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The Letters of Robert Frost
by Robert FrostOne of the acknowledged giants of twentieth-century American literature, Robert Frost was a public figure much celebrated in his day. Although his poetry reached a wide audience, the private Frost--pensive, mercurial, and often very funny--remains less appreciated. Following upon the publication of Frost's notebooks and collected prose, "The Letters of Robert Frost" is the first major edition of the poet's written correspondence. The hundreds of previously unpublished letters in these annotated volumes deepen our understanding and appreciation of this most complex and subtle of verbal artists. Volume One traverses the years of Frost's earliest poems to the acclaimed collections "North of Boston "and "Mountain Interval "that cemented his reputation as one of the leading lights of his era. The drama of his personal life--as well as the growth of the audacious mind that produced his poetry--unfolds before us in Frost's day-to-day missives. These rhetorical performances are at once revealing and tantalizingly evasive about relationships with family and close friends, including the poet Edward Thomas. We listen in as Frost defines himself against contemporaries Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats, and we witness the evolution of his thoughts about prosody, sound, style, and other aspects of poetic craft. In its literary interest and sheer display of personality, Frost's correspondence is on a par with the letters of Emily Dickinson, Robert Lowell, and Samuel Beckett. "The Letters of Robert Frost" holds hours of pleasurable reading for lovers of Frost and modern American poetry.
The Letters of Sara Hutchinson
by Kathleen Coburn Sara HutchinsonSarah Hutchinson has never been much more than a name, though a name connected with some of the greatest in English literature. The sister of Mrs. Wordsworth, and a member of the Wordsworth household for thirty years, Coleridge's beloved Asra to whom many of his poems were written, Southey's friend and Lamb's, and a guest of the Arnolds at Rugby, she was a member of an interesting circle. For her intimate relations to Wordsworth and Coleridge it has long been apparent that we should like to know her better. Now her letters to members of her family and to friends demonstrate how worthwhile it is to know her for herself as well.<P><P>The letters come from the family and from the Wordsworth collection at Dove Cottage and are here printed (almost in full) for the first time.<P>They show a lively and amusing woman, kind, forthright to the extent of bluntness, especially when she takes up the cudgels in the cause of what she considers truth or justice or human kindness. Coleridge describes her in one apt and characteristic sentence: <P>'If Sense, Sensibility, Sweetness of Temper, perfect simplicity and unpretending Nature, joined to shrewdness and entertainingness make a valuable Woman, Sara Hutchinson is so.'<P>Such qualities certainly make a delightful letter-writer.
The Letters of Thom Gunn
by Thom GunnThe Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. "I write about love, I write about friendship," remarked Thom Gunn: "I find that they are absolutely intertwined." These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and shed new light on "one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century" (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement).The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn's work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume I, 1809–1836
by William Cullen BryantThis is the only collection ever made of Bryant's letters, two-thirds of which have never before been printed. Their publication was foreseen by the late Allan Nevin as "one of the most important and stimulating enterprises contributory to the enrichment of the nation's cultural and political life that is now within range of individual and group effort.William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) was America's earliest national poet. His immediate followers—Longfellow, Poe, and Whitman—unquestionably began their distinguished careers in imitation of his verses. But Bryant was even more influential in his long career as a political journalist, and in his encouragement of American art, from his lectures at the National Academy of Design in 1828 to his evocation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1870. Between the appearance of his first major poem, "Thanatopsis," in 1817, and his death sixty-one years later at the age of eight-three, Bryant knew and corresponded with an extraordinary number of eminent men and women. More than 2,100 of his know letters have already been recovered for the present edition.When William Cullen Bryant signed the first of 314 letters in the present volume, in 1809, he was a frail and shy farm boy of fourteen who had nonetheless already won some fame as the satirist of Thomas Jefferson. When he wrote the last, in 1836, he had become the chief poet of his country, the editor of its principal liberal newspaper, and the friend and collaborator of its leading artists and writers. His collected poems, previously