BENGT GUNNAR EKELÖF, SURREALIST SWEDISH POETRY

Monday is always a day of introspection and what really helps on days like these is reading poetry.

The Grandma is reading one of her favourite poets, Gunnar Ekelöf, the Swedish author who was born on a day like today in 1907.

Bengt Gunnar Ekelöf (15 September 1907-16 March 1968) was a Swedish poet and writer. He was a member of the Swedish Academy from 1958 and was awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy by Uppsala University in 1958. He won a number of prizes for his poetry.

Gunnar Ekelöf was born on 15 September 1907 in Stockholm. He has been called Sweden's first surrealist poet. He made his debut with the collection sent på jorden (late on earth) in 1932, written during an extended stay in Paris in 1929-1930, which was too unconventional to become widely appreciated and described by its author as capturing a period of suicidal thoughts and apocalyptic moods.

While not disavowing his debut, Ekelöf moved towards romanticism and received better reviews for his second poetry collection, Dedikation (1934). Both the volumes are influenced by surrealism and show a violent, at times feverish torrent of images, deliberate breakdown of ordered syntax and traditional poetic language and a defiant spirit bordering on anarchism. This defiant externalism was grounded in his person.

Though he came from an upper-class background, Ekelöf had never felt committed to it  -his father had been mentally ill and when his mother remarried, Ekelöf strongly disapproved of his stepfather, and by extension of his mother; he had become a loner and a rebel by his teens and would never feel at ease with the mores of the established upper and middle classes or with their inhibitions and what he perceived as their hypocrisy and back-scratching.

Swedish critic Anders Olsson described Ekelöf's turn to poetry as a choice of the only utterance that doesn't expurge the contradictions and empty spaces of language and of the mind.

Färjesång (1941), showed influence from T.S. Eliot, whose poem East Coker Ekelöf had translated to Swedish. It took influence from oriental poetry and the darkness of the ongoing Second World War. Ekelöf himself considered Färjesång as his personal breakthrough and with its simple and effective language it has had an strong influence on later Swedish poetry.

Färjesång was followed by the acclaimed works, the prose book Promenader (1941, Walks), the disillusioned Non Serviam (1945) in which the title poem borrowed from Lucifer's motto I will not serve in Latin, which symbolises a refusal to adapt to the conformity of the welfare society, and Om hösten (1951, In autumn) which includes the well-known poem Röster under jorden (Underground voices).

In Strountes (1955), from Swedish strunt (nonsense), Ekelöf returned to his attacks on literary conventions, exploring meaninglessness. With his continual wordplay, he demonstrated that meaning can emerge from apparent nonsense. Similar themes were explored in Opus incertum (1959) och En natt i Otočac (1961). The poetry suite En Mölna-elegi. Metamorfoser (1960) features an advanced technique of allusions, in which the protagonist in a short moment experiences a long time sequence.

In April 1958, Ekelöf was elected a member of the Swedish Academy, succeeding author Bertil Malmberg on chair 18 in December the same year.

Ekelöf's last works, Dīwān över Fursten av Emgión (1965, Diwan on the Prince of Emgion), Sagan om Fatumeh (1966, The Tale of Fatumeh) and Vägvisare till underjorden (1967, Guide to the Underworld) was a trilogy with Byzantine theme. The trilogy was inspired by journey to Istanbul and İzmir in 1965 that resulted in an outburst of creativity. In his diary, Ekelöf described the visit as a revelation that would change his life. Dīwān över Fursten av Emgión tells the story of the fictive Prince of Emgión who participated in the Battle of Manzikert, was captured, tortured and blinded, and then jailed in Constantinople for ten years. On his way home, the Prince is accompanied by a mysterious woman, assisting him in his blindness. For this book, Ekelöf was awarded the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 1966.

Ekelöf is remembered as one of the first surrealist poets of Sweden. 

He died on 16 March 1968 in Sigtuna. According to his will, his ashes were scattered in the river Pactolus (now the river Sart) in Salihli, Turkey. Ovid records the legend that King Midas divested himself of the golden touch by washing himself in that river.

