6. SECCIÓN B

 

UNIT 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

SECCIÓN B, 

TEMA 6: LITERATURA INGLESA Y NORTEAMERICANA 1900-1960

 

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 NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4516162/

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

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Recordad que ya podéis ir leyendo y estudiando los textos de esta sección, que están en la segunda parte de vuestro bloque de fotocopias. Para dudas y consultas sobre ellos y sobre los autores de la sección B, podéis anotarlas y enviármelas por correo a garciala@unizar.es

 

En este tema 6 tratamos (en orden inverso, empezando por abajo) autores ingleses y norteamericanos de principios y mediados del siglo XX. Seguidamente pasamos al tema 7, Literatura inglesa 1960-2000. 

_____________

Richard Gray on Nabokov.

Terminamos el TEMA 6 con unas notas sobre Vladimir Nabokov, clásico moderno de dos idiomas, ruso e inglés, 

—y con una panorámica sobre Samuel Beckett, otro clásico bilingüe en inglés y francés:

 

SAMUEL BECKETT         (1906-1989)

Anglo-Irish and French modernist bilingual writer, conservative bourgeois family, born in Foxrock, Ireland; studied at Portora School, Trinity College Dublin, and the Sorbonne; lived in Ireland, then Paris; loved cousin Peggy Sinclair;  bohemian lifestyle, expatriate skeptic vs. Catholic tradition; admirer and assistant of James Joyce in the 30s; m. Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil; member of the Resistance, lived in hiding in Roussillon during 2nd WW; experimental writer and dramatist in English and French, world success as "absurdist" dramatist with Waiting for Godot; developed an ascetic aesthetics of impotence, decay, minimalism and impoverishment, writing ever shorter and denser works;  Nobel Prize 1969; international success but reclusive character; often directed his own plays; lived and died in Paris)

_____. En attendant Godot / Waiting for Godot. Drama, 1951. 1954.
_____. Molloy. Novel. 1951. In English,1955.
_____. Malone meurt / Malone Dies. Novel. 1951. 1956.
_____. L'Innommable / The Unnamable. Novel. 1954. 1958.
_____. Fin de partie /Endgame. Drama. 1954. 1958.
_____. Krapp's Last Tape / La Dernière bande. Drama. 1958. 1959.
_____. Happy Days / Oh les beaux jours. Drama. 1961. 1963.
_____. Play / Comédie. Drama. 1963. 1964.
_____. Not I / Pas moi. Drama. 1973. 1975 

______. Stirrings Still (Soubresauts). Prose. 1988. 1989.

- The New Drama: Beckett and Osborne (Andrew Sanders).

- "Samuel Beckett." In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.*
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett

- En YouTube se pueden ver varias obras de Beckett. Por ejemplo, Catastrophe.  O la que hemos incluido como lectura obligatoria, Krapp's Last Tape.

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NIVEL AVANZADO: 

- Un audio en français sur Beckett: Une vie, une œuvre.

- Samuel Beckett's experimental fiction, in THE NEW NOVELISTS OF THE 1950s.

- Vladimir Nabokov: A documentary and a lecture on Lolita.

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________________________

 

E. E. CUMMINGS     (1894-1962)

Edward Estlin Cummings, US man of letters, modernist poet, dramatist and novelist; b. Cambridge, MA; grad. Harvard, Master of Arts 1916, ambulance volonteer in France, unjustly accused of treasonable correspondence 1st WW, defender of individualism and creative eccentricity vs. social regimentation, 20th-c. Transcendentalist.


Works

Cummings, E. E. The Enormous Room. Narrative. 1922.
_____. Tulips and Chimneys. Poems. 1923.
_____. &. 1925.
_____. is 5.  Poems. 1926.
_____. ViVa. 1931.
_____. (Untitled work). 1930.
_____. Eimi. 1933.
_____. Tom. 1935. (Satirical ballet based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).
_____. No Thanks. 1935.
_____. 50 Poems. 1940.
_____. I x I. 1944.
_____ . XAIPE.  1950.
_____. Poems: 1924-1954. 1954.
_____. 95 Poems. 1958.
_____. 73 Poems. 1963. (Posth.).
_____.  Complete Poems, 1904-62.   1993.

- Unas notas sobre el poeta modernista norteamericano e. e. cummings.

Y otro poeta modernista inglés. Notas clicando en su nombre:

W. H.  AUDEN     (1907-1973)

Wystan Hugh Auden, modernist English poet, born in York; anglo-catholic family; studied at Gresham's School, Holt and Christ Church, Oxford;  homosexual, 1928 stay in Berlin with Isherwood, 1930s taught in Scotland and Downs School, Birmingham; professional writer late 30s, leftist sympathies before the war, turned conservative thereafter, cultivated Christian humanism and literary tradition; trips to Spanish War and China; expatriate in US 1939; US citizen c. 1946, lived half-year in Europe and USA with life partner Chester Kallman in New York; summer stays in Ischia and Kirschtetten; honorary Professor of Poetry U of Oxford, 1956-60s; died in Vienna.

Auden, W. H.  Poems. 1930.
_____. Look, Stranger! Poems.  1936.
_____. "Spain 1937." Poem. 1937, 1940.
_____. "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." Poem. 1939.
_____. "In Time of War." Sonnet sequence. 1939.
_____. Another Time. Poems.  1940.
_____. New Year Letter. Poems. 1941.
_____. The Age of Anxiety. Poems. 1947.
_____. The Shield of Achilles. Poems. 1955.
_____. Homage to Clio. Poems. 1960.

_____. About the House. Poems. 1965.
_____. Los señores del límite: Selección de poemas y ensayos (1927-1973). 2007.
 


____________________________________________

Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO:

- Dos influyentes críticos de la sociedad moderna y sus tendencias distópicas: Huxley y Orwell

—muy relevantes los dos en la era 2020.

Introducción a 1984 de Orwell 

La distopía de Orwell se hace realidad.

 

- Un documentaire, en français, sur Le meilleur des mondes et 1984— ...aujourd'hui.

-  Orwell en España: Rebelión en la pocilga

                                           ___________

 

-  Los poemas de Sylvia Plath, poeta feminista y suicida.


