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Thom Gunn
Thomson William "Thom" Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with Movement (literature), The Movement, and his later poetry in America, where he adopted a looser, free-verse style. Gunn wrote about his experience moving to San Francisco from England. He received numerous literary honors, and his best poems are reputed to possess a restrained elegance of philosophy. Life and career Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, the son of Bert Gunn. Both of his parents were journalists. They divorced when he was 10 years old. When he was a teenager his mother committed suicide. It was she who had sparked in him a love of reading, including an interest in the work of Christopher Marlowe, John Keats, John Milton, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended University College School in Hampstead, London, then spent two years doing national service ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Movement (literature)
The Movement was a term coined in 1954 by J. D. Scott, literary editor of ''The Spectator'', to describe a group of writers including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, Donald Davie, D. J. Enright, John Wain, Elizabeth Jennings (poet), Elizabeth Jennings, Thom Gunn and Robert Conquest. The Movement was quintessentially English in character; poets from other parts of the United Kingdom were not involved. Description Although considered a literary group, members of the Movement saw themselves more as an actual literary movement, with each writer sharing a common purpose. To these poets, good poetry meant simple, sensuous content and traditional, conventional and dignified form. The Movement's importance includes its worldview, which took into account the collapse of the British Empire and the United Kingdom's drastically reduced power and influence over world geo-politics. The group's objective was to prove the importance of traditional English poetry, over the American-led innovati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Boyd McDonald (pornographer)
Boyd McDonald (1925 – September 1993) was an American writer, editor, and publisher of the long-running gay pornography and erotic literature zine '' S.T.H.'', or ''Straight to Hell''. He sometimes prefixed his name with the title of "Reverend," from a mail-order divinity degree he purchased. Life Early life McDonald was born in South Dakota in 1925. He attended Lake Preston, South Dakota High School, but did not graduate. Despite his lack of a high school diploma, he was admitted to Harvard University and given a small scholarship. He was soon drafted into the Army. After discharge from the Army he returned to Harvard (Eliot House) and earned a degree in American history and literature. He said that "of all the benefits I got from Harvard, I am most grateful for the opportunity it gave me, albeit unwittingly, to come out fast and thoroughly."Jones, p. 20. He frequently attended gay parties "that quickly turned into orgies;" his "first serious lover" was a straight football ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for '' Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled '' The Changing Light at Sandover'' (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays. Early life James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City, to Charles E. Merrill (1885–1956), the founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm, and Hellen Ingram Merrill (1898–2000), a society reporter and publisher from Jacksonville, Florida. He was born at a residence which would become the site of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, which Merrill would lament in the poem " 18 West 11th Street" (1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stanford
Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth governor of and then-incumbent United States senator representing California) and his wife, Jane, in memory of their only child, Leland Jr. The university admitted its first students in 1891, opening as a coeducational and non-denominational institution. It struggled financially after Leland died in 1893 and again after much of the campus was damaged by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Following World War II, university provost Frederick Terman inspired an entrepreneurial culture to build a self-sufficient local industry (later Silicon Valley). In 1951, Stanford Research Park was established in Palo Alto as the world's first university research park. By 2021, the university had 2,288 tenure-line faculty, senior fellows, center fellows, and medical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ) and later christened by Giovanni Boccaccio, is widely considered one of the most important poems of the Middle Ages and the greatest literary work in the Italian language. Dante chose to write in the vernacular, specifically, his own Tuscan dialect, at a time when much literature was still written in Latin, which was accessible only to educated readers, and many of his fellow Italian poets wrote in French or Provençal dialect, Provençal. His ' (''On Eloquence in the Vernacular'') was one of the first scholarly defenses of the vernacular. His use of the Florentine dialect for works such as ''La Vita Nuova, The New Life'' (1295) and ''Divine Comedy'' helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language. His wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Terza Rima