On the 103rd anniversary of his birth, 40 Swedish poetry enthusiasts gathered in Salihli. Together with the deputy mayor, they honored Ekelöf's legacy in the city, which he had come to admire ardently on a visit in 1965, and had portrayed in several poems. A bust of Ekelöf by Gürdal Duyar was to have been placed there, but this was never done, and it now waits in the garden of the Swedish Embassy in Istanbul.

More information: Ekelut

Något av det viktigaste i all konst: 
att överlåta en anständig del åt läsaren, 
betraktaren, den medverkande. 
Det ska finnas en tom plats vid det dukade bordet. 
Den är hans.

One of the most important things in all art: 
to leave a decent part to the reader, 
the viewer, the participant.
There should be an empty place at the set table. 
It's his.

Gunnar Ekelöf

MAX JACOB, FRENCH POET & PABLO PICASSO’S FRIEND

Today, The Grandma has been reading poetry. She likes Max Jacob's works a lot. He was born on a day like today in 1876.  

Max Jacob (12 July 1876-5 March 1944) was a French poet, painter, writer, and critic.

After spending his childhood in Quimper, Brittany, he enrolled in the Paris Colonial School, which he left in 1897 for an artistic career. He was one of the first friends Pablo Picasso made in Paris. They met in the summer of 1901, and it was Jacob who helped the young artist learn French. Later, on the Boulevard Voltaire, he shared a room with Picasso, who remained a lifelong friend (and was represented as the monk in his painting Three Musicians, which Picasso painted in 1921).

Jacob introduced him to Guillaume Apollinaire, who in turn introduced Picasso to Georges Braque. He would become close friends with Jean Cocteau, Jean Hugo, Christopher Wood and Amedeo Modigliani, who painted his portrait in 1916. He also befriended and encouraged the artist Romanin, otherwise known as French politician, and future Resistance leader Jean Moulin. Moulin's famous nom de guerre Max is presumed to be selected in honor of Jacob.

Jacob, who was Jewish, claimed to have had a vision of Christ in 1909, and converted to Catholicism. He was hopeful that this conversion would alleviate his homosexual tendencies.

Max Jacob is regarded as an important link between the symbolists and the surrealists, as can be seen in his prose poems Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box, 1917-the 1948 Gallimard edition was illustrated by Jean Hugo) and in his paintings, exhibitions of which were held in New York City in 1930 and 1938.

His writings include the novel Saint Matorel (1911), the free verses Le laboratoire central (1921), and La défense de Tartuffe (1919), which expounds his philosophical and religious attitudes.

The famous psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan attributed the quote The truth is always new to Jacob.

Having moved outside Paris in May 1936, to settle in Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire, Loiret, Max Jacob was arrested on 24 February 1944 by the Gestapo, and interned at Orléans prison (prisoner #15872).

Jewish by birth, Jacob's brother Gaston had been previously arrested in January 1944, and deported to the concentration camp Auschwitz along with their sister Myrthe-Lea; her husband was also deported by the Nazis at this time. A cousin, Andrée Jacob, survived by living under an assumed name and worked in the Resistance movement Noyautage des administrations publiques.

Following his incarceration at Orléans, Max was then transferred to Drancy internment camp from where he was to be transported in the next convoy to Auschwitz. However, said to be suffering from bronchial pneumonia, Max Jacob died on 5 March in the infirmary of La Cité de la Muette, a former housing block which served as the internment camp known as Drancy.

First interred in Ivry after the war ended, his remains were transferred in 1949 by his artist friends Jean Cassou and René Iché (who sculpted the tomb of the poet) to the cemetery at Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire in the Loiret département.

More information: Poetry Foundation

 What is called a sincere work is one that is endowed 
with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

Max Jacob

DYLAN M. THOMAS, POETRY & WRITING FROM WALES

Today, The Grandma has been reading some poetry. She has chosen one of her favourite Welsh writers, Dylan Thomas, who died on a day like today in 1953.

