Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Emily Dickinson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 207575849533298df10a8607b6cc8ab5eed65a7e4d2e84dcf846ffc51107b950 Death pulls up in a carriage. He's terribly polite. And there's room for one more. It's one of the most famous rides in poetry: Emily Dickinson's Because I could not stop for Death. But when it first appeared in print, in eighteen ninety, four years after she died, her editors had given it a little valeting. First, a new title. The Chariot. Rather grand. Then the schoolchildren. Dickinson wrote that the carriage passed a school, where children strove, at recess, in the ring. Strove. Even at playtime, they're struggling. The editors had them simply play, their lessons scarcely done. Much nicer children. Then the grave. Dickinson's house has its cornice in the ground — a building, sinking. The editors gave it a cornice but a mound. Tidier. And then they took out a whole stanza. Just after the carriage passes the setting sun, she corrects herself. Or rather, he passed us. The dews drew quivering and chill. And she notices what she's wearing. Only gossamer, my gown. My tippet, only tulle. In other words: she's dead, she's cold, and she's dressed for a summer evening, not for eternity. Gone. The whole shiver, quietly removed. Her own version, stanza and all, only became the standard text with Thomas H. Johnson's edition, in nineteen fifty-five. So when you hear that Death kindly stopped for her, remember. For sixty-five years, in most people's books, he'd also put the heating on. Sources: - Poems by Emily Dickinson (1890), where the poem appears as "The Chariot", with the fourth stanza omitted and the readings "played" and "mound". - The manuscript in Dickinson's fascicles, Houghton Library, Harvard. - Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Poems of Emily Dickinson (Harvard University Press, 1955), restoring the stanza and Dickinson's wording; Franklin (1998), Fr479. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-pirate-who-wrote-invictus === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-pirate-who-wrote-invictus Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Pirate Who Wrote Invictus Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Ernest Henley Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 93c2d3f37daaec6d73998ea930b5eb72f0dbda99c1b097e9cfc371d19dbf244c In eighteen eighty-three, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a confession to his friend, the poet William Ernest Henley. It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver in Treasure Island. So yes. Long John Silver — one-legged, silver-tongued, utterly terrifying — owes his existence to a poet. Stevenson did add, in fairness, that Silver wasn't like Henley in any other quality or feature. Henley, presumably, checked his pockets for doubloons anyway. Here's how they met. Henley had lost his left leg below the knee to tuberculosis of the bone as a young man. Then the disease went for his other foot, and he was told that might have to come off too. Instead, he went to Edinburgh, and put himself in the hands of Joseph Lister, the pioneer of antiseptic surgery. He spent the best part of two years in the Royal Infirmary. Lister saved the foot. In eighteen seventy-five, the critic Leslie Stephen brought a young Stevenson to the ward. Stevenson wrote that the patient sat up in bed, hair and beard all tangled, and talked as cheerfully as if he had been in a king's palace. That same year, Henley wrote a poem. Tradition says he wrote it there, in that hospital; nobody can quite pin it down. It went out into the world with no title. An editor later named it Invictus. I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul. Which is very much the sort of thing a pirate would say. Sources: - Robert Louis Stevenson to W. E. Henley, May 1883: "It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot John Silver" (The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Bradford Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol. 4). - Henley's treatment under Joseph Lister at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, 1873–75, and the "In Hospital" poems: John Connell, W. E. Henley (1949); Henley's A Book of Verses (1888). - Stevenson's first visit, February 1875, brought by Leslie Stephen: Stevenson's letter to Frances Sitwell, February 1875 ("sat up in his bed ... as cheerful as if he had been in a king's palace"). - "Invictus" was published untitled in A Book of Verses (1888); the dedication "To R. T. H. B." was added in the second edition (1891); the title was supplied by Arthur Quiller-Couch in The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900). - Treasure Island (1883). Notes: - That "Invictus" was written in the Infirmary in 1875 is tradition rather than record; the poem is dated 1875 in the collection. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-girl-who-called-barrie-fwendy === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-girl-who-called-barrie-fwendy Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Girl Who Called Barrie Fwendy Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: William Ernest Henley Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 5ae6a8a897173a143a5c10784899be288215cad86622d3eb06be1f85f393a26a Here's a little girl you've never heard of, whose name you've almost certainly said out loud. Margaret Henley. Born in eighteen eighty-eight, the only child of William Ernest Henley, the one-legged poet who wrote Invictus. Her father doted on her. And one of the grown-ups who came to the house was a small, shy Scotsman called James Barrie. The story goes that Margaret couldn't quite manage her Rs. So Barrie wasn't her friend. He was her fwendy. And, the way small children do, she stretched it: her fwendy-wendy. In February eighteen ninety-four, she died of meningitis. She was five years old. Ten years later, Barrie opened a play in London about a boy who wouldn't grow up. And the girl who flies away with him is called Wendy. Now, a word of caution, because the name-spotters get terribly cross about this. Barrie did not invent the name. A scattering of Wendys turn up in old census returns, decades before. What he did was take a name almost nobody used and hand it to millions of parents. And the line from Margaret to Wendy is the story everybody tells. It's lovely, it's plausible, and, as far as anyone knows, no note in Barrie's hand settles it. When Henley died, in nineteen-oh-three, his ashes were laid in Margaret's grave, in the churchyard at Cockayne Hatley, in Bedfordshire. Henley's most famous poem is about a man unbowed by fate. Fate took Margaret anyway. But if the story's true, every Wendy since has carried a little girl's lisp. Sources: - Margaret Emma Henley (1888–1894); her death from meningitis and burial at Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire, where Henley's ashes were placed in 1903: Connell, W. E. Henley (1949). - The "fwendy-wendy" story and the Wendy connection: Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979). - Peter Pan (first performed London, December 1904); Peter and Wendy (1911). - Pre-1904 occurrences of the name Wendy in English census returns: noted in Birkin and in the Oxford Dictionary of First Names. Notes: - No letter or note in Barrie's hand states that Margaret was the source. The connection rests on Henley family tradition and on Barrie's known affection for the child. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-man-who-lost-treasure-island === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-man-who-lost-treasure-island Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Man Who Lost Treasure Island Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Louis Stevenson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: bd211dcf7f5730333e768e7eee06e31e898351006e0be321e6a85b7c00132c4c Treasure Island began with a rainy holiday. Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands, summer eighteen eighty-one. Robert Louis Stevenson was stuck indoors with his thirteen-year-old stepson, Lloyd, and a box of paints. And out of that came a map. Stevenson remembered it lovingly. It was, he said, elaborately and, he thought, beautifully coloured, with harbours that pleased him like sonnets. Now, who actually drew it? Stevenson said he did. Lloyd, years later, said he'd drawn the island himself, and his stepfather leaned over his shoulder and took over. Take your pick. Either way, Stevenson labelled it Treasure Island. And as he pored over it, he said, the characters began to appear among the imaginary woods. The novel grew out of the map. Then, as Stevenson told it, disaster. When the book went to the publishers, Cassell, the map went with the manuscript. The proofs came back. The map didn't. He wrote to ask, and was told it had never been received. He sat, as he put it, aghast. Drawing a map and writing a story to fit it is a joy. Fitting a map to a finished book is not. He had to go back through the whole novel, list every reference, and, with a pair of compasses, painfully design a map to suit the data. His father lent a hand, and, having a knack for handwriting, elaborately forged the signature of Captain Flint. It's a beautiful map. It's the one in the book. But, Stevenson admitted, somehow it was never Treasure Island to him. Sources: - Robert Louis Stevenson, "My First Book: Treasure Island", The Idler, August 1894: the Braemar map, "harbours that pleased me like sonnets", the loss of the map at Cassell's, "aghast", the compasses, and his father's forged signature of Captain Flint. - Lloyd Osbourne's claim to have drawn the island: his introduction to Treasure Island in the Tusitala Edition (1923) and An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (1924). - Treasure Island (London: Cassell, 1883), with the redrawn map. