Valentine Ackland (20 May 1906– 9 November 1969) was an English poet, an important figure in the emergence of modernism in twentieth-century British poetry. Life Ackland was born Mary Kathleen Macrory Ackland to Robert Craig Ackland and his wife Ruth Kathleen (née Macrory), and nicknamed “Molly” by her family. With no sons born to the family, Valentine’s father, a West End London dentist, worked at making a symbolic son of Molly, teaching her to shoot rifles and to box. This attention to Molly made her sister Joan Alice Elizabeth (b. 1898) immensely jealous. Older by eight years, Joan psychologically tormented and physically abused Molly as a way of unleashing her jealousy and anger. Molly received an Anglo-Catholic upbringing in Norfolk and a convent school education in London. In 1925 at the age of nineteen, she impetuously married Richard Turpin, a homosexual youth who was unable to consummate their marriage. Upon her marriage, she was also received into the Catholic church, a religion that she later abandoned, returned to, and then abandoned again in the last decade of her life. In less than a year, she had her marriage to Turpin annulled, and, despite numerous pleas from her family and much psychological pressure from them, never returned to a serious relationship with a man again. Alert to social mores of her day, she became aware of societal patterns of male privilege and female submission set about challenging the female gender identifications expected of her. She took to wearing men’s clothing, cut her hair in a short style called the Eton crop, and was at times mistaken for a handsome young boy. She changed her name to the androgynous Valentine Ackland when she decided to become a serious poet in the late 1920s. Her poetry appeared in British and American literary journals during the 1920s to the 1940s, but Ackland deeply regretted that she never became a noted and widely read poet. In this regard, much of her poetry was published posthumously, and she received little attention from critics until a revival of interest in her work in the 1970s. In 1930, Ackland was introduced to the short story writer and novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner, with whom she had a lifelong relationship, albeit tumultuous at times given Ackland’s increasing alcoholism and infidelities. Warner was twelve years older than Ackland, and the two lived together until Ackland’s death from breast cancer in 1969. Warner went on to outlive Ackland by nine years, dying in 1978. The pair were together for thirty-nine years. Ackland’s reflections upon her relationship with Warner and the former’s long affair with American heiress and writer Elizabeth Wade White (1908–1994), were posthumously published in For Sylvia: An Honest Account (1985). Ackland was a highly emotional woman prone to numerous self-doubts and shifts in emotions and intellectual interests. She was responsible for involving Warner in membership in the Communist Party in the 1930s and in 1937 she visited Valencia and Benicàssim within the framework of the Spanish Civil War as well as numerous socialist and pacifist activities. The two women’s involvement in the Communist Party came under investigation by the British government in the late 1930s and remained an open file until 1957, when the investigation was halted. Ackland and Warner supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, and Ackland criticised the British government for its indifference to the “sufferings of the Spanish people at the grass-roots level” in her poem "Instructions from England, 1936". Note nothing of why or how, enquire no deeper than you need into what set these veins on fire, Note simply that they bleed. After World War II, Ackland turned her attention to confessional poetry and a memoir concerning her relationship with Warner and its many emotional issues as Ackland pursued involvements with other women. At first, Warner was tolerant with her younger lover’s dalliances, but the seriousness and length of Ackland’s relationship with Elizabeth Wade White was distressing to Warner and also pushed her relationship with Ackland to the edge. Ackland’s distresses at loving two women simultaneously and of endeavouring to balance her feelings for each woman with the responsibilities and commitments of her primary relationship with Warner are presented openly in Ackland’s poetry and in her memoir of this period. Ackland was struggling with additional doubts and conflicts during this period as well. She continued to battle her alcoholism, and she was undergoing shifts in her political and religious alliances. Doubts about her sexual identity and her identity as a poet as well as about her Christian faith and her political convictions are evident in her poetry. In 1934, Ackland and Warner produced a volume of poetry, “Whether a Dove or a Seagull” that was an unusual and democratic experiment in writing as none of the poems is ascribed to either author. The volume was also an attempt by Warner to introduce Ackland to publication since Warner had an already established reputation as a novelist, and her work was widely read in the 1930s. The volume was controversial for its frank discussion of lesbianism at a time and in a society in which lesbianism was regarded as deviant and immoral behaviour. In 1937, Ackland and Warner moved from rural Dorset to a house near Dorchester. Both became involved with Communist ideals and issues, with Ackland writing a column called “Country Dealings” concerning rural poverty for the “Daily Worker” and the “Left Review.” In 1939, the two women attended the American Writers Congress in New York City to consider the loss of democracy in Europe and returned when World War II broke out. Ackland’s poetry of this period attempted to capture the political dynamics she saw at work, but she had a difficult time as a poet mastering the craft of combining political polemics with her natural tendency toward lyrical expression. In a similar vein, her distress over the loss of democracy in Europe became a broader identification with Existentialism and the sense that the human condition itself was hopeless. Death Ackland died on 9 November 1969 from breast cancer that had metastasised to her lungs. She was buried together with Sylvia Townsend Warner in St Nicholas’s churchyard at Chaldon Herring with the inscription from Horace Non omnis moriar (Ode III.30, “I shall not wholly die”) on her gravestone. Critical assessment Ackland’s poetry—largely neglected after the 1940s—came into a resurgence of interest with the emergence of both women’s studies and of lesbian literature. Contemporary critical reaction finds much to value in Ackland’s poetry and confessional writings, which are of historical interest to the development of self-reflective, modernist poetry, and to the political and cultural issues of the 1930s and 1940s. One example of a recent critical analysis is Wendy Milford’s 1988 study, This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. With regard to her self-reflection as a poet, Ackland exhibits themes and explorations similar to poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Of interest, too, is Ackland’s explorations of terminal illness as her life was drawing to a close from cancer. In her later years, Ackland turned from Catholicism to Quaker beliefs and also to involvement with issues of environmentalism. In overall assessment, Milford considers the two-minds at work in Ackland’s work. She cites as examples Ackland’s focus on optimism and dread, the longing for emotional closeness and the fear of intimacy, self-assertion and self-negation, the search for privacy and solitude amidst the longing for connection and social acceptance as a lesbian and as a noteworthy poet. In this regard, Ackland shares much thematically—though not in artistic achievement—with metaphysical poets like John Donne and Philip Larkin in the effort to see personal experience from multiple perspectives and never fully resting with one perspective or another. A contemporary examination of Ackland’s poetry and essays was published by Carcanet Press in 2008 titled Journey from Winter: Selected Poems. The volume is edited by Frances Bingham, who also provides a contextual and critical introduction. Bibliography * Whether a Dove or a Seagull (1934) volume of poetry with Sylvia Townsend Warner * Twenty-Eight Poems (1957) privately printed in London * Later Poems by Valentine Ackland (1970) * The Nature of the Moment (1973) * Further Poems of Valentine Ackland (1978) * For Sylvia: An Honest Account (1985) a memoir of Ackland’s relationship with Sylvia Townsend Warner * This Narrow Place: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland 1931–1951, by Wendy Mulford (1988) * Jealousy in Connecticut, by Susanna Pinney (1998) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_Ackland

Bernard Patrick O’Dowd (11 April 1866– 1 September 1953) was an Australian activist, educator, poet, journalist, and author of several law books and poetry books, born in Beaufort, Victoria. O’Dowd worked as an assistant-librarian and later Chief Parliamentary Draughtsman in the Supreme Court at Melbourne for 48 years; he was also a co-publisher and writer for the radical paper Tocsin. Bernard O’Dowd lived to age 87.

Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903– June 25, 2004) was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s. Early life Rakosi was born in Berlin and lived there and in Hungary until 1910, when he moved to the United States to live with his father and stepmother. His father was a jeweler and watchmaker in Chicago and later in Gary, Indiana. The family lived in semi-poverty but contrived to send him to the University of Chicago and then to the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During his time studying at the university level, he started writing poetry. On graduating, he worked for a time as a social worker, then returned to college to study psychology. At this time, he changed his name to Callman Rawley because he felt he stood a better chance of being employed if he had a more American-sounding name. After a spell as a psychologist and teacher, he returned to social work for the rest of his working life. Early writings At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rakosi edited the Wisconsin Literary Magazine. His own poetry at this stage was influenced by W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings. He also started reading William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot. By 1925, he was publishing poems in The Little Review and Nation. Pound and the Objectivists By the late 1920s, Rakosi was in correspondence with Ezra Pound, who prompted Louis Zukofsky to contact him. This led to Rakosi’s inclusion in the Objectivist issue of Poetry and in the Objectivist Anthology. Rakosi himself had reservations about the Objectivist tag, feeling that the poets involved were too different from each other to form a group in any meaningful sense of the word. He did, however, especially admire the work of Charles Reznikoff. Later career Like a number of his fellow Objectivists, Rakosi abandoned poetry in the 1940s. After his 1941 Selected Poems he dedicated himself to social work and apparently neither read nor wrote poetry. Years earlier, shortly after his twenty-first birthday, Rakosi had legally changed his name to Callman Rawley, believing that he would not find work with his foreign-sounding name. Under his adopted name, he served as head of the Minneapolis Jewish Children’s and Family Service from 1945 until his retirement in 1968. A letter from the English poet Andrew Crozier about his early poetry was the trigger that started Rakosi writing again. His first book in 26 years, Amulet, was published by New Directions in 1967 and his Collected Poems in 1986 by the National Poetry Foundation. These were followed by several more volumes and by readings across the United States and Europe. In early November 2003, Rakosi celebrated his 100th birthday with friends at the San Francisco Public Library. Upon his death Jacket Magazine editor John Tranter observed the following: Poet Carl Rakosi died on Friday afternoon June 25 at the age of 100, after a series of strokes, in his home in San Francisco. My wife Lyn and I were passing through California in November 2003, and we stopped by to have a coffee with Carl at his home in Sunset. By a lucky coincidence, it happened to be his 100th birthday. He was, as always, kind, thoughtful, bright and alert, and as sharp as a pin. We felt privileged to know him. External links Rakosi at Modern American Poetry The Carl Rakosi Papers in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UC San Diego Carl Rakosi Reading and Interview on KPFA’s Ode To Gravity, 13 May 1971 (from The Internet Archive) Obituary in The Guardian, UK Carl Rakosi feature at Jacket Magazine includes Rakosi in conversation with Tom Devaney & Olivier Brossard; link to audio recordings at University of Pennsylvania, and poems, dedications & remembrances from Jane Augustine, Robert Creeley, Laurie Duggan, Michael Heller and Kent Johnson “Add-Verse” a poetry-photo-video project Rakosi participated in References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Rakosi

Henry Livingston, Jr. (October 13, 1748 - February 29, 1828) has been proposed as being the uncredited author of the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas”, more popularly known (after its first line) as “The Night Before Christmas.” Credit for the poem was taken in 1837 by Clement Clarke Moore, a Bible scholar in New York City, nine years after Livingston’s death. It wasn’t until another twenty years that the Livingston family knew of Moore’s claim, and it wasn’t until 1900 that they went public with their claim. Since then, the question has been repeatedly raised and argued by experts on both sides. In 2000, Professor Don Foster made a strong case for Livingston’s authorship, while Professor Stephen Nissenbaum and manuscript dealer Seth Keller, who had owned a Moore manuscript copy of the poem at the time of Foster’s book, argued for Moore. Fifteen years later New Zealand scholar and Emeritus Professor of English Literature MacDonald P. Jackson invested over a year of research statistically analyzing the poetry of both men. His conclusion: “Every test, so far applied, associates ”The Night Before Christmas" much more closely with Livingston’s verse than with Moore’s.” Biography Livingston was born on October 13, 1748, in Poughkeepsie, New York, to Henry Livingston, Sr. and Susannah Conklin. In 1774, Livingston married Sarah Welles, the daughter of Reverend Noah Welles, the minister of the Stamford, Connecticut Congregational Church. Their daughter Catherine was born shortly before Livingston joined the army on a six months’ enlistment. In 1776, their son Henry Welles Livingston was born; the child was fatally burned at the age of fourteen months and, when another son was born, he was given the same name, according to the common practice of necronyms. Livingston farmed. Sarah died in 1783, and the children were boarded out. During this period Livingston began writing poetry. Over the next ten years, Livingston was occupied with poetry and drawings for his friends and family, some of which ended up in the pages of New York Magazine and the Poughkeepsie Journal. Although he signed his drawings, his poetry was usually anonymous or signed simply “R”. Ten years to the day after Sarah’s death, Livingston remarried. Jane Patterson, at 24, was 21 years younger than her husband. Their first baby arrived nine months after the wedding. After that, the couple bore seven more children. It was for this second family that Henry Livingston is believed by some to have written the famous poem known as “A Visit from St. Nicholas” or “The Night Before Christmas”. This famous Christmas poem first appeared in the Troy Sentinel on December 23, 1823. There seems to be no question that the poem came out of the home of Clement Moore, and the person giving the poem to the newspaper, without Moore’s knowledge, certainly believed the poem had been written by Moore. However, several of Livingston’s children remembered their father reading that very same poem to them fifteen years earlier. As early as 1837, Charles Fenno Hoffman, a friend of Moore’s, put Moore’s name on the poem. In 1844, Moore published the poem in his own book, Poems. At multiple times in his later life, Moore wrote out the now famous poem in longhand for his friends. Dispute over authorship Because the poem was first published anonymously, various editions were for many years published both with and without attribution. As a result, it was only in 1859, 26 years after the poem first appeared in print, that Henry’s family discovered that Moore was taking credit for what they believed to be their father’s poem. That belief went back many years. Around 1807, Henry’s sons Charles and Edwin, as well as their neighbor Eliza (who would later marry Charles) remembered their father’s reading the poem to them as his own. Following their father’s death in 1828, Charles claimed to have found a newspaper copy of the poem in his father’s desk, and son Sidney claimed to have found the original handwritten copy of the poem with its original crossouts. The handwritten copy of the poem was passed from Sidney, on his death, to his brother Edwin. However, the same year that the family discovered Moore’s claim of authorship, Edwin claimed to have lost the original manuscript in a house fire in Wisconsin, where he was living with his sister Susan. By 1879, five separate lines of Henry’s descendants had begun to correspond among themselves, trying to compare their family stories in the hope that someone had some proof that could be brought forward, but there was no documentation beyond family stories. In 1899, even without proof, Sidney’s grandson published the first public claim of Henry’s authorship in his own newspaper on Long Island. The claim drew little attention. In 1920, Henry’s great grandson, William Sturgis Thomas became interested in the family stories and began to collect the memories and papers of existing descendants, eventually publishing his research in the 1919 issue of the Duchess County Historical Society yearbook. Thomas provided this material to Winthrop P. Tryon for his article on the subject in the Christian Science Monitor on August 4, 1920. Later, Moore descendants arranged to have an elderly family connection, Maria Jephson O’Conor, depose about her memories of Moore’s claim of authorship. On independent grounds, Don Foster, Professor of English at Vassar, has argued that Livingston is a more likely candidate for authorship than Moore. Foster’s claim, however, has been countered by document dealer and historian Seth Kaller, who once owned one of Moore’s original manuscripts of the poem. Kaller has offered a point-by-point rebuttal of both Foster’s linguistic analysis and external findings, buttressed by the work of autograph expert James Lowe and Dr. Joe Nickell, author of Pen, Ink and Evidence. There is no proof that Livingston himself ever claimed authorship, nor has any record ever been found of any printing of the poem with Livingston’s name attached to it. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Livingston,_Jr.

Augustus Montague Toplady (4 November 1740– 11 August 1778) was an Anglican cleric and hymn writer. He was a major Calvinist opponent of John Wesley. He is best remembered as the author of the hymn “Rock of Ages”. Three of his other hymns– “A Debtor to Mercy Alone”, “Deathless Principle, Arise” and “Object of My First Desire”– are still occasionally sung today, though all three are far less popular than “Rock of Ages”. Background and early life, 1740–55 Augustus Toplady was born in Farnham, Surrey, England in November 1740. His father, Richard Toplady, was probably from Enniscorthy, County Wexford in Ireland. Richard Toplady became a commissioned officer in the Royal Marines in 1739; by the time of his death, he had reached the rank of major. In May 1741, shortly after Augustus’ birth, Richard participated in the Battle of Cartagena de Indias (1741), the most significant battle of the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739–42), during the course of which he died, most likely of yellow fever, leaving Augustus’ mother to raise the boy alone. Toplady’s mother, Catherine, was the daughter of Richard Bate, who was the incumbent of Chilham from 1711 until his death in 1736. Catherine and her son moved from Farnham to Westminster. He attended Westminster School from 1750 to 1755. Trinity College, Dublin: 1755–60 In 1755, Catherine and Augustus moved to Ireland, and Augustus was enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin. Shortly thereafter, in August 1755, the 15-year-old Toplady attended a sermon preached by James Morris, a follower of John Wesley, in a barn in Codymain, co. Wexford (though in his Dying Avowal, Toplady denies that the preacher was directly connected to Wesley, with whom he had developed a bitter relationship). He would remember this sermon as the time at which he received his effectual calling from God. Having undergone his religious conversion under the preaching of a Methodist, Toplady initially followed Wesley in supporting Arminianism. In 1758, however, the 18-year-old Toplady read Thomas Manton’s seventeenth-century sermon on John 17 and Jerome Zanchius’s Confession of the Christian Religion (1562). These works convinced Toplady that Calvinism, not Arminianism, was correct. In 1759, Toplady published his first book, Poems on Sacred Subjects. Following his graduation from Trinity College in 1760, Toplady and his mother returned to Westminster. There, Toplady met and was influenced by several prominent Calvinist ministers, including George Whitefield, John Gill, and William Romaine. It was John Gill who in 1760 urged Toplady to publish his translation of Zanchius’s work on predestination, Toplady commenting that “I was not then, however, sufficiently delivered from the fear of man.” Church ministry: 1762–78 In 1762, Edward Willes, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, ordained Toplady as an Anglican deacon, appointing him curate of Blagdon, located in the Mendip Hills of Somerset. Toplady wrote his famous hymn “Rock of Ages” in 1763. A local tradition– discounted by most historians– holds that he wrote the hymn after seeking shelter under a large rock at Burrington Combe, a magnificent ravine close to Blagdon, during a thunderstorm. Upon being ordained priest in 1764, Toplady returned to London briefly, and then served as curate of Farleigh Hungerford for a little over a year (1764–65). He then returned to stay with friends in London for 1765–66. In May 1766, he became incumbent of Harpford and Venn Ottery, two villages in Devon. In 1768, however, he learned that he had been named to this incumbency because it had been purchased for him; seeing this as simony, he chose to exchange the incumbency for the post of vicar of Broadhembury, another Devon village. He would serve as vicar of Broadhembury until his death, although he received leave to be absent from Broadhembury from 1775 on. Toplady never married, though he did have relationships with two women. The first was Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, the founder of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, a Calvinist Methodist series of congregations. Toplady first met Huntingdon in 1763, and preached in her chapels several times in 1775 during his absence from Broadhembury. The second was Catharine Macaulay, whom he first met in 1773, and with whom he spent a large amount of time in the years 1773–77. Animals and Natural World Toplady was a prolific essayist and letter correspondent and wrote on a wide range of topics. He was interested in the natural world and in animals. He composed a short work “Sketch of Natural History, with a few particulars on Birds, Meteors, Sagacity of Brutes, and the solar system”, wherein he set down his observations about the marvels of nature, including the behaviour of birds, and illustrations of wise actions on the part of various animals. Toplady also considered the problem of evil as it relates to the sufferings of animals in “A Short Essay on Original Sin”, and in a public debate delivered a speech on “Whether unnecessary cruelty to the brute creation is not criminal?”. In this speech he repudiated brutality towards animals and also affirmed his belief that the Scriptures point to the resurrection of animals. Toplady’s position about animal brutality and the resurrection were echoed by his contemporaries Joseph Butler, Richard Dean, Humphry Primatt and John Wesley, and throughout the nineteenth century other Christian writers such as Joseph Hamilton, George Hawkins Pember, George N. H. Peters, Joseph Seiss, and James Macauley developed the arguments in more detail in the context of the debates about animal welfare, animal rights and vivisection. Calvinist controversialist: 1769–78 Toplady’s first salvo into the world of religious controversy came in 1769 when he wrote a book in response to a situation at the University of Oxford. Six students had been expelled from St Edmund Hall because of their Calvinist views, which Thomas Nowell criticised as inconsistent with the views of the Church of England. Toplady then criticised Nowell’s position in his book The Church of England Vindicated from the Charge of Arminianism, which argued that Calvinism, not Arminianism, was the position historically held by the Church of England. 1769 also saw Toplady publish his translation of Zanchius’s Confession of the Christian Religion (1562), one of the works which had convinced Toplady to become a Calvinist in 1758. Toplady entitled his translation The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted. This work drew a vehement response from John Wesley, thus initiating a protracted pamphlet debate between Toplady and Wesley about whether the Church of England was historically Calvinist or Arminian. This debate peaked in 1774, when Toplady published his 700-page The Historic Proof of the Doctrinal Calvinism of the Church of England, a massive study which traced the doctrine of predestination from the period of the Early Church through to William Laud. The section about the Synod of Dort contained a footnote identifying five basic propositions of the Calvinist faith, arguably the first appearance in print of the summary of Calvinism known as the “five points of Calvinism”. The relationship between Toplady and Wesley that had initially been cordial, involving exchanges of letters in Toplady’s Arminian days, became increasingly bitter and reached its nadir with the “Zanchy affair”. Wesley took exception to the publication of Toplady’s translation of Zanchius’s work on predestination in 1769 and published, in turn, an abridgment of that work titled “The Doctrine of Absolute Predestination Stated and Asserted”, adding his own comment that “The sum of all is this: One in twenty (suppose) of mankind are elected; nineteen in twenty are reprobated. The elect shall be saved, do what they will; the reprobate will be damned, do what they can. Reader believe this, or be damned. Witness my hand.” Toplady viewed the abridgment and comments as a distortion of his and Zanchius’s views and was particularly enraged that the authorship of these additions were attributed to him, as though he approved of the content. Toplady published a response in the form of “A Letter to the Rev Mr John Wesley; Relative to His Pretended Abridgement of Zanchius on Predestination”. Wesley never publicly accepted any wrongdoing on his part and seemingly denied his authorship of the comments contained in his abridgement when, in his 1771 work “The Consequenses Proved” that responded to Toplady’s letter, he ascribed his additions to Toplady. Subsequently Wesley avoided direct correspondence with Toplady, famously stating in a letter of 24 June 1770 that “I do not fight with chimney-sweepers. He is too dirty a writer for me to meddle with. I should only foul my fingers. I read his title-page, and troubled myself no farther. I leave him to Mr Sellon. He cannot be in better hands.” Last years Toplady spent his last three years mainly in London, preaching regularly in a French Calvinist chapel at Orange Street (off of Haymarket), most spectacularly in 1778, when he appeared to rebut charges being made by Wesley’s followers that he had renounced Calvinism on his deathbed. Toplady died of tuberculosis on 11 August 1778. He was buried at Whitefield’s Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road. Hymns Compared with Christ, in all beside n. 760 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1772) Deathless spirit, now arise n. 1381 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1776) Holy Ghost, dispel our sadness n. 80 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1776). Modernising of John Christian Jacobi’s translation (1725) of Paul Gerhardts hymn from 1653. How happy are the souls above n. 1434 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1776) (? A. M. Topladys text) Inspirer and hearer of prayer n. 30 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1774) O thou, that hear’st the prayer of faith n. 642 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1176) Praise the Lord, who reigns above n. 160 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1759) Rock of ages, cleft for me n. 697 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1776) Surely Christ thy griefs hath borne n. 443 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1759) What, though my frail eye-lids refuse n. 29 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1774) When langour and disease invade n. 1032 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1778) Your harps, ye trembling saints n. 861 in The Church Hymn book 1872 (1772) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus_Toplady