Dylan Marlais Thomas (27 October 1914-9 November 1953) was a Welsh poet and writer whose works include the poems Do not go gentle into that good night and And death shall have no dominion, as well as the play for voices Under Milk Wood. He also wrote stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child's Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his death at the age of 39 in New York City. By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a roistering, drunken and doomed poet.

He was born in Uplands, Swansea, in 1914, leaving school in 1932 to become a reporter for the South Wales Daily Post. Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager.

In 1934, the publication of Light breaks where no sun shines caught the attention of the literary world. While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara. They married in 1937 and had three children: Llewelyn, Aeronwy, and Colm.

He came to be appreciated as a popular poet during his lifetime, though he found earning a living as a writer difficult. He began augmenting his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. His radio recordings for the BBC during the late 1940s brought him to the public's attention, and he was frequently featured by the BBC as an accessible voice of the literary scene.

Thomas first travelled to the United States in the 1950s. His readings there brought him a degree of fame, while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened. His time in the United States cemented his legend, and he went on to record to vinyl such works as A Child's Christmas in Wales. During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma. He died on 9 November 1953 and his body was returned to Wales. On 25 November 1953, he was interred at St Martin's churchyard in Laugharne, Carmarthenshire.

Although Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, he has been acknowledged as one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century. He is noted for his original, rhythmic, and ingenious use of words and imagery. His position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and he remains popular with the public.

More information: Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas was born on 27 October 1914 in Swansea the son of Florence Hannah (née Williams; 1882-1958), a seamstress, and David John 'Jack' Thomas (1876-1952), a teacher. His father had a first-class honours degree in English from University College, Aberystwyth, and ambitions to rise above his position teaching English literature at the local grammar school. Thomas had one sibling, Nancy Marles (1906-1953), who was eight years his senior.

At the 1921 census, Nancy and Dylan are noted as speaking both Welsh and English. Their parents were also bilingual in English and Welsh, and Jack Thomas taught Welsh at evening classes. One of their Swansea relations has recalled that, at home, Both Auntie Florrie and Uncle Jack always spoke Welsh. There are three accounts from the 1940s of Dylan singing Welsh hymns and songs, and of speaking a little Welsh.

Thomas's father chose the name Dylan, which could be translated as son of the sea after Dylan ail Don, a character in The Mabinogion. His middle name, Marlais, was given in honour of his great-uncle, William Thomas, a Unitarian minister and poet whose bardic name was Gwilym Marles. Dylan, pronounced ˈ [ˈdəlan] (Dull-an) in Welsh, caused his mother to worry that he might be teased as the dull one. When he broadcast on Welsh BBC early in his career, he was introduced using this pronunciation. Thomas favoured the Anglicised pronunciation and gave instructions that it should be Dillan /ˈdɪlən/.

The red-brick semi-detached house at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive (in the respectable area of the Uplands), in which Thomas was born and lived until he was 23, had been bought by his parents a few months before his birth.

Thomas' childhood also featured regular summer trips to the Llansteffan peninsula, a Welsh-speaking part of Carmarthenshire. In the land between Llangain and Llansteffan, his mother's family, the Williamses and their close relatives, worked a dozen farms with over a thousand acres between them. The memory of Fernhill, a dilapidated 15-acre farm rented by his maternal aunt, Ann Jones, and her husband, Jim Jones, is evoked in the 1945 lyrical poem Fern Hill, but is portrayed more accurately in his short story, The Peaches. Thomas also spent part of his summer holidays with Jim's sister, Rachel Jones, at neighbouring Pentrewyman farm, where he spent his time riding Prince the cart horse, chasing pheasants and fishing for trout.

All these relatives were bilingual, and many worshipped at Smyrna chapel in Llangain where the services were always in Welsh, including Sunday School which Thomas sometimes attended. There is also an account of the young Thomas being taught how to swear in Welsh. His schoolboy friends recalled that It was all Welsh -and the children played in Welsh...he couldn't speak English when he stopped at Fernhill...in all his surroundings, everybody else spoke Welsh... At the 1921 census, 95% of residents in the two parishes around Fernhill were Welsh speakers. Across the whole peninsula, 13% -more than 200 people- spoke only Welsh.