published at New York, Boston, and London, were going into their third edition. His incisive editorials in the New York Evening Post were affecting the decisions of Andrew Jackson's administration. His poetic themes were beginning to find expression in the landscape paintings of Robert Weir, Asher Durand, and Thomas Cole.The early letters gathered here in chronological order give a unique picture of Cullen Bryant's youth and young manhood: his discipline in the classics preparatory to an all-too-brief college tenure; his legal study and subsequent law practice; the experiments with romantic versification which culminated in his poetic masterpieces, and those with the opposite sex which led to his courtship and marriage; his eager interest in the politics of the Madison and Monroe Presidencies, and his subsequent activities as a local politician and polemicist in western Massachusetts; his apprenticeship as magazine editor and literary critic in New York City, from which his later eminence as journalist was the natural evolution; the lectures on poetry and mythology which foreshadowed a long career as occasional orator; the collaboration in writing The Talisman, The American Landscape, and Tales of Glauber-Spa, and in forming the National Academy of Design, and the Sketch Club, which brought him intimacy with writers, artists, and publishers; his first trip to the Aemrican West, and his first long visit to Europe, during which he began the practice of writing letters to his newspaper which, throughout nearly half a century, proved him a perceptive interpreter of the distant scene to his contemporaries.Here, in essence, is the first volume of the autobiography of one whom Abraham Lincoln remarked after his first visit to New York City in 1860, "It was worth the journey to the East merely to see such a man." And John Bigelow, who of Bryant's many eulogists knew him best, said in 1878 of his longtime friend and business partner, "There was no eminent American upon whom the judgment of his countrymen would be more immediate and unanimous. The broad simple outline of his character and career had become universally familiar, like a mountain or a sea."
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume II, 1836–1849
by William Cullen BryantThe second volume of William Cullen Bryant's letters opens in 1836 as he has just returned to New York from an extended visit to Europe to resume charge of the New York Evening Post, brought near to failure during his absence by his partner William Leggett's mismanagement. At the period's close, Bryant has found in John Bigelow an able editorial associate and astute partner, with whose help he has brought the paper close to its greatest financial prosperity and to national political and cultural influence.Bryant's letters lf the years between show the versatility of his concern with the crucial political, social, artistic, and literary movements of his time, and the varied friendships he enjoyed despite his preoccupation with a controversial daily paper, and with the sustenance of a poetic reputation yet unequaled among Americans. As president of the New York Homeopathic Society, in letters and editorials urging widespread public parks, and in his presidency of the New York Society for the Abolition of the Punishment of Death, he gave attention to public health, recreation, and order. He urged the rights of labor, foreign and religious minorities, and free African Americans; his most powerful political effort of the period was in opposition to the spread of slavery through the conquest of Mexico. An early commitment to free trade in material goods was maintained in letters and editorials, and to that in ideas by his presidency of the American Copyright Club and his support of the efforts of Charles Dickens and Harriet Martineau to secure from the United States Congress and international copyright agreement.Bryant's first visit to Great Britain came at the height of his poetic and journalistic fame in 1845, bringing him into cordial intimacy with members of Parliament, scientists, journalists, artists, and writers. In detailed letters to his wife, published here for the first time, he describes the pleasures he took in breakfasting with the literary patron Samuel Rogers and the American minister Edward Everett, boating on the Thames with artists and with diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, spending an evening in the home of Leigh Hunt, and calling on the Wordsworths at Rydal Mount as well as in the distinctions paid him at a rally of the Anti-Corn-Law League in Covent Garden Theatre, and at the annual meeting in Cambridge of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.Equally fresh are most of the letters to prominent Americans, many of them his close friends, such as the two Danas, Bancroft, Cole, Cooper, Dewey, Dix, Downing, Durand, Forrest, Greenough, Irving, Longfellow, Simms, Tilden, Van Buren, and Weir. His letters to the Evening Post recounting his observations and experiences during travels abroad and in the South, West, and Northeast of the United States, which were copied widely in other newspapers and praised highly by many of their subscribers, are here made available to the present-day reader.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume III, 1849–1857
