Fun_People Archive
26 Mar
LIT BITS V3 #85

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sun, 26 Mar 100 09:58:33 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: LIT BITS V3 #85

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Excerpted-from: LITERARY CALENDAR V3 #85

Today is Sunday, 26 March 2000; on this day,

141 years ago (1859),

     A. E. (Alfred Edward) Housman--"I could no more define poetry than a
     terrier can define a rat"--is born in Fockbury, Worcestershire.

126 years ago (1874),

     Robert Frost is born in San Francisco. Although he will be proclaimed
     "the Voice of New England," he first sees a New England farm at the
     age of ten. To Frost, "Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is
     also what is lost in interpretation."

108 years ago (1892),

     Walt Whitman dies in Camden, New Jersey, at 72. Constantly revising
     and augmenting his _Leaves of Grass_, he receives the final, ninth,
     edition on his deathbed.

85 years ago (1915),

     Following the publication of her first novel, _The Voyage Out_,
     Virginia Woolf suffers a nervous breakdown.

80 years ago (1920),

     American poet and leading member of the Beat movement, Gregory Corso,
     is born in New York. Convicted of theft at 17, he will be introduced
     to literature while in prison and later meet Allen Ginsberg and publish
     his first volume of verse, _The Vestal Lady on Brattle_ in 1955.

Today's poem:

                             XV

     Look not in my eyes, for fear
       Thy mirror true the sight I see,
     And there you find your face too clear
       And love it and be lost like me.
     One the long nights through must lie
       Spent in star-defeated sighs,
     But why should you as well as I
       Perish? gaze not in my eyes.

     A Grecian lad, as I hear tell,
       One that many loved in vain,
     Looked into a forest well
       And never looked away again.
     There, when the turf in springtime flowers,
       With downward eye and gazes sad,
     Stands amid the glancing showers
       A jonquil, not a Grecian lad.

                                              Alfred Housman
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