Kathleen Faragher (1904–1974) was the most significant and prolific Manx dialect author of the mid twentieth century. She is best known for her poems first published in the Ramsey Courier and collected into five books published between 1955 and 1967. She was also a prolific short story writer and playwright. Her work is renowned for its humour born of a keen observation of Manx characters, and for its evocative portrayal of the Isle of Man and its people. Life Kathleen Faragher was born in 1904 in Ramsey, Isle of Man, to Joseph and Catherine Anne Faragher, owners of a grocer and provision merchant business on Approach Road. Kathleen was the youngest of five children: Laurence (who died in Gibraltar in 1944 during WWII), Fred (later manager of Martin’s Bank, Peel), Joseph (who took over the family business but died in 1946), Evelyn (who emigrated to Auckland, New Zealand, where she died in 1949) and herself. Kathleen Faragher was raised in Ramsey until about 1924, when she moved to London to take up a business career. After 25 years working in London, ill-health forced her into early retirement, whereupon she returned to live on the Isle of Man in October 1949. Faragher lived first in Ramsey but eventually moved to Maughold, finally coming to live near to the Dhoon Church in Glen Mona. Poetry Faragher’s first poem, 'Blue Point’, was published in the Ramsey Courier on 14 October 1949. The poem was written whilst in Kent and sent to the paper, who surprised Faragher in accepting it, although it was not published until she had returned to live on the island. This poem was different in style to Faragher’s subsequent work and it was only published in her third book of poetry, Where Curlews Call, in 1959, by which time it had been substantially rewritten. Her next poem, 'Maughold Head’, was published at the start of February 1950, after which her poems were published regularly in the Ramsey Courier. Her first published poem in the Anglo-Manx dialect was 'A Lament’, which appeared in September 1950. Her poems were quickly picked up as special evocations of the Isle of Man and they were recited at meetings of Manx Societies in England alongside poems by the Manx National Poet, T. E. Brown, as early as November 1951. Her poems, 'Maughold Head’ and 'In Exile’, were set to music by C. Sydney Marshall and had been cut to record by February 1960. Her first book of poems, Green Hills by the Sea, was published in February 1955 by The Ramsey Courier Ltd. The book’s title is a reference to the popular song, 'Ellan Vannin’, composed from a poem by Eliza Craven Green. The book was described as displaying Faragher’s “deep insight into Manx feelings and a nostalgic love of the old folk and ways” by George Bellairs. The collection opened with 'Land of My Birth’, which she described as “the greatest compliment she can pay to the Manx people” and with which she usually ended her recitals. I love this purple-misted Isle, This land where I was born. The gorse-clad hills and bracken tops, The fields of waving corn. [...] But best of all I love to hear The gentle, lilting voice Of kindly Manx folk greeting me: It makes my heart rejoice, To feel once more the friendly hand, To hear the welcome warm, To look into each smiling face And know I have come home. Her second collection, This Purple-Misted Isle, was published in October 1957. The title was another reference to her forebears of Manx literature, this time to T. E. Brown, a reference continued within the collection with Faragher’s 'The Immortal “Kitty”' paying homage to Brown’s 'Kitty o’ the Sherragh Vane’ from his Fo’c’s’le Yarns. The collection had a Foreword by the Lieutenant Governor, Ambrose Flux Dundas. It proved to be very popular, having to be reprinted by the end of the year, and by the end of 1959 a third print had also almost sold out. This collection included 'The Homecomer’, which displays her distinctive Anglo-Manx conversational style: [...] “It isn’ me dyin’ that I min’, boy,” She said as she sat by her bed; “I’d go peaceful if it wasn’ for thinkin’ Ye’ll be managin’ so maul when I’m dead.” An’ Billy sthroked her cheek– so the tale goes – An’ whispered all lovin’ an’ low, “Dunt be grievin’, Nellie Kate; theer’s no need to gel, To worry about me when yer go! For theer’s the nices’ li’l wumman in Laxaa That I’ve had me eye on this las’ bit; She’ll look after me well, I can tell yer, So take yer res’, Nellie Kate, an’ dunt fret!” My gough! She gorrup from that bed theer Like an arra shot straight from the bow! Ay! an’ Billy himself was years buried ‘Fore herself in the en’ had to go! [...] By 1959 Faragher’s poems had been heard on BBC Radio a number of times, recited both by herself and by others. It was in October of that year that her third collection was released, Where Curlews Call, bearing a perceptive Preface by Sir Ralph Stevenson: “Our mother tongue has been overlaid by a stereotyped accent [...]. The Manx lilt [...] is all too rapidly fading. She does her best in these poems to keep it alive and at the same times gives a warm and human picture of our farms and crofts and the kindly folk who live in them. For this, if for nothing else, she has earned our gratitude.” Her subsequent collections of poetry were These Fairy Shores (1962) and English and Manx Dialect Poems (1967). Faragher’s poems can be predominantly categorised into two types: light-humoured dialect vignettes or lyrical descriptions of the Isle of Man. Her poems are distinctive in Manx literature in being prevailingly from or of a female perspective and based within the family or home environment. Theatre and prose As early as 1951 Faragher had been experimenting with extending her conversational monologue Anglo-Manx poems into theatrical dialogues for performance. In 1964 four such 'character sketches’ were published as Kiare Cooisghyn. As was distinctive of her dialect poetry, all of these pieces were written for middle-aged or elderly female characters and used a very tender humour born of a close observation of Manx character. Something of this is shown in the first 'duologue’ from the collection, 'The Caffy’ in which two women discuss the new café in town: [...] Mrs K. An’ what like was the china? Gran’ mighty I suppose? Mrs C. Aw! somethin’ awful that was! Rale indacent, in fac’. A whole lorra naked childher flyin’ about on the plates shootin’ bows an’ arras. Mrs K. Aw! them 'ud be l’il Cupids. Mrs C. Li’l Cupids? Li’l divils, more like! Why wan o’ them was the dead spit o’ that young dirt Kermid’s yandher! Ay! skeetin’ up at me through the gravy he was– enough to turn yer! [...] She came to concentrate on prose towards the end of her life, publishing By The Red Fuchsia Tree in 1967, a collection of short stories interspersed with reprints of poems from her earlier collections. This was followed by a long series of short dialect stories published under the pseudonym, “Kirree Ann”, in the Ramsey Courier at a rate of almost one a week over the last two years of her life. This output of nearly 100 short stories makes her the most prolific Manx short story writer of the twentieth Century. Death and legacy Kathleen Faragher died in 1974, on the same day as her final story was published in the Ramsey Courier. She was buried in the family plot in Maughold churchyard, a graveyard also associated with other important Manx writers such as T. E. Brown, Hall Caine, Cushag and William Kennish. Six years after her death, her friend, Constance Radcliffe, the leading authority on the local history of Ramsey and Maughold, wrote of Faragher’s work that: “In all her works she expressed her affection for a Manx way of life which has only just disappeared, her kindly humour based on acute observation of people’s idiosyncrasies, and her deep and abiding love of the island itself.” Her work continues to be popularly performed in recitals on the Isle of Man, despite none of her books having been republished after her death, and her “Kirree Ann” stories having never been collected. In 2015 a project to record the memories of those who knew and remember Faragher was launched. Funded by Culture Vannin, it is envisioned to tie in with the Culture Vannin oral history programme, but also to reach more widely to collect unpublished works, memorabilia or other artefacts that might be uncovered. In introducing the initiative, the project organiser gave an estimation of Faragher’s work in relation to Manx literature: “the importance of her work to the Isle of Man would be hard to overestimate. It would be a tragedy for Manx culture if we did not do everything in our power to preserve all we can of her memory.” Publications * Green Hills by the Sea. Ramsey: The Ramsey Courier Ltd. 1954. * This Purple-Misted Isle. Ramsey: The Ramsey Courier Ltd. 1957. * Where Curlews Call. Ramsey: The Ramsey Courier Ltd. 1959. * These Fairy Shores. Ramsey: The Ramsey Courier Ltd. 1962. * Kiare Cooisghyn. Ramsey: The Ramsey Courier Ltd. 1964. * English and Manx Dialect Poems. Douglas: Norris Modern Press. 1967. * By The Red Fuchsia Tree. Douglas: The Norris Modern Press. 1967. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Faragher

Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705]– April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A renowned polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As an inventor, he is known for the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other inventions. He facilitated many civic organizations, including Philadelphia’s fire department and a university. Franklin earned the title of “The First American” for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity, initially as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies. As the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, “In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat.” To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin “the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become.” Franklin became a successful newspaper editor and printer in Philadelphia, the leading city in the colonies, publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette at the age of 23. He became wealthy publishing this and Poor Richard’s Almanack, which he authored under the pseudonym “Richard Saunders”. After 1767, he was associated with the Pennsylvania Chronicle, a newspaper that was known for its revolutionary sentiments and criticisms of the British policies. He pioneered and was first president of the The Academy and College of Philadelphia which opened in 1751 and later became the University of Pennsylvania. He organised and was the first secretary of the American Philosophical Society and was elected president in 1769. Franklin became a national hero in America when, as an agent for several colonies, he spearheaded an effort in London to have the Parliament of Great Britain repeal the unpopular Stamp Act. An accomplished diplomat, he was widely admired among the French as American minister to Paris and was a major figure in the development of positive Franco-American relations. His efforts to secure support for the American Revolution by shipments of crucial munitions proved vital for the American war effort. He was promoted to deputy postmaster-general for the British colonies in 1753, having been Philadelphia postmaster for many years, and this enabled him to set up the first national communications network. After the Revolution he became the first US Postmaster General. He was active in community affairs, colonial and state politics, as well as national and international affairs. From 1785 to 1788, he served as governor of Pennsylvania. Although he initially owned and dealt in slaves, by the 1750s he argued against slavery from an economic perspective and became one of the most prominent abolitionists. His colorful life and legacy of scientific and political achievement, and status as one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers, have seen Franklin honored on coinage and the $100 bill; warships; the names of many towns; counties; educational institutions; corporations; and, more than two centuries after his death, countless cultural references. Early life in Boston Benjamin Franklin was born on Milk Street, in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1706, and baptized at Old South Meeting House. He was one of seventeen children born to Josiah Franklin, and one of ten born by Josiah’s second wife, Abiah Folger; the daughter of Peter Foulger and Mary Morrill. Among Benjamin’s siblings were his older brother James and his younger sister Jane. Josiah wanted Ben to attend school with the clergy, but only had enough money to send him to school for two years. He attended Boston Latin School but did not graduate; he continued his education through voracious reading. Although “his parents talked of the church as a career” for Franklin, his schooling ended when he was ten. He worked for his father for a time, and at 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who taught Ben the printing trade. When Ben was 15, James founded The New-England Courant, which was the first truly independent newspaper in the colonies. When denied the chance to write a letter to the paper for publication, Franklin adopted the pseudonym of “Mrs. Silence Dogood”, a middle-aged widow. Mrs. Dogood’s letters were published, and became a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the Courant’s readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Ben when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. Franklin was an advocate of free speech from an early age. When his brother was jailed for three weeks in 1722 for publishing material unflattering to the governor, young Franklin took over the newspaper and had Mrs. Dogood (quoting Cato’s Letters) proclaim: “Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.” Franklin left his apprenticeship without his brother’s permission, and in so doing became a fugitive. Philadelphia At age 17, Franklin ran away to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, seeking a new start in a new city. When he first arrived, he worked in several printer shops around town, but he was not satisfied by the immediate prospects. After a few months, while working in a printing house, Franklin was convinced by Pennsylvania Governor Sir William Keith to go to London, ostensibly to acquire the equipment necessary for establishing another newspaper in Philadelphia. Finding Keith’s promises of backing a newspaper empty, Franklin worked as a typesetter in a printer’s shop in what is now the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great in the Smithfield area of London. Following this, he returned to Philadelphia in 1726 with the help of Thomas Denham, a merchant who employed Franklin as clerk, shopkeeper, and bookkeeper in his business. Junto and library In 1727, Benjamin Franklin, then 21, created the Junto, a group of “like minded aspiring artisans and tradesmen who hoped to improve themselves while they improved their community.” The Junto was a discussion group for issues of the day; it subsequently gave rise to many organizations in Philadelphia. The Junto was modeled after English coffeehouses that Franklin knew well, and which should become the center of the spread of Enlightenment ideas in Britain. Reading was a great pastime of the Junto, but books were rare and expensive. The members created a library initially assembled from their own books after Franklin wrote: A proposition was made by me that since our books were often referr’d to in our disquisitions upon the inquiries, it might be convenient for us to have them altogether where we met, that upon occasion they might be consulted; and by thus clubbing our books to a common library, we should, while we lik’d to keep them together, have each of us the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be nearly as beneficial as if each owned the whole. This did not suffice, however. Franklin conceived the idea of a subscription library, which would pool the funds of the members to buy books for all to read. This was the birth of the Library Company of Philadelphia: its charter was composed by Franklin in 1731. In 1732, Franklin hired the first American librarian, Louis Timothee. The Library Company is now a great scholarly and research library. Newspaperman Upon Denham’s death, Franklin returned to his former trade. In 1728, Franklin had set up a printing house in partnership with Hugh Meredith; the following year he became the publisher of a newspaper called The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette gave Franklin a forum for agitation about a variety of local reforms and initiatives through printed essays and observations. Over time, his commentary, and his adroit cultivation of a positive image as an industrious and intellectual young man, earned him a great deal of social respect. But even after Franklin had achieved fame as a scientist and statesman, he habitually signed his letters with the unpretentious ‘B. Franklin, Printer.’ In 1732, Ben Franklin published the first German language newspaper in America– Die Philadelphische Zeitung– although it failed after only one year, because four other newly founded German papers quickly dominated the newspaper market. Franklin printed Moravian religious books in German. Franklin often visited Bethlehem staying at the Moravian Sun Inn. In a 1751 pamphlet on demographic growth and its implications for the colonies, he called the Pennsylvania Germans “Palatine Boors” who could never acquire the “Complexion” of the English settlers and to “Blacks and Tawneys” as weakening the social structure of the colonies. Although Franklin apparently reconsidered shortly thereafter, and the phrases were omitted from all later printings of the pamphlet, his views may have played a role in his political defeat in 1764. Franklin saw the printing press as a device to instruct colonial Americans in moral virtue. Frasca argues he saw this as a service to God, because he understood moral virtue in terms of actions, thus, doing good provides a service to God. Despite his own moral lapses, Franklin saw himself as uniquely qualified to instruct Americans in morality. He tried to influence American moral life through construction of a printing network based on a chain of partnerships from the Carolinas to New England. Franklin thereby invented the first newspaper chain. It was more than a business venture, for like many publishers since, he believed that the press had a public-service duty. When Franklin established himself in Philadelphia, shortly before 1730, the town boasted two “wretched little” news sheets, Andrew Bradford’s American Mercury, and Samuel Keimer’s Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences, and Pennsylvania Gazette. This instruction in all arts and sciences consisted of weekly extracts from Chambers’s Universal Dictionary. Franklin quickly did away with all this when he took over the Instructor and made it The Pennsylvania Gazette. The Gazette soon became Franklin’s characteristic organ, which he freely used for satire, for the play of his wit, even for sheer excess of mischief or of fun. From the first he had a way of adapting his models to his own uses. The series of essays called “The Busy-Body”, which he wrote for Bradford’s American Mercury in 1729, followed the general Addisonian form, already modified to suit homelier conditions. The thrifty Patience, in her busy little shop, complaining of the useless visitors who waste her valuable time, is related to the ladies who address Mr. Spectator. The Busy-Body himself is a true Censor Morum, as Isaac Bickerstaff had been in the Tatler. And a number of the fictitious characters, Ridentius, Eugenius, Cato, and Cretico, represent traditional 18th-century classicism. Even this Franklin could use for contemporary satire, since Cretico, the “sowre Philosopher”, is evidently a portrait of Franklin’s rival, Samuel Keimer. As time went on, Franklin depended less on his literary conventions, and more on his own native humor. In this there is a new spirit—not suggested to him by the fine breeding of Addison, or the bitter irony of Swift, or the stinging completeness of Pope. The brilliant little pieces Franklin wrote for his Pennsylvania Gazette have an imperishable place in American literature. The Pennsylvania Gazette, like most other newspapers of the period, was often poorly printed. Franklin was busy with a hundred matters outside of his printing office, and never seriously attempted to raise the mechanical standards of his trade. Nor did he ever properly edit or collate the chance medley of stale items that passed for news in the Gazette. His influence on the practical side of journalism was minimal. On the other hand, his advertisements of books show his very great interest in popularizing secular literature. Undoubtedly his paper contributed to the broader culture that distinguished Pennsylvania from her neighbors before the Revolution. Like many publishers, Franklin built up a book shop in his printing office; he took the opportunity to read new books before selling them. Franklin had mixed success in his plan to establish an inter-colonial network of newspapers that would produce a profit for him and disseminate virtue. He began in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1731. After the second editor died, his widow Elizabeth Timothy took over and made it a success, 1738–46. She was one of the colonial era’s first woman printers. For three decades Franklin maintained a close business relationship with her and her son Peter who took over in 1746. The Gazette had a policy of impartiality in political debates, while creating the opportunity for public debate, which encouraged others to challenge authority. Editor Peter Timothy avoided blandness and crude bias, and after 1765 increasingly took a patriotic stand in the growing crisis with Great Britain. However, Franklin’s Connecticut Gazette (1755–68) proved unsuccessful. Freemason In 1731, Franklin was initiated into the local Masonic Lodge. He became Grand Master in 1734, indicating his rapid rise to prominence in Pennsylvania. That same year, he edited and published the first Masonic book in the Americas, a reprint of James Anderson’s Constitutions of the Free-Masons. Franklin remained a Freemason for the rest of his life. Common-law marriage to Deborah Read In 1723, at the age of 17, Franklin proposed to 15-year-old Deborah Read while a boarder in the Read home. At that time, Read’s mother was wary of allowing her young daughter to marry Franklin, who was on his way to London at Governor Sir William Keith’s request, and also because of his financial instability. Her own husband had recently died, and Mrs. Read declined Franklin’s request to marry her daughter. While Franklin was in London, his trip was extended, and there were problems with Sir William’s promises of support. Perhaps because of the circumstances of this delay, Deborah married a man named John Rodgers. This proved to be a regrettable decision. Rodgers shortly avoided his debts and prosecution by fleeing to Barbados with her dowry, leaving Deborah behind. Rodgers’s fate was unknown, and because of bigamy laws, Deborah was not free to remarry. Franklin established a common-law marriage with Deborah Read on September 1, 1730. They took in Franklin’s young, recently acknowledged illegitimate son, William, and raised him in their household. In addition, they had two children together. The first, Francis Folger Franklin, born October 1732, died of smallpox in 1736. Their second child, Sarah Franklin, familiarly called Sally, was born in 1743. She eventually married Richard Bache, had seven children, and cared for her father in his old age. Deborah’s fear of the sea meant that she never accompanied Franklin on any of his extended trips to Europe, despite his repeated requests. She wrote to him in November 1769 saying she was ill due to “dissatisfied distress” from his prolonged absence, but he did not return until his business was done. Deborah Read Franklin died of a stroke in 1774, while Franklin was on an extended mission to England; he returned in 1775. William Franklin In 1730, at the age of 24, Franklin publicly acknowledged the existence of William, his son, who was deemed 'illegitimate’ as he was born out of wedlock, and raised him in his household. His mother’s identity is not known. He was educated in Philadelphia. Beginning at about age 30, William studied law in London in the early 1760s. He fathered an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, born February 22, 1762. The boy’s mother was never identified, and he was placed in foster care. Franklin later that year married Elizabeth Downes, daughter of a planter from Barbados. After William passed the bar, his father helped him gain an appointment in 1763 as the last Royal Governor of New Jersey. A Loyalist, William and his father eventually broke relations over their differences about the American Revolutionary War. The elder Franklin could never accept William’s position. Deposed in 1776 by the revolutionary government of New Jersey, William was arrested at his home in Perth Amboy at the Proprietary House and imprisoned for a time. The younger Franklin went to New York in 1782, which was still occupied by British troops. He became leader of the Board of Associated Loyalists—a quasi-military organization, headquartered in New York City. They initiated guerrilla forays into New Jersey, southern Connecticut, and New York counties north of the city. When British troops evacuated from New York, William Franklin left with them and sailed to England. He settled in London, never to return to North America. In the preliminary peace talks in 1782 with Britain, “... Benjamin Franklin insisted that loyalists who had borne arms against the United States would be excluded from this plea (that they be given a general pardon). He was undoubtedly thinking of William Franklin.” Success as an author In 1733, Franklin began to publish the noted Poor Richard’s Almanack (with content both original and borrowed) under the pseudonym Richard Saunders, on which much of his popular reputation is based. Franklin frequently wrote under pseudonyms. Although it was no secret that Franklin was the author, his Richard Saunders character repeatedly denied it. “Poor Richard’s Proverbs”, adages from this almanac, such as “A penny saved is twopence dear” (often misquoted as “A penny saved is a penny earned”) and “Fish and visitors stink in three days”, remain common quotations in the modern world. Wisdom in folk society meant the ability to provide an apt adage for any occasion, and Franklin’s readers became well prepared. He sold about ten thousand copies per year—it became an institution. In 1741 Franklin began publishing The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle for all the British Plantations in America, the first such monthly magazine of this type published in America. In 1758, the year he ceased writing for the Almanack, he printed Father Abraham’s Sermon, also known as The Way to Wealth. Franklin’s autobiography, begun in 1771 but published after his death, has become one of the classics of the genre. Daylight saving time (DST) is often erroneously attributed to a 1784 satire that Franklin published anonymously. Modern DST was first proposed by George Vernon Hudson in 1895. Inventions and scientific inquiries Franklin was a prodigious inventor. Among his many creations were the lightning rod, glass harmonica (a glass instrument, not to be confused with the metal harmonica), Franklin stove, bifocal glasses and the flexible urinary catheter. Franklin never patented his inventions; in his autobiography he wrote, “... as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.” His inventions also included social innovations, such as paying forward. Franklin’s fascination with innovation could be viewed as altruistic; he wrote that his scientific works were to be used for increasing efficiency and human improvement. One such improvement was his effort to expedite news services through his printing presses. Electricity Franklin started exploring the phenomenon of electricity in 1746 when he heard of the Leyden Jar. Franklin proposed that “vitreous” and “resinous” electricity were not different types of “electrical fluid” (as electricity was called then), but the same electrical fluid under different pressures. He was the first to label them as positive and negative respectively, and he was the first to discover the principle of conservation of charge. In 1748 he constructed the first ever electrical battery by placing eleven panes of glass coated with lead hung from silk cords and connected by wires. In 1750, he published a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm that appeared capable of becoming a lightning storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin’s experiment using a 40-foot-tall (12 m) iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. On June 15 Franklin may possibly have conducted his well known kite experiment in Philadelphia, successfully extracting sparks from a cloud. Franklin’s experiment was not written up with credit until Joseph Priestley’s 1767 History and Present Status of Electricity. Franklin was careful to stand on an insulator, keeping dry under a roof to avoid the danger of electric shock. Others, such as Prof. Georg Wilhelm Richmann in Russia, were indeed electrocuted during the months following Franklin’s experiment. In his writings, Franklin indicates that he was aware of the dangers and offered alternative ways to demonstrate that lightning was electrical, as shown by his use of the concept of electrical ground. If Franklin did perform this experiment, he may not have done it in the way that is often described—flying the kite and waiting to be struck by lightning—as it would have been dangerous. Instead he used the kite to collect some electric charge from a storm cloud, which implied that lightning was electrical. On October 19 in a letter to England with directions for repeating the experiment, Franklin wrote: When rain has wet the kite twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it streams out plentifully from the key at the approach of your knuckle, and with this key a phial, or Leyden jar, may be charged: and from electric fire thus obtained spirits may be kindled, and all other electric experiments [may be] performed which are usually done by the help of a rubber glass globe or tube; and therefore the sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightening completely demonstrated. Franklin’s electrical experiments led to his invention of the lightning rod. He noted that conductors with a sharp rather than a smooth point could discharge silently, and at a far greater distance. He surmised that this could help protect buildings from lightning by attaching “upright Rods of Iron, made sharp as a Needle and gilt to prevent Rusting, and from the Foot of those Rods a Wire down the outside of the Building into the Ground;... Would not these pointed Rods probably draw the Electrical Fire silently out of a Cloud before it came nigh enough to strike, and thereby secure us from that most sudden and terrible Mischief!” Following a series of experiments on Franklin’s own house, lightning rods were installed on the Academy of Philadelphia (later the University of Pennsylvania) and the Pennsylvania State House (later Independence Hall) in 1752. In recognition of his work with electricity, Franklin received the Royal Society’s Copley Medal in 1753, and in 1756 he became one of the few 18th-century Americans elected as a Fellow of the Society. He received honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale universities (his first). The cgs unit of electric charge has been named after him: one franklin (Fr) is equal to one statcoulomb. Population studies Franklin had a major influence on the emerging science of demography, or population studies. Thomas Malthus is noted for his rule of population growth and credited Franklin for discovering it. Kammen (1990) and Drake (2011) say Franklin’s “Observations on the Increase of Mankind” (1755) stands alongside Ezra Stiles’ “Discourse on Christian Union” (1760) as the leading works of eighteenth century Anglo-American demography; Drake credits Franklin’s “wide readership and prophetic insight.” In the 1730s and 1740s, Franklin began taking notes on population growth, finding that the American population had the fastest growth rates on earth. Emphasizing that population growth depended on food supplies—a line of thought later developed by Thomas Malthus—Franklin emphasized the abundance of food and available farmland in America. He calculated that America’s population was doubling every twenty years and would surpass that of England in a century. In 1751, he drafted "Observations concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c." Four years later, it was anonymously printed in Boston, and it was quickly reproduced in Britain, where it influenced the economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus. Franklin’s predictions alarmed British leaders who did not want to be surpassed by the colonies, so they became more willing to impose restrictions on the colonial economy. Franklin was also a pioneer in the study of slave demography, as shown in his 1755 essay. Atlantic Ocean currents As deputy postmaster, Franklin became interested in the North Atlantic Ocean circulation patterns. While in England in 1768, he heard a complaint from the Colonial Board of Customs: Why did it take British packet ships carrying mail several weeks longer to reach New York than it took an average merchant ship to reach Newport, Rhode Island? The merchantmen had a longer and more complex voyage because they left from London, while the packets left from Falmouth in Cornwall. Franklin put the question to his cousin Timothy Folger, a Nantucket whaler captain, who told him that merchant ships routinely avoided a strong eastbound mid-ocean current. The mail packet captains sailed dead into it, thus fighting an adverse current of 3 miles per hour (5 km/h). Franklin worked with Folger and other experienced ship captains, learning enough to chart the current and name it the Gulf Stream, by which it is still known today. Franklin published his Gulf Stream chart in 1770 in England, where it was completely ignored. Subsequent versions were printed in France in 1778 and the U.S. in 1786. The British edition of the chart, which was the original, was so thoroughly ignored that everyone assumed it was lost forever until Phil Richardson, a Woods Hole oceanographer and Gulf Stream expert, discovered it in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris in 1980. This find received front page coverage in the New York Times. It took many years for British sea captains to adopt Franklin’s advice on navigating the current; once they did, they were able to trim two weeks from their sailing time. In 1853, the oceanographer and cartographer Matthew Fontaine Maury noted that Franklin only charted and codified the Gulf Stream, he did not discover it: Though it was Dr. Franklin and Captain Tim Folger, who first turned the Gulf Stream to nautical account, the discovery that there was a Gulf Stream cannot be said to belong to either of them, for its existence was known to Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, and to Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in the 16th century. Wave theory of light Franklin was, along with his contemporary Leonhard Euler, the only major scientist who supported Christiaan Huygens’ wave theory of light, which was basically ignored by the rest of the scientific community. In the 18th century Newton’s corpuscular theory was held to be true; only after Young’s well known slit experiment in 1803 were most scientists persuaded to believe Huygens’ theory. Meteorology On October 21, 1743, according to popular myth, a storm moving from the southwest denied Franklin the opportunity of witnessing a lunar eclipse. Franklin was said to have noted that the prevailing winds were actually from the northeast, contrary to what he had expected. In correspondence with his brother, Franklin learned that the same storm had not reached Boston until after the eclipse, despite the fact that Boston is to the northeast of Philadelphia. He deduced that storms do not always travel in the direction of the prevailing wind, a concept that greatly influenced meteorology. After the Icelandic volcanic eruption of Laki in 1783, and the subsequent harsh European winter of 1784, Franklin made observations connecting the causal nature of these two separate events. He wrote about them in a lecture series. Traction kiting Though Benjamin Franklin has been most noted kite-wise with his lightning experiments, he has also been noted by many for his using kites to pull humans and ships across waterways. The George Pocock in the book A TREATISE on The Aeropleustic Art, or Navigation in the Air, by means of Kites, or Buoyant Sails noted being inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s traction of his body by kite power across a waterway. In his later years he suggested using the technique for pulling ships. Concept of cooling Franklin noted a principle of refrigeration by observing that on a very hot day, he stayed cooler in a wet shirt in a breeze than he did in a dry one. To understand this phenomenon more clearly Franklin conducted experiments. In 1758 on a warm day in Cambridge, England, Franklin and fellow scientist John Hadley experimented by continually wetting the ball of a mercury thermometer with ether and using bellows to evaporate the ether. With each subsequent evaporation, the thermometer read a lower temperature, eventually reaching 7 °F (−14 °C). Another thermometer showed that the room temperature was constant at 65 °F (18 °C). In his letter Cooling by Evaporation, Franklin noted that, “One may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.” Temperature’s effect on electrical conductivity According to Michael Faraday, Franklin’s experiments on the non-conduction of ice are worth mentioning, although the law of the general effect of liquefaction on electrolytes is not attributed to Franklin. However, as reported in 1836 by Prof. A. D. Bache of the University of Pennsylvania, the law of the effect of heat on the conduction of bodies otherwise non-conductors, for example, glass, could be attributed to Franklin. Franklin writes, “... A certain quantity of heat will make some bodies good conductors, that will not otherwise conduct ...” and again, “... And water, though naturally a good conductor, will not conduct well when frozen into ice.” Oceanography findings An aging Franklin accumulated all his oceanographic findings in Maritime Observations, published by the Philosophical Society’s transactions in 1786. It contained ideas for sea anchors, catamaran hulls, watertight compartments, shipboard lightning rods and a soup bowl designed to stay stable in stormy weather. Decision-making In a 1772 letter to Joseph Priestley, Franklin lays out the earliest known description of the Pro & Con list, a common decision-making technique, now sometimes called a decisional balance sheet: ... my Way is, to divide half a Sheet of Paper by a Line into two Columns, writing over the one Pro, and over the other Con. Then during three or four Days Consideration I put down under the different Heads short Hints of the different Motives that at different Times occur to me for or against the Measure. When I have thus got them all together in one View, I endeavour to estimate their respective Weights; and where I find two, one on each side, that seem equal, I strike them both out: If I find a Reason pro equal to some two Reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two Reasons con equal to some three Reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the Ballance lies; and if after a Day or two of farther Consideration nothing new that is of Importance occurs on either side, I come to a Determination accordingly. Oil on water While traveling on a ship, Franklin had observed that the wake of a ship was diminished when the cooks scuttled their greasy water. He studied the effects at Clapham Common, London on a large pond there. “I fetched out a cruet of oil and dropt a little of it on the water... though not more than a teaspoon full, produced an instant calm over a space of several yards square.” He later used the trick to “calm the waters” by carrying “a little oil in the hollow joint of my cane”. Musical endeavors Franklin is known to have played the violin, the harp, and the guitar. He also composed music, notably a string quartet in early classical style. He developed a much-improved version of the glass harmonica, in which the glasses rotate on a shaft, with the player’s fingers held steady, instead of the other way around; this version soon found its way to Europe. Chess Franklin was an avid chess player. He was playing chess by around 1733, making him the first chess player known by name in the American colonies. His essay on “The Morals of Chess” in Columbian magazine in December 1786 is the second known writing on chess in America. This essay in praise of chess and prescribing a code of behavior for the game has been widely reprinted and translated. He and a friend also used chess as a means of learning the Italian language, which both were studying; the winner of each game between them had the right to assign a task, such as parts of the Italian grammar to be learned by heart, to be performed by the loser before their next meeting. Franklin was able to play chess more frequently against stronger opposition during his many years as a civil servant and diplomat in England, where the game was far better established than in America. He was able to improve his playing standard by facing more experienced players during this period. He regularly attended the Old Slaughter’s Coffee House in London for chess and socializing, making many important personal contacts. While in Paris, both as a visitor and later as ambassador, he visited the famous Café de la Régence, which France’s strongest players made their regular meeting place. No records of his games have survived, so it is not possible to ascertain his playing strength in modern terms. Franklin was inducted into the U.S. Chess Hall of Fame in 1999. The Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia, the second oldest chess club in the U.S., is named in his honor. Public life Early steps in Pennsylvania In 1736, Franklin created the Union Fire Company, one of the first volunteer firefighting companies in America. In the same year, he printed a new currency for New Jersey based on innovative anti-counterfeiting techniques he had devised. Throughout his career, Franklin was an advocate for paper money, publishing A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency in 1729, and his printer printed money. He was influential in the more restrained and thus successful monetary experiments in the Middle Colonies, which stopped deflation without causing excessive inflation. In 1766 he made a case for paper money to the British House of Commons. As he matured, Franklin began to concern himself more with public affairs. In 1743, he first devised a scheme for The Academy, Charity School, and College of Philadelphia. However, the person he had in mind to run the academy, Rev. Richard Peters, refused and Franklin put his ideas away until 1749, when he printed his own pamphlet, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. He was appointed president of the Academy on November 13, 1749; the Academy and the Charity School opened on August 13, 1751. In 1743, Franklin founded the American Philosophical Society to help scientific men discuss their discoveries and theories. He began the electrical research that, along with other scientific inquiries, would occupy him for the rest of his life, in between bouts of politics and moneymaking. In 1747, he retired from printing and went into other businesses. He created a partnership with his foreman, David Hall, which provided Franklin with half of the shop’s profits for 18 years. This lucrative business arrangement provided leisure time for study, and in a few years he had made discoveries that gave him a reputation with educated persons throughout Europe and especially in France. Franklin became involved in Philadelphia politics and rapidly progressed. In October 1748, he was selected as a councilman, in June 1749 he became a Justice of the Peace for Philadelphia, and in 1751 he was elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly. On August 10, 1753, Franklin was appointed deputy postmaster-general of British North America, (see below). His most notable service in domestic politics was his reform of the postal system, with mail sent out every week. In 1751, Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond obtained a charter from the Pennsylvania legislature to establish a hospital. Pennsylvania Hospital was the first hospital in what was to become the United States of America. Between 1750 and 1753, the “educational triumvirate” of Dr. Benjamin Franklin, the American Dr. Samuel Johnson of Stratford, Connecticut, and the immigrant Scottish schoolteacher Dr. William Smith built on Franklin’s initial scheme and created what Bishop James Madison, president of the College of William & Mary, called a “new-model” plan or style of American college. Franklin solicited, printed in 1752, and promoted an American textbook of moral philosophy from the American Dr. Samuel Johnson titled Elementa Philosophica to be taught in the new colleges to replace courses in denominational divinity. In June 1753, Johnson, Franklin, and Smith met in Stratford. They decided the new-model college would focus on the professions, with classes taught in English instead of Latin, have subject matter experts as professors instead of one tutor leading a class for four years, and there would be no religious test for admission. Johnson went on to found King’s College (now Columbia University) in New York City in 1754, while Franklin hired Smith as Provost of the College of Philadelphia, which opened in 1755. At its first commencement, on May 17, 1757, seven men graduated; six with a Bachelor of Arts and one as Master of Arts. It was later merged with the University of the State of Pennsylvania to become the University of Pennsylvania. The College was to become influential in guiding the founding documents of the United States: in the Continental Congress, for example, over one third of the college-affiliated men who contributed the Declaration of Independence between September 4, 1774, and July 4, 1776, were affiliated with the College. In 1753, both Harvard and Yale awarded him honorary degrees. In 1754, he headed the Pennsylvania delegation to the Albany Congress. This meeting of several colonies had been requested by the Board of Trade in England to improve relations with the Indians and defense against the French. Franklin proposed a broad Plan of Union for the colonies. While the plan was not adopted, elements of it found their way into the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. In 1756, Franklin organized the Pennsylvania Militia (see “Associated Regiment of Philadelphia” under heading of Pennsylvania’s 103rd Artillery and 111th Infantry Regiment at Continental Army). He used Tun Tavern as a gathering place to recruit a regiment of soldiers to go into battle against the Native American uprisings that beset the American colonies. Reportedly Franklin was elected “Colonel” of the Associated Regiment but declined the honor. Decades in London From the mid 1750s to the mid 1770s, Franklin spent much of his time in London. Officially he was there on a political mission, but he used his time to further his scientific explorations as well, meeting many notable people. In 1757, he was sent to England by the Pennsylvania Assembly as a colonial agent to protest against the political influence of the Penn family, the proprietors of the colony. He remained there for five years, striving to end the proprietors’ prerogative to overturn legislation from the elected Assembly, and their exemption from paying taxes on their land. His lack of influential allies in Whitehall led to the failure of this mission. At this time, many members of the Pennsylvania Assembly were feuding with William Penn’s heirs, who controlled the colony as proprietors. After his return to the colony, Franklin led the “anti-proprietary party” in the struggle against the Penn family, and was elected Speaker of the Pennsylvania House in May 1764. His call for a change from proprietary to royal government was a rare political miscalculation, however: Pennsylvanians worried that such a move would endanger their political and religious freedoms. Because of these fears, and because of political attacks on his character, Franklin lost his seat in the October 1764 Assembly elections. The anti-proprietary party dispatched Franklin to England again to continue the struggle against the Penn family proprietorship. During this trip, events drastically changed the nature of his mission. In London, Franklin opposed the 1765 Stamp Act. Unable to prevent its passage, he made another political miscalculation and recommended a friend to the post of stamp distributor for Pennsylvania. Pennsylvanians were outraged, believing that he had supported the measure all along, and threatened to destroy his home in Philadelphia. Franklin soon learned of the extent of colonial resistance to the Stamp Act, and he testified during the House of Commons proceedings that led to its repeal. With this, Franklin suddenly emerged as the leading spokesman for American interests in England. He wrote popular essays on behalf of the colonies. Georgia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts also appointed him as their agent to the Crown. Franklin lodged in a house in Craven Street, just off The Strand in central London. During his stays there, he developed a close friendship with his landlady, Margaret Stevenson, and her circle of friends and relations, in particular her daughter Mary, who was more often known as Polly. Their house, which he used on various lengthy missions from 1757 to 1775, is the only one of his residences to survive. It opened to the public as the Benjamin Franklin House museum in 2006. Whilst in London, Franklin became involved in radical politics. He belonged to a gentleman’s club (which he called “the honest Whigs”), which held stated meetings, and included members such as Richard Price, the minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church who ignited the Revolution Controversy, and Andrew Kippis. In 1756, Franklin had become a member of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (now the Royal Society of Arts or RSA), which had been founded in 1754 and whose early meetings took place in Covent Garden coffee shops. After his return to the United States in 1775, Franklin became the Society’s Corresponding Member, continuing a close connection. The RSA instituted a Benjamin Franklin Medal in 1956 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his birth and the 200th anniversary of his membership of the RSA. The study of natural philosophy (what we would call science) drew him into overlapping circles of acquaintance. Franklin was, for example, a corresponding member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, which included such other scientific and industrial luminaries as Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood and Erasmus Darwin; on occasion he visited them. In 1762, Oxford University awarded Franklin an honorary doctorate for his scientific accomplishments. He also managed to secure an appointed post for his illegitimate son, William Franklin, by then an attorney, as Colonial Governor of New Jersey. While living in London in 1768, he developed a phonetic alphabet in A Scheme for a new Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling. This reformed alphabet discarded six letters Franklin regarded as redundant (c, j, q, w, x, and y), and substituted six new letters for sounds he felt lacked letters of their own. His new alphabet, however, never caught on, and he eventually lost interest. Travels around Britain and Ireland Franklin used London as a base to travel. In 1771, he made short journeys through different parts of England, staying with Joseph Priestley at Leeds, Thomas Percival at Manchester and Erasmus Darwin at Lichfield. In Scotland, he spent five days with Lord Kames near Stirling and stayed for three weeks with David Hume in Edinburgh. In 1759, he visited Edinburgh with his son, and recalled his conversations there as “the densest happiness of my life”. In February 1759, the University of St Andrews awarded him an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. From then he was known as “Doctor Franklin”. In October of the same year he was granted Freedom of the Borough of St Andrews. He had never been to Ireland before, and met and stayed with Lord Hillsborough, who he believed was especially attentive. Franklin noted of him that “all the plausible behaviour I have described is meant only, by patting and stroking the horse, to make him more patient, while the reins are drawn tighter, and the spurs set deeper into his sides.” In Dublin, Franklin was invited to sit with the members of the Irish Parliament rather than in the gallery. He was the first American to receive this honor. While touring Ireland, he was moved by the level of poverty he saw. Ireland’s economy was affected by the same trade regulations and laws of Britain that governed America. Franklin feared that America could suffer the same effects should Britain’s “colonial exploitation” continue. Visits to Europe Franklin spent two months in German lands in 1766, but his connections to the country stretched across a lifetime. He declared a debt of gratitude to German scientist Otto von Guericke for his early studies of electricity. Franklin also co-authored the first treaty of friendship between Prussia and America in 1785. In September 1767, Franklin visited Paris with his usual traveling partner, Sir John Pringle. News of his electrical discoveries was widespread in France. His reputation meant that he was introduced to many influential scientists and politicians, and also to King Louis XV. Defending the American cause One line of argument in Parliament was that Americans should pay a share of the costs of the French and Indian War, and that therefore taxes should be levied on them. Franklin became the American spokesman in highly publicized testimony in Parliament in 1766. He stated that Americans already contributed heavily to the defense of the Empire. He said local governments had raised, outfitted and paid 25,000 soldiers to fight France—as many as Britain itself sent—and spent many millions from American treasuries doing so in the French and Indian War alone. In 1773, Franklin published two of his most celebrated pro-American satirical essays: “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One”, and “An Edict by the King of Prussia”. Hutchinson letters In June 1773 Franklin obtained private letters of Thomas Hutchinson and Andrew Oliver, governor and lieutenant governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, that proved they were encouraging the Crown to crack down on the rights of Bostonians. Franklin sent them to America, where they escalated the tensions. The British began to regard him as the fomenter of serious trouble. Hopes for a peaceful solution ended as he was systematically ridiculed and humiliated by Solicitor-General Alexander Wedderburn, before the Privy Council on January 29, 1774. He returned to Philadelphia in March 1775, and abandoned his accommodationist stance. Coming of revolution In 1763, soon after Franklin returned to Pennsylvania from England for the first time, the western frontier was engulfed in a bitter war known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. The Paxton Boys, a group of settlers convinced that the Pennsylvania government was not doing enough to protect them from American Indian raids, murdered a group of peaceful Susquehannock Indians and marched on Philadelphia. Franklin helped to organize a local militia to defend the capital against the mob. He met with the Paxton leaders and persuaded them to disperse. Franklin wrote a scathing attack against the racial prejudice of the Paxton Boys. “If an Indian injures me”, he asked, “does it follow that I may revenge that Injury on all Indians?” He provided an early response to British surveillance through his own network of counter-surveillance and manipulation. “He waged a public relations campaign, secured secret aid, played a role in privateering expeditions, and churned out effective and inflammatory propaganda.” Declaration of Independence By the time Franklin arrived in Philadelphia on May 5, 1775, after his second mission to Great Britain, the American Revolution had begun– with fighting between colonials and British at Lexington and Concord. The New England militia had trapped the main British army in Boston. The Pennsylvania Assembly unanimously chose Franklin as their delegate to the Second Continental Congress. In June 1776, he was appointed a member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. Although he was temporarily disabled by gout and unable to attend most meetings of the Committee, Franklin made several “small but important” changes to the draft sent to him by Thomas Jefferson. At the signing, he is quoted as having replied to a comment by Hancock that they must all hang together: “Yes, we must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Postmaster Well known as a printer and publisher, Franklin was appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737, holding the office until 1753, when he and publisher William Hunter were named deputy postmasters–general of British North America, the first to hold the office. (Joint appointments were standard at the time, for political reasons.) Franklin was responsible for the British colonies as far as the island of Newfoundland, opening Canada’s first post office at Halifax, Nova Scotia, while Hunter became postal administrator in Williamsburg, Virginia and oversaw areas south of Annapolis, Maryland. Franklin reorganized the service’s accounting system, then improved speed of delivery between Philadelphia, New York and Boston. By 1761, efficiencies lead to the first profits for the colonial post office. When the lands of New France were ceded to the British under the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the new British province of Quebec was created among them, and Franklin saw mail service expanded between Montreal, Trois-Rivières, Quebec City, and New York. For the greater part of his appointment, Franklin lived in England (from 1757 to 1762, and again from 1764 to 1774)– about three-quarters of his term. Eventually, his sympathies for the rebel cause in the American Revolution led to his dismissal on January 31, 1774. On July 26, 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the United States Post Office and named Benjamin Franklin as the first United States Postmaster General. Franklin had been a postmaster for decades and was a natural choice for the position. He had just returned from England and was appointed chairman of a Committee of Investigation to establish a postal system. The report of the Committee, providing for the appointment of a postmaster general for the 13 American colonies, was considered by the Continental Congress on July 25 and 26. On July 26, 1775, Franklin was appointed Postmaster General, the first appointed under the Continental Congress. It established a postal system that became the United States Post Office, a system that continues to operate today. Ambassador to France: 1776–1785 In December 1776, Franklin was dispatched to France as commissioner for the United States. He took with him as secretary his 16-year-old grandson, William Temple Franklin. They lived in a home in the Parisian suburb of Passy, donated by Jacques-Donatien Le Ray de Chaumont, who supported the United States. Franklin remained in France until 1785. He conducted the affairs of his country toward the French nation with great success, which included securing a critical military alliance in 1778 and negotiating the Treaty of Paris (1783). Among his associates in France was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau—a French Revolutionary writer, orator and statesman who in early 1791 would be elected president of the National Assembly. In July 1784, Franklin met with Mirabeau and contributed anonymous materials that the Frenchman used in his first signed work: Considerations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus. The publication was critical of the Society of the Cincinnati, established in the United States. Franklin and Mirabeau thought of it as a “noble order”, inconsistent with the egalitarian ideals of the new republic. During his stay in France, Benjamin Franklin was active as a Freemason, serving as Venerable Master of the Lodge Les Neuf Sœurs from 1779 until 1781. He was the 106th member of the Lodge. In 1784, when Franz Mesmer began to publicize his theory of “animal magnetism” which was considered offensive by many, Louis XVI appointed a commission to investigate it. These included the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, the physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly, and Benjamin Franklin. In 1781, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Franklin’s advocacy for religious tolerance in France contributed to arguments made by French philosophers and politicians that resulted in Louis XVI’s signing of the Edict of Versailles in November 1787. This edict effectively nullified the Edict of Fontainebleau, which had denied non-Catholics civil status and the right to openly practice their faith. Franklin also served as American minister to Sweden, although he never visited that country. He negotiated a treaty that was signed in April 1783. On August 27, 1783, in Paris, Franklin witnessed the world’s first hydrogen balloon flight. Le Globe, created by professor Jacques Charles and Les Frères Robert, was watched by a vast crowd as it rose from the Champ de Mars (now the site of the Eiffel Tower). This so enthused Franklin that he subscribed financially to the next project to build a manned hydrogen balloon. On December 1, 1783, Franklin was seated in the special enclosure for honoured guests when La Charlière took off from the Jardin des Tuileries, piloted by Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert. Constitutional Convention When he returned home in 1785, Franklin occupied a position only second to that of George Washington as the champion of American independence. Le Ray honored him with a commissioned portrait painted by Joseph Duplessis, which now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. After his return, Franklin became an abolitionist and freed his two slaves. He eventually became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. In 1787, Franklin served as a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention. He held an honorary position and seldom engaged in debate. He is the only Founding Father who is a signatory of all four of the major documents of the founding of the United States: the Declaration of Independence, the Treaty of Alliance with France, the Treaty of Paris and the United States Constitution. In 1787, a group of prominent ministers in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, proposed the foundation of a new college named in Franklin’s honor. Franklin donated £200 towards the development of Franklin College (now called Franklin & Marshall College). Between 1771 and 1788, he finished his autobiography. While it was at first addressed to his son, it was later completed for the benefit of mankind at the request of a friend. Franklin strongly supported the right to freedom of speech: In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech... Without freedom of thought there can be no such thing as wisdom, and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech, which is the right of every man... —Silence Dogood no. 8, 1722 In his later years, as Congress was forced to deal with the issue of slavery, Franklin wrote several essays that stressed the importance of the abolition of slavery and of the integration of blacks into American society. These writings included: * An Address to the Public (1789) * A Plan for Improving the Condition of the Free Blacks (1789) * Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade (1790) In 1790, Quakers from New York and Pennsylvania presented their petition for abolition to Congress. Their argument against slavery was backed by the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society and its president, Benjamin Franklin. President of Pennsylvania Special balloting conducted October 18, 1785, unanimously elected Franklin the sixth president of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, replacing John Dickinson. The office was practically that of governor. Franklin held that office for slightly over three years, longer than any other, and served the constitutional limit of three full terms. Shortly after his initial election he was reelected to a full term on October 29, 1785, and again in the fall of 1786 and on October 31, 1787. In that capacity he served as host to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia. Virtue, religion, and personal beliefs Like the other advocates of republicanism, Franklin emphasized that the new republic could survive only if the people were virtuous. All his life he explored the role of civic and personal virtue, as expressed in Poor Richard’s aphorisms. Franklin felt that organized religion was necessary to keep men good to their fellow men, but rarely attended religious services himself. When Franklin met Voltaire in Paris and asked his fellow member of the Enlightenment vanguard to bless his grandson, Voltaire said in English, “God and Liberty”, and added, “this is the only appropriate benediction for the grandson of Monsieur Franklin.” Franklin’s parents were both pious Puritans. The family attended the Old South Church, the most liberal Puritan congregation in Boston, where Benjamin Franklin was baptized in 1706. Franklin’s father, a poor chandler, owned a copy of a book, Bonifacius: Essays to Do Good, by the Puritan preacher and family friend Cotton Mather, which Franklin often cited as a key influence on his life. Franklin’s first pen name, Silence Dogood, paid homage both to the book and to a widely known sermon by Mather. The book preached the importance of forming voluntary associations to benefit society. Franklin learned about forming do-good associations from Cotton Mather, but his organizational skills made him the most influential force in making voluntarism an enduring part of the American ethos. Franklin formulated a presentation of his beliefs and published it in 1728. It did not mention many of the Puritan ideas as regards belief in salvation, the divinity of Jesus, and indeed most religious dogma. He clarified himself as a deist in his 1771 autobiography, although he still considered himself a Christian. He retained a strong faith in a God as the wellspring of morality and goodness in man, and as a Providential actor in history responsible for American independence. It was Ben Franklin who, at a critical impasse during the Constitutional Convention in June 1787, attempted to introduce the practice of daily common prayer with these words: ... In the beginning of the contest with G. Britain, when we were sensible of danger we had daily prayer in this room for the Divine Protection.– Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us who were engaged in the struggle must have observed frequent instances of a Superintending providence in our favor.... And have we now forgotten that powerful friend? or do we imagine that we no longer need His assistance. I have lived, Sir, a long time and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth– that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the sacred writings that “except the Lord build they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel:... I therefore beg leave to move– that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that service. However, the motion met with resistance and was never brought to a vote. Franklin was an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical minister George Whitefield during the First Great Awakening. Franklin did not subscribe to Whitefield’s theology, but he admired Whitefield for exhorting people to worship God through good works. Franklin published all of Whitefield’s sermons and journals, thereby earning a lot of money and boosting the Great Awakening. When he stopped attending church, Franklin wrote in his autobiography: ... Sunday being my studying day, I never was without some religious principles. I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that He made the world, and governed it by His providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded, either here or hereafter. Franklin retained a lifelong commitment to the Puritan virtues and political values he had grown up with, and through his civic work and publishing, he succeeded in passing these values into the American culture permanently. He had a “passion for virtue”. These Puritan values included his devotion to egalitarianism, education, industry, thrift, honesty, temperance, charity and community spirit. The classical authors read in the Enlightenment period taught an abstract ideal of republican government based on hierarchical social orders of king, aristocracy and commoners. It was widely believed that English liberties relied on their balance of power, but also hierarchal deference to the privileged class. “Puritanism... and the epidemic evangelism of the mid-eighteenth century, had created challenges to the traditional notions of social stratification” by preaching that the Bible taught all men are equal, that the true value of a man lies in his moral behavior, not his class, and that all men can be saved. Franklin, steeped in Puritanism and an enthusiastic supporter of the evangelical movement, rejected the salvation dogma, but embraced the radical notion of egalitarian democracy. Franklin’s commitment to teach these values was itself something he gained from his Puritan upbringing, with its stress on “inculcating virtue and character in themselves and their communities.” These Puritan values and the desire to pass them on, were one of Franklin’s quintessentially American characteristics, and helped shape the character of the nation. Franklin’s writings on virtue were derided by some European authors, such as Jackob Fugger in his critical work Portrait of American Culture. Max Weber considered Franklin’s ethical writings a culmination of the Protestant ethic, which ethic created the social conditions necessary for the birth of capitalism. One of Franklin’s notable characteristics was his respect, tolerance and promotion of all churches. Referring to his experience in Philadelphia, he wrote in his autobiography, “new Places of worship were continually wanted, and generally erected by voluntary Contribution, my Mite for such purpose, whatever might be the Sect, was never refused.” “He helped create a new type of nation that would draw strength from its religious pluralism.” The evangelical revivalists who were active mid-century, such as Franklin’s friend and preacher, George Whitefield, were the greatest advocates of religious freedom, “claiming liberty of conscience to be an ‘inalienable right of every rational creature.’” Whitefield’s supporters in Philadelphia, including Franklin, erected “a large, new hall, that... could provide a pulpit to anyone of any belief.” Franklin’s rejection of dogma and doctrine and his stress on the God of ethics and morality and civic virtue made him the “prophet of tolerance.” Franklin composed “A Parable Against Persecution”, an apocryphal 51st chapter of Genesis in which God teaches Abraham the duty of tolerance. While he was living in London in 1774, he was present at the birth of British Unitarianism, attending the inaugural session of the Essex Street Chapel, at which Theophilus Lindsey drew together the first avowedly Unitarian congregation in England; this was somewhat politically risky, and pushed religious tolerance to new boundaries, as a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity was illegal until the 1813 Act. Although Franklin’s parents had intended for him to have a career in the Church, Franklin as a young man adopted the Enlightenment religious belief in deism, that God’s truths can be found entirely through nature and reason. “I soon became a thorough Deist.” As a young man he rejected Christian dogma in a 1725 pamphlet A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain, which he later saw as an embarrassment, while simultaneously asserting that God is “all wise, all good, all powerful.” He defended his rejection of religious dogma with these words: “I think opinions should be judged by their influences and effects; and if a man holds none that tend to make him less virtuous or more vicious, it may be concluded that he holds none that are dangerous, which I hope is the case with me.” After the disillusioning experience of seeing the decay in his own moral standards, and those of two friends in London whom he had converted to Deism, Franklin turned back to a belief in the importance of organized religion, on the pragmatic grounds that without God and organized churches, man will not be good. Moreover, because of his proposal that prayers be said in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, many have contended that in his later life Franklin became a pious Christian. At one point, he wrote to Thomas Paine, criticizing his manuscript, The Age of Reason: For without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection... think how great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc’d and inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great Point for its Security; And perhaps you are indebted to her originally that is to your Religious Education, for the Habits of Virtue upon which you now justly value yourself. If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be if without it. According to David Morgan, Franklin was a proponent of religion in general. He prayed to “Powerful Goodness” and referred to God as “the infinite”. John Adams noted that Franklin was a mirror in which people saw their own religion: “The Catholics thought him almost a Catholic. The Church of England claimed him as one of them. The Presbyterians thought him half a Presbyterian, and the Friends believed him a wet Quaker.” Whatever else Franklin was, concludes Morgan, “he was a true champion of generic religion.” In a letter to Richard Price, Franklin stated that he believed that religion should support itself without help from the government, claiming, “When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.” In 1790, just about a month before he died, Franklin wrote a letter to Ezra Stiles, president of Yale University, who had asked him his views on religion: As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupt changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his divinity; tho’ it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and I think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure. On July 4, 1776, Congress appointed a three-member committee composed of Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams to design the Great Seal of the United States. Franklin’s proposal (which was not adopted) featured the motto: “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God” and a scene from the Book of Exodus, with Moses, the Israelites, the pillar of fire, and George III depicted as pharaoh. The design that was produced was never acted upon by Congress, and the Great Seal’s design was not finalized until a third committee was appointed in 1782. Thirteen Virtues Franklin sought to cultivate his character by a plan of 13 virtues, which he developed at age 20 (in 1726) and continued to practice in some form for the rest of his life. His autobiography lists his 13 virtues as: 1. “Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.” 2. “Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.” 3. “Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.” 4. “Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” 5. “Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.” 6. “Industry. Lose no time; be always employ’d in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” 7. “Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.” 8.“Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.” 9. “Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.” 10. “Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation.” 11. “Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.” 12. “Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.” 13. “Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.” Franklin did not try to work on them all at once. Instead, he would work on one and only one each week “leaving all others to their ordinary chance.” While Franklin did not live completely by his virtues, and by his own admission he fell short of them many times, he believed the attempt made him a better man contributing greatly to his success and happiness, which is why in his autobiography, he devoted more pages to this plan than to any other single point; in his autobiography Franklin wrote, “I hope, therefore, that some of my descendants may follow the example and reap the benefit.” Slavery During Franklin’s lifetime slaves were numerous in Philadelphia. In 1750, half the persons in Philadelphia who had established probate estates owned slaves. Dock workers in the city consisted of 15% slaves. Franklin owned as many as seven slaves, two males of whom worked in his household and his shop. Franklin posted paid ads for the sale of slaves and for the capture of runaway slaves and allowed the sale of slaves in his general store. Franklin profited from both the international and domestic slave trade, even criticizing slaves who had run off to join the British Army during the colonial wars of the 1740s and 1750s. Franklin, however, later became a “cautious abolitionist” and became an outspoken critic of landed gentry slavery. In 1758, Franklin advocated the opening of a school for the education of black slaves in Philadelphia. After returning from England in 1762, Franklin became more anti-slavery, in his view believing that the institution promoted black degradation rather than the idea blacks were inherently inferior. By 1770, Franklin had freed his slaves and attacked the system of slavery and the international slave trade. Franklin, however, refused to publicly debate the issue of slavery at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Franklin tended to take both sides of the issue of slavery, never fully divesting himself from the institution. Death and legacy Franklin struggled with obesity throughout his middle-aged and later years, which resulted in multiple health problems, particularly gout, which worsened as he aged. In poor health during the signing of the US Constitution in 1787, he was rarely seen in public from then until his death. Benjamin Franklin died from pleuritic attack at his home in Philadelphia on April 17, 1790, at age 84. Approximately 20,000 people attended his funeral. He was interred in Christ Church Burial Ground in Philadelphia. In 1728, aged 22, Franklin wrote what he hoped would be his own epitaph: The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author. Franklin’s actual grave, however, as he specified in his final will, simply reads “Benjamin and Deborah Franklin”. In 1773, when Franklin’s work had moved from printing to science and politics, he corresponded with a French scientist, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg, on the subject of preserving the dead for later revival by more advanced scientific methods, writing: I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection. (Extended excerpt also online.) His death is described in the book The Life of Benjamin Franklin, quoting from the account of Dr. John Jones: ... when the pain and difficulty of breathing entirely left him, and his family were flattering themselves with the hopes of his recovery, when an imposthume, which had formed itself in his lungs, suddenly burst, and discharged a quantity of matter, which he continued to throw up while he had power; but, as that failed, the organs of respiration became gradually oppressed; a calm, lethargic state succeeded; and on the 17th instant (April 1790), about eleven o’clock at night, he quietly expired, closing a long and useful life of eighty-four years and three months. A signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Franklin is considered one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His pervasive influence in the early history of the nation has led to his being jocularly called “the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States.” Franklin’s likeness is ubiquitous. Since 1928, it has adorned American $100 bills, which are sometimes referred to in slang as “Benjamins” or “Franklins.” From 1948 to 1963, Franklin’s portrait was on the half dollar. He has appeared on a $50 bill and on several varieties of the $100 bill from 1914 and 1918. Franklin appears on the $1,000 Series EE Savings bond. The city of Philadelphia contains around 5,000 likenesses of Benjamin Franklin, about half of which are located on the University of Pennsylvania campus. Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin Parkway (a major thoroughfare) and Benjamin Franklin Bridge (the first major bridge to connect Philadelphia with New Jersey) are named in his honor. In 1976, as part of a bicentennial celebration, Congress dedicated a 20-foot (6 m) marble statue in Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute as the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Many of Franklin’s personal possessions are also on display at the Institute, one of the few national memorials located on private property. In London, his house at 36 Craven Street, which is the only surviving former residence of Benjamin Franklin, was first marked with a blue plaque and has since been opened to the public as the Benjamin Franklin House. In 1998, workmen restoring the building dug up the remains of six children and four adults hidden below the home. The Times reported on February 11, 1998: Initial estimates are that the bones are about 200 years old and were buried at the time Franklin was living in the house, which was his home from 1757 to 1762 and from 1764 to 1775. Most of the bones show signs of having been dissected, sawn or cut. One skull has been drilled with several holes. Paul Knapman, the Westminster Coroner, said yesterday: “I cannot totally discount the possibility of a crime. There is still a possibility that I may have to hold an inquest.” The Friends of Benjamin Franklin House (the organization responsible for the restoration) note that the bones were likely placed there by William Hewson, who lived in the house for two years and who had built a small anatomy school at the back of the house. They note that while Franklin likely knew what Hewson was doing, he probably did not participate in any dissections because he was much more of a physicist than a medical man. Bequest Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time, or about $112,000 in 2011 dollars) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when the French mathematician Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour, who admired Franklin greatly, wrote a friendly parody of Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” called “Fortunate Richard”. The main character leaves a smallish amount of money in his will, five lots of 100 livres, to collect interest over one, two, three, four or five full centuries, with the resulting astronomical sums to be spent on impossibly elaborate utopian projects. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. By 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin’s Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin’s Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time; at the end of its first 100 years a portion was allocated to help establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston, and the whole fund was later dedicated to supporting this institute. For his philanthropic life and generosity, he is included in the Philanthropy Hall of Fame in the Almanac of American Philanthropy. Franklin on U.S. postage Benjamin Franklin is a prominent figure in American history comparable to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln, and as such he has been honored on U.S. postage stamps many times. The image of Franklin, the first Postmaster General of the United States, occurs on the face of U.S. postage more than any other notable American save that of George Washington. Franklin appeared on the first U.S. postage stamp (displayed above) issued in 1847. From 1908 through 1923 the U.S. Post Office issued a series of postage stamps commonly referred to as the Washington-Franklin Issues where, along with George Washington, Franklin was depicted many times over a 14-year period, the longest run of any one series in U.S. postal history. Along with the regular issue stamps Franklin however only appears on a few commemorative stamps. Some of the finest portrayals of Franklin on record can be found on the engravings inscribed on the face of U.S. postage. Bawdy Ben “Advice to a Friend on Choosing a Mistress” is a letter written by Benjamin Franklin, dated June 25, 1745, in which Franklin gives advice to a young man about channeling sexual urges. Due to its licentious nature, the letter was not published in collections of Franklin’s papers during the nineteenth century. Federal court decisions from the mid– to late– twentieth century cited the document as a reason for overturning obscenity laws, using it to make a case against censorship. Exhibitions “The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment” exhibition opened in Philadelphia in February 2006 and ran through December 2006. Benjamin Franklin and Dashkova met only once, in Paris in 1781. Franklin was 75 and Dashkova was 37. Franklin invited Dashkova to become the first woman to join the American Philosophical Society; she was the only woman so honored for another 80 years. Later, Dashkova reciprocated by making him the first American member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Places and things named after Benjamin Franklin As a founding father of the United States, Franklin’s name has been attached to many things. Among these are: The State of Franklin, a short-lived independent state formed during the American Revolutionary War Counties in at least 16 U.S. states Several major landmarks in and around Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Franklin’s longtime home, including: Franklin and Marshall College in nearby Lancaster Franklin Field, a football field once home to the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League and the home field of the University of Pennsylvania Quakers since 1895 The Franklin Mercantile Chess Club in Philadelphia, the second oldest chess club in the U.S. (Franklin was a keen chess enthusiast and the first writer on chess in America) The Benjamin Franklin Bridge across the Delaware River between Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey The Franklin Institute, a science museum in Philadelphia, which presents the Benjamin Franklin Medal The Sons of Ben soccer supporters club for the Philadelphia Union Ben Franklin Stores chain of variety stores, with a key-and-spark logo Franklin Templeton Investments an investment firm whose New York Stock Exchange ticker abbreviation, BEN, is also in honor of Franklin The Ben Franklin effect from the field of psychology Benjamin Franklin Shibe, baseball executive and namesake of the longtime Philadelphia baseball stadium Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, the fictional character from the M*A*S*H novels, film, and television program Benjamin Franklin Gates, Nicolas Cage’s character from the National Treasure films. Several US Navy ships have been named the USS Franklin or the USS Bonhomme Richard, the latter being a French translation of his penname “Poor Richard”. Two aircraft carriers, USS Franklin (CV-13) and USS Bon Homme Richard (CV-31) were simultaneously in commission and in operation during World War II, and Franklin therefore had the distinction of having two simultaneously operational US Navy warships named in his honor. The French ship Franklin (1797) was also named in Franklin’s honor. Franklinia alatamaha, commonly called the Franklin tree. It was named after him by his friends and fellow Philadelphians, botanists James and William Bartram. CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin, a Chinese-built French owned Explorer-class container ship Ancestry Franklin’s father, Josiah Franklin, was a tallow chandler, a soap-maker and a candle-maker. Josiah was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England, on December 23, 1657, the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith-farmer, and Jane White. Benjamin’s mother, Abiah Folger, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger (Governor Thomas Mayhew’s assistant), a miller and schoolteacher, and his wife Mary Morrill, a former indentured servant. Josiah Franklin had 17 children with his two wives. He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about 1677 in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in 1683; they had three children before emigrating and four after. After her death, Josiah married Abiah Folger on July 9, 1689, in the Old South Meeting House by Samuel Willard. Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin’s 15th child and tenth and last son. Benjamin Franklin’s mother, Abiah Folger, was born into a Puritan family among those that fled to Massachusetts to establish a purified Congregationalist Christianity in New England, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans. They sailed for Boston in 1635. Her father was “the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America”; as clerk of the court, he was jailed for disobeying the local magistrate in defense of middle-class shopkeepers and artisans in conflict with wealthy landowners. Ben Franklin followed in his grandfather’s footsteps in his battles against the wealthy Penn family that owned the Pennsylvania Colony. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin

Maryann Corbett (née Zillotti, Washington, D.C.) is an American poet, medievalist, and linguist.She grew up in northern Virginia. She did her undergraduate work at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and graduated with a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota.Her work has appeared in Southwest Review, Barrow Street, Rattle, River Styx, Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Measure, Literary Imagination, The Dark Horse, Italian Americana, Mezzo Cammin, Linebreak, Subtropics, Verse Daily, American Life in Poetry, The Poetry Foundation, The Writer’s Almanac, and many other venues in print and online, as well as an assortment of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2018. She has been a several-time Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee; a finalist for the 2009 Morton Marr Prize, the 2010 Best of the Net anthology, and the 2011 and 2016 Able Muse Book Prize; and a winner of the Lyric Memorial Award, the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, and the Richard Wilbur Award. Her third book, Mid Evil, is the Wilbur Award winner and has been published by the University of Evansville Press.She has worked as a writing teacher and indexer for the Minnesota Legislature. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Amy Clampitt (June 15, 1920– September 10, 1994) was an American poet and author. Life Amy Clampitt was born on June 15, 1920 of Quaker parents, and brought up in New Providence, Iowa. In the American Academy of Arts and Letters and at nearby Grinnell College she began a study of English literature that eventually led her to poetry. She graduated from Grinnell College, and from that time on lived mainly in New York City. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Oxford University Press, a reference librarian at the Audubon Society, and a freelance editor. Not until the mid-1960s, when she was in her forties, did she return to writing poetry. Her first poem was published by The New Yorker in 1978. In 1983, at the age of sixty-three, she published her first full-length collection, The Kingfisher. In the decade that followed, Clampitt published five books of poetry, including What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), and Westward (1990). Her last book, A Silence Opens, appeared in 1994. She also published a book of essays and several privately printed editions of her longer poems. She taught at the College of William and Mary, Smith College, and Amherst College, but it was her time spent in Manhattan, in a remote part of Maine, and on various trips to Europe, the former Soviet Union, Iowa, Wales, and England that most directly influenced her work. Clampitt was the recipient of a 1982 Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and she was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Poets. She died of cancer in September 1994.

Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849– June 24, 1909) was an American novelist, short story writer and poet, best known for her local color works set along or near the southern seacoast of Maine. Jewett is recognized as an important practitioner of American literary regionalism. Early life Jewett’s family had been residents of New England for many generations, and Sarah Orne Jewett was born in South Berwick, Maine. Her father was a doctor specializing in “obstetrics and diseases of women and children.” and Jewett often accompanied him on his rounds, becoming acquainted with the sights and sounds of her native land and its people. As treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, a condition that developed in early childhood, Jewett was sent on frequent walks and through them also developed a love of nature. In later life, Jewett often visited Boston, where she was acquainted with many of the most influential literary figures of her day; but she always returned to South Berwick, small seaports near which were the inspiration for the towns of “Deephaven” and “Dunnet Landing” in her stories. Jewett was educated at Miss Olive Rayne’s school and then at Berwick Academy, graduating in 1866. She supplemented her education through an extensive family library. Jewett was “never overtly religious,” but after she joined the Episcopal church in 1871, she explored less conventional religious ideas. For example, her friendship with Harvard law professor Theophilus Parsons stimulated an interest in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and theologian, who believed that the Divine “was present in innumerable, joined forms—a concept underlying Jewett’s belief in individual responsibility.” Career She published her first important story in the Atlantic Monthly at age 19, and her reputation grew throughout the 1870s and 1880s. Her literary importance arises from her careful, if subdued, vignettes of country life that reflect a contemporary interest in local color rather than plot. Jewett possessed a keen descriptive gift that William Dean Howells called “an uncommon feeling for talk—I hear your people.” Jewett made her reputation with the novella The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). A Country Doctor (1884), a novel reflecting her father and her early ambitions for a medical career, and A White Heron (1886), a collection of short stories are among her finest work. Some of Jewett’s poetry was collected in Verses (1916), and she also wrote three children’s books. Willa Cather described Jewett as a significant influence on her development as a writer, and “feminist critics have since championed her writing for its rich account of women’s lives and voices.” Later life On September 3, 1902, Jewett was injured in a carriage accident that all but ended her writing career. She was paralyzed by a stroke in March 1909, and she died on June 24 after suffering another. The Georgian home of the Jewett family, built in 1774 overlooking Central Square at South Berwick, is now a National Historic Landmark and Historic New England museum called the Sarah Orne Jewett House. Jewett never married, but she established a close friendship with writer Annie Adams Fields (1834–1915) and her husband, publisher James Thomas Fields, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. After the sudden death of James Fields in 1881, Jewett and Annie Fields lived together for the rest of Jewett’s life in what was then termed a “Boston marriage”. Some modern scholars have speculated that the two were lovers. Both women “found friendship, humor, and literary encouragement” in one another’s company, traveling to Europe together and hosting “American and European literati.” In France Jewett met Thérèse Blanc-Bentzon with whom she had long corresponded and who translated some of her stories for publication in France.

Dame Emilie Rose Macaulay, DBE (1 August 1881– 30 October 1958) was an English writer, most noted for her award-winning novel The Towers of Trebizond, about a small Anglo-Catholic group crossing Turkey by camel. The story is seen as a spiritual autobiography, reflecting her own changing and conflicting beliefs. Macaulay’s novels were partly-influenced by Virginia Woolf; she also wrote biographies and travelogues. Early years and education Macaulay was born in Rugby, Warwickshire the daughter of George Campbell Macaulay, a Classical scholar, and his wife, Grace Mary (née Conybeare). Her father was descended in the male-line directly from the Macaulay family of Lewis. She was educated at Oxford High School for Girls and read Modern History at Somerville College at Oxford University. Career Macaulay began writing her first novel, Abbots Verney (published 1906), after leaving Somerville and while living with her parents at Ty Isaf, near Aberystwyth, in Wales. Later novels include The Lee Shore (1912), Potterism (1920), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told by an Idiot (1923), And No Man’s Wit (1940), The World My Wilderness (1950), and The Towers of Trebizond (1956). Her non-fiction work includes They Went to Portugal, Catchwords and Claptrap, a biography of Milton, and Pleasure of Ruins. Macaulay’s fiction was influenced by Virginia Woolf and Anatole France. During World War I Macaulay worked in the British Propaganda Department, after some time as a nurse and later as a civil servant in the War Office. She pursued a romantic affair with Gerald O’Donovan, a writer and former Jesuit priest, from 1918 until his death in 1942. During the interwar period she was a sponsor of the pacifist Peace Pledge Union; however she resigned from the PPU and later recanted her pacifism in 1940. Her London flat was utterly destroyed in the Blitz, and she had to rebuild her life and library from scratch, as documented in the semi-autobiographical short story, Miss Anstruther’s Letters, which was published in 1942. The Towers of Trebizond, her final novel, is generally regarded as her masterpiece. Strongly autobiographical, it treats with wistful humour and deep sadness the attractions of mystical Christianity, and the irremediable conflict between adulterous love and the demands of the Christian faith. For this work, she received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956. Personal life Macaulay was never a simple believer in “mere Christianity”; however, and her writings reveal a more complex, mystical sense of the divine. That said, she did not return to the Anglican church until 1953; she had been an ardent secularist before and, while religious themes pervade her novels, previous to her conversion she often treats Christianity satirically, for instance in Going Abroad and The World My Wilderness. She never married, as a result of her lengthy and secret relationship with Gerald O’Donovan. They met in 1918 and the affair lasted until his death in 1942. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) on 31 December 1957 in the 1958 New Years Honours. Macaulay was an active feminist throughout her life. Dame Rose Macaulay died on 30 October 1958, aged 77. Memorable quotes From The Towers of Trebizond: “Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.” First line of The Towers of Trebizond, cited by librarian Nancy Pearl in “Famous First Words: A Librarian Shares Favorite Literary Opening Lines,” [1] hosted by Steve Inskeep on NPR’s Morning Edition, 8 September 2004, as an example among “some notable opening lines that have made Pearl’s heart pound”. “Take my camel, dear”, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. From Staying with Relations. Discussing the coat worn by a visitor, a character remarks: “Is rabbit fur disgusting because it’s cheap, or is it cheap because it’s disgusting?”

References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

William Sydney Graham (19 November 1918– 9 January 1986) was a Scottish poet who is often associated with Dylan Thomas and the neo-romantic group of poets. Graham’s poetry was mostly overlooked in his lifetime but, partly due to the support of Harold Pinter, his work has enjoyed a revival in recent years. He was represented in the second edition of the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse (Harmondsworth, UK, 1962) and the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2001). Early life and work Graham was born in Greenock. In 1932, he left school to become an apprentice draughtsman and then studied structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow. He was awarded a bursary to study literature for a year at Newbattle Abbey College in 1938. Graham spent the war years working at a number of jobs in Scotland and Ireland before moving to Cornwall in 1944. His first book, Cage Without Grievance was published in 1942. Graham and the neo-romantics The 1940s were prolific years for Graham, and he published four more books during that decade. These were The Seven Journeys (1944)' 2ND Poems (1945), The Voyages of Alfred Wallis (1948) and The White Threshold (1949). The style of these early poems led critics to see Graham as part of the neo-romantic group that included Dylan Thomas and George Barker. The affinities between these three poets derive from a common interest in poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Rimbaud and Hart Crane, and, in the cases of Thomas and Graham, a taste for the Bohemian lifestyle of the London literary scene. In 1947, Graham received the Atlantic Award for Literature, and lectured at New York University whilst spending a year on a reading touring of the United States. He moved to London to be nearer the hub of that Bohemian world. Here he came into contact with T. S. Eliot, then editor of Faber and Faber who published The White Threshold and who were to remain Graham’s publishers for the rest of his life. The Nightfishing and legacy In 1954, Graham returned to Cornwall to live near the St. Ives artists colony. Here he became friendly with several of the resident painters, including Bryan Wynter and Roger Hilton. The following year, Faber and Faber published his The Nightfishing, a book whose title poem marked a dramatic change in Graham’s poetry. The poem moved on from his earlier style and moved away from the neo-romantic/apocalyptic tag. Unfortunately for the poet, the poem’s appearance coincided with the rise of the Movement with their open hostility to the neo-romantics, and, despite the support of Eliot and Hugh MacDiarmid, the book was neither a critical nor a popular success. It was to be fifteen years before Graham published another book, Malcolm Mooney’s Land (1970). This, and his last book, “Implements In Their Places” are truly original and enduring poetic achievements, for which Graham is slowly coming to be recognised. For many years, he had been living in semi-poverty on his income as a writer, but in 1974 he received a Civil List pension of £500 per year. Perhaps because of this alleviation of his financial circumstances, Graham began to publish with more frequency, with Implements in their Places (1977), Collected Poems 1942–1977 (1979) and an American-published Selected Poems (1980). He died in Madron, Cornwall in 1986. His last collection Aimed at Nobody was published posthumously in 1993 and a book of Uncollected Poems appeared in 1990. Faber brought out a new Selected Poems in 1996. The Nightfisherman: Selected Letters was published in 1999 and New Collected Poems in 2005. All Graham’s poems have a location, a plot and setting (or narrative) as Graham insisted ‘the first act of engagement of reader and poem was in reading it aloud. This tested the syntax, pace and tone of poem and reader ’. Posthumous publication activity indicates, Graham’s reputation has grown in recent years. Some might argue this is partly due to Harold Pinter’s often-expressed enthusiasm for the poet, or attribute his increasing recognition to the widespread advocacy of poets associated with the British Poetry Revival. However Graham’s work was represented in the anthology Conductors of Chaos (1996) by a selection introduced by the poet and critic Tony Lopez, who also wrote a book-length study, The Poetry of W. S. Graham (1989). Marriage, death and recognition He married another poet, Agnes Kilpatrick Dunsmuir (1909–1999), known as “Nessie Dunsmuir”. He died on 9 January 1986. Copyright in Graham’s works is held by his daughter, Rosalind Mudaliar. In 2006, 20 years after his death, memorial plaques were unveiled in Fore Street, Madron where he spent his final years, and at his birthplace, 1 Hope Street, Greenock. Bibliography * Cage without Grievance, Parton Press, 1942 * The Seven Journeys, William MacLellan, 1944 * 2ND Poems, Nicholson and Watson, 1945 * The White Threshold, Faber and Faber, 1949 * The Nightfishing, Faber and Faber, 1955 * Malcolm Mooney’s Land, Faber and Faber, 1970 * Penguin Modern Poets 17, David Gascoyne, W. S. Graham, Kathleen Raine, Penguin Books, 1970 * Implements in their Places, Faber and Faber, 1977 * Collected Poems, 1942-1977, Faber and Faber, 1979 * Selected Poems, Ecco Press, 1980 * Uncollected Poems, Greville Press, 1990 * Aimed at Nobody: Poems from Notebooks, ed. Margaret Blackwood and Robin Skelton, Faber and Faber, 1993 * Selected Poems, Faber and Faber, 1996 * W.S. Graham Selected by Nessie Dunsmuir, Greville Press, 1998 * The Night Fisherman: Selected Letters of W. S. Graham, ed. Michael and Margaret Snow, Carcanet, 1999 * New Collected Poems, ed. Matthew Francis, Faber and Faber, 2004 * Approaches to How They Behave, Donut Press, 2009 * Les Dialogues obscurs / The Dark Dialogues, selected poems, bilingual book English-French, introduction Michael Snow, afterword Paul Stubbs, Black Herald Press, 2013 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._S._Graham

The reign of Queen Elizabeth I is often referred to as The Golden Age of English history. Elizabeth was an immensely popular Queen, and her popularity has waned little with the passing of four hundred years. She is still one of the best loved monarchs, and one of the most admired rulers of all time. She became a legend in her own lifetime, famed for her remarkable abilities and achievements. Yet, about Elizabeth the woman, we know very little. She is an enigma, and was an enigma to her own people. Elizabeth was the daughter of King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn. She was born on 7 September 1533 at Greenwich Palace. Her birth was possibly the greatest disappointment of her father's life. He had wanted a son and heir to succeed him as he already had a daughter, Mary, by his first wife, Katherine of Aragon. He had not divorced Katherine, and changed the religion of the country in the process, to have only another daughter. Elizabeth's early life was consequently troubled. Her mother failed to provide the King with a son and was executed on false charges of incest and adultery on 19 May 1536. Anne's marriage to the King was declared null and void, and Elizabeth, like her half-sister, Mary, was declared illegitimate and deprived of her place in the line of succession. The next eight years of Elizabeth's life saw a quick succession of stepmothers. There was Jane Seymour who died giving birth to the King's longed for son, Edward; Anne of Cleves who was divorced; Catherine Howard who was beheaded; and finally Catherine Parr. For generations, historians have debated whether the constant bride changing of her father was responsible for Elizabeth's apparent refusal to marry. It is certainly possible that the tragic fates of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard impressed upon her a certain fear of marriage, but there may have been other reasons for the Queen's single state, such as a fear of childbirth, which claimed the lives of a significant number of women in this period. Even if the Queen had no personal reservations about marriage, there were political problems with almost every contender for her hand. Religion was a major divisive issue, and there was also the problem of whether Elizabeth would have to relinquish any of her royal powers to a husband in an age when the political sphere was exclusively male. As a child, Elizabeth was given a very impressive education. It had become popular amongst the nobility to educate daughters as well as sons and Elizabeth excelled at her studies. She was taught by famous scholars such as William Grindal and Roger Ascham, and from an early age it was clear that she was remarkably gifted. She had an especial flare for languages, and by adulthood, she could reputedly speak five languages fluently. Elizabeth's adolescence was no easier than her childhood. While the King lived, she was safe from political opportunists, but when he died in the January of 1547, and his young son became King Edward VI, she was vulnerable to those who saw her as a political pawn. Despite being officially illegitimate, Henry had reinstated his daughters in the line of succession. Mary was to follow Edward, and Elizabeth was to follow Mary. This meant that Elizabeth was now second in line to the throne. Edward was too young to rule himself as he was only nine years old, so his uncle, Edward Seymour, became Protector of England. His younger brother, Thomas Seymour, was jealous of his position and attempted to overthrow him. His scheme, which involved an attempted kidnapping of the Boy King, cost him his life. He had made no secret of his desire to marry Elizabeth (in Tudor times a girl was considered of marriageable age at twelve) so she was implicated in his plot. It was treason for an heir to the throne to marry without the consent of the King and his Council, and at only fifteen years of age, Elizabeth had to persuade her interrogators that she knew nothing of the plot and had not consented to marry the King's uncle. She succeeded in defending her innocence, but rumors of an illicit affair with Seymour, all the more scandalous because he had been married to her last step-mother, Katherine Parr, (before she died in childbirth), plagued her long afterwards. Elizabeth again found herself implicated in treason after the Wyatt rebellion of 1554. Edward had died in the summer of 1553 from prolonged ill health, and Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary, was now Queen Mary I of England after a brief fight for the throne against the scheme of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, to make his daughter in law, Jane Grey, queen. Mary was not a particularly popular monarch, and was suspicious of her Protestant half-sister. It was thus not difficult to persuade her that Elizabeth may have been conspiring with Thomas Wyatt and his men to seize the throne. Whether or not the rebellion was to make Elizabeth queen is uncertain, and it is also unknown whether Elizabeth had any knowledge of the conspirators plans. Even if she did have knowledge of them, there is no evidence that she approved of the actions of Wyatt and his followers. Elizabeth said she was innocent of the accusations made against her, but she was still arrested and sent to the Tower of London as a prisoner. Many of those surrounding the Queen would have liked Elizabeth to have been executed, but there was no evidence against her and she was popular with the people. Elizabeth was kept a captive at the Tower for two months and then removed to Woodstock Manor in Oxfordshire, where she was kept a prisoner for a year. The house itself was uninhabitable so she had to be lodged in the gatehouse with her servants. It was only at the behest of the Queen's husband, Philip of Spain, that she was allowed to return to her childhood home of Hatfield in Hertfordshire. Philip was aware of the Queen's poor health and wanted to gain the friendship of Elizabeth to ensure peaceable relations between England and Spain should his wife die and Elizabeth succeed to the throne. Elizabeth did finally succeed to the throne on 17th November 1558. It was a moment of supreme triumph for the unwanted daughter who had spent her life in the shadow of the court, cast aside and forgotten. The years following the death of her father had called for sobriety and caution, but now that she was Queen, Elizabeth was determined to enjoy her new found freedom and live life to the full. She loved all kinds of sports, especially horse riding, and in the early years of her reign spent many an hour riding. She also loved hunting, hawking, bear baiting, and watching the male courtiers excel at jousts or other sporting contests. She loved music and dancing, pageantry and masques, and could even play the virginals and the lute herself with skill. She had no time for the Puritan theologians who deemed such things impious. She also loved watching plays and created the atmosphere responsible for the flourishing of the literary masterpieces of the period against the Puritan demands for the closure of all theaters and playhouses. Elizabeth was crowned Queen on Sunday 15th January 1559. In the months that followed, the new Queen re-established the Protestant Church in England and restored the debased coinage. Perhaps to appease Catholics or to appease those who did not believe a woman could become head of the church, Elizabeth became Supreme Governor of the Church of England, rather than Supreme Head as her father had been. While it is impossible to know what exactly the Queen's personal religious beliefs were, the Church she established is an indication of them. She was a committed Protestant, and reputedly spent time in prayer every day, but she was probably a conservative Protestant. She liked candles and crucifixes in her private chapel, liked church music, and enjoyed the more traditional style of worship in contrast to the sermon based service that was becoming popular in some Protestant circles. She did not like religious extremism and did not want to persecute any of her people for their religious beliefs. However, the tenacious political nature of the Catholic/Protestant split meant that her government had to take a harsher line towards Catholics than she wanted. Now that Elizabeth was Queen, proposals of marriage flooded in, but Elizabeth committed herself to none of them. In a genius of political wheeling and dealing, she managed to use her single state to benefit the country by using the bait of marriage to draw in enemies, or to frighten them by suggesting she would marry one of their foes. Whatever Elizabeth's personal feelings towards marriage, on two occasions she did come close to matrimony. For many years, the most serious contender for her hand was Robert Dudley, created Earl of Leicester in 1564. He and Elizabeth had known each other for years and had been imprisoned in the Tower of London at the same time. He was the only serious personal love interest of the Queen's life. Politically, however, marrying him would have been a disaster. He was unpopular as he was the son of the traitor Northumberland, and was loathed even more after his wife was found dead in mysterious circumstances. It was thought he had murdered her so he would be free to marry Elizabeth. The other serious contender for the Queen's hand was Francis, Duke of Alencon/Anjou, heir to the French throne. But again, political considerations made the match ultimately impossible. Not marrying and having a child of her own meant that the succession was unsettled. Elizabeth did not like to talk about the succession and tried to have talk of it suppressed, but people were anxious about what would happen to the country when she died. However, having a child of her own may not have been an end to all problems. In the eyes of Catholics, Elizabeth was illegitimate and had no right to the throne. To them, Mary, Queen of Scots was the rightful Queen of England. Plots were made to make Mary queen and these would have been formed regardless of whether Elizabeth had a child or not. This is perhaps especially so when Mary was Elizabeth's prisoner following her disastrous reign in Scotland. Forced to flee her own country, having abdicated her throne in favor of her son, she landed in England, seeking Elizabeth's help in restoring her to her kingdom. She was immediately imprisoned. This was as much to protect her as to minimize the danger she posed to Elizabeth. Mary was kept a prisoner for almost twenty years. In that time, Elizabeth refused to hear about executing her cousin, but Mary's complicity in the Babington plot of 1586 made the execution, in the eyes of many, unavoidable. It was a traumatic time for Elizabeth, and for a while it seemed that she would not have the strength to go ahead with the execution, but she did, and Mary was executed at Fotheringay Castle on 8 February 1587. Relations between Elizabeth and Philip, now King of Spain, had begun amicably, but had deteriorated over the years as their different political and religious agendas clashed. By 1588 they were enemies of the first-rate. Philip had spoken of invading England and dethroning Elizabeth for years but the execution of the Queen of Scots gave him an added incentive. Now he could claim the English throne for himself and not for her. In the summer of 1588 he sent his mighty fleet against England. But by superior tactics, ship design, and sheer good fortune, the English defeated them. Elizabeth's popularity reached its zenith. It was also another personal triumph as she had proved that she, a woman, could lead in war as well as any man. Elizabeth was dedicated to her country in a way few monarchs had been or have been since. Elizabeth had the mind of a political genius and nurtured her country through careful leadership and by choosing capable men to assist her, such as Sir William Cecil and Sir Francis Walsingham. Elizabeth was a determined woman, but she was not obstinate. She listened to the advice of those around her, and would change a policy if it was unpopular. In appearance she was extravagant, in behavior sometimes flippant and frivolous, but her approach to politics was serious, conservative, and cautious. When she ascended the throne in 1558, England was an impoverished country torn apart by religious squabbles. When she died at Richmond Palace on the 24th March 1603, England was one of the most powerful and prosperous countries in the world.