- Dylan Thomas, poeta galés, recita uno de sus poemas en la radio.



__________________________________________ 

 

 

WILLIAM FAULKNER        (1897-1962)

_____.  Soldier's Pay. Novel. 1926.
_____. Mosquitoes. 1927.
_____. Sartoris. Novel. 1929.
_____. The Sound and the Fury. Novel. 1929.
_____. As I Lay Dying. Novel. 1930.
_____. "A Rose for Emily." Story. 1930.
    http://www.eng.fju.edu.tw/English_Literature/Rose/el-text-E-Rose.htm
    2012
_____. Sanctuary. Novel. New York: Random House, 1931.
_____. Light in August.  Novel. 1932.
_____. Pylon. Novel. 1935.
_____. Absalom, Absalom! 1936.
_____. The Wild Palms. Novel. 1939.
_____. The Hamlet. Novel. 1940. (Vol. 1 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Big Sleep. Film script based on Raymond Chandler's novel. 1946.
_____. Go Down, Moses. Stories / novel. 1942.
_____. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. 1950.
_____. Requiem for a Nun. Novel. 1951.
_____. A Fable. Novel. 1954.
_____. The Town. Novel. 1957. (Vol. 2 of the Snopes trilogy).
_____. The Mansion. Novel. 1959. (Vol. 3 of the Snopes trilogy).

William Faulkner was a US southern writer, major modernist novelist and story writer; b. William Harrison Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi; l. Oxford, Lafayette county; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; Pulitzer Prize 1955, 1962; d. Byhalia, Mississipi. He is best known for his complex narrative style involving the memories and mental worlds of characters, and for his portraits of Southern society. Faulkner's South is scarred by the legacies of racism and slavery, with deep-set social divisions as traditional rural communities both decay and endure amid twentieth-century disruptions.

ON FAULKNER'S  NOVEL THE SOUND AND THE FURY.



An introduction to Hemingway and Faulkner  (by Richard Gray)
http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/hemingway-and-faulkner.html




____________________________________

ERNEST HEMINGWAY      (1899-1961)

_____.  In Our Time. Stories. 1925.
_____. The Sun Also Rises. Novel. 1926. (= Fiesta)
_____. Men Without Women. Stories. 1927.
_____. A Farewell to Arms. Novel. 1929.
_____. Death in the Afternoon. Essay. 1932.
_____. Winner Take Nothing. Stories. 1933.
_____. Green Hills of Africa. Novel. 1935.
_____. To Have and Have Not. Novel. 1937.
_____. The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. 1938.
_____. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Novel. 1940.
_____. Men at War. Stories. 1942.
_____. The Old Man and the Sea. Novel. 1952.
_____. The Dangerous Summer. Report. 1960.
_____. A Moveable Feast. Memoir. 1964.
_____. Islands in the Stream. Novel. 1970.
_____. The Garden of Eden. Novel. 1986.
_____. True at First Light. Novel. 1999.



Hemingway was a major US novelist and short story writer; doctor's son, second of six children, b. Oak Park, Illinois; father committed suicide; reporter at Kansas City Star volunteer ambulance driver in Italy 1st WW, wounded and decorated; USA 1919, married and settled in Paris as foreign correspondent 1921, reporter at Greco-Turkish war 1922, "Lost Generation" expatriate with Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; became Catholic, reporter at the Spanish War and anti-Nazi activist during World War II; left-wing sympathies, lived in Key West and Cuba; travelled widely; wrote modernist fiction with aesthetics of impersonality and spare realistic style, journalist, traveller, sportsman, big-game hunter and sporting fisherman; socialite, divorced, several marriages and divorces; alcoholic, suffered severe accidents, Nobel Prize for Literature 1954, seriously ill, electroshock sessions, committed suicide in Ketchum, Idaho.


 


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SECCIÓN B, nivel AVANZADO:

-  Hemingway and others.

- Un audio en français sur Ernest Hemingway: Une vie, une œuvre.

______________

 

 

 


VIRGINIA WOOLF     (1882-1941)


English woman of letters, modernist writer and forerunner of feminist criticism, b. at High Park Gate as Adeline Virginia Stephen, daughter of scholar Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth; lived in Bloomsbury, London, 1904-, nucleus of the "Bloomsbury Group" of intellectuals and artists; contributor to the Times Literary Supplement; married Leonard Woolf 1912; leading modernist novelist and critic; loving "lesbian" friendship with writer Vita Sackville-West; suffered frequent mental disturbances and heard voices; committed suicide by drowning in the river Ouse, Sussex.

_____. The Voyage Out. Novel. 1915.
_____. Night and Day. Novel. 1919.
_____. "The Mark on the Wall." Experimental prose. http://www.online-literature.com/virginia_woolf/855/
_____. Jacob's Room. Novel. 1922.
_____. Mrs. Dalloway. Novel. London: Hogarth, 1925.
_____. The Common Reader.  1925.
_____. To the Lighthouse. Fiction. 1927.
_____. Orlando: A Biography. Novel. 1928.
_____. A Room of One's Own. 1929.
_____. The Waves. Novel. 1931.
_____. The Years. Novel. 1937.
_____. Between the Acts. Experimental novel. 1941.
_____. The Moment and Other Essays. 1948.
_____. A Writer's Diary.
_____. Moments of Being. Memoirs.
_____. The Diary of Virginia Woolf.





 Why should you read Virginia Woolf ?







El grupo de Bloomsbury, círculo modernista bohemio chic de Londres.


"Virginia Woolf: Huerto, jardín y campo de batalla." Conferencia de Laura Freixas,
http://www.march.es/conferencias/anteriores/voz.aspx?id=2961&l=1
  


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 Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: Virginia Woolf

 

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Muchos autores quedan fuera de programa, entre ellos algunos de los más populares actualmente—Stephen King, Agatha Christie.... Como no podemos incluir más autores en el programa, para curiosear sobre estos "fuera de programa" os remito a la Wikipedia, que es excelente sitio para empezar—incluyendo los autores del programa. Aquí Agatha Christie (en la edición inglesa mejor, claro).