by William Cullen BryantDuring the years covered in this volume, Bryant traveled more often and widely than at any comparable period during his life. The visits to Great Britain and Europe, a tour of the Near East and the Holy Land, and excursions in Cuba, Spain, and North Africa, as well as two trips to Illinois, he described in frequent letters to the Evening Post. Reprinted widely, and later published in two volumes, these met much critical acclaim, one notice praising the "quiet charm of these letters, written mostly from out-of-the-way places, giving charming pictures of nature and people, with the most delicate choice of words, and yet in the perfect simplicity of the true epistolary style."His absence during nearly one-fifth of this nine-year period reflected the growing prosperity of Bryant's newspaper, and his confidence in his editorial partner John Bigelow and correspondents such as William S. Thayer, as well as in the financial acumen of his business partner Isaac Henderson. These were crucial years in domestic politics, however, and Bryant's guidance of Evening Post policies was evident in editorials treating major issues such as the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the rise of the Republican Party, and the Dred Scott Decision, as well as in his correspondence with such statesmen as Salmon P. Chase, Hamilton Fish, William L. Marcy, Edwin D. Morgan, and Charles Sumner. His travel letters and journalistic writings reflected as well his acute interest in a Europe in turmoil. In France and Germany he saw the struggles between revolution and repression; in Spain he talked with journalists, parliamentary leaders, and the future president of the first Spanish republic; in New York he greeted Louis Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi.Bryant's close association with the arts continued. He sat for portraits to a dozen painters, among them Henry P. Gray, Daniel Huntington, Asher Durand, Charles L. Elliott, and Samuel Laurence. The landscapists continued to be inspired by his poetic themes. Sculptor Horatio Greenough asked of Bryant a critical reading of his pioneering essays on functionalism. His old friend, the tragedian Edwin Forrest, sought his mediation in what would become the most sensational divorce case of the century, with Bryant and his family as witnesses. His long advocacy of a great central park in New York was consummated by the legislature. And in 1852, his eulogy on the life of James Fenimore Cooper became the first of several such orations which would establish him as the memorialist of his literary contemporaries in New York.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume IV, 1858–1864
by William Cullen BryantThe years just before and during the Civil War marked the high point of Bryant's influence on public affairs, which had grown steadily since the Evening Post had upheld the democratic Jacksonian revolution of the 1830s. A founder of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and the Republican Party in 1856, Bryant was lauded in 1857 by Virginia anti-slavery leader John Curtis Underwood, who wrote to Eli Thayer, "What a glory it would be to our country if it could elect this man to the Presidency-the country not he would be honored & elevated by such an event."In 1860 Bryant helped secure the Presidential nomination for Abraham Lincoln, and was instrumental in the choice of two key members of his cabinet, Salmon Chase as Secretary of the Treasury, and Gideon Welles as Secretary of the Navy. During disheartening delays and defeats in the early war years, direct communications from Union field commanders empowered his editorial admonitions to such a degree that the conductor of a national magazine concluded that the Evening Post's "clear and able political leaders have been of more service to the government of this war than some of its armies."Bryant's correspondence with statesmen further reflects the immediacy of his concern with military and political decisions. There are thirty-five known letters to Lincoln, and thirty-two to Chase, Welles, war secretary Stanton, and Senators Fessenden, Morgan, and Sumner.This seven-year passage in Bryant's life, beginning with his wife's critical illness at Naples in 1858, concludes with a unique testimonial for his seventieth birthday in November 1864. The country's leading artists and writers entertained him at a "Festival" in New York's Century Club, giving him a portfolio of pictures by forty-six painters as a token of the "sympathy" he had "ever manifested toward the Artists," and the "high rank" he had "ever accorded to art." Poets Emerson, Holmes, Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier saluted him in prose and verse. Emerson saw him as "a true painter of the face of this country"; Holmes, as the "first sweet singer in the cage of our close-woven life." To Whittier, his personal and public life sounded "his noblest strain." And in the darkest hours of the war, said Lowell, he had "remanned ourselves in his own manhood's store," had become "himself our bravest crown."