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-fine-bogey-tale === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-fine-bogey-tale Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Fine Bogey Tale Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Louis Stevenson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 87f5c136b7690c087fb696b26adf794855aa6e1decb96dde62b092d75107cd4a Bournemouth, autumn, eighteen eighty-five. Fanny Stevenson remembered being woken in the small hours by her husband crying out in horror. So she woke him. He was not pleased. Why had she woken him? He'd been dreaming a fine bogey tale. She'd interrupted the first transformation scene. He later explained he'd spent two days racking his brains for a plot. On the second night, he dreamed a scene at a window, and a man who, pursued for some crime, took a powder and changed in front of his pursuers. The rest, he admitted, he wrote awake, though he thought he saw the hand of his Brownies, the little people who staged plays in his sleep. His stepson Lloyd Osbourne remembered him coming downstairs in a fever and reading out nearly half the book. Lloyd doubted the first draft took even three days. Then, the family story goes, Fanny gave her verdict: it ought to be an allegory, and he'd written a mere story. Stevenson burned it — and wrote the whole thing again. You may have heard he was high on cocaine at the time. A splendid rumour, but as far as anyone has shown, that's all it is. He was ill, on prescribed medicine, and there the paper trail ends. Some scholars even doubt the bonfire. Months earlier, the same man had published A Child's Garden of Verses. In it, a moon with a face like the clock in the hall, who shines on thieves on the garden wall. He always did know who was out there in the dark. Sources: - Stevenson, "A Chapter on Dreams", Scribner's Magazine, January 1888: the Brownies, the two days' search for a plot, and the dream of the powder and the transformation. - Fanny Stevenson's account of waking him, and her verdict on the first draft: her prefatory note to the Biographical Edition of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1901). - Lloyd Osbourne, An Intimate Portrait of R.L.S. (1924), for the three-day draft and the burning. - The cocaine theory and the doubts about the bonfire: Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (2005). - A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), "The Moon". === text:story:poetry-tale-the-birthday-he-gave-away === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-birthday-he-gave-away Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Birthday He Gave Away Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Louis Stevenson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 0216bee1109d6da1f462e81133c2182174406276465e02c83ea641750acd18dc Imagine being born on Christmas Day. Every year, your birthday gets swallowed whole by somebody else's. That was the trouble for Annie Ide, daughter of the American Land Commissioner in Samoa. And in June eighteen ninety-one, a family friend came to the rescue: Robert Louis Stevenson. He gave her his birthday. Properly. In a deed. "I, Robert Louis Stevenson, Advocate of the Scots Bar, author of The Master of Ballantrae and Moral Emblems, stuck civil engineer…" It goes on. Annie, it explains, was born out of all reason upon Christmas Day, and was therefore out of all justice denied the consolation and profit of a proper birthday. Whereas he had reached an age when he had no further use for one. So he handed over the thirteenth of November, to be enjoyed "by the sporting of fine raiment, eating of rich meats, and receipt of gifts, compliments, and copies of verse". There were conditions. She was to use it with moderation and humanity, the birthday not being so young as it once was. And if she broke the terms, it would pass to the President of the United States. Who would then have had two. Stevenson died in eighteen ninety-four. But here's the lovely bit. In nineteen thirty-eight, Time magazine reported that Annie, by then Missus Cockran, had held the rights to his birthday for forty-seven years. The man who wrote The Swing and The Moon knew that children take their games very seriously. So, it turns out, did she. Sources: - The deed of gift to Annie H. Ide, dated at Vailima, 19 June 1891, printed in The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Sidney Colvin (1899), and in Booth and Mehew's edition. Henry C. Ide was United States Land Commissioner in Samoa. - Time, "People", 21 November 1938: Stevenson's birthday "celebrated by proxy by Mrs. Annie Ide Cockran, who has had full and undisputed right to Stevenson's birthday (November 13) for 47 years." - A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), "The Swing" and "The Moon". === text:story:poetry-tale-the-island-in-a-shop-window === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-island-in-a-shop-window Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Island in a Shop Window Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: W. B. Yeats Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 35ecd34026f3c6dd47ee6cc800fa4df99527eab6cc0f3dac63ad559acf993380 London, the late eighteen-eighties. A young Irishman in his early twenties, rather hard up and very homesick, is walking down Fleet Street. Ink, newspapers, noise. His name is W. B. Yeats. Then he hears it. A little tinkle of water. In a shop window, there's a novelty fountain, balancing a small ball on its jet. And that's all it takes. Suddenly he's remembering lake water. Lough Gill, back in Sligo, and the little island of Innisfree. Since his teens, he'd had a plan. To settle on that island like Thoreau. Yes, that Thoreau. The cabin, the pond, Walden. His father had read him bits of the book, and the boy decided Sligo could do Walden too. Out of that shop window came the poem. The small cabin of clay and wattles, the nine bean-rows, the hive for the honey-bee. Now, all of this is Yeats's own story, told decades later. Nobody else on Fleet Street was taking notes. But he did give the poem a stern review. It was, he said, his first lyric with anything in its rhythm of his own music. And yet, a couple of years later, he wouldn't have written that opening line, with its conventional archaism. "I will arise and go now." Tut tut. The world disagreed. It's probably the most loved thing he ever wrote. And he never did move to the island. He didn't need to. He had a shop window on Fleet Street. Sources: - W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies ("Reveries over Childhood and Youth", 1915, and "The Trembling of the Veil", 1922): the Fleet Street fountain, the boyhood plan to live on Innisfree in imitation of Thoreau, his father reading him Walden, the "first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music", and the regret over the "conventional archaism" of "I will arise and go now". - Yeats's letter to Katharine Tynan, December 1888, the first mention of the poem (The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1). - "The Lake Isle of Innisfree", National Observer, 13 December 1890; collected in The Countess Kathleen and Various Legends and Lyrics (1892). - R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 1, The Apprentice Mage (1997). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-honeymoon-had-extra-guests === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-honeymoon-had-extra-guests Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Honeymoon Had Extra Guests Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: W. B. Yeats Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: d78552ad2499e678cceca2fa71401665ecb6f683a0f25e9576b1880a3269519c In the summer of nineteen seventeen, W. B. Yeats, aged fifty-two, proposed to Iseult Gonne. She was the young daughter of Maud Gonne, the woman he'd been proposing to, on and off, for decades. Iseult said no. A few weeks later, he proposed to someone else. Georgie Hyde-Lees. Twenty-five, clever, and deeply into the occult. He would come to call her George. They married on the twentieth of October. The honeymoon, at a hotel in Ashdown Forest, did not go well. As George's biographer tells it, a letter arrived from Iseult, and Yeats sank into gloom. So his new bride decided to fake it. A spot of automatic writing, just to cheer him up. Four days into the marriage, Yeats later wrote, she took up a pencil. Soon he was telling Lady Gregory what had come out. All was well, it said, with the bird, and his action had been right for both. The bird, he understood, was Iseult. His misery, he said, lifted. Then, George later felt, something else took over. It went on for years. Hundreds of sittings. Thousands of pages. It became his strange book, A Vision. When Yeats offered to spend the rest of his life explaining it, the answer came back: "No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry." Hoax, shared fantasy, or something stranger? Nobody can say. Maybe not even George. Nearly thirty years earlier, he'd written about longing to be alone in the bee-loud glade. He got a honeymoon for two, and an unknown number of guests. Sources: - The proposals to Iseult Gonne and to Georgie Hyde-Lees, the marriage of 20 October 1917, and the honeymoon at the Ashdown Forest Hotel: Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, vol. 2, The Arch-Poet (2003). - Yeats to Lady Gregory, 29 October 1917, reporting the first automatic script and the message about "the bird". - Yeats's own account of the writing beginning "four days after my marriage", and the spirits' reply "No, we have come to give you metaphors for poetry": the introduction to the second edition of A Vision (1937), "A Packet for Ezra Pound". - George Yeats's later admission that she began by faking, and her sense that "something else" took over: Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats (2002); Brenda Maddox, George's Ghosts: A New Life of W. B. Yeats (1999). - The scripts themselves: Yeats's Vision Papers, ed. George Mills Harper (1992). - "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1890). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-gland-old-man === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-gland-old-man Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Gland Old Man Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: W. B. Yeats Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 68ed108c48a5ed89927739feed66486b97a6fa677ff6bef52681af8c2b7572ac Spring, nineteen thirty-four. William Butler Yeats is sixty-eight and miserable. He has confided that his sexual powers are fading. And he's written nothing new, his doctor later said, for about three years. That doctor was Norman Haire, a fashionable London sexologist. His treatment: the Steinach operation. It promised rejuvenation. In plain terms, it was a vasectomy. No monkey glands, whatever you may have heard. Somewhere along the way, Yeats picked up a nickname: the gland old man. Nobody knows who coined it, but it stuck. Still, something happened, or he believed it had. He wrote to the poet Dorothy Wellesley that his present weakness was made worse by — I quote — the strange second puberty the operation has given me, the ferment that has come upon my imagination. If I write more poetry, he added, it will be unlike anything I have done. What followed was a late blaze of verse, and a procession of women: the actress Margot Ruddock, the novelist Ethel Mannin, Wellesley herself, and others. Did the surgery do anything below the waist? His biographer Richard Ellmann doubted it. The benefit, he thought, was all in the head. Then again, that's where a poet keeps his engine. In a poem called The Spur, he imagines us thinking it horrible that lust and rage should dance attendance upon his old age. But what else, he asks, will spur him into song? Forty-odd years earlier, a homesick young man had written one of the most famous lines in Irish poetry. I will arise and go now. Sources: - The Steinach operation of April 1934, performed by Norman Haire, and its aftermath: Richard Ellmann, "W. B. Yeats's Second Puberty", The New York Review of Books, 9 May 1985 (reprinted in Four Dubliners, 1987); Foster, The Arch-Poet (2003). - "The strange second puberty the operation has given me": Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, in Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley (1940). - The Dublin nickname "the gland old man": reported in Foster. - Margot Ruddock, Ethel Mannin and the late friendships: Foster (2003). - "The Spur", New Poems (1938); "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" (1890). Notes: - The Steinach procedure was a unilateral vasectomy promoted as rejuvenation; it has no connection with the "monkey gland" grafts of Serge Voronoff, with which it is often confused. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-song-that-left-without-him === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-song-that-left-without-him Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Song That Left Without Him Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: James Weldon Johnson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: c1a7384270715ef78bccb0c1543265d7e8790d8599ed5c5a24ee5ebccbb717ad In nineteen hundred, James Weldon Johnson, head teacher of the Stanton School in Jacksonville, Florida, was down to give an address on Lincoln's birthday, and wanted a poem as well. He tried. He couldn't do it. Decades later he admitted his poem on Lincoln was still to be written. What he wrote instead was a song. His brother Rosamond set it to music, and on the twelfth of February, nineteen hundred, five hundred schoolchildren sang it for the first time. Lift Every Voice and Sing. Johnson remembered pacing up and down the porch as he finished it. He could not keep back the tears, he wrote, and made no effort to do so. And then, the extraordinary bit. The brothers went off to New York to write for the stage. And, in Johnson's words, the song passed out of our minds. The children didn't forget. They kept singing it. They took it to other schools. Some became teachers, and taught it to their own pupils. Within twenty years it was being sung across the South, and the N double A C P had taken it up as the Negro National Anthem. By then Johnson was working for the N double A C P, and would soon be running it. The song he'd forgotten had come back and found him at the office. In The Gift to Sing, he wrote that he had a magic way to turn the gloom to cheerful day. It turns out the magic didn't need him. It needed five hundred children with good memories. Sources: - James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (1933): the Lincoln's-birthday request, the unwritten Lincoln poem, pacing the porch in tears, the first performance by five hundred Stanton School children on 12 February 1900, and the song "passing out of our minds". - "Lift Every Voice and Sing", music by J. Rosamond Johnson; adopted by the NAACP as the "Negro National Anthem" in 1919. Johnson served the NAACP as field secretary from 1916 and as executive secretary from 1920. - "The Gift to Sing", Fifty Years and Other Poems (1917). === text:story:poetry-tale-two-live-as-three === Owner: story:poetry-tale-two-live-as-three Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Two Live as Three Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: James Weldon Johnson Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: c174398465b4acb91a3a563ff334f24f8cdc7f7deb4cc3c259a6894711588c17 Before he was a diplomat, a civil-rights leader, and the man behind a hymn sung by millions, James Weldon Johnson wrote pop songs. Hit pop songs. Around the turn of the century he joined his younger brother, the composer Rosamond Johnson, and the writer and performer Bob Cole, in New York. Three Black songwriters, selling tunes to Broadway. Florida had given him reasons to stay away. In nineteen-oh-one, back home in Jacksonville, armed men found him in a park with a fair-skinned woman journalist, and by his own account he came close to being lynched. In nineteen-oh-two the trio had a smash. The star Marie Cahill sang it in a show called Sally in Our Alley, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies of sheet music. It was called Under the Bamboo Tree. The tune, it's said, was built on a spiritual: Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, quietly turned into ragtime. And the chorus promised: One live as two, two live as one, under the bamboo tree. Some forty years on, Judy Garland would sing it in Meet Me in Saint Louis. But my favourite fan is T. S. Eliot. In the nineteen-twenties, the most buttoned-up man in modern poetry wrote a jazzy verse play called Sweeney Agonistes. And two of his characters strike up: Under the bamboo. Bamboo bamboo. Under the bamboo tree. Two live as one. One live as two. Two live as three. Eliot added a third person. Of course he did. Sources: - Along This Way (1933): the Cole and Johnson Brothers partnership in New York, and the 1901 Jacksonville incident in which Johnson was nearly lynched. - "Under the Bamboo Tree" (1902), by Bob Cole and J. Rosamond Johnson with James Weldon Johnson, introduced by Marie Cahill in Sally in Our Alley; its sheet-music sales and the spiritual behind the tune are discussed in Along This Way and in Eugene Levy, James Weldon Johnson: Black Leader, Black Voice (1973). - T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama ("Fragment of an Agon", first published 1927; book form 1932). - Meet Me in St. Louis (MGM, 1944), in which Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien perform the song. === text:story:poetry-tale-going-up === Owner: story:poetry-tale-going-up Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Going Up Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a29bc2e8bbcf146a9a1c0374132049f4f7532d2f13a18f9806a32d53e1b958de What do you call a poet with a stack of unsold books, a box that goes up and down, and a captive audience? A businessman. Paul Laurence Dunbar finished high school in Dayton, Ohio, in eighteen ninety-one. He was clever, he was already publishing poems, and he was Black in eighteen ninety-one America. So he got a job running the elevator in the Callahan Building. The lift, to you and me. His first collection, Oak and Ivy, left him owing the printer about a hundred and