En SparkNotes http://www.sparknotes.com  encontráis abundantes materiales didácticos sobre literatura inglesa, introducciones, guías de estudio, etc.

______________________

Un autor norteamericano muy popular de principios del siglo XX  que nos cae fuera del programa es Jack London.  Se estrenó hace poco una película inspirada en una de sus novelas, Martin Eden.

Martin Eden. Dir. Pietro Marcello. Based on Jack London's novel. Italy/France, 2019.*

http://redaragon.elperiodicodearagon.com/ocio/cine/pelicula.asp?id=35560#trailer

         2020

De Jack London es especialmente memorable su relato sobre una pandemia apocalíptica, "The Scarlet Plage". Su interés va más allá de lo meramente literario. Aquí puede leerse algo más sobre Jack London y la epidemiología evolutiva.

 

-  OTROS AUTORES NORTEAMERICANOS 1900-1960

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T. S. Eliot           (1888-1965)  

Thomas Stearns Eliot, US/British poet, critic and dramatist; b. St Louis; Ph.D. Harvard; st. France and Germany, l. London, bank clerk at Lloyd's; married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, expressed disgust with sex in poetry; unhappy marriage, wife with mental problems, separated 1933; married Vivien Eliot 1957; l. London; conservative social critic, influential modernist poet and critic, poetic dramatist; anti-modernist in ideas, "classicist, anglo-Catholic and monarchic"; w. as poetry ed. for Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber; major influence on English-speaking literary world; Order of Merit 1948; Nobel Prize for Literature 1949; d. London.

______.  Prufrock and Other Observations. Poems. 1917.  

_____. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Essay. 1919.

_____. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London, 1920.

_____. "The Metaphysical Poets." Essay. 1921.

http://myhome.naver.com/for_eliot/prose/metaphysical.htm

         2008

_____. The Waste Land. Poem. 1922.

_____. "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Essay. 1923.

_____. Dante. Essay. 1929.

_____. Ash Wednesday. Poem. 1930.

_____. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. 1933.

_____. After Strange Gods. Criticism. New York: Harcourt, 1933.

_____. Murder in the Cathedral. Drama. 1936.

_____. The Family Reunion. Drama. 1939.

_____. Four Quartets. Poems. 1943.

_____. The Cocktail Party. Drama.  1949.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber, 1957.

_____. Selected Essays. New ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960.

_____. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber, 1963. 1974.*

_____. To Criticize the Critic. New York: Farrar, 1965.

_____. Selected Poetry of Thomas Stearns Eliot. In Representative Poetry Online. U of Toronto.

         http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poet111.html

         2005-08-10

 Unas notas sobre T. S. Eliot

 

 
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Sección B: Drama, T. S. Eliot, Modernism: NIVEL AVANZADO



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JAMES JOYCE         (1882-1941)

Expatriate Irish writer, leading modernist, experimental novelist; lived a bohemian life in Trieste and then Paris; famous for his representation of the 'stream of consciousness' of his characters in narrative, and for his complex multilayered wordplay and intertextual allusions. Joyce is the ultimate model for 'difficult' and elitist Modernist literature, initially censored in English-speaking countries on grounds of obscenity.



Joyce, James. Dubliners. Short stories. 1914.
_____. Exiles. Drama.
_____. Stephen Hero. Novel.
_____. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Novel. 1916. (Rewriting of Stephen Hero).
_____ . Ulysses. Experimental novel. Paris, 1922.
_____. Collected Poems. 1937.
_____. Finnegans Wake. Experimental novel. 1939.



- An introduction to James Joyce, from the Norton Anthology.

- Jorge Luis Borges, "Conferencia sobre James Joyce." (audio): https://youtu.be/i_ZTt_JQXRU

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SECCIÓN B,  James Joyce - NIVEL AVANZADO.


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Empezamos la sección B con un premio Nobel irlandés, W. B. Yeats:

W. B. YEATS     (1865-1939)

Anglo-Irish poet; b. Sandymount, Dublin; son of painter J. B. Yeats; lived in London 1874-83; later in Dublin / London / Sligo; associated to the folk Irish revival in late 19th, then Modernist poet and close friend of Ezra Pound; a superstitious believer in occultism and magic, he held anti-bourgeois aristocratic ideals and sympathized with Fascist movements and traditionalism. He was in love with nationalist Maud Gonne, but was rejected by her; he married a "psychic" wife, 'George' Hyde-Lees in 1917; Irish Free State senator allied to the interests of the Protestant landed classes and a friend of Lady Gregory, he promoted with her the Irish National Theatre at the Abbey Theatre and  lived in a tower in her land; Nobel Prize for Literature 1923.


Yeats, W. B. "The Madness of King Goll." Poem. 1884, pub. 1887.
_____. "The Wanderings of Oisin." Poem. 1889.
_____. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Poem. 1890.
_____. "The Sorrow of Love." Poem. 1891.
_____. The Countess Kathleen. Drama. 1892.
_____. Crossways. Poems. 1892.
_____. The Rose. Poems. 1893.
_____. "Who Goes with Fergus?" Poem. 1893.
_____. The Land of Heart's Desire. Drama. 1894.
_____. The Wind among the Reeds. Poems. 1899.
_____. The Shadowy Waters. Dramatic poetry. 1902, 1906.
_____. In the Seven Woods. Poems. 1903.
_____. The Green Helmet and Other Poems. 1910.
_____. Deirdre. Drama. 1906.
_____. Responsibilities. Poems. 1914.
_____. "Easter 1916." Poem. 1916.
_____. "The Second Coming." Poem. 1919
    http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html
_____. The Wild Swans at Coole. Poems. 1919.
_____. "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death." Poem. 1919.
    http://www.thebeckoning.com/poetry/yeats/yeats.html
_____. Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Poems. 1921.
_____. "Leda and the Swan." Poem. 1923.
_____. "Among School Children." Poem. 1926.
_____. "Sailing to Byzantium." Poem. 1926
_____. The Tower. Poems. 1928.
_____. The Winding Stair, and Other Poems. 1933.
_____. A Full Moon in March. Poems. 1935.
_____. "Under Ben Bulben." Poem. 1938.