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume V, 1865–1871
by William Cullen BryantOn April 26, 1865, as Abraham Lincoln's funeral cortege paused in Union Square, New York, before being taken by rail to Springfield, Illinois, William Cullen Bryant listened as his own verse elegy for the slain president was read to a great concourse of mourners by the Reverend Samuel Osgood. Only five years earlier and a few blocks downtown, at Cooper Union, Bryant had introduced the prairie candidate to his first eastern audience. There his masterful appeal to the conscience of the nation prepared the way for his election to the presidency on the verge of the Civil War. Now, Bryant stood below Henry Kirke Brown's equestrian statue of George Washington, impressing Osgood as if he were "the 19tth Century itself thinking over the nation and the age in that presence." Bryant's staunch support of the Union cause throughout the war, and of Lincoln's war efforts, no less than his known influence with the president, led several prominent public figures to urge that he write Lincoln's biography. Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote him, "No man combines the qualities for his biographer so completely as yourself and the finished task would be a noble crown to a noble literary life." But Bryant declined, declaring his inability to record impartially critical events in which he had taken so central a part. Furthermore, while preoccupied with the editorial direction of the New York Evening Post, he was just then repossessing and enlarging his family's homestead at Cummington, Massachusetts, where he hoped his ailing wife might, during long summers in mountain air, regain her health. But in July 1866, Frances died of recurrent rheumatic fever, and, Bryant confessed to Richard Dana, he felt as "one cast out of Paradise." After France's death Bryant traveled with his daughter Julia for nearly a year through Great Britain and the Continent, where he met British statesman and novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton and French literary critic Hyppolyte Taine, renewed his friendship with Spanish poet Carolina Coronado, Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi, and British and American artists, and visited the family of the young French journalist Georges Clemenceau, as well as the graves of earlier acquaintances Francis Lord Jeffrey and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In his spare moments Bryant sought solace by beginning the translation of Homer, and Longfellow had found relief after his wife's tragic death by rendering into English Dante's Divine Comedy. Home again in New York, Bryant bought and settled in a house at 24 West 16th Street which would be his city home for the rest of his life. Here he completed major publications, including the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer and an exhaustive Library of Poetry and Song, and added to published tributes to earlier friends, such as Thomas Cole, Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving, memorial discourses on Fitz-Greene Halleck and Gulian Verplanck. In addition to his continued direction of the New York Homeopathic Medical college and the American Free Trade League, he was elected to the presidency of the Williams College Alumni Association, the International Copyright Association, and the Century Association, the club of artists and writers of which, twenty years earlier, he had been a principal founder and which he would direct for the last decade of his life.