Thomas was a teenager when many of the poems for which he became famous were published: And death shall have no dominion, Before I Knocked and The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. And death shall have no dominion appeared in the New English Weekly in May 1933. When Light breaks where no sun shines appeared in The Listener in 1934, it caught the attention of three senior figures in literary London, T. S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson and Stephen Spender.

They contacted Thomas and his first poetry volume, 18 Poems, was published in December 1934. 18 Poems was noted for its visionary qualities which led to critic Desmond Hawkins writing that the work was the sort of bomb that bursts no more than once in three years.The volume was critically acclaimed and won a contest run by the Sunday Referee, netting him new admirers from the London poetry world, including Edith Sitwell and Edwin Muir. The anthology was published by Fortune Press, in part a vanity publisher that did not pay its writers and expected them to buy a certain number of copies themselves. A similar arrangement was used by other new authors including Philip Larkin.

More information: Discover Dylan Thomas

In May 1934, Thomas made his first visit to Laugharne, the strangest town in Wales, as he described it in an extended letter to Pamela Hansford Johnson, in which he also writes about the town's estuarine bleakness, and the dismal lives of the women cockle pickers working the shore around him.

In December 1935, Thomas contributed the poem The Hand That Signed the Paper to Issue 18 of the bi-monthly New Verse.

In 1936, his next collection Twenty-five Poems, published by J. M. Dent, also received much critical praise.

Two years later, in 1938, Thomas won the Oscar Blumenthal Prize for Poetry; it was also the year in which New Directions offered to be his publisher in the United States. In all, he wrote half his poems while living at Cwmdonkin Drive before moving to London. During this time Thomas's reputation for heavy drinking developed.

By the late 1930s, Thomas was embraced as the poetic herald for a group of English poets, the New Apocalyptics. Thomas refused to align himself with them and declined to sign their manifesto. He later stated that he believed they were intellectual muckpots leaning on a theory. Despite this, many of the group, including Henry Treece, modelled their work on Thomas's.

In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1930s Thomas's sympathies were very much with the radical left, to the point of his holding close links with the communists; he was also decidedly pacifist and anti-fascist. He was a supporter of the left-wing No More War Movement and boasted about participating in demonstrations against the British Union of Fascists. Bert Trick has provided an extensive account of an Oswald Mosley rally in the Plaza cinema in Swansea in July 1933 that he and Thomas attended.

More information: Poetry Foundation

In 1939, a collection of 16 poems and seven of the 20 short stories published by Thomas in magazines since 1934, appeared as The Map of Love. Ten stories in his next book, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog (1940), were based less on lavish fantasy than those in The Map of Love and more on real-life romances featuring himself in Wales. Sales of both books were poor, resulting in Thomas living on meagre fees from writing and reviewing. At this time he borrowed heavily from friends and acquaintances. Hounded by creditors, Thomas and his family left Laugharne in July 1940 and moved to the home of critic John Davenport in Marshfield near Chippenham in Gloucestershire. There Thomas collaborated with Davenport on the satire The Death of the King's Canary, though due to fears of libel the work was not published until 1976.

American poet John Brinnin invited Thomas to New York, where in February 1950 they embarked on a lucrative three-month tour of arts centres and campuses. The tour, which began in front of an audience of a thousand at the Kaufmann Auditorium of the Poetry Centre in New York, took in about 40 venues.

Thomas arrived in New York on 20 October 1953 to undertake further performances of Under Milk Wood, organised by John Brinnin, his American agent and Director of the Poetry Centre.

Thomas died at noon on 9 November, having never recovered from his coma. A nurse, and the poet John Berryman, were present with him at the time of death.

More information: Poem Hunter

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes,
and before I could read them for myself,
I had come to love just the words of them,
the words alone.

Dylan Thomas

THOMAS MOORE, ENGLISH VERSES & OLD IRISH TUNES

Today, The Grandma has been reading some poetry. She loves it, and she has chosen Thomas Moore's poems, the Irish poet who was born on a day like today in 1852.