An introduction to W. B. Yeats, from the Norton Anthology. With links to further criticism. 

Wikipedia is also a good resource for all our writers in section B: W. B. Yeats.




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Sección B, NIVEL AVANZADO: A Yale lecture on Yeats.






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SECCIÓN B:

 

UNIT 6: Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

Comenzamos la sección B con los autores del siglo XX. Recordad que los autores de la sección B no entran como tema de redacción: sí como preguntas cortas, y como comentario/traducción. Son para preparación individual,  con los materiales que iré añadiendo aquí...

... y con el manual que os habéis comprado, sin duda. Aquí está el manual recomendado, el de Alexander:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9a3FSxKl6ZlV0dkUkJSWHR0dEU/view?usp=drivesdk   (Michael Alexander: A History of English Literature)

Y aquí otro de NIVEL MÁS AVANZADO, el de Oxford:

PDF (The Short Oxford History of English Literature)

—oOo—

 

 

 5. Literatura inglesa y norteamericana 1900-1960

E. E. Cummings

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:

E[dward] E[stlin] Cummings (1894-1962), born in Cambridge, Mass., after receiving his A.B. (1915) and M.A. (1916) from Harvard joined the service of the American volunteer Norton Harjes Ambulance Corps in France before the U.S. entered World War I, and in 1917 was confined for several months in a French concentration camp on an unfounded charge of treasonable correspondence. This experience provided the basis for his first book, The Enormous Room (1922), a prose narrative of poetic and personal perception. His first book of poetry, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), followed by & (1925), XLI Poems (1925), and is 5 (1926, substantially augmented in a reprint of 1985), clearly established his individual voice and tone. The poems show his transcendental faith in a world where the self-reliant, joyful, loving individual is beautifully alife but in which mass man, or the man who lives by mind alone, without heart and soul, is dead. The true individual Cummings praised, often reverently and with freshness of spirit and idiom, but the "unman" was satirized as Cummings presented witty, bitter parodies of and attacks on the patriotic and cultural platitudes and shibboleths of the "unworld." This poetry is marked by experimental word coinages, shifting of grammar, blending of established stanzaic forms and free verse, flamboyant punning, typographic distortion, unusual punctuation, and idiosyncratic division of words, all of which became integral to the ideas and rhythms of his relatively brief lyrics. These he continued to write with subtlety of technique and sensitivity of feeling and to publish in ViVa (1931), No Thanks (1935), I/20 (1936), Collected Poems (1938), 50 poems (1940), I x I (1944), Xaipe (1950), Poems: 1923-1954 (1954), 95 Poems (1958), and the posthumously collected 73 Poems (1963). His other works are him (1927), an expressionist drama in verse and prose, with kaleidoscopic scenes dashing from comedy to tragedy; a book which bears no title (1930); Eimi (1933), a travel diary utilizing the techniques of his poetry and violently attacking the regimentation of individuals in the U.S.S.R;  Tom (1935), a satirical ballet based on Uncle Tom's Cabin; CIOPW (1931), drawings and paintings showing his ability in charcoal, ink, oil, pencil, and watercolor; Anthropos, The Future of Art (1944); Santa Claus (1946), a morality play; and i (1954), "six nonlectures" delivered at Harvard.



_____

Eimi, travel narrative by E. E. Cummings of his 36-day visit to the Soviet Union, published in 1933. This long prose work employs the techniques of his poetry and, like it, also celebrates the individual of the title (Greek, "I am"), and with wit and vigor attacks the regimentation of people in the USSR.




_____


E. E. Cummings (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia)


_____


A Leaf

l(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

So many selves

La distopía de Orwell se hace realidad (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

Con el nuevo orden global de la plandemia, la geoestrategia cambiante y el control en red...

Un libro una hora: 1984 de George Orwell

Hemingway, Ernest Miller

(from The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger)

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST [MILLER] (1899-1961), born in Illinois, while attending school made frequent hunting and fishing expeditions in Northern Michigan, which helped condition his later primitivistic attitude. After working as a Kansas City reporter, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in France, then transferred to the Italian infantry until the close of World War I, after which he reported battles in the Near East for the Toronto Star, and settled in Paris as a member of the expatriate group.

Influenced by Ezra Pound and particularly by Gertrude Stein, wholse style strongly affected him, he published Three Stories & Ten Poems (Paris, 1923) and *In Our Time (U.S. 1925). These early stories already exhibited the attitude of mind and technique for which he later became famous. As the leading spokesman for the "lost generation" he expressed the feelings of a war-wounded people disillusioned by the loss of faith and hope, and so thoroughly defeated by the collapse of former values that, their atrophied nerves not permitting them to attack their betrayers, they could turn only to a stoic acceptance of primal emotions. The stories are mainly concerned with "tough" people, either intelligent men and women who have dropped into an exhausted cynicism, or such primitives as frontiersmen, Indians, and professional athletes, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. Emotion is held at arm's length; only the bare happenings are recorded, and emphasis is obtained by understatement and spare dialogue.

After Hemingway returned to New York and wrote the lesser satirical novel The Torrents of Spring (1926), he carried the style and attitude of his short stories into the novel *The Sun Also Rises (1926), which tells of the moral collapse of a group of expatriated Americans and Englishmen, broken by the war, who turn toward escape through all possible violent diversions. Success in fictional craftsmanship and in portraying the mind of an era was again achieved in *A Farewell to Arms (1929), the poignant love story of an English nurse and an American ambulance lieutenant during the war. Besides further distinguished collections of short stories, *Men Without Women (1927) and *Winner Take Nothing (1933), he wrote only two lesser books during the next few years, although his work continued to exercise a great influence on the literature of the period. *Death in the Afternoon (1932), a book on bullfighting, and Green Hills of Africa (1935), an account of big-game hunting with digressions on literary matters, show a further cultivation of the primitive and brutal levels, contrasted with the hollow culture that had cheated his generation.