The Letters of William Cullen Bryant: Volume VI, 1872–1878
by William Cullen BryantIn January 1872, Bryant traveled to Mexico City, where he was greeted warmly by President Benito Juarez; on this and other occasions he was feted for the Evening Post's sturdy condemnation in 1863 of the abortive invasion of Mexico, which was freshly remembered there. AT the close of his visit a local newspaper remarked that the "honors and hospitality which were so lavishly and generously conferred upon him were the spontaneous outpouring of a grateful people, who had not forgotten that when Mexico was friendless Mr. Bryant became her friend." Returning in April through New Orleans and up the Mississippi by steamboat to Cincinnati, he was greeted at a public reception by Governor Rutherford Hayes, who was pleased by his "winning and lovable" manners and "pithy" anecdotes.That spring Bryant built a library for his birthplace, Cummington, stocking it with several thousand books procured for him by the publisher George Palmer Putnam in New York and London. The following year, after the last of his many travels - this time a revisit to South Carolina and Florida - he made a similar gift to Roslyn. These benefactions won him honorary membership in the newly formed American Library Association, and an invitation to open a library at Princeton University, which made him an honorary doctor of letters. Ultimately, in the final year of his life, his plans for the Bryant Library at Cummington, solicited from the White House by President Hayes, provided the basic design for the first presidential library in the country - that established by Hayes in Fremont, Ohio.An improbable by-product of the presidential race in 1872 was a proposal by leading journalists that Bryant become -in his seventy-eighth year - a candidate to oppose President Grant and his challenger for the Republican nomination, the mercurial editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley. Bryant's immediate refusal to take the suggestion seriously was succinct, and tinged with humor. It was impossible, he declared in his newspaper, that he should receive the nomination, and "equally impossible," if it were offered, that he should "commit the folly of accepting it." Four years later he was distressed at being unable to switch his journal's support of the Republican candidate Hayes to the Democratic candidate, his old companion in political reform, Samuel Jones Tilden.As Bryant approached and entered his eighties, his writing and public speaking continued without slackening. Between 1872 and 1878 he published his collected Orations and Addresses, edited a revision of his anthology of poetry and two volumes of landscape sketches, Picturesque America, co-authored a four-volume Popular History of the United States, and undertook to co-edit a three-volume set of Shakespeare's plays, while also producing long monographs on several seventeenth-century English poets. He dedicated statues of Shakespeare, Walter Scott, and Fitz-Green Halleck in Central Park, and spoke elsewhere on Robert Burns, Benjamin Franklin, Goethe, and Shakespeare, gave speeches on Mexico and "National Honesty," and presided over the founding of the State Charities Aid Association. He was honored in Albany at receptions by each house of the legislature. For his eightieth birthday, his life's work was celebrated in silver on a Tiffany vase given him by admirers throughout the country.Bryant's last public act was to unveil, in Central Park, his brainchild of nearly a half century earlier: a bust of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini. Here, after exhaustion under the June sun, he fell and suffered a massive concussion followed by a stroke, which led to his death a fortnight later in his eighty-fourth year. A period of virtual national mourning preceded his funeral and his burial beside his wife at Roslyn. At one of many memorial services, a eulogist exclaimed, "The broad outline of his character had become universally familiar, like a mountain or a sea. Whoever saw Bryant saw America."
Letters to a Young Brown Girl (American Poets Continuum Series #182)
by Barbara Jane ReyesLetters to a Young Brown Girl
Letters to a Young Poet
by Lewis Hyde Rainer Maria Rilke Charlie LouthRilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for generations of writers and artists of all kinds, including Lady Gaga and Patti Smith. With honesty, elegance, and a deep understanding of the loneliness that often comes with being an artist, Rilke's letters are an endless source of inspiration and comfort. Lewis Hyde's new introduction explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. This edition also includes Rilke's later work The Letter from the Young Worker.
Letters to a Young Poet
by M. D. Norton Rainer Maria RilkeRilke's timeless letters about poetry, sensitive observation, and the complicated workings of the human heart. Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle of Rilke's life that shows what he was experiencing in his own relationship to life and work when he wrote them.
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria RilkeThese have been called the most famous and beloved letters of the past century. Rainer Maria Rilke himself said that much of his creative expression went into his correspondence, and here he touches upon a wide range of subjects that will interest writers, artists,and thinkers. This luminous translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's classic offers brilliant inspiration to all people who seek to know and express their inner truth. Letters to a Young Poet is a classic that should be required reading for anyone who dreams of expressing themselves creatively.
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria RilkeIn 1903, Rilke replied in a series of 10 letters to a student who had submitted some verses to the well-known Austrian poet for an assessment. Written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, these letters contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers.
Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary
by Rainer Maria RilkeA fresh perspective on a beloved classic by acclaimed translators Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.German poet Rainer Maria Rilke&’s (1875–1926) Letters to a Young Poet has been treasured by readers for nearly a century. Rilke&’s personal reflections on the vocation of writing and the experience of living urge an aspiring poet to look inward, while also offering sage wisdom on further issues including gender, solitude, and romantic love. Barrows and Macy&’s translation extends this compilation of timeless advice and wisdom to a fresh generation of readers. With a new introduction and commentary, this edition places the letters in the context of today&’s world and the unique challenges we face when seeking authenticity.
