|
George Reavey
George Reavey (1 May 1907 – 11 August 1976) was a Russian-born Irish surrealist poet, publisher, translator and art collector. He was also Samuel Beckett's first literary agent. In addition to his own poetry, Reavey's translations and critical prose helped introduce 20th century Russian poetry to an English-speaking audience. He was also the first publisher to bring out a collection of English translations of the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard. Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of Reavey's literary career was his claim, made to the New York press and to British editor and publisher Alan Clodd, that he had written '' The Painted Bird'' for Jerzy Kosiński. Early life and work Reavey's father, Daniel Reavey, was a flax engineer from Belfast and his mother, Sophia Turchenko, was Russian. He was born in Vitebsk and the family moved to Nizhni Novgorod in 1909, where the young poet was educated and became a fluent Russian speaker. When Daniel was arrested in 1919, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Empson
Sir William Empson (27 September 1906 – 15 April 1984) was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, '' Seven Types of Ambiguity'', published in 1930. Jonathan Bate has written that the three greatest English literary critics of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries are Johnson, Hazlitt and Empson, "not least because they are the funniest". Background and education Empson was the son of Arthur Reginald Empson of Yokefleet Hall, East Yorkshire. His mother was Laura, daughter of Richard Mickelthwait, JP, of Ardsley House, Yorkshire. He was a first cousin of the twins David and Richard Atcherley. Empson first discovered his great skill and interest in mathematics at his preparatory school. He won an entrance scholarship to Winchester College, where he excelled as a student and received what he later described as "a ripping education" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vers Libre
Free verse is an open form of poetry which does not use a prescribed or regular meter or rhyme and tends to follow the rhythm of natural or irregular speech. Free verse encompasses a large range of poetic form, and the distinction between free verse and other forms (such as prose) is often ambiguous. History Though individual examples of English free verse poetry surfaced before the 20th-century (parts of John Milton's '' Samson Agonistes'' or the majority of Walt Whitman's poetry, for example), free verse is generally considered an early 20th century innovation of the late 19th-century French ''vers libre''. T. E. Hulme and F. S. Flint first introduced the form to the London-based Poets' Club in 1909. This later became the heart of the Imagist movement through Flint's advocacy of the genre. Imagism, in the wake of French Symbolism (i.e. vers libre of French Symbolist poets) was the wellspring out of which the main current of Modernism in English flowed. T. S. Eliot later ide ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New Review
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Putnam
Samuel Putnam (October 10, 1892 – January 15, 1950) was an American translator and scholar of Romance languages. He authored ''Paris Was Our Mistress'', a memoir on writers and artists associated with the American ex-patriate community in Paris in the 1920s and early 1930s. Work Putnam's most famous work is his 1949 English translation of Miguel de Cervantes' ''Don Quixote''. It is the first version of the work in contemporary English; archaic language remains, but less than in earlier English versions. The language is formal when spoken by educated characters, but seldom old-fashioned, while the peasant characters speak in colloquial modern English. Putnam worked on the translation for 12 years. He also published a companion volume, ''The Portable Cervantes'', which included an abridged version of his translation, in addition to English versions of two of Cervantes' ''Novelas ejemplares''. Daniel Eisenberg, comparing translations of ''Don Quixote'', called Putnam's translat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transition (literary Journal)
''transition'' was an experimental literary journal that featured surrealist, expressionist, and Dada art and artists. It was founded in 1927 by Maria McDonald and her husband Eugene Jolas and published in Paris, France. They were later assisted by editors Elliot Paul (April 1927 – March 1928), Robert Sage (October 1927 – Fall 1928), and James Johnson Sweeney (June 1936 – May 1938). After the Second World War, the publishing license of ''transition'' was transferred from the Jolases and McDonald to Georges Duthuit who capitalized the title to ''Transition'' (1948–1950) and changed its focus. Origins The literary journal was intended as an outlet for experimental writing and featured modernist, surrealist and other linguistically innovative writing and also contributions by visual artists, critics, and political activists. It ran until spring 1938. A total of 27 issues were produced. It was distributed primarily through Shakespeare and Company, the Paris bookstore ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denis Devlin