Thomas Moore (28 May 1779-25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies.

Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or squib, writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.

Married to a Protestant actress and hailed as Anacreon Moore after the classical Greek composer of drinking songs and erotic verse, Moore did not profess religious piety. Yet in the controversies that surrounded Catholic Emancipation Moore was seen to defend the tradition of the Church in Ireland against both evangelising Protestants and uncompromising lay Catholics.

Longer prose works reveal more radical sympathies. The Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald depicts the United Irish leader as a martyr in the cause of democratic reform.

Complementing Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent, Memoirs of Captain Rock is a saga, not of Anglo-Irish landowners, but of their exhausted tenants driven to the semi-insurrection of Whiteboyism.

Today, however, Moore is remembered almost alone either for his Irish Melodies, typically The Minstrel Boy and The Last Rose of Summer or, less generously, for the role he is thought to have played in the loss of the memoirs of his friend Lord Byron.

More information: Poetry Foundation

Thomas Moore was born to Anastasia Codd from Wexford and John Moore from Kerry over his parents' grocery shop in Aungier Street, Dublin, He had two younger sisters, Kate and Ellen.

Moore showed an early interest in music and performance, staging musical plays with his friends and entertaining hope of being an actor.

In Dublin he attended Samuel Whyte's co-educational English grammar school, where he was schooled in Latin and Greek and became fluent in French and Italian. By age fourteen he had had one of his poems published in a new literary magazine called the Anthologia Hibernica, Irish Anthology.

Samuel Whyte had taught Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Irish playwright and English Whig politician, of whom Moore later was to write a biography.

In the early years of his career, Moore's work was largely generic, and had he died at this point he would likely not have been considered an Irish poet.

From 1806 to 1807, Moore dramatically changed his style of writing and focus. Following a request by the publishers James and William Power, he wrote lyrics to a series of Irish tunes in the manner of Haydn's settings of British folksongs, with Sir John Andrew Stevenson as arranger of the music.

The principal source for the tunes was Edward Bunting's A General Collection of the Ancient Irish Music (1797) to which Moore had been introduced at Trinity by Edward Hudson. The Melodies were published in ten volumes, together with a supplement, over 26 years between 1808 and 1834. The musical arrangements of the last volumes, following Stevenson's death in 1833, were by Henry Bishop.

More information: All Poetry

The Melodies were an immediate success, The Last Rose of Summer, The Minstrel Boy, Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms and Oft in the Stilly Night becoming immensely popular. There were parodies in England, but translations into German, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, and French, and settings by Hector Berlioz guaranteed a large European audience. In the United States, The Last Rose of Summer alone sold more than a million copies.

Byron said he knew them all by rote and by heart; setting them above epics and Moore above all other poets for his peculiarity of talent, or rather talents, -poetry, music, voice, all his own-. They were also praised by Sir Walter Scott who conceded that neither he nor Byron could attain Moore's power of adapting words to music.

Moore was in no doubt that the Irish Melodies would be the only work of my pen […] whose fame, thanks to the sweet music in which it is embalmed, may boast a chance of prolonging its existence to a day much beyond our own.

The ultra-Tory The Anti-Jacobin Review, Monthly Political and Literary Censor discerned in Moore's Melodies something more than innocuous drawing-room ballads: several of them were composed in a very disordered state of society, if not in open rebellion. They are the melancholy ravings of the disappointed rebel, or his ill-educated offspring.

Moore was providing texts to what he described as our national music, and his lyrics did often reflect an unmistakable intimation of dispossession and loss in the music itself.

In the late 1840s, and as the catastrophe of the Great Famine overtook Ireland, Moore's powers began to fail. He was reduced ultimately to senility, which came suddenly in December 1849.

Moore died on February 25, 1852, preceded by all his children and by most of his friends and companions.

More information: Biblioteca Virtual Universal

 Humility, that low, sweet root,
from which all heavenly virtues shoot.