In *To Have and Have Not (1937). Hemingway for the first time showed an interest in a possible solution of social problems though collective action. This attitude continued in newspaper articles from Spain about its civil war, whose espionage was the subject of his realistic play, The Fifth Column, adapted for the stage (1940) by Benjamin Glazer, and printed in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938), in which appeared two of his finest stories, *"The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and *"The Snows of Kilimanjaro". *For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), his longest novel, on an incident in the Spanish Civil War, has universality in its thesis that the loss of liberty in one place means a loss everywhere. He edited an anthology, Men at War (1942), but issued no new novel until Across the River and into the Trees (1950), which was considered to show that Hemingway had become bitter and defeatist like his tale's protagonist, and aging colonel. With *The Old Man and the Sea (1952), a parable of man against nature in a poignant novelette, he recaptured his critical acclaim, recognized in a Nobel Prize (1954).

In his last years he published nothing, and he had been seriously ill for some time before his death as a suicide by gunshot. However, several posthumous works followed, most notably *A Moveable Feast (1964), sketches of his life and acquaintances in Paris, 1921-1926, and Islands in the Stream, (1970), a novel in three parts about a painter's unhappy marriage, his affection for his sons, their deaths, his bravery in war, his pleasure in deep-sea fishing, and his loneliness. Another novel, written in the 1940s, edited and published in 1986, The Garden of Eden, begins with the honeymoon of an enticing young couple, David and Catherine Bourne, he a good wirter, she an heiress, who break up over serious sexual differences. Later compilations include The Wild Years (1962), his journalism for the Toronto Star; By-Lines (1967), selected journalism of four decades; The Nick Adams Stories (1972), eight of them previously unpublished; and three collections of verse, the last and most inclusive being 88 Poems (1979). Selected Letters was issued in 1981.



In Our Time, 15 short stories by *Hemingway with vignettes serving as interchapters, published in the U.S. in 1925. In Our Time (Paris, 1924) contains only the vignettes. Most stories treat life in the Middle West, but the interpolated sketches describe war in Europe and bullfights.

"Indian Camp," "The Doctor and the Doctor's Wife," "The Three Day Blow," and others tell of the boyhood experiences of Nick, the author's counterpart, who grew up in the Great Lakes region, learning the bitter as well as the beautiful facts of existence through the work of his father, a physician, and through his association with Indian guides and their families. Such stories as "Mr. and Mrs. Elliot," "Out of Season," and "Cross Country Snow" are brief, poignant tales of American expatriates in Europe and their complex loves and friendships. "My Old Man" is the story of a boy's loyalty to his father, an American jockey forced to work in Europe because of unsportsmanlike conduct at home, and of the boy's disillusion following his father's death. The author's enthusiasm for sport and the American wilderness is shown in "Big Two-Hearted River," an account of a trout-fishing expedition.


The Sun Also Rises, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1926. The title is derived from a pessimistic passage in Ecclesiastes, expressing a cynical disillusion in keeping with the postwar attitude. The English title of the work is Fiesta.

Lady Brett Ashley, "as charming when she is drunk as when she is sober," is traveling on the continent, waiting for a divorce in order to marry Michael Campbell. Among her other satellites are Jake Barnes, an American newspaper correspondent; his friend Bill Gorton; Robert Cohn, an American Jewish novelist; and an eccentric Greek count. Cohn is weary of his mistress, Frances Clyne, and falls in love with Brett, although neither she nor his other acquaintances feel any real affection for him. The group leave Paris for an excursion in Spain, where they visit the fiesta at Pamplona. They are enthusiastic fans of the bullfights, finding in the ritualistic spectacle a mysterious beauty of precision. Brett and Jake are in love, but unhappily, because a wartime injury has emasculated him. She falls in love with a young bullfighter, Pedro Romero, with whom she elopes; and Cohn departs, expressing his anger by beating Jake, Michael, and Romero. When Romero wants to marry her, Brett decides to return to Michael, who is one of her own kind. She tells Jake, "We could have had such a damned good time together," and he concludes, "Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?"




A Farewell to Arms, novel by Hemingway, published in 1929, and dramatized by Laurence Stallings (1930).

Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant in the Italian ambulance service during World War I, falls in love with an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. She returns his feeling, and when Henry, wounded during a bombardment, is sent to a hospital at Milan, Catherine comes to nurse him. They spend a happy summer together while he recuperates, and in the autumn Catherine confesses that she is pregnant, but will not marry him, fearing to be sent back to England. Henry returns to his post, finds his comrade Rinaldi depressed by the monotonous horrors of the war, and shares the suffering during the disastrous retreat from Caporetto. He deserts, learns that Catherine has been transferred to Stresa, and joins her there. Although he is in civilian clothes, he is suspected, and forced to flee with Catherine to Switzerland. They go to Lausanne for the birth of their child, but both mother and baby die, leaving Henry desolate and alone in a strange land.


Men without Women, 14 short stories by *Hemingway, published in 1927.

"The Undefeated" tells of the futile heroism of Manuel Garcia, a Spanish bullfighter just released from a hospital, who stubbornly refuses to retire, secures an ill-paid "nocturnal" engagement, and gives an adequate performance before an appreciative audience, but is seriously injured and returned to the hospital. "The Killers" describes the tense atmosphere in a small-town lunchroom, when two Chicago gangsters enter to await Ole Andreson, whom they have been paid to murder. He fails to arrive, and they finally leave. Nick, the waiter, goes to Andreson's room, and finds the victim aware of his impending doom but paralyzed by fear and unwilling to attempt escape. "Fifty Grand" is the story of a champion prizefighter, Jack Brennan, and his bout with the contender Walcott. The midde-aged champion, worried by his responsibilities, cannot train properly, decides that he is bound to lose, and bets $50,000 on his own defeat. He fights well for several rounds, until brutally fouled by his opponent. Insisting that this was an accident, he continues with difficulty, then suddenly ends the matter by an obvious foul on Walcott. "'It's funny how fast you can think when it means that much money'", he says.


Winner Take Nothing, 14 stoires by *Hemingway, published in 1933.

"The Light of the World," set in a small town in the Middle West, has for its chief character a fat, blonde prostitute, who recalls nostalgically the prizefighter who furnished the one rudimentary romantic episode of her life. *"A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" portrays the desolate lives of a writer and a customer of a Spanish café. 

