Fun_People Archive
20 Dec
LIT BITS V2 #353

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 99 17:16:19 -0800
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Subject: LIT BITS V2 #353

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V2 #353

Today is Tuesday, 21 December 1999; on this day,

624 years ago (1375),

	Giovanni Boccaccio dies at 62 in Certaldo, Italy, the town of
     his birth.

450 years ago (1549),

	Margaret of Angouleme, Queen consort of Henry II of Navarre,
     a patron of humanities and religious reformers and an author,
     dies in Odos-Bigorre. Her most important work, _Heptameron_, is
     contructed on the lines of Giovanni Boccaccio's _Decameron_,
     (who died on the same day), consisting of 72 tales (out of a
     planned 100) told by a group of travelers delayed by a flood on
     their return from a Pyrenean spa. The stories, illustrating the
     triumphs of virtue, honor, and quick-wittedness, and the
     frustration of vice and hypocricy, contain a strong element of
     satire directed against licentious and grasping monks and
     clerics.

200 years ago (1799),

	William Wordsworth and his devoted sister, Dorothy, take
     possession of Dove Cottage at Grasmere, Westmorland.

194 years ago (1805),

	Portuguese neoclassical lyric poet who dissipated his
     energies in a stormy life, Manuel Bocage, dies in Lisbon.

140 years ago (1859),

	Gustave Kahn, French poet and literary theorist who claimed
     to be the inventor of vers libre, is born in Metz.

94 years ago (1905),

	British novelist best known for the autobiographical and
     satiric 12-volume series of novels, _A Dance to the Music of
     Time_, Anthony Powell is born in London.

82 years ago (1917),

	Heinrich Boll is born in Cologne. The West German novelist
     and playwright will win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.

59 years ago (1940),

	F. Scott Fitzgerald, 44, dies of a heart attack in Los
     Angeles, leaving _The Last Tycoon_ unfinished.

19 years ago (1980),

	American playwright, journalist, teacher, actor, director,
     member of the Algonquin Round Table group of writers, Marc
     Connelly dies in New York.

Today's poem:

        The World Is Too Much with Us; Late and Soon

	The world is too much with us; late and soon
     Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
     Little we see in Nature that is ours;
     We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
     The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
     The winds that will be howling at all hours,
     And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
     For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
     It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
     A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
     So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
     Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
     Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
     Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

                                          William Wordsworth

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© 1999 Peter Langston