Final - Connecticut History
S.SHARON
literary_connecticut.ppt
Literary Connecticut
Nutmeggers
and Nomads
By Amy Nawrocki and Eric D. Lehman
Connecticut’s Rich History of Authorship
Life is either a great adventure or nothing.
-Helen Keller
“Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.”
– Mark Twain
Creating literature is a human activity – we all do it, even if we are just telling a funny story about our uncle and a pig. But few people write those stories down, and even fewer are read by more than their families…that is why great writers are so important – their work stands in for all those lost tales; they tell our stories as I they knew us, as if they verbalized the unwritten longings of our souls.
America’s First Literary Movement
The Wits:
John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight
“Columbia, Columbia, to glory arise, The queen of the world and the child of the skies! Thy genius commands thee; with rapture behold, While ages on ages thy splendors unfold.”
- Timothy Dwight
From Yale Graduates to Hartford Worthies to Poets of a Nation
Four years of college dozed away
In sleep, in slothfulness and play,
Too dull for vice, with clearest conscience
Charged with no fault but that of nonsense
- John Trumbull, “Progress of Dulness”
All spurious appellations, void of truth;
I've better known thee from my earliest youth,
Thy name is Hasty Pudding! thus our sires
Were wont to greet thee fuming from their fires;
And while they argued in thy just defence
With logic clear, they thus explained the sense:
'In haste the boiling cauldron, o'er the blaze,
Receives and cooks the ready-powdered maize;
In haste 'tis served, and then in equal haste,
With cooling milk, we make the sweet repast.
No carving to be done, no knife to grate
The tender ear, and wound the stony plate;
But the smooth spoon, just fitted to the lip,
And taught with art the yielding mass to dip,
By frequent journeys to the bowl well stored,
Performs the hasty honors of the board.'
Such is the name, significant and clear,
A name, a sound to every Yankee dear,
But most to me, whose heart and palate chaste
Preserve my pure hereditary taste.
- Joel Barlow, “Hasty Pudding”
Why were the Hartford Wits forgotten?
Their true allegiance was to life rather than to the muse…
Noah Webster’s Dictionary
Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.
- Noah Webster
The Youngest and Last Hartford Wit Defines an American Language
Connecticut Authors Help to Change America
The Beechers of Connecticut
“I thus sat and watched my father writing,
turning to his books, and speaking from time
to time to himself in a loud, earnest whisper.”
~Harriet Beecher, on her father’s library.
Nook Farm
“. . . A little society by ourselves”
~Isabella Beecher Hooker
They were women who put the pen to work for the progress of all women and for the promise of equal opportunities for all people.
“The first duty of a human
being is to assume the right
relationship to society –
more briefly, to find
your real job, and do it. “
~Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Toward a More Perfect Union
A story, as simple as those we tell each other
on the coldest of nights around the fireplace,
has the can blow the fire out, or start a new one.
Connecticut Playwrights Transform American Drama
I tasted the power which is reserved, I imagine, for playwrights, which is to know that by one’s invention a mass of strangers has been publicly transfixed.
- Arthur Miller
William Gillette and the Old Dispensation
Gillette’s castle in East Haddam
Eugene O’Neill
Father of American Drama
"[O'Neill] has done nothing much in the American drama save to transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness ... [he has] seen life as something not to be neatly arranged in a study, but as terrifying, magnificent and often quite horrible, a thing akin to a tornado, an earthquake or a devastating fire.'‘
– Sinclair Lewis (Yale grad)
Eugene O’Neill as a boy in New London
Thornton Wilder Experiments
Now, there are somethings we all know, but we don’t take’m out and look at’m very often. We all know that seomthing is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.
- Thornton Wilder, Our Town
Wilder’s writing room in Hamden
Arthur Miller and the American Dream
Miller’s home in Roxbury
I have lived more than half my life in the Connecticut countryside…There is something about this forty-three [sixty-seven] year temporary residence that strikes me funny now.
– Arthur Miller
Connecticut Drama
Becomes
American Drama
Have you ever thought about writing plays, Albee?
- Thornton
Wilder
Curiosity killed the cat; but satisfaction brought it back
– Eugene
O’Neill
Connecticut Changes American Poetry
What is this purple, this parasol,
This stage-light of the Opera?
It is like a region full of intonings.
It is Hartford seen in a purple light.
* * *
See the river, the railroad, the cathedral. . .
Wallace Stevens
Anna Hempstead Branch, “Connecticut Road Song” (1910)
In the wide and rocky pasture where the cedar trees are gray,
The briar rose was growing with the blueberry and bay.
The girls went forth to pick them and the lads went out to play,
But I had to get to Stonington before the break of day.
And when I came to Stonington, she was a town of pride.
'Come in,' they said, 'and labor, and be at home and bide.
For gold shall be thy wage,' but 't was past the hour of morn—
And I had to get to Jordan while the dew was on the thorn.
* * *
Wherefore, ye men of Coventry, if ye desire to stay,
Lay not your curb upon me, that love the open way.
For I want to smell the dew, the blueberry and the bay,
And I have to get to Colchester before the break of day.
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
“There is such a complete freedom
now-a-days in respect to the technique
that I am rather inclined to disregard form so long as I am free and can
express myself freely.”
~Wallace Stevens
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
From “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
.
“I awoke once several hours before daylight and as I lay in bed I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow under my window almost inaudibly. The faintness and strangeness of the sound made on me one of those impressions
which one so often seizes as the pretexts
for poetry.”
~Wallace Stevens
“What he derives from his generation he returns to his
generation, as best he can.”
~Wallace Stevens
Genealogy of
Connecticut Poetry
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
~Ernest Hemingway
The New Millennium
The Man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
– Mark Twain
The whole day long, under the walking sun
That poised an eye on me from a high floor,
Holding my toy beside the clapboard house
I looked for him, the summer I was four.
I was afraid the waking arm would break
From the loose earth and rub against his eyes
A fist of trees, and the whole country tremble
In the exultant labor of his rise;
Then he with giant steps in the small streets
Would stagger, cutting off the sky, to seize
The roofs from house and home because we had
Covered his shape with dirt and planted trees;
And then kneel down and rip with fingernails
A trench to pour the enemy Atlantic
Into our basin, and the water rush,
With the streets full and the voices frantic.
That was the summer I expected him.
Later the high and watchful sun instead
Walked low behind the house, and school began,
And winter pulled a sheet over his head.
- Donald Hall
*