twenty-five dollars. So he sold it to his passengers. A dollar a copy. And nobody can storm off between floors. Now, the part that sounds made up. One of Dunbar's school friends was Orville Wright. Yes — THAT one. Before the brothers ever went near an aeroplane, they ran a print shop, and in eighteen ninety they printed Dunbar's newspaper for Dayton's Black community, the Tattler. It lasted three issues. And here we wander into legend. The story goes that Dunbar left a verse on the wall of the Wrights' shop. Orville Wright is out of sight, in the printing business. No other mind is half as bright, as his'n is. Don't go looking for the original, mind you. It comes down to us from biographers, not photographs. But it's far too good to leave out. So the next time someone presses the button for you and smiles… be polite. He may have a book to sell you. Sources: - Dunbar's job as elevator operator in the Callahan Building, Dayton, and the sale of Oak and Ivy (Dayton: United Brethren Publishing House, 1893) to passengers for a dollar a copy: Lida Keck Wiggins, The Life and Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1907); Gene Andrew Jarrett, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Life and Times of a Caged Bird (2022). - The Dayton Tattler (1890), edited by Dunbar and printed by Wright & Wright: Fred C. Kelly, The Wright Brothers (1943); Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. - The rhyme on the print-shop wall ("Orville Wright is out of sight") is repeated in early Dunbar biographies and in Kelly's life of the Wrights; no original survives. === text:story:poetry-tale-love-by-return-of-post === Owner: story:poetry-tale-love-by-return-of-post Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Love by Return of Post Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Paul Laurence Dunbar Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 9c9d8617a0b5ef477f50b903ec5c0b34afcae31c75e883f7e0739d7f412b2093 Spring, eighteen ninety-five. In Dayton, Ohio, a young poet opens a Boston magazine and finds a piece by a schoolteacher from New Orleans. Next to it, her photograph. Her name was Alice Ruth Moore. She was nineteen. He was Paul Laurence Dunbar, twenty-two, and he wrote to her at once. Now, a man writing to a pretty stranger needs a pretext. His, say those who've read the letters, was terribly literary. What did she think, he asked, of using dialect in literature? She answered politely, and a little coolly. Fine, if you have the gift for it. She, for one, did not. It was enough. Two years of letters followed. In February eighteen ninety-seven, at a farewell party before he sailed for England, he proposed. Her family disapproved. So on the sixth of March, eighteen ninety-eight, the two young writers married in secret, in New York. It did not end well. Paul drank, and the drinking turned to violence. Early in nineteen-oh-two he beat Alice so badly she needed hospital treatment. She left him, and never went back. He died of tuberculosis four years later, aged thirty-three. They never divorced. She went on to a long career as a writer and activist, Alice Dunbar-Nelson. And here's what's hard to shake. Around the time those first letters crossed, he published a poem. We wear the mask that grins and lies, it hides our cheeks and shades our eyes. He meant the face Black Americans had to show a hostile world. Read it now, and you hear the letters too. Sources: - Alice Ruth Moore's piece and photograph in the Monthly Review (Boston), April 1895, which prompted Dunbar's first letter. - The Dunbar–Moore correspondence, Paul Laurence Dunbar Papers, Ohio History Connection, Columbus, including the opening exchange on dialect. - The secret marriage in New York, 6 March 1898, the violence of early 1902, and the permanent separation: Eleanor Alexander, Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow: The Tragic Courtship and Marriage of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Alice Ruth Moore (2001); Jarrett (2022). - "We Wear the Mask", Majors and Minors (1895). Notes: - Dunbar died of tuberculosis in Dayton on 9 February 1906. Alice Dunbar-Nelson's own account of the marriage survives in her diaries, published as Give Us Each Day (1984). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-apocalypse-with-a-timing-problem === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-apocalypse-with-a-timing-problem Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Apocalypse with a Timing Problem Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Frost Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 4d6e71d351f6213b048b8123af1f9f8c1d147f089bffbb0cf776ff725ccffa9d Here's a story the astronomer Harlow Shapley liked to tell. Shapley was a giant of his field — the man who showed that our sun is nowhere near the centre of the galaxy. And once, at a Harvard faculty gathering, Robert Frost cornered him with a question. How, exactly, is the world going to end? Shapley assumed he was joking. Then Frost came back and asked again. So Shapley gave him the scientist's answer. Either the earth is burned up by the sun, or it slides into a permanent ice age. A year or two later, Shapley said, he came across a poem. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Some say. That, he decided, was him. He'd been put in a poem. Lovely. Except. Fire and Ice was published in Harper's Magazine in December nineteen twenty. At that point Shapley wasn't at Harvard at all. He was in California, at the Mount Wilson Observatory. He didn't arrive at Harvard until nineteen twenty-one, and Frost didn't settle in there as a resident poet until the late nineteen thirties. So either the two men had an earlier chat nobody recorded, or a great astronomer's memory slipped. He told the story in nineteen sixty, forty years on. Stars aren't the only things that drift. Not that the poem needed him. Frost weighs up fire. Then he considers ice, which, he concludes, is also great, and would suffice. Sources: - "Fire and Ice", Harper's Magazine, December 1920 (in "A Group of Poems by Robert Frost"); collected in New Hampshire (1923). - Harlow Shapley's anecdote, told in a 1960 talk on "Science and the Arts", as recounted in Deirdre J. Fagan, Critical Companion to Robert Frost (2007). - Shapley's career dates: Mount Wilson Observatory 1914–21; director of the Harvard College Observatory from 1921. Frost's long-term Harvard appointments date from 1939. - The alternative source in Dante: Jeffrey Meyers, Robert Frost: A Biography (1996), on Canto 32 of the Inferno. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poem-that-lost-two-thirds-of-itself === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poem-that-lost-two-thirds-of-itself Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poem That Lost Two-Thirds of Itself Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Frost Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 33ad1ed1c7a10b6a7e35dcbcf7dd0b0de75de18f89c97138241ac1a849156b5d Nothing Gold Can Stay is eight lines long. It's one of the shortest famous poems in English. And, according to a recent Poetry Foundation essay, it started out three times the size. As that essay tells it, in March nineteen twenty, Robert Frost tucked a draft into a letter to his friend, the critic George Roy Elliott. It was called Nothing Golden Stays, and it ran to three stanzas. Twenty-four lines. The first stanza is recognisably the poem we know. Nature's first green is gold. Then Frost kept going, for two stanzas more. By the time it appeared in The Yale Review, in October nineteen twenty-three, those two stanzas had gone. What was left was eight lines in which everything slips away almost before you've noticed. Her early leaf's a flower, but only so an hour. So Eden sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Now, the gorgeous bit. By the same account, Frost didn't bin the cuttings. Years later, he recycled those two lost stanzas into a quite different poem, called It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand. Nothing gold can stay, apparently. But nothing useful gets thrown away, either. And the eight lines that survived went further than he could ever have guessed. In nineteen sixty-seven, a young novelist, S. E. Hinton, had a boy recite the poem in The Outsiders. Later his dying friend tells him: Stay gold, Ponyboy. Which is lovely. And exactly what the poem says can't be done. Sources: - Tyler Malone, "Robert Frost: 'Nothing Gold Can Stay'", Poetry Foundation Poem Guide (July 2024): the three-stanza draft "Nothing Golden Stays" sent to George R. Elliott in March 1920, and the reuse of the discarded stanzas. - Frost's letter to Elliott, March 1920: The Letters of Robert Frost, vol. 2, ed. Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, Robert Bernard Hass and Henry Atmore (Harvard University Press, 2016). - "Nothing Gold Can Stay", The Yale Review, October 1923; collected in New Hampshire (1923). - "It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand", A Witness Tree (1942). - S. E. Hinton, The Outsiders (1967). === text:story:poetry-tale-those-who-favour-fire === Owner: story:poetry-tale-those-who-favour-fire Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Those Who Favour Fire Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Frost Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 389f98c5e208802d20e7f7604f0c72fea442053caa92537d38f77d795643a5bc August, nineteen thirty-eight. Bread Loaf, the writers' conference high in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Archibald MacLeish, prize-winning poet and loud supporter of President Roosevelt, is giving a reading in one of the cottages. At the back sits Robert Frost. Sixty-four. Widowed that spring. And no admirer of MacLeish, or of Roosevelt. What follows comes from the novelist Wallace Stegner, who was there and wrote about it years later, and from the retellings that followed. Frost's friends have tended to play it down. So treat it as gossip. Eyewitness gossip, mind. The way it's told, Frost kept up a whispered commentary, loud enough to carry. Archie's poems, he said, all had the same tune. Then MacLeish reached one of his best-loved poems, You, Andrew Marvell. And somebody noticed smoke. Robert Frost had set some papers alight, and was busy beating out the flames and fanning away the smoke. An accident, naturally. Most of the room was happy to believe it. Later, when MacLeish was asked to read from a play, Stegner says the barbs got sharper, until the critic Bernard DeVoto told Frost, for God's sake, to let the man read. DeVoto, it seems, had had enough. The two men fell out, and DeVoto is reported to have told him he was a good poet, but a bad man. And Frost had already declared his position, years before. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire, I hold with those who favour fire. Especially during somebody else's reading. Sources: - Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974), the eyewitness account of the MacLeish reading at Bread Loaf, August 1938, the burning papers and DeVoto's intervention. - Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915–1938 (1970), for the same evening and for DeVoto's "good poet, but a bad man". - Archibald MacLeish, "You, Andrew Marvell" (1930). - Elinor Frost died in March 1938. - "Fire and Ice" (1920). Notes: - Frost's defenders have argued the fire was an accident and the heckling exaggerated; Stegner was present, but wrote more than thirty years later. === text:story:poetry-tale-too-bright-to-read === Owner: story:poetry-tale-too-bright-to-read Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Too Bright to Read Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Robert Frost Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 58d05ef3a18d7efa39c4c3bb26dab13b1485d0621dfcfc217a4227ddea478c4b The twentieth of January, nineteen sixty-one. Washington had been buried in snow the night before. Now the sun was out, hard and bright, bouncing off every white surface on Capitol Hill. Into that glare stepped Robert Frost. Eighty-six years old. The first poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration. He'd written a new poem for the day, called Dedication, and had it typed up. He began to read it. And he couldn't see it. The wind worried the pages. The light bleached the typing to nothing. He faltered, and started again. Lyndon Johnson, the new vice president, tried to shade the paper with his hat. It didn't help. So Frost gave up on the paper, and did what old poets do. He recited from memory. An older poem, The Gift Outright, the one Kennedy had asked for in the first place. Clear and steady. And at the end, by most accounts, he nudged a word for the new president, so the country was no longer what she would become, but what she will become. Here's what lingers. The poem he never got through ended with a promise: a golden age of poetry and power, of which this noonday's the beginning hour. Frost died two years later. Kennedy, not ten months after that. And Frost had already written the footnote, almost forty years before. Nothing gold can stay. Sources: - Film and audio of the inauguration of 20 January 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum; the Library's account of Kennedy's invitation to Frost and his request for "The Gift Outright". - "Dedication" (later published as "For John F. Kennedy His Inauguration", in In the Clearing, 1962); the typescript Frost could not read is in the Library of Congress. - "The Gift Outright" (1942), and the change of "would become" to "will become" at Kennedy's suggestion: Lawrance Thompson and R. H. Winnick, Robert Frost: The Later Years, 1938–1963 (1976); Stewart Udall's recollections. - "Nothing Gold Can Stay" (1923). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poet-and-the-champion-goat === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poet-and-the-champion-goat Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poet and the Champion Goat Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Carl Sandburg Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 08099d10d4d21ab9dd7331b3e54e24ebce4fe3362e467cb2dc5b23fd77dc5d55 Carl Sandburg won three Pulitzer Prizes. And in his own household, he still may not have been the biggest star. That was a goat. Her name was Puritan Jon's Jennifer the Second. In nineteen sixty she was recognised as the top-producing Toggenburg goat in the world. She belonged to Sandburg's wife, Lilian, whom the family called Paula. Paula was the sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, and she did nothing by halves. It began in Michigan in nineteen thirty-five. Their youngest daughter, Helga, wanted a cow. Carl, as Paula remembered it, said a cow was more than they could handle, but a goat would be just their size. In time, there were more than two hundred of them. In nineteen forty-five the whole family moved south, to a farm called Connemara in North Carolina, partly because the herd needed more room and a milder climate. Carl got peace and quiet to write. The goats got the pasture. And Jennifer? In one official test lasting three hundred and five days, she gave five thousand, seven hundred and fifty pounds of milk. That's more than two and a half thousand quarts. Most poets would be thrilled with a body of work like that. Back in nineteen eighteen, Carl had written a poem called Autumn Movement, about beautiful things passing. The old things go, he wrote, not one lasts. Paula's answer was rather more practical. Breed a better one. Sources: - Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site, Flat Rock, North Carolina (National Park Service): history of the Connemara herd, and the record of Puritan Jon's Jennifer II, a Toggenburg, whose 305-day test of 5,750 pounds of milk made her the top-producing Toggenburg in 1960. - Helga Sandburg, A Great and Glorious Romance: The Story of Carl Sandburg and Lilian Steichen (1978), and Where Love Begins (1989), for the first goat in Michigan in 1935 and Carl's "just our size". - Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography (1991), for the move to Connemara in 1945. - "Autumn Movement", Cornhuskers (1918). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poet-and-marilyn === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poet-and-marilyn Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poet and Marilyn Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Carl Sandburg Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 077ad723232ccf81165fc23d773138476250167cd991b2ae77531aa281305b76 Picture the most famous blonde in the world, nuzzling a white-haired poet of eighty-four. He stares straight ahead, utterly composed. That's Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg, and it's a real photograph. By Sandburg's own account, they met in Hollywood in nineteen sixty, when she made a point of coming over to introduce herself. Others put it a couple of years earlier. They had something in common: both of them worshipped Abraham Lincoln — and Sandburg had written the great Lincoln biography. In December nineteen sixty-one she turned up to meet him at a photographer's flat in New York. Three hours late, by the host's account. A month later, at a producer's house in Beverly Hills, she said she couldn't sleep. So, as the photographer Arnold Newman remembered it, the old poet showed her an exercise to cure it. Then the two of them danced. Newman photographed the lot. Her half-sister later wrote that Marilyn kept a bust of Sandburg, and carried it from room to room. She wanted him, she said, everywhere. That summer, she was dead. In Look magazine, Sandburg paid tribute to her vitality and her readiness for humour. He's reported to have said he believed he could have talked her out of it. Nobody can know that, of course. But some forty years before he met her, he'd already written the line. I cried over beautiful things, knowing no beautiful thing lasts. Sources: - Len Steckler's photographs of Monroe and Sandburg at his New York apartment, December 1961, and his account of her arriving three hours late. - Arnold Newman's photographs at the Beverly Hills home of producer Henry Weinstein, January 1962, including the exercise and the dancing. - Sandburg's 1960 work in Hollywood as a consultant on The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his account of meeting Monroe: Niven, Carl Sandburg (1991). - Berniece Baker Miracle and Mona Rae Miracle, My Sister Marilyn (1994), for the bust carried from room to room. - Sandburg's tribute in Look, September 1962. - "Autumn Movement", Cornhuskers (1918). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-tramp-poet-and-the-businessman === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-tramp-poet-and-the-businessman Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Tramp Poet and the Businessman Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Sara Teasdale Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 16fa25d4cd22070a321fed149955b297175fc7c70896a7c0d44b34bd72619589 By nineteen fourteen, the shy, delicate poet Sara Teasdale of Saint Louis had two men in pursuit. They could hardly have been less alike. One was Vachel Lindsay. A poet, and a loud one: he chanted his verse like a revival preacher. Not long before, he'd set off on foot from Springfield, Illinois, heading for New Mexico, swapping his poems for meals and a bed. He even printed a pamphlet for the purpose. Its title: Rhymes to be Traded for Bread. The other was Ernst Filsinger. A Saint Louis businessman. Steady. Solvent. And a long-time admirer of her poems. Lindsay wooed her by letter, constantly and extravagantly. In time he would dedicate a whole book to her, The Chinese Nightingale. But even Lindsay doubted he could give her the money and stability she would need. Rhymes for bread are romantic. They don't heat a house. In December nineteen fourteen, she married Filsinger. That much is on record. The legend — that she loved the wild poet and settled for the safe man — is reading between the lines. She certainly cared for Lindsay. Whether she was in love with him, nobody can prove. A few years later, in a poem called Barter, she gave the rest of us her advice: spend all you have for loveliness, buy it and never count the cost. If the legend's right, she was speaking from experience. She'd counted it. Sources: - William Drake, Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet (1979), and Margaret Haley Carpenter, Sara Teasdale: A Biography (1960), for the 1914 courtship and the marriage to Ernst Filsinger on 19 December 1914. - Vachel Lindsay, Rhymes to Be Traded for Bread (1912) and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty (1914), for the walking tour; The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (1917), dedicated to Teasdale. - The Lindsay–Teasdale letters, discussed in Drake. - "Barter", Love Songs (1917). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-love-poets-secret-exit === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-love-poets-secret-exit Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Love Poet’s Secret Exit Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Sara Teasdale Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: aa82bb257c8a766e3d8313ad995117374132ef038897d30db8105e31185b9eec In the late spring of nineteen twenty-nine, Sara Teasdale, America's great poet of longing, packed a bag and went to Reno, Nevada. Reno meant one thing. Divorce. Stay in Nevada for three months, and the state would happily unmarry you. Fifteen years earlier, she'd chosen a businessman, Ernst Filsinger, over the poet Vachel Lindsay, who adored her but doubted he could support her. Ernst was forever away on business. Now he'd sailed off to South Africa. Sara, her biographers say, dreaded gossip. She told almost nobody. Two friends knew. Ernst did not. So picture the summer. Ernst climbs into a tiny de Havilland Moth biplane in Johannesburg and is flown, stop by stop, all the way to Berlin. Weeks of it, hopping over Africa and Europe. And meanwhile his wife sits in Reno, quietly counting off the days. Now, the story of how he found out comes from those biographers too, not from a court record. It goes like this: she only told him when her lawyers insisted. He was, apparently, astonished. The divorce came through on the fifth of September. Years before, she had published a poem that begins: "I am not yours, not lost in you." Back then, it was a lament. She longed to be lost. In Reno, it was simply the paperwork. Sources: - Drake, Sara Teasdale: Woman and Poet (1979), for the Reno residence of 1929, the secrecy, Filsinger's travels in Africa and Europe, and his reaction. - The divorce decree, Washoe County, Nevada, 5 September 1929. - "I Am Not Yours", Rivers to the Sea (1915). Notes: - Nevada's three-month residency requirement for divorce was in force in 1929; it was cut to six weeks in 1931. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-bank-clerk-with-the-green-face === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-bank-clerk-with-the-green-face Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Bank Clerk with the Green Face Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: T. S. Eliot Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 7c4727b1bd09ed953e906493e00e815b1919f4ccd4f9b03994170bbc6159b005 In nineteen seventeen, a young American poet called T. S. Eliot took a job at Lloyds Bank in the City of London. He stayed eight years, in the foreign department, among the ledgers. Aldous Huxley went to see him there, and declared him the most bank-clerky of all bank clerks. So here's the gossip. In nineteen twenty-two, Virginia Woolf confided to her diary: I am not sure that he does not paint his lips. Around the same time, so the story goes, the critic Clive Bell told Virginia's sister, Vanessa, that Eliot had taken to powdering his face green. Clive thought it made him look interesting and cadaverous. And Osbert Sitwell later remembered seeing it for himself. A dusting of powder on Eliot's cheeks. Pale, but distinctly green — the colour of a forced lily-of-the-valley. Baffling, from a man who seemed to spend his entire life trying not to be noticed. Why green? Nobody knows. People have guessed at vanity, at illness, at a quiet bid for sympathy from an overworked, hard-up, unhappily married man. But it is guesswork. What we've actually got is two Bloomsbury gossips and a Sitwell, peering very hard at one man's cheekbones. And Eliot, of course, was ahead of them. Years before, in Prufrock, he had written about the need to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet. He just never said what colour. Sources: - Eliot's employment at Lloyds Bank, Colonial and Foreign Department, 1917–25: Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984); Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998). - Aldous Huxley's "most bank-clerky of all bank clerks": Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. Grover Smith (1969). - Virginia Woolf, diary, 1922: "I am not sure that he does not paint his lips" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 2, ed. Anne Olivier Bell). - Clive Bell's report to Vanessa Bell of the green powder, and Osbert Sitwell's recollection ("the colour of a forced lily-of-the-valley"): Ackroyd (1984); Gordon (1998); Sitwell's memoirs. - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). === text:story:poetry-tale-a-bucket-of-firecrackers === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-bucket-of-firecrackers Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Bucket of Firecrackers Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: T. S. Eliot Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a8a8ee194b4c25e8ab57370e08003244da0fa11f21d4fa91e84547f317b3f551 Picture T. S. Eliot. The sober suit. The rolled umbrella. A voice like evensong in an empty cathedral. The man who gave us The Waste Land. Now picture him in a little shop that sold exploding cigars, squirting buttonholes and soapy chocolates. A loyal customer, for years. That comes, as it's usually quoted, from Time magazine's cover story on him in nineteen fifty. And Time, by the same account, had a better story. Eliot was a director of the publishers Faber and Faber. Once, on the Fourth of July, this American-born gentleman, gone thoroughly British, set off a bucketful of firecrackers at a solemn board meeting. Between the chairman's legs. So that one was in print in his lifetime, and nobody seems to have denied it. The rest is shakier. You'll often hear that he sat visiting authors on whoopee cushions and then offered them an exploding cigar. Lovely. But nobody ever seems to name a victim, so file it under legend. His friends knew the mischief well. Ezra Pound called him Old Possum, the creature that plays dead while it's very much awake. The usual reading: Eliot was the solemn one inside the British establishment, playing possum. He liked the name enough to put it on the cover of his book of cats. So go back to Prufrock, that timid man with the bottoms of his trousers rolled, asking: Do I dare disturb the universe? His author did. With a bucket. Sources: - Time, "Mr. Eliot", cover story, 6 March 1950, the source of the joke-shop custom and the firecrackers at the Faber board meeting. - Ezra Pound's nickname "Old Possum"; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). - Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984), on Eliot's practical jokes at Faber and Faber. - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). Notes: - The whoopee-cushion and exploding-cigar stories circulate without a named victim and are treated here as legend. === text:story:poetry-tale-talking-of-duck-soup === Owner: story:poetry-tale-talking-of-duck-soup Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: Talking of Duck Soup Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: T. S. Eliot Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: dd284ca01b6ab091e3825210cdf452bbc2c99f904113183b506fe4a04fe2916f In nineteen sixty-one, the most solemn poet in the English language wrote a fan letter. To Groucho Marx. T. S. Eliot wanted a signed photograph. Groucho obliged, with a perfectly respectable studio portrait. Eliot