Letters to a Young Poet (Thrift Editions Ser.)
by Rainer Maria RilkeAt the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering and the nature of advice itself; these profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds. This book also contains the 'Letter from a Young Worker', a striking polemic against Christianity written in letter-form, near the end of Rilke's life. In Lewis Hyde's introduction, he explores the context in which these letters were written and how the author embraced his isolation as a creative force. Charlie Louth's afterword discusses the similarities and contrasts of the two works, and Rilke's religious and sexual wordplay. This edition also contains a chronology, notes, and suggested further reading.
Letters to a Young Poet: With The Letters From The Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke Franz Xaver Kappus Damion Searls“The ultimate expression of intergenerational literary wisdom.” —Andrew Solomon, The New Yorker A work that has inspired generations, this new edition of Letters to a Young Poet features a fresh translation of Rilke’s ten classic letters, along with the missing letters from the young poet himself.For nearly a century, eager writers and young poets, as well as those simply looking for a purpose in life, have embraced the wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, first published in 1929. Most readers and scholars have long assumed that the letters from the young poet were forever lost to posterity. Yet, shockingly, these letters were recently uncovered in Germany, and now the acclaimed translator Damion Searls has not only cast a fresh eye on Rilke’s original letters but also those of the “young poet,” Franz Xaver Kappus, an Austrian military cadet and an aspiring poet. This timeless edition, in addition to presenting their dialogue together for the first time in English, provides a new window into the workings of Rilke’s visionary poetic and philosophical mind, allowing us to reexperience the literary genius of one of the most inspiring works of twentieth-century literature.
Letters to a Young Poet: The Norton Centenary Edition
by Rainer Maria RilkeA gorgeous edition of one of the most beloved classics of the twentieth century, published in celebration of W. W. Norton’s 100th anniversary. This slim volume of letters from the poet and mystic, Rainer Maria Rilke, to a nineteen-year-old cadet and aspiring poet named Franz Xaver Kappus, has touched millions of readers since it was first published in English in 1934. The translator, Mary Dows Herter Norton—a polymath extraordinaire with expertise in music, literature, and science, and who, along with her husband, William Warder Norton, founded the company that bears his name—played a crucial role in elevating Rilke’s reputation in the English-speaking world. This Norton Centenary Edition commemorates Norton, known as “Polly” to friends and colleagues, and the 100th anniversary of the publishing company she co-founded. An admiring foreword by Damion Searls—himself a recent translator of Rilke’s Letters—celebrates Polly’s stylistic achievement, and an afterword by Norton’s President, Julia A. Reidhead, honors her commitment to maintaining W. W. Norton & Company’s independence. This handsome new edition of a beloved classic brings Rilke’s enduring wisdom about life, love, and art to a new generation, in the translation that first introduced him to the English-speaking world.
Letters to a Young Queen: Redefining Their Throne
by Jay BarnettThis book is a collection of letters and poems for young girls. Author Jay Barnett highlights the struggles and triumphs of the young women he has encountered through the Women of Excellence Project. This book is for the fatherless little girl who is desperately seeking male attention and craves the encouragement, discipline, and authority that only a father figure can give. These letters will inspire and empower young girls from all backgrounds to grow into the queens they were destined to be. Women of the 1900’s had many fearless leaders and trailblazers to admire and respect-Amelia Earhart, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few. Since then, women have shattered the glass ceiling-landing positions in traditionally male-dominated industries, such as politics, banking and science. Despite this progression, several prominent women in our current culture detract from the progress made thus far. The days of positive female role models are slowly disappearing, as reality stars and entertainers have captured the attention of our young girls. Young women of this generation have lost sight of the numerous sacrifices made to ensure and protect their freedoms and rights. How do we stop the perpetual cycle of uneducated and foolish behaviors of our young women before it’s too late? The Women of Excellence Project is a program dedicated to the mentoring and mental development of young women. Through this work, author Jay Barnett began to see recurring behavior patterns among the young women highlighting their need for acceptance and validation. Even at an early age, young girls want to pursue what is socially accepted. In the absence of positive role models in today’s society, girls imitate reality TV stars and their friends’ behavior on social media. Now is the time to restore young women to their rightful place in society and to build them up into the queens that they truly are.