At a sidewalk table of a Spanish café an old, deaf man sits drinking brandy late at night as the two waiters discuss him, the older one with sympathy because he too is lonely, fearful, confident of nothing, and also in need of the security of a clean, well-lighted place.

"The Sea-Change" tells of the tragic separation of a young couple, when the girl drifts into a homosexual relation with another woman. "A Way You'll Never Be" describes the hysterical reaction of a young American officer in the Italian army, when he is relieved from active duty and thus has time to become aware of the significance of the war. "Homage to Switzerland" contains three vignettes of fatuous middle-class American tourists in Europe. "A Natural History of the Dead" is a bitter satire on the results of modern warfare. "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" is concerned with two hospital patients, a Mexican gambler and an author, and the way in which the writer cynically plays upon the phrase "the opium of the people."


Death in the Afternoon, discursive work by *Hemingway, published in 1932. In it he describes the rearing and fighting of bulls in Spain, and depicts the bullfight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy, in which the death of the bull is inevitable but must be achieved by the observance of ritual, which gives the animal a maximum chance to destroy the matador. The discussion includes lengthy digressions, in the form of conversations between the author and an old lady, presenting his philosophy through the discussion of various aspects of life and death.


To Have and Have Not, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1937.

Harry Morgan, a tough "conch," as natives of Key West, Fla., call themselves, has devoted his life to the single-minded effort of keeping himself, his wife, and his children on the upper fringe of the "have-nots." He hires out his powerboat to wealthy men for fishing trips, but, when the Depression destroys this source of income and a rich tourist welshes on payment for lost fishing tackle, he is obliged to turn to illegal activities. He contracts to smuggle Chinese from Cuba into the U.S., but, taking their money, murders their leader and abandons the others. While smuggling illegal liquor, he is captured in a gun battle by federal officers, loses an arm, and has his boat confiscated. In a last desperate attempt to obtain money, he aids in the escape of four bank robbers, although realizing that unless he kills them they will kill him. This he does, but they wound him fatally. Picked up by the Coast Guard and accused of being a member of the gang, he stammers, "'A man . . . ain't got no hasn't got any can't really isn't any way out . . . One man alone ain't got . . . no chance.' He shut his eyes. It had taken him a long time to get it out and it had taken him all his life to learn it."

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, short story by Ernest *Hemingway, published in Cosmopolitan (Sept. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

An American couple on a safari in Kenya, the Macombers have long given the impression of a glamorous and comparatively happy marriage, although the basis for their union is that "Margot was too beautiful for Macomber to divorce her and Macomber had too much money for Margot ever to leave him." The marriage comes to a new straining point when in cowardice he runs from a wounded lion that he has shot badly, and she, in disgust, gives herself that night to the professional hunter and guide, the sturdy Englishman Robert Wilson. The next day, in a surge of excitement, Macomber discovers self-confidence and happiness as he shoots three wild buffalo, but Margot is suddenly made insecure as she sees him at last as a man who will dominate their marriage. Forced to go into the hiding place of one of the animals he has only wounded to administer the coup de grâce, Macomber seems about to be gored by the buffalo when from the car Mrs. Macomber shoots at the beast and kills her husband instead, after which Wilson says wryly, "Of course it's an accident. I know that."


The Snows of Kilimanjaro, story by *Hemingway, published in Esquire (Aug. 1936) and collected in The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938).

Dying with "a great tiredness and anger" of blood poisoning from his gangrenous leg, the novelist Harry lies in camp on his African safari, accopmapnied by his wife and native attendants, waiting for a rescue plane that he knows will arrive too late, and remembers experiences that were to have served as subjects of stories when he knew enough to write them well. But he realizes too that he has destroyed his talent by sloth, by enjoyments such as the marriage with his rich wife could bring, and that he hates himself as he vents his cruelty on her. As he knows he will die that night, he tries to write, but vividly he feels and sees and smells death as he drops off, dreaming that the plane has come and taken him not to a hospital but to the very top of Kilimanjaro, said to be the highest mountain in Africa, where, according to the story's epigraph, close to the summit that is called the House of God "there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude."

For Whom the Bell Tolls, novel by *Hemingway, published in 1940. The title is derived from a sermon by Donne: "No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent . . . And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." 

Robert Jordan, an American, has entered the Loyalist army during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and has been sent to join a guerrilla band in the mountains near Segovia to blow up a strategic bridge at the exact minute that will help a Loyalist advance. During the three days and nights that he spends in the guerrilla's cave, he awaits with a romantic opposition to heroism what he suspects will be his own destruction and that of his companions. He falls in love with Maria, daughter of a Republican mayor, who has seen her parents killed and was herself raped by Falangists. Her close-cropped hair is a symbol of her tortures; Jordan helps her to regain her desire to live. Their passioinate love is abetted by the powerful woman Pilar, who dominates the group by her force of character, gusto, and love of the Republic. Her man Pablo is wily but lacks belief and hence courage. The others include foul-mouthed Agustín; pedantic, dignified Fernando; the gypsy Rafael; and the adoring Andrés. A sense of impending disaster develops, with smolering opposition within the group, a Falangist attack on the guerrilla leader El Sordo on a neighboring hill, acts of cowardice by Pablo, and a mission by Andrés to Loyalist headquarters to carry a note from Jordan saying the advance is likely to fail, with the messenger impeded by the Communists' bureaucracy and suspicion. The generals finally realize they should have cancelled the attack, but it is too late. Leaving the retreat, Jordan successfully blasts the bridge. In the attempt to flee he is wounded, and forces the others to leave hism. He lies on the hillside almost delirious, restraining himself from suicide so that he may shoot the leader of the Fascists, and thinks, "I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. . . ."




The Old Man and the Sea, novelette by *Hemingway, published in 1952.