Thomas Moore

KOSTAS KARYOTAKIS, GREEK POETRY & ICONOCLASTICS

Today, The Grandma has gone to the library to search more information about Kostas Karyotakis, the Greek poet who was born on a day like today in 1896.

Kostas Karyotakis, in Greek: Κώστας Καρυωτάκης, (30 October 1896-20 July 1928) is considered one of the most representative Greek poets of the 1920s and one of the first poets to use iconoclastic themes in Greece.

His poetry conveys a great deal of nature, imagery and traces of expressionism and surrealism. He also belongs to the Greek Lost Generation movement.

The majority of Karyotakis' contemporaries viewed him in a dim light throughout his lifetime without a pragmatic accountability for their contemptuous views; for after his suicide, the majority began to revert to the view that he was indeed a great poet. He had a significant, almost disproportionately, progressive influence on later Greek poets.

Karyotakis gave existential depth as well as a tragic dimension to the emotional nuances and melancholic tones of the neo-Symbolist and new-Romantic poetry of the time.

With a rare clarity of spirit and penetrating vision, he captures and conveys with poetic daring the climate of dissolution and the impasses of his generation, as well as the traumas of his own inner spiritual world.

Karyotakis was born in Tripoli, Greece, his father's occupation as a county engineer resulted in his early childhood and teenage years being spent in various places, following his family's successive moves around the Greek cities, including Argostoli, Lefkada, Larisa, Kalamata, Athens and Chania. He started publishing poetry in various magazines for children in 1912. It is solely rife speculation that he had felt deeply betrayed that a girl he had cared for in Hania in 1913 had married and sent him into melancholy.

After receiving his degree from the Athens School of Law and Political Sciences, in 1917, he did not pursue a career as a lawyer. Karyotakis became a clerk in the Prefecture of Thessaloniki. However, he greatly disliked his work and could not tolerate the bureaucracy of the state, which he wrote about often in his poems. His prose piece Catharsis is characteristic of this. For this reason he would often be removed from his posts and transferred to other locations in Greece. During these removals he became familiar with the boredom and misery of the country during World War I.

In February 1919, he published his first collection of poetry: The Pain of People and of Things, in Greek Ὁ πόνος τοῦ ἀνθρώπου καὶ τῶν πραμάτων, which was largely ignored or badly reviewed by the critics. In the same year he published, with his friend Agis Levendis, a satirical review, called The Leg, which, despite its success, was banned by the police after the sixth issue.

More information: All Poetry

In 1921, he published his second collection called Nepenthe, in Greek Νηπενθῆ, and also wrote a musical revue, Pell-Mell, in Greek Πελ-Μελ.

In 1922, he began having an affair with the poet Maria Polydouri who was a colleague of his at the Prefecture of Attica.

In 1923, he wrote a poem called Treponema pallidum, in Greek Ὠχρὰ Σπειροχαίτη, which was published under the title Song of Madness and gave rise to speculation that he may have been suffering from syphilis, which before 1945 was considered a chronic illness with no proven cure for it.

George Skouras, a physician of the poet, wrote: He was sick, he was syphilitic and George Savidis (1929–1999), professor of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, who possessed the largest archive about Greek poets, revealed that Karyotakis was syphilitic, and that his brother, Thanasis Karyotakis, thought the disease to be a disgrace to the family.

In 1924, he travelled abroad, visiting Italy and Germany.

In December 1927 he published his last collection of poetry: Elegy and Satires, in Greek Ἐλεγεῖα καὶ Σάτιρες.

In February 1928, Karyotakis was transferred to Patras although soon afterwards he spent a month on leave in Paris and in June 1928 he was sent yet again to Preveza by ship.

Karyotakis lived in Preveza only for 33 days, until his suicide on 21 July 1928 at age 31. His work was in the Prefecture of Preveza, in the Palios mansion, 10 Speliadou street, as a lawyer for control of land donations from the State to refugees from Asia Minor War of 1922.