Letters to Benvenuta
by Rainer Maria RilkeThis collection of letters by the renowned Austrian poet offers a rare glimpse into his private life and his relationship with the woman he called Benvenuta.In January of 1914, Rainer Maria Rilke received his first letter from a Viennese correspondent who had discovered his story collection, Tales of the Dear Lord God. A sudden and intense exchange of letters followed which would eventually put the famous poet in touch with the woman he would never meet. Nearing forty and separated from his wife, Rilke was ill and depressed when his correspondence with Magda von Hattingberg began. A concert pianist many years younger, she was also alone. Von Hattingberg told the story of their brief but dramatic attachment in her book Rilke and Benvenuta. Now their story is made complete with Letters to Benvenuta, a series of letters written by Rilke during a sojourn in Paris.
Letters to Borges
by Stephen Kuusisto"[Kuusisto] is a powerful writer with a musical ear for language and a gift for emotional candor."-The New York Times"A talented writer judged against any standard."-USA TodayBest-selling memoirist Stephen Kuusisto uses the themes of travel, place, religion, music, art, and loneliness to explore the relationship between seeing, blindness, and being. In poems addressed to Jorge Luis Borges-another poet who lived with blindness-Kuusisto leverages seeing as negative capability, creating intimacy with deep imagination and uncommon perceptions."Alone"Today I understoodWhile drinking tea& hearing rainThat the word for birth& the one for sinCome from a single rootIn Finnish - that tongue theySpoke when I was small.Synnty, untranslatable,Original sin nearly,But softer,Like waterCarried a long wayIn a jarIn May.Stephen Kuusisto is a poet, essayist, and memoirist. He is the author of two collections of poetry and two memoirs, including the best-selling Planet of the Blind (W. W. Norton & Company, 1998). A graduate from and former teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Kuusisto now teaches at Syracuse University in New York State.
Letters to Kurt
by Eric ErlandsonA poetic elegy for Kurt Cobain from the man who created the band Hole with Cobain's wife Courtney Love. "Nearly two decades after the death of Kurt Cobain, a friend and fellow musician not only continues to mourn his suicide, but also rages against the culture that he holds responsible. These 52 'letters' . . . combine the subject matter of the Byrds' 'So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star' with the fury of Allen Ginsberg's Howl . . . A catharsis for the writer and perhaps for the reader as well." --Kirkus Reviews "A touching and enlightening collection of prose poems addressed to [Erlandson's] departed friend." --The San Francisco Bay Guardian "Erlandson finally comes to terms with his loss in 52 prose-poem letters ostensibly addressed to Cobain in which he straightforwardly confronts his inner demons while offering personal reflections on food, drug abuse, death, and self-sabotage."--Booklist "The reverberations of Kurt's suicide last to this day, and have touched the lives of many. Dozens of people could have written their own version of this bracingly candid book; Eric Erlandson has written one, filled with rage and love, landmined with detail, that can stand for them all." --Michael Azerrad, author of Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana "Eric was the spirit-boy in the Nirvana/Hole dynamic. Quiet, bemused, intelligent, and curiously intuitive to the power of hugging the devil, to say we will all be okay . . . Eric expresses how enchanting Kurt was, how the whole scene was, with his thoughtful, radical adult/prose love. Bring on the future, darling."--Thurston Moore, musician "Eric. He was always there: supportive, observing, in the thick of it. Hidden in plain sight . . . Without him, I can't imagine Seattle or L.A. or a dozen other places. This book is beautiful, brutal, brief. Happy-sad eloquence. Boy Scouts playing with the complimentary cologne in the heart of the ghost town. Listen to the man. He knows." --Everett True, author of Nirvana: The Biography Letters to Kurt is an anguished, angry, and tender meditation on the octane and ether of rock and roll and its many moons: sex, drugs, suicide, fame, and rage. It's part Dream Songs, part Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, and the Clash. Rants, reflections, and gunshot fill these fifty-two prose poems. They are raw, funny, sad, and searching. This will make a beautiful book for anyone who loved Nirvana and Hole and the time and place when their music changed everything. Ultimately, it's an elegy for Kurt and the "suicide idols" who tragically fail to find salvation in their amazing music.