''Terza rima '' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three-line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rhyme for the first and third lines in the tercet that follows (ABA BCB CDC). The poem or poem-section may have any number of lines (not divisible by 3), but it ends with either a single line or a couplet, which repeats the rhyme of the middle line of the previous tercet (YZY Z or YZY ZZ). ''Terza rima'' was invented early in the fourteenth century by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri for his narrative poem the ''Divine Comedy'', which he set in hendecasyllabic lines. In English, poets often use iambic pentameter. ''Terza rima'' is a challenging form for a poet, and it did not become common in the century following its invention. The form is especially challenging in languages that are inherently less rich in rhymes than Italian. ''Terza r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with Lucien Carr, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Best known for his poem " Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956, and a subsequent obscenity trial in 1957 attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made male homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters (October 17, 1900 – January 25, 1968) was an American poet and literary critic. Life Winters was born in Chicago, Illinois and lived there until 1919 except for brief stays in Seattle and Pasadena, where his grandparents lived. He attended the University of Chicago for four-quarters in 1917–18, where he was a member of a literary circle that included Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and his future wife Janet Lewis. In the winter of 1918–19 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and underwent treatment for two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico. During his recuperation he wrote and published some of his early poems. On his release from the sanitarium he taught in high schools in nearby mining towns. In 1923 Winters published one of his first critical essays, "Notes on the Mechanics of the Poetic Image," in the expatriate literary journal ''Secession''. That same year he enrolled at the University of Colorado, where he achieved his BA and MA degrees in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quintain (poetry)
A quintain or pentastich is any poetic form containing five lines. Examples include the tanka, the cinquain, the quintilla, Shakespeare's Sonnet 99, and the limerick. Examples Sonnet 99 (first stanza) The forward violet thus did I chide: Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells If not from my love’s breath? The purple pride Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells, In my love’s veins thou hast too grossly dyed. — William Shakespeare Autumn Song Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the heart feels a languid grief Laid on it for a covering, And how sleep seems a goodly thing In Autumn at the fall of the leaf? And how the swift beat of the brain Falters because it is in vain, In Autumn at the fall of the leaf Knowest thou not? and how the chief Of joys seems—not to suffer pain? Know'st thou not at the fall of the leaf How the soul feels like a dried sheaf Bound up at length ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free Verse
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllabic Verse
Syllabic verse is a poetic form having a fixed or constrained number of syllables per line, while stress, quantity, or tone play a distinctly secondary role—or no role at all—in the verse structure. It is common in languages that are syllable-timed, such as French or Finnish, as opposed to stress-timed languages such as English, in which accentual verse and accentual-syllabic verse are more common. Overview Many European languages have significant syllabic verse traditions, notably Italian, Spanish, French, and the Baltic and Slavic languages. These traditions often permeate both folk and literary verse, and have evolved gradually over hundreds or thousands of years. In a sense, the metrical tradition is older than the languages themselves, since it (like the languages) descended from Proto-Indo-European. It is often implied, incorrectly, that word stress plays no part in the syllabic prosody of these languages. While word stress in most of these languages is much less ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edmund White
Edmund Valentine White III (January 13, 1940 – June 3, 2025) was an American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer, and essayist. A pioneering figure in LGBTQ and especially gay literature after the Stonewall riots, he wrote with rare candor about gay identity, relationships, and sex. His work emerged as part of an increasingly solidified and visible LGBTQ community, helping to reshape public narratives at a time when coming out was still a dangerous, even radical act. His writing, noted for intimate depth and literary elegance, includes the semi-autobiographical trilogy '' A Boy's Own Story'' (1982), '' The Beautiful Room Is Empty'' (1988), and '' The Farewell Symphony'' (1997). He also co-authored '' The Joy of Gay Sex'' (1977), promoting sex-positive discourse. Born in Cincinnati and raised outside Chicago, White studied Chinese at the University of Michigan after initially declining admission to Harvard University in order to adhere to conversion therapy. He ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