Frederick William Harvey DCM (26 March 1888– 13 February 1957), often known as Will Harvey, and dubbed “the Laureate of Gloucestershire”, was an English poet, broadcaster and solicitor whose poetry became popular during and after World War I. Early life Harvey was born in 1888 in Hartpury, Gloucestershire, and grew up in Minsterworth. He was educated at the King’s School, Gloucester, where he formed a close friendship with Ivor Gurney, and then at Rossall School. Gurney and Herbert Howells, another local composer, would set a number of his poems to music. He started on a legal career, which would always be somewhat tentative; and began to consider conversion to Roman Catholicism. World War I On 8 August 1914, only four days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany, Harvey joined the 5th battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment as a private. Shortly afterwards, in November, he became a Roman Catholic. He was an adherent of the distributism movement, described as a “third way”, in opposition to both socialism and capitalism; and he was influenced by the work of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. His battalion was posted to France in March 1915, where he was promoted to lance corporal and awarded the Distinguished Conduct Medal. His citation for the DCM reads: 2371 Lance-Corpl. F.W. Harvey, 1/5th Gloucestershire R[egiment]. (T.F.) For conspicuous gallantry on the night of Aug. 3-4, 1915, near Hebuterne, when, with a patrol, he and another non-commissioned officer went out to reconnoiter in the direction of a suspected listening-post. In advancing they encountered the hostile post, evidently covering a working party in the rear. Corporal Knight at once shot one of the enemy, and, with Lance-Corporal Harvey, rushed the post, shooting two others, and, assistance arriving, the enemy fled. Lance-Corporal Harvey pursued, felling one of the retreating Germans with a bludgeon. He seized him, but, finding his revolver empty and the enemy having opened fire, he was called back by Corporal Knight, and the prisoner escaped. Three Germans were killed, and their rifles and a Mauser pistol were brought in. The patrol had no loss. He returned to England for officer training, but after being commissioned and returning to France he was captured on 17 August 1916 in the German front-line trench while carrying out a reconnaissance patrol. He spent the remainder of the war in prisoner-of-war camps, including those at Gütersloh, Crefeld, Schwarmstedt, Holzminden, Bad Colberg, and Stralsund. Writing Soon after his arrival in France, Harvey had begun to contribute to a trench newspaper, the Fifth Gloucester Gazette. His first volume of poems, A Gloucestershire Lad At Home and Abroad, was published in September 1916, shortly after his capture. He began to write more intensively in captivity, and poems were sent back to England for publication: his second collection, Gloucestershire Friends, appeared in 1917. His time in the camps is held to be his most productive period of writing. On returning from a spell of solitary confinement at Holzminden after a failed escape attempt, he saw that a fellow prisoner had drawn a picture over his bed in chalk of ducks in a pool of water. This inspired his most celebrated poem (and the title poem of his third collection, published in 1919), “Ducks”. Post-war life Harvey returned home in 1919, married in 1921, and returned to legal practice. He became a respected and loved figure in the Forest of Dean. He worked largely as a defence solicitor (his own captivity convincing him that incarceration was destructive and pointless), and became known as the “poor man’s solicitor”. His work was not financially successful, and in the 1930s he sold his practice. In 1920 he published a memoir of his prison-camp experiences, Comrades in Captivity; and in 1921 Farewell, the title an acknowledgement of his intention to remove himself from the literary world. He had a brief creative union with his great friend and collaborator, Ivor Gurney, which was cut short by Gurney’s mental breakdown. His gift for oration, versatile voice and scripting led him to become a popular broadcaster at the BBC, Bristol, where he used his popularity to promote the Forest of Dean, its people and traditions. He promoted local choirs, musicians and young authors such as Leonard Clark. He was friends with Rutland Boughton and the local MP, Morgan Philips Price, who worked with him to promote the arts and the interests of Foresters. Later years In later life Harvey craved the comradeship he had found in the trenches and was disappointed that the new social order he had anticipated never happened. His later poetry of remembrance captured those feelings, but retained the essential humour of his early work and included verse in the local dialect. In 1956, in failing health, he attended the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester Cathedral to hear Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, a work that had inspired his ideas about creativity and beauty some fifty years earlier. He died the following year and was buried at Minsterworth. Personal life In 1921 Harvey married Anne Kane, an Irish nurse. They had two children, Eileen Anne (born 1922) and Patrick (born 1925). He led a bohemian lifestyle, rejecting material values, and often recklessly gave away his professional services and income. Reputation and legacy Harvey’s poems published during and immediately after World War I were highly acclaimed, and his status was acknowledged when a collection was published in 1926 in the Augustan Books of Modern Poetry series, edited by Edward Thompson. The lyricism of his poetry led to it being set to music by his friends Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells and Sir Herbert Brewer, among others. It continues to be used by contemporary composers including Johnny Coppin. His work is particularly noted for its appreciation of the natural world and the landscape and traditions of West Gloucestershire. Harvey was commemorated by a slate memorial tablet in the south transept of Gloucester Cathedral in 1980. “Ducks”, Harvey’s best known work, was voted one of the nation’s 100 favourite poems in 1996 in a nationwide poll conducted by the BBC. Works Poetry collections * A Gloucestershire Lad At Home and Abroad. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1916. * Gloucestershire Friends: Poems from a German Prison Camp. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1917. * Ducks, and other Verses. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1919. * Farewell. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1921. * September and Other Poems. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. 1925. * In Pillowell Woods. Lydney: Frank Harris. 1926. * Gloucestershire: A Selection from the Poems of F.W. Harvey. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. 1947. Edited collections * Thompson, Edward, ed. (1926). The Augustan Books of Modern Poetry: Frederick William Harvey. London: Ernest Benn. * Forest Offering: A Selection from the Unpublished Poems of F.W. Harvey, 1888-1957. Frank Green. 1962. * F.W. Harvey: Collected Poems 1912-1957. Coleford: Douglas McLean. 1983. * Boden, Anthony; Thornton, R.K.R., eds. (2011). F.W. Harvey: Selected Poems. Coleford: Douglas McLean. Novel * Harvey, F.W. (2014). A War Romance. Stroud, Glos.: The History Press. Prose (war memoirs) * Harvey, F.W. (1920). Comrades in Captivity: a Record of Life in Seven German Prison Camps. London: Sidgwick & Jackson. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._W._Harvey

Reginald Arkell (1882–1959) was a British script writer and comic novelist who wrote many musical plays for the London theatre. The most popular of those was an adaptation of the spoof history book 1066 and All That: 1066—and all that: A Musical Comedy based on that Memorable History by Sellar and Yeatman. He was the author of A Cottage in the Country and the Green Fingers series of garden verse. Arkell was born on 14 October 1882 at Lechlade, Gloucestershire, England, was educated at Burford Grammar School and trained as a journalist. He married actress Elizabeth Evans in 1912. During the First World War he served with the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and The Norfolk Regiment. Arkell died on 1 May 1959 at Cricklade, England. Works * The Round House (1958) (novel) * Charley Moon (1953) (novel) Published by Michael Joseph Ltd. * “Trumpets Over Merriford” (1955), American title: The Miracle Of Merriford (1956) (novel) * Collected Green Fingers (1956) (poems) * Come to the ball; or, Harlequin (1951) (adaptation of Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus) * Old Herbaceous (1950, republished 2002) * Green fingers Again (1942) (poems) * War Rumours (1939) (verse, illustrated by Edgar Norfield) * Percy Ponsonby (1939) (TV series) * 1066 And All That (1939) (TV version) * The Street Singer or Interval for Romance (1937) (film musical which starred Arthur Tracy) * Smash and Grab (1937) (film) * Green fingers, and other poems (1934) (includes Roses at Owlpen) * The Last Waltz (1936) (film of the musical comedy) * 1066 And All That (1935) (revue) * A Kingdom for a Cow (1935) (adaptation of Kurt Weill’s operetta Der Kuhhandel) * Playing the Games (1935) (humour) * Bridge Without Sighs (1934) (A Harmless Handbook to the game, written in rhyme) * Richard Jefferies (1933) (biography) * Winter Sportings (1929) * Meet These People (1928) - Poetry with caricatures by Bert Thomas. Published by Herbert Jenkins. * Columbine– A Fantasy of Summertime (1928) (adaptation for radio) * The Blue Train (1927) (musical, music by Robert Stolz, additional lyrics by Ivy St. Helier) * Frasquita (1925) (operetta, music by Franz Lehár) * Our Nell (1924) (musical play, music by Ivor Novello and Harold Fraser-Simson) * The tragedy of Mr. Punch (1923) (play) * Columbine (1922) (play) * Catherine (1922) (musical play, music by Tchaikovsky) * The Last Waltz (1922) (musical comedy, music by Oscar Straus) * All the Rumors (1916) (contains the poem Actual Evidence I Have None... Published by Duckworth & Company, 1916 - World War, 1914-1918 - 47 pages) * The Holidays (Children’s poem in The Captain Dec 1910) Old Herbaceous * Old Herbaceous is a classic British novel of the garden, with a title character as outsized and unforgettable as P. G. Wodehouse’s immortal manservant, Jeeves. Born at the dusk of the Victorian era, Bert Pinnegar, an awkward orphan child with one leg a tad longer than the other, rises from inauspicious schoolboy days spent picking wildflowers and dodging angry farmers to become the legendary head gardener “Old Herbaceous,” the most esteemed flower-show judge in the county and a famed horticultural wizard capable of producing dazzling April strawberries from the greenhouse and the exact morning glories his Lady spies on the French Riviera, “so blue, so blue it positively hurts.” * Sprinkled with nuggets of gardening wisdom, Old Herbaceous is a witty comic portrait of the most archetypal—and crotchety—head gardener ever to plant a row of bulbs at a British country house. External links * Works by Reginald Arkell at Faded Page (Canada) * BBC page on Percy Ponsonby * Reginald Arkell on Internet Movie Database References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Arkell

Frank Stuart Flint (19 December 1885– 28 February 1960) was an English poet and translator who was a prominent member of the Imagist group. Ford Madox Ford called him “one of the greatest men and one of the beautiful spirits of the country”. Life and career British poet, and a poetry reviewer with an unusual gift for language, a self-educated man, born in Islington, London; he left school at 13 and worked in various capacities before beginning his long and distinguished career in the Civil Service in 1904. He published a book on French poets, starting in 1908 and by 1910, his intensive private study had gained him recognition as one of Britain’s most highly informed authorities on modern French poetry. His first collection of poems, In the Net of the Stars (1909), consisted mainly of conventional love lyrics. Flint is mostly known for his participation in the “School of Images” with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme in 1909, of which he gave an account in the “Poetry Review” in 1909, and which was to serve as the theoretical basis for the later Imagist movement (1913). His subsequent association with Ezra Pound and T. E. Hulme, together with his deepening knowledge of innovative French poetic techniques, radically affected his poetry’s development. Glenn Hughes reports Flint ‘claiming to inventing the open verse form ’unrimed cadence’, by cutting away all personal emotion, where symbolism was barely suggested, but instead shortened and hardened, and where meter was supplanted by cadence’. Hughes explaining Flint’s form is best understood ‘by comparing his poem ’ A Swan Song’(Published in 1909 and later by Pound in 1914 in 'Des Imagistes’) and, his later ‘cadenced ’ version thereof, ' The Swan’, a poem so devoid of superfluities and cliches, to achieve that perfect chiseled beauty which is the essence of classical art’ In 1916 Flint was described as having ' the gift of artistic courage clothed in beauty which will help build the poetry of the future’. Flint himself, considered his 'cadenced’ form to be a reversion to the real tradition of the English poetry of Cynewulf in the 'Riddle, The Nightingale’ Earlier Flint had published a series of articles on contemporary French poets (1912) that much influenced his contemporaries. In 1914 he was included by Pound in Des Imagistes. He entered into a short-lived dispute with Pound as to each one’s relative contribution to the Imagist movement. During the 1930s Flint was among a number of poets who moved away from poetry and towards economics, working for the Statistics Division of the Ministry of Labour writing that "[t]he proper study of mankind is, for the time being, economics". Flint would go on to publish an article entitled The Plain Man and Economics in The Criterion in 1937. He became a leading spokesman for Imagism and exemplified its methods in the concentration and clarity displayed by much of the work in Cadences (1915). Otherworld, his third and last collection, was published in 1920, its lengthy title poem responding to the desolation of the First World War in its meditations on more viable modes of existence. For some years after he ceased publishing poetry, Flint continued to contribute influential articles to the Times Literary Supplement and The Criterion. He was also a prolific translator of prose works and poetry by French, German, and classical authors. With the exception of some short works arising from his activities as a civil servant, he ceased writing for publication entirely in the early 1930s. Poetry In the Net of the Stars, BiblioBazaar (Jun 2009) ISBN 978-1-110-85842-2 Cadences, Poetry Bookshop. London, 1915 Otherworld: Cadences, Poetry Bookshop, 1920 Translations The Love Poems of Emile Verhaeren, Houghton Mifflin, Boston 1916 The Closed Door, by Jean de Bosschere, John Lane, London 1917 Essays etc ‘Contemporary French Poetry’, article in The Poetry Review, August 1912 ‘Some Modern French Poets( A Commentarey with a Specimen) The Chapbook: A Monthly Miscellany, London October 1919 ‘ The Younger French Poets The Chapbook; A Monthly Miscellany, London November 1920 ‘The History of Imagism’, essay in The Egoist, May 1915 ‘The Poetry of HD ’ essay in The Egoist, May 1915 ‘ Six French Poets’ essay in The Egoist, January 1916 ‘Imagisme, Poetry Chicago March 1913 References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._S._Flint

William Harris Lloyd Roberts (31 October 1884– 28 June 1966) was a Canadian writer, poet, and playwright. He was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, the son of noted Canadian poet Charles George Douglas Roberts and Mary Isabel Fenety. After an education by private tutors, he attended King’s Collegiate School then, in 1905, Fredericton High School. In 1903 he performed clerical work at McClure’s magazine. From 1904 until 1907 he was an assistant editor at the Outing magazine, based in New York City. He wrote short stories and poetry for various magazines, plus performing part-time newspaper work starting in 1911. On January 1, 1914, he was married to Helen Hope Farquhar Bolmain. The couple had a daughter, Patricia Bliss, before Helen died. In 1912, he became editor of immigration literature for the Canadian Department of Interior in Ottawa. Two years later, he served as a correspondent for the Timer and Grazing branch of the Interior Department in Ottawa. On August 15, 1914, he married his second wife, Lila White; the couple divorced shortly thereafter. After 1920 he retired from work in order to devote all of his time to writing fiction, drama, poetry, and special articles. From 1925 until 1939 he was a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, then he performed public relations for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police up to 1945. His third marriage in 1943 was to Julia Bristow, and they would have two daughters. Bibliography * England Over Seas (1914) * Come Quietly, Britain (1915) * Mother Doneby (1916) * The Book of Roberts (1923) * Along the Ottawa (1927) * I Sing of Life (1937) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Harris_Lloyd_Roberts

May Sarton is the pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton ( (May 3, 1912– July 16, 1995), an American poet, novelist and memoirist. Biography Sarton was born in Wondelgem, Belgium (today a part of the city of Ghent). Her parents were science historian George Sarton and his wife, the English artist Mabel Eleanor Elwes. When German troops invaded Belgium after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, her family fled to Ipswich, England, where Sarton’s maternal grandmother lived. One year later, they moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where her father started working at Harvard University. She went to school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, graduating from Cambridge High and Latin School in 1929. She started theatre lessons in her late teens, but continued writing poetry. She published her first collection in 1937, entitled Encounter in April. In 1945 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she met Judy Matlack, who became her partner for the next thirteen years. They separated in 1956, when Sarton’s father died and Sarton moved to Nelson, New Hampshire. Honey in the Hive (1988) is about their relationship. In her memoir At Seventy, Sarton reflected on Judy’s importance in her life and how her Unitarian Universalist upbringing shaped her. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1958. Sarton later moved to York, Maine. In 1990, she suffered a stroke, severely reducing her ability to concentrate and write. After several months, she was able to dictate her final journals, starting with Endgame, with the help of a tape recorder. She died of breast cancer on July 16, 1995, and is buried in Nelson, New Hampshire. Works and themes Despite the quality of some of her many novels and poems, May Sarton’s best and most enduring work probably lies in her journals and memoirs, particularly Plant Dreaming Deep (about her early years at Nelson, ca. 1958-68), Journal of a Solitude (1972-1973, often considered her best), The House by the Sea (1974-1976), Recovering (1978-1979) and At Seventy (1982-1983). In these fragile, rambling and honest accounts of her solitary life, she deals with such issues as aging, isolation, solitude, friendship, love and relationships, lesbianism, self-doubt, success and failure, envy, gratitude for life’s simple pleasures, love of nature (particularly of flowers), the changing seasons, spirituality and, importantly, the constant struggles of a creative life. Sarton’s later journals are not of the same quality, as she endeavoured to keep writing through ill health and by dictation. Although many of her earlier works, such as Encounter in April, contain vivid erotic female imagery, May Sarton often emphasized in her journals that she didn’t see herself as a “lesbian” writer, instead wanting to touch on what is universally human about love in all its manifestations. When publishing her novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing in 1965, she feared that writing openly about lesbianism would lead to a diminution of the previously established value of her work. “The fear of homosexuality is so great that it took courage to write Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing,” she wrote in Journal of a Solitude, “to write a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality ...” After the book’s release, many of Sarton’s works began to be studied in university level women’s studies classes, being embraced by feminists and lesbians alike. However, Sarton’s work should not be classified as 'lesbian literature’ alone, as her works tackle many deeply human issues of love, loneliness, aging, nature, self-doubt etc., common to both men and women. Margot Peters’ controversial biography (1998) revealed May Sarton as a complex individual who often struggled in her relationships.

James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926– February 6, 1995) was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1977) for Divine Comedies (1976). 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.

Abraham Cowley (1618– 28 July 1667) was an English poet born in the City of London late in 1618. He was one of the leading English poets of the 17th century, with 14 printings of his Works published between 1668 and 1721. Early life and career His father, a wealthy citizen, who died shortly before his birth, was a stationer. His mother was wholly given to works of devotion, but it happened that there lay in her parlour a copy of The Faerie Queene. This became the favourite reading of her son, and he had read it twice before he was sent to school. As early as 1628, that is, in his tenth year, he composed his Tragicall History of Piramus and Thisbe, an epic romance written in a six-line stanza, a style of his own invention. It is not too much to say that this work is the most astonishing feat of imaginative precocity on record; it is marked by no great faults of immaturity, and possesses constructive merits of a very high order. Two years later the child wrote another and still more ambitious poem, Constantia and Philetus, being sent about the same time to Westminster School. Here he displayed extraordinary mental precocity and versatility, and wrote in his thirteenth year the Elegy on the Death of Dudley, Lord Carlton. These three poems of considerable size, and some smaller ones, were collected in 1633, and published in a volume entitled Poetical Blossoms, dedicated to the head master of the school, and prefaced by many laudatory verses by schoolfellows. The author at once became famous, although he had not, even yet, completed his fifteenth year. His next composition was a pastoral comedy, entitled Love’s Riddle, a marvelous production for a boy of sixteen, airy, correct and harmonious in language, and rapid in movement. The style is not without resemblance to that of Randolph, whose earliest works, however, were at that time only just printed. In 1637 Cowley was elected into Trinity College, Cambridge, where he betook himself with enthusiasm to the study of all kinds of learning, and early distinguished himself as a ripe scholar. Portraits of Cowley, attributed to William Faithorne and Stephen Slaughter, are in Trinity College’s collection. It was about this time that he composed his scriptural epic on the history of King David, one book of which still exists in the Latin original, the rest being superseded in favour of an English version in four books, called the Davideis, which were published after his death. The epic deals with the adventures of King David from his boyhood to the smiting of Amalek by Saul, where it abruptly closes. In 1638 Love’s Riddle and a Latin comedy, the Naufragium Joculare, were printed, and in 1641 the passage of Prince Charles through Cambridge gave occasion to the production of another dramatic work, The Guardian, which was acted before the royal visitor with much success. During the civil war this play was privately performed at Dublin, but it was not printed till 1650. It is bright and amusing, in the style common to the “sons” of Ben Jonson, the university wits who wrote more for the closet than the public stage. Royalist in exile The learned quiet of the young poet’s life was broken up by the Civil War; he warmly espoused the royalist side. He became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, but was ejected by the Parliamentarians in 1643. He made his way to Oxford, where he enjoyed the friendship of Lord Falkland, and was tossed, in the tumult of affairs, into the personal confidence of the royal family itself. After the battle of Marston Moor he followed the queen to Paris, and the exile so commenced lasted twelve years. This period was spent almost entirely in the royal service, “bearing a share in the distresses of the royal family, or labouring in their affairs. To this purpose he performed several dangerous journeys into Jersey, Scotland, Flanders, the Netherlands, or wherever else the king’s troubles required his attendance. But the chief testimony of his fidelity was the laborious service he underwent in maintaining the constant correspondence between the late king and the queen his wife. In that weighty trust he behaved himself with indefatigable integrity and unsuspected secrecy; for he ciphered and deciphered with his own hand the greatest part of all the letters that passed between their majesties, and managed a vast intelligence in many other parts, which for some years together took up all his days, and two or three nights every week.” In spite of these labours he did not refrain from literary industry. During his exile he met with the works of Pindar, and determined to reproduce their lofty lyric passion in English. However, Cowley misunderstood Pindar’s metrical practice and therefore his reproduction of the Pindaric Ode form in English does not accurately reflect Pindar’s poetics. But despite this problem, Cowley’s use of iambic lines of irregular length, pattern, and rhyme scheme was very influential and is still known as English “Pindarick” Ode, or Irregular Ode. One of the most famous odes written after Cowley in the Pindaric tradition is Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality.” During this same time, Cowley occupied himself in writing a history of the Civil War (which did not get published in full until 1973). In the preface to his 1656 Poems, Cowley mentioned that he had completed three books of an epic poem on the Civil War, but had left it unfinished after the First Battle of Newbury when the Royalist cause began to lose significant ground. In the preface Cowley indicated that he had destroyed all copies of the poem, but this was not precisely the truth. In 1697, twelve years after Cowley’s death, a shortened version of the first book of the poem, called A Poem on the Late Civil War was published. It was assumed that the rest of the poem had indeed been destroyed or lost until the mid-20th century when scholar Allan Pritchard discovered the first of two extant manuscript copies of the whole poem among the Cowper family papers. Thus, the three completed books of Cowley’s great (albeit unfinished) English epic, The Civill Warre (otherwise spelled “The Civil War”), was finally published in full for the first time in 1973. In 1647 a collection of his love verses, entitled The Mistress, was published, and in the next year a volume of wretched satires, The Four Ages of England, was brought out under his name, with the composition of which he had nothing to do. In spite of the troubles of the times, so fatal to poetic fame, his reputation steadily increased, and when, on his return to England in 1656, he published a volume of his collected poetical works, he found himself without a rival in public esteem. This volume included the later works already mentioned, the Pindarique Odes, the Davideis, the Mistress and some Miscellanies. Among the latter are to be found Cowley’s most vital pieces. This section of his works opens with the famous aspiration: “What shall I do to be for ever known, And make the coming age my own?” It contains elegies on Wotton, Vandyck, Falkland, William Hervey and Crashaw, the last two being among Cowley’s finest poems, brilliant, sonorous and original; the amusing ballad of The Chronicle, giving a fictitious catalogue of his supposed amours; various gnomic pieces; and some charming paraphrases from Anacreon. The Pindarique Odes contain weighty Lines and passages, buried in irregular and inharmonious masses of moral verbiage. Not more than one or two are good throughout, but a full posy of beauties may easily be culled from them. The long cadences of the Alexandrines with which most of the strophes close, continued to echo in English poetry from Dryden down to Gray, but the Odes themselves, which were found to be obscure by the poet’s contemporaries, immediately fell into disesteem. The Mistress was the most popular poetic reading of the age, and is now the least read of all Cowley’s works. It was the last and most violent expression of the amatory affectation of the 17th century, an affectation which had been endurable in Donne and other early writers because it had been the vehicle of sincere emotion, but was unendurable in Cowley because in him it represented nothing but a perfunctory exercise, a mere exhibition of literary calisthenics. He appears to have been of a cold, or at least of a timid, disposition; in the face of these elaborately erotic volumes, we are told that to the end of his days he never summoned up courage to speak of love to a single woman in real life. The “Leonora” of The Chronicle is said to have been the only woman he ever loved, and she married the brother of his biographer, Sprat. Return to England Soon after his return to England he was seized in mistake for another person, and only obtained his liberty on a bail of £1000. In 1658 he revised and altered his play of The Guardian, and prepared it for the press under the title of The Cutter of Coleman Street, but it did not appear until 1661. Late in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died, and Cowley took advantage of the confusion of affairs to escape to Paris, where he remained until the Restoration brought him back in Charles’s train. He published in 1663 Verses upon several occasions, in which The Complaint is included. He is also known for having provided the earliest reference to coca in English literature, in a poem called “A legend of coca” in his 1662 collection of poems Six Books of Plants. Cowley obtained permission to retire into the country; and through his friend, Lord St Albans, he obtained a property near Chertsey, where, devoting himself to botany and books, he lived in comparative solitude until his death. He took a practical interest in experimental science, and he was one of those advocating the foundation of an academy for the protection of scientific enterprise. Cowley’s pamphlet on The Advancement of Experimental Philosophy, 1661, immediately preceded the foundation of the Royal Society; to which Cowley, in March 1667, at the suggestion of John Evelyn, addressed an ode. He died in the Porch House, in Chertsey, in consequence of having caught a cold while superintending his farm-labourers in the meadows late on a summer evening. On 3 August, Cowley was buried in Westminster Abbey beside the ashes of Chaucer and Spenser, where in 1675 the duke of Buckingham erected a monument to his memory. His Poemata Latina, including six books “Plantarum,” were printed in 1668. The poetry of Cowley rapidly fell into neglect. The works of Cowley were collected in 1668, when Thomas Sprat brought out an edition in folio, to which he prefixed a life of the poet. There were many reprints of this collection, which formed the standard edition till 1881, when it was superseded by Alexander Balloch Grosart’s privately printed edition in two volumes, for the Chertsey Worthies library. The Essays have frequently been revived. A Satire Against Separatists, printed in 1675, has been variously attributed to Cowley and to Peter Hausted. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Cowley