From Preveza he sent desperate letters to friends and relatives describing the misery he felt in the town. His family offered to support him for an indefinite stay in Paris, but he refused, knowing what a monetary sacrifice like this would entail for them. His angst is felt in the poem Preveza, in Greek Πρέβεζα, which he wrote shortly before his suicide. The poem displays an insistent, lilting anaphora on the word Death, which stands at the beginning of several lines and sentences.

On 19 July 1928, Karyotakis went to Monolithi beach and kept trying to drown in the sea for ten hours, but failed in his attempt, because he was an avid swimmer as he himself wrote in his suicide note. In the subsequent morning he returned home and left again to purchase a revolver and went to a little café in the place Vryssoula, near today Hotel Zikas. After smoking for a few hours, and drink cherry juice, he left 75 drachmas as a gratuity, while the cost of the drink was 5 drachmas, he went to Agios Spyridon, where, under a eucalyptus tree, he shot himself through the heart.

More information: Poem Hunter

 Walking slowly on the quay,
"do I exist?" you say, and then: "you do not!"

Kostas Karyotakis

ALFONSINA STORNI, ARGENTINIAN MODERNIST POETRY

Today, The Grandma has been reading some poems written by Alfonsina Storni, the Argentine poet who died on a day like today in 1938.

Alfonsina Storni (29 May 1892-25 October 1938) was an Argentine poet of the modernist period.

Storni was born on May 29, 1892 in Sala Capriasca, Switzerland. Her parents were Alfonso Storni and Paola Martignoni, who were of Italian-Swiss descent. Before her birth, her father had started a brewery in the city of San Juan, Argentina, producing beer and soda.

In 1891, following the advice of a doctor, he returned with his wife to Switzerland, where Alfonsina was born the following year; she lived there until she was four years old.

In 1896 the family returned to San Juan, and a few years later, in 1901, moved to Rosario because of economic issues. There her father opened a tavern, where Storni did a variety of chores. That family business soon failed, however.

Storni wrote her first verse at the age of twelve, and continued writing verses during her free time. She later entered into the Colegio de la Santa Union as a part-time student.

In 1906, her father died, and she began working in a hat factory to help support her family.

In 1907, her interest in dance led her to join a travelling theatre company, which took her around the country. She performed in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts, Benito Pérez Galdós's La loca de la casa, and Florencio Sánchez's Los muertos.

More information: Poem Hunter

In 1908, Storni returned to live with her mother, who had remarried and was living in Bustinza. After a year there, Storni went to Coronda, where she studied to become a rural primary schoolteacher. During this period, she also started working for the local magazines Mundo Rosarino and Monos y Monadas, as well as the prestigious Mundo Argentino.

In 1912, she moved to Buenos Aires, seeking the anonymity afforded by a big city. There she met and fell in love with a married man, whom she described as an interesting person of certain standing in the community. He was active in politics... That year, she published her first short story in Fray Mocho.

At age nineteen, she found out that she was pregnant with the child of a journalist and became a single mother. Supporting herself with teaching and newspaper journalism, she lived in Buenos Aires, where the social and economic difficulties faced by Argentina's growing middle classes were inspiring an emerging body of women's rights activists.

Storni was among the first women to find success in the male-dominated arenas of literature and theatre in Argentina, and as such, developed a unique and valuable voice that holds particular relevance in Latin American poetry.

Storni was an influential person, not only to her readers but also to other writers. Though she was known mainly for her poetic works, she also wrote prose, journalistic essays, and drama.

Storni often gave controversial opinions. She criticized a wide range of topics, from politics to gender roles and discrimination against women.

In Storni's time, her work did not align itself with a particular movement or genre. It was not until the modernist and avant-garde movements began to fade that her work seemed to fit in. She was criticized for her atypical style, and she has been labelled most often as a postmodern writer.

Storni published some of her first works in 1916 in Emin Arslan's literary magazine La Nota, where she was a permanent contributor from 28 March until 21 November 1919. Her poems Convalecer and Golondrinas were published in the magazine. In spite of economic difficulties, she published La inquietud del rosal in 1916, and later started writing for the magazine Caras y Caretas while working as a cashier in a shop.