Letters to Monica
by Philip LarkinIn 1950 Larkin moved to Belfast, and thence to Hull, while Monica remained in Leicester, becoming by turns his correspondent, lover and closest confidante, in a relationship which lasted over forty years until the poet's death in 1985. <P><P>This remarkable unpublished correspondence only came to light after Monica Jones' death in 2001, and consists of nearly two thousand letters, postcards and telegrams, which chronicle - day by day, sometimes hour by hour - every aspect of Larkin's life and the convolutions of their relationship.
Letters to Yesenin
by Jim Harrison"The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin's, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing."--Hayden Carruth, Sulfur"Harrison inhabits the problems of our age as if they were beasts into which he had crawled, and Letters to Yesenin is a kind of imaginative taxidermy that refuses to stay in place up on the trophy room wall, but insists on walking into the dining room."--The American Poetry ReviewJim Harrison's gorgeous, desperate, and harrowing "correspondence" with Sergei Yesenin--a Russian poet who committed suicide after writing his final poem in his own blood--is considered an American masterwork.In the early 1970s, Harrison was living in poverty on a hardscrabble farm, suffering from depression and suicidal tendencies. In response he began to write daily prose-poem letters to Yesenin. Through this one-sided correspondence, Harrison unloads to this unlikely hero, ranting and raving about politics, drinking problems, family concerns, farm life, and a full range of daily occurrences. The rope remains ever present.Yet sometime through these letters there is a significant shift. Rather than feeling inextricably linked to Yesenin's inevitable path, Harrison becomes furious, arguing about their imagined relationship: "I'm beginning to doubt whether we ever would have been friends."In the end, Harrison listened to his own poems: "My year-old daughter's red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting Stop."
Letters Written and Not Sent: Poems
by William Louis-DreyfusThis culmination of a life of poetry, art, and social justice “has the freshness of an opening argument and the majesty of a man’s last words” (Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst).Like paperweights, his lyrics are both small and hefty. His subjects range from race relations to trees, from secrets to parenthood, from ideas of god to kissing, from sons and mothers to fate, and of course, to poetry itself. Never afraid of the big questions of why human beings are alive, and what hope and justice are for, Louis-Dreyfus could take decades to finish a poem. A perfectionist, a thinker, and always inspired by visual art, he fought with himself over how to say what he wanted to say best. Like the French-Uruguayan businessman poet Jules Supervielle, whom Louis-Dreyfus translated, he felt the tug of the financial world against the pull of the lyricism of poetry, and the division marked his life and sparked ideas for his finest poems. As the heart condition that seized him made it absolutely imperative, finishing Letters Written and Not Sent literally became a life-or-death matter. This is the book that he wished to send into the world.“There’s rock-bottom integrity, a dignified modesty, and a quizzical, persistent quest for meaning in this collection. It’s a final bequest to the living from an intensely generous man.” —Rosanna Warren, author of So Forth: Poems“The poems of William Louis-Dreyfus testify to an inner life of great richness, but one that freely slipped across the border of the self into the world beyond . . . a fine collection of his work, and it is good to have it at last.” —Charles Martin, author of Future Perfect