John Allyn Berryman (October 25, 1914– January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs. Life and career John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith, Jr. in Oklahoma where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Tampa, Florida. In 1926, in Florida, when the poet was eleven years old, his father shot and killed himself, Berryman was haunted by his father’s death for the rest of his life and would later write about his struggle to come to terms with it in his book The Dream Songs. In "Dream Song #143", he wrote, "That mad drive [to commit suicide] wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will". In "Dream Song #145", he also wrote the following lines about his father: he only, very early in the morning, rose with his gun and went outdoors by my window and did what was needed. I cannot read that wretched mind, so strong & so undone. I've always tried. I–I'm trying to forgive whose frantic passage, when he could not live an instant longer,in the summer dawn left Henry to live on. Similarly, in Dream Song #384, Berryman wrote: The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done, I stand above my father's grave with rage, often, often before I've made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful bankers grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn After his father’s death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet’s mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City. The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman’s mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill. Although his stepfather would later divorce his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms. With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him away to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut. Then Berryman went on to college at Columbia College where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar’s Head Society, edited the Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren. Berryman would later credit Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship, awarded by Columbia. He graduated in 1936. Regarding Berryman’s earliest success in poetry, the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry editors note that "Berryman’s early work formed part of a volume entitled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940". One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell. Berryman would soon publish some of this early verse in his first book, also with New Directions Publishing, simply titled Poems, in 1942. However, his first mature collection of poems, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later, published by William Sloane Associates. The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Randall Jarrell who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose poetry in The Dispossessed was too derivative of W. B. Yeats. Berryman would later concur with this assessment of his early work, stating, “I didn’t want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.” In October 1942, Berryman married Eileen Mulligan (later Simpson) in a ceremony at St. Patrick’s Catherdral, with poet Mark Van Doren as his best man. The pair moved to Beacon Hill, where Berryman lectured at Harvard. The marriage ended in 1953 (a divorce was formalized in 1956), when Simpson finally grew weary of tolerating Berryman’s affairs and acting as “net-holder” throughout his self-destructive personal crises. Simpson would memorialize her time with Berryman and his circle in her 1982 book Poets in Their Youth. In 1947, Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing, in part, because publication of the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife. However, he did eventually decide to publish the work, titled Berryman’s Sonnets, in 1967. The work included over one hundred sonnets. In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane whom he greatly admired becoming, “the only biography by a leading American poet of the great American writer, Stephen Crane.” This book was followed by his next significant poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman’s first poem to receive “national attention” and a positive response from critics. Edmund Wilson wrote that it was “the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” When “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems” was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the shorter poems in the book which he thought were actually better than “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”. Despite the relative success of his third book of verse, Berryman’s great poetic breakthrough occurred after he published 77 Dream Songs in 1964. It won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and solidified Berryman’s standing as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II generation that included Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz. Soon afterwards, Berryman started receiving a great deal of national attention from the press, from arts organizations, and even from the White House which sent him an invitation to dine with President Lyndon B. Johnson (though Berryman had to decline because he was in Ireland at the time). Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and that same year Life magazine ran a feature story on him. Also, that year the newly created National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a ten thousand dollar grant (though he admitted, when asked about the award by a Minneapolis reporter, that he had never heard of the organization before). Berryman also continued to work on the “dream song” poems at a feverish pace and published a second, significantly longer, volume entitled His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, in 1968, which won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize. The following year Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest as one book titled The Dream Songs, in which the character Henry serves as Berryman’s alter ego. But in Love & Fame (1970), he dropped the mask of Henry to write more plainly about his life. Responses to the poems from critics and most of Berryman’s peers ranged from tepid, at best, to hostile; now the collection is generally “considered a minor work”. The character of Henry reappeared in a couple of poems published in Delusions Etc., (1972), Berryman’s last collection, which focused on his religious concerns and his own spiritual rebirth. The book was published posthumously and, like its predecessor, Love & Fame, it is considered a minor work. Berryman taught or lectured at a number of universities including University of Iowa (in their Writer’s Workshop), Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of Minnesota, where he spent the majority of his career, except for his sabbatical year in 1962-3, when he taught at Brown University. Some of his illustrious students included W. D. Snodgrass, William Dickey, Donald Justice, Philip Levine, Robert Dana, Jane Cooper, Donald Finkel, and Henri Coulette. Philip Levine stated, in a recorded interview from 2009, that Berryman took his class extremely seriously and that "he was entrancing... magnetic and inspiring and very hard on [his students’] work... [and] he was [also] the best teacher that I ever had". Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to him being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication. He turned to his friend, the poet Allen Tate, who helped him get his teaching job at the University of Minnesota. Berryman was married three times. And according to the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, he lived turbulently. During one of the many times he was hospitalized in order to detox from alcohol abuse, in 1970, he experienced what he termed “a sort of religious conversion”. According to his biographer Paul Mariani, Berryman experienced “a sudden and radical shift from a belief in a transcendent God... to a belief in a God who cared for the individual fates of human beings and who even interceded for them.” Nevertheless, Berryman continued to abuse alcohol and to struggle with depression, as he had throughout much of his adult life, and on the morning of January 7, 1972, he killed himself by jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, onto the west bank of the Mississippi River. Newspaper reports of the event indicate that he missed the water and smothered in mud. Poetry Berryman’s poetry, which often revolved around the sordid details of his personal problems (in The Dream Songs but also in his other poems as well) is closely associated with the Confessional poetry movement. In this sense, his poetry had much in common with the poetry of his friend, Robert Lowell. The editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry note that “the influence of Yeats, Auden, Hopkins, Crane, and Pound on him was strong, and Berryman’s own voice—by turns nerve-racked and sportive—took some time to be heard.” Berryman’s first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, published in 1956. In the long, title poem, which first appeared in Partisan Review in 1953, Berryman addressed the 17th century American poet Anne Bradstreet, combining the history of her life with his own fantasies about her (and inserting himself into the poem). Joel Athey noted, “This difficult poem, a tribute to the Puritan poet of colonial America, took Berryman five years to complete and demanded much from the reader when it first appeared with no notes. The Times Literary Supplement hailed it as a path-breaking masterpiece; poet Robert Fitzgerald called it ‘the poem of his generation.’” Edward Hirsch observed that "the 57 stanzas of Homage to Mistress Bradstreet combine the concentration of an extended lyric with the erudition and amplitude of a historical novel". Berryman’s major poetic breakthrough came after he began to publish the first volume of The Dream Songs, 77 Dream Songs, in 1964. The dream song form consisted of short, eighteen-line lyric poems in three stanzas. The poems are written in free verse although some stanzas contain irregular rhyme. 77 Dream Songs (and its sequel His Toy, His Dream, His Rest) centers on a character named “Henry” who bears a striking resemblance to John Berryman. However, Berryman was careful about making sure that his readers realized that “Henry” was not his equivalent, but rather a fictional version of himself (or a literary alter ego). In an interview, Berryman stated, “Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax. And bats come over and they stall in my hair—and fuck them, I’m not Henry; Henry doesn’t have any bats.” In The New York Times review of 77 Dream Songs, John Malcolm Brinnin praised the book, declaring that "[the book’s] excellence calls for celebration". And in The New York Review of Books, Robert Lowell also reviewed the book, writing, “At first the brain aches and freezes at so much darkness, disorder and oddness. After a while, the repeated situations and their racy jabber become more and more enjoyable, although even now I wouldn’t trust myself to paraphrase accurately at least half the sections.” In response to the perceived difficulty of the dream songs, in his 366th “Dream Song”, Berryman facetiously wrote, "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort". In His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, many of the dream songs are elegies for Berryman’s recently deceased poet friends, including Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, and Theodore Roethke. Since this volume contained four times the number of poems that appeared in the previous volume, Berryman covered a lot more subject matter. For instance, in addition to the elegies, Berryman writes about his trip to Ireland as well as his own burgeoning literary fame. Berryman’s last two volumes of poetry, Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. featured free-verse poems that were much more straightforward and less idiosyncratic than The Dream Songs. Prior to the publication of Love & Fame, Berryman sent his manuscript to several peers for feedback, including the poets Adrienne Rich and Richard Wilbur, both of whom were disappointed with the poems which they considered inferior to the poems in The Dream Songs. However, a number of Berryman’s old friends and supporters, including the novelist Saul Bellow and the poets Robert Lowell and William Meredith, offered high praise for a number of the Love & Fame poems. Both Love & Fame and Delusions, Etc. were more openly “confessional” than Berryman’s earlier verse, and since he embraced religion when he wrote these volumes, he also explored the nature of his spiritual rebirth in poems like “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” (which Lowell thought was one of Berryman’s best poems and “one of the great poems of the age”), as a well as “Certainty Before Lunch”. In 1977 John Haffenden published Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, a selection of dream songs that Berryman wrote after His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, but had never published. In reviewing the book, Time magazine noted, “Posthumous selections of unpublished poetry should be viewed suspiciously. The dead poet may have had good aesthetic reasons for keeping some of his work to himself. Fortunately, Henry’s Fate does not malign the memory of John Berryman”. Berryman’s Collected Poems—1937-1971 edited and introduced by Charles Thornbury, was published in 1989. However, Robert Giroux decided to leave out The Dream Songs from the collection. In his review of the Collected Poems, Edward Hirsch commented on this decision, stating, "It is obviously practical to continue to publish the 385 dream songs separately, but reading the Collected Poems without them is a little like eating a seven-course meal without a main course." Hirsch also notes that, "[Collected Poems features] a thorough nine-part introduction and a chronology as well as helpful appendixes that include Berryman’s published prefaces, notes and dedications; a section of editor’s notes, guidelines and procedures; and an account of the poems in their final stages of composition and publication.” In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young. In Poetry magazine, David Orr wrote: Young includes all the Greatest Hits [from Berryman’s career]... but there are also substantial excerpts from Berryman’s Sonnets (the peculiar book that appeared after The Dream Songs, but was written long before) and Berryman’s later, overtly religious poetry. Young argues that “if his middle, elegiac period... is most in need of rediscovery, then these late poems are most in need of redemption.” It’s a good point. Although portions of Berryman’s late work are sloppy and erratic, these poems help clarify the spiritual struggle that motivates and sustains his best writing. After surveying Berryman’s career and accomplishments, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry stated, “What seems likely to survive of his poetry is its pungent and many-leveled portrait of a complex personality which, for all its eccentricity, stayed close to the center of the intellectual and emotional life of the mid-century and after.” In popular culture The ghost of John Berryman is a character in Thomas Disch’s novel The Businessman: A Tale of Terror, published in 1984. The Hold Steady’s song “Stuck Between Stations” from the 2006 album Boys and Girls in America relates a loose rendition of Berryman’s death, describing the isolation he felt, despite his critical acclaim, and depicting him walking with “the devil” on the Washington Avenue Bridge where he committed suicide. Okkervil River’s song “John Allyn Smith Sails” from their 2007 album The Stage Names is about John Berryman. Australian singer/songwriter Nick Cave has admiringly referenced Berryman in the song “We Call Upon the Author” from the 2007 album Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. Phish bassist Mike Gordon’s side-project band has performed "Dream Song 22-'Of 1826", releasing it on a live album, The Egg. Additionally, on March 30, 2014, their show featured a rendition of “The Poet’s Final Instructions”. Berryman and his poem Dream Song 235 is referenced in Elizabeth Strout’s novel and HBO’s adaption of Olive Kitteridge with the quote "Save us from shotguns & fathers’ suicides.” Berryman and his poem “The Curse” are referenced in the prologue of Tracy Letts’s play August: Osage County by the character Beverly, a poet who later commits suicide. Bibliography * Poems. Norfolk, Ct.: New Directions Press, 1942. * The Dispossessed. New York: William Sloan Associates, 1948. * Stephen Crane. New York: Sloan, 1950. * Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956. * 77 Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964. * Berryman’s Sonnets. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. * His Toy, His Dream His Rest. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968. * The Dream Songs. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969. * Love & Fame. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970. * Delusions, Etc. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972. * Recovery. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973. * The Freedom of the Poet. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1976. * Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, 1967-1972. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1977. * Collected Poems 1937-1971. Ed. Charles Thornbury. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989. * Berryman’s Shakespeare. Ed. John Haffenden. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999. * Selected Poems. Ed. Kevin Young. New York: Library of America, 2004. * The Heart Is Strange. Ed. Daniel Swift. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berryman

Susan Frances Harrison née Riley (February 24, 1859– May 5, 1935) (a.k.a. Seranus) was a Canadian poet, novelist, music critic and music composer who lived and worked in Ottawa and Toronto. Life Susie Frances Riley was born in Toronto of Irish-Canadian ancestry, the daughter of John Byron Riley. She studied music with Frederic Boscovitz, at a private school for girls in Toronto, and later in Montreal. She reportedly began publishing poetry, in the Canadian Illustrated News, at 16 under the pseudonym “Medusa.” After completing her education, she worked as a pianist and singer. In 1880 she married organist John W. F. Harrison, of Bristol, England, who was the organist of St. George’s Church in Montreal. The couple had a son and a daughter. The Harrisons lived in Ottawa in 1883, when Susie Harrison composed the song “Address of Welcome to Lord Lansdowne” to celebrate the first public appearance of the new Governor General, the Marquess of Lansdowne. In 1887 the Harrisons moved to Toronto, where John Harrison became organist and choirmaster of St. Simon the Apostle, and Susan Harrison began a literary career under the pseudonym “Seranus” (a misreading of her signature, “S. Frances”), soon publishing articles in “many of the leading journals and periodicals.” She wrote a number of songs published in the United States and England under the name Seranus, and published other songs in England under the name, Gilbert King. She was the music critic of The Week from December 1886 to June 1887 under her pen-name of Seranus. She wrote the “Historical sketch on Canadian music” for the 1898 Canada: An Encyclopedia of the Country. Susan Harrison was considered an authority on folk music, and often lectured on the subject. She used traditional Irish melodies in her String Quartet on Ancient Irish Airs, and French-Canadian music in her 1887 Trois Esquisses canadiennes (Three Canadian Sketches), ‘Dialogue,’ ‘Nocturne,’ and 'Chant du voyageur’. She also incorporated French-Canadian melodies in her three-act opera, Pipandor (with libretto by F.A. Dixon of Ottawa). Her String Quartet on Ancient Irish Airs, is likely the first string quartet composed in Canada by a woman. In 1896 and 1897 she presented a series of well-received lectures in Toronto on "The Music of French Canada. For 20 years Harrison was the principal of the Rosedale branch of the Toronto Conservatory of Music. During the 1900s she contributed to and edited the Conservatory’s publication Conservatory Monthly, and contributed to its successor Conservatory Quarterly Review. She wrote the article on “Canada” for the 1909 Imperial History and Encyclopedia of Music. In addition, she wrote at least six books of poetry, and three novels. Writing Poetry Harrison’s musical training is reflected in her poetry: “she was adept in her handling of the rhythmic complexities of poetic forms such as the sonnet and the villanelle. Like other Canadian poets of the late nineteenth century, her prevailing themes include nature, love, and patriotism. Her landscape poetry, richly influenced by the works of Charles G.D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman, paints the Canadian wilderness as beguilingly beautiful yet at the same time mysterious and distant.” Harrison was a master of the villanelle. The villanelle was a French verse form that had been introduced to English readers by Edmund Gosse in his 1877 essay, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse”. Novels Her two novels “articulate a fascination with a heavily mythologized Quebec culture that Harrison shared with many English-speaking Canadians of her time... characterized by a gothic emphasis on horror, madness, aristocratic seigneurial manor houses, and a decadent Catholicism.” “Harrison writes elegiacally of a regime whose romantic qualities are largely the creation of an Upper Canadian quest for a distinctive historical identity.” Recognition Harrison experienced a decline in reputation in her lifetime. In 1916 anthologist John Garvin called her “one of our greater poets whose work has not yet had the recognition in Canada it merits.”. "By 1926, Garvin describes her merely as 'one of our distinctive poets’.” The Dictionary of Literary Biography wrote of Susan Frances Harrison, in 1990, that “Harrison’s unpublished work has not been preserved, her published work is out of print and difficult to obtain, and her once-substantial position in the literary life of her country is now all but forgotten.” Publications Selected songs * Song of Welcome. * Pipandor. opera * ‘Trois Esquisses canadiennes: ’Dialogue,' ‘Nocturne,’ 'Chant du voyageur’. 1887. * Quartet on Ancient Irish Airs. Poetry * Four Ballads and a Play. Toronto: Author, 1890. * Pine, Rose and Fleur De Lis. Toronto: Hart, 1891. * In Northern Skies and Other Poems. Toronto: Author, 1912. * Songs of Love and Labor. Toronto: Author, 1925. * Later Poems and New Villanelles. Toronto: Ryerson, 1928. * Penelope and Other Poems. Toronto: Author, 1934. * Bibliographical information on poems from Wanda Campbell, Hidden Rooms. Prose * Crowded Out and Other Sketches. Ottawa: Evening Journal, 1886. * The Forest of Bourg-Marie, novel. Toronto: G.N. Morang, 1898. * Ringfield, novel. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914. Edited * Canadian Birthday Book. Toronto: Robinson, 1887. Poetry anthology. Articles * “Historical sketch of music in Canada,” Canada: An Encyclopedia of the Country, vol 4, J.C. Hopkins ed., Toronto, 1898. * “Canada,” The Imperial History and Encyclopedia of Music, vol 3: History of Foreign Music, W.L. Hubbard ed., New York ca 1909. Discography * Harrison’s piano music has been recorded and issued on media, including: * Keillor, Elaine. By a Canadian Lady Piano Music 1841-1997 Carleton Sound * Keillor, Elaine. Piano Music by Torontonians (1984) References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susie_Frances_Harrison

Sir Andrew Motion FRSL (born 26 October 1952) is an English poet, novelist, and biographer, who was Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. During the period of his laureateship, Motion founded the Poetry Archive, an online resource of poems and audio recordings of poets reading their own work. In 2012, he became President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, taking over from Bill Bryson. Early life Motion was born on 26 October 1952 in London; his mother was Catherine Gillian Bakewell (known as Gillian) and his father Andrew Richard Michael Motion (known as Richard). The family moved to Stisted, near Braintree in Essex, when Motion was 12 years old. Motion went to boarding school from the age of seven joined by his younger brother. Most of the boy’s friends were from the school and when Motion was in the village he spent a lot of time on his own. He began to have an interest and affection for the countryside and he went for walks with a pet dog. Later he went to Radley College, where, in the sixth form, he encountered Peter Way, an inspiring English teacher who introduced him to poetry– first Hardy, then Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, Heaney, Hughes, Wordsworth and Keats. When Motion was 17 years old, his mother had a horse riding accident and suffered a serious head injury requiring a life-saving neurosurgery operation. She regained some speech, but she was severely paralysed and remained in and out of coma for nine years. She died in 1978 and her husband died of cancer in 2006. Motion has said that he wrote to keep his memory of his mother alive and that she was a muse of his work. When Motion was about 18 years old he moved away from the village to study English at University College, Oxford; however, since then he has remained in contact with the village to visit the church graveyard, where his parents are buried, and also to see his brother, who lives nearby. At University he studied at weekly sessions with W. H. Auden, whom he greatly admired. Motion won the university’s Newdigate Prize and graduated with a first class honours degree. Career Between 1976 and 1980, Motion taught English at the University of Hull and while there, at age 24, he had his first volume of poetry published. At Hull he met university librarian and poet Philip Larkin. Motion was later appointed as one of Larkin’s literary executors which would privilege Motion’s role as his biographer following Larkin’s death in 1985. In Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Motion says that at no time during their nine-year friendship did they discuss writing his biography and it was Larkin’s longtime companion Monica Jones who requested it. He reports how, as executor, he rescued many of Larkin’s papers from imminent destruction following his friend’s death. His 1993 biography of Larkin, which won the Whitbread Prize for Biography, was responsible for bringing about a substantial revision of Larkin’s reputation. Motion was Editorial Director and Poetry Editor at Chatto & Windus (1983–89), he edited the Poetry Society’s Poetry Review from 1980–1982 and succeeded Malcolm Bradbury as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. He is now on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. Laureateship Motion was appointed Poet Laureate on 1 May 1999, following the death of Ted Hughes, the previous incumbent. The Nobel Prize-winning Northern Irish poet and translator Seamus Heaney had ruled himself out for the post. Breaking with the tradition of the laureate retaining the post for life, Motion stipulated that he would stay for only ten years. The yearly stipend of £200 was increased to £5,000 and he received the customary butt of sack. He wanted to write “poems about things in the news, and commissions from people or organisations involved with ordinary life,” rather than be seen a 'courtier’. So, he wrote "for the TUC about liberty, about homelessness for the Salvation Army, about bullying for ChildLine, about the foot and mouth outbreak for the Today programme, about the Paddington rail disaster, the 11 September attacks and Harry Patch for the BBC, and more recently about shell shock for the charity Combat Stress, and climate change for the song cycle he finished for Cambridge University with Peter Maxwell Davies.” On 14 March 2002, as part of the 'Re-weaving Rainbows’ event of National Science Week 2002, Motion unveiled a blue plaque on the front wall of 28 St Thomas Street, Southwark, to commemorate the sharing of lodgings there by John Keats and Henry Stephens while they were medical students at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in 1815–16. In 2003, Motion wrote Regime change, a poem in protest at Invasion of Iraq from the point of view of Death walking the streets during the conflict, and in 2005, Spring Wedding in honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales to Camilla Parker Bowles. Commissioned to write in the honour of 109-year-old Harry Patch, the last surviving “Tommy” to have fought in World War I, Motion composed a five-part poem, read and received by Patch at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells in 2008. As laureate, he also founded the Poetry Archive, an on-line library of historic and contemporary recordings of poets reciting their own work. Motion remarked that he found some of the duties attendant to the post of poet laureate difficult and onerous and that the appointment had been "very, very damaging to [his] work". The appointment of Motion met with criticism from some quarters. As he prepared to stand down from the job, Motion published an article in The Guardian that concluded, "To have had 10 years working as laureate has been remarkable. Sometimes it’s been remarkably difficult, the laureate has to take a lot of flak, one way or another. More often it has been remarkably fulfilling. I’m glad I did it, and I’m glad I’m giving it up– especially since I mean to continue working for poetry." Motion spent his last day as Poet Laureate holding a creative writing class at his alma mater, Radley College, before giving a poetry reading and thanking Peter Way, the man who taught him English at Radley, for making him who he was. Carol Ann Duffy succeeded him as Poet Laureate on 1 May 2009. Post-laureateship Motion is Chairman of the Arts Council of England’s Literature Panel (appointed 1996) and is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2003, he became Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since July 2009, Motion has been Chairman of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) appointed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. He is also a Vice-President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity which provides funding support to the British Library. He was knighted in the 2009 Queen’s Birthday Honours list. He has been a member of English Heritage’s Blue Plaques Panel since 2008. Motion was selected as jury chair for the Man Booker Prize 2010 and in March 2010, he announced that he was working with publishers Jonathan Cape on a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Entitled Silver, the story is set a generation on from the original book and was published in March 2012. In July 2010, Motion returned to Kingston-upon-Hull for the annual Humber Mouth literature festival and taking part in the Larkin 25 festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of Philip Larkin’s death. In his capacity as Larkin’s biographer and as a former lecturer in English at the University of Hull, Motion named an East Yorkshire Motor Services bus Philip Larkin. Motion’s debut play Incoming, about the war in Afghanistan, premièred at the High Tides Festival in Halesworth, Suffolk in May 2011. Motion also featured in Jamie’s Dream School in 2011 as the poetry teacher. In June 2012, he became the President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. In March 2014 he was elected an Honorary Fellow at Homerton College, Cambridge. Motion won the 2015 Ted Hughes Award for new work in poetry for the radio programme Coming Home. The production featured poetry by Motion based on recordings he made of British soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Work Motion has said of himself: “My wish to write a poem is inseparable from my wish to explain something to myself.” His work combines lyrical and narrative aspects in a “postmodern-romantic sensibility”. Motion says that he aims to write in clear language without tricks. The Independent describes the stalwart poet as the “charming and tireless defender of the art form”. Motion has won the Arvon Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Eric Gregory Award, Whitbread Prize for Biography and the Dylan Thomas Prize. Motion took part in the Bush Theatre’s 2011 project Sixty-Six Books, writing and performing a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible. Personal life Motion’s marriage to Joanna Powell ended in 1983. He was married to Jan Dalley from 1985 to 2009, divorcing after a seven-year separation. They had one son born in 1986 and twins, a son and a daughter, born in 1988. In 2009 he married Kyeong-Soo Kim. They live in Baltimore, Maryland. Selected honours and awards 1975: won the Newdigate prize for Oxford undergraduate poetry 1976: Eric Gregory Award 1981: wins Arvon Foundation’s International Poetry Competition with The Letter 1984: John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984 1986: Somerset Maugham Award for The Lamberts 1987: Dylan Thomas Prize for Natural Causes 1999: appointed Poet Laureate for ten years 1994: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life, Whitbread Prize for Biography 2009: Knighthood 2014: Wilfred Owen Poetry Award Selected works Poetry collections * 1972: Goodnestone: a sequence. Workshop Press * 1976: Inland. Cygnet Press * 1977: The Pleasure Steamers. Carcanet * 1981: Independence. Salamander Press * 1983: Secret Narratives. Salamander Press * 1984: Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984. Salamander Press / Penguin * 1987: Natural Causes. Chatto & Windus * 1988: Two Poems. Words Ltd * 1991: Love in a Life. Faber and Faber * 1994: The Price of Everything. Faber and Faber * 1997: Salt Water Faber and Faber * 1998: Selected Poems 1976–1997. Faber and Faber * 2001: A Long Story. The Old School Press * 2002: Public Property. Faber and Faber * 2009: The Cinder Path. Faber and Faber * 2012: The Customs House. Faber and Faber * 2015: Peace Talks. Faber and Faber * 2015: Coming Home. Published by Andrew J Moorhouse at Fine Press Poetry http://www.finepresspoetry.com Criticism * 1980: The Poetry of Edward Thomas. Routledge & Kegan Paul * 1982: Philip Larkin. (Contemporary Writers series) Methuen * 1986: Elizabeth Bishop. (Chatterton Lectures on an English Poet) * 1998: Sarah Raphael: Strip!. Marlborough Fine Art (London) * 2008: Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets. Faber and Faber Biography and memoir * 1986: The Lamberts: George, Constant and Kit. Chatto & Windus * 1993: Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life. Faber and Faber * 1997: Keats: A Biography. Faber and Faber * 2006: In the Blood: A Memoir of my Childhood. Faber and Faber Fiction * 1989: The Pale Companion. Penguin * 1991: Famous for the Creatures. Viking * 2003: The Invention of Dr Cake. Faber and Faber * 2000: Wainewright the Poisoner: The Confessions of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (biographical novel) * 2012: Silver. Jonathan Cape Edited works, introductions, and forewords * 1981: Selected Poems: William Barnes. Penguin Classics * 1982: The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry with Blake Morrison. Penguin * 1994: Thomas Hardy: Selected Poems. Dent * 1993: New Writing 2 (With Malcolm Bradbury). Minerva in association with the British Council * 1994: New Writing 3 (With Candice Rodd). Minerva in association with the British Council * 1997: Penguin Modern Poets: Volume 11 with Michael Donaghy and Hugo Williams. Penguin * 1998: Take 20: New Writing. University of East Anglia * 1999: Verses of the Poets Laureate: From John Dryden to Andrew Motion. With Hilary Laurie. Orion. * 1999: Babel: New Writing by the University of East Anglia’s MA Writers. University of East Anglia. * 2001: Firsthand: The New Anthology of Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. University of East Anglia * 2002: Paper Scissors Stone: New Writing from the MA in Creative Writing at UEA. University of East Anglia. * 2001: The Creative Writing Coursebook: Forty Authors Share Advice and Exercises for Fiction & Poetry. With Julia Bell. Macmillan * 2000: John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion. Faber and Faber * 2001: Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry. Faber and Faber * 2002: The Mays Literary Anthology; Guest editor. Varsity Publications * 2003: 101 Poems Against War . Faber and Faber (Afterword) * 2003: First World War Poems. Faber and Faber * 2006: Collins Rhyming Dictionary. Collins * 2007: Bedford Square 2: New Writing from the Royal Holloway Creative Writing Programme. John Murray Ltd. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Motion