This parable of man's struggle with the natural world, of his noble courage and endurance, tells of the Cuban fisherman Santiago, who for 84 luckless days has rowed his skiff into the Gulf Stream in quest of marlin. At first accompanied by the boy Manolin, with whom he talked of better days and about the great sport of baseball, he is now alone. Aged and solitary, he goes far out and hooks a great fish that tows his boat all afternoon and night and into the next day as he pits his skill and waning strength against it the way he once did as a wrestler called "El Campeón." As the second night turns to dawn he finally harpoons his catch, lashes it to his small boat, and makes his weary way home. As he sails down to port sharks attack his catch and he fights them as best he can with a knife lashed to the tiller gripped in raw hands. Whan he makes land his marlin is but a skeleton. Proud in defeat, Santiago furls his sail and staggers to his shack to be found by the boy and other fishermen, who marvel at his catch, while the spent man sleeps and dreams of past experience.


A Moveable Feast, memoir by *Hemingway of his life in Paris (1921-26), published in 1964. In brief sketches the work summons up the sense of what Paris meant to him as a writer beginning a career and to other expatriate Americans. It tells how Gertrude Stein came to employ the term "lost generation" and of his friendship and falling out with her, of Pound, Fitzgerald, and other associates.

The Age of Chaucer

 From A Short History of English Literature, 2nd ed., by Robert Barnard (Blackwell, 1994).

 

1. THE AGE OF CHAUCER

England in the mid-fourteenth century, the England in which Chaucer, Langland and the author of Gawain grew up, was to all appearances a country cresting a wave of success. In Edward III it had a glamorous, efficient king, and one who appreciated the value of the outward show of monarchy—pageantry, honours, patronage. His court was a centre of culture and chivalry renowned over Europe. With the French monarchy relatively weak, England was losing its status as a dim little off-shore island and attaining the rank of European power. Its seamen were forging links  all over Europe an North Africa; its merchants were prospering, forming the beginnings of a solid middle-class. It was a confident, exuberant age. The king had just founded the greatest order of English chivalry, the Order of the Garter, basing it on a celebrated act of chivalry performed by the king towards the Countess of Salisbury. 

The reality was rather different—just as the reality behind the garter incident was rather different (according to one account the Countess was wife of the king's best friend, and he raped her). The Black Death of 1348, and subsequent plagues only slightly less terrible, had undermined the whole basis of feudal society, and the Peasant's revolt of 1381 and the civil wars of the next century were evidence of the decline and ultimate collapse of the traditional medieval class structure. Edward's French wars in pursuit of a dubious claim to the French crown over-stretched English resources and proved a chimera which was to delude English kings and impoverish their country for a century. Edward's England, then, was a glorious structure built on dangerously flimsy foundations—a thriving, exciting, fluid age, which finds brilliant expression in the work of its greatest poet. 

Geoffrey Chaucer (?1340-1400) is the first English writer whom we today can read with anything like ease and he is one who sepaks with particular directness to the modern reader. He was a servant of the court and on occasion its emissary abroad, yet he was born into the middle class which was then so rapidly consolidating its position. Thus his contacts ranged from the highest to the lowest in this changing, threatened, feudal society, and with his extraordinary appetite for all manifestations of human aspiration and human folly he was abrle to capture the essence of fourteenth-century life in a way no contemporary in Britain or on the Continent, could rival.

The plan of Chaucer's last and greatest work, The Canterbury Tales, was not original: to gather together a heterogenous collection of people and have them tell a series of stories—moral stories, romantic stories, bawdy stories, fables. It is Chaucer's genius for characterization and his feeling for social relationships, for the personal, moral and class tensions between people, that give his work a warmth and depth that other similar medieval collections lack. The people on his pilgrimage are described in the masterly 'General Prologue.' they frequently sepak for themseves in the prologues to the 'Tales,' they reveal—often unconsciously—further aspects of their natures in their choice of tale and manner of telling it, and in the conversations, disputes and fights that occur between the tales we get a further sense of medieval humanity at its most unzipped and outrageous.

The pictures of the pilgrims in the 'General Prologue' are little masterpieces of characterization in which what seems at first sight to be a mere accumulation of detail, often quite haphazard, turns out on closer reading to be full of sly innuendo and subtle juxtapositions. If the Prioress wears a brooch with the inscription Amor Vincit Omnia (Love Conquers All), is it love of God or of man that is referred to? What exactly does it mean when we are told that the Shipman, if he took prisoners by sea, 'by water he sent them home to every land'? (It means he threw them into the water to drown). What precisely does Chaucer mean to imply when he says that the Wife of Bath (for whom the pilgrimage was a combination of package tour and husband-hunt) was very good at 'wandering by the way'? Two lines, placed together, will illuminate a character and his profession. The excellence of the Cook's creamed chicken is placed next to a description of the foul ulcer on his shin; the description of the worldly monk as a fine prelate comes next to a description of his gourmet taste in food; in the portrait of the Wife of Bath we get this: 

She was a worthy woman all her live:

Husbands at chruche door she hadde five...

Sometimes these characters speak with a naturalness or an intensity that like a trumpet brings down the walls of the centuries between us and them. 'Alas, alas, that ever love was sin!' cries the Wife of Bath—who apart from the five husbands has enjoyed 'other company in youth',' so she clearly hasn't been unduly inhibited. 'Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!' ('Let Saint Augustine do his own bl— work!' expostulates the Monk, when he is reminded that the founder of his religious order included hard work among the daily tasks of the monks. 

In the tales these people tell, too, we have a wonderful picture of all sides of medieval life, but there is also that tang of modernity that makes our heart stop as we relize our kinship with them. The Pardoner tells his story of the riotous group of young men who decide to seek out and kill Death—and we recognize the teenage rowdies in our own streets. The Nun's Priest tells an animal fable about a about a chicken run—about Chauntecleer who with his six wives, his parade of learning, and his overwhelming conceit is the perfect male chauvinist cock—and even in these days we recognize pale shadows of his type. The bawdy tales of the Miller and the Reeve are funny today precisely because of the swift, economical, humane delineation of characters we can recognize: the story of someone getting branded on the bare behind may be funny on first reading, but it is only funny on second reading if you are interested in the man behind the behind.