Denis Devlin (15 April 1908 – 21 August 1959) was, along with Samuel Beckett, Thomas MacGreevy and Brian Coffey, one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s. He was also a career diplomat. Early life and studies He was born in Greenock, Scotland of Irish parents, and his family returned to live in Dublin in 1918. He studied at Belvedere College and, from 1926, as a seminarian for the Roman Catholic priesthood at Clonliffe College. As part of his studies, he attended a degree course in modern languages at University College Dublin (UCD), where he met and befriended Brian Coffey. Together they published a joint collection, ''Poems'', in 1930. In 1927, Devlin abandoned the priesthood and left Clonliffe. He graduated with from UCD his BA in 1930 and spent that summer on the Blasket Islands to improve his spoken Irish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studied literature at Munich University and the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting, amongst others, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Brian Coffey
Brian Coffey (8 June 1905 – 14 April 1995) was an Irish poet and publisher. His work was informed by his Catholicism, his background in science and philosophy, and his connection to French surrealism. He was close to an intellectual European Catholic tradition and mainstream Irish Catholic culture. Two of his long poems, ''Advent'' (1975) and ''Death of Hektor'' (1979), were widely considered to be important works in the canon of Irish poetic modernism. He also ran Advent Books, a small press, during the 1960s and 1970s. Early life and work Coffey was born in Dublin in the suburb of Dún Laoghaire. He attended the Mount St Benedict boarding school in Gorey, County Wexford from 1917 to 1919 and then James Joyce's old school, Clongowes Wood College, in Clane, County Kildare, from 1919 until 1922. In 1923, he went to France to study for a Bachelor's degree in Classical Studies at the Institution St Vincent, Senlis, Oise. His father, Denis J. Coffey, was a professor of ana ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (born James Augusta Joyce; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the twentieth century. Joyce's novel ''Ulysses (novel), Ulysses'' (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's ''Odyssey'' are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection ''Dubliners'' (1914) and the novels ''A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'' (1916) and ''Finnegans Wake'' (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism. Born in Dublin into a middle-class family, Joyce attended the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare, then, briefly, the Congregation of Christian Brothers, Christian Brothers–run O'Connell School. Despite the chaotic family li ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas MacGreevy
Thomas MacGreevy (born Thomas McGreevy; 26 October 1893 – 16 March 1967) was a pivotal figure in the history of Irish literary modernism. A poet, he was also director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963 and served on the first Irish Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon). Early life Thomas McGreevy was born in Tarbert, County Kerry, the son of a Royal Irish Constabulary policeman and a primary school teacher. At the age of 16, he joined the British Civil Service as a boy clerk. At the outbreak of the First World War he was promoted to an intelligence post with the Admiralty. He enlisted in 1916, and saw active service at the Battle of Ypres Salient and the Somme, being wounded twice. After the war he studied at Trinity College, Dublin, in whose library his papers are now held. He then became involved in various library organisations, began publishing articles in Irish periodicals, and wrote his first poems. In 1941, he changed the spelling of his sur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (30 May 1960) was a Russian and Soviet poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator. Composed in 1917, Pasternak's first book of poems, ''My Sister, Life'', was published in Berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the Russian language. Pasternak's translations of stage plays by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Schiller, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Calderón de la Barca and William Shakespeare, Shakespeare remain very popular with Russian audiences. Pasternak was the author of ''Doctor Zhivago (novel), Doctor Zhivago'' (1957), a novel that takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Second World War. ''Doctor Zhivago'' was rejected for publication in the Soviet Union, USSR, but the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and was first published there in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, an event that enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which forced him ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julian Trevelyan
Julian Otto Trevelyan (20 February 1910 – 12 July 1988) was an English artist and poet. Early life Trevelyan was the only child to survive to adulthood of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven. His grandfather was the liberal politician Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and his uncle the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan; he is the great-uncle of his namesake, Julian Trevelyan the pianist. Julian Trevelyan was educated at Bedales School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English Literature. Artistic career He moved to Paris to become an artist, enrolling at Atelier Dix-Sept, Stanley William Hayter's engraving school, where he learned etching. He worked alongside artists including Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. In 1935, Trevelyan bought Durham Wharf, beside the river Thames in Hammersmith, London. This became his home and studio for the rest of his life and was a source of artistic inspiration to him. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