Nicholas Moore (16 November 1918 – 26 January 1986) was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, whose reputation stood as high as Dylan Thomas’s. He later dropped out of the literary world. Moore was born in Cambridge, England, the elder child of the philosopher G. E. Moore and Dorothy Ely. His paternal uncle was the poet, artist and critic Thomas Sturge Moore, and his brother was the composer Timothy Moore (1922-2003). He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford, Leighton Park School in Reading, the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and Trinity College in Cambridge. Moore was editor and co-founder of a literary review, Seven (1938–40), while still an undergraduate. Seven, Magazine of People's Writing, had a complex later history: Moore edited it with John Goodland; it later appeared edited by Gordon Cruikshank, and then by Sydney D. Tremayne, after Randall Swingler bought it in 1941 from Philip O'Connor. While in Cambridge Moore became closely involved with literary London, in particular Tambimuttu. He published pamphlets under the Poetry London imprint in 1941 (of George Scurfield, G. S. Fraser, Anne Ridler and his own work). This led to Moore becoming Tambimuttu's assistant. Moore later worked for the Grey Walls Press. The Glass Tower, a selected poems collection from 1944, appeared with illustrations by the young Lucian Freud. In 1945 he edited The PL Book of Modern American Short Stories, and won Contemporary Poetry's Patron Prize (judged that year by W. H. Auden) for Girl with a Wine Glass. In 1947 he won the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize for Girls and Birds and various other poems. Later Moore encountered difficulty in publishing; he was in the unusual position for a British poet of having a higher reputation in the USA. His association with the "romantics" of the 1940s was, in fact, rather an inaccurate reflection of his style. In the 1950s he worked as a horticulturist, writing a book The Tall Bearded Iris (1956). In 1968 he entered 31 separate pseudonymous translations of a single Baudelaire poem, in a competition for the Sunday Times, run by George Steiner. Each translation focused on a different element of the poem: rhyme, pattern, tropes, symbolism, etc. producing vastly different results, to illustrate the inadequacies and lacunae produced in translation. This work was published in 1973 as Spleen; it is also available online. Longings of the Acrobats, a selected poems volume, was edited by Peter Riley and published in 1990 by Carcanet Press. An interview with Riley concerning Moore's rediscovery and later years appears as a documentary element within the "Guilty River" chapter of Iain Sinclair's novel Downriver. According to Riley, Moore was extremely prolific and left behind many unpublished poems. An example of one of Moore's "pomenvylopes" – idiosyncratic documents consisting of poems and comments typed onto envelopes and posted to friends and acquaintances – appears online at The Fortnightly Review. His Selected Poems was published by Shoestring Press in 2014. Bibliography * A Wish in Season (1941) * The Island and the Cattle (1941) * A Book for Priscilla (1941) * Buzzing around with a Bee (1941) * The Cabaret, the Dancer, the Gentlemen (1942) * The Glass Tower (1944) * Thirty-Five Anonymous Odes (published anonymously, 1944) * The War of the Little Jersey Cows (published under the pseudonym "Guy Kelly", 1945) * The Anonymous Elegies and other poems (published anonymously, 1945) * Recollections of the Gala: Selected Poems 1943-48 (1950) * The Tall Bearded Iris (1956) * Anxious To Please (1968) (published under the pseudonym (anagram) "Romeo Anschilo", 1995 by Oasis Books) * Identity (1969) * Resolution and Identity (1970) * Spleen (1973) * Lacrimae Rerum (1988) * Longings of the Acrobats: Selected Poems (1990) * The Orange Bed (2011) References Wikipedia—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Moore

Florence Randall Livesay, daughter of Stephen and Mary Louisa Randal, was born at Compton, P. Q., and educated at Compton Ladies' College, now King's Hall. She taught for one year in a private school in New York, and subsequently for seven years was a member of the staff of the Evening Journal, Ottawa,–editor of the Woman's Page. In 1902, the Hon. Joseph Chamberlain requested Canada to send some teachers to the Boer Concentration Camps and Miss Randal, offering her services, was one of the forty chosen. She remained for one year and then returned to Canada, locating at Winnipeg. She joined the staff of the Winnipeg Telegram, and three years later that of the Manitoba Free Press. For several years she edited the Children's Department of the latter, but now writes as a 'free lance.' In 1908, she married Mr. J. Fred. B. Livesay of Winnipeg, Manager and Secretary of the Western Associated Press, Limited, and is now the mother of two girls. Of recent years, Mrs. Livesay has contributed poems, short stories and articles to Canadian and American magazines and journals, and a volume of her verse, entitled Songs of Ukraina is now being published by J. M. Dent & Sons. Mrs. Livesay's folk songs translated from the Ruthenian are unusual and notable, but her poetical gift is quite as discernible in her other poems. She has the imagination and the practiced touch of the artist., daughter of Stephen and Mary Louisa Randal, was born at Compton, P. Q., and educated at Compton Ladies' College, now King's Hall. She taught for one year in a private school in New York, and subsequently for seven years was a member of the staff of the Evening Journal, Ottawa,–editor of the Woman's Page. In 1902, the Hon. Joseph Chamberlain requested Canada to send some teachers to the Boer Concentration Camps and Miss Randal, offering her services, was one of the forty chosen. She remained for one year and then returned to Canada, locating at Winnipeg. She joined the staff of the Winnipeg Telegram, and three years later that of the Manitoba Free Press. For several years she edited the Children's Department of the latter, but now writes as a 'free lance.' In 1908, she married Mr. J. Fred. B. Livesay of Winnipeg, Manager and Secretary of the Western Associated Press, Limited, and is now the mother of two girls. Of recent years, Mrs. Livesay has contributed poems, short stories and articles to Canadian and American magazines and journals, and a volume of her verse, entitled Songs of Ukraina is now being published by J. M. Dent & Sons. Mrs. Livesay's folk songs translated from the Ruthenian are unusual and notable, but her poetical gift is quite as discernible in her other poems. She has the imagination and the practiced touch of the artist.

Charles Mair (September 21, 1838– July 7, 1927) was a Canadian poet and journalist. He was a fervent Canadian nationalist noted for his participation in the Canada First movement and his opposition to Louis Riel during the two Riel Rebellions in western Canada. Life Mair was born at Lanark, Upper Canada, to Margaret Holmes and James Mair. He attended Queen’s University but did not graduate. On leaving college, he became a journalist. In Ottawa in 1868, Mair was introduced by civil servant and writer Henry Morgan to young lawyers George Denison, William Foster, and Robert Haliburton. “Together they organized the overtly nationalistic Canada First movement, which began as a small social group.” Mair “represented the Montreal Gazette during the first Riel Rebellion, and was imprisoned and narrowly escaped being shot by the rebels.” Mair was a Freemason Mair "was an Officer of the Governor-General’s Body Guard during the second Riel rebellion in 1885, and was later employed in the Canadian civil service in the West." He died in Victoria, British Columbia. Writing Mair published the first book of poetry in post-Confederation Canada, 1868's Dreamland and Other Poems. “Negligible as verse,” says The Canadian Encyclopedia, "the volume gained interest when Mair escaped after being captured by Louis Riel during the Red River disturbances of 1869-70.” The Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) states that Dreamland “demonstrates a conventional colonial approach to poetry. Such poems as 'August’ succeed in their attention to natural detail: descriptions of the blueflies, the milkmaids, and the 'ribby-lean’ cattle in parched fields anticipate the mature nature poetry of Archibald Lampman. But too often he wrote not of the timberlands he knew but of a dreamland weakly modelled upon the romantic flights of Keats.” However, the book was praised by “the established poet Charles Sangster, who referred to Canada’s sophisticated literary tradition as one that was habitually overlooked in the popular press.” Writing later in the Ottawa Journal, William Wilfred Campbell saw Dreamland as a precursor to the nature poetry later popularized in Canada by the Confederation Poets: “The thirty-three poems constitute the first attempt to deal with Canadian nature, in the manner of Keats and the other classic poets, and many of them in theme and treatment are similar to the verse of Lampman and Roberts.... And there are strong evidences in Mair’s work that he influenced these poets to a great extent.” Mair published Tecumseh, a historical drama mainly in blank verse dealing with the War of 1812, in 1886. Canadian critic Alan Filewood wrote of the political and philosophical ideas expressed by Mair in the poem: Mair’s projection of Canadian nationhood is embodied in the character of Lefroy, a Byronesque poet who flees civilization to seek solace in nature’s genius. He learns– tragically– from the British General Brock that natural law finds its outward form in the monarchic principle, and from the Indian chieftain Tecumseh that nature must be defended against the perversion of American materialism. The dying Tecumseh legitimizes the proto-(Anglo) Canadians as the natural guardians of the land, and Canadian manhood finds mature expression in a race of armed poets.(...) Mair looked to the day when the dominions would assume the responsibilities of adulthood: Then shall a whole family of young giants stand 'Erect, unbound, at Britain’s side-' her imperial offspring oversea, the upholders in the far future of her glorious tradition, or, should exhaustion ever come, the props and supports of her declining years. The DCB calls Tecumseh "a major contribution to our 19th-century literary heritage, wherein the War of 1812 is the central event of Canadian history. Among the many literary treatments of this war, including works by Sangster, John Richardson, and Sarah Anne Curzon... Tecumseh stands as the most accomplished." The Canadian Encyclopedia says that the poem’s “blank verse is pedestrian and untheatrical”, but it also tells us that “Tecumseh was important in the development of Canadian drama. It presents a vision of Canada as a co-operative enterprise in contrast with the self-seeking individualism of the United States.” Recognition Mair was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1889. In 1937 he was designated a Person of National Historic Significance. Canadian folksinger Gordon Lightfoot adapted a line from Tecumseh, “There was a time on this fair continent,” for the first line in his 1967 historical ballad, “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy” ("There was a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run"). Publications * Dreamland and Other Poems. London: S. Low, 1868. Montreal: Dawson, 1868, * Tecumseh. Toronto: Hunter, Rose & Co., 1886. London: Chapman & Hall, 1886. * Through the Mackenzie Basin: A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 . London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1903. References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Mair

Thomas Ernest Hulme (16 September 1883– 28 September 1917) was an English critic and poet who, through his writings on art, literature and politics, had a notable influence upon modernism. He was an aesthetic philosopher and the 'father of imagism’. Early life Hulme was born at Gratton Hall, Endon, Staffordshire, the son of Thomas and Mary Hulme. He was educated at Newcastle-under-Lyme High School, and from 1902, St John’s College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, but was sent down in 1904 after rowdy behaviour on Boat Race night. He was thrown out of Cambridge a second time after a scandal involving a Roedean girl. He returned to his studies at University College, London before travelling around Canada and spending time in Brussels acquiring languages. Proto-modernist From about 1907 Hulme became interested in philosophy, translating works by Henri Bergson and sitting in on lectures at Cambridge. He translated Georges Sorel’s Reflections on Violence. The most important influences on his thought were Bergson, who asserted that 'human experience is relative, but religious and ethical values are absolute’ and, later, Wilhelm Worringer (1881–1965), German art historian and critic - in particular his Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy, 1908). Hulme was influenced by Remy de Gourmont’s aristocratic concept of art and his studies of sensibility and style. From 1909 Hulme contributed critical articles to The New Age, edited by A. R. Orage. Hulme developed an interest in poetry and wrote a small number of poems. He was made secretary of the Poets’ Club, attended by such establishment figures as Edmund Gosse and Henry Newbolt. There he encountered Ezra Pound and F. S. Flint. In late 1908 Hulme delivered his paper A Lecture on Modern Poetry to the club. Hulme’s poems Autumn and City Sunset, both published in 1909 in a Poets’ Club anthology, have the distinction of being the first Imagist poems. A further five poems were published in The New Age in 1912 as The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme. Despite this misleading title, Hulme in fact wrote about 25 poems totalling some 260 lines, of which the majority were possibly written between 1908–1910. Robert Frost met Hulme in 1913 and was influenced by his ideas. The publisher of the book 'Ripostes’ (to which Pound appended the 'complete’ poetical works of T. E. Hulme) spoke in that book of Hulme ‘the meta-physician, who achieves great rhythmical beauty in curious verse-forms.’ In his critical writings Hulme distinguished between Romanticism, a style informed by a belief in the infinite in man and nature, characterised by Hulme as “spilt religion”, and Classicism, a mode of art stressing human finitude, formal restraint, concrete imagery and, in Hulme’s words, “dry hardness”. Similar views were later expressed by T.S. Eliot. Hulme’s ideas had a major effect on Wyndham Lewis (quite literally when they came to blows over Kate Lechmere; Lewis ended the worse for it, hung upside down by the cuffs of his trousers from the railings of Great Ormond Street). He championed the art of Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg, was a friend of Gaudier-Brzeska, and was in on the debut of Lewis’s literary magazine BLAST and vorticism. Hulme’s politics were conservative, and he moved further to the right after 1911 as a result of contact with Pierre Lasserre, who was associated with Action Française. First World War Hulme volunteered as an artilleryman in 1914 and served with the Honourable Artillery Company and later the Royal Marine Artillery in France and Belgium. He kept up his writing for The New Age. Notable publications during this period for that magazine were “War Notes,” written under the pen name “North Staffs”, and “A Notebook”, which contains some of his most organised critical writing. He was wounded in 1916. Back at the front in 1917, he was killed by a shell at Oostduinkerke near Nieuwpoort, in West Flanders. [...] On 28 September 1917, four days after his thirty-fourth birthday, Hulme suffered a direct hit from a large shell which literally blew him to pieces. Apparently absorbed in some thought of his own he had failed to hear it coming and remained standing while those around threw themselves flat on the ground. What was left of him was buried in the Military Cemetery at Koksijde, West-Vlaanderen, in Belgium where—no doubt for want of space—he is described simply as 'One of the War poets’.” Works * Notes on Language and Style (1929, University of Washington Book Store); in The Criterion, Vol. 3, No. 12, (July 1925) (ed. T.S. Eliot) * Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1936, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.), edited by Herbert Read * Further Speculations of T. E. Hulme (1955, University of Minnesota), edited by Samuel Hynes * The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme (1996, OUP), edited by Karen Csengeri * Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme (2003, Fyfield Books), edited by Patrick McGuinness Selected poems * Above the Dock * Autumn * A City Sunset * Conversion * The Embankment * Mana Aboda * The Man in the Crow’s Nest * Susan Ann and Immortality * The Poet * A Tall Woman * A Sudden Secret * In the Quiet Land * At Night! * Town Sky-line As translator * Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, (1912) * Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, (1915) Articles References Wikipedia—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._E._Hulme

Edward William Thomson was born in Toronto township, county of Peel, Ontario, February 12th, 1849. His father was William Thomson, grandson of Archibald Thomson, the first settler in Scarboro. His grandfather Edward William Thomson, was present at the taking of Detroit, and served with distinction under Brock at Queenston Heights; and was afterwards well known in Upper Canada as Col. E. W. Thomson of the Legislative Council, and as the one successful opponent of William Lyon Mackenzie in an election for the Legislature. The mother of the present E. W. Thomson was Margaret Hamilton Foley, sister of the Hon. M. H. Foley, twice Postmaster-General of the united Canadas. The future poet was educated at the Brantford Grammar School, and at the Trinity College Grammar School at Weston; but when about fourteen years of age, he was sent to an uncle and aunt in Philadelphia and given a position in a wholesale mercantile house as 'office junior.' Finding this employment very uncongenial, he enlisted in the Union army, in October, 1864, as a trooper in the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry. This corps was engaged twice at Hatcher's Run, and was with Grant when he took Petersburgh. Discharged in August, 1865, he returned to the parental home at Chippewa, Ontario. In June, 1866, when the Fenians raided Upper Canada, young Thomson promptly enlisted in the Queen's Own, and was in action at the Ridgeway fight. The following year he entered the profession of Civil Engineering, and in 1872 was registered a Provincial Land Surveyor. He practised his profession until December, 1878, when at the invitation of the Hon. George Brown, he joined the staff of The Globe, Toronto, as an editorial writer. Four years later the Manitoba boom attracted him, and he practised surveying for two or three years in Winnipeg. In 1885, he rejoined The Globe staff, but retired again in 1891, because of his opposition to the Liberal policy of Unrestricted Reciprocity. Shortly afterwards he was invited to join the staff of the Youth's Companion. He accepted and remained for eleven years. Since 1903, he has lived in Ottawa, employed as a newspaper correspondent and engaged in literary work.The Many-Mansioned House and Other Poems was issued in 1909. His poems, like his short stories, are lucid, vital, original. References http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/garvin/poets/thomson.html

Lilian Helen Bowes Lyon (1895–1949) was a British poet. Biography Born 23 December 1895 at Ridley Hall, Northumberland. She was the youngest daughter of the Honourable Francis Bowes Lyon and was a first cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. During the First World War, Bowes Lyon helped at Glamis Castle (owned by her uncle) which became a convalescence home for soldiers. Her brother Charles Bowes Lyon was killed in the war on 23 October 1914, inspiring her poem “Battlefield” which was later published in Bright Feather Fading. After the Great War, Bowes Lyon studied for a time at the University of Oxford and then moved to London. She was independently wealthy. In 1929, she met the writer William Plomer CBE and through him, Laurens van der Post. She published two novels, The Buried Stream (1929) and Under the Spreading Tree (1931) but thereafter focused on poetry. Bowes Lyon published six individual collections with Jonathan Cape and a Collected Poems in 1948. Her “Collected Poems” contains an introduction by C. Day-Lewis, who noted the influences of Emily Dickinson, Hopkins and Christina Rossetti. Her verse appeared in many periodicals and anthologies including The Adelphi, Country Life, Kingdom Come, The Listener, The London Mercury, The Lyric (USA), The Observer, Orion, Punch, The Spectator, Time and Tide and “Poetry” (USA). During the Second World War, Bowes Lyon moved to the East End of London, where she used the Tilbury Docks unofficial air raid shelter and assisted with nursing the injured. She had several amputations due to thromboangiitis obliterans (Buerger’s Disease), losing toes, a foot, her lower legs and eventually both her legs below her hips. She returned to her home in Kensington and continued to write poetry despite the thromboangitis obliterans beginning to affect her hands. These poems, found amongst William Plomer’s papers at University of Durham, were published in “Uncollected Poems” by Tragara Press. She died on 25 July 1949.