Even though today Storni's early works of poetry are among her most well known and highly regarded, they received harsh criticism from some of her male contemporaries, including such well-known figures as Jorge Luis Borges and Eduardo Gonzalez Lanuza. The eroticism and feminist themes in her writing were a controversial subject for poetry during her time, but writing about womanhood in such a direct way was one of her principal innovations as a poet.

In the rapidly developing literary scene of Buenos Aires, Storni soon became acquainted with other writers, such as José Enrique Rodó and Amado Nervo. Her economic situation improved, which allowed her to travel to Montevideo, Uruguay. There she met the poet Juana de Ibarbourou, as well as Horacio Quiroga, with whom she would become great friends. Quiroga led the Anaconda group and Storni became a member together with Emilia Bertolé, Ana Weiss de Rossi, Amparo de Hieken, Ricardo Hicken and Berta Singerman.

During one of her most productive periods, from 1918 to 1920 Storni published three volumes of poetry: El dulce daño, 1918; Irremediablemente, 1919; and Languidez, 1920. The latter received the first Municipal Poetry Prize and the second National Literature Prize, which added to her prestige and reputation as a talented writer.

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She also published many articles in prominent newspapers and journals of the time. Later, she continued her experimentation with form in 1925's Ocre, a volume composed almost entirely of sonnets that are among her most traditional in structure. These verses were written around the same time as the more loosely structured prose poems of her lesser-known volume, Poemas de Amor, from 1926.

After a nearly 8-year hiatus from publishing volumes of poetry, Storni published El mundo de siete pozos, 1934. That volume, together with the final volume she published before her death, Mascarilla y trébol (Mask and Clover), 1938, mark the height of her poetic experimentation. The final volume includes the use of what she termed antisonnets, or poems that used many of the versification structures of traditional sonnets but did not follow the traditional rhyme scheme.

In 1935, Storni may have discovered a lump on her left breast and decided to undergo an operation. On May 20, 1935, she underwent a radical mastectomy.

In 1938, she found out that the breast cancer had reappeared. Around 1:00 AM on Tuesday, 25 October 1938. Storni left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach in Mar del Plata, and committed suicide. Later that morning, two workers found her body washed up on the beach.

Although her biographers hold that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she slowly walked out to sea until she drowned. She is buried in La Chacarita Cemetery. Her death inspired Ariel Ramírez and Félix Luna to compose the song Alfonsina y el Mar.

More information: Alfonsina y el mar

 Yo he sido aquella que paseó orgullosa
El oro falso de unas cuantas rimas
Sobre su espalda, y se creyó gloriosa,
De cosechas opimas.

I have been the one who walked proudly
The fake gold of a few rhymes
On her back, and she thought herself glorious,
Of opima crops.

Alfonsina Storni

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT, MODERNIST POETRY IN ENGLISH

Today, The Grandma is relaxing at home. She has decided to practice one of her favourite hobbies, reading poetry. She has chosen T. S. Eliot, the American-English poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor, who was born on a day like today in 1888.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888-4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. One of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship.

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915, which was received as a modernist masterpiece. It was followed by some best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).

He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.

The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.

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Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socializing with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys' college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German.

He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them.

His first published poem, A Fable For Feasters, was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as Song in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine.

He also published three short stories in 1905, Birds of Prey, A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. Such a link with indigenous peoples importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.

In 1915, he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London.

In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.

Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students included John Betjeman.

Charles Whibley recommended T.S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where he remained for the rest of his career. At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Charles Madge and Ted Hughes.

More information: Poetry Foundation

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.

Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding, the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living.

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For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career.

Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, and strongly influenced the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimizing of his work, and once said his criticism was merely a by-product of his private poetry-workshop.

T.S. Eliot influenced many poets, novelists, and songwriters, including Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Díreáin, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Russell Kirk, George Seferis, who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land, and James Joyce.

T. S. Eliot was a strong influence on 20th-century Caribbean poetry written in English, including the epic Omeros (1990) by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and Islands (1969) by Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite.

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 Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality.
But, of course,
only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.

T. S. Eliot