wrote back, wanting the real thing. Visitors, he said, didn't recognise Groucho without the cigar and the rolling eyes. The proper Groucho went up on his wall, beside Yeats and the French poet Paul Valéry. They wrote for three years, plotting to meet. Finally, in June nineteen sixty-four, Groucho and his wife Eden came to dinner in London. And Groucho had done his homework. As he told his brother Gummo the next day, he'd read Murder in the Cathedral twice, The Waste Land three times, and, just in case of a conversational bottleneck, brushed up on King Lear. So when the cocktails came and the talk faltered, Groucho tossed in a line from The Waste Land. Eliot just smiled. Groucho tried King Lear. Eliot wasn't biting. What Eliot wanted to talk about was Animal Crackers, and A Night at the Opera. He quoted one of Groucho's own jokes back at him, one Groucho had long forgotten. Then he asked whether Groucho remembered the courtroom scene in Duck Soup. Groucho had forgotten every word. It was, he wrote, obviously the end of the Literary Evening. But very pleasant. They found they shared cigars, cats, and a weakness for puns. So, with apologies to Prufrock. In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. And at the dinner table, the poet himself, talking of Duck Soup. Sources: - The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx (1967): the correspondence with Eliot from 1961, the request for a photograph with cigar, and Groucho's letter to his brother Gummo describing the dinner of June 1964. - The signed photograph's place beside Yeats and Valéry: Eliot's letter in The Groucho Letters. - Duck Soup (1933), Animal Crackers (1930), A Night at the Opera (1935). - "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-speech-churchill-never-gave === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-speech-churchill-never-gave Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Speech Churchill Never Gave Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Claude McKay Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 9bdd6aaf1025132b5c4ac5ff5fcbf23aa6a4ff33954d5452084f4d3110a5f5e8 Summer, nineteen nineteen. White mobs are attacking Black communities across America. They'll call it the Red Summer. A young Jamaican poet is waiting tables in a dining car on the Pennsylvania Railroad. His name is Claude McKay. In those days, he said later, a sonnet exploded out of him. It begins: If we must die, let it not be like hogs, hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. A radical magazine, The Liberator, printed it that July. The same month, riots broke out in Washington and Chicago, and by September Black magazines were reprinting it. It was the only poem, he wrote, that he ever read to his crew. They were agitated. Now for the legend. Twenty-odd years later, so the story goes, Winston Churchill, during the war against Hitler, stood up before the House of Commons, or was it the United States Congress, and declaimed McKay's poem as a battle cry. It's a wonderful story. Writers repeated it for decades. It also appears never to have happened. A scholar called Lee Jenkins went looking. Hansard. The Congressional Record. The Churchill archive. The biographers. Not one line of McKay. The International Churchill Society now files it, politely, under myths. Which leaves the true version, and frankly it's better. The audience McKay remembered wasn't Parliament. It was a dining-car crew of Black waiters, rattling down the line, in the summer the country turned on them. Sources: - "If We Must Die", The Liberator, July 1919. - Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937), for the dining-car job on the Pennsylvania Railroad and the reading of the sonnet to his crew. - Lee M. Jenkins, "'If We Must Die': Winston Churchill and Claude McKay", Notes and Queries 50:3 (September 2003), tracing the Churchill legend and finding no record in Hansard, the Congressional Record or the Churchill archives. - International Churchill Society, "Churchill Quoted Radical Poet Claude McKay?" (Myths series, winstonchurchill.org). - The Red Summer of 1919: Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (2011). Notes: - The Churchill story was repeated by, among others, Melvin B. Tolson and Arna Bontemps; it appears to have grown after the war. === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poet-moscow-wouldnt-put-down === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poet-moscow-wouldnt-put-down Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poet Moscow Wouldn’t Put Down Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Claude McKay Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a991d14d40e3592e7432b26ab342e87fe9258485b52b63f2829b335a6693f85b In November nineteen twenty-two, the Jamaican poet Claude McKay arrived in Soviet Russia. Within days, Moscow was throwing him into the air. Literally. He'd come for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, and he found himself a celebrity. On the seventh of November, the fifth anniversary of the revolution, he and his friend Max Eastman tried to push through the crowds on Tverskaya Street. The crowd had other ideas. In McKay's own telling, he was lifted clean off his feet, tossed up, caught, and passed along by dozens of strapping young men. He met Bolshevik leaders. He addressed the Congress itself. For a man who had come from an America of lynchings and race riots, it was dizzying. Now, that's McKay's version, and he was a poet, not a stenographer. He wrote it up for The Crisis a year later, and went back over the whole Russian trip in his memoir in nineteen thirty-seven, by which time he'd fallen out with communism altogether. And here's the joke. Months earlier, in Harlem Shadows, he'd published After the Winter, a poem about escaping the cold. It dreams of leaving with a lover: "We'll turn our faces southward, love, toward the summer isle." He went to Moscow. In November. Sources: - Claude McKay, "Soviet Russia and the Negro", The Crisis, December 1923 and January 1924. - A Long Way from Home (1937), Part Four, "The Magic Pilgrimage", for the crowd on Tverskaya Street, the Fourth Congress of the Comintern (November–December 1922) and the address to the Congress. - Wayne F. Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (1987). - "After the Winter", Harlem Shadows (1922). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-poetry-contest-that-picked-the-wrong-winner === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-poetry-contest-that-picked-the-wrong-winner Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Poetry Contest That Picked the Wrong Winner Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: cb502bbe615dee988bad2a88f8f40733cac927308eef264b478c2620d7089592 In August nineteen twelve, a hard-up twenty-year-old stood up at a party at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine, where her sister worked, and recited a long poem she'd written. It was called Renascence. A guest from New York, Caroline Dow of the YWCA, was listening. Hold on to her. She matters later. That same year the poem went in for a competition run by an anthology called The Lyric Year. The young woman had signed herself E. Vincent Millay. The editor was so impressed that, as he later recalled, he wrote back to Mister Millay. The prizes went to three men. Renascence came fourth, which in this contest meant no money at all. And the poetry world rather lost its temper. Even the winner, Orrick Johns, felt awkward. He later admitted the prize embarrassed him, and he stayed away from the prize dinner. Then the poet Arthur Davison Ficke wrote that no sweet young thing of twenty ever ended a poem where this one ends. That took, he reckoned, a brawny male of forty-five. She wrote back, and enclosed her photograph. "The brawny male sends his picture," she said, adding that she had to laugh. Meanwhile Caroline Dow helped raise the money to send her to college. By the following autumn, Millay was at Vassar. Years later she published a little poem called Travel, about hearing every train whistle, day and night. It ends: "there isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going." Fourth place, as it turned out, was a perfectly good ticket. Sources: - The Lyric Year, ed. Ferdinand Earle (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), in which "Renascence" appeared under the name E. Vincent Millay; the prizes went to Orrick Johns, Thomas Augustine Daly and George Sterling. - The Whitehall Inn recitation of August 1912, Caroline B. Dow of the YWCA, and the fundraising for Vassar: Nancy Milford, Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001). - Arthur Davison Ficke's "brawny male of forty-five" and Millay's reply enclosing her photograph: Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay, ed. Allan Ross Macdougall (1952). - Orrick Johns, Time of Our Lives (1937), on his embarrassment at winning and his absence from the dinner. - "Travel", Second April (1921). === text:story:poetry-tale-no-dead-shelleys-on-my-doorstep === Owner: story:poetry-tale-no-dead-shelleys-on-my-doorstep Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: No Dead Shelleys on My Doorstep Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: c8d309ae1cc04c3a16ab79f450e5060bab14e992a421a52c0d31d2e6d7a44afd Vassar College, around nineteen sixteen. A small redhead is working her way through the rulebook, breaking most