Every sort of story is here, and every technique of story-telling in its most modern form. The Wife of Bath's Prologue (longer and better than her actual Tale) tells in shameless detail how she gained mastery over one after another of her husbands, and one gropes towards Joyce's Molly Bloom for comparisons; the Reeve's Tale tells a story of complicated changings of bed-partners which reminds us of nothing so much as a modern French farce. At one point in the Nun's Priest's Tale Chauntecleer, who has dreamed he has been seized by a fox, launches into an enormously long disquisition on the theory of dreams, their meaning in history and literature, intended to put down his silly wives who have pooh-poohed the prophetic significance of his dream. so long and rambling is it that we are about to say how medieval and dated this all is when suddenly Chauntecleer end his lecture and is so puffed up with his learning and his debating victory over his wives that he forgets the point of the whole thing, jumps down into the hen-run—and is seized by a fox. The long disquisition has been an example of Chaucer's mastery of one of the gifts of a great story-teller—that of timing.

The Canterbury Tales were unfinished at Chaucer's death. The greatest long poem he completed was the slightly earlier Troilus and Criseyde, a superb re-working of one of the most popular medieval accretions to the legends of Troy. The framework is superficially a courtly love stroy—of how prince Troilus courts the lovely widow Criseyde, how she is ent to join her father in the Grecian camp, and is there unfaithful to him. But Chaucer's treatment of this simple story is wholly modern in tone, particularly in its treatment of the central characters. Criseyde is the first depiction in depth of a woman in our literature, and still one of the finest. She is a widow, contentedin her solitude and independence: 

I am myn owne woman, wll at ease...

Shal noon housbonde seyn to me 'checkmate!'

For whither they ben full of jealousye,

Or masterful, or loven noveltye.    (novelty)

Chaucer's sympathy with Criseyde shows itself in the way he meticulously dtails the considerations that drive her into Troilus's arms: since her father's defection to the Greeks she is alone in a hostile city; flattered by the attentions of a Prince, she feels the stars are ordaining that she fall to him; she is pestered by her cousin Pandarus, who acts as pimp for his friend Troilus. From being the prototype of the faithless woman, as she is in much of medieval literature, Chaucer transforms Criseyde into the tragic symbol of war's efffects on human relationships and fates.

The unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, writing at around the same time as Chaucer, seems at first sight more remote from the present-day reader: his alliterative verse-form was old-fashioned even in his own day; his dialect, that of North-West England, is much more difficult for us; and his subject-matter does not immediately call on us to claim kinship with medieval man, as Chaucer's does in his best tales. Sir Gawain is a story of King Arthur's knights, but the courtly romance is married to archetypal folk myths and to religion: the knights are challenged at Christmas by a green knight—who is beheaded, yet speaks on and issues a challenge for the succeeding Christmas. But there is in fact nothing primitive in this stroy-teller's art: behind the odd mixture of the courtly, the Christian and the mythic is a delicate morality about man's duty—as knight, as lover, as Christian. By involving Sir Gawain in a supernatural challenge the author nullifies mny of his attributes as a perfect knight; and when he has him sexually tempted by his host's wife he involves him in delicate questions of conscience concerning his duty as knight and his duty to his host—questions that can be resolved only by marrying courtly and Christian codes. Through both these plot elements he succeeded in relating the idealized world of Arthur with the real world he knew. If Gawain demands more of us, as readers, than Chaucer does, we are ultimately convinced we are in the presence of as great an artist. This feeling is augmented by the other poems probably by him bound into the same single surviving manuscript—particularly Pearl, a lament for the loss of his daughter that goes some way towards negativing Barbara Tuchman's judgment that medieval man was uninterested in children, and that 'emotion in relation to them rarely appears in art or literature'.

The other major work of the age of Chaucer, The Vision of Piers Plowman, is also written in the alliterative verse style of Gawain, but it displays a very different kind of mind. Its author—William Langland—is a name to us only, but he is usually conjectured to be a rural priest, and one agonized by the social abuses of his time. Using the framework of a dream—a favourite medieval device—the poem covers a wide spectrum from social satire to religious allegory, as the author puts foward his notion of what a truly Christian community would be, and how sadly far the England he knows falls short of it. His hatred of pride, greed and ostentation, his almost 'nonconformist' conscience, ally him with later writers in the puritan tradition such as the Milton of Lycidas and John Bunyan. And like Bunyan he retained his popularity with ordinary readers long after his own time—at least until the Elizabethan age. 

After his inexplicably rich harvest of literary genius in the fifteeenth century is a sad, barren period. The splendour of Edward's court gave way to popular discontent, factional strife and the desolating futility of the Wars of the Roses, with two factions of noble thugs disputing a crown that increasingly seemed not worth the winning. In England, in spite of the establishment of Caxton's printing press, literary activity was at its lowest ebb—at best imitative, uncertain of aim, fleeing from the disagreable present into nostalgia. Even Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur—a collection and retelling of the early French and English legends of King Arthur—while a superb example of the potential of English prose, nevertheless at times seems enervated and lacking in conviction, as if the knightly ideal the author was celebrating seemed even to himself remote and impossible in a country torn apart by its own nobility.

The richest poetic harvest was late in the century in Scotland. This kingdom, enjoying unusual stability under a succession of talented Stuart kings, produced several poets of consequence, notably Robert Henryson (?1430-?1506) and William Dunbar (?1460-1513). Henryson's Testament of Cresseid is a sort of sequel to Chaucer's poem in which the faithless Cressid contracts leprosy. Its dialect (and perhaps its subject) will always prevent its enjoying the wide popularity of Chaucer's poem, yet it can be mentioned in the same breath without bathos, which is more than can be said of most fifteenth-century poems inspired by Chaucer. And Dunbar's famous 'Lament for the Makaris' (or poets), with its haunting, disturbing refrain Timor mortis conturbat me (I am troubled by the fear of death) may be taken as a requiem for a sad, confused, barren century:

The state of man does change and vary

Now sound, now sick, now blyth, now sary     (sorry)

Now dansand merry, now like to die;

        Timor mortis conturbat me...

He takis the knichtis in to field 

Enarmit under helm and shield, 

Victor he is at all mellie         (battles)

        Timor mortis conturbat me.

 

 

Piers Plowman (In Our Time)

 

—oOo—

 

 

(...)