of it. Edna Saint Vincent Millay. Vincent, to her friends. The college president, Henry MacCracken, told this one fifty years later. Students could skip classes by sending in a sick excuse. One morning, Vincent sent in hers. By ten o'clock he saw her from his office window, trying to kick out the light in the chandelier on top of the Taylor Hall arch. A remarkable recovery. He could have had her expelled. He didn't. As MacCracken put it, he didn't want any dead Shelleys on his doorstep. Shelley, remember, was thrown out of Oxford. Her answer is the line to keep. On those terms, she said, I think I can continue to live in this hell-hole. That's an old man's memory, fifty years on. Take it with a pinch of salt. What's on paper is her senior year. In her final weeks, she stayed out of town overnight with friends, forgetting, she told her family, that she'd already lost her privileges. She was suspended, and she wrote home that the faculty had taken away her part in Commencement. Her classmates protested, and she was allowed to graduate after all. A few years later she summed up her whole philosophy in four lines. My candle burns at both ends. It will not last the night. But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light. She'd started on the chandeliers. Sources: - Henry Noble MacCracken, president of Vassar 1915–46, recalling the chandelier episode and his remark about "dead Shelleys", as quoted in Milford, Savage Beauty (2001), and in the Vassar Encyclopedia (vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu). - Millay's letters home of May–June 1917 on her suspension and the threat to her part in Commencement: Letters, ed. Macdougall (1952). - "First Fig", A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). Notes: - Shelley's expulsion from Oxford is the subject of Tale 09. === text:story:poetry-tale-a-marriage-with-different-rules === Owner: story:poetry-tale-a-marriage-with-different-rules Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: A Marriage with Different Rules Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: Edna St. Vincent Millay Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: a98960c917c659a04cace1d4ed0c82d64c2e3d2c2671757b59456fcc695bd819 In the summer of nineteen twenty-three, Edna Saint Vincent Millay got married at Croton-on-Hudson. Straight after the ceremony, her brand-new husband drove her to Manhattan for emergency surgery. She told her old friend Arthur Ficke that if she died now, at least she'd be immortal. She'd just won the Pulitzer Prize. She had a point. The husband was Eugen Boissevain, a Dutch importer, a widower, and a self-proclaimed feminist. His first wife had been the suffragist Inez Milholland. And, as the biographers tell it, he set about arranging life so that Millay could write. He ran the house. He handled the money, the reading tours and the doctors. In time he gave up his business altogether. The other rules were just as unusual. This was an open marriage. By most accounts, both of them took other lovers. In nineteen twenty-eight, at a reading in Chicago, she met George Dillon, a young poet fourteen years her junior. The affair that followed inspired Fatal Interview, a sequence of fifty-two sonnets. Eugen knew. The biographers agree on that much. How he felt about it is another matter, and nobody can honestly say. A couple of years before the wedding, she'd published Song of a Second April, about a spring in which everything comes back except one person. It ends: "only you are gone, you that alone I cared to keep." Eugen took the opposite view. As far as anyone can tell, he never tried to keep her. She stayed for twenty-six years, until his death. Sources: - The wedding at Croton-on-Hudson on 18 July 1923, the same-day surgery, and the remark to Ficke about immortality: Milford, Savage Beauty (2001); Daniel Mark Epstein, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed: The Loves and Love Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001). - The 1923 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver and other work). - Eugen Boissevain's first marriage to Inez Milholland (d. 1916), his management of Millay's affairs, and the open marriage: Milford; Epstein. - George Dillon, met at a Chicago reading in 1928; Fatal Interview (1931). - "Song of a Second April", Second April (1921). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-wrong-answer === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-wrong-answer Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Wrong Answer Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: E. E. Cummings Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: d3747d76dd69bf37ecbead373f4cda3a807e33e7ab1d7aeccf7ce3ccb125ba12 Nineteen seventeen. Edward Estlin Cummings, twenty-two, is driving ambulances in France. His friend William Slater Brown is writing letters home. The French censors opened them. Brown had written that the French soldiers were despondent, and didn't believe Germany would be beaten. In wartime, that was enough for suspicion of espionage. In late September, both men were arrested. By his own account, when asked whether he hated the Germans, Cummings gave an honest answer. No. He liked the French very much. Wrong answer. Off he went to a detention camp at La Ferté-Macé, in Normandy, to sleep in one vast, filthy room with dozens of other prisoners. Back home in Massachusetts, his family was living on cables. One said their son had sailed on the Antilles, a ship sunk by a German submarine, and was reported lost. The next called that a cruel error. Still no son. So his father, the Reverend Edward Cummings, wrote to the President of the United States. A long, formal, furious letter. He was not speaking for his son alone, he told Woodrow Wilson. Eleven days later, Cummings was free. Whether the letter did it is doubtful. State Department files suggest his release was already on its way. He turned the whole ordeal into a book, The Enormous Room. A man locked up over words in a letter. And in some copies of his book, someone inked out one rude word by hand. Since feeling is first, he wrote later, who pays any attention to the syntax of things? The French censors did. Sources: - E. E. Cummings, The Enormous Room (1922), and the 1934 Modern Library edition, whose foreword prints the Rev. Edward Cummings's letter to President Wilson of 8 December 1917. - Richard S. Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror: A Biography of E. E. Cummings (1980), for the arrest of Cummings and William Slater Brown in September 1917, the interrogation, La Ferté-Macé, the cables about the Antilles, and the State Department record of the release. - The SS Antilles was torpedoed on 17 October 1917. - "since feeling is first", is 5 (1926). === text:story:poetry-tale-the-portrait-with-a-secret === Owner: story:poetry-tale-the-portrait-with-a-secret Rights scope: Hello Doggo controlled contributions only Title: The Portrait with a Secret Author: Hello Doggo About the poet: E. E. Cummings Hello Doggo's public creative work is offered without attribution, payment, registration, or response, to the broadest extent of the rights Hello Doggo owns or controls. Hello Doggo will not claim an output solely because this material was used to make it. Text SHA-256: 064c587d238d7a88a13d8c34aeed76a6a82db280efb6e02a55310cf44562743e Nineteen forty-eight. A young woman sits for her portrait. The painter is E. E. Cummings, the famous poet. She's fond of him. Rather more than fond, according to some accounts. There's one thing she doesn't know. He's her father. Nancy Thayer was born in December nineteen nineteen. Her mother, Elaine, was married to Scofield Thayer, the wealthy editor of The Dial — and Cummings's friend and patron. Elaine and Cummings were lovers. Thayer gave the baby his name. Cummings and Elaine did eventually marry, in nineteen twenty-four. It lasted less than a year. Elaine left him for an Irishman, Frank MacDermot, took Nancy away to Ireland, and Cummings, for all his visiting rights, more or less lost her. Then, in the nineteen-forties, she drifted back into his life — by now married to a grandson of Theodore Roosevelt — and agreed to sit for him. Now, here's where the stories diverge. One version has Nancy confessing she was falling for him. Another has her simply asking about her father, Scofield Thayer. The accounts don't agree on exactly what was said. But on one of her visits, with his partner out of the room, Cummings told her the truth. And then — this is the bit that stings — he'd rather she didn't call him Father. Estlin would do. This is the poet who famously shrank his capital letters down to size. Apparently that included the F in Father. Sources: - Kennedy, Dreams in the Mirror (1980); Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, E. E. Cummings: A Biography (2004); Susan Cheever, E. E. Cummings: A Life (2014), for Nancy's birth in December 1919, Elaine Orr Thayer's marriage to Scofield Thayer, the 1924 marriage to Cummings, the move to Ireland with Frank MacDermot, and the 1948 sittings at which Cummings told Nancy the truth. - Nancy Thayer's marriage to Willard Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. - Cummings's partner at the time, Marion Morehouse. Notes: - The accounts of what passed between father and daughter differ between the biographers, as the tale says; Nancy Thayer Andrews gave her